The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By H.L. Mencken and Dennis Sweet

H. L. Mencken’sThe Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908) was the first complete exposition of Nietzsche’s thought written in English. It provides a coherent and systematic picture of the tapestry that is Nietzsche’s philosophy. In several analyses Mencken almost seems to make Nietzsche’s point better than Nietzsche does.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411429727

H.L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. Mencken is best known for The American Language, a multivolume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

H. L. MENCKEN’S THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WAS THE first complete exposition of Nietzsche’s thought written in English. Published in 1908 when Mencken was twenty-seven years old, the book is remarkable for a number of reasons. Despite the fact that it was penned a century ago, without the aid of any serious secondary source materials, the book is rich in insights, extremely thorough in its coverage, and superbly written. It does not possess Mencken’s later flamboyant style, but it does provide a clear, no-nonsense presentation of the many and varied themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

It opens with one of the best biographical essays on Nietzsche to be found in any secondary source. Mencken provides insightful discussions of the distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses in the origin of Greek drama; the origins of morality; the concept of superman and the compunction to go beyond good and evil; the origin and nature of Christian values and value-creation; and the nature of truth. Mencken does a remarkable job of tying together these and other disparate threads, providing a coherent and systematic picture of the tapestry that is Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880. His father owned a cigar factory, which provided financial security for the family and likely contributed to Mencken’s life-long devotion to cigars. In 1899, he began his literary career, becoming a police reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald. Then in 1906, he joined the staff of The Baltimore Sun, where he was an editorial contributor. Around this time he began to write short stories, a novel, poetry (which he later abandoned), and, at the suggestion of the Sun publisher John W. Luce, he began work on his study of Nietzsche. In 1908, Mencken became a book reviewer for and later editor of (1914-23) the witty and fashionable literary magazine The Smart Set.

For most of the first two decades of the twentieth century he was romantically involved with Marion Bloom. They had intended to marry upon her return from Europe, where she served as a nurse during World War I; when she came back, however, the relationship immediately soured, because Marion had become a Christian Scientist, an organization for which Mencken had no tolerance.

In 1924, Mencken and George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) founded and edited The American Mercury, a magazine, published by Alfred A. Knopf, that had a wide circulation and popularity on college campuses and in literary circles throughout the United States. Mencken continued to edit this magazine until 1933 (Nathan left after the first year). During the 1920s, Mencken achieved fame and notoriety as a satirist and critic, and became a friend and supporter of many successful writers, including Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Carl Sandburg, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was a champion of freethinking, freedom of the press, and libertarianism, and from 1919 to 1927 he published a six-volume collection of essays, Prejudices, which contained some of his most brilliant and most characteristic pieces. The book that many regard as his most important work, however, is The American Language, originally published in 1919 and revised in several subsequent editions over the years. In the book, Mencken traces the etymologies and usages of contemporary American words and phrases; it remains a classic to this day.

During the summer of 1925, Mencken reported on the Scopes Monkey Trial (and is credited with coining this description of the affair), which concerned the teaching of evolution in public schools. The case was a much-publicized contest between the Tennessee state legislature, represented by the politician and fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, and the American Civil Liberties Union, represented by the libertarian and agnostic Clarence Darrow. Mencken’s colorful descriptions of the trial’s characters and events did much to dramatize for the American public the issues at stake as well as the personalities involved.

During the Great Depression, when Mencken hurled searing criticisms of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers, his influence and popularity began to wane. Although he continued to publish some important works during this period (e.g., Treatise on the Gods [1930] and Treatise on Right and Wrong [1934]), his most insightful works appeared in the 1940s, with the publication of his three-volume autobiography: Happy Days, 1880-1892 (1940), Newspaper Days, 1899-1906 (1941), and Heathen Days, 1890-1936 (1943).

