[Barrett was an American critic, educator, and editor who was associated with the influential leftist journal Partisan Review, whose editors, including Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, and Mary McCarthy, espoused Marxist and modernist ideas in politics and literature. Barrett reacted against the utopian strain in these ideologies and distinguished himself in translating and explicating the work of European existentialists. In the following excerpt from his much-praised study of existentialism, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, Barrett elucidates Nietzsche's contributions to existentialist thought.]

By the middle of the nineteenth century …, the problem of man had begun to dawn on certain minds in a new and more radical form: Man, it was seen, is a stranger to himself and must discover, or rediscover, who he is and what his meaning is. Kierkegaard had recommended a rediscovery of the religious center of the Self, which for European man had to mean a return to Christianity, but what he had in mind was a radical return that went back beyond organized Christendom and its churches to a state of contemporaneity with the first disciples of Christ. Nietzsche's solution harked back to an even more remote and archaic past: to the early Greeks, before either Christianity or science had put its blight upon the healthiness of man's instincts.

It was Nietzsche's fate to experience the problem of man in a peculiarly personal and virulent form. At twenty-four, an unheard-of age in the German academic world, he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. The letter of recommendation written for him on this occasion by his teacher, Ritschl, is almost one continuous exclamation of awe at the prodigy of culture being sent to Basel. Besides being immensely learned in the classical languages, Nietzsche showed extraordinary literary promise and was also a gifted musician. But this prodigy was also a very delicate and sickly youth, with weak eyesight and a nervous stomach. Nietzsche had undoubtedly inherited this fragile constitution, but in later years he tended to think resentfully that it had been brought about by the excessive labors of scholarship. At any rate, intensive study had not helped his health. He thus knew at first hand the war between culture and vitality: he was himself, in fact, the field of battle between the two. He had to resign his professorship after ten years because of his poor health. Thereafter he became the wanderer and his shadow—to use the title of one of his books, which accurately describes his own life—traveling all over southern Europe in search of a health that he never could regain. In those disconsolate and lonely years all his glittering cultural attributes did not help him in the least; culture, in fact, was a screen between the wanderer and the natural man that he strove to resurrect. As a scholarly bookworm he had not even known that he was unknown to himself, but when his eyesight became too poor to read books he began at last to read himself: a text that culture up to that time had obscured.

Nietzsche had originally encountered the god Dionysus in his studies of Greek tragedy. Dionysus was the patron deity of the Greek tragic festivals, and so the cult of this god had received all the blessing of high culture, since it was associated with the most sublime and formally beautiful products of human art. On the other hand, the Dionysian cult reached back into the most primitive and archaic eras of the Greek race. For Dionysus was the god of the vine, the god of drunken ecstasy and frenzy, who made the vine come to life in spring and brought all men together in the joy of intoxication. This god thus united miraculously in himself the height of culture with the depth of instinct, bringing together the warring opposites that divided Nietzsche himself. The problem of reconciling these opposites was the central theme later of D. H. Lawrence, of Gide in his Immoralist (a fiction based upon Nietzsche's life), and of Freud in one of his last and most significant works, Civilization and Its Discontents. It is still the most formidable problem of man in our twentieth, the psychoanalytic, century. Dionysus reborn, Nietzsche thought, might become a savior-god for the whole race, which seemed everywhere to show symptoms of fatigue and decline. The symbol of the god became so potent for Nietzsche that it ended—as only symbols can do—by taking possession of his life. He consecrated himself to the service of the god Dionysus.

But Dionysus is a dangerous as well as an ambiguous god. Those in antiquity who meddled with him ended by being torn to pieces. When he took possession of his own followers he drove them to frenzies of destruction. He was called, among other names, "the horned one" and "the bull" by the Greeks, and in one of his cults was worshiped in the form of a bull who was ritually slaughtered and torn to pieces. So Dionysus himself, according to the myth, had been torn to pieces by the Titans, those formless powers of the subterranean world who were always at war with the enlightened gods of Olympus. The fate of his god overtook Nietzsche: he too was torn apart by the dark forces of the underworld, succumbing, at the age of forty-five, to psychosis. It may be a metaphor, but it is certainly not an exaggeration, to say that he perished as a ritual victim slaughtered for the sake of his god.

It is equally true, and perhaps just another way of saying the same thing, that Nietzsche perished for the sake of the problems of life that he set out to solve. The sacrifice of a victim, in the ancient and primitive world, was supposed to bring blessings upon the rest of the tribe, but Nietzsche was one of those who bring not peace but a sword. His works have divided, shocked, and perplexed readers ever since his death, and at the low point of his posthumous fortune his name was polluted by a Nietzschean cult among the Nazis. Nevertheless, the victim did not perish in vain; his sacrifice can be an immense lesson to the rest of the tribe if it is willing to learn from him. Nietzsche's fate is one of the great episodes in man's historic effort to know himself. After him, the problem of man could never quite return to its pre-Nietzschean level. Nietzsche it was who showed in its fullest sense how thoroughly problematical is the nature of man: he can never be understood as an animal species within the zoological order of nature, because he has broken free of nature and has thereby posed the question of his own meaning—and with it the meaning of nature as well—as his destiny. Nietzsche's works are an immense mine of observations on the condition of man, one that we are still in the process of quarrying.

Moreover, Nietzsche's life stands in a double sense as a great warning to mankind, to be heeded lest we too suffer the fate of being torn apart like Dionysus Zagreus. He who would make the descent into the lower regions runs the risk of succumbing to what the primitives call "the perils of the soul"—the unknown Titans that lie within, below the surface of our selves. To ascend again from the darkness of Avernus is, as the Latin poet tells us, the difficult thing, and he who would make the descent had better secure his lines of communication with the surface. Communication means community, and the adventurer into the depths would do well to have roots in a human community and perhaps even the ballast, somewhere in his nature, of a little bit of Philistinism. Nietzsche lacked such lines of communication, for he had cut himself off from the human community; he was one of the loneliest men that ever existed. By comparison, Kierkegaard looks almost like a worldly soul, for he was at least solidly planted in his native Copenhagen, and though he may have been at odds with his fellow citizens, he loved the town, and it was his home. Nietzsche, however, was altogether and utterly homeless. He who descends must keep in touch with the surface, but on the other hand—and this is the other sense of Nietzsche's warning—modern man may also be torn apart by the titanic forces within himself if he does not attempt the descent into Avernus. It is no mere matter of psychological curiosity but a question of life and death for man in our time to place himself again in contact with the archaic life of his unconscious. Without such contact he may become the Titan who slays himself. Man, this most dangerous of the animals, as Nietzsche called him, now holds in his hands the dangerous power of blowing himself and his planet to bits; and it is not yet even clear that this problematic and complex being is really sane.

