FATE OF PLEASURE
183
clog and hamper the movement of the individual spmt toward
freedom, because they prevent the attainment of "more life." The
particular systems and modes of thought of the bourgeois world are
a natural first target for the modern spirituality. But it is not hard to
believe that the impulse to destroy specious good would be as readily
directed against the most benign society, which, by modern definition,
serves the principle of pleasure.
In the characteristically modern conception of the spiritual life,
the influence of Dostoevsky is definitive. By comparison with it,
'the influence of Nietzsche is marginal. For however radical
Nietzsche was in criticism of the existing culture, the terms of his
adversity were, as I have remarked, essentially social and humanistic.
The moral and personal qualities suggested by a particular class, the
aristocracy, had great simple force with him and proposed to his
imagination a particular style of life. Despite the scorn he expressed for
liberal democracy and socialist theory as he knew them, he was able
to speak with sympathy of future democracies and possible socialisms,
led to do so by that element of his thought which served to aerate
his
mind and keep it frank and generous- his awareness of the part
played in human existence by the will to power, which, however
it
figures in the thought of his epigones and vulgarizers, was con–
ceived by Nietzsche himself as comprising the whole range of the
possibilities of human energy, creativity, libido. The claims of any
social group to this human characteristic had weight with him. And
he gave ready credence to the pleasure that attends one or another
kind of power; if he was quick to judge people by the pleasures they
chose-and woe to those who preferred beer to wine and
Parsifal
to
Carmen
!- the principle of pleasure presented itself to him as con–
stituting an element of the dignity of man. It is because of this
humanism of his, this naturalistic acceptance of power and pleasure,
that Nietzsche is held at a distance by the modern spiritual sensi–
bility. And the converse of what explains Nietzsche's relative margin–
ality explains Dostoevsky'S position at the very heart of the modern
spiritual life.
If
we speak of spirituality, we must note that
it
is not only
humanism that is negated by the Underground Man but Christianity
as well, or at least Christianity as Western Europe understands it.
For not only humanism but the Christianity of the West bases reason
