The Teachings of Friedrich Nietzche

The eccentric and influential writer whose teachings form the topic of the present paper is a man not readily to be understood, nor easily to be estimated, by those students to whom as to all of us Americans his language is foreign, and to whom his social and national environment can be known only through a comparatively distant and superficial observation. I myself feel very strongly, as I approach him, [2] the limitations both of my power to understand his mental processes, and of my natural sympathy with some of his interests. Yet when one notes how passionately he has been both attacked and defended by his foes and by his partisans in recent German discussion, ― when one observes the so far continuous growth both of his personal influence and of the efforts of his disciples to expound and to apply his meaning, one feels that Nietzsche is, for good or for ill, a power in the literature of the moment, ― a power of which serious people must take account. [3] The present paper, wholly tentative in its nature, is in my own case a sort of effort to come to clearness as to the main outlines of Nietzsche's world. In the absence of any sufficient preparation on the part of our American public, for a study of this skeptic, individualist, and iconoclast, I suppose that even so imperfect an effort as this one may be of temporary service of those who hear me. In addition to use of Nietzsche's own, always problematic writings, this paper is much dependent for its facts, and for its estimates, upon some of his recent German critics and expositors, and I make [4] no pretense of offering anything wholly independent or critically final. We Americans are still in the position of needing to learn to understand Nietzsche. Now in order to understand a man, it is not in the least necessary to become a follower of his cult; but it is very necessary to be patient with his anomalies of style and of opinion, and to be willing to assume the attitude of waiting for further light as to the final significance of the new tendencies that he represents. In this spirit I undertake a sketch which is intended to be neither an attack nor a defense, but an effort to help him for [5] our extraordinary, and unhappy thinkers, a fair hearing, and to increase the circle of those who may come to read him with profit, as well as with critical coolness and gentleness.I