Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

His article “Immorality as a Philosophic Principle” is reprinted here in facsimile from the July 1899 issue of The Monist. In it, Carus introduces the reader to Nietzsche’s ideas and this “aristocratic individualism”. “It is a consistent anarchism, a courageous immoralism, and a proud aristocratism, the ruthless shout of triumph of the victor who hails the doctrine of the survival of the strongest and craftiest as a ‘joyful science.'”

Available from Underworld Amusements

In a section titled “Nietzsche’s Disciples”, Carus covers some of the work of egoists of the time, including the journal The Eagle and The Serpent in England and Der Eigene in Germany. Strangely enough, he refers to Max Stirner as being an “expounder of Niteche’s philosophy even though he predated him by decades. Further, Ragnar Redbeard and his book Might is Right are touched upon, as well as Clarence L. Swartz and Elbert Hubbard. Readers of Der Geist and the Stand Alone series will be well familiar with all the names mentioned in this section.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

DER GEIST issue five features the first publication of original research, and archival materials thought lost. Steven T. Byington (first English translation of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner); Thomas Common (first English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche); Georgia Replogle (first English-language journal on egoism); Malfew Seklew (the Laughing Philosopher); Arthur Desmond (author of a notorious book); Dora Marsden, S. E. Parker and more.

DER GEIST (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
ISSUE 5
Spring 2022
Paperback, 206 pages, fifteen dollars
ISBN 978-1944651244
ISSN 2639-5339

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor

1. Steven T. Byington

A Proofreader Looks Back | The Human Cutworm | Photo of Steven T. Byington | Biographical Note | Selected Bibliography

2. Thomas Common

Review of Survival of the Fittest | The Silent Isle: Finding the Gravesite of Thomas Common | A Memorial | Selected Bibliography

3. Ragnar Redbeard

Bertha McNamara’s Reflections on Arthur Desmond | Illustration from The Worker | John Ploughman and His Letter | The Brutalitarian: A Journal for the Sane and the Strong | Lion’s Paw Banned | Confessions of an Anarchist

4. Max Stirner / The Ego And His Own

Donald Rooum’s “Eigenheit” | An Early Literary Portrait of Max Stirner

5. Dora Marsden

Brainy Beauties | Private Places | Lover of Freedom

6. Malfew Seklew

Dan O’Brien, Social Supercrat | Victor Grayson, M.P.: A Rhapsody on a Reality | Spencella Wilkesbarre’s What Women Ought to Know | Stanley Simpoleon Says Seklew Stand-In | William Henry Powell and Malfew Seklew | Poetic Beer Drinker | A Remarkable Character | Two from Day Book

7. Free Spirits

Photo of Georgia Replogle | Photo of S. E. Parker | Letter from Denise Juin | Interview with S. E. Parker | Sophie Leppel’s “Pig Eaters Challenge” | Herbert Roseman on Laurance Labadie | Leedz Anarkyst: Greevz Fisher (1845-1931) | Holbrook Jackson on Nietzsche | Index of Der Geist | From the Library | Index to The Lumberjack / Voice of the People | A Thank-You to Patrons | Select Titles Available | About the Editors

REDBEARD’S ROUGH STUFF.

To the Editor of The Truth Seeker:

The Crucible, Seattle, Wash., advertised a book, “Might Is Right,” by Ragnar Redbeard, and seemed to approve of the fiendishness of Nietzsche and the frightful crimes which the Huns recently practiced as ordinary daily activities. Now The Crucible says the article (offering the book for sale) “was a clever bit of satire.”

I would strike out the word “clever.” The article was a clear recommendation of the book, and the advertisement still appears. Perhaps some kind of joke money is accepted for the book.

The love of horrors can be left with the followers of Moses, Samuel, Joshua and David. After exterminating whole peoples, the Lord told them: Thou hast done well. Unorthodox conquerors show clemency. Liberal papers must not disgrace themselves by beastly ethics, especially since murder, rape and robbery, as natural virtues, have been tried and found wanting ; have been crushed as menaces to civilization; and by their own principles are not Right lacking Might.

“Might Is Right” just as the preacher goes to the circus, to learn the evil of it. Redbeard is simply an ignorant cave-man who is sure the evolutionary process stopped with himself. Because beasts fight, the horrors of human fighting will always be beautiful; and kindness, benevolence, equality, which have somehow evolved, are vices of weakness. Read in the preface:

“The natural law is tooth and claw. All else is error, It rules all things; it decides all things. The victor gets the gold and land every time. He also gets the fairest maidens. And why should it be otherwise? Why should the delights of life go to failures?”

