Nietzsche: A Response to G. K. Chesterton

I haven't posted anything here in a long time, but The Catholic Science Geek sent a quote by G. K. Chesterton, the Catholic Englishman, regarding Friedrich Nietzsche, and asked for my opinion. I posted my thoughts on Facebook, but for reference, here they are.  (Shout out to The Catholic Science Geek.)

"THIS, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either."

~G.K. Chesterton, 'Orthodoxy.'

I will attempt to address these points in order. If Facebook will allow me to hit enter and put them in paragraph form.

1) "No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker." This is true. Nietzsche used metaphors to varying degrees throughout his works and almost exclusively in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is why it is necessary to read 5-6 of his major works to get any sense out of any of them: they only make sense when you know what ideas his metaphors are referencing. Nietzsche's works fit together like a puzzle: no piece standing alone can reveal the whole picture.

2) "He was not at all bold. ... Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor." Yes, that's true of his presentation. He never comes out and says, to borrow from a favorite film of mine, "Zorba, come; or Zorba, don't come." Which is, in turn, my own metaphorical way of saying, "Nietzsche never says plainly what he means." Walter Kaufmann explains in the commentary to his translations of the philosopher that besides being couched in metaphor, everything in Nietzsche is veiled, qualified, and superqualified. Oftentimes, he will use words in a context so that they mean generally the opposite of what they normally mean. He will also make contradictory statements in different passages of his writing, seeming to praise in one place, while seeming to "rip a new one" in other places. Again, only by reading multiple works can one get some sense of what Nietzsche is getting at. I'd say that is the opposite of "clear and bold" in any sense of those words.

3) " 'More good than good and evil,' or 'more evil than good and evil.' " This is probably the Ubermensch concept in a clearer nutshell than Nietzsche gave in the 5 and a half works of his that I've read. An Ubermensch may be higher, but not necessarily better, and not necessarily worse, either. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes, "When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere courtesy of the heart--it is simply his duty." This courtesy was something that Nietzsche himself showed in his own dealings with those around him. The implication is that a code of morals "higher" than those currently developed or widely accepted comes with noblesse oblige. I read somewhere once (probably Wikipedia) that in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, the generosity and magnanimity of Spock's self-sacrifice come close to Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermensch, in contradistinction to the physical eugenics and despicable acts on the part of Khan: one is only physically developed, while the other is morally developed.

4) "He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce."

To borrow a passage in Nietzsche's own words (Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Good Books," Section 1): "The word 'overman,' as the designation of a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to 'modern' men, to 'good' men, to Christians and other nihilists--a word that in the mouth of a Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, becomes a very pensive word--has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent--that is, as an 'idealistic' type of a higher kind of man, half 'saint,' half 'genius.' Other scholarly oxen have suspected me of Darwinism on that account."

To counter Chesterton's idea that Nietzsche "wants evolution to produce [a sort of man]," here Nietzsche writes that the Ubermensch idea does not have to do with Darwinism or evolution. Does Nietzsche ever come out and say what his idea of the Ubermensch really is? Not in the 5 works of histhat I've read. Does Nietzsche himself have an idea in mind? I do not know. However, from what I can gather, the Ubermensch is closer to the idea of an "aristocrat," which ties in with the noblesse oblige mentioned in my previous post.


To conclude, I would say that Nietzsche was in some ways more of a prophet than a thinker, as Chesterton calls him. He was an outspoken critic of the anti-Semitism and German nationalism that he saw accrete around the person of Wagner, and that snowballed throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the regime of the Nazis. He posed the question of power vs. morality for our own time. In identifying nihilism as the main sickness with which modern man is afflicted, he foresaw what so many traditionalists today describe as the "moral decay" into which the 20th century tumbled further and further.

He also prescribed a sort of remedy to this nihilism: "You call yourself free? Your dominant thought would I hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?" The key is to live FOR something, and not to rebel if you cannot handle that responsibility.

I think Nietzsche was light years (or at least decades) ahead of his time. He provides a valuable lens through which to understand the 20th century and the continuing developments in our own society and culture. If you can only get through his metaphors, contradictions, and rants, he actually has something worth hearing.