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Show THE CITIZEN 8 glllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllMlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllla I 5 "THINGS BOOKISH I ' ' S . iiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiHiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii? . . Edited By WILLIAM C. WINDER, Jr. Nietzsches Books What would be the book of your choice if you were given leisure and isolation for a period of months and the privilege of selecting one book as your only companion? 'Of course I am not unaware that the charming thing to do is to give to the bible the place, of honor, and it has ever been . claimed that such a choice would be almost unanimous. However, as nobody is going to tell your neighbor what name is uppermost in your mind, let us be truthful rather than proper, and give the matter an honest thought. Which one, of all the books you have ever read, could you enjoy reading for an hour a day for a year; which one, owing to its manner or content, can at any moment give you some new thrill or help to renew the vigor of your mind? While the entire question is certainly not new, it holds a considerable interest for me, and after consideration of the matter, my answer would unquestionably be Thus Spake Zarathustra," by Frederick Wilhelm Nietzsche. It is quite .probable, that no name has ever been more ignorantly and viciously used in misleading propaganda than that of Nietzache during the war years. The consensus of opinion even at this late day would doubtless be that at the bottom of the madness of the war lay the philosophy of Nietzsche. Who, thinking back on those vile war pictures, can forget the frequent use of such words and terms as The great blonde beast, "German supermen, The Will to Power, etc? Even the most bloodsemi-intellige- -- nt thirsty of the helmeted soldiers, the one ready to pierce the baby with his bayonet, would have the features of . Nietzsche, with the same heavy mustache and eyebrows; Even the name became anathema, for such is the Jesuit of propaganda playing with ignorance. Naturally such an indictment as this will cause resentment, but it will be the blind resentment of those who .even yet are in blissful ignorance of the real meaning and place in the world of the writings of this master mind; Not one in a thousand has the least idea what influence the work. of this. man has had on the thinking men of every country within the last three decades. . It is a difficult matter to fight prejudice of. any kind; and when that prejudice is backed up by a complete lack of first hand knowledge of the subject at issue, then the task is well nigh impossible. And when, too, the man, about whom your argument rages, has taken a few well directed blows at the religious faith of your fathers, then the hope of ever even causing an investigation by your opponent flies out of the window. How many times have I heard the name, for example, of Robert G. Ingersoll cursed, and yet I have failed to find one of those people who has read a tenth of his writings, and usually none at all. Of course it is good and proper for men well along in years to say that they foolishly read such things in youth, but always to their lasting regret, but to such talk we need pay no attention as it usually is for effect and with the knowledge that youth will not press age for facts. As with Ingersoll, so with Nietzsche. I have yet to meet, personally, more than one person who can claim even a partial acquaintance with the books of this man, and yet he has wielded one . of the most powerful influences on our age. In this article,' and perhaps in more to follow, I do not ask for the agreement of anybody with my ideas. It would give me considerable pleasure to enter into controversy regarding points in his philosophy, if I could even arouse people to intelligently disagree. The reading of the books of Nietzache is not particularly the wTork for a lazy, warm afternoon, as a substitute for a book of light fiction If you - . do not go in earnestly to get what there is for you, you will .get nowhere and. accomplish nothing. ...There, are no rules to this study, no particular guides but your own intellect. You dont read and study and remember, you simply absorb it through your every pore.. If you have nothing with which to meet this magnificent teacher half way, you simply fail in the class'. If your intellect does not respond to the stimulus of contact with this master mind, then you should simply leave him alone. A few years ago, I read him not for days or weeks, but for months and months and with no other books on my mind. His books became a passion, a mania, and yet I realize that even now I am but a neophyte in his philosophy, and I never read again one of- his thousands of aphorisms without finding something new and . - delightful in it. Who, then, is this man? Nietzsche was born at'Roecken, Province of Saxony, on October 15, 1844, the son of a pastor; a fact which, of itself, is quite Preachers sons have significant. strangely often carried the hammer of He claims to be desiconoclasm! cended from the nobility of Poland, but of this fact there appears to be no complete substantiation; and one way or the other, it can matter but little. As we will mention later, he never felt a strong kinship for the Teutons. His profession was mainly that of teacher of philology at the University of Basel, which post he held while doing most of his writing, although during his entire adult life, he was never entirely well. In 1889 his mind became hopelessly unbalanced, and he was taken in charge by his sister, Frau Elizabeth at Weimar, where he continued to live on, some days better and some days worse, until his death at that city on August 25, 1900. It is not my idea of good criticism to fill space with Foerster-Niet-zsch- e, dates, places and names, but there are certain things connected with