ABSTRACT
In Nietzsche's view, the dominant fact of the nineteenth century was "the death of God." No longer able to summon faith in the Christian pieties, the most sensitive and imaginative men of the nineteenth century nevertheless inherited the intense spiritual feelings and yearnings of the Christian tradition. Nietzsche passes beyond the philosophy of The Birth of Tragedy, but he never really abandons his "aestheticism." The superman is intelligible and convincing only as a supreme artist. The will to power as a positive doctrine is productive primarily in the realm of art. Rilke's idiom is Nietzschean, particularly in the phrase "man will degenerate and gradually die out." It is difficult to know how literally one is to take this vision. The tragedy of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Lawrence lies in the contrast between so much isolated intensity and the "abyss" of normal life. Contemporary literary attitudes toward democracy have been seriously affected by aristocratic views of writers like De Tocqueville and Nietzsche.
