This document provides a comparison of Tolstoy and Nietzsche. It argues that though they arrived at opposite doctrines, psychologically they complete one another as they both sought to solve the same inner dilemma of self-division from different ends. It says their philosophies stemmed more from their personal suffering than a search for truth, and served as weapons, refuges, and masks to deal with tensions in their own spirits between conflicting values and truths. While religious ideas once provided unity, in their age of skepticism they felt compelled to impose their own needed truths and belief in them to avoid disintegration of self.
This document provides a comparison of Tolstoy and Nietzsche. It argues that though they arrived at opposite doctrines, psychologically they complete one another as they both sought to solve the same inner dilemma of self-division from different ends. It says their philosophies stemmed more from their personal suffering than a search for truth, and served as weapons, refuges, and masks to deal with tensions in their own spirits between conflicting values and truths. While religious ideas once provided unity, in their age of skepticism they felt compelled to impose their own needed truths and belief in them to avoid disintegration of self.
This document provides a comparison of Tolstoy and Nietzsche. It argues that though they arrived at opposite doctrines, psychologically they complete one another as they both sought to solve the same inner dilemma of self-division from different ends. It says their philosophies stemmed more from their personal suffering than a search for truth, and served as weapons, refuges, and masks to deal with tensions in their own spirits between conflicting values and truths. While religious ideas once provided unity, in their age of skepticism they felt compelled to impose their own needed truths and belief in them to avoid disintegration of self.
Source: The Slavonic Review, Vol. 4, No. 10 (Jun., 1925), pp. 67-82 Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4201926 . Accessed: 31/10/2014 20:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE. (An address delivered at King's College, before the Anglo-Russian. Society, on March 4, I924. IL A COMPARISON of Tolstoy and Nietzsche is both tempting and ungrateful. It is tempting on account of the very contrast between the two, and ungrateful because this theme has been already treated too often and by too many people. Yet in spite even of such elucidating essays as those of Merezhkovsky and Shestov, the subject itself is still far from being exhausted. One can still find some new standpoint or other from which to approach both Nietzsche and Tolstoy, even if it is taken for granted that their doctrines have lost much of the importance which used to be attributed to them (whether rightly or wrongly) a few decades ago. Some aspects of their teaching are in fact covered with a fairly thick layer of dust which we always risk stirring up-at least as long as we attempt a dry and academic exposition of their views. However, a bald summing up of their debits and credits, according to all the recipes of philosophic bookkeeping, would be now-a-days not only utterly uninteresting, but perhaps even misleading. For both Tolstoy and Nietzsche philosophised not in order to reveal their ultimate secrets, but perhaps in order to conceal them. Consequently, we can fully understand their ideas only after having sifted them through their own personalities; and the methods for such a proceeding we can take from Nietzsche himself. As is known, Nietzsche was a past master at looking through the key-holes into the workshop in which various ideas and ideals are being fabricated. And indiscreet as he always was, he showed us-largely through his own example-that the external appearances and the hidden inner motives of a philosophy may be two widely different things. That is to 1 This address is printed exactly as it was delivered. A further development of certain ideas which are only suggested in it can be found in some of my books, particularly in Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Modvern Consciousness. E 2 This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 68 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. say, the conscious and the " unconscious " attitudes towards life-problems on the part of the philosopher are often poles apart. But, if this be so, then a doctrine-even a doctrine which has already passed its first youth-may acquire a new depth and a new interest as soon as we begin to investigate not the ideas, but those hidden roots of ideas of which the thinker himself is perhaps only half-aware, or even entirely unaware. It goes without saying that such an approach is worth while only with regard to those philosophers who are not mere "registering apparatuses," but real human beings-with human pains and passions, human flesh and blood. In other words, the true fascination of philosophy begins where one's inquiring in- tellect comes into active touch with real throbbing life, where profound thinking is the result of profound living and not a cowardly substitute for it. This does not imply that philosophy ought to be replaced by mere personal " confessions"; at the same time