In 1948, Mencken suffered a cerebral thrombosis, which incapacitated him. Always a voracious reader and a voluminous writer, he was now incapable of doing either. He spent the remaining eight years of his life preparing his papers and correspondences for publication and listening to classical music, especially Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. He died on January 29, 1956.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a prolific writer whose ideas can be difficult to decipher and grasp, due to the complex manner in which they are expressed. Nietzsche usually presented his ideas in a stylized fashion, for example, as aphorisms, or in experimental prose, with the significance of one idea dependent upon its interrelationships with other ideas. When the twenty-six-year-old Mencken began writing The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, there were virtually no secondary sources to consult or to reference. Furthermore, he had only the original German editions of Nietzsche’s works to read. Given these factors, it is remarkable that Mencken was able to produce such a useful, readable book. His discussions, for example, on the origin of morality and the psychology of Christian beliefs are, in some ways, clearer and more comprehensible than Nietzsche’s. In several other analyses he almost seems to make Nietzsche’s point better than Nietzsche does.

Yet, there are other areas where Mencken misses the mark. One of his most obvious flaws is Mencken’s insistence that Nietzsche was, and remained throughout his career, a devotee of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Schopenhauer’s philosophy was largely a reaction against the views of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), who dominated the philosophical landscape of the early nineteenth century. For Hegel, history is a rational process wherein all changes and activities are determined by necessary laws of development and improvement. Schopenhauer, by contrast, insists that the world consists in the activities of an irrational, purposeless will (Wille), which veils itself in its representations (Vorstellungen), or appearances. There is neither rational development nor historical improvement in how this process occurs; and since there is no necessity or purpose involved in the alterations of the appearances, there is no real significance in the knowledge that humans may achieve regarding the appearances. For Schopenhauer, the essential motive of all philosophical inquiry is human vanity; and the ultimate insight into the nature of reality is our recognition of this essential motive of philosophical inquiry. We can, however, come to a kind of intuition of the fundamental, metaphysical will through the immediate appreciation of music, and through an intuitive recognition of other conscious individuals as subjective embodiments of the objective Wille. Such intuitions provide us with brief respite against an otherwise nihilistic reality.

Nietzsche encountered Schopenhauer’s great work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1818-19), in the autumn of 1865. While Mencken is correct in calling attention to the strong influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on Nietzsche’s early development, what Mencken fails to acknowledge is the all-important degree to which Nietzsche’s later conception of the will to power (der Wille zur Macht) transcends and supercedes Schopenhauer’s notion of the will. For Schopenhauer, the world is completely devoid of meaning or value, and the most fundamental insight into the nature of this situation leaves the inquirer with a sense of pessimistic resignation. For Nietzsche, the world is devoid of intrinsic meaning or value; yet, it may acquire meaning and value insofar as we human beings, we value-creators, bestow values and meanings upon the world. The recognition of this value-creating ability leaves the inquirer with a sense of optimistic affirmation. This is Nietzsche’s Dionysian attitude; his new life-affirming, yea-saying philosophy for the future. While Mencken acknowledges this attitude, he nevertheless maintains that there is virtually no difference between Schopenhauer’s nihilistic conception of the will, and Nietzsche’s positive and creative notion of the will to power.

Another of Nietzsche’s ideas which Mencken appears to have a flawed understanding is the idea of the superman, or overman (der Übermensch), a concept that is crucial for understanding Nietzsche’s mature doctrines. Nietzsche introduces this idea as a goal for human striving—a this-world antithesis to the traditional conception of God, who he proclaimed to be dead. While there is indeed a good deal of debate about what precisely the notion of the overman is and how it functions, it is fairly clear that it was not intended to serve as a kind of ancestral (or racial) ideal, as Mencken asserts. Mencken tends to view the overman notion through the lens of Social Darwinism. This distortion is uncharacteristic of the author’s interpretation of Nietzsche, which, as a rule, is taken straight from the German texts and is interpreted using several primary sources. With respect to Nietzsche’s discussions of the superman, however, Mencken inexplicably seems to rely more on the theories of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who is considered the father of Social Darwinism, and Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), the German zoologist whose ideas posited a biological basis for justifying racism.

