Nietzsche has a strong fascination for some people, and some of the judgements made about him, even by some of his most sympathetic critics, can seem provocatively misguided and in need of correction. In Anglo-Saxon countries at least, Nietzsche's advocates cannot be said to have been so far successful, if we may judge from the number of slighting and disparaging references to be found in the literary columns of newspapers and magazines. Nietzsche was well versed in English writers, and would have rejected the imputation that he belonged to an alien culture and that his well considered criticisms could be lightly disregarded.

For those who believe, as many do, that Nietzsche's thought offers the best key to the understanding of what has been happening to western civilisation for the past two centuries or so, the setting right of such misunderstanding presents itself as an uncompleted and still important task. Some misunderstanding is excusable, since even to decide what is being said is in some respects to take sides, to make assumptions as to the possible limits of controversy. Nevertheless, there are degrees of incomprehension, and Nietzsche has suffered badly from it, at the hands both of the general public, and of many who ought to know better.

A somewhat unfavourable image of him persists in the minds of many of those with some interest in literature or ideas. Many people know that he was a philosopher genius who went mad, and have heard of his doctrine of the superman, which they may perhaps envisage as some cruel conquering hero, gazing ruthlessly over vast horizons, to the accompaniment of Siegfried, or some other Wagnerian piece. Some people think of him as the advocate of the vicious idea of the master race. In modern folklore, Nazism has become the great archetype of wickedness receiving its just deserts, and Nietzsche is sometimes seen vaguely as the philosopher of that wickedness, a man who intoxicated himself with grandiose delusions, (hubris) with the natural consequence of total insanity (nemesis). According to one writer, the villain Nietzsche has passed into literature as the villain Moriarty, greatest adversary of Sherlock Holmes, himself a figure possessed of certain Nietzschean qualities. Nijinsky, in his Diary, expressed one popular view, when he wrote that 'Nietzsche lost his reason because he thought too much'.

Bertrand Russell, in his 'History of Western Philosophy', characterises Nietzsche's philosophy as the product of hatred and fear, and Nietzsche himself as a rather unpleasant person. The Soviet Encyclopaedia of philosophy interprets him as the theorist of reaction, one who perceived the rising tide of socialism and tried to dam it with an elitist, proto fascist doctrine. One conservative, Christian view, is to see him as a dangerous romantic, and heir of Rousseau in the extremity of his self assertion, a striking illustration of the peril and folly of abandoning those norms of moral and spiritual authority that alone make for stable society and decent living. Such a position may be associated with the traditional reactionary or High Catholic attack on the principles of the French revolution, as enunciated by Joseph de Maistre. Then there are those literary intellectuals who, despite a deep immersion in much of that twentieth century culture on which Nietzsche's influence has been most decisive, persist in regarding him as overrated and unimportant. Such was the often stated view of the late Philip Toynbee, for many years leading book critic for the 'Observer'. The Oxford professor John Carey, leading book critic for the 'Sunday Times', wrote a vitriolic attack on Nietzsche in his book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses'. Another Oxford don, A.L. Rowse, reviewing this asked contemptuously of Nietzsche, 'who cares what he thought?'. There remain many who, for various, often quite different reasons, continue to respect him as a very important and challenging thinker. Even in England, his 'Zarathustra' sells so well that it has long been recommended by Penguins as basic bookshop stock. In France some acquaintance with his ideas is said to be part of the syllabus for the baccalaureate.

His writings have the power to disturb complacency, and critics are concerned to reconcile his obvious attraction with all kinds of previously held positions. Numerous well researched books on Nietzsche have appeared which suggest that he is to be taken at something other than face value.

Janko Lavrin appears to suggest that Nietzsche's ideas should always be seen in the context of his struggle against ill health, and that we are to extract a message from the extent to which he was enabled to feel better by thinking thoughts inevitably related to his own special condition. This is held to make him an existentialist, a case history like Pascal, attempting to live by a creed, rather than an objective critic whose ideas stand or fall on their own merits.

On the continent, since the war, existentialists, structuralists, and deconstructionists, have honoured him highly. I do not mean to deny the interest of such interpretations, but they mostly do not seem to me to elucidate what was most solid and original in his achievement. Besides an existentialist or a deconstructionist, plausible cases have been made for treating him as a precursor of the later Wittgenstein, or of the Bertrand Russell school of logical analysis. On the level of academic philosophy, it would seem that Nietzsche's ideas are found to be compatible with a number of different positions.

My position is that on certain important issues, Nietzsche makes a good claim to being entirely right, and that he offers a radical alternative to many current beliefs and ideals. This raises questions as to how it is possible for a thinker in such a field to be 'right'. There are Nietzscheans who think Nietzsche was right, Freudians who think Freud was right, Marxists who think Marx was right, once there were humanists who used to say the same for T.H.Huxley and so on. I shall first try to explain what I mean by putting him in some very general historical perspective.
 
 

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
 
 

The inrush of Greek scholars to the west, following the collapse of the Byzantine empire, helped stimulate the new spirit of enquiry that was felt in Europe at the renaissance. The mediaeval synthesis, built of a union of Catholic dogma and Aristotle's science of qualities, was discovered to be inadequate, and it was now felt that far more could be satisfactorily explained than had hitherto been thought possible, that perhaps all mysteries could be penetrated with the aid of reason, and made clear to the understanding. One of the forms taken by this movement was an interest in esoteric philosophies such as neoplatonism, and the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, according to which the understanding of the workings of nature is inextricably involved with the individual's quest for perfection. Art magic and science, or rather a union of all three, were the key to the secrets of the universe, to learn which was to attain to perfection within it, to reach maximum individual fulfilment, even godhood. At the least, by studying the nature of the cosmos, a man might discover his innermost will, dispensing with the need for blind faith and obedience to hallowed authority. Truth was rational, but not to be acquired by exclusively intellectual methods. The will to perfection was to find its way as much by intuition as by logical demonstration, and would often express itself in obscure, symbolic terminology.

In many respects this was highly invigorating attitude, and it had a seminal function in the genesis of modern science, and also political theory. Grand utopian programmes were conceived on the basis of esoteric wisdom, and Europe buzzed with hope for the future. However, with the discrediting of astrology, and the correct dating of the Hermetic writings, the direct connection between macrocosm and microcosm, the truths of nature and the whole will of man, became harder to maintain.

The movement known as the enlightenment can usefully be seen in relation to this earlier, Hermetic movement, which it largely superseded. Many of the ideals of the older outlook were retained in a modified form, and helped to give impetus to rationalism as a social and cultural force. Rationalism, understood in a broad sense, as an outlook on life, occurs to a greater or lesser degree at various points in history, when the influence of dogmatic religion is low, and reasoned argument is seen as the surest foundation for all beliefs and institutions. Esoteric religion is not rationalistic, because it gives to intuition an authority which the rationalist would not allow, it makes understanding depend upon inner experiences. One of the principal developments characterising the thought of the European enlightenment was the clear separation of the knower from the known, classically expressed by Descartes' dualistic theory of the relation between mind and matter. These were now interpreted as two entirely independent substances, and the material universe was to be explained in purely mechanistic terms.

The mechanistic hypothesis proved remarkably fruitful, and having apparently been vindicated by the discoveries of Newton, all other models of the universe fell into disrepute. Here was a type of explanation to which the will of man was irrelevant, and which was in no sense esoteric, but as clear as the language in which it was expressed, a science in which every step could be made quantitatively exact, and which could produce striking, and publicly verifiable results. This had been achieved by chopping away what was seen as the debris of mediaeval obscurantism. We may speak of two great currents in enlightenment rationalism, the rationalistic, in the narrower sense, typified by the followers of Descartes, and the empirical, typified by the followers of Locke; the former laying more stress upon deductive logic, the latter upon sense experience. All our knowledge was to be based upon reason and sense experience; the relative importance of these, and the different ways of stating it, helped to provide the material for the problems of philosophy.

In eighteenth century France, the writers known as the Philosophes, usually seen more as popularisers than profoundly original thinkers, helped to transform this outlook into a complete way of life. Reason, as something available to all, was elevated to the supreme position that it held for Socrates, and as much as possible was brought under its sway. It was briefly granted the status of a goddess at the time of the French revolution, in the form of a young girl, at a ceremony in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Questions of values were included in this synthesis, and ethical systems were devised, like Kant's, which judged of motives insofar as they met up to a standard of rational consistency.

The outward style of the enlightenment drew inspiration from the art and culture of ancient Rome. One of the marks of a rationalistic culture is the desire for clarity and concision in all spheres. It is a commonplace that the Romans were not as creatively original as the Greeks, that they produced no original philosophy, little in the way of new art forms, and there is an opinion that, except in legal and political matters, they were essentially imitators. This ignores their immense contribution to precision of language, something later taken for granted, and hence to precision of thought and expression. With its consolidation of the inspired, but often erratic achievements of the self destructive Greeks, its absence of dogmatic religion, its freedom of thought, and its values of order and clarity, pagan Rome became something of a model for the men of the enlightenment.

The vast claims made on behalf of reason at this period, meant that man was expected to adjust his expectations in accordance with it. What was, by the standards of the time, unreasonable, seemed pointless, and therefore there were large areas of possible experience which tended to be dismissed as unsusceptible to reason and science.

The romantic movement was to a large extent, a reaction in favour of all that the enlightenment synthesis had left out. There was a renewed interest in the lands of the counter reformation, notably Italy and Spain, which did not experience the full force of the age of reason until Napoleon, and which often struck the eighteenth century northerner as the home of the sinister and the strange, of dark irrational passion. Gothic novels like 'The Monk', portrayed the sensuality, superstition and aristocratic villainy of the south with fascinated horror, but it took Byron to turn this obsession with the perverse into positive enthusiasm and approbation.

Romantic art and literature expressed all kinds of apparently irrational forces and anarchic instincts, which the previous era had preferred to ignore, and thus implied the inadequacy of the rationalistic schemes as a whole account of human nature. The common distinction between 'classical' and 'romantic' can be a confusing one. It might be said that there were many 'romantic' elements in classical civilisation. Many of the leading romantics, Rousseau, for example, and Keats and Shelley in England, were among the most enthusiastic admirers of the ancient world. Phenomena from the French revolution to twentieth century literary or artistic movements, interpreted by some people, whether approvingly or otherwise, as classical, are seen by others as romantic, and vice versa.

It is probable that it was not so much the enlightenment that killed the esoteric tradition as romanticism. The culture of the enlightenment was aware of such ideals, much as it might have opposed them; the romantics turned to them second-hand, as to something opposed to rationalism, and contaminated them. Romanticism was the victory of enlightenment culture, the first movement to presuppose it. Everything outside it was treated as bizarre and exotic, and the reasons for desiring the bizarre and exotic were perfectly rational and intelligible. As romanticism matured, it developed into the so called decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. Late romantics like Baudelaire, Flaubert, Lautreamont, Swinburne, even Dostoyevsky, pursued bold experimental journeys into some of the stranger reaches of possible experience, taking the interest in the perverse to extreme, sometimes destructive, limits.