it cannot be denied that it is above all the profoundly personal touch which makes-let us say-Nietzsche's un- systematic philosophy more alive, more stimulating than hundreds of well-ordered and canonised academic systems. For whatever our personal opinion of Nietzsche's views may be, we feel in them all the pathos, all the passion, all the contradic- tions of intense life. And his attitude towards respectable official philosophies is the same as that of his Catholic double, Pascal, who once said, " Se moquer de la philosophie c'est vraiment philosopher." Nietzsche said more or less the same thing when he wrote about the philosophers of his own kind, " We philosophers are not at liberty to separate soul and body, as the people separate them, and we are still less at liberty to separate soul and spirit. We are not thinking frogs, we are not objectifying and registering apparatuses with cold entrails- our thoughts must be continually born to us out of our pain, and we must, motherlike, share with them all that we have in us of blood, heart, ardour, joy, passion, pang, conscience, fate and fatality. Life-that means for us to transform constantly into light and flame all that we are, and all that we meet with; we cannot possibly do otherwise." II. So the very starting point of our investigation is the question: what type of mentality can produce views such as those of Nietzsche and of Tolstoy? And on discovering that both of them belong in essence to a similar type we must This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE. 69 needs ask: why is it that, in spite of this, they have arrived at such entirely opposite doctrines? For let us state at once that, although the Christian Tolstoy and the Antichristian Nietzsche exclude each other as thinkers and moralists, physchologically they complete one another. They are but the two antipodes of one and the same mentality. Their work is an attempt to solve one and the same inner dilemma-from its opposite ends. In the case of both of them we see also that their philosophy was born not out of their brains, but out of their suffering. Their thinking has nothing to do with any " theory of knowledge," but only with their own inner struggle, which was their chief, and sometimes even their only, way to knowledge. In this struggle they needed their own philosophy now as a weapon, now as a refuge, and practically always as a mask-a mask before others and before themselves. Their principles were important to them not in so far as they were " true," but in so far as they proved an efficient means against their own self-division. I have in view not only the old and rather crude division between " flesh " and " spirit," but first of all a highly modern phenomenon: the disintegration of the spirit itself into its antagonistic elements and values. The conflict between the impulse of man-god and that of God-man (to use Dostoyevsky's terminology) takes place only oni the spiritual plane, and its tension may be infinitely greater and more tragic than the old tension between " flesh " and " spirit." Or take the conflict between the conscious and the subconscious truths as depicted in Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov: on their own planes they are equally true, but no sooner have they met than they exclude each other. Moreover, one and the same " truth " may radically change all its inner contents if transferred upon a different plane-a fact which makes the value of self-complacent "logical" truths all the more problematic. The curious point, however, is that the stronger one's inner vitality, the more painful becomes this danger of self-division and disintegration. In former times strong religious ideas alone were sufficient to save the individual from such a danger, simply by giving him a firm spiritual focus which not only held his personality together, but also linked him to the rest of mankind. But in our age of universal scepticism, the religious ideas have lost all their former vital power. And so a man who wants to be " saved " from himself is compelled to seek This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 70 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. various substitutes, or even deliberate illusions, in which he tries to believe. For let us be sincere: instead of a strong belief, we have only a strong will to believe. A modem seeker imposes upon himself both the truths he needs and his belief in them. And the more he suspects that his own belief is shaky, the more passionately he will insist on its validity-until he becomes a fanatic of ideas not because he believes in them, but because he is continuously afraid of not believing in them sufficiently, of not believing in them at all. This is, by the way, a typical feature of modern idealists. Our modern idealism has in fact little in common with that of our grandfathers, who were idealistic out of naiYete', out of " noble " sentimentality mixed with dreamy romanticism. They believed in life because they saw and knew too little of its negative side. Our problem, on the contrary, is: how to make ourselves believe in life, although we feel and see too much of its negativeness-much more than we are able to bear. This feeling, joined by all the contradictions without and