the few facts named here which are of considerable Importance in trying to understand some of Nietzsches teachings. At an early age the young Friedrich began to question things for himself. He was tormented with the question as to why he was supposed to accept as truths the old accepted values, although his whole reasoning power was against them. With him the question foremost was, Is it esAnd in putting this sentially true? question to every problem, he began to see more clearly that the old beliefs and hopes and faiths were no longer valid. They could not answer the demands of investigation by reason. His militant spirit was aroused, and he decided that he would revalue all the old values; that he would put to them the acid test of How and Why, that his new values would be lights by which men could walk in reason rather than stumble in faith. Of the men who influenced his younger life, the first and greatest was . Arthur Schopenhauer with his pes- simism and his Will to Existence.' Schopenhauer was the one great philosopher of the time who had broken all ties with the present trend of thought, and it was this fine independence of spirit which first won the respect of the young fighter, Nietzsche. Although, after a few years, Nietzsche felt that Schopenhauer had nothing else to give him, he still retained a great respect for him. When he wrote his Schopenhauer als Erzieher, he laid his burnt offering at the feet of his great teacher. Then appeared Richard Wagner on the horizon of his life, and in the rebel Wagner and his new music, the young Nietzsche felt that he had found a saviour, a deliverer from the decad-- . ence of the age. His love of Wagner was perhaps the greatest of his life, and even after their tragic parting and the long, years of enmity, in one of his lucid moments not long before his death, on hearing the name of Wagner, he said to his sister, Den habe ich In his praise of the sehr geliebt. in his Wagner at Bayreuth, he speaks beautifully and glowingly of the one greatest thought and motive of all the operas of Wagner, in fact, of the man himself, that of fidelity, unselfish fidelity. And if we look for a moment at the operas, do wre not find it in the feeling of Elizabeth for Tannhauser, Elsa for Lohengrin, Senta for the Dutchman, and so on and on? It was later, when Wagner had composed Parsifal that the anger and disgust of Nietzsche broke all bounds, and the wound was opened which was never to heal. And we know now that it was all so unnecessary, simply a misunderstanding. Nietzsche resented the religious mysticism of the and he felt that Wagner was appealing to the approval of the masses. He did not realize that Wagner was a poet, and that although he believed not a whit in the dogma of the mother church, yet the ritual and ceremony fascinated him as beautiful pictures might have done. The damage was done; to Nietzsche, Wagner was a decadent of the worst type, one poet-musicia- n music-drama- s, who really knew better; to Wagner, Nietzsche appeared crazy. Nietzsche dipped his pen in pure vitriol when he wrote The 'Case of Wagner, yet underlying it all there, is the sad note of a disappointed worship. Of the influences which affected the style and writing of these books, thesis litle to be found among the German writers. In fact, Heine was the only one to whom he did not feel, superior as an artist. To the French he went for his style, as is well evidenced by the fact that most of his books are composed solely of aphorisms and epigrams. In his study of philology, and especially in going deep into the causes of the glory of Greece, he arrived at the conclusion that in any civilization it is never the state which lives and sheds its lustre, nor the dumb massef of people, but the few. individuals, the creators. He saw' through the old fallacy that men are equal; and now. we know they are not and never will be. He saw the tragedy of trying to bring the upper level down to the masses, and. the resulting stagnation if the upper men were compelled to wait for the lower to climb up to them. His cry was-- for freedom for the individual. In The Dawn of Day, he says, A young man can be most surely corrupted when he is taught to value more highly than the the differently minded. He knew well the curse of a united effort to fit every man into the same mold. His appeal was for a class, men who so loved their own thoughts that they could enjoy being alone. His plea was ever for the man instead of the state, for he realized that their aims were antagonistic; that where the central power was great; the influence and chance of the individual would be slight. He is the greatest individualist of our modern times and, after all, what is more Important than the production of men who create new values? The dumb masses go down to death, but here and there stand out the individuals who would not conform and their memories, through their words and songs, shine down through the generations to follow. Nietzsches hope for the world was not merely the producing of a few isolated individuals here and there. It was rather to be a conscious process, in which every man was to play his part. This effort was, in years and perhaps ages, to produce a class of men above anything which we now know, men who should start where we should leave off, men of real intellect. In his Zarathustra, he thus states his basic ideas, Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed. Elsewhere he tells us that man is simply a bridge, not a goal. And after all, is this feeling peculiar to Nietzsche? I am not 'working for heavenly bliss, but I am working to make myself a starting point from which my boy shall soar far higher. And the producing of supermen is not at all impossible with generation after generation of conscious effort. He further says, The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The .superman shall be the , , like-minde- d self-conscio- us |