Lun Xun And Friedrich Nietzsche
When Zhou Shuren, alias Lu Xun, delivered his manuscript ‘Diary of a Madman’ to the New Youth magazine in 1918 he explained it later as ‘an attempt to reform his people’s nature’. To understand Lu Xun’s powerful metaphor of ‘Cannibalism’ and his famous slogan ‘Save the children’ we have to analyze the Diary’s social and historical background and discuss its philosophical qualities with respect to Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘Last Man’.
The historical circumstances in the early 19th century are well documented in many studies on Lu Xun (LuXue). It is desirable, nonetheless, to briefly recall the major events after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911.
The young Republic of China was declared in 1912, yet the Nationals looked upon a country that lacked crucial social reforms, economic development, and political unity. The humiliating defeat of China by Japan in 1895 and the vengeance of the Great Powers after the Boxer rising (1900) all let to revolution far too moderate in terms of political will.
Not more could be expected, though: The ever-increasing aggressive policy of Imperial Japan to uphold civil war in China and a multitude of humiliations and disabilities inflicted by the Europeans had weakened China’s military and naval forces and had forced upon the Chinese the stance of accumulated cultural inferiority and incompetence.
China’s relatively late entry into the Great War in 1917 and her failure to recover Shandong was another characteristic manifestation of her political and diplomatic inability and frail psychological state of mind.
The traditional civilization of China, so it was believed by its contemporaries, had stagnated, became non-progressive, and – most importantly – had ceased to produce anything of value in the way of art, literature or science.
Revolutionaries and intellectual circles alike called for social reforms: If the Chinese chose, they could be the most powerful nation in the world, if only it acquired Western thought and technology. Naturally, in Lu Xun’s time, many young Chinamen under thirty years of age had come in contact with Western ideas, often assimilating them without great struggle or spiritual conflicts.
Lu Xun himself came across Western knowledge during his stay in Japan, and he is well reported studying and translating not only Japanese but German (and a bit English) too during those years. Eventually, he studied the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Although the Diary had been a product of a multitude of influences Lu Xun acquainted during his studies of foreign literature, it is generally accepted that Lu Xun’s work cannot be read without reading Nietzsche, in particular Nietzsche’s ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’. Lu Xun mentioned it several times and translated it partly in 1918.
Nietzsche notoriously argued that there were two types of morality, a master morality of the so-called ‘Overman’ (or Superman) and a slave morality of the weak and the feeble, the latter one being coined as the concept of the ‘Last Human’.
This is what Nietzsche thought of would be the Chinese morality:
“There is a Chinese saying that all mothers teach their children: Xiao Xin ‘make your heart small!’ That really is the basic tendency of all later civilizations: I do not doubt, the ancient Greeks would spot today’s European self-inflicted reduction in size at first sight, – this alone would be sufficient to disgust them.”
Nietzsche was concerned about the decadent state of European culture, yet his analysis could be applied to other societies as well. We read in astonishment how closely written two paragraphs (first) in ‘Diary of a Madman’ and (second) Nietzsche’s Zarathustra are:
“By seeking to improve themselves, they became men, true men. Yet there were some who still practiced cannibalism, – like worms, some of whom became fish, birds, primates, and finally men. Some have not progressed, and to this day are still worms. These cannibals, compared with true men, what a laughingstock they are. I fear they are far more of a laughingstock and embarrassment than worms are to primates.” –Lu Xun
“What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.” –Nietzsche
Both authors use heavy prose style in form of a Darwinian parable about the nature of evolution – and its shortcomings, although both come with a slightly different degree of ambition. For Nietzsche, his ‘Overman’ is its own cause that succeeds ape and finally becomes man. Lu Xun is less grandeur: his ‘man’ or ‘true man’ is not a superhuman, but the result of a striving ‘Underman’ or ‘Cannibal’. Nietzsche wanted to overcome human nature, Lu Xun saw human nature as something that was coming. Better, it was in the making.
In Lu Xun’s fiction he would rarely call his people good-natured. In ‘Diary of a Madman’ he accused them of eating people. The Madman, after having been confused for thirty years, finally saw the truth: “All things must be studied, before you can get them straight. People often ate people in the past.”. The diary tells of the protagonist’s growing obsession with cannibalism and his conviction that sooner or later he will be eaten. He opened a history book to look it up, only to find that “this history had no periods” but written on every page: “the words renyi daode (benevolence, righteousness and morality)”.
This discovery is a parody of traditional Confucian scholarship. In one sense, the madman is a social critic whose madness symbolizes the spark of enlightenment necessary to uncover the cannibalistic feudal society of pre-revolution China.
The madman is not a true man but a prophet who sees the arrival of the true man. He himself has no power to change tradition, so his looks fall onto the children. Indeed, every child in China had to learn by heart every day some portion of the classical text, and repeat it loud in class. It made them dull and indifferent to challenge the present misery of the Chinese malaise: “Their fathers and mothers have taught them to be like that!” says the madman, and he cries: “Save the children!”
Nietzsche‘s Zarathustra thunderously proclaimed to destroy the idols, the old and weak moral standards, and to replace them with instincts, that is with the Will to Power in accordance with the law of nature: the strong must rule over the weak.
As Lu Xun saw it, the idols of ancient China were her ideological principals, all-perverting instruments to destroy any rational reflection on one’s own behavior but to obey the heavenly principals only (Kongzi’s Ideal of Humanity, Mozi’s Ideal of Benevolence and Laozi’s Ideal of Non-action, to name a few). True so, the Chinese civilization shows a tendency for ‘unreflective culture’ and ‘unquestioned dogmas’, for example Kongzi’s Ideal of the Love for Learning still being handed down in China from one generation to the next. All those ethical principles were ‘history’ that caused the madman’s ‘cannibals’, or in terminology of Nietzsche: the ‘Last Men’ of China. So, how would the ‘Last Man’ of Lu Xun’s China be like?