within ourselves, may become so oppressive as to threaten us with catastrophe. And since we possess no longer any universal values upon which to lean, the only outlet that remains in most cases is-sauve qui pbeut. It is at this point that life itself begins to philosophise: our very instinct of inner self-preservation will often suggest to us those " truths" and values which provide at least a pro- visional escape from our impasse. And if we insist on the universal validity of these truths, we do so-unconsciously, at any rate-not for the sake of the universe, but only for our own sake. The doctrines of Tolstoy and Nietzsche may serve, on the whole, as a good illustration of this view. III. We are all acquainted with Tolstoy's so-called Christianity. We know how smooth and " logical " that doctrine appears at first sight. And yet the same Tolstoy who passionately preached his own version of Christ's teaching wrote to his aunt, the Countess A. Tolstoy, at the period of his seeking (I877) that religion was for him simply " the question of a man who is drowning and seeks something to clutch in order to avoid the inevitable ruin which he foresees with all his soul. During the last two years," he continues, " religion seemed to me a possibility of salvation . . . This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE. 7I And it happens that just when I have seized this saving board, it seems to me that I am going with it to the bottom . . . If you ask me what it is that prevents me from floating on the surface with the board, I shall not tell you because I am afraid of disturbing your faith, and I know that faith is the greatest boon. I also know that you will smile at the idea that my doubts could disturb you; however, it is important to know not which of us reasons better, but what one ought to do to save oneself from drowning. This is why I will not talk to you about them; on the contrary, I shall be glad for you and for all those who are floating in the little boat that does not carry me. I have a good friend, a savant, Strakhov, one of the best men I know. We agree considerably in our ideas about religion, and we are both convinced that without religion one cannot live, and yet we cannot believe." And now listen how the half-blind invalid Nietzsche gives away the secret of his own philosophy. He confesses quite openly that to him philosophy is not a chase after some abstract truth or other, but simply a matter of self-preservation, a self- concocted medicine. So in I882 he writes to Hans von Billow: " I will make no mention of the dangerous nature of my emotions, but this I must say, the altered manner in which I think and feel and which has even been expressed in my writings during the last six years has sustained me in life and almost made me quite healthy. What -do I care when my friends assert that my present attitude of a ' free spirit ' is an eccentric pose, a resolve made, as it were, with clenched teeth and wrung by force and imposed upon my genuine inclinations? So be it! -let it be a ' second nature '; but I will prove yet that only with this second nature I was able to become possessed of my first nature." And in the preface to the second edition of Human-all-too- Human (I886) he is even more outspoken. He says frankly that his philosophy is a kind of deliberate self-deception: " Supposing that I were reproached with good reason [because of this self-deception]," he says, "what do you know, what could you know as to how much artifice of self-preservation, how much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception-and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerityv? ... In short, I still live; and life, in spite of ourselves, demands illusion, it lives by illusion ... but-there ! I am already beginning again and doing what I have always done, old immoralist and This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 72 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. bird-catcher that I am-I am talking immorally, ultra-morally, beyond good and evil! " These passages show that the Antichristian philosophy of Nietzsche and the Christian teaching of Tolstoy have a similar inner impulse. Both Tolstoy and Nietzsche hoped to find in their doctrines a life-buoy which would prevent them from drowning. Only, Nietzsche had courage enough to acknowledge this openly, while Tolstoy always tried to hide his own secret behind pious, sometimes too pious labels. The transvaluations of both thinkers were largely the expression of their personal needs. Their instinct of self-preservation urged them to adopt those views and ideas which would most probably help them to endure the pain of their inner conflicts, the pain of their own existence. As the philosopher of the superman is a particularly salient case, I will first give a brief analysis of Nietzsche. IV. I have just mentioned, that Nietzsche often betrays his philosophic secret without any reticence. His doctrine was, however, not only his medicine, but also his complement; it was that antithesis of his own self on which he disciplined his decaying strength, his will to health and life. " Apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature," he says in Ecce Homo. "That energy with which I serttenced myself to absolute