The third flaw in Mencken’s book is less important and more understandable, given the time in which it was written: namely, Mencken’s account of Nietzsche’s insanity, which he attributed to overstudy in his youth, over-work and over-drugging later on, exposure on the battlefield, functional disorders and constant and violent strife. Nietzsche, having expressed increasing evidence of mental peculiarities in his letters to friends through the last three months of 1888, collapsed in the street in Turin, Italy, where he was then living, on January 3, 1889. On the following day he wrote to his friend Peter Gast: To My Maestro Pietro—Sing me a new song: The world is transfigured and all the heavens are joyous. (Signed) The Crucified One.

His friends came to his apartment to find that he had passed into a darkness from which there was no return. Given the progressive nature of the loss of his mental and physical capacities, which continued over an eleven-year period until his death in August 1900, Nietzsche’s doctors described his condition as dementia paralytica. This is the standard interpretation of his illness, the one that is prevalent today—that Nietzsche’s madness was the result of the tertiary stage of syphilis. When and how he contracted the disease is a question that is still debated. One commonly accepted explanation is that Nietzsche served for a short time (in September 1870) as a medical aide during the Franco-Prussian War, during which time he was exposed to the blood of his soldier-patients, some of whom were infected with syphilis.

Regardless of what caused Nietzsche’s mental illness, Mencken is emphatic on the important point that, while there is evidence of the progressive nature of his illness during 1888, there is no reason to reject or to devalue any of Nietzsche’s published works from that period—or from any other period—on the charge of mental incompetence. Mencken regarded the books written during the productive year 1888, in the twilight of Nietzsche’s career, to be among his most important, most powerful, and most beautifully written. It was no arbitrary choice when, of all of Nietzsche’s works, Mencken chose The Antichrist to translate into English—a work written in September and October of 1888, less than three months before the onset of Nietzsche’s dementia.

Mencken was a complex, outspoken, and eccentric writer who took great delight in surprising, shocking, and even offending his audience. That his first serious literary effort would be a work on Nietzsche seems entirely fitting, as does the fact that he translated The Antichrist, one of Nietzsche’s most powerful and vitriolic books. But between these works, published in 1908 and 1920 respectively, Mencken wrote another book, The Gist of Nietzsche, published in 1910 by John W. Luce (the original publisher of this work). To The Gist of Nietzsche, Mencken provided an introduction, a biography, and a translation of what he regarded as some of Nietzsche’s most memorable observations and quotable bons mots.

Like Nietzsche, Mencken was an iconoclast of the first order. But whereas Nietzsche’s criticisms were generally strategic, aimed at Western culture as a whole and at Christianity in general, Mencken was more tactical in his criticisms, waging his attacks at a particular enemy—the twentieth-century middle-class American, the Protestant fundamentalist, the Christian Scientist, the American southerner, and others. In fact, Mencken was the enemy of any sort of group-think. He was always the champion of individualism and individual accomplishment, and he disdained those who found their identities and their purposes in groups and group ideals.

Mencken launched his missiles in wide and, at times, seemingly arbitrary arcs. In some of his writings he makes comments that are clearly misogynistic, and in other places he sounds blatantly anti-Semitic; and he made numerous racist observations in his writings concerning African-Americans (some are contained in the present work, in part 2, section 13, Civilization). Yet he published an essay in which he argued that the Anglo-Saxon race (by which he meant the vast majority of his readership) was the most cowardly race in human history. With regard to the average American, the group Mencken referred to as the booboisie, or the "boobus americanus, he observed that, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American middle class. Even though Mencken criticized women, Jews, and African Americans, he was at least consistent in being equally critical of white Anglo-Saxons. In modern terms, he tended to be an equal opportunity offender," critical of all equally and discriminating somewhat indiscriminately.

But this simple observation applies to a tendency more ambiguous and complicated than it would imply. Although many of Mencken’s comments do indeed make him sound like an ardent misogynist, Dorothy Parker was one of The Smart Set’s most published authors while Mencken was editor of the magazine. Similarly, even though some of Mencken’s remarks are clearly anti-Semitic, he was responsible for helping a number of Jews escape from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territories during World War II, while other, more socially aware or concerned literary figures bemoaned the situation, did nothing, or simply ignored the situation.