Confronted with the obvious appeal of all this apparent irrationalism, how are the advocates of reason to react? They might dismiss it as mere atavism, but once atavism begins itself to use the weapons of reason, enlightenment itself seems to be in serious danger. Nietzsche's precursor, the Marquis de Sade, in many volumes of extreme and savage irony, exposed the limitations of eighteenth century rationalism, not from the viewpoint of the bankruptcy of reason, but from that of a clearer and more honest usage of it. Men like De Sade and Nietzsche were no more proponents of the irrational than was Socrates, and the same can be said, if less obviously of a renaissance Hermeticist like Giordano Bruno, or a poet such as William Blake. All are joined in a common opposition to obscurantism and dogmatism, united in the belief that the most sacred mysteries are directly accessible to the human understanding. Instead of conceding defeat when faced with the 'irrational', one can attempt a more plausible account of human nature than that propagated by traditional rationalism.

As the heir of the enlightenment, Nietzsche may be thought of as bringing certain ideas and attitudes which have, in some form or other, been perennial throughout human history, to a new level of clarity. In a less rationalistic culture his aspirations might have found an outlet in channels more secret and obscure, perhaps he might have been a magus or a Sufi. Schopenhauer had identified Giordano Bruno and the Sufis as intellectual and religious exemplars of the life affirmation which Nietzsche was to make so much his own cause. To speak of periods intellectually closer to our own, the teachings of Heraclitus in Greece, and Chuang Tsu in China, show significant resemblances to his own.

Nietzsche was unique in the way that Newton, Darwin and Beethoven were unique, he perceived and explored certain relations with unprecedented clarity and penetration. That this was possible had much to do with the time at which he lived. Science and scholarship had recently made huge advances, scholars were discovering and translating the wisdom of the orient, and in literature the novel was exhibiting an ever increasing psychological power. New standards of scientific and rational rigour had been set, and Nietzsche's task was to apply these to fields where they had previously been thought inapplicable, turning the searchlight of reason and science onto those questions of value where prejudice maintains its strongest hold, and where he would be most likely to meet with impassioned opposition. We may think of his work as the true flower of the enlightenment, the crowning achievement of the rationalistic outlook; with him rationalism attains the comprehensiveness of a major religion.

He concluded that what was required was a 'transvaluation of values', and this meant a radical hostility to Christianity. He saw his discoveries as the basis for a thoroughgoing critique of civilisation, art, politics, religion, and many other subjects. He was led to an admirably clear and concise understanding of some of the most significant features of modern western civilisation in terms of what he described as decadence.

Even when he seems to ignore important aspects of a complex problem, we may still perceive his consistency. The inconsistencies in his conclusions are usually superficial, often only apparent. He saw the kind of consistency that insists on surface unity at the expense of inner conviction as a serious impediment to honest thinking. That is why he writes that 'the will to a system is a lack of integrity'. There is nevertheless a unifying thread, a common viewpoint or method, behind all his judgements, and it is quite misleading to interpret them as a collection of random prejudices or clever observations, to be embraced or rejected only insofar as they chime with our immediate predilections.

The freedom with which he dispenses judgements is not a sign that he sees himself as some journalistic pundit, delivering opinions on all subjects for the guidance of his readers. Such judgements which must often appear dogmatic, are part of his philosophical style. They are the illustrations and examples through which he develops and communicates his underlying moral and psychological discoveries. Either to dismiss them lightly, or to take issue with him over them as if they were the real substance of his thought, is to miss the point.

People of many different persuasions can find much in him that is attractive. A strictly edited Nietzsche was used as support for the official Nazi ideology; from seemingly the other end of the political spectrum, Herbert Marcuse takes out of him what he finds suitable, and rejects much else as a reactionary hangover from which the philosopher was not sufficiently advanced to emancipate himself. Others, Hermann Hesse for example, have upheld him as the champion of liberal values against totalitarian oppression. Nietzsche's overt anti Christianity and atheism have been no barrier to Christian traditionalists claiming him for one of their own. It was suggested, for example, by the English translator of the fountainhead of Christian mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysius, that had Nietzsche known these mystical writings he would never have felt obliged to leave the Christian 'fold'. More recently, Don Cuppit has written that "His teaching was in fact a naturalistic version of the Protestant gospel of salvation by faith alone". ('Life Lines' p.157)

The situation is complicated by the fact that Nietzsche's thought was in a constant state of development, right up to his final breakdown, as his ideas, and their implications became ever clearer to him. Towards the end, he became ever more radical and shocking, also far less tolerant of some things. In this book I shall attempt to clarify some of his characteristically original discoveries, contrasting his ideas with other widely canvassed points of view, and looking at one or two of the further issues he raises, and which others, after his death, were to try to tackle systematically and in greater detail.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

The antitheses of which I have spoken in the introduction, often misleadingly referred to as the classical versus the romantic, were Nietzsche's preoccupation in his first book, 'The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music', which he dedicated to his friend Wagner. The book is different in style and conception from his later masterpieces, but is a jewel in its own right, brilliant original and inspiring, and even if he had written nothing else, he would be honoured for this. Whatever the literal truth of his theory of the origin of Greek tragedy, his ideas are of great psychological interest.

The problem of tragedy is one that has fascinated for a long time; not so much the origin of it, as the source of its great power and effectiveness, the peculiar exhilaration that is inspired by the 'Agamemnon', 'Oedipus Tyrannus', 'Hamlet', or 'Othello'. Tragedy replaced epic in critical esteem as the highest form of literature, and many feel that perhaps the central riddle of life comes closest to expression here than in any other art form. Tragedy focuses on the point where all guiding principles break down, showing how even that which is most unacceptable has a logic to it and can be assimilated. Thus it has been seen as an alternative to philosophy, resolving the deepest and most essential of life's perplexities. Aeschylus, for example, in portraying the type of all error, and the worst of our fears, is seen as having somehow rendered irrelevant all consciously formulated philosophies of life.

Aristotle's theory was that the life enhancing effect comes about by a process of catharsis, or purging, of negative emotions such as pity and terror, which it excites to an extreme pitch. Left without any proper outlet, these emotions are liable to seethe within us and do harm. Tragedy has the effect of a psychological enema, removing the spiritual poisons and waste products from the system. Nietzsche still considered this worth arguing against.

Many other writers have concerned themselves with this problem. R.G.Collingwood argued that Aristotle misunderstood the seriousness of early tragedy, producing what amounted to a defence of the essentially decadent amusement art that had been attacked by Plato. Aeschylean tragedy Collingwood saw as a form of 'magical' art, aiming to evoke certain emotions intended to be usefully discharged in the activities of everyday life. Freud had a theory that, like all important religious developments, tragedy was an attempt to resolve the deep seated conflicts in the human psyche deriving from memory of past guilt (the murder of the primal father). Its liberating effect comes from the release into consciousness of repressed material. Kitto sees tragedy as demonstrating, in an unanswerable fashion, some of the most basic moral truths about the human condition, and analyses a number of plays from this viewpoint. In elucidating the nature of tragedy we are to use moral language, make moral judgements, speak of right and wrong and how we ought to behave in certain situations. Schopenhauer wrote that tragedy is the summit of poetic art because it reveals the terrible true nature of the world, the horrible self antagonism of the thing in itself, the will, at the highest grade of its objectivity. With such complete knowledge comes true wisdom, complete resignation, abandonment of the will to live.

In his first book, Nietzsche analyses tragedy in terms of the interaction of two principles, which he calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and which correspond very roughly to the traditional antitheses of classical versus romantic. The Dionysian spirit is the force of unrestrained instinct, uninhibited libido, orgiastic, amoral, and destructive of all social conventions. The wildness of Dionysus worship is portrayed in the 'Bacchae' of Euripides, where it appears as a frenzy or madness inflaming the women of the land, a primaeval savagery overturning all the standards of civilisation.

The festivals at which Greek tragedy first appeared were celebrations held in honour of Dionysus, where music was performed as the direct expression of the spirit of the god. The choral ode, out of which tragedy developed, was a celebration of his power. In contrast to Dionysus, ecstatically exalting the forbidden, stood Apollo, representing order, form, clarity and civilisation. On its own, the Apollonian is a sterile force, just as the other is too disorganised for sustained creation. According to Nietzsche, it was the Dionysian energy, modified and qualified by the Apollonian sense of form, that produced tragedy, and was furthermore the driving force behind Greek civilisation.

We may say that as Dionysus stood for intoxication, for wine, so Apollo stood for dream, for opium perhaps, and as Apollo was the god of the plastic arts, so Dionysus was the patron of music and dance. The gradual disciplining of the irrational was to result in the highest standards of art and civilisation, so long as the tension remained, but when the Apollonian fully gained the upper hand a period of decline set in. The curbing of the Dionysian, the spread of rationality, especially since the time of Socrates, up through the Alexandrian era, led to a progressive weakening of the springs of creativity, to decadence, shallow rationalism, and the eventual demise of the Hellenic spirit. A similar process was occurring in modern western culture, as the one-sided rationalism of the enlightenment culminated in such shallow schemes as utilitarianism, with its bland disregard of the instinctual basis of life.

Because reason is a purely Apollonian force, it cannot on its own offer hope of salvation. We can only be saved from the complete enervation and trivialisation of our culture by a strong infusion of the spirit of Dionysus as manifested in music. The conception of Dionysus gives an affirmative twist to Schopenhauer's pessimism. Tragedy, conceding all the pain and frustration of life emphasised by the pessimists, involves the 'affirmation of life in its most difficult problems', and is the mark of exuberant vitality, whereas conventional 'optimism' is shallow, rationalistic and late.

The hope for the future lies in German music, a rebirth of the Dionysian spirit, rendered bearable by an Apollonian framework of myth, which has found its strongest expression in Wagner. It is at this point that the book becomes least plausible. Aubrey Beardsley caricatured an audience of self satisfied Wagnerites, Rupert Brooke wrote a comic poem on the same theme; it is hard to envisage such people as the vanguard of a spiritual revolution destined to regenerate civilisation. Nietzsche himself came to regard his early enthusiasm for Wagner with irony, and Wagner himself as a typical decadent. It is hardly plausible that a decadence springing from an excess of reason and refinement could be cured by the efforts of that small elite which produces and enjoys classical music. The spirit of Dionysus is supposed to represent the socially subversive primaeval energy, the hatred of order and restriction. Where can this come but from below, perhaps from outside, as the god himself originated among the barbaric Thracians?

Perhaps we can find Dionysian music in Nietzsche's sense, whether or not it would be capable of effecting the regeneration he had in mind. Several people have suggested jazz. Kenneth Clark, referring to a different myth, spoke of the "wail of the saxophone" as "the revenge of Marsyas", certainly implying that the anti-Apollonian movement has gone too far. Jazz has tended to be rather a specialised taste in western society, those who are profoundly affected by it forming something of a minority subculture. This cannot be said of rock and roll. The music, produced in the sixties by the Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix, seemed to answer admirably to Nietzsche's requirements; it appeal was both wide and in some ways revolutionary. It is violent, sensual and antinomian, redolent of many forms of intoxication, and of the same sexual ambiguity that characterised the god Dionysus himself. This could hardly be said of Wagner's music, at least not so obviously. Rock music has had an effect on social mores, and for long inspired great hopes. It is fair to say that a yearning for the Dionysian does exist among the intellectual classes, and as late as the punk movement the nihilistic revelry of the rebellious adolescent was hailed as something of high cultural significance. More recently, the cult for violent and criminally inspired rap music from the black ghettos of America suggest that exploitation of the Dionysian is now a recognised commercial principle.

