GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

638
ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
may be prescribed as a remedy, if, indeed, they really
want to go on living. National consumption, as well as
individual, admits of a brutal cure. The eternal will to
live and inability to die is ever in itself already a sign of
senility of emotion. The more fully and thoroughly we
live, the more ready we are to sacrifice life for a single
pleasurable emotion."
Nietzsche was not a consistent thinker, and although
on occasion he undoubtedly writes as if he thought that
war is a good, it is of spiritual and psychological conflict,
of tension, competition and the clash of rival self-assertivenesses,
rather than of war between nations that he
sings the praises. Certainly he was no friend to militarism,
and attacked the Germanic nationalism of his time just
as he attacked anti-Semitism. It is rather as a remedy
for degeneracy than as a good in itself that he recommends
war between nations. The contemporary German writer
Oswald Spengler has, however, so developed Nietzsche's
praise of psychological
conflict and of war as a cure for
degeneracy, that in his hands it has become a glorification
of war as a good in itself.
A similar attitude was common in England before the last
war. " War, " wrote Ruskin in the Crown of Wild Olives, "is
the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of
man"; and Henley and Garlyle had much to say in the
same strain. It is, however, in Germany that the advocates
ofwar on biological grounds have made the most numerous
converts. War, it is said, eliminates the weak, enhances
the strong, and places a premium upon those virtues which
have survival value. Thus immediately before the war of
1914-1918 a German general, Bernhardi, published a
bode, German? and the Next War, in which he shows how
"war is a biological necessity, an indispensable regulator
in the life of mankind, failing which would result a course
of evolution deleterious to the species and, too, utterly
to all culture' 9
. And because it is necessary,
antagonistic
it is also beautiful: "Though words are very beautiful
things," Mussolini has declared, "rifles, machine-guns,