solitude, and to severance from all those conditions in life to which I had grown accustomed; my discipline of myself, and my refusal to allow myself to be pampered, to be tended hand and foot, to be doctored-all this betrays the absolute certainty of my instincts respecting what at that time was most needful to me. I placed myself in my own hands, I restored myself to my hlealth. This double thread of experience, this means to two worlds that seem so far asunder, finds in every detail its counterpart in my own nature; I am my own complement." As I have put it elsewhere,' the duality of a conscious decadent and of his equally conscious opponent is the thread which runs unbroken through the whole of Nietzsche's work and life. Each of his books represents a certain stage of the duel between these two antagonists and also a kind of self-conquest. No sooner had Nietzsche discovered a decadent quality in himself than his philosophy invented a radical antidote with which to fight 1 In my book, Nietzsche and Modern Consciousness. This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE. 73 and paralyse it. So it happened that the more he was aware of his own disease the more he praised health, even health in its savage form. The more he realised his own weakness and his own ingrained Christian instincts the more he extolled strength, even aggressive and cynical strength. Nietzsche knew also that he had inherited a great amount of German sentimentality; and this made him all the more determined to fight it with a desperate and entirely self-imposed manliness. It was partly due to his innate gentleness that he sang hymns to hardness and cruelty, while the helplessness of an invalid and his absolute ]ack of real " power " made him clamour all the more for the " will to power." He also struggled with the various diseases of the age in the same ratio as he himself wanted to get rid of them. In this connection, Nietzsche's attitude towards Wagner on the one side, and towards Christianity on the other, is par- ticularly interesting and typical. It is generally known that, at the beginning of his career, Nietzsche found in Wagner his best and most helpful friend. And yet, after his second visit to Bayreuth (I876), Nietzsche quarrelled with Wagner without any external reason whatever. He just turned away from him; and although he himself had been a great admirer of Wagner's music, he soon began to attack that very music with an hysterical vehemence which gradually increased so much as to become (in his pamphlets Nietzsche contra Wagner and The Wagner Case) almost pathological. However, the very passion of Nietzsche's attacks against WVagner is suspicious. For it shows that in attacking Wagner he attacked in essence himself. Or, better, Nietzsche the doctor attacked Nietzsche the patient. He knew that he needed the music of Wagner as a kind of narcotic. But the very moment he came to realise that Wagner's music was only a powerful narcotic and therefore all the more dangerous to him because of his personal attachment to the great musician, Nietzsche broke all his friendly ties with Wagner-he broke them in order not to be broken by them. When, six years later, Wagner died, Nietzsche wrote these significant lines to his friend Peter Gast: " I am better now and even believe that Wagner's death was the most substantial relief that could have been given me just now. It was hard for six years to have to be the opponent of the man one had most reverenced on earth, and my constitution is not sufficiently coarse for such a position." I have emphasised Nietzsche's attitude towards Wagner because it is somewhat analogous to his attitude towards Christianity. Being an invalid, Nietzsche probably knew that This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 74 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. Christianity with its profound resignation was the only religion which could give him inner solace in his distress. But for this very reason he rejected it all the more as a religion of weakness and decadence. Even had he been a believer, his pride would not have allowed him to humiliate himself when humility and resignation were personally advantageous-as a cosy shelter, as a haven of peace. He would never " wag his tail" before God, precisely because he needed'him as the last and the only refuge from his own suffering. In his affliction he considered any whining, any philandering with philosophies or religions of comfort as unmanly and indecent. He preferred to increase his pain rather than shelter himself in a doctrine whose hidden inner motives he conceived as veiled fear of suffering and a craving for spiritual ease. On the other hand, Nietzsche derived from this very defiance a greater ecstasy than any passive religious resignation could ever give him. He revelled in his own recklessness and endurance simply because this was the best way of converting his suffering into an illusion of promethean power, or even into a fountain of defiant joy. Feeding thus on his own wounds, Nietzsche always found enough pretexts to increase the illusion of his " strength," of his daring and inner independence, through a kind of self-inquisition. So he revelled in war against himself. And this war was the most frequent