Nietzsche later came to believe that in this book he had oversimplified an great deal, and he noted a suspiciously Hegelian flavour to it, with the thesis and antithesis of Apollo and Dionysus synthesised in the tragic impulse. As a mirror of reality, Hegelian dialectic was a meretricious blind alley. One crucial change in symbolism he made concerned the meaning of 'Dionysus' in his thought. Instead of uncontrolled energy, untempered by the Apollonian, it came to mean something close to what he originally meant by the harmonious interaction of these two principles, energy harnessed and directed, as in Greek art at its best. Far from being a mere matter of terminology, this change clearly differentiates Nietzsche from Freud and others. Instead of two basic principles, he now had only one, conceived as the expression of the will to power. There is an incompleteness in the original two principles; if they are to interact successfully they presuppose an end beyond them both. An illustration of the danger of complete surrender to the original Dionysus principle is the tendency of a total revolution to follow absolute anarchy with absolute tyranny. Many remain attracted, in an almost religious sense, to the idea of violent revolution as if to a festival of Dionysus, a Bacchanalian riot, identifying the spirit of revolution with the true life force, and everything that opposes it with death. Only on such ephemeral occasions, it is felt, are the people really free. Elements of this attitude are to be found in Blake, who spent much of his life exploring the dangers and contradictions to which it gave rise. There is a tendency in Nietzsche's original antithesis, which became developed in Freud, to identify the Dionysus principle, the anarchic libido, with the drive to happiness, and all order with necessarily irksome restraint.

In contrast, Nietzsche came to hold that what he had identified as the raw, Dionysian, instinctual energy is mere material for the will to power, which is the real key to happiness and fulfilment, and which requires a measure of discipline and order for its continuing success. Against this, we have the possibility of demoralisation, marked by a readiness to put up with far less than is potentially ours. The 'healthy neurosis' that he praises in the Greeks, may thus be interpreted as a form of discontent that is potentially the birth pang of a more intensely satisfying mode of experience than most people usually admit to be possible.

Nietzsche is very interested in what he believed to have been the higher quality of life that prevailed in certain periods of history, such as the Italian renaissance, the classic era of the Greeks, Moorish civilisation in Spain. Russell suggests one interpretation of Nietzsche's ideas as the statement 'I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles, or the Florence of the Medici'. Nietzsche is presented as one who, having a taste for certain ideals, for certain kinds of art, for military glory, a high standard of craftsmanship, aristocratic living and suchlike, tries to work out the conditions that would best promote them. Nietzsche certainly believed himself to be saying more than this, feeling that where he sensed what to him was a higher quality of life, human potential was, as a matter of psychological reality, that much more fulfilled. He does not admire human greatness as a communist might, as a sacrifice to the common good, but sees it as having a direct relevance to the individual in his efforts to get most out of life, an objective, rather than a merely subjective relation to the human will.

The source and continuing inspiration of much of Nietzsche's philosophising was a love of art, a motive which it would be quite wrong to dismiss as crudely literary. The conclusions he reached in elaborating some of his almost poetic intuitions have a remarkably explanatory and satisfying character, with progressive elucidation they transcend the realm of poetry and enter that of science.

MIDDLE PERIOD

Nietzsche's thought divides conventionally into three periods. 'The Birth of Tragedy' had expressed the fundamentals of an outlook that was to be further and further clarified throughout his career. He soon found the neat Hegelian formula of this book to be inadequate and unsatisfactory, and after the publication of his 'Thoughts out of Season', essays still written under the influence of Wagner and Schopenhauer, was led onto the middle period, predominantly one of experimentation, the search for what he expressed in the title of one of his books as a 'frohliche wissenschaft', variously translated as 'The Gay science' (from 'gaya scienza', also his own expression) and 'The Joyful Wisdom'.

The joyful wisdom is meant to fill the gap created by the loss of religion, the 'death of God, in Nietzsche's famous phrase, and involves the most complete affirmation of life combined with the most searching honesty in all fields, the qualities he had discovered in Greek tragedy. By many nineteenth century writers, the loss of religious faith was felt to involve, if not an impoverishment of the world, at least an emancipation from pleasing illusions. Nietzsche's programme is a comprehensive critical outlook showing how we may have our cake and eat it. This brought him into the field of human values, a search for those moral forces and ideas which demoralise and weaken, and an understanding of how they operate. The results of this programme were the books he wrote shortly before his mental collapse, displaying an ever increasing clarity and radicalism of thought.

Despite the fact that to read only the books of the middle period, 'Human All Too Human', 'Daybreak', and most of 'The Joyful Wisdom', would give am impression of Nietzsche as rather an acute critic than someone with a finished system of thought, some commentators have held these to be superior to his later work. Part of the reason for this is that here Nietzsche was concerned to show the compatibility of his ideas with humane and liberal values; with the progressive specialisation and concentration of his later works this ceases to be a task that he performs for his readers.

ZARATHUSTRA

With 'Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book for everyone and no one', he initiated this third stage of his philosophy. Many would dispute his own claim that it is the best of his books, at one point he asserted it to be the most profound book possessed by humanity. Judging by its wide appeal, we might be tempted to view it as his great popular work, the one where he deliberately addresses himself to a larger audience and dramatises his ideas, almost a work of propaganda.

Zarathustra, better known under his Greek name Zoroaster, was the ancient Iranian prophet who founded a religion in which the principal feature is a cosmic dualism involving two warring principles of good and evil. Somewhat impertinently, one might think, Nietzsche decided that this ancient error of the good versus evil antithesis must be set right by the one who originated it, and chose the oriental sage as the mouthpiece for his own philosophy.

The book is partly in the form of a dithryambic kind of poetry, and relies strongly on emotional effect. In the manner of a Hebrew prophet, Zarathustra delivers a number of inspired monologues on various topics, and expounds revolutionary new doctrines, notably those of the superman and the eternal recurrence. Nietzsche presents his own tastes, desires and aversions, with much colourful imagery, as a form of revealed truth, and a total vision of life. For Nietzsche it was a kind of source book. In placing all his emotions and prejudices on paper, so to speak, often writing in a mood of intense agitation and excitement, he provided himself with a rich fund of inspiration for his more critical, considered work, which largely grew from a clarification of emotions and intuitions.

It is easy to find fault with 'Zarathustra', which is too chaotic to be a great work of art in any usual sense. The tone sometimes appears shrill, the prophet goads and exhorts us to make some tremendous effort, to work towards distant ideals, great goals, and this can be tiresome. It seems to lack a sense of humour, despite the constant insistence on the importance of laughter. It is full of contempt, of a strong emotional revulsion for the pettiness of the modern world.

In its luxuriant style, it is closer to oriental literature than the western tradition, a sacred book with a teaching, such as the Koran. Zarathustra has the assurance of a divinely inspired prophet, and we can extract a mature and consistent message, or 'weltanschaung', from his exhortations. He denounces ascetic values and preaches contempt for the rabble, praises the pleasures of the body, and the virtue of a proud, ambitious selfishness, the clean fresh air of the mountains contrasted with the flies of the market place. These are aristocratic, pagan values, raised to a level of articulate intensity that gives them the force of a religion. Zarathustra is distinguished from such pacific hedonists as Epicurus or Omar Khayyam by his renunciation of harmlessness, and his great sense of urgency.

In the dedication, 'a book for everyone and no one', is a clear hint that the form and style of 'Zarathustra' perhaps conceal a deeper meaning than is at first apparent, and are not to be taken at face value. To penetrate this, we have to consider why Nietzsche needed to write such a book in such a style, and we are led to his anti-Christianity. 'Zarathustra' is Nietzsche's answer to the Bible, sometimes almost in the sense of a parody, and it often echoes biblical language.

It was Christianity that destroyed, or at least replaced, the pagan civilisation of antiquity, with which Nietzsche to a great extent identified himself. Against the cool, rational methods of the ancient philosophers was pitted the fire of prophetic inspiration, and against the accumulated wisdom of the Graeco-Roman world was set the Bible, holy scripture, received by revelation. Lacking the advantage of a sacred book, paganism could claim no such authoritative contact with the sources of ultimate truth. In comparison, it was argued by the church fathers, with the sublime certainties of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, paganism was all doubt and darkness, offering nothing in the way of spiritual comfort but some dubious old myths, and the at best merely probable speculations of philosophers. Homer did not quite count as a prophet, he was a poet, a man from Halicarnassus, inspired by the muses no doubt, but those were not such authoritative figures as Lord God Almighty.

Nietzsche took up the challenge. He would produce a vigorous affirmation of his own, anti-Christian values in the oriental prophetic mode, effect a momentous counter revolution using the methods of the enemy. So inevitably Zarathustra exudes something of the intense moral earnestness and reforming zeal that characterised the prophets of Israel. Any relaxation in mood would be a lapse from the level of inspiration that is to be attained. Now the atheist and anti-Christian can proclaim his message, for everyone, with all the poetic force and inspired assurance that is admired in the Bible. However, Nietzsche is aware of the limitations of that approach, and would not wish to base his case upon it, so strictly speaking the book is for no one. To understand it properly, he says, one must have been both deeply moved and deeply offended by it, which perhaps overstates the case.

'Zarathustra' is attuned to an emotional state of great enthusiasm and excitement. In its lyrical exaltation, and its condemnation of the pettiness of ordinary life, it does convey the prospect of a mode of experience very much more enjoyable and satisfying than that to which most people are accustomed, and it goads us to set about achieving it. Viewed from a lower emotional pitch, these exhortations can seem irksome, even hysterical. Nietzsche restores the balance in his autobiography 'Ecce Homo', the title obviously inviting comparison of himself as man and teacher with Christ. In the chapters 'Why I am so Clever', and 'Why I am so Wise', he pours scorn on the Faustian ideal of ceaseless striving, and attributes much of his own success to good fortune, diet, and an essentially lazy disposition. Again, we could hardly find a more complete contrast to the urgency and grandiosity of 'Zarathustra' than Lawrence Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy', once described as the apotheosis of the inconsequential, yet in a rejected passage for 'Ecce Homo', speaking of the books that have most lastingly influenced him, he describes this as one of his earliest favourites.

It is with such considerations in mind that we must understand the doctrine of the superman.

'I teach you the superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

'All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you wish to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals, rather than overcome man?

'What is the ape to man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the superman a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment'.

The superman in Zarathustra's religion is analogous to the Messiah (incidentally a doctrine said to be derived from the Sasoshyant of Zoroastrianism) in Isaiah's. As an ideal he is very different from Jesus.

The superman seems to be the central plank of Zarathustra's teaching. What kind of being is he? For one thing, presumably, he possesses to a high degree those qualities which Nietzsche admired in men, creative originality, egoism, pride, strength of will and the like. From a list of those whom he held to be the greatest, beside these two, such figures as Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, Cesare Borgia, Francis Bacon (whom he believed to have been the real author of Shakespeare's plays), the Emperor Frederick II, the Persian poet Hafiz, some might conclude that for him worldly achievement was the highest value, as it appears to be for Cicero in 'The Dream of Scipio'. Cicero portrayed personal immortality, in a world beyond the spheres, as the special reward only of those who have won eternal fame for themselves and brought credit to their native lands. Such a doctrine might be highly useful to the state, but Nietzsche was no admirer of the state, nor was his prime concern with some 'general good'. His superman has a quality of unpredictability and dangerousness and he is above ordinary morality.