Mencken made many blatantly racist remarks in his writings; but as the chief creative force behind and editor of The American Mercury, he was instrumental in getting more African-American writers, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, published than any other non-African-American magazine in publication. Mencken was a long-time friend to the African-American author and social critic George Schuyler, whom he regarded as the most competent editorial writer now in practice in this great free republic. In his book The Sage in Harlem, Charles Scruggs provides a detailed account of the positive effect of Mencken’s writings and influence upon many black writers. For example, Scruggs quotes a particularly poignant observation by the African-American author Richard Wright, who asserted that he was inspired to become a writer through his encounters with Mencken’s books:

I was jarred and shocked by the clear, clean, sweeping sentences . . . I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen . . . denouncing everything American . . . laughing . . . mocking God, authority. . . . This man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. . . . I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.

If Mencken was a misogynist, an anti-Semite, and a racist, he was certainly not of a garden variety. If he found fault with members of these groups, it was nothing personal; he found fault with most members of most groups, just because they were group members. To some this made him a despicable, self-serving elitist; to others he was a generous, inspirational champion of civil liberties and free speech. Nietzsche could have been foreshadowing Mencken when, in Human, All Too Human, he wrote:

If anyone wanted to imagine a genius of culture, what would the latter be like? He would manipulate falsehood, force, the most ruthless self-interest as his instruments so skillfully he could only be called an evil, demonic being; but his objectives, which here and there shine through, would be great and good. He would be a centaur, half beast, half man, and with angel’s wings attached to his head in addition.

In conclusion, we are left to imagine how a a twenty-seven-year-old Mencken, in reading and writing about Nietzsche, could have become increasingly attracted to and influenced by the beliefs of his subject. As we have seen, there are many parallels, similarities, and congruencies between Nietzsche and Mencken, many of which would not become recognizable until later in Mencken’s life.

Dennis Sweet holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Iowa. He writes frequently on Kant, Heraclitus, and Nietzsche, and teaches philosophy and history at several colleges in Pittsburgh.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

WHEN THIS ATTEMPT TO SUMMARIZE AND INTERPRET THE PRINCIPAL ideas of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was first published, in the early part of 1908, several of his most important books were yet to be translated into English and the existing commentaries were either fragmentary and confusing or frankly addressed to the specialist in philosophy. It was in an effort to make Nietzsche comprehensible to the general reader, at sea in German and unfamiliar with the technicalities of the seminaries, that the work was undertaken. It soon appeared that a considerable public had awaited that effort, for the first edition was quickly exhausted and there was an immediate demand for a special edition in England. The larger American edition which followed has since gone the way of its predecessor, and so the opportunity offers for a general revision, eliminating certain errors in the first draft and introducing facts and opinions brought forward by the publication of Dr. Oscar Levy’s admirable complete edition of Nietzsche in English and by the appearance of several new and informative biographical studies, and a large number of discussions and criticisms. The whole of the section upon Nietzsche’s intellectual origins has been rewritten, as has been the section on his critics, and new matter has been added to the biographical chapters. In addition, the middle portion of the book has been carefully revised, and a final chapter upon the study of Nietzsche, far more extensive than the original bibliographical note, has been appended. The effect of these changes, it is believed, has been to increase the usefulness of the book, not only to the reader who will go no further, but also to the reader who plans to proceed to Nietzsche’s own writings and to the arguments of his principal critics and defenders.

That Nietzsche has been making progress of late goes without saying. No reader of current literature, nor even of current periodicals, can have failed to notice the increasing pressure of his ideas. When his name was first heard in England and America, toward the end of the nineties, he suffered much by the fact that few of his advocates had been at any pains to understand him. Thus misrepresented, he took on the aspect of an horrific intellectual hobgoblin, half Bakúnin and half Byron, a sacrilegious and sinister fellow, the father of all the wilder ribaldries of the day. In brief, like Ibsen before him, he had to bear many a burden that was not his. But in the course of time the truth about him gradually precipitated itself from this cloud of unordered enthusiasm, and his principal ideas began to show themselves clearly. Then the discovery was made that the report of them had been far more appalling than the substance. Some of them, indeed, had already slipped into respectable society in disguise, as the original inspirations of lesser sages, and others, on examination, turned out to be quite harmless, and even comforting. The worst that could be said of most of them was that they stood in somewhat violent opposition to the common platitudes, that they were a bit vociferous in denying this planet to be the best of all possible worlds. Heresy, of course, but falling, fortunately enough, upon ears fast growing attuned to heretical music. The old order now had fewer to defend it than in days gone by. The feeling that it must yield to something better, that contentment must give way to striving and struggle, that any change was better than no change at all—this feeling was abroad in the world. And if the program of change that Nietzsche offered was startling at first hearing, it was at least no more startling than the programs offered by other reformers. Thus he got his day in court at last and thus he won the serious attention of open-minded and reflective folk.