Thus maidens are mere “delights,” not humans with rights. Page 98: “Women are frail beings . . . they must be held in subjection. Man has captured them. Woe unto the race if ever these lovable creatures become rulers or equals of men.”

Ragnar’s ignorance is proved by his love of big words, used at random. Page 79: “Allegorically speaking, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, the food we eat, the books we read, have been carved (by force) out of men’s bones and fesh. Literally, they are the hides, sinews, flesh, pulp, and outer wool covering of captive animals, transmuted by human slavery into garments, lumber, implements, thoughts, shoes, dinners. And behold it is good. … This world is a gruesome butcher shop, where slain men hang in rows. Man is the fighting, roving, pillaging, lusting, cannibalistic animal. The King of the Great Carnivore.”

Page 99: “Daughters . . . are given to men who have proved their inherent manhood in carnivorous (flesh-eating) combat.”

He probably means “sanguinary” or “bloody”; but what can we expect of a cave-man? The social lesson is that fair daughters must be given into slavery to a superman who has killed and eaten at least one man.

Ignorance of medical facts appears on page 78: “The transfusion of blood of animals in human veins . . . is regularly practiced by medical men.” The Encyclopedia Britannica says of transfusion (vol. 27, page 939): “Only the blood of man must be used.”

Well, lumber is not made from animals; nor is humanity compelled to get its ideals from carnivorous animals. The mildest and most useful animals could not be induced to eat an organic creature, nor rend one unless in self-defense. If we must learn of animals, take for teacher the patient cow or playful horse. Combat has been found to exterminate, rather than preserve, the fittest.

C. F. HUNT.

WILL NIETZSCHE COME INTO VOGUE IN AMERICA?

Thomas Common

*The Works of Friedrich Niezsche. Edited by Oscar Levy. The Macmillan Company.
* Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism. By A. Orage. Chicago: The A. C. McClurg Company.
* The Gist of Nietzsche. Arranged by H. L. Mencken. Boston: John W. Luce & Company.
* Men Versus the Man. A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H. L. Mencken, lndividualist. Henry Holt & Company.

The neurotic but strangely fascinating “philosopher with the hammer,” Friedrich Nietzsche, has begun to invade this country. “Nietzsche is in the air,” Dr. Joseph Jacobs remarks in the New York Times Saturday Review. Six volumes of a projected complete translation of his works are now in currency here. A handbook on Nietzsche, written by an Englishman, has been re-published in Chicago. A collection of epigrams, entitled “The Gist of Nietzsche,” is offered by Henry L. Mencken, of Baltimore, author of “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche” and champion of that same philosophy in a newly issued written debate with a Socialist. Mr. Mencken, who undoubtedly has done more than any other writer in this country to spread Nietzsche’s gospel, calls attention to the fact that “Nietzsche has been breaking into print of late with conspicuous assiduity”:

“The theological reviews denounce him in every issue as a natural son of Judas Iscariot and Lucretia Borgia. The yellow journals connect him with ‘waves of crime’ and ‘the decay of the churches’—spelling his name Nietsche, Neitzche, Nitshe, Neatzsche, Nitysche, Nittsche, Neitzshy, Nitschie, Nietzschy and Niscksy, according to their degrees of ignorance. In the uplift magazines he is becoming as prominent as Dr. Woods Hutchinson and Judge Ben B. Lindsay. In the New York Nation—last stronghold of the Harvardocentric theory of the universe—his name is mentioned in the same paragraph with those of immortal Rollos and Waldos. Only The Ladies’ Home Journal and The War Cry have yet to find him out.”

The slow but persistent growth of Nietzsche’s fame is one of the intellectual romances of our time. When he died, bereft of reason, ten years ago, no one could have predicted the extent of the influence he was to exert. Nothing less than a library of comment, interpretation and criticism has grown up around his name. Some of his phrases have become household words. His books, which were printed at his own expense and hardly taken seriously during his lifetime, have since been pronounced masterpieces and translated into many tongues. A German critic, Robert Mayer, speaks of Nietzsche’s rhapsodic poem, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” as the greatest production of German literature since Goethe’s “Faust.” Bernard Shaw goes even further in calling the same poem “the first modern book that can be set above the Psalms of David at every point on their own ground.”