source of his inspiration. Nietzsche's passionate fight against Christianity thus became in essence only a fight against himself. As is known, he was the son of a pious pastor, and in his childhood and youth he himself was unusually pious. Entering the University in Bonn, he matriculated first in theology (which, however, he soon re- linquished for classical philosophy). It is also remarkable that in his private life Nietzsche was extremely meek and considerate towards other people; he was in fact the very embodiment of Christian meekness and altruism. In this respect he forms a striking contrast to Tolstoy, who retained a great deal of half- suppressed egoism even in his Christian love. Another Christian feature of Nietzsche was his scrupulous morality even in his younger years, which also compares very favourably with the stormy youth of Tolstoy. Nietzsche is in fact an inverted Christian. He is much nearer to Pascal or to St. Paul than to an ancient Greek. All his temperament, more-his entire subliminal self-was profoundly religious, while his intellect strove all the time against religion and insisted only upon those biological values which could be accepted by his scrupulous This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE. 75 "intellectual conscience." Yet his religious temper smuggled irrational and metaphysical elements even into his " biological'" Weltanschauung-to mention only his theory of Dionysos, or his " Eternal Recurrence." Nietzsche's anti-religious outbursts were but inverted re- ligiosity. They were also a result of the painful conflict between his instincts and his convictions, between his spiritual conscience and his intellectual conscience. A proper understanding of this conflict will always provide the best clue to his self- contradictions, to the intense lyrical pathos of - his works, as well as to all those innumerable masks behind which he tried to conceal his real face. Thus it would be easy to prove that Nietzsche was all the time subconsciously drawn to Christ. In some of his passages (also in those of his Zarathustra) one can feel an almost touching love and admiration for Christ himself. Yet, the more his inherited instincts urged him to accept Christ and His religion, the stronger was the rebellion on the part of his conscious will. This rebellion he then justified by the lower, historical forms of Christianity, in which he found only veiled weakness, cowardice, mendacity, cant and disguised utilitarianism of a not very elevated kind. It was precisely the suppressed and uncompromising Christian in Nietzsche himself that made him turn against Christianity. As he says, " The fatal feature of Christianity lies in the necessary fact that its faith had become as morbid, base and vulgar as the needs to which it had to minister were morbid. base and vulgar." And yet he himself adds: " The Christianity of my forebears reaches its logical conclusion in me: a stern intellectual conscience, fostered and made by Christianity itself, turns against Christianity; in me Christianity raises itself and overcomes itself." V. Tolstoy's dilemma is analogous to that of Nietzsche. He is Nietzsche from the other end. So much so, that if Nietzsche's Paganism may be defined as suppressed Christianity, Tolstoy's Christianity is suppressed Paganism, i.e., Paganism which tries to strangle itself at any cost. Nietzsche was in many respects a potential Christian of the purest type; the young Tolstoy again was a potential Pagan in the best sense of this word. This has been so well shown already by Merezhkovsky that I need not indulge in any proofs or illustrations. Besides, first-hand proofs can always be found in Tolstoy's This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 76 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. works, at least in those which he wrote before his " conversion" (The Cossacks, War and Peace, even Anna Karenina, etc.). While Nietzsche was perhaps the most tragic modern deracine'-a man entirely " out of season " (unzeitgemdss)-Tolstoy seemed to be rooted in the soil and the primitive people of his country to such an extent that even his artistic vision and intuition were largely those of a primitive Pagan, or of a child, who is still half-immersed in the collective group-soul from which he derives vitality, inspiration, clairvoyance, and all the instinctive knowledge of things. Tolstoy's genius was strong and grand owing chiefly to a close organic (i.e., subconscious) touch with his race and soil, while his creative power weakened in proportion to his distance from them. An excess of Pagan vitality and instinctive joy in life, with all its wealth and beauty, was one pole of Tolstoy's artistic creation. Hence it is obvious that its other pole should be an equally excessive fear of that which threatens to destroy vitality, joy and beauty: the fear of Death. Death and decay are a direct negation of life, and therefore throw a haunting shadow upon all things passing. Beauty and joy of existence can be definitely accepted only on condition that life should not flow and drift away. But life does flow and drift away. Death is lurking everywhere. And it was this senseless fact of death that gradually undermined Tolstoy's vitality and made all existence so dreadful that he wanted to put an end to his own life, as we read in his poignant Confession. " What I had lived by no longer existed, and I had nothing to live by. My life came to a standstill. There was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I considered reasonable . . . The truth was that life was meaningless. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death-complete anni- hilation." And so, if the first half of Tolstoy's literary activities was a continuous revelling in living life in spite of death, a revelling which reached its highest pitch in War and Peace, the second half was a continuous endeavour to find a justification of that very life before death. This was the reason of his search after a meaning of life, or, better still, after a meaning of death. It was largely in this search that Tolstoy mobilised all the resources of his reason in order to construct a most rationalistic gospel of his own, into whose frame he now tried to squeeze not only his rich individuality, but also the whole of social and This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE. 77 political life of modem mankind. " Death, death, death awaits you every second," he exclaims in What I Believe. " Your life passes in the presence of death. If you labour personally for your own future, you yourself know that the one thing awaiting you is-death. And that death ruins all you work for. Consequently, life for oneself can have no meaning. If there is a reasonable life, it must be sought elsewhere; it must be a life, the aim of which does not lie in preparing further life for oneself." Tolstoy's rationalistic Christian teaching is nothing but a shelter from his own terrible bogey-death. His selflessness became a kind of selfish flight from his inner fear and torment. And as his own tremendous vitality could not find an adequate justification in the face of death, so it naturally turned against itself. Tolstoy's "reasonable " meaning of life eventually wanted to destroy life itself. And so, if the essence of Nietzsche's Paganism is utter defiance, the essence of Tolstoy's Christianity is utter resignation. To quote his own words, " Christianity does not give happiness, but safety; it lets you down to the bottom from which there is no place to fall." (Tolstoy's Diary of I896) And again " To him who lives a spiritual life entirely, life here becomes so uninteresting and burdensome that he can part with it easily." The diseased Nietzsche was only too well aware of the debilities of his body; therefore he did his best to assert (through his will and his philosophy) the " biological " man against his over- developed spirit. He summoned all the resources of his undaunted mind chiefly in order to supply through them a continuous stream of fresh vitality to his decaying physique. Tolstoy again, whose dilemma was largely due to an exuberant vitality of bodily instincts, turned against that very biological man whom Nietzsche exalted so highly. Nietzsche crucified his spirit on his flesh; Tolstoy crucified his flesh on his spirit. Yet neither of them was " saved." And the more they knew this, the more passionately they insisted on the fact that they were what they professed, or better, what they wished to be. The potential Pagan, Tolstoy, did everything to prove that he was a Christian, only a Christian; and the latent Christian, Nietzsche, shouted all the time against Christ- ianity, chiefly in order to convince himself and others that he was the fiercest anti-Christian ever born. It was mainly on these impulses that Tolstoy and Nietzsche formulated their doctrines. This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 78 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. VI. It is now generally accepted that Tolstoy is not so much a religious as a moral teacher. And as a moralist he represents a fine example of what Nietzsche labelled (rather disparagingly) as the Socratic mentality. He combines indeed a weak religious feeling with a very strong moral sense.' Nietzsche again shows his latent religious verve in every line, and most of all in those passages which are directed against religion. If the deism of Tolstoy often seems to be irreligious, the very atheism of Nietzsche is of a religious kind. But quite apart from this, there is another fundamental difference between both of them-the difference in the planes of consciousness. The evolution of human consciousness has to pass through three consecutive stages: (i) the pre-individual (or patriarchal) stage in which the individual self as such has not yet emerged from " nature," or the collective group-self. This kind of con- sciousness, which knows no disharmony, no inner struggles, is symbolised, in the legends of the lost paradise and of the golden age. (2) The individualised stage, which comes next, represents a complete disruption of the harmonious group-soul, in so far as every single person tries to assert his own self against other selves and against the whole. (3) When the ultimate limit of this disruption has been reached, single individuals either must perish in the war of all against all, or pass on to that plane of " supra-individual " consciousness where every single ego enlarges to such an extent as to include the whole of humanity (without