Not, of course, that Nietzsche threatens, today or in the near future, to make a grand conquest of Christendom, as Paul conquered, or the unknown Father of Republics. Far from it, indeed. Filtered through the comic sieve of a Shaw or sentimentalized by a Roosevelt, some of his ideas show a considerable popularity, but in their original state they are not likely to inflame millions. Broadly viewed, they stand in direct opposition to every dream that soothes the slumber of mankind in the mass, and therefore mankind in the mass must needs be suspicious of them, at least for years to come. They are pre-eminently for the man who is not of the mass, for the man whose head is lifted, however little, above the common level. They justify the success of that man, as Christianity justifies the failure of the man below. And so they give no promise of winning the race in general from its old idols, despite the fact that the pull of natural laws and of elemental appetites is on their side. But inasmuch as an idea, to make itself felt in the world, need not convert the many who serve and wait but only the few who rule, it must be manifest that the Nietzschean creed, in the long run, gives promise of exercising a very real influence upon human thought. Reduced to a single phrase, it may be called a counterblast to sentimentality—and it is precisely by breaking down sentimentality, with its fondness for moribund gods, that human progress is made. If Nietzsche had left no other vital message to his time, he would have at least forced and deserved a hearing for his warning that Christianity is a theory for those who distrust and despair of their strength, and not for those who hope and fight on.

To plat his principal ideas for the reader puzzled by conflicting reports of them, to prepare the way for an orderly and profitable reading of his own books—such is the purpose of the present volume. The works of Nietzsche, as they have been done into English, fill eighteen volumes as large as this one, and the best available account of his life would make three or four more. But it is sincerely to be hoped that the student, once he has learned the main paths through this extensive country, will proceed to a diligent and thorough exploration. Of all modern philosophers Nietzsche is the least dull. He was undoubtedly the greatest German prose writer of his generation, and even when one reads him through the English veil it is impossible to escape the charm and color of his phrases and the pyrotechnic brilliance of his thinking.

MENCKEN

Baltimore, November 1913

NIETZSCHE THE MAN

003 CHAPTER ONE 004

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WAS A PREACHER’S SON, BROUGHT UP IN THE fear of the Lord. It is the ideal training for sham-smashers and freethinkers. Let a boy of alert, restless intelligence come to early manhood in an atmosphere of strong faith, wherein doubts are blasphemies and inquiry is a crime, and rebellion is certain to appear with his beard. So long as his mind feels itself puny beside the overwhelming pomp and circumstance of parental authority, he will remain docile and even pious. But so soon as he begins to see authority as something ever finite, variable and all-too-human—when he begins to realize that his father and his mother, in the last analysis, are mere human beings, and fallible like himself—then he will fly precipitately toward the intellectual wailing places, to think his own thoughts in his own way and to worship his own gods beneath the open sky.

As a child Nietzsche was holy; as a man he was the symbol and embodiment of all unholiness. At nine he was already versed in the lore of the reverend doctors, and the pulpit, to his happy mother—a preacher’s daughter as well as a preacher’s wife—seemed his logical and lofty goal; at thirty he was chief among those who held that all pulpits should be torn down and fashioned into bludgeons, to beat out the silly brains of theologians.

The awakening came to him when he made his first venture away from the maternal apron-string and fireside: when, as a boy of ten, he learned that there were many, many men in the world and that these men were of