Two American estimates of Nietzsche of more than usual penetration appear in recent issues of The Independent and The Smart Set. The first, by Edwin E. Slosson, excels as a piece of criticism, while the second, by Mr. Mencken, is strong on the positive and affirmative side. While differing widely in their estimates of Nietzsche, these writers both agree in conceding his compelling power.

Dr. Slosson takes as his point of departure a saying of Nietzsche’s to the effect that “every great philosophy is the confession of its originator and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” If this aphorism of Nietzsche’s be applied to himself, Dr. Slosson declares, the result is curious, for “never was there a greater contrast between the life and the creed of any man, moralist or immoralist, than existed in his case.” The argument continues:

“The eulogist of the strenuous life, he spent his in teaching classical philosophy and in philosophizing. War he regarded as the mother of virtues and pity the greatest of crimes, yet his part in the Franco-Prussian war was that of hospital nurse. His ideal was the great blond beast, ruthless, self-asserting, lustful, healthy, independent and dominant. He himself was frail, near-sighted, dyspeptic, neurasthenic, enslaved to drugs, celibate, timorous and retiring. He condemned and denounced women as inferior beings, to be kept as slaves and toys, yet it was to a woman, his sister, Frau Forster-Nietzsche, that he owed not only his life, during the last eleven years, when he was as helpless and witless as a babe, but also the establishment of his reputation after his death, through the collection, publication and elucidation of his manuscripts.”

If, then, Nietzsche’s philosophy was in any sense his autobiography, it was the autobiography. Dr. Slosson suggests, not of his actual but of his dream life. “All he could never be, all men ignored in him, that he was worth to himself.” The qualities he lacked appeared to him the greatest of all virtues, and the things he couldn’t do seemed to him of all things the ones most worth doing. “We all,” Dr. Slosson thinks, “have moods like this, a form of the natural attraction of opposites, of our awe of the incomprehensible and our admiration for the unattainable.” Moreover:

“Nietzsche was Hegelian in temperament. Every idea suggested to him its opposite and he was equally attracted by it. He reminds one of the pith ball of the laboratory, that is first drawn to an electrified body and clings to it for an instant, then is seized with repulsion and evermore flies from it. So Nietzsche is enamored in turn of Schopenhauer and of Wagner until he becomes charged with their spirit, and then conceives for them an intense aversion and antagonism. He treats even his own ideas in the same way, flying the next moment to the opposite pole of thought, becoming the iconoclast of his own idols. He was like most of us in seeing only one side of a thing. He was unlike most of us in seeing the other side of it soon after with equal intensity and exclusiveness. He never sees both at the same time in their real proportions and relationship. Had he kept to one point of view he would have exerted more influence over the world, but the fascination of his style lies in his vibrant thought. An Audrey Beardsley sketch, with its impossible masses of black and white, is more striking and sometimes brings out an idea better than a half tone.”

As Dr. Slosson sees him, Nietzsche was the incarnation of the spirit that denies. The very fact that a thing was established or accepted was enough to incite him to attack it. Finding woman honored, he depreciated her. Finding the spirit of democracy everywhere, he denounced it as a delusion and a snare. In a civilization saturated with the Christian feeling, he preached the gospel of the AntiChrist. While the trend of social development ran overwhelmingly in the direction of a subordination of the individual to organizations that increase his efficiency, he advocated an individualism bordering on Anarchism. He objected even to the communism of opinion: “My opinion is my opinion; another person has not easily a right to it. One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.” Altogether he was, in Dr. Slosson’s judgment, about as negative and iconoclastic a figure as could be conceived.

But Mr. Mencken, presenting Nietzsche sympathetically, sees him from a very different angle. The great value of Nietzsche, Mr. Mencken would have us believe, lay just in the fact that he reacted from Christian doctrine and emphasized the values that Christianity blurs or ignores. He went back to paganism to recover the values that Christianity had lost. To quote verbatim:

“Nietzsche’s whole philosophy grew out of his early inquiries, as a student of Greek, into the spirit of Hellenism. It needed no long investigation to show that this spirit of Hellenism was almost diametrically opposed to the spirit of Christianity. The Greeks, indeed, esteemed as virtues nearly all of the things banned by Christianity as vices and sins. Their notion of an admirable man was one who exhibited strength, ingenuity and what might be called assertive autonomy. A man who, on being smitten by a foe, turned the other cheek, would have excited their contempt. A man who, in the face of danger, threw down his arms and began to pray to the gods, would have made them laugh. They believed that life was a pleasant thing, and that it was worth while to fight for it. They believed in efficiency and egotism; they liked to do things—to rear great temples, to dance, to give gigantic shows, to make war, to amass wealth, to conquer.”