dissolving in it). The second phase is the most terrible of all, for this is the phase of civilisation, of uprootedness, of division and self-division. It is here that many spirits get tired of this human Golgotha and begin to call us " back to nature "-that is, back to the happy childhood of humanity which is possible only on the first plane of consciousness. Rousseau was one of those who, instead of overcoming civilisation, wanted to suppress it by means of a return to a primitive " natural " humanity. Another powerful voice calling us back to it was the voice of his disciple-Tolstoy. Tolstoy's consciousness moves, in fact, all the time along the line where the first and the second planes meet. And all his instincts and his intuitive genius are so much rooted in the first plane (the plane of undifferentiated humanity) that he rejects 1 A strong moral consciousness without an adequate religious conscious- ness was also at the bottom of Ibsen's inner tragedy. Further elaboratiorn of this theme can be found in my book, Ibsen and his Creation (Collins). This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE. 79 a priori everything that goes against it, denying the very poss- ibility of division or disruption. Nietzsche, on the other hand, represents the very limit of the second stage. He is that ultimate point of individualisation where one's ego must " die " in order to rise again on a higher plane (Goethe's Stirb und Werde), or it is bound to destroy itself through its own monomania and madness. And so we can better understand why it is that Tolstoy values human personality only in so far as it sacrifices itself to the compactness of the whole, and why he proclaims any act of individual self-affirmation as the original sin and as the very spring of all evil on earth. Nietzsche discards God with almost hysterical vehemence-simply in order to procure to man that illimitable freedom of self-will which would make him the only- divinity in the universe: the freedom of the individual man- God. Tolstoy, again, talks all the time of God; only he conceives. him in such a way as to find in him, above all, the primeval antithesis to all individualisation whatsoever, a kind of Nirvana. Tolstoy's " voice of God " is in essence only the voice of the- pre-individual group-soul which he deifies; this he tries to raise to the rank of the eternal Categorical Imperative-the Imperative- of self-effacement and absolute levelling of men on, or near, the line of zero. Tolstoy is against all social differentiation because he sees in it only individual self-assertion and violence. He hates the State and the whole of culture precisely because they are based on social differentiation. He preaches even complete uniformity of- work, so that everybody should till the ground with his own hands. Making further conclusions, Tolstoy denounces also. education and habits of cleanliness as dangerous, since they too are elements of division among men. So he writes in What to Do: " To-day cleanliness consists in changing your shirt once a day, to-morrow in changing it twice a day. To-day the footman's. lhands must be clean; to-morrow he must wear gloves, and in his clean gloves he must present a letter on a clean salver. And there are no limits to this cleanliness, which is useless, and object-- less, except for the purpose of separating oneself from others, and of rendering impossible all intercourse with them, when this cleanliness is attained by the labour of others. Moreover, when I studied the subject, I became convinced that even what is commonly called education is the very same thing... Education consists of those forms and acquirements which are calculated to separate a man from his fellows, and its object is identicaL This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 8o THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. with that of cleanliness-to seclude us from the herd of the poor." Owing to the same subconscious urge, Tolstoy goes against all external authorities, all laws, all manifestations of civilisation whatever, and likewise against all manifestations of the human self as such. It is on this premise that he constructs his theory of non-resistance, which is the inevitable logical outcome of his fear of division. Every resistance on our part, even if this be the resistance of evil, is in essence an act of individual self- assertion. As this act is necessarily directed against other fellow- beings, it intensifies their own aggressiveness, increasing thereby violence and division among men. According to Tolstoy, one must love one's enemies to such an extent as to let them do whatever they like. Even if they wish to kill us, we must passively sacrifice ourselves to this conception of love without raising a finger in self-defence. For if our self as such has no right to exist, we have no right to defend this self. Tolstoy goes, in fact, so far as to forbid even resistance against raving drunkards or madmen. Thus, entirely forgetting that Christ Himself used violence when chasing the traders out of the temple, he writes, in a letter about Adin Ballou's rival theory of non-resistance: " I cannot agree with the concession he makes for employing violence against drunkards and insane people. The Master made