We might think of Achilles, magnificent for all his vices, rejecting the chance of a life of peace and happiness, and choosing instead suffering and death, partly for the promise of eternal fame that is offered him. But Nietzsche does not set supreme value upon worldly acclaim, and he was scathing about the hero worship advocated by Carlyle, another ingredient in the eclectic ideology of fascism. The conquering hero is admired not so much for what he does as for what he is and represents. He is emblematic of the state of the will that Nietzsche considers desirable.

Just as the Christian ideal is not to be thought of as fulfilled only be famous saints, though these may provide the aptest illustration of it, so with Nietzsche's great achievers. The famous and the politically powerful offer perhaps the best symbols of the nature of power and will, the overcoming of obstacles, but the emancipated will is not so constrained as to feel obliged to strive for fame or political power. Nietzsche's ideal is an egoistic one, and an asocial drop out such as a perfected Taoist sage might well embody it, while not exactly the suitable image for Zarathustra's purpose.

Sometimes Nietzsche speaks of the possibility of breeding the superman, toying with the principles of racialism and eugenics. Spengler argued that for such eugenic measures to be possible would entail a degree of state control that could only mean socialism; therefore, he maintained, the great counterrevolutionary turns out as a socialist in spite of himself. Spengler considered G.B.Shaw to be Nietzsche's natural successor. Shaw was an enthusiastic populariser and policy maker, and he helped to popularise certain ideas derived from Nietzsche. The devising of political programmes, even in Shaw's perhaps rather frivolous sense, was not Nietzsche's concern; he wrote of politics as an ephemeral chatter, a passing shadow play of little more relevance to his real preoccupations than any other subject. For him there was a clear distinction between the abstract consideration of possibilities, and the conditions of certain possible effects, and the formulation of programmes and policies.

Conceding this, persistent and inevitable criticisms have been levelled against the profession of detachment. Contempt for politics, it is argued, was a common motive in German culture, and bears a large measure of responsibility for the catastrophe of nazism. Whether or not this is true, it does not mean Nietzsche's ideas as such are incompatible with democratic political engagement. They belong to a quite separate field of concern. If western culture were to come to terms with Nietzsche's insights, it would presumably be in the context of a democratic society, and there should be no difficulty with this.

Nietzsche does make Zarathustra say some things which seem to contradict not only his claim to detachment, but even some of his basic principles. He speaks of the superman as something which has never yet been achieved, and to which everything else must be sacrificed. If this is seen as some kind of utopian ideal it appears to go against his egoistic morality. Why should I sacrifice myself for some creature as yet unborn? The doctrine of the superman, by a curious paradox, seems to advocate self abnegation:-

'I love him who works and invents that he may build a house for the superman and prepare earth, animals and plants for him: for thus he wills his own downfall'.

Such an ideal could presumably be used by the weak as a weapon against the strong in precisely the manner that Nietzsche abhors. 'Man has his justification in the superman', says Zarathustra. It was Trotsky, for whom we may be fairly sure that Nietzsche would have had little sympathy, who spoke of raising average humanity to the level of an Aristotle or a Goethe, above which standard new peaks of human glory and greatness would soar.

It is plain from almost everything he says that Nietzsche is not here talking about eugenics, or a utopian ideal, but about something of far more immediate impact. His interest is in values, and for a revolution in values, what would happen after that is left an open question. Zarathustra is urging us to replace the Christian ideal by that of the superman.

Many write as if this ideal is merely the reflection of personal taste on Nietzsche's part, that he admires such men as he does for the same reason that Swinburne admired sadistic women like Dolores, because he likes to contemplate them. If this were true, he would indeed be little more than a poet, a Byron or a Swinburne, turning a romantic attitude into a philosophy, reversing moral values to the end of moulding society more in accord with his preferences. It is true that he was inspired by his emotions, his love of art and his classical ideals, but this no more resulted in a mere justification of his taste than the inspiration which Socrates and Plato received from the physical beauty of boys led to mere rationalisation of pederasty.

So if it is not just a matter of taste, what is it? There is a clue in the formula 'man is something that must be overcome'. This is an answer to the question 'what is man?', not 'what ought man to be?' Far from being a distant ideal, the superman is already here in potential, and as a possibility is vital to the explanation of man as he is.

The superman is not simply stronger, more talented, more powerful, more intelligent, than the average citizen, his life is vastly fuller and richer. If it were not for the possibility of this fuller, richer life that exists in each of us, we should never do anything at all. In propounding the superman, Zarathustra is not inventing something new, merely reminding of permanently present potential. Otherworldly religions place the better life in Heaven after death; Zarathustra brings it down to earth and unites it with knowledge.

He opposes that conception of man as malleable being which was to be elaborated into the system of behaviourism, as advocated in the following passage by J.B.Watson, from his book 'Behaviourism', 1930:-

'I wish I could picture for you what a rich and wonderful individual we should make of every child, if only we could let it shape itself properly and then provide for it a universe in which it could exercise that organisation - a universe unshackled by legendary folk lore of thousands of years ago; unhampered by disgraceful political history, free of foolish customs and conventions which have no significance in themselves but which hem the individual in like taut steel bands'.

Give man the chance to fulfil himself, Nietzsche maintains, and he will be perverse and unpredictable. The superman is in a manner the driving force of us all, the image of where the energies that propel us would lead us if they were allowed full range. The behaviourist ideal, that of Watson and the typical humanist optimist from Auguste Comte to most modern educationalists and social planners, is covered by what Zarathustra says about the 'last' or 'ultimate' man.

"Behold I show you the last man....

"What is love? What is creation? What is desire? asketh the last man and he blinketh!

"Then will earth have grown small, and upon it shall hop the last man, who maketh all things small. His kind is inexterminable like the ground flea; the last man livest longest.

"We have discovered happiness", say the last men, and they blink.

"They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one must have warmth. Man still loveth his neighbour and rubbeth himself against him; for one must have warmth.

"Sickness and mistrust they hold sinful. They go warily.

A fool is he that yet stumbleth over stones and men!

A little poison now and then: for that causes pleasant dreams.

And much poison at the last for an easy death.

They still work, for work is a pastime. But they take heed, lest the pastime harm them.

They grow no longer poor nor rich; it is too troublesome to do either. Who desireth to rule? Who to obey? both are too troublesome.

"No shepherd and but one flock! All men will alike, all are alike; he that feeleth otherwise goeth voluntarily to a madhouse.

"'Once all the world was mad', say these refined ones, and they blink.

"They are clever and know all that hath come to pass, so that there is no end of mockery. They quarrel yet, but are soon reconciled, lest their stomachs turn.

"They have little lusts for the day and little lusts for the night; but they have respect for health.

"'We have discovered happiness', say the last men, and they blink".

To say that man is something that must be overcome, is to deny the possibility of this form of contentment to anyone who understands what really drives him, and life's true potential. To understand this is to become inescapably involved in an imperative, the struggle against those limitations and resistances, moral and mental, that beset us.

Zarathustra's view on the comparative worth of human beings finds an echo in a speech by Don Quixote to his housekeeper and niece, at the beginning of the second volume of his adventures, where he concludes:-

"As for the vulgar, I say nothing of them, more than that they are thrown in as ciphers to increase the number of mankind, without deserving any other praise".

A natural objection to Nietzsche's ideas at this point is as follows. People like Nietzsche, it is argued, make people dissatisfied with their lots, and so increase the unhappiness in the world. Given his assumptions, the ordinary business of life can become tedious and intolerable, stimulating intense, and nearly always frustrated, ambition. The attractiveness of what he considers to be the fuller, richer life, depends on the revulsion he makes us feel for ordinary living, and thus, instead of expanding our choice, he has narrowed it down. Perhaps we should all be happier if we followed the ethical principles of Kant or of Schopenhauer, in which case Nietzsche's observations about morality might have some historical interest without making any difference to the practical values of everyday life.

One defence might be to invoke Darwin and argue the superman ideal is primordial and innate. It is not inconceivable that the survival of the species might at one time have depended upon valuing the strong, creative and original spirits far more highly than the ordinary mass who greatly outnumbered them, and that these values have become instinctive, so that to repress them leads to individual unhappiness. But this is dubious, and except as a counterbalance to other doctrines, largely irrelevant. It focuses on the happiness of believing in the superman, rather than the happiness he enjoys. Seeing man as a compressed spring, the superman is the image of what to expect if we released the spring.

It is not Nietzsche's object to provide some competitive standard, or measure of success in life. He does not see frustration, or even failure, as the evils to be primarily avoided. We produce enjoyment by struggling against resistances, that is against certain kinds of pain. If there is no discontent, there is no resistance, and no possibility of satisfaction. The enjoyment he calls affirmation is something that is generated in struggle, this is the point of life. The object of striving is nothing in itself, apart from the joy to be felt in its pursuit and attainment. To say that happiness does not lie in the pursuit of inclination but in overcoming the deeper resistances that beset us, does not mean that it is impossible until we have overcome all of these, or that not to have done so is to be flawed or inadequate. Our own happiness is not located in the unattainable ideal, but in overcoming the resistance it inspires.

ETERNAL RECURRENCE

Eternal recurrence is the other main plank of Zarathustra's message, what we might call his cosmology, the cosmology, if that is the right word for it, which prevails today in what used to be Christendom, that time is an endless progression and death an eternal extinction, is only one of a great number that have predominated at various points in history. There is the Judaic, Christian, Muslim type, a view of time as a drama, with a definite plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. Then there is the Hindu theory of kalpas and mahakalpas, a mahakalpa being an immense span of time at the end of which the cosmos returns to its original state, the night of Vishnu, before repeating itself. Then there is the Maya doctrine, a philosophy of the unreality of time, together with the whole world of appearances.

Whatever cosmology we adopt has the power, if we take it seriously, radically to determine our view of ourselves. Of particular relevance to Nietzsche is the Buddhist scheme, to which he was introduced by Schopenhauer, who had his own interpretation of it. The central idea of Buddhism is how to escape the endless series of births to which we seem inevitably condemned, and enter Nirvana. Orthodox Buddhism as an outlook on life seems to presuppose world weariness, and the problem is how to escape from suffering into a condition in which all desire, the cause of suffering, is extinguished. The urgency of this problem is greatly magnified in the light of the cosmology, since on the Christian, or extinction theories, the suffering of life is of strictly limited duration.

Nietzsche was not world weary, and he wanted an ideal which asserted the positive value of life. Christianity he despised, Buddhism he respected, despite his disagreement, and in fact there are what we would now call Nietzschean elements in much Buddhist culture, tantrism for example. In its later elaborations, Buddhist philosophy and culture, like Christianity, acquired elements which went far beyond the simple pessimistic scheme that Nietzsche saw as its heart and which Schopenhauer and other nineteenth century Europeans found so attractive.