To Nietzsche the Greek spirit was beautiful, the Judaistic spirit repulsive. The first was an assertion of the will-to-live, the second an attempt to escape from facing real life by preaching self-sacrifice, humility, altruism, and similar sentiments. These principles, he contended, were the logical outcome of the oppression and suffering endured by the Jewish race; they may have served an admirable purpose in their time and place, but when they were taken over by the nations of western Europe, they became a positive hindrance to all that is best in humanity. Mr. Mencken tells us:

“Nietzsche believed that if the dominant races of the present day could be rid of the outworn and unworkable moral code of the Jews, they would make far more rapid progress than the world has ever seen. Out of this idea grew his celebrated conceptions—the higher man and the superman. The higher man is merely an efficient and ruthless man who has rid himself of all pious cant and hypocrisy. He is not a predatory bully, as many critics of Nietzsche seem to think, but an intelligent progressivist, with an eye not so much to his own immediate advantage as to the ultimate profit of the race. He wars upon the unfit chiefly because he doesn’t want them to contaminate the racial strain. He sees nothing honorable nor noble in poverty and humility, but only a confession of unfitness to survive. Let the weak die, he says, that the strong may not have them to drag along. Let the highest honors of the world go to those men who make the most successful war upon the forces and conditions which work against the race—disease, climate, distance, time, terrestrial catastrophes, religions, superstitions, handicapping customs and laws. Not only to the warrior the honor, nor only to the emperor and millionaire, but also to the explorer, the pathologist, the revolutionary, the iconoclast, the immoralist.”

Such, in crude outline, are the principal ideas of Nietzsche’s philosophy as Mr. Mencken presents it. Is it, he asks, insane, as many would have us believe? He answers:

“I am constrained to think not. In places it may tax the imagination, but in other places it makes an irresistible appeal to every reflective man. Twenty years ago Nietzsche was merely an interesting freak, but to-day you will find his notions elaborated in the writings of men whose sanity and title to leadership are unquestioned. Mr. Roosevelt borrowed copiously from Nietzsche for his essay on ‘The Strenuous Life’ —the most astonishing and most sincere of all his compositions. From Nietzsche Dr. Metchnikoff got his idea of a welcome death, and from Nietzsche Dr. Eliot got two-thirds of the propositions in his New Religion. Take away his Nietzschean flavor, and Shaw would be a mere harlequin. Rid the world of Nietzsche, and the year of grace 1909 could show no living philosophy.”

The question arises, How far is the Nietzschean point of view likely to appeal to America? and the answers already given are manifold. Robert Rives La Monte, the Socialist opponent of Mr. Mencken in the debate already mentioned, finds in Walt Whitman all the healthiest elements in Nietzsche. His attitude suggests that Thus Spake Zarathustra will never supplant Leaves of Grass. Elbert Hubbard, on the other hand, looks to Emerson as a substitute for Nietzsche, and establishes (in The Philistine) this rather ingenious antithesis between Emerson and Nietzsche:

“‘Behold! I teach you the Overman,’ might have been enunciated by Emerson. The Overman of Nietzsche aimed at a beyond-man. The Overman of Emerson is to be evolved in man. Nietzsche sought to manufacture a God; Emerson sought to fabricate a man. Nietzsche conceived power as something that primarily flowed out of man; Emerson conceived it as something flowing into man from the Oversoul—the shoreless sunken seas of the potential.”

A Socialist writer in Wilshire’s Magazine argues that if the “ruling classes” know their own business and want to stem the rising tide of Socialism, they will vigorously encourage the spread of Nietzsche’s ideas. He is led to this view after reading Mr. Mencken’s contribution to the Socialist-Individualist debate. It is not that he is won over by Mr. Mencken’s statements, but they form, he thinks, the most logical argument against Socialism he has ever seen in print. He says further:

“However, they possess one fatal drawback in the fact that the bourgeois dare not publicly use them against Socialism. Even if their truth were admitted, their general and public announcement by the ruling class would be the signal for the almost instant destruction of the present order of things. The Nietzschean philosophy and the logical deductions therefrom cannot be proclaimed from the capitalist housetops. They constitute a true individualist philosophy which must remain the secret possession of the individual—a philosophy which is not for ‘Men,’ but for ‘the Man.’ The philosophical legacy left by Friedrich Nietzsche to the ruling classes of the world is a sword which, if they dare to draw publicly in their own defence, will turn upon and slay them.