"In the end one experiences only oneself," Nietzsche observes in his Zarathustra, and elsewhere he remarks, in the same vein, that all the systems of the philosophers are just so many forms of personal confession, if we but had eyes to see it. Following this conviction, that the thinker cannot be separated from his thought, Nietzsche revealed himself in his work more fully than any philosopher before or since. Hence the best introduction to him may be the little autobiographical book Ecce Homo, which is his own attempt to take stock of himself and his life. Nietzsche is not the most prepossessing figure, as we are introduced to him here, for in this work he was clearly already in the grip of the psychological malady that three years later was to bring on his breakdown. But he is a great enough figure that he can stand being approached from his weakest side. And did not he himself say we must divest philosophers of their masks, learn to see the thinker's shadow in his thought? Paradoxical as it may sound, to praise Nietzsche properly we have also to say the worst possible things about him. This too is in line with his own principle, that good and bad in any individual are inextricably one, all the more so as the opposing qualities become more extreme. All of Nietzsche—in his extremes of good and bad—is summed up in Ecce Homo, and it is precisely the all that he himself could not see.

An unprejudiced psychological observer is at once fascinated and appalled by what he finds in Ecce Homo. The process of ego-inflation has already gone beyond the bounds of what we ordinarily call neurosis. And this inflation is already tinged with curious distortions of the facts: Nietzsche refers to himself swaggeringly as "an old artilleryman" as if he had had a robust military career, though we of course know that his service in the artillery was so brief as to be almost non-existent, and that it terminated with his illness after a fall from his horse. The relation with Lou Salome, which was in fact very slight, is described obliquely in such a fashion as to suggest that Nietzsche was a devil of a fellow with women. These are not the shallow lies of a calculating mind, but delusions in the systematic sense of psychopathology: that is, fantasies in which the man himself has begun to live. He rails against the Germans, yet he himself is German to the marrow. And while he proclaims himself above all resentments, we are aware throughout of a thin skin that is smarting with resentment at his lack of readers and of recognition in Germany. Nietzsche speaks of himself as the greatest psychologist who ever lived; and while there is some basis for so grandiose a boast—he was indeed a great psychologist—the overwhelming question his book raises is why this psychologist has so little insight into himself. The vision of his true self, we suspect, would have been too terrifying for him to face. The fantasies, the delusions, the grandiose inflation of the ego are only devices to shield him from the sight of the other side of himself—of Nietzsche, the sickly lonely man, emotionally starved, a ghost flitting from place to place, always without a home—the dwarf side, that is, of the giant about whom he boasts. Nietzsche's systematic shielding of himself from the other side is relevant to his explanation of the death of God: Man killed God, he says, because he could not bear to have anyone looking at his ugliest side. Man must cease to feel guilt, he goes on; and yet one senses an enormous hidden guilt and feeling of inferiority behind his own frantic boasts. Yet, though the wind of madness may already be blowing through Ecce Homo, at the same time the powers of Nietzsche's mind were never more formidable. The style is as brisk and incisive as anything he wrote, as he lays before us in bold and simple outline the guiding pattern of his ideas. It is this split between madness and coherence that makes the book so paradoxical. How could the mind of this man have so split off from the rest of himself—and this in a thinker who, above all other philosophers, seemed to have found access to the unconscious?

The title of the book itself Ecce Homo—"Behold the Man!", the words of Pontius Pilate spoken about Christ—supplies a very definite clue. The imitation of Christ, in however remote and unconscious a form, is something that almost nobody raised a Christian can avoid. ("All my life I have compared myself with Christ," exclaims the tramp in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.) Nietzsche had come from a line of Protestant pastors, had been raised in a very pious atmosphere, and was himself as a boy very devout. The religious influences of childhood are the hardest things to extirpate; the leopard can as easily change his spots. Had Nietzsche merely lost his Christian faith, or even simply attacked it intellectually, these acts would in themselves have been sufficient to create a conflict within him; but he went further by attempting to deny the Christian in himself, and thereby split himself in two. The symbol of Dionysus had possessed him intellectually; he identified with this pagan god (in one place in Ecce Homo he actually speaks of himself as Dionysus), and thenceforth, with all the energy of mind that he could summon, he devoted himself to elaborating the opposition between Dionysus and Christ. In the end, however, the symbol of Christ proved the more potent; and when his unconscious finally broke irremediably into the open, it was Christ who took possession of Nietzsche, as is shown by the letters written after his breakdown which he signed "The Crucified One."

In a life so filled with portents and omens it is remarkable that he should have recorded one-in a dream he had when a schoolboy of fifteen, at Pforta-that was prophetic of the central conflict out of which he was to write and live. In the dream he was wandering about in a gloomy wood at night, and after being terrified by "a piercing shriek from a neighboring lunatic asylum," he met with a hunter whose "features were wild and uncanny." In a valley "surrounded by dense undergrowth," the hunter raised his whistle to his lips and blew such "a shrill note" that Nietzsche woke out of his nightmare. Now it is interesting that in this dream he had been on his way to Eisleben, Luther's town; but on meeting the hunter it became a question of going instead to Teutschenthal (which means, German Valley). That is, the two roads diverge, one leading toward Lutheran Christianity, the other toward the primeval pagan German soil. Being a classical scholar, Nietzsche preferred to let his wandering German god assume the Greek guise of Dionysus. It would be farfetched to make much of this dream if it were merely an isolated revelation, but it is in fact of a piece with the other dreams and visions that Nietzsche poured into his writings. Even the frightening prophecy of madness that occurs in the dream is echoed among the images of Zarathustra. Nietzsche's life has all the characteristics of a psychological fatality.