Allan Bennett, an acute and much respected English Buddhist monk, who had previously taught magic to Aleister Crowley, wrote a book called "The Wisdom of the Aryas", in which he criticises Nietzsche as encouraging egoism such as to obscure the Buddhist's doctrine of Anatta, or egolessness. This seems an oversimplification. The differences between the Buddhist position and the Nietzschean are often seen as far greater than they are, partly because of Christian preconceptions as to what all religion must be like. Schopenhauer himself sometimes goes beyond Buddhism to advocate the extreme life hatred of some of the more morbid Christian mystics. There is also a radical ambiguity surrounding such terms as 'egoism', 'egolessness', 'self, 'selfish', 'subject' etc.

In saying that Nietzsche had an egoistic morality, the point is to contrast this with values and ideologies that oppose the interests of self, that, for example, inhibit the pursuit of selfish impulses by the deliberate inculcation of guilt feelings. Talk of heavenly rewards and punishments disguises the nature of an ideology that can be generally hostile to the direct interests of the subject.

This is not the point of the Buddhist doctrine of Anatta, a sophisticated philosophical idea that is psychologically related to a commonplace of mystical expression in various different cultures. Losing the ego, as it is vulgarly described today, is something different from the Christian ideal of self sacrifice and humility, which has passed over into the guilty conscience of the modern 'wet liberal'. The point of 'egolessness' is escaping the limitations of the obsession with self as a concept, the restrictions involved in the idea of the personality, the ego, the subject. Too much consciousness of self is an obstacle to certain valuable forms of experience. For all his egoistic triumphalism, perhaps even as a consequence of pursuing that impulse to its limit, as it were, Nietzsche, like Blake before him, became concerned with the prospect of overcoming the traditional concepts of selfhood and personality. A section of 'The Will to Power' is devoted to this question.

"Subject; this is the term we apply to our belief in an entity underlying all the different moments of the most intense reality: we regard this belief as the effect of a cause, - and we believe in our belief to such an extent that, on account alone, we imagine 'truth', 'reality', substantiality. - 'Subject' is the fiction which would fain make us believe that several similar states were the effect of one substratum: but it was we who first created the 'similarity' of these states; the similising and adjusting of them is the fact - not their similarity (on the contrary, this ought to be denied)".

This is a line of investigation which later thinkers much influenced by Nietzsche, such as Foucault, have pursued in detail. This idea modifies our understanding of the doctrine of the radical inequality of human personalities, and mitigates something of its exclusivity.

Nietzsche saw the main difference between Buddhism and himself as one of mood, world weariness versus amor fati. A Buddhist might criticise his philosophy by saying that he has evidently not advanced to the point of disillusion, that he is still in love with life, essentially because he has not had enough experience, or rather conscious, remembered experience. He would be advised to continue in his path in the confident expectation that it would eventually turn sour on him, and that, perhaps after a few more lifetimes, he would become world weary and don the yellow robe. The comprehensive disillusion that is the beginning of the road to enlightenment can come only to those who have understood the best that life has to offer, and experienced the full force of the 'obscuring passions', which for that reason are classified in Buddhist scripture as among 'those things not to be avoided'. ('Precepts of the Gurus', V3, in 'Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines', ed. W.Y.Evans Wentz). This would be a sympathetic criticism. Perhaps there are Buddhists, as there are many Christians, temperamentally disposed to see him as the arch enemy of all truth, the ally of Mara, the Evil One.

Nietzsche's criticism of the Buddha would be that for certain physiological reasons, perhaps added to a degree of demoralisation resulting from overintellectuality and an oversensitive conscience, he had lost the capacity to enjoy the world properly. 'Never mind', he would say, 'such conditions may be curable'. D.H.Lawrence, in his short story 'The Man Who Died', envisaged Jesus, having survived crucifixion, being cured of his otherworldliness by the love of an Egyptian priestess. Perhaps something of the sort could be done for Buddha.

There is a great gulf separating the optimism of Nietzsche from what normally passes for such. He is as conscious of the pain and suffering of life as any Buddhist, and yet he affirms it, making him appear to some as a monster. He is as far from the healthy minded, indiscriminate affirmation of Walt Whitman, as he is from the positivist faith in inevitable and permanent human progress. All such attitudes, in his view, greatly underestimate the significance of certain forms of suffering, states of disillusion, misanthropy, frustration and fear. It has been said that he means to go all the way with pessimism in order to advance beyond it.

To Nietzsche, Buddhism was, in its essence, an eminently honest, practical philosophy of life, with which he was nevertheless in fundamental disagreement. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism was perfectly intelligible without any presumptions as to what lies behind the natural world. From the earliest surviving Buddhist scriptures may be extracted what can pass for a basically practical ethical philosophy, without speculative or dogmatic trimmings. The aim is that 'this suffering' should end, desire is the cause of suffering, desire must be destroyed. Yet beyond what Nietzsche sees as the rationalistic core, the elaborated system provides a wonderfully dramatic expression of negation. The Buddhist looks at the wheel of birth, the prospect of continued existence without end, and finds it so appalling that he wants to opt out, he seeks moksha, release, liberation, nirvana.

To understand why Nietzsche needed such a plank as the eternal recurrence in his philosophy, we have to see that, even as a sceptic, he wanted a comparable test of affirmation. From the oriental viewpoint, perpetual existence, up and down the grades of being, incarnation after incarnation, is an intolerable thought. Men desire immortality, but not this purposeless continuance.

Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, repetition of precisely the same life, over and over again for all eternity may seem an even drearier thought. There is to be no rest, even in the grave, for the innumerable aeons in which I do not exist will be nothing to me on my time scale, and I consequently always exist, at some point or other on this same life span, endlessly repeated. I will have to go to school again, endure all the same humiliations, with no possibility of ever evolving into any wiser state. This horrible prospect is Nietzsche's test of affirmation. When I not only desire the eternal recurrence to be true, but embrace it with unreserved enthusiasm, then I can say that I truly affirm.

Nietzsche seemed to think the principle of eternal recurrence was literally true; he had an argument for it which very few people would find completely convincing. Metaphysical arguments are, on the most sympathetic view, seldom conclusive, and this one is metaphysical throughout, for one thing it makes all kinds of assumptions about the nature of personal identity. It is not as if the only alternative is the death as extinction theory; neither science nor philosophy have proved the inevitability of that picture. Many of the ancient Greeks, and a number of other people, seem to have held the theory of eternal recurrence, but never with the passionate urgency of Nietzsche.

Leaving aside the question of its truth, we may consider it as a test of amor fati, intensifying as it does the significance of this life, in all its good and bad aspects, by multiplying it to infinity. It is arguable that the extreme form of Calvinist Antinomianism portrayed in James Hogg's 'Confessions of a Justified Sinner', offers an incomparable sink or swim test of affirmation. Come through to the sense of being one of the elect, free from all danger of Hell, and you are above all moral law, freed from all rules and obligations. For waking people up to the importance of living in a certain way, nothing has been found so effective as the threat of Hell. The poet Rilke, much influenced by Nietzsche, and after him the philosopher Heidegger, made much of the liberating, transforming power of the thought of death, conceived as annihilation.

A serious objection to basing a test for affirmation on the possibility of sometimes achieving a certain state of consciousness, is that among those who pass it most successfully are likely to be the mentally ill. How is Nietzschean affirmation to be distinguished from manic elation?

SCIENTIFIC MODELS

Value equality, as explicit in behaviourism and implicit in certain kinds of liberalism, is allied to a model of scientific explanation that is generally considered to be obsolete. Taking into account the changing model of what was required of a scientific explanation, Nietzsche's programme comes to seem more of a feasible one.

The principles of associationism go back to the eighteenth century and beyond, they provided the kind of explanation that was demanded by the science of the time. Eighteenth century science was connected with the movement known as deism. The orderly, law governed universe that science was discovering, was conceived like a clock which moved according to immutable principles, though why those principles rather than others, it was hard to say. God was in effect removed from the picture; the workings of the world could be admirably explained without the doctrine of divine interference or final causes. The solar system operated according to Newton's laws of motion, and human action was governed by similarly fixed laws, association and the pleasure principle; why this should be was unknown. The universe seemed, for the time being, to be an extremely well organised rational system, but to explain the origin of the laws governing it was still found useful to invoke the idea of God. 17th and 18th century science still left a great deal unexplained, and even a perfectly working mechanical system such as the universe was conceived to be, presupposes someone who made the machine, albeit that it now works so perfectly that he has no further reason to interfere, even to continue to exist.

As scientific knowledge expanded, this picture of the universe became less compelling. The world came to seem a far more complex place than Newton's picture suggested, and yet, despite this increasing complexity, it was becoming more explicable in detail. The cosmos was coming to look less like the orderly machine of Newton, and more like the world described by Lucretius, where the operations of chance manage to produce a semblance of order and regularity. Atomic theory reduces the problem of the diversity of substances, but introduces new mysterious entities, the atoms.

Darwin introduced a new model of scientific understanding, and delivered the death blow to so called 'natural religion'. Henceforth the universe was not to be conceived as a static system operating according to immutable mechanical laws, but as evolving, from which standpoint it was far more susceptible to scientific explanation. The mechanistic hypothesis no longer provided the only acceptable model of rational explanation, whatever its continuing success in many fields.

Darwin explains the origin of man in terms of variation and natural selection, which might be thought to dispense with will and motivation altogether. However, Darwinism does speak of a 'struggle to survive', or 'instinct of self preservation', that has been, in a sense, the motive behind evolution, and it is here that is its main interest to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche had some disparaging things to say about the quality of Darwin's mind, but he did not altogether deny the value of his achievement, holding that certain types of discovery are best made by mediocre minds. It might therefore seem strange that he should have felt moved to attack someone who, to most people's mind, was an inoffensive natural scientist. What he disliked about Darwin was the same thing Marx liked about him, namely his ideological associations with the school of Manchester economics. Like many nineteenth century critics, Nietzsche disliked industrial society, and especially those ideologues who believed that the unhindered operation of economic laws would bring about inevitable and uninterrupted progress towards the millennium. He held in common with such writers as Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, the view that the excessive importance placed on the economic motive, especially in nineteenth century England, had helped to create a society in many respects ugly and philistine. Darwin, whose inspiration was partly in Malthus and other economic writers, and who in turn inspired a virulent form of the progress heresy called 'social Darwinism', shared in the odium.

It is possible to state Darwin's theory behaviouristically, without reference to will, but so long as we grant that science need not restrict itself to measurable quantities, there persists a feeling that talk of will can add something to our understanding. The pleasure principle and the law of association, too, are not materialistic but mentalistic forms of explanation; as an account of why human beings are as they are, they go far beyond a clinical description of behaviour. The will to survive, assumed to be an innate drive which is inherited, is a psychological law which is more specific than the pleasure principle, and which explains more things. However, it is less mechanistic than the associationist account and may therefore be thought by some to be less scientific. Mechanistic materialism dispenses with will, or at least relegates its explanatory function to a very subordinate role. Evolution is in a sense teleological, since the qualities that characterise life forms may be thought of as having a very definite purpose without which they would have disappeared.

Lamarck's theory of evolution, later adapted by Bergson, presupposed a will to evolve into higher forms. Darwin dispensed with this. It would be difficult to explain the origin of a will to evolve, whereas it is easy to account for a will to survive on the principle of natural selection. Biologically, the development of a will to survive, something presumably not present in plants, would be a beneficial mutation, favouring survival. It would work through the pleasure-pain mechanism; as the acts of eating and mating bring pleasure, so the prospect of death brings pain. Thus originate the instincts, which apart form those concerned with reproduction are all concerned with individual survival.