“Mr. Mencken has but pushed to their logical conclusion views which in embryo are held by many bourgeois opponents of Socialism, but which, lacking his courage, they dare not develop, and are consequently forced to occupy a shifty, evasive and apologetic position, which rightly draws upon them the contempt and ridicule of the Socialist.”

Dr. Joseph Jacobs, editor of The American Hebrew, seems to feel that Nietzsche’s philosophy has a great future in America. Nietzsche, he points out, is aristocratic to the core, America democratic to the depths. Nietzsche is essentially Hellenic, esthetic, America is Hebraic, ascetic. Nietzsche’s ideal is the solitude of the thinker, America’s the solidarity of the people. “In the midst of the dissatisfaction with Americanism, which is characteristic of the age,” Dr. Jacobs remarks, “it is refreshing, and, in many ways, instructive to consider a set of ideals so opposed and subversive of the American ones. Nietzsche is essentially one sided, but the side he presents happens to be the one hitherto unrepresented by American thinkers, and it therefore will have, in all probability, the greater attractiveness and influence on this continent.” Dr. Jacobs writes further (in The Times Saturday Review):

“Against slave morality he opposes a master morality based upon the higher selfishness of the masterful men with the will to power. Napoleon, it may be remembered, made a similar distinction between ‘la grande morale’ and ‘la petite morale,’ and men of the type of Napoleon, Caesar, and Borgia, were the types that Nietzsche desired to see rule and destroy much of the rotting conventions of the hour. It is a mistake to think that they were his type of Supermen. They were only the anti-Christs to prepare the way.

“There is a rude, rough vigor in all this which is immensely attractive amid all the overturning of the ideals—Nietzsche calls them idols—of today. His virile thought ranges over the whole field of modern culture, except the economic division, on which he does not judge. His works are as stimulating as a storm by the seaside; the salt spray lashes but invigorates you. The supreme self-confidence with which he gives utterance to his paradoxes and cynicisms has specially an attraction for little minds, who flatter themselves they are little Nietzsches.”

The New York Evening Post is unwilling to give Nietzsche much importance. It finds in the Anglo-Saxon mind a sanity which “feels instinctively that this boasted philosophy of strength is in reality a product of febrile weakness.” In similar spirit Dr. Slosson affirms:

“It is not likely that he will ever be much read in the United States. Nor is there any reason why he should be. Nietzsche in Germany represents the reaction from Schopenhauer. Never having had the disease in this country we do not need the antidote. It is inevitable that we, like the rest of the world, should be influenced more or less by some phases of Nietzschean thought, but it will not be directly.”

October 2, 1914
London
Dear Mr Schumm:

I have heard from the Hetzels (as indeed you have written me yourself) that you think me mistaken regarding Nietzsche’s responsibility for the war. I enclose a letter from Wm. Archer to Gerhardt Hauptmann, showing that not only archer, but Hauptmann himself, takes my view.

How do you account for the writings of Treitschke, Bernhardi, H. S. Chamberlain, and others? Are not these evidently an outgrowth of the reading of Nietzsche? And have these not dictated the military policy of Germany? It is no answer to argue that Nietzsche meant this, or that, or the other. The apologists for E.G. use the same argument when confronted with the acts of her disciples. In both cases there may be some slight misunderstanding of the teacher, but I think that both may fairly be held responsible. Certainly, if Hauptmann is misled, the Kaiser may well be. And I think that Archer’s quotation from Nietzsche illustrates with sufficient exactness the German treatment of Belgium.

Yours sincerely,
Benj R. Tucker

(Excerpt from a letter of 10/11/14)

I enclose some clippings. That signed W. Bulloch expresses my view of the actual results of Nietzsche’s influence, while not failing to do justice to Nietzsche by showing that these results have not taken the exact form that he looked for or would have approved.