Now all these self-revelations that we have been discussing, it might be said, reflect nothing but a pathological process, and therefore had best be left to one side while we discuss the philosophic ideas of this thinker. Unfortunately, nothing in life is nothing but; it is always something more. What we have been talking about is indeed a pathological process, but it is also a pathological process taking place in a thinker of genius, from whom the process thereby acquires an immense significance. It is just as much a mistake for interpreters of Nietzsche to cast aside this whole matter of Nietzsche's sickness, as it was for the Philistines, shocked by his ideas, to discount them simply as the ravings of a madman. It may be that genius and neurosis are inextricably linked, as some recent discussions of the subject have held; in any case Nietzsche would be one of the prime examples of the kind of truth neurosis, and even worse than neurosis, can be made to reveal for the rest of mankind. The pathological process in Nietzsche, which we have dealt with only briefly here, is in fact indispensable for an understanding of the philosophic meaning of atheism as he tried to live it. Nietzsche was engaged in a process of tearing himself loose from his psychological roots at the very moment in history that Western man was doing likewise—only the latter did not know it. Up to that time man had lived in the childhood shelter of his gods or of God; now that all the gods were dead he was taking his first step into maturity. This, for Nietzsche, was the most momentous event in modern history, one to which all the social, economic, and military upheavals of the nineteenth and indeed of the coming twentieth century would, as he prophesied, be secondary. Could mankind meet this awful challenge of becoming adult and godless? Yes, said Nietzsche, because man is the most courageous animal and will be able to survive even the death of his gods. The very process of tearing consciousness loose from its roots, which ends inevitably in Ecce Homo in the grandiose inflation of the ego, had for Nietzsche himself the significance of a supreme act of courage. Not a day goes by, he wrote in one of his letters, that I do not lop off some comforting belief. Man must live without any religious or metaphysical consolations. And if it was to be humanity's fate to become godless, he, Nietzsche, elected to be the prophet who would give the necessary example of courage. It is in this light that we must look upon Nietzsche as a culture hero: he chose, that is, to suffer the conflict within his culture in its most acute form and was ultimately torn apart by it.

Now, there are atheists and atheists. The urbane atheism of Bertrand Russell, for example, presupposes the existence of believers against whom he can score points in an argument and get off some of his best quips. The atheism of Sartre is a more somber affair, and indeed borrows some of its color from Nietzsche: Sartre relentlessly works out the atheistic conclusion that in a universe without God man is absurd, unjustified, and without reason, as Being itself is. Still, this kind of atheism seems to carry with it the bravado of one who is ranging himself on the side of a less sanguine truth than the rest of mankind. Nietzsche's atheism, however, goes even deeper. He projects himself into the situation where God is really dead for the whole of mankind, and he shares in the common fate, not merely scoring points off the believers. Section 125 of The Joyful Wisdom [The Gay Science], the passage in which Nietzsche first speaks of the death of God, is one of the most heart-rending things he ever wrote. The man who has seen the death of God, significantly enough, is a madman, and he cries out his vision to the unheeding populace in the market place, asking the question: "Do we not now wander through an endless Nothingness?" Here we are no longer dealing with the abstractions of logical argument, but with a fate that has overtaken mankind. Of course, Nietzsche himself tried elsewhere to assume the witty mask of the libre penseur of the Enlightenment and to make brilliant aphorisms about God's non-existence. And in his Zarathustra he speaks of "Zarathustra the godless" and even "the most godless." But godless is one thing Nietzsche certainly was not: he was in the truest sense possessed by a god, though he could not identify what god it was and mistakenly took him for Dionysus. In a very early poem, "To the Unknown God," written when he was only twenty years old, he speaks about himself as a god-possessed man, more truthfully than he was later, as a philosopher, to be able to recognize:

I must know thee, Unknown One,
Thou who searchest out the depths of my soul,
And blowest like a storm through my life.
Thou art inconceivably and yet my kinsman!
I must know thee and even serve thee.

Had God really died in the depths of Nietzsche's soul or was it merely that the intellect of the philosopher could not cope with His presence and His meaning?

If God is taken as a metaphysical object whose existence has to be proved, then the position held by scientifically-minded philosophers like Russell must inevitably be valid: the existence of such an object can never be empirically proved. Therefore, God must be a superstition held by primitive and childish minds. But both these alternative views are abstract, whereas the reality of God is concrete, a thoroughly autonomous presence that takes hold of men but of which, of course, some men are more conscious than others. Nietzsche's atheism reveals the true meaning of God—and does so, we might add, more effectively than a good many official forms of theism. He himself scoffs in one place at his being confused with the ordinary run of freethinkers, who have not the least understanding of his atheism. And despite the desperate struggle of the "godless Zarathustra," Nietzsche remained in the possession of this Unknown God to whom he had paid homage in his youth. This possession is shown in its most violent form in Zarathustra, even though Nietzsche puts the words into the mouth of the Magician, an aspect of himself that he wishes to exorcise:

Thus do I lie,
Bend myself, twist myself, convulsed
With all eternal torture,
And smitten
By thee, cruelest huntsman,
Thou unfamiliar—GOD

At this point we are ready to see what takes place behind the scenes in Zarathustra, where all the aforementioned themes become fully orchestrated.

No adequate psychological commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra has yet been written, perhaps because the materials in it are so inexhaustible. It is a unique work of self-revelation but not at all on the personal or autobiographical level, and Nietzsche himself ostensibly does not appear in it; it is self-revelation at a greater, more primordial depth, where the stream of the unconscious itself gushes forth from the rock. Perhaps no other book contains such a steady procession of images, symbols, and visions straight out of the unconscious. It was Nietzsche's poetic work and because of this he could allow the unconscious to take over in it, to break through the restraints imposed elsewhere by the philosophic intellect. For this reason it is important beyond any of his strictly philosophic books; its content is actually richer than Nietzsche's own conceptual thought, and its symbols of greater wisdom and significance than he himself was able to grasp.