So pleasure and pain, rather than generating the will to survive by the law of association, can be said to presuppose it, since otherwise their origin would be inexplicable. While it may be possible to divert the will behaviouristically into courses unconducive to survival, this would be a form of perversion, rather like training a tree to grow in an unnatural fashion.

Nietzsche argued against Darwin that we only perceive an explicit will to survive in exceptional circumstances, as when resources are scarce and we have cut throat competition within species. Normally, he says, nature is distinguished by abundance of resources, and this means that most of the time there is no struggle to survive. Darwin's picture recalls the ruthless competition of nineteenth century industrial society, where in some quarters economic survival came to be seen as the main object of life, and the will to that end as the source of all good. Nietzsche agrees with the usefulness of the concept of will in an explanation of human nature, but holds that the idea of the will to survive as the mainspring of life is grossly inadequate.

As I sit here now, listening to the breathing of Gerda asleep, the ticking of the clock and the roar of the traffic outside, wondering what to write next, whether to break off and read a book, or roll out my sleeping bags and go to sleep, my immediate survival is not in question. It seems far fetched to try to make a direct 'will to survive' cover all this, since the energy imparted would hardly be great enough.

Nietzsche claims that the will to survive is merely one case of the operation of the will to power, which is his unifying principle, a position even more incompatible with associationism. If the will to power is primary, efforts to redirect the energies to various arbitrarily chosen goals can only succeed by diverting the will from its natural course, by putting obstacles in its path. The will to power philosophy implies always an end beyond that already achieved, that things could be very much better for me if I had more power. It is argued that were it not for the possibility of something very much better than ordinary life, the force of the will would not be sufficient to account for the luxuriant variety of human behaviour and experience. Associationism denies this, arguing that I live purely for pleasure, and have become accustomed to seeking it from certain accustomed paths. If I seek power, that is not so much a search for anything better, as a mark of the conditioning to which I have been subjected.

According to associationism, the will is like a balloon in the wind, and the task of psychology is to learn how to direct it rationally, by means of sails and the like; according to the will to power theory it is like a river whose natural course is to flow down to the sea, and to alter its course one has to place dams to make its journey longer and more difficult, or alternatively speed up its progress by cutting channels.

On the principle of Ockham's razor, the river hypothesis would seem to be preferable, since it involves only one force, that of gravity, whereas the balloon theory is much more complicated when we think about it. Even on the clockwork analogy, dear to the eighteenth century, the concept of the will to power makes human behaviour more explicable. A clock works because it is wound up, that is it works on a spring, or by means of weights. What could be more unreliable than a clock worked by stray magnets in the outside world? While the clock is working, the force pressing within the mechanism is usually much greater than is required to move the hands say, an hour or a minute. Remove all the resistance and the spring would unwind, or the weights fall in no time at all. A will to power assumes a motive force greater than that required to perform any particular act of will. Unhindered, its action would be unpredictable, and possibly very destructive.

There is evidence for the river, as distinct from the balloon hypothesis, in the ineradicable perversity of human nature, that which makes the behaviourist's programme implausible. Skinner's proposals to mould the behaviour of mankind suffer from the same unresolvable hiatus that is noticed in Bentham, that of quis custodiet custodes, who is to condition the conditioners, and how we can be sure that their power will not be abused. On the associationist thesis it ought to be relatively easy to precondition behaviour, but in experience it is not, and those who possess power tend to use it unpredictably. Remove constraints, and the will pursues its own course, as surely as a river flows towards the sea, suggesting that the propelling force behind it is something internal like weight, rather than external, like attraction. Such a force is insufficiently explained by a mere will to pleasure, which upon examination says too little, reducing simply to will, and to speak merely of will as the motivation behind all action says nothing about goals, it is not a unifying explanation.

The concept of the will to power brings the diversity of human aims and values under a single unifying principle, and provides a standard by which they might be compared, while associationism leaves this diversity very much under the rule of chance. Nietzsche offers a psychological formula with the capacity to bring together, in a convincing explanation, a vast amount of diverse material in the form of human ideals and values. Of course many people remain unconvinced. Nietzsche's theory can be looked on as a grand co-ordination of psychological insights. These are not the sort of thing that can be demonstrated mathematically, and there are some minds that are, for various reasons, not receptive to them. Such insights, however, have always been produced, and are usually considered to express a form of truth, public and recognisable, though not involving measurable quantities. It is not unreasonable to assert that Nietzsche is a great psychologist and his perspective a true one, that it satisfies most of the criteria of a successful scientific theory, comparable, for example, with Darwin in biology, or Adam Smith in economics. If various alternative psychological systems, of which associationism is but one, possess a powerful charm and fascination of their own, the same can be said for many of the countless discredited cosmologies and biological or physical theories with which the history of science is littered. I hope to show that the expression 'will to power', however open to misrepresentation, is, under the circumstances, the most appropriate that he might have chosen.

The contrast between the will to power theory and associationism has far reaching moral and psychological consequences. For those under the influence of the latter theory, little meaning can be attached to the concept of a life that is very much more desirable and fulfilling than the one probably led already. It is hard to see how anything can be desirable apart from what is in fact desired. So art, for example, tends to be seen in an essentially hedonistic, consumerist way, and there is held to be no method by which rational thought can lead to an understanding of a fundamentally deeper or richer existence than the apparent social norm.

While philosophy cannot disprove, to everybody's satisfaction, the validity of any set of values, even the most superstitious and peculiar, it is plain that values and ways of living may be profoundly influenced by the philosophy and science of the time. The supposed demands of intellectual consistency may interrupt common sense, or the received wisdom of the human race. The associationist theory can act as a rationalistic block against experience, notably against the insights on which Nietzsche draws for his conclusions. A long way from the striving for perfection of the renaissance scholar, we have come to the doctrine that we are as we are and that there is no real reason why we should be any different. The result is a bifurcation of thought and life, that encourages many people in the idea that reason and the intellect are hostile to energy and vitality.

Given the view that average everyday life is fully meaningful and satisfactory as it is, there is no place for Nietzsche, whose entire mission is seen as an irrelevance and an aberration; and this has ramifications throughout our culture. True profundity may be seen predominantly in such works of literature as insist on the need for compromise, like the novels of the later Tolstoy, or E.M.Forster, adjusting to, rather than resisting, the pressures of mediocrity. Struggle against the grey forces is left to artists and other rebellious irrationalists who persist in believing in that higher potential the denial of which has become a mark of the rational mind.
 
 

GENETIC POTENTIALS

Instead of the will to power, and instead of the behaviourist idea of the conditioned reflex, the psychologist Hans Eysenck holds to a theory of what we may call genetic potentials. This has similar ethical implications to behaviourism in that it likewise refuses to postulate an end beyond those behaviour patterns that are statistically measurable within society.

The varieties of human behaviour are to be explained, to a far greater extent than strict behaviourists allow, by the action of predetermining genes. For the purpose of research, human potential is treated in terms of financial and social success, something that can be statistically, and therefore 'scientifically' measured. While much of this may well produce a body of verifiable scientific data, Eysenck goes beyond it in drawing conclusions which would seem to rule out Nietzsche's conception of the will to power. Whatever the use of his theory in explaining differences of individual achievement within society, it is quite another matter to extend its application and present it as an explanation of the mainspring of human behaviour.

Nietzsche would see differences in human character as due, to a greater extent than is normally thought, to the effects and frustrations of the will to power. Genetic determinations, insofar as they existed, would be essentially tools in the service of the will to power, strengths and weaknesses, which while operating in predictable ways, are not to be looked on as in any sense final causes. Eysenck tends to treat them as if they were final causes, taking the present state of society as given. Instincts are acknowledged, but because their aims and objects are argued back from behaviour that is normally observed to occur, it is concluded that this is how they are best satisfied, except where we have the kind of discontent that would show up on a statistical survey. Thus a general conformity of behaviour can appear to be a desirable social end. Deviance is untidy, for one thing, and most genetic predispositions can seem to have some kind of social fit. On the will to power theory, deviant responses, whatever their rarity, might be especially instructive, they might represent the effort to surmount socially normal behaviour for the sake of something more satisfying. On Eysenck's thesis, this is unintelligible, and he is driven to speak of square pegs in round holes.

Human objectives presuppose a context, an order of things. While an explicit desire to change the order of things may not present, certain changes might yet produce great satisfaction. If we restrict our explanations to conscious desires, we explain such satisfaction when it occurs by saying that a passion, hitherto absent, has come into being. At any given moment there are a number of conscious impulses. If these are actual, others are potential. A thesis like Nietzsche's holds that the actual is insufficient to explain what actually does occur. Certain desires fail to find expression because they are unrealistic, that does not mean that the will ceases at those points, or that we should not take account of such repressed, or stopped, desires. To limit our conception of the will of man to what is realistically possible to him in his given setting is deeply restrictive as an attempt to explain why he is as he is, or how happiness and satisfaction are best to be attained.

To count the appetite for art as just another impulse or appetite is to distort the emotional map, the whole system of the mind, much as if one were to write about the human body as a series of separate functions, without mentioning the way in which they work together as a system.

WILL TO POWER

To see more specifically what Nietzsche means by power, we may look at what he says about happiness. 'What is happiness?' he writes, 'the feeling that power is increasing, that resistance is being overcome'. This harmonises with the axiom, common to Freud and Buddha, that the desire which motivates action can in all cases be thought of as an 'unpleasurable tension', to overcome which is to experience pleasure, or at least a lessening of pain. In overcoming the resistance presented by any desire, one gains power. But power and resistance may be spoken of, without radical change of meaning, in less private senses. Beyond the resistances presented by momentary desire, with the transient satisfactions it offers, there are levels of resistance more permanent in nature, to overcome which means a substantial and lasting gain in power.

Santayana's contention that by 'power' Nietzsche meant primarily military and financial power appears crudely ill informed. Money can be but one motive among many, and love, for example, is a manifestation of power insofar as it involves the overcoming of a resistance. Since we are speaking of a principle which is supposed to underlie every conscious action, it is obviously wrong to interpret it narrowly as meaning exclusively power over other human beings, indeed it is so extensive a concept that it might be wondered how it can avoid triviality and add anything to our understanding of human motivation. Nietzsche's answer to this would presumably be that in respect of human psychology it restores a correct perspective in a sense that a new jargon word like the Freudian 'libido' could never do. To see this we have to see how it is possible for a natural perspective to become distorted.

The will to power is taken as basic to all life, but we are particularly concerned with its relevance to human psychology and to morality, that is to say values. The concept includes power in its most obvious human senses, and it is not loose thinking to try to elucidate it from this viewpoint. Those who possess a lot of power will tend to have different values from those who have little. Beginning with a distinction between what he calls master morality and slave morality, the values of the powerful and of those most subject to such power, he introduces some order into the conflicting diversity of values that are found.