In reading these clippings, of course, you will entertain no suspicion that I share the tendency of the writers to champion Christian influences. I am the same egoist as always. The egoism of Germany does not disturb me; given the Germans’ domineering instincts, I am glad that they have no scruples about satisfying them; and my answer to their brutality would be to slay them as speedily as possible and put them forever out of the way, in order that egoists of another type, who love peace and liberty, may enjoy their preferences undisturbed.

November 25, 1927

Dear Mr. Schumm:

I wrote you of the proposition of the National Institute for the Blind regarding ‘The Ego and His Own’. It turns out to be a bit less encouraging than the first letters to Fifield indicated. Not bad, though, after all. What it amounts to is this; a copy is to be cut in raised type, by hand, by a volunteer, for Helen Keller, and a duplicate is to be put in the general library of raised type for the blind. I suppose, then, that Helen Keller is interested, or, if not, that some enthusiastic person hopes to interest her.

One sees now in Russia the perfect realization of “peace at any price,” a land that knows not hate, the flowering of the gospel of universal love, Tolstoyism gone to seed. What a spectacle does that unhappy country present today! Simple, stupid, sodden; reeking, rotting, rampant; a deliquescent nest of life that crawls and creeps, she melts, she sprawls, she slops, she stinks! A gigantic Camembert, in the last disgusting stage.

Yours sincerely,
Benj R. Tucker

c/o Munroe & Co.
4 rue Ventadour
Paris, France

Der Geist issue 4 is now available! That creates a total of 724 pages of egoism from 1845 to 1945, with “lost” works reprinted, new translations every issue, rare photos and images, and new research and writing.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

In this issue, a previously undiscovered speech by Ragnar Redbeard; original translations of Max Stirner and Malfew Seklew; rare reproductions from Dora Marsden and Friedrich Nietzsche; individualists and eccentrics versus the KKK; and more.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
ISSUE 4
Spring 2021
Paperback, 172 pages, fifteen dollars
ISBN 978-1944651-21-3
ISSN 2639-5339

THE COMPLETE NIETZSCHE.¹⁾“The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche.” (First complete and Authorised Translation in 18 volumes). Edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. (T. N. Foulis.

One cannot contemplate the completion of the English translation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche without feelings of gratitude towards the practical enthusiasm of Dr. Oscar Levy who has guided so remarkable an enterprise to success. At the outset, the production of a complete set of Nietzsche’s works in English was not without commercial hazard, but the results must indeed be gratifying to all concerned for (and it will come as a surprise to many people) no less than seven of the eighteen volumes comprising the edition are in a second, and three are in a third edition. That would indicate the existence of a public seriously interested in Friedrich Nietzsche, for it may be surmised with some certainty that the light interest aroused by journalistic exploitation of the challenge of his thought, and the tragedy of his life, has long since been surfeited, and those who skim over the surface of philosophic fashions are engaged elsewhere. There are, as a matter of fact, a great many people who feel, rightly or wrongly, that Nietzsche has a message for them; and their number is still respectable after it has been written down by the subtraction of those (and they are still many) who misuse or misunderstand him, drawn as they have been to his work by his apparent, but apparent only to the dull-witted, advocacy of moral license, and his childish and often irritating insistence on a desire to write only for the elect. To say you write for the elect is the surest way of attracting the mediocre. But, whatever, the status of Nietzsche’s public there is little doubt that his thought and ideas are at length receiving something like acceptance in this country, or rather, we are at length in the heyday of surprise at the daring of the great German psychologist, although long after he has ceased to startle our continental neighbors. But up to the present, his direct influence has been small, what real influence he has had on English writers has been indirect, coming through French, German, and Italian authors who have written under his spell. It may be indeed that Nietzsche will not affect us as he has affected others, for we have become inured to the flaming aphorism of revolt in this country by the genius of Mr. Bernard Shaw, a thinker bearing many superficial resemblances to Nietzsche, though fundamentally opposed to him. So similar at times have these two thinkers been that shallow critics have hinted rather broadly as to Mr. Shaw’s continental inspirers. The author of “Man and Superman” is strong enough to be his own first line of defense, but it is interesting to note, in the light of past criticisms of his originality, that the publication of Nietzsche’s autobiography, “Ecce Homo,” actually lays the German open to the charge of having plagiarised the Irishman! In this autobiography, which is, by the way, one of the most remarkable and inspiring books ever written, Nietzsche repeatedly uses the egotistical gags which have been the stock properties of Bernard Shaw’s drum and trumpeting for something like a quarter of a century. Before G.B.S. an autobiography like “Ecce Homo,” with such chapter headings as “Why I am so wise,” “Why I am so clever,” and “Why I write such excellent books,” might have evoked an admonitory leader in The Times, and scare headlines in the Daily Mail; but familiarity with that method of self-expression has, as usual, produced indifference.