Nietzsche himself has described the process of inspiration by which he wrote this book, and his description makes it clear beyond question that we are in the presence here of an extraordinary release of and invasion by the unconscious:

Can any one at the end of this nineteenth century have any distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous period meant by inspiration? If not, I should like to describe it.… The notion of revelation describes the condition quite simply; by which I mean that something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indescribable definiteness and exactness.… There is an ecstasy whose terrific tension is sometimes released by a flood of tears, during which one's progress varies from involuntary impetuosity to involuntary slowness. There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand.… Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power and divinity. The spontaneity of the images and similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of what is imagery and simile; everything offers itself as the most immediate, exact, and simple means of expression.

"One loses all perception of what is imagery and simile"—that is to say, the symbol itself supersedes thought, because it is richer in meaning.

His most lyrical book, Zarathustra is also the expression of the loneliest Nietzsche. It has about it the icy and arid atmosphere not merely of the symbolic mountaintop on which Zarathustra dwells, but of a real one. Reading it, one sometimes feels almost as if one were watching a film of the ascent of Mount Everest, hearing the climber's sobbing gasp for breath as he struggles slowly to higher and still higher altitudes. Climbing a mountain is the aptest metaphor for getting above ordinary humanity, and this precisely is what Zarathustra-Nietzsche is struggling to do. One hears throughout the book, though, in the gasping breath of the climber, the lament of Nietzsche the man.

The book begins with the recognition of this human relevance as Zarathustra, about to leave his mountain solitude, declares he is going down among men "once again to be a man." The mountain is the solitude of the spirit, the lowlands represent the world of ordinary men. The same symbolic contrast appears in Zarathustra's pet animals, the eagle and the serpent: the one the creature of the upper air, the other the one that moves closest to the earth. Zarathustra, as the third element, symbolizes the union between the two animals, of high and low, heaven and earth. He is going down among men, he says, as the sun sets dipping into the darkness below the horizon. But the sun sets in order to be reborn the next morning as a young and glowing god. The book thus opens with the symbols of rebirth and resurrection, and this is in fact the real theme of Zarathustra: how is man to be reborn, like the phoenix, from his own ashes? How is he to become really healthy and whole? Behind this question we see the personal shadow of Nietzsche's own illness and his long struggle to regain health; Zarathustra is at once the idealized image of himself and the symbol of a victory, in the struggle for health and wholeness, that Nietzsche himself was not able to achieve in life.

Despite the intensely personal sources of his theme, Nietzsche was dealing in this work with a problem that had already become central in German culture. Schiller and Goethe had dealt with it—Schiller as early as 1795 in his remarkable Letters on Aesthetic Education, and Goethe in his Faust. Schiller has given an extraordinarily clear statement of the problem, which was for him identical in all its salient features with the problem later posed by Nietzsche. For man, says Schiller, the problem is one of forming individuals. Modern life has departmentalized, specialized, and thereby fragmented the being of man. We now face the problem of putting the fragments together into a whole. In the course of his exposition, Schiller even referred back, as did Nietzsche, to the example of the Greeks, who produced real individuals and not mere learned abstract men like those of the modern age. Goethe was even closer to Nietzsche; Faust and Zarthustra are in fact brothers among books. Both attempt to elaborate in symbols the process by which the superior individual—whole, intact, and healthy—is to be formed; and both are identically "immoral" in their content, if morality is measured in its usual conventional terms.

Placed within the German cultural context, indeed, Nietzsche's immoralism begins to look less extreme than the popular imagination has taken it to be; it is not even as extreme as he was led to make it appear in some of the bloody creations of his overheated imagination in his last work, The Will to Power. Goethe in Faust was every bit as much at odds with conventional morality as was Nietzsche, but the old diplomatic fox of Weimar was a more tactful and better-balanced man and knew how to get his point across quietly, without shrieking it from the housetops as Nietzsche did. The Faust of the second part of Goethe's poem is already, as we have seen, something of a Nietzschean Superman, beyond ordinary good and evil. The story of the other, moral Faust is told in the popular sentimental opera of Gounod, in which the character sells himself to the Devil and wrongs a young girl; the whole thing comes to an end with the girl's tragic death. But Goethe could not leave matters at this; the problem that had taken hold of him, through his creation of Faust, led him to look upon Gretchen's tragedy simply as a stage along Faust's way. A process of self-development such as his cannot come to a close because a young girl whom he has seduced goes crazy and dies. The strong man survives such disasters and becomes harder. The Devil, with whom Faust has made a pact, becomes in a real sense his servitor and subordinate, just as our devil, if joined to ourselves, may become a fruitful and positive force; like Blake before him Goethe knew full well the ambiguous power contained in the traditional symbol of the Devil. Nietzsche's immoralism, though stated much more violently, consisted in not much more than the elaboration of Goethe's point: Man must incorporate his devil or, as he put it, man must become better and more evil; the tree that would grow taller must send its roots down deeper.

If Nietzsche was not able to contain himself as tactfully as Goethe, on this point, he nevertheless had something to shriek about: The whole of traditional morality, he believed, had no grasp of psychological reality and was therefore dangerously one-sided and false. To be sure, this had always been known but mankind, spouting ideals, had looked at such realities and winked, or adopted casuistry. But if one is going to live one's life literally and totally by the Sermon on the Mount or Buddha's Dhammapada, and one cannot manage to be a saint, one will end by making a sorry mess of oneself. Nietzsche's point has already carried so far that today in our ordinary valuations we are actually living in a post-Nietzschean world, one in which the psychoanalyst sometimes finds it necessary to tell a patient that he ought to be more aggressive and more selfish. Besides, what does the whole history of ethics amount to for that half, and more than half, of the human race, women, who deal with moral issues in altogether different terms from men? It amounts to rather a silly man-made affair that has very little to do with the real business of life. On this point Nietzsche has a perfectly sober and straightforward case against all those idealists, from Plato onward, who have set universal ideas over and above the individual's psychological needs. Morality itself is blind to the tangle of its own psychological motives, as Nietzsche showed in one of his most powerful books, The Genealogy of Morals, which traces the source of morality back to the drives of power and resentment. There are other motives that Nietzsche did not see, or did not care to honor, but no one can deny that these two, power and resentment, have historically been part of the shadow behind the moralist's severity.