The original concept of goodness, the ex professor of philology tells us on sound etymological grounds, by no means entailed the altruism which is its received sense today. Instead of the good-evil antithesis, we had the good bad, which is something quite different. The good man was like a Homeric hero, proud, sensual, ambitious and passionate. He was able to find wide scope for the fulfilment of his instincts, and his morality was directed to maintaining and increasing his power. 'Bad' meant what was plebeian and base, weak and mean. We can make most sense of the history of morals if we imagine back to a time in our own savage or barbaric past, when might was right and there was no moral argument. Moral superiority was hardly thought of as distinct from external power, and so power was a unity in this sense. Then came priests and witchdoctors, with claims to special knowledge of the supernatural, taking a degree of power away from the chiefs and kings. In Homer, as in ancient Greek culture generally, the role of priests was unimportant, which was not the case with most other contemporary civilisations.

What Nietzsche called the slave revolution in morals, brought about by Christianity, consisted in something far more radical than this, for kings and priests at first belonged to essentially the same class of people. Ancient civilisations were mostly based on slavery, with the notable exception of the Indian, which made do with the caste system instead. There are certain virtues appropriate to a lowly situation in life, which enable the oppressed and the suffering best to gain such happiness as is possible to them. The slave revolution in morals meant the appropriation of moral superiority on the part of the weak, and the eventual conversion of the strong to this evaluation. Of the Christian God it is intoned 'He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek'. The permanent effect of this revolution was an alteration in the concept of moral goodness, so that it has now become largely synonymous with altruism and self sacrifice.

So power, in its plainest external sense is an essential factor in the generation of values, by which one understands beliefs about the world, psychological beliefs, religious, moral and political ideals and suchlike. There are only certain kinds of values, however, which have an interest in acknowledging this truth, and are compatible with full honesty concerning human motivation. This is vividly illustrated by the history of Greek moral ideas in the classical period.

Traditional Greek morality was a collection of taboos serving to protect the unity and domination of a class. Values were uncompromising and egoistic, the ideal was courage, the refusal to submit to intolerable conditions, and required a strength beyond that available to the mass of ordinary people. This morality understands self sacrifice in terms of an egoistic motive like honour, or glory, or patriotism. Christian humility, which centuries of conditioning have forced us to admire, with its insistence on self mortification and suppressing the passions, and its condemnation of that spiritual pride which might alone make such behaviour sympathetic to a pagan, as the worst sin of all, would have been found incomprehensible and repellent. There is plenty of guilt in Greek literature, but mostly in the form of outrage to natural feelings, a wife killing her husband, a son his mother, conflicts of feelings, contradictions and dilemmas. Conscience is recognised as emotion, the gods are personifications of natural forces, there is no criticism of the human passions, only conflict between them. Those who do wrong are liable to come to a bad end mainly because they are unable to support their deeds. Clytemnestra, for example, is an unhappy woman, and her actions set forces in motion which destroy her, but not because she has 'sinned' in the Christian sense.

Aeschylus presents an evolving conception of justice; man is to make his own laws, and the Prometheus myth is a challenge to the idea of an omnipotent God and an unalterable law of righteousness. Aeschylus was by the standards of his country, a religious man, yet he repudiates the concept of a divine law set up against, and in judgement of, human passions.

Greek myth was a prescientific, prephilosophical kind of thought, and despite its beauty and power it eventually came to be considered an intellectual encumbrance by many educated men; those wishing to dispense with it were said to 'disbelieve' in the gods, something which the early Christians were far from doing, rather turning them into demons (see I Cor. x 20).

Once such a step has been taken, one is intellectually free from those taboos and pieties of traditional morality which inhibit the formulation of a science of behaviour. A traditional morality finds it difficult to allow for relativity of values, and this, for one thing, may make for discomfort in a period of rapid social change and expanding horizons. The dramatic use made by Aeschylus and Sophocles of religious myth, reveals an impressive insight into human nature. Nietzsche saw what he considered as the sophist culture as the continuation of this wisdom, an attempt to make it systematic and scientific, detaching moral psychology from its mythological framework.

The sophists were travelling teachers who instructed in the art of success in life, particularly in rhetoric, but many of them had distinctive philosophical ideas of their own. They were perhaps the first to apply rational critical methods to moral questions, and in the main they were relativists. Protagoras said that 'man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not'; Gorgias apparently expressed a sceptical, even nihilistic view, saying that there is nothing and even if there were anything we could never know it. Many of them were in favour of the uninhibited pursuit of instinct, which they advocated with a frankness that would in most circumstances be self defeating. Nietzsche had especial admiration for the historian Thucydides, whom he regarded as one of the finest flowers of sophist culture, thinking of the clear insight into human motivation, and the freedom from moral prejudice, evinced in his history of the Peloponnesian war, which tore Greece apart in the fifth century.

Traditional Greek values were aristocratic and unrationalised. The movement towards more popular forms of government, democracies and tyrannies, put the aristocratic ethos under threat. Not that any of the leading representatives of the sophist culture, despite their frequent adherence to anti aristocratic parties, would have allied themselves directly to any force opposed to that ethos, but their considerable moral cynicism threatened cultural disintegration. Many of the Greeks of the time were inordinately individualistic and ambitious. A common ideal of those influenced by the sophists was to become an amoral tyrant, a not altogether unfeasible ambition in the light of the great number of independent city states and the fluid state of contemporary politics.

In overthrowing the taboos of conventional morality, and looking honestly at human motivation, there was an obvious tendency to undermine the concept of moral standards altogether. Thrasymachus, in Plato's Republic, brashly declares that 'justice is the interest of the stronger', a cynical position, which however rooted in an urge to uncompromising honesty, seems to render all moral language redundant. If the aristocratic ethos had come to this, it was likely that 'the stronger' would ultimately turn out to be the democratic ethos, effectively the prejudices and principles of the mob. Plato was opposed to this, but felt that traditional values were obsolete. He wanted to create a new rational basis for aristocracy. Judging by what was to eventually happen, it would seem that he failed, unless one sees as a partial success the survival of a Platonist, or neoplatonist, element in the Christian religion. In speaking of Socrates, I mean the Platonic Socrates, but follow Nietzsche in treating him only as the ethical teacher, not the metaphysician or political utopian.

On Nietzsche's view, the supreme cultural achievements of fifth century Athens culture are to be valued as the expression of mankind at the highest expression of his powers. Rather than viewing them in the manner of the eugenicist Francis Galton, as the result of a unique concentration of very high natural intelligence, he sees them explicable in terms of an exceptional freedom from taboos and superstitious ideals. Life was then valued for what it was, and there was an unparalleled intellectual honesty in all fields. Athens was not merely excellence, but by Christian standards, immorality triumphant. We have a view of a full social world unshackled by so many of the inhibitions that restrain us. It was the peak of classical culture, and if we know the reasons for its supremacy we may know where to look for the reasons for the decline and ultimate collapse of classical civilisation several hundred years later.

There were many at the time who felt that it was rationalism itself that was destructive and dangerous, as men forsook the wisdom enshrined in tradition for the uncertainties of speculation. Socrates, himself associated with the sophist movement, was put to death for impiety and corrupting the morals of Athenian youth. Nietzsche saw him as the initiator of a decadent movement in a different sense, the subverter of the brilliant sophist culture, yet nevertheless perhaps the saviour of Greek civilisation which had been set on a self destructive course.

Socrates took on the task of correcting the dangers of individualistic excess, not by a return to the traditional order, but by means of rational argument. He criticised the traditional wisdom of the poets, saying, 'not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration'. In turning the sophisticated methods of Greek philosophy onto ethical questions, he established a reputation as one of the most original and seminal minds in history.

Nietzsche saw him as trying to curb the violence of instinct by means of rational argument. The identification of knowledge and virtue is the foundation of Greek ethics, and Socrates argued that the pursuit of socially desirable moral virtue necessarily follows from a direct understanding of one own real interests, which turn out to be incompatible with the unrestrainedly egoistic passion which governed many of his contemporaries. Nietzsche saw one effect of this as to set up an artificial ideal by which real life was to be judged and found wanting, and which was eventually to open the door to the extreme otherworldliness of Christianity. The underlying motive of such an ideal was to alter some of the power relationships, what we might call the pecking order, of society. Those who criticise established values may generally be thought of as suffering, in some way or other, from the existing order, and aiming at a transfer of the moral power and self confidence associated with the old values to others more personally advantageous and congenial. Nietzsche lays stress on Socrates' physical ugliness and plebeian descent.

Socrates is not necessarily to be condemned for complicating the game in this fashion; at the very least, Nietzsche suggests, such complexities help to make life interesting. As Plato portrays him, he is far superior in reasoning ability to his sophist opponents, and he seems to have raised rational discussion to a new level of effectiveness. Nietzsche says that he invented a new 'agon', a contest, an intellectual form of chariot racing. The aristocratic happiness hymned by the poet Pindar was that of the Olympic victor, a conscious power ideal, achieved through formalised athletic contest. In the modern world we still have Olympic victors, as we still have dictators. We still have athletes who value athletic triumph above life and health. But such triumph palls beside that of a winner of minds by rational persuasion, such as Socrates. His standard of reference was always reason, never traditional dogma, and his claim to our respect is based on his power of argument.

Nietzsche himself does not use the Socratic method of closely reasoned (if often fallacious) argument. He is rational but not dialectical. In presenting his case he is not concerned to argue each individual assertion against all possible objections. Given his style of thinking he would hardly have time to do so, but he has the same commitment to complete rational defensibility.

It might on the face of it seem an obviously excellent thing that the ability to defend one's position logically should have become, with Socrates, a newly important factor in determining power and status. As with the older shift in power from chief to witchdoctor, it might seem highly desirable that power should be in the hands of the intelligent rather than the merely strong, rich and brutal. Nietzsche argues that there can be dangers in setting up an ideal standard in criticism of what appear to be natural human responses and reactions. It may obscure the psychological understanding that can grow from the perception of the roots of moral valuation in the will to power, such as Nietzsche discerned in some of the sophists, and in such later writers as Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld and certain novelists. Those who lay claim to inherent moral superiority based on virtue, find it hard, for fear of undermining that claim, to acknowledge motives such envy and resentment to which they might be subject. Only master values can frankly admit the primacy of the will to power. In proposing an alternative standard of right and wrong to that which was accepted in a society singularly free from traditional prejudices, Socrates leaves the door open for the conception of a 'real world', superior to the apparent, which was to become developed in Plato. To admit the roots of this in the will to power would be to concede the logical priority of the old values, which would be unacceptable. Once it is presumed to exist, this 'real world' can become the vehicle for all kinds of dogmatic and coercive assertions, and is particularly useful for revolutionaries and those with an interest in falsifying psychological reality.

Given the Socratic reform, the requirement for rational justification, there is a danger that those in a weak position should succeed, by means of propaganda and dialectic, in so exalting the virtues and values of weakness as to paralyse the natural expression of strength. One reason, Nietzsche says, why Socratic dialectics cannot work as a cure for decadence is that Socrates personally was himself extremely decadent, plagued, on his own admission, by abnormally vicious instincts, which he needed to bring under close control.