This is not the place or the time to interpret the Nietzschean idea, even if one could grant that place or time were ever proper to such an endeavor, which is doubtful. No interpretation of Nietzsche can have anything but a purely subjective value. Nietzsche has ever been his own best interpreter, but he becomes doubly so by the publication of “Ecce Homo,” which, with a stroke of the pen as it were, robs all his friendly commentators of their validity. All that need be said in a general way about Nietzsche, either in elucidation, in extenuation, or even in praise, is said in this wonderful book, and it is said on the authority of the only final authority, Friedrich Nietzsche himself, that is why Dr. Oscar Levy might have stayed the energy of his translators at the translation, and added himself the few necessary bibliographical and biographical details which are really all the preface each volume requires; not that the existing prefaces are incapable, they are unnecessary. Beyond a natural feeling against being talked to by what might be called conscientious Nietzscheans, before beginning one of the Master’s books, I have none but feelings of gratitude for this splendid monument to the genius of the deepest and the highest thinker of our time. The volumes themselves are convenient and quietly dignified both as to type and binding.

The completion of the English translation of his works gives us in this country the first chance of drawing for ourselves a full-length portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, and we are helped very considerably in this task by “Ecce Homo,” which is at least a three-quarter portrait of the artist by himself. In this book he not only reveals his own ideas one by one in a sort of organic relationship with each other, but he reveals himself also in relation to them, and here they do not always square well together; particularly in the philosopher’s aspiration to be a satyr rather than a saint, for Nietzsche was by constitution the latter. He admits to never having had a desire, and from what we know of his life we can believe him: perhaps even Nietzsche was sentimentalizing when he patronized the satyr. His love of health also is unrelated to his condition, or rather related contrariwise, for, of course, it is not the first time an invalid has written vehemently of health. Such inconsistencies are forced upon readers of Nietzsche, not because they affect his philosophy, but because in so intensely personal a thinker they affect your view of him. The fact that his sanity gave way just after he had written “Ecce Homo,” in 1889, has been used by many writers as an argument against his ideas, but the relationship, in this case, is very remote. Nietzsche was undoubtedly sane when he wrote his books, he wrote nothing after his mind gave way. It is conceivable that even the strongest of minds might break beneath such pressure as Nietzsche could bring to bear upon himself, for he was no formal thinker; he did not codify and co-ordinate the already thought-out, he constant1y, made tracks into the unknown, and it is inconceivable that his ideas should be finally condemned and repudiated because of that. It may be unusual to say instinct is superior to reason; it may be illogical to stigmatize morality as decadent; it may have been wrong of him to prefer Dionysus to Christ or satyr to saint; his objection to ideals may have been inconvenient; his deep sense of the formative value of tragedy may have been unpleasant, and his dream of superman, absurd. But neither the charges of being unusual, illogical, wrong, inconvenient, unpleasant, or even absurd, are sufficient, severally or collectively, to convict a man of insanity–or there are very few of us sane. One idea, and one only, in the whole of Nietzsche’s works touches the borderland, that is his conception of “eternal recurrence,” but that idea, upon which one might brood oneself into Bedlam, is by no means peculiar to him, it exists in all its appalling emptiness in several writers and in many forms. Friedrich Nietzsche is really much saner than most men, or perhaps than any man–he is as sane as the animals. It is his extreme naturalism, in an age conventional and artificial in idea and habit, that arouses doubts as to his sanity. Nietzsche is the naturalist of psychology–a sufficiently new thing to attract and repel. Like life, he is paradoxical, a yea-saying and a destruction. To accept life as a battle and take the consequences without revenge or resentment–and what does not destroy you creates you–that is the essence of Nietzsche. And after breathing the rare air of his thoughts one feels that the unwritten lave is no longer unwritten, the contentiousness of life no longer a contention. He calls one of his books, “a book for all and none,”–Nietzsche may be described as a philosopher for all and none.

HOLBROOK JACKSON.

*