But it is precisely here, in the context of the Faust-Zarathustra parallel, that the chief problem arises for Nietzsche as man and moralist. Suppose the ethical problem becomes the problem of the individual; the ethical question then becomes: How is the individual to nourish himself in order to grow? Once we set ourselves to reclaim that portion of human nature that traditional morality rejected—man's devil, to put it symbolically—we face the immense problem of socializing and taming those impulses. Here the imagination of Faustian man tends to become much too high-falutin. For Western man Faust has become the great symbol of the titanically striving individual, so much so that the historian Spengler could use the term "Faustian culture" to denote the whole modern epoch of our dynamic conquest of nature. In Nietzsche's Superman the spiritual tension would be even greater, for such an individual would be living at a higher level than all of humanity in the past. But what about the individual devil within the Superman? What about Zarathustra's devil? So far as Nietzsche attempts to make the goal of this higher individual the goal of mankind, a fatal ambiguity appears within his ideal itself. Is the Superman to be the extraordinary man, or the complete and whole man? Psychological wholeness does not necessarily coincide with extraordinary powers, and the great genius may be a crippled and maimed figure, as was Nietzsche himself. In our own day, of course, when men tend more and more to be miserable human fragments, the complete man, if such existed, would probably stand out from the others like a sore thumb, but he might not at all be a creature of genius or extraordinary powers. Will the Superman, then, be the titanically striving individual, dwelling on the mountaintop of the spirit, or will he be the man who has realized within the world his own individual capacities for wholeness? The two ideals are in contradiction—a contradiction that is unresolved in Nietzsche and within modern culture itself.

The fact is that Zarathustra-Nietzsche did not come to terms with his own devil, and this is the crucial failure of Zarathustra in the book and of Nietzsche in his life. Consequently, it is also the failure of Nietzsche as a thinker. Not that Zarathustra-Nietzsche does not see his devil; time and again the latter pokes a warning finger at Zarathustra, and like a good devil he knows how to assume many shapes and disguises. He is the clown who leaps over the ropedancer's head at the beginning of the book, he is the Ugliest Man, who has killed God, and he is the Spirit of Gravity, whom Zarathustra himself names as his devil—the spirit of heaviness which would pull his too high-soaring spirit to earth. Each time Zarathustra thrusts aside the warning finger, finding it merely a reason for climbing a higher mountain to get away from it. The most crucial revelation, however, comes in the chapter "The Vision and the Enigma," in which the warning figure becomes a dwarf sitting on Zarathustra's back as the latter climbs a lonely mountain path. Zarathustra wants to climb upward, but the dwarf wants to pull him back to earth. "O Zarathustra," the dwarf whispers to him, "thou didst throw thyself high, but every stone that is thrown must fall." And then, in a prophecy the more menacing when applied to Nietzsche himself: "O Zarathustra, far indeed didst thou throw thy stone, but upon thyself will it recoil!" This is the ancient pattern of the Greek myths: the hero who soars too high crashes to earth; and Nietzsche, as a scholar of Greek tragedy, should have given more respectful ear to the dwarf's warning.

But why a dwarf? The egotism of Zarathustra-Nietzsche rates himself too high; therefore the figure in the vision, to right the balance, shows him to himself as a dwarf. The dwarf is the image of mediocrity that lurks within Zarathustra-Nietzsche, and that mediocrity was the most frightening and distasteful thing that Nietzsche was willing to see in himself. Nietzsche had discovered the shadow, the underside, of human nature, and he had correctly seen it as a side that is present inescapably in every human individual. But he converted this perception into a kind of romantic diabolism; it amused him to play at being wicked and daring. He would have been prepared to meet his own devil if this devil had appeared in some grandiose form. Precisely what is hardest for us to take is the devil as the personification of the pettiest, paltriest, meanest part of our personality. Dostoevski understood this better than Nietzsche, and in that tremendous chapter of The Brothers Karamazov where the Devil appears to Ivan, the brilliant literary intellectual nourished on the Romanticism of Schiller, it is not in the guise of a dazzling Miltonic Lucifer or a swaggering operatic Mephistopheles, but rather of a faded, shabby-genteel person, a little out of fashion and ridiculous in his aestheticism—the perfect caricature of Ivan's own aesthetic mind. This figure is the Devil for Ivan Karamazov, the one that most cruelly deflates his egotism; and Dostoevski's genius as a psychologist perhaps never hit the nail on the head more accurately than in this passage. Nietzsche himself said of Dostoevski that he was the only psychologist from whom he had had anything to learn; the remark is terribly true, and in a profounder sense than Nietzsche realized.

Zarathustra—to return to him—is too touchy to acknowledge himself as this dwarf. He feels his courage challenged and believes it will be the supreme act of courage, the highest virtue, to get rid of the dwarf. "Courage at last bade me stand still and say: Dwarf! Either thou or I!" It would have been wiser, and even more courageous, to admit who the dwarf really was and to say, not "Either thou or I" but rather, "Thou and I (ego) are one self."

The vision shifts and pauses for a moment, and Nietzsche now presents us with the idea of the Eternal Return. This idea has an ambiguous status in Nietzsche. He tried to base it rationally and scientifically on the premise that if time were infinite and the particles in the universe finite, then by the laws of probability all combinations must repeat themselves over and over again eternally; and that therefore everything, we ourselves included, must recur again and again down to the last detail. But to take this as a purely intellectual hypothesis does not explain why the idea of the Eternal Return had such a powerful hold upon Nietzsche's emotions, and why, particularly, the idea is revealed at this most charged and visionary moment in Zarathusta. The circle is a pure archetypal form for the eternal: "I saw Eternity the other night," says the English poet Vaughan, "Like a great ring of pure and endless light." The idea of the Eternal Return thus expresses, as Unamuno has pointed out, Nietzsche's own aspirations toward eternal and immortal life. On the other hand, the notion is a frightening one for a thinker who sees the whole meaning of mankind to lie in the future, in the Superman that man is to become; for if all things repeat themselves in an endless cycle, and if man must come again in the paltry and botched form in which he now exists—then what meaning can man have? For Nietzsche the idea of the Eternal Return becomes the supreme test of courage: If Nietzsche the man must return to life again and again, with the same burden of ill health and suffering, would it not require the greatest affirmation and love of life to say Yes to this absolutely hopeless prospect?