Whatever values I acknowledge, insofar as I cannot live up to them, my morale is correspondingly low. Persuade myself that they are wrong and it rises. There are fundamentally two different kinds of values, those of the powerful and those of the powerless. We speak of master and slave morality, because the power of a master over a slave is the most effective symbol of other forms of power, or of power relationships generally. It presents these relationships, of universal application, in a particularly vivid and easily graspable form. This was well understood in the ancient world, where one of the most basic distinctions was between slave and free, between those who were to use their energies serving others, and those who were to use them serving themselves. In modern terms, Nietzsche suggests at one point that anyone who does not have at least two thirds of his time to himself might be considered a slave.

Being anyway debarred from the satisfaction of certain instincts, the powerless come to assert that the instincts are themselves evil, and the satisfaction of them wrong. In this they seemingly have nothing to lose, and at least relief from a depressing feeling of inferiority to gain. The idea of what ought to be also, it is hoped, succeeds in demoralising the strong, so that established power is no longer understood as a guarantee of moral rightness. So slave values are to be understood in terms of opposition to master values, rooted in an unexplicit desire for power, for an immediate gain in morale, and also the hope of eventual material success.

The interests of groups and individuals inevitably conflict, so in striving to satisfy myself I am necessarily involved in a struggle against other human beings, who while they may not threaten my survival, do threaten my power, including the value I might want to set on myself. Such power is not just a matter of telling other people what to do; much is needed simply to enjoy oneself in peace. Even an idealistic revolutionary, seeks it not simply for the pleasure of having other people serve him, but to remake his moral environment, removing the features he finds objectionable and remodelling society after his heart's desire.

It should not be thought that power in Nietzsche's sense could be easily quantified. To think of it purely in terms of money or social status would be grossly crude. It is not even the possession of power that is worth having so much as the enjoyment of it increasing, the overcoming of resistance. The subjective significance of any theoretically measurable quantum of power would vary tremendously from person to person, and it is this that determines the enjoyment or happiness received from it. To accuse someone who sees the will to power as the motive behind even the most refined and cultivated of human experiences, even, presumably dreams, as denigrating those experiences in favour of the life ideals of press barons, unscrupulous politicians and careerists of all kinds, is a serious misinterpretation. Power seeking in the vulgar sense, however, is of interest to him, especially when it exhibits human nature stripped of the veil of moral prejudice which normally obscures it.

Many would agree with the interpretation of desire in terms of resistance to be overcome, but would normally understand this in a trivial sense. On Nietzsche's view, it is not just the desire itself that creates a resistance. Resistances pervade the outside world, and among the most important are those presented by the wills and desires of other people. The instinctual driving force of the will is in continual opposition to these.

According to Nietzsche it is not the satisfaction of any particular drive that is important in an act of will, but the overcoming of resistance. In his account of the variations of human values, he isolates some of the characteristic resistances with which the will is faced, and so manages to correlate a lot of disparate phenomena. If all human beings were solitary, and equally free and independent, if they were more like cats, it might not be helpful to speak of this in terms of power, not because happiness would not then seem like power, but because there would be little motive to deny it.

There are a number of related reasons why the word 'power' is so appropriate. One is the psychological observation as to what the feeling of happiness is like, "the sense that power is increasing, that resistance is being overcome". It also focuses on an important truth, that just as people are, in general, quite obviously deprived of power in a very plain sense, so are they deprived of potential enjoyment and satisfaction, far more than they generally care to admit. One may talk of power over the natural world, but the world of the human and the social is permeated with power relationships. Living together as social animals, human beings set up all kinds of resistances to each other's wills. Among the resistances set up is a deliberate obscuring of psychological reality, confusion implanted in the mind as to the effects of certain actions in securing happiness. The initially very obvious fact that happiness is closely related to the sense of increasing power is denied and obscured. The reason for this is closely bound up with external power relationships in society, the motive behind 'slave values' and the 'morality of the weak'.

The concept of the will to power is an appropriate characterisation of what would be more widely recognised as the ordinary facts of human nature were it not for the effects of a widespread interest in falsification deriving fairly directly from an experience of powerlessness in relation to the strong and successful. With the word 'power' we break the mystique, assert what is most importantly denied, namely the existence of the falsifying motive itself.

To speak simply of instinct, libido or will, rather than will to power, would make it easy to disregard the vital fact that in any conceivable form of human society the instinctual energy of different individuals must clash. There is a very powerful interest in denying this fact. Those whose interest it is to render man harmless, falsify human nature. Only those who live by master values are strong enough not to need to defend themselves thus. Master morality may make a virtue of truth for its own sake; it is the only position which has no interest in self deception, that does not see reality as something to be feared, perhaps threatening a hostile judgement. Truth is in the interest of those who live by master values, they want to know how they may put the world to use for their own purposes; the interest in falsification comes from those who see the truth as dangerous in the use that the stronger may make of it, and who need to defend themselves against it. Aleister Crowley expressed Nietzsche's point succinctly in the 'Book of Lies'. "White is white is the lash of the overseer, white is black is the watchword of the slave".

In answer to the ancient question of what life is about, revealed religion introduces a complication in the form of an antiegoistic moral dimension, which moves us further away from the truths of human nature expressed in pagan myth and art. So the good, meaning ultimate happiness) has to be mediated through this moral dimension, whose original significance was to enable the underdog classes to participate in what good is available. It is proclaimed that you cannot be happy unless you are 'good', that is unless you observe the many restrictions demanded by the religion. Christian values of neighbourliness and forgiving enemies sprang originally, he says, from women and slaves, oppressed classes for whom it was the supreme interest to create a 'harmless' type of humanity.

In the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, the concept of morality was far more in the forefront of intellectual discussion than it is today. Kant raised the idea of the 'ethical' life to a supreme status, and was followed in this by Fichte and others. Nietzsche describes Kant as deriving this ideal ultimately from the ancient Stoics, via Rousseau. Such an explicit position Nietzsche could clearly attack as a falsification of human nature, a tendentious distortion of human motivation and the psychology of happiness. That this self consciously ethical life however, is no longer so widely proclaimed a philosophy, does not mean that moralistic distortion is any less a feature of modern culture, though it may take less obvious forms.

An explicitly moralistic account of human nature is often superseded by a quasi-medical one, making of mental health a comprehensive ideal parallel to bodily health. Unlike the will to power theory, this may present some or other fairly specific set of values, attitudes and behaviour patterns as objectively and medically desirable, thus imbuing them with a power equivalent to moral rightness. Some such model, rarely subjected to philosophical scrutiny, is frequently upheld by psychiatrists and social engineers, with all their sophisticated techniques for making people conform to orthodox patterns of life. The moralistic concept of wickedness gives way to a medical concept of sickness. Both aim to weaken the deviant's egoism, his confidence in his own will.

Medical models may be used to promote personal hobbyhorses as fundamental truths of human nature. Those who maintain that some particular drive, such as the sexual, or even the hunger drive, must be satisfied before any degree of fulfilment is possible, might be said to attach a higher degree of importance to that drive than is reasonably necessary. Wilhelm Reich, for example, managed to reduce religion to sex, but only, it might be thought, because he himself devised what amounts to a religion of sex, with the place of God taken by the orgasm. It is a possible religion, but to adopt it is to attach a significance to sex which is even greater than that given by most people, and which makes it stand for more things.

The will to power theory does not promote any one set of values against another in such a question begging manner, it unifies by seeing every specific attitude in context as the necessary expression of the will to power, given all circumstances. It has been suggested that it is morally biased because it has the effect of demoralising the weak. It is felt that it gives moral strength to those already in a position of strength by reducing all human differences to a power hierarchy against which there is no appeal. It must be stressed that this theory says nothing about the possible validity or invalidity of any value judgement whatever, and I am under no more of a obligation to respect the established order than to reject it, and may make what judgements I will.

Of course, each alleged falsification claims to correspond with the facts of human nature as much as Nietzsche does. In expounding Nietzsche it would be easy enough to treat him as a purely experimental thinker with whom we are invited to take issue at every point, or to give various examples of power and say that this is what he thinks we are all after. We can look for a greater degree of coherence than that. The point is not so much to do with what people in fact desire, but is concerned with the whole process of willing, desiring acting and imagining. The conception of the will to power offers a hypothesis which links up and accounts for what Nietzsche describes as the huge variety of moral attitudes we find at various places and times, and an explanation of some of the ways in which values may alter over the course of time.

The positing of a largely unconscious motive, to explain why people hold the beliefs and values they do, is not something to be introduced lightly. The will to power is something different from what people would usually offer as an explanation of their behaviour, it goes beyond a simple explication of their beliefs and desires. We are explaining people's beliefs and values in terms other than they would probably use themselves. The justification for the concept can only be that it makes clear what would otherwise be obscure. However accurately we describe what someone believes, it is still often perplexing why he should believe it. People may believe things we find not only incredible but deeply repellent. Where there is verbal understanding, psychological sympathy may yet seem impossible. Wittgenstein spoke of different values and beliefs in terms of different 'forms of life'. Yet insofar as we are all human, it is felt, we are one form of life, and should be mutually comprehensible.

A concept such as the will to power has more specific content than that of forms of life, but only enough to make sense of the diversity. It is the generality of the will to power theory which some people find offensive; they want something far more particular, for reasons that are not hard to identify. I like to feel that my own values are the norm from which other people have deviated; if I can persuade others of this then I gain moral power. The will to power theory offers no such norm, nothing to use as a protection against others, no specific statement of what is right or healthy. Nietzsche by no means subscribed to a doctrine that might is right. Concepts of rightness and wrongness may vary according to how much power we possess, but insofar as power is a fact of nature its moral rightness or wrongness is not a question, and all that is asked is that we be strong enough to look these facts in the face.

HEDONISM

Modern morality of a seemingly egoistic cast finds expression in the qualification 'so long as you don't hurt anyone else' to the old adage 'do what you will'. There is usually an assumption that egoistic fulfilment is possible without infringing on the egoism of others. This supports an ideology of atomistic, individualistic hedonism, or egoism without will to power. From the Nietzschean viewpoint the assumption is unacceptable. Such an ideology may purportedly be practised, but one would look for hidden motives in the way it would actually operate. From the viewpoint of the conscious will to power, the limitation in the psychology means a limitation in the fulfilment offered. The doctrine will be seen as restrictive. From a less enlightened point of view, however, the results may be more satisfying. The will to power will operate unconsciously, and the doctrine, far from restraining, or holding up its operation, provides the framework of its ambition. Any ideology can produce a highly competitive motive. The prospect of success within it can provide a strong emotional challenge, offering a great sense of power once it is attained. Such a motive is in conflict with the simplicity of the explicit ideology, and will tend to be concealed. In the case of a second rate ideology, those who can identify most strongly with it, and therefore become most successful within its terms will be the second rate minds. It will be the second rate that has all the confidence and restrains and oppresses the excellent.

The seventeenth century French aphorist La Rochefoucauld, was an explorer of such hidden motives, of the operations of what he calls 'Self Love'. 'Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self love', he writes, 'many regions still remain unexplored'. Nietzsche expressed agreement with the general outlook of his book of 'Maxims', or psychological observations, usually regarded as cynical (e.g. 'there is something in the misfortunes of our closest friends that does not displease us'), though he repudiates his pessimism, which is to say that he refuses to find such truths objectionable, or to be depressed by them. The more power a human being acquires, the more he will tend to behave in a manner which is unpredictable, and liable to be regarded as immoral or dangerous. This is not meant as a value judgement, but as a factual