CHAPTER VI
NIETZSCHE AND THE CATASTROPHE
i. Nietzsche
Into this situation of extremest historical contradiction and
under a cloud of the most menacing dangers there stepped, at
the very moment when these dangers were beginning to manifest
themselves, a personality of colossal dimensions whom we have
already met in youth—Nietzsche, now grown ripe and conscious
of his task, feeling himself called to be a spiritual destroyer, the
transvaluer of all values, a man who had at his command unique
powers of expression of high intellectual calibre and who could
tip the trembling scales to one side or the other decisively. In his
own estimation only partially a German and consciously standing
aloof from everything German, Nietzsche nevertheless was a
child of the German problem. He takes his stand on the crucial
border-line, one might say on the very suture, of history, the
crater of seething world-danger.
We have no intention of outlining the phenomenon of Nietzsche
as a whole, which is more massive and more cloven almost than
that of any other great man. Nor do we intend to penetrate to
the full the marvellous spiritual caverns of his philosophy,
sparkling and glancing with a thousand colours, or to isolate, as
some have tried to do, the ultimate individual core of this most
individual of philosophers and personalities, the most pregnant
with fate of aU Fate's vehicles of the spirit. The first is imprac-
ticable for us, and the second, quite apart from anything else, is
forbidden us by our respect for his mighty destiny which the
daemonism of his age cast into twilight. What we have to say
in elucidation of the salient features of his historical significance
which, like a storm, cleared the atmosphere with liberating and
exhilarating but, on the whole, devastating effect, is roughly
given below.
With him there burst upon the cultured classes who had,
95