no concessions, and we can make none. We must try to make impossible the existence of such people, but if they do exist we must use all possible means and sacrifice ourselves, but not employ violence. A true Christian will always prefer to be killed by a madman rather than deprive him of his liberty." (I889.) In his important work, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy conceives the whole historical evolution of humanity simply as a process of depersonalisation, whose final goal ought to be the compact pre-individual group-consciousness of the whole of mankind. This final stage of human evolution Tolstoy calls the Kingdom of God. But in general he confuses two entirely different stages-the pre-individual and the supra- individual stage of human development-in such a way that even when his reasoning seems to point to the latter, his instincts and tendencies remain exclusively on the plane of the first, i.e., the amorphic stage. In other words, even when Tolstoy's formulae about the Christian universal love and peace and good- will are absolutely right, the plane on which he uses them is not right. Hence the great difference between the Christianity of This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE. 8r Tolstoy and that of Solovyev, for instance. In many cases, both of them use identical formulke, and yet no one ironised Tolstoy's Christian teaching more than Solovyev (especially in his Three Conversations). He even proclaimed Tolstoy to be Anti-Christ and Tolstoy's God simply a clever impostor. Like- wise, he says that Tolstoy's Kingdom of God is " only an arbitrary and vain euphemism for the Kingdom of Death." VII. Being convinced that even in the greatest altruism there is a fair amount of veiled selfishness, Nietzsche was cynically frank about it. He maintained that the open or masked " will to power" is the only inner agent of our actions, and therefore denied those transcendental categories of good and evil which Tolstoy considered eternal-as given once for all time and obligatory for all men. While Tolstoy's gospel has in view a state-less community of meek and good men united in that pre- individual love which alone can give tranquillity and happiness on earth (as he says), the weakling Nietzsche expresses the need of powerful men who are strong enough to laugh at all " easy- yokes," men who can boldly look at life in its most horrible aspects and yet make it worth living. Instead of an escape from reality, Nietzsche requires a tragic courage to face it. Therefore he insists on the creative value of hardness towards oneself and towards others. A hard and dangerous life is one of his first demands. For our strength and endurance grow in proportion with those dangers which we are able to overcome. In Nietzsche's opinion, the evil side of existence is necessary for the very growth of life. It is also necessary for the sake of that higher goodness which comes not from weakness, but from one's overflowing power and abundance-that goodness and that bestowing virtue at which only those arrive who have first conquered the right to it. If Tolstoy's ethics are based on obligatory moral categories, the moral valuations of Nietzsche are above all those of taste. He is beyond good and evil only with regard to so-called eternal categories. But apart from this, he measures everything from the standpoint of what he calls noble and ignoble. And ignoble is for him all that comes from weakness and cowardice, as well as from the absence of a striving will to overcome the present man. To put it somewhat baldly, Nietzsche stands for the ultimate aristocratic-aesthetic, and Tolstoy for the ultimate F This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 82 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW. democratic-ethical ideal of human society. The contrast between the two may be partly elucidated also by the difference between the morality of honour and the morality of pity-the two moral codes which Europe has been mixing all the time without ever being able to reconcile them. Nietzsche and Tolstoy are the two extremes of this antagonism, and as such they are all the more interesting. One could mention many other aspects illustrating our thesis, but time urges me to conclude this hasty paper. However, before finishing, I should like to point out that both Tolstoy and Nietzsche have, in their moral theories, one substantial mistake in common they both confused, or even identified, selfness with selfishness. The result was that Nietzsche accepted selfishness in the name of selfness; Tolstoy, on the other hand, rejected selfness together with selfishness, because he did not care to distinguish it from the latter. At the same time, they both used analogous methods of coping with their own dilemmas: each of them tried to suppress one half of his person- ality for the benefit of the other half. But as suppression is not yet victory, they both remained in a state of warfare-that inner warfare by which the whole of European consciousness is and will remain lacerated, until it finds a synthetic outlet upon a higher plane. JANKO LAVRIN. University College, Nottingham. This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:07:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions