Thoughts out of Season, part 1 | Page 8

it and let
us eat and be merry!" AMEN.
OSCAR LEVY.
LONDON, January 1909.
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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. To the reader who knows Nietzsche,
who has studied his Zarathustra and understood it, and who, in addition,
has digested the works entitled Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy
of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist,-- to such a
reader everything in this volume will be perfectly clear and
comprehensible. In the attack on Strauss he will immediately detect the
germ of the whole of Nietzsche's subsequent attitude towards too hasty
contentment and the foolish beatitude of the "easily pleased"; in the
paper on Wagner he will recognise Nietzsche the indefatigable borer,
miner and underminer, seeking to define his ideals, striving after
self-knowledge above all, and availing himself of any contemporary
approximation to his ideal man, in order to press it forward as the
incarnation of his thoughts. Wagner the reformer of mankind! Wagner
the dithyrambic dramatist!--The reader who knows Nietzsche will not
be misled by these expressions.
To the uninitiated reader, however, some words of explanation are due,
not only in regard to the two papers before us, but in regard to
Nietzsche himself. So much in our time is learnt from hearsay
concerning prominent figures in science, art, religion, or philosophy,

that it is hardly possible for anybody to-day, however badly informed
he may be, to begin the study of any great writer or scientist with a
perfectly open mind. It were well, therefore, to begin the study of
Nietzsche with some definite idea as to his unaltered purpose, if he ever
possessed such a thing; as to his lifelong ideal, if he ever kept one so
long; and as to the one direction in which he always travelled, despite
apparent deviations and windings. Had he such a purpose, such an ideal,
such a direction? We have no wish to open a controversy here, neither
do we think that in replying to this question in the affirmative we shall
give rise to one; for every careful student of Nietzsche, we know, will
uphold us in our view. Nietzsche had one very definite and unaltered
purpose, ideal and direction, and this was "the elevation of the type
man." He tells us in The Will to Power: "All is truth to me that tends to
elevate man!" To this principle he was already pledged as a student at
Leipzig; we owe every line that he ever wrote to his devotion to it, and
it is the key to all his complexities, blasphemies, prolixities, and terrible
earnestness. All was good to Nietzsche that tended to elevate man; all
was bad that kept man stationary or sent him backwards. Hence he
wrote David Strauss, the Confessor and Writer (1873).
The Franco-German War had only just come to an end, and the keynote
of this polemical pamphlet is, "Beware of the intoxication of success."
When the whole of Germany was delirious with joy over her victory, at
a time when the unquestioned triumph of her arms tended rather to
reflect unearned glory upon every department of her social organisation,
it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and
to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit,
because his worst fears were aroused. Smug content (erbärmliches
Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose--the elevation of
man; smug content personified in the German scholar was giving itself
airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all the while it was
a mere cover for hidden rottenness and jejune pedantry.
Nietzsche's attack on Hegelian optimism alone (pp. 46, 53-54), in the
first paper, fully reveals the fundamental idea underlying this essay;
and if the personal attack on Strauss seems sometimes to throw the
main theme into the background, we must remember the author's own
attitude towards this aspect of the case. Nietzsche, as a matter of fact,
had neither the spite nor the meanness requisite for the purely personal

attack. In his Ecce Homo, he tells us most emphatically: "I have no
desire to attack particular persons--I do but use a personality as a
magnifying glass; I place it over the subject to which I wish to call
attention, merely that the appeal may be stronger." David Strauss, in a
letter to a friend, soon after the publication of the first Thought out of
Season, expresses his utter astonishment that a total stranger should
have made such a dead set at him. The same problem may possibly face
the reader on every page of this fssay: if, however, we realise
Nietzsche's purpose, if we understand his struggle to be one against
"Culture-Philistinism" in general, as a stemming, stultifying and
therefore degenerate factor, and regard David Strauss--as the author
himself did, that is to say, simply as a glass, focusing the whole