Zarathustra glimpses some of the fearful implications in this vision, for he remarks after expounding the Eternal Return, "So I spoke, and always more softly: for I was afraid of my own thoughts, and afterthoughts." Thereupon, in the dream, he hears a dog howl and sees a shepherd writhing on the ground, with a heavy black reptile hanging from his mouth. "Bite!" cries Zarathustra, and the shepherd bites the serpent's head off and spits it far away. The uncanny vision poses its enigma to Zarathustra:

Ye daring ones! Ye venturers and adventurers, and whoever of you have embarked with cunning sails on unexplored seas! Ye enjoyers of enigmas!

Solve unto me the enigma that I then beheld, interpret for me the vision of the loneliest one.

For it was a vision and a foresight. What did I then behold in parable? And who is it that must come some day?

Who is the shepherd into whose throat the serpent thus crawled? Who is the man into whose throat all the heaviest and blackest will crawl?

—The shepherd bit as my cry had admonished him; he took a good bite, and spit the head of the serpent far away:—and sprang up—

No longer shepherd, no longer man—a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that laughed. Never on earth laughed a man as he laughed!

O my brethren, I heard a laughter which was no human laughter.

"Who is the shepherd into whose throat the serpent thus crawled?" He is Nietzsche himself, and both the serpent and the dwarf set for him the same task: to acknowledge "the heaviest and the blackest in himself." We commonly speak of the truth as a bitter pill that we have to swallow, but the truth about ourselves may take even the more repulsive form of a reptile. Nietzsche does not swallow the serpent's head; he denies his own shadow, and out of it he sees a transfigured being spring up. This being laughs with a laughter that is no longer human. We know this laughter all too well: it is the laughter of insanity. A few years ago Andre Breton, the surrealist, published an Anthologie de l'humour noir, in which was included one of Nietzsche's letters written after his psychosis. If one did not know who the author was and what his condition was when he wrote it, one could indeed take the letter as a dazzling piece of surrealistic laughter, a high empty mad laughter. This is the laughter Nietzsche hears in his vision, and he speaks like a tragic character ironically ignorant of his own prophecy when he says, "It was a vision and a prevision." This laughter already began to sound eerily in the pages of Ecce Homo.

There is an inner coherence in the vision of Zarathustra, in that each of its three parts—the dwarf, the Eternal Return, and the shepherd spitting out the serpent—presents an obstacle and objection to Nietzsche's utopian conception of the Superman. They prefigure his own personal catastrophe; but since he was a thinker who really lived his thought, they indicate the fatal flaw in all such utopian thought. He who would launch the Superman into interstellar space had better recognize that the dwarf goes with him. "Human, all too human!" Nietzsche exclaimed in disgust at mankind as it had hitherto existed. But he who would try to improve man might do well not to make him inhuman but, rather, a little more human. To be a whole man—a round man, as the Chinese say—Western man may have to learn to be less Faustian. A touch of the average, the mediocre, may be necessary ballast for human nature. The antidote to the hysterical, mad laughter of Zarathustra's vision may be a sense of humor, which is something Nietzsche, despite his brilliant intellectual wit, conspicuously lacked.

The conclusions we have reached here on a psychological level become confirmed when we turn to Nietzsche's systematic philosophy of power.

Nietzsche is considered by many philosophers to be an unsystematic thinker. This view, a mistaken one, is based largely on the external form of his writings. He loved to write aphoristically, to attack his subjects indirectly and dramatically rather than in the straightforward solemn form of a pedantic treatise; he was one of the great prose stylists of the German language, and in his writing he could not, or would not, deny the artist in himself. He even went so far as to say that he was viewing science and philosophy through the eyes of art. But beneath and throughout all these belletristic forays a single consuming idea was moving in him toward a systematized development. As thinking gradually took over the whole person, and everything else in his life being starved out, it was inevitable that this thought should tend to close itself off in a system. At the end of his life he was making notes for a great systematic work which would be the complete expression of his philosophy. This work we now have in unfinished form in The Will to Power. The increase in systematization in Nietzsche's work is in many ways a psychological loss, since in pursuing his thematic idea he lost sight of the ambiguity in matters of the human psyche. However, there is a gain as well, for by carrying his ideas to the end he lets us see what they finally amount to. Heidegger has, in a recent memorable essay, called attention to the hitherto unrecognized fact that Nietzsche is a thoroughly systematic thinker. Indeed, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche is the last metaphysician in the metaphysical tradition of the West, the thinker who at once completes and destroys that tradition.

We do not know when the idea of the Will to Power first dawned upon Nietzsche, but there is a striking and picturesque incident, which he later told to his sister, that is relevant to it: During the Franco-Prussian War, when Nietzsche was a hospital orderly, he saw one evening his old regiment ride by, going into battle and perhaps to death, and it came to him then that "the strongest and highest will to life does not lie in the puny struggle to exist, but in the Will to war, the Will to Power." But it is a mistake to locate the birth of this idea in any single experience; it was, in fact, fed by a number of tributary streams, by Nietzsche's struggle against ill health and also by his studies in classical antiquity. Nietzsche's greatness as a classical scholar lay in his ability to see plain and simple facts that the genteel tradition among scholars had passed over. The distinguished British classicist F. M. Cormford has said of Nietzsche that he was fifty years ahead of the classical scholarship of his day; the tribute was meant to be generous, but I am not sure that the classical scholarship of our own day has yet caught up with Nietzsche. It requires much more imagination to grasp the obvious than the recondite, and a kind of imagination that Nietzsche had much more of than the classical scholars of his time. Take, for example, the obvious fact that the noble Greeks and Romans owned slaves and thought this quite natural; and that because of this they had a different orientation toward existence than did the Christian civilization that followed them. The humanistic tradition among classical scholars had idealized the ancients, and thereby, as in all idealistic views, falsified the reality. One does not need to be much of a classical specialist to note, on the first page of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, that the word virtus, virtue, means courage and martial valor—just the kind of thing that a military commander would most fear in the enemy and most desire in his own soldiers. (It is one of the odd developments of history—as one philosophical wag put it, making thereby a perfectly Nietzschean joke—that the word "virtue," which originally meant virility in a man, came in Victorian times to mean chastity in a woman.) Nor does it require any greater classical scholarship to recognize in the Greek word that we translate as virtue, arete, the clanging tone of Ares, god of battle. Classical civilizations rested on the recognition of power, and the relations of power, as a natural and basic part of life.

