Tolstoy and Nietzsche Comparison PDF

Tolstoy and Nietzsche
Author(s): Janko Lavrin

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
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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
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
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
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 . . .
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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).
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
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
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
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.

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Tolstoy and Nietzsche

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