In his book (The) ‘Problem of China’ written in Beijing only four years after ‘Diary of a Madman’ was published, Bertrand Russell made a crucial observation: “The callousness of the Chinese is bound to strike every European. They have none of that humanitarian impulse which leads us to devote one per cent of our energy to mitigating the evils wrought by the other ninety-nine per cent. While I was in China, millions were dying of famine, men sold their children into slavery for a few dollars, and killed them if this sum was unobtainable.”
And he continues: “If a dog is run over by an automobile and seriously hurt, nine out of ten passers-by will stop to laugh at the poor brute’s howls. The spectacle of suffering does not of itself rouse any sympathetic pain in the average Chinaman; in fact, he seems to find it mildly agreeable.”
Russell, who is otherwise very fond of the Chinese, saw the ‘Last Man’ of China himself. And through the glasses of Western literature, Lu Xun became an observer too, a madman in a ‘man-eating’ society where indeed not only do the strong eat the weak, but the legions of the weak show no remorse in devouring their own kin.
The idea of “the non-uniformity of the race” is very central in Lu Xun’s other works like Kong Yiji and The true story of Ah Q, or the essay Climbing and Hurtling, where most characters occupy a more primitive stage of human existence, which reflects an early level of evolution.
Although the evolutionary advent of Nietzsche’s Overman was too remote in Lu Xun’s mind, the becoming of the true men could be achieved by saving the children: “We can still do our best to improve. And we can start today!”
It is much suggested that Darwin’s theory of evolution and Huxley’s comments were immensely important to Chinese intellectuals during Lu Xun’s lifetime and a common token of discourse. Furthermore, with regards to intellectual leadership, China has always been a country where writers, in particular those who had been abroad, had enormous influence, and a vigorous reformer possessed of literary skill and Western theory could carry with him the great majority of Young China.
Lu Xun’s ‘Madman’, with all his provoking remarks on societies’ ‘dogs’, ‘chickens’, ‘worms’, ‘hyenas’, ‘wolves’ and ‘cannibals’ and other evolutionary vocabulary (“And he’s probably already passed it on to his own son.”), written from a subjective point of view and in an modern, easily accessible vernacular (baihua) was predestined to support the aims of the May 4th movement, and later revolutionary China and the Communists alike, without ever losing its appeal to a Western audience of modern fiction.
If Nietzsche’s faith was that of a Socrates or a Christ who had to pay with their life (in Nietzsche’s case his sanity) for breaking the traditional rules of their time, Lu Xun, on the other hand, was well absorbed by the Chinese intelligence and earned fame already during his lifetime.
In the case of the Diary, one reason for its historical impact might be its modern, yet timeless literary quality, which distances itself immensely from Zarathustra’s difficult archaic and sometimes self-righteous moral teachings. That is, apart from its chronological eminence in (Chinese) Modern Literature the ‘Diary of a Madman’ is also an ageless fairy tale full of symbolic folklore about man-eaters that could be analyzed out of its philosophical and political context but purely on its aesthetics’ merits of a profoundly humanistic attitude toward life.
The theorizing of the madman is a traumatic journey to the roots of his family’s distress (the death of his little sister, the cannibalism of his elder brother). The “moonlight’s really nice tonight”-opening phrase of the Diary resembles Western superstition in the ‘company of wolves’. There are no werewolves but cannibals with their “smiling green faces with protruding fangs” who ally with the beasts: “Otherwise, how do you explain those dirty looks the Zhao family’s dog gave me?”
The inability of man to conform is the awakening of the madman in a world of darkness and paranoia, “that meant they already had their henchman well deployed.” Suddenly elements of or allusions to the supernatural become apparent. The village becomes a prison, in fact, the history that spit out this village becomes a prison: “people have always practiced cannibalism”.
In such a pitiless society of deceptions and false appearances, morality and righteousness become meaningless words and civilization is reduced to its most primitive element: naked survival.
The weakness of the cannibal species is further jeopardized by its inability to murder: “They’ll never be willing to come straight out and kill me. Besides, they wouldn’t dare. They’d be afraid of all the bad luck it might bring down on them if they did.”
In the animal kingdom for example there is no clear distinction between a carnivore and a scavenger (including hyenas, vultures, and flies), however the latter one, when being used to classify human character traits (!), has most negative connotations, conjuring up images of low-class or poor people and sadistic cowardice. Society is full of them and Nietzsche detested them. Lu Xun, in a way pitied them: “I’m going to convert cannibals.”, but in the end he let his prophetic madman fail (like Zarathustra) to do so: “I’m someone with four thousand years’ experience of cannibalism behind me, how hard it is to look real human beings in the eye!”.
To conclude, the concept of Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man’ is the underlying philosophical key to the Diary, and eventually to Lu Xun’s autobiographical confessionism. His ironic look at Chinese history and culture, with cannibalism as symbolic theme (that has some grounding in historical practices), together with his congenial conviction to bring to a halt the devastating effects of all visions of totalitarian life-doctrines and false idols that haunted his people, and to offer them a new perspective, the arrival of the ‘True Man’ of China – this all verifies Lu Xun’s successful communication with Nietzsche’s complex philosophical theories.
Yet, we have also seen that Lu Xun is a reformer, a populist, a novelist – not a philosopher in a classical sense. It is not on him to explain his Diary, he is not to prove nor deny anything, nor does he give an answer on how to ‘save the children’. Unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who in his biblical allure tutors us how we ought to overcome the ‘Last Man’, Lu Xun’s faith lies within a heart’s range: Once we hear the madman’s plea, we all will understand.