Nietzsche's idea also reflected the modern influence of Stendhal and Dostoevski, the two nineteenth-century novelists whom he most admired. Stendhal had shown the components of ego and power mingled in all the exploits of Eros: in the arts of seduction and conquest, in the battle of the sexes. Dostoevski had revealed how the most self-abasing acts of humility could be brutally aggressive. Nietzsche's own psychological acuity, however, once started on this path, did not need much prompting. He was able to see the Will to Power secretly at work everywhere in the history of morals: in the asceticism of the saint and the resentment of the condemning moralist, as well as in the brutality of the primitive legislator. All his separate insights on the theme accumulated finally in a single monolithic idea of all-comprehending universality: the Will to Power was in fact the innermost essence of all beings; the essence of Being itself.

Now, it is one thing to perceive that all the psychological impulses of man are mingled in some way with the impulse to power; it is quite another thing to say that this impulse toward power is the basic impulse to which all the others may be reduced. We are faced at once with that problem of reduction which haunts particularly the battle among the modern schools of psychology. As is well known, the individual psychology of Alfred Adler split off from Freudian psychoanalysis over just this point—Adler, who had read Nietzsche, declaring that the Will to Power was basic, Freud maintaining that sexuality and Eros were. But what—to confound matters by speaking paradoxically—if both are right and both wrong? What if the human psyche cannot be carved up into compartments and one compartment wedged in under another as being more basic? What if such dichotomizing really overlooks the organic unity of the human psyche, which is such that a single impulse can be just as much an impulse toward love on the one hand as it is toward power on the other? Dostoevski, at least as a novelist, preserves this sense of duality and ambivalence; and Nietzsche too, where his intuition was functioning as concretely as a novelist's, saw this interplay between power and the other drives. (In Beyond Good and Evil he remarked, rather as a good Freudian than an Adlerian, "The degree and nature of a man's sensuality extends to the highest altitudes of his spirit.") But later he had Zarathustra the loveless declare that "Love is the danger of the loneliest one," and suppress love and compassion; and so Nietzsche gave the last word to the Will to Power, making it the basis of every other psychological motive; he became one of the reductive psychologists.

What is most remarkable is that this Will to Power should have been made by him into the essence of Being. Remarkable because Nietzsche had ridiculed the very notion of Being as one of the most deceptive ghosts spawned by the brains of philosophers, the most general and therefore the emptiest of concepts, a thin and impalpable ectoplasm distilled from the concrete realities of the senses. He had perceived correctly that the principal conflict within Western philosophy lay at its very beginning, in Plato's condemnation of the poets and artists as inhabiting the world of the senses rather than the supersensible world of the abstractions, the Ideas, which represent true Being as opposed to the constant flux of Becoming in the world of the senses. Nietzsche took the side of the artist: The real world, he said, than which there is no other, is the world of the senses and of Becoming. Nevertheless, to become a systematic thinker Nietzsche had to become a metaphysician, and the metaphysician is driven to have recourse to the idea of Being. To be sure, Nietzsche's thought preserves his dynamism, for Being is turned into Becoming—becomes, in fact, essentially the Will to Power.

But what is power? It is not, according to Nietzsche, a state of rest or stasis toward which all things tend. On the contrary, power itself is dynamic through and through: power consists in the discharge of power, and this means the exercise of the will to power on ever-ascending levels of power. Power itself is the will to power. And the will to power is the will to will.

It is at this point that Nietzsche's doctrine begins to look rather terrifying to most people, and to seem merely an expression of his own frenetic and unbalanced temperament. Frenetic he had certainly become, in many passages of The Will to Power, where indeed he resembles nothing so much as "the pale Criminal" of his own description (in Zarathustra), the loveless one who thirsts for blood. But here, as elsewhere, the personal frenzy of Nietzsche had a much more than personal meaning; and precisely in this idea of power he was the philosopher of this present age in history, for he revealed to it its own hidden and fateful being. No wonder, then, that the age should have branded him as a wicked and malevolent spirit.

The fact is that the modern age has prided itself everywhere on its dynamism. In history textbooks we represent the emergence of the modern period out of the Middle Ages as the birth of an energetic and dynamic will to conquer nature and transform the conditions of life, instead of submitting passively to them while waiting to be sent to the next world as medieval man had done. We congratulate ourselves over and over again on all this. But when a thinker comes along who seeks to explore what lies hidden behind all this dynamism, we cry out that we do not recognize ourselves in the image he draws and seek refuge from it by pointing an accusing finger at his derangement. Technology in the twentieth century has taken such enormous strides beyond that of the nineteenth that it now bulks larger as an instrument of naked power than as an instrument for human well-being. Now that we have airplanes that fly faster than the sun, intercontinental missiles, space satellites, and above all atomic explosives, we are aware that technology itself has assumed a power to which politics in any traditional sense is subordinate. If the Russians were to outstrip us decisively in technology, then all ordinary political calculations would have to go by the boards. The classical art of politics, conceived since the Greeks as a thoroughly human art addressed to humans, becomes an outmoded and fragile thing beside the massive accumulation of technological power. The fate of the world, it now appears, turns upon sheer mastery over things. All the refinements of politics as a human art—diplomatic tact and finesse, compromise, an enlightened and liberal policy, good will—are as little able to avail against technological supremacy as the refinement of a man's dress and person are able to ward off the blow of a pile driver. The human becomes subordinated to the machine, even in the traditionally human business of politics.

Here Nietzsche, more acutely than Marx, expresses the real historical meaning of Communism and especially of the peculiar attraction Communism holds for the so-called backward or under-developed countries: it is a will to power on the part of these peoples, a will to take their fate in their own hands and make their own history. This powerful and secret appeal of Communism is something that our own statesmen do not seem in the least to understand. And America itself? Yes, we bear with us still the old liberal ideals of the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but the actual day-to-day march of our collective life involves us in a frantic dynamism whose ultimate goals are undefined. Everywhere in the world, men and nations are behaving precisely in accordance with the Nietzschean metaphysics: The goal of power need not be defined, because it is its own goal, and to halt or slacken speed even for a moment would be to fall behind in achieving it. Power does not stand still; as we say nowadays in America, you are either going up or coming down.

But on what, philosophically speaking, does this celebrated dynamism of the modern age rest? The modern era in philosophy is usually taken to begin with Descartes. The fundamental feature of Descartes' thought is a dualism between the ego and the external world of nature. The ego is the subject, essentially a thinking substance; nature is the world of objects, extended substances. Modern philosophy thus begins with a radical subjectivism, the subject facing the object in a kind of hidden antagonism. (This subjectivism has nothing to do with Kierkegaard's idea of "subjective truth"; Kierkegaard simply chose his term unfortunately, for his intention is the very opposite of Cartesianism.) Nature thus appears as a realm to be conquered, and man as the creature who is to be conqueror of it. This is strikingly shown in the remark of Francis Bacon, prophet of the new science, who said that in scientific investigation man must put nature to the rack in order to wring from it an answer to his questions; the metaphor is one of coercion and violent antagonism. A crucial step beyond Descartes was taken when Leibnitz declared that material substances are not inert, as Descartes thought, but endowed with a fundamental dynamism: all things have a certain drive (appetitio) by which they move forward in time. Here the Cartesian antagonism between man and nature is stepped up by having added to it an intrinsic dynamism on both sides. Nietzsche is the culmination of this whole line of thought: the thinker who brings the seed to its violent fruition. The very extremity of his idea points to a fundamental error at the source of the modern epoch. Whether or not it points beyond that to a fundamental error at the root of the whole Western tradition, as Heidegger holds, is another matter, and one that we shall examine in the context of Heidegger's own philosophy.

Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself. The Will to Power begets the problem of nihilism. Here again Nietzsche stands as the philosopher of the period, for he prophesied remarkably that nihilism would be the shadow, in many guises and forms, that would haunt the twentieth century. Supposing man does not blow himself and his earth to bits, and that he really becomes the master of this planet. What then? He pushes off into interstellar space. And then? Power for power's sake, no matter how far the power is extended, leaves always the dread of the void beyond. The attempt to stand face to face with that void is the problem of nihilism.

For Nietzsche, the problem of nihilism arose out of the discovery that "God is dead." "God" here means the historical God of the Christian faith. But in a wider philosophical sense it means also the whole realm of supersensible reality—Platonic Ideas, the Absolute, or what not—that philosophy has traditionally posited beyond the sensible realm, and in which it has located man's highest values. Now that this other, higher, eternal realm is gone, Nietzsche declared, man's highest values lose their value. If man has lost this anchor to which he has hitherto been moored, Nietzsche asks, will he not drift in an infinite void? The only value Nietzsche can set up to take the place of these highest values that have lost their value for contemporary man is: Power.

But do we today really have any better answer? An answer, I mean, that we live and not just pay lip service to? Nietzsche is more truly the philosopher for our age than we are willing to admit. To the degree that modern life has become secularized those highest values, anchored in the eternal, have already lost their value. So long as people are blissfully unaware of this, they of course do not sink into any despondency and nihilism; they may even be steady churchgoers. Nihilism, in fact, is the one subject on which we speak today with the self-complacency of commencement-day orators. We are always ready to invoke the term against a new book or new play that has anything "negative" to say, as if nihilism were always to be found in the other person but never in ourselves. And yet despite all its apparently cheerful and self-satisfied immersion in gadgets and refrigerators American life, one suspects, is nihilistic to its core. Its final "What for?" is not even asked, let alone answered.

Man, Nietzsche held, is a contradictory and complex being, and he himself is as complex and contradictory an example as one could find. One has the feeling in reading him that those ultimate problems with which he dealt would have been enough almost to drive any man mad. Was it necessary that he be deranged in order to reveal the secret derangement that lies coiled like a dragon at the bottom of our epoch? He does not bring us any solutions that satisfy us to the great questions he raises, but he has stated the central and crucial problems for man in this period, as no one else has, and therein lies at once his greatness and his challenge.

And Nietzsche's fate might very well prefigure our own, for unless our Faustian civilization can relax its frantic dynamism at some point, it might very well go psychotic. To primitives and Orientals, we Western men already seem half crazy. But it will not do merely to assert blandly that the tension of this dynamism has to be relaxed somehow and somewhere; we need to know what in our fundamental way of thinking needs to be changed so that the frantic will to power will not appear as the only meaning we can give to human life. If this moment in Western history is but the fateful outcome of the fundamental ways of thought that lie at the very basis of our civilization—and particularly of that way of thought that sunders man from nature, sees nature as a realm of objects to be mastered and conquered, and can therefore end only with the exaltation of the will to power—then we have to find out how this one-sided and ultimately nihilistic emphasis upon the power over things may be corrected.

This means that philosophers must take up the task of rethinking Nietzsche's problems back to their sources, which happen also to be the sources of our whole Western tradition. The most thoroughgoing attempt at this, among philosophers in the twentieth century, has been made by Heidegger, who is … engaged in nothing less than the Herculean task of digging his way patiently and laboriously out of the Nietzschean ruins, like a survivor out of a bombed city.

William Barrett, "Nietzsche," in his Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958, pp. 158-83.