George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.

He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council.

Bernard Shaw is probably the man most responsible for transferring Nietzsche's ubermensch into English and into the minds of English-speaking audiences with his play Man and Superman. This connection should not mislead one to assume that Shaw borrowed anything more of Nietzsche's philosophy than the name, as Shaw makes clear in his preface to Major Barbara. Bentley claims that Shaw was not a Heroic Vitalist himself but had some leanings in their direction. He shared with Carlyle, Wagner, and Nietzsche their evaluation that the common man of the 19th century was pitifully unfit to rule, a factor the voices of democracy had not reckoned with, and frankly declared, "The majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive" (Wagnerite 215; cf. Nietzsche's sentiments, "I don't find it easy to believe that little people are necessary” Bentley 68). Out of this deep sense of contemporary political failure, Shaw could only hope for the appearance of great individuals of genius, presently produced by chance but perhaps someday by design through eugenics. He appreciated as did Nietzsche the iconoclastic free spirit of those who rise above conventional morality to do what is necessary.

Shaw was too much of a humanitarian, however, to approve of Nietzsche's praise of cruelty. He believed that the superman should benefit others, not live solely for himself. In Back to Methuselah Shaw seems to parody the Nietzschean hero in his depiction of Cain, the first murderer. When Cain claims for himself the title of superman, Eve retorts, "Superman! You are no superman; you are Anti-man. . . . You despise your father, but when he dies the world will be richer because he lived. When you die, men will say, 'He was a great warrior, but it would have been better for the world if he had never been born'".

Shaw and Nietzsche parted on political theory, for however much he admired great men, Shaw continued to support socialism and the rights of the many over the few. In Our Theater of the Nineties Shaw described Nietzsche as "the champion of privilege, of power, of inequality," and summarized the German's views: "To him modern democracy, Pauline Christianity, Socialism, and so on are deliberate plots hatched by malignant philosophers to frustrate the evolution of the human race and mass the stupidity and brute force of the many weak against the beneficial tyranny of the few strong." In Shaw's opinion this was "an absolutely fictitious hypothesis. . . not worth reading were it not that there is almost as much evidence for it as if it were true". He sympathized with the analysis of the situation but supported a different solution.

In The Perfect Wagnerite Shaw made use of Ring mythology as allegory to catalog the socio-political problems of his day. He saw three categories of men: the "moral dwarves" whose greed drives them to enslave others and whose craftiness allows them to get away with it; the industrious but stupid giants who supply the work force; and the administrative gods who because of the giants' deficient mentalities must rule by mechanical exercise of law and threat of punishment rather than by reason. Eventually Wotan realizes that, to create a better form of government, what the world needs are not new laws but new men, not one individual Siegfried but a race of heroes, or in the words of John Tanner's "Revolutionist's Handbook," a democracy of supermen (Man and Superman 755). The Shavian superman wants not to rule over others but to raise all humanity to his level. Only when all people are so evolved as to desire naturally to do what is best for the entire race will Shaw have any confidence in man as a political being.

Shaw's concept of the superman was influenced less by Nietzsche than by his admiration for Ibsen and Wagner (Mills, "Superman" 52). In Ibsen's Brand Shaw found two qualities which apply to his superman: heroic energy and a willingness to serve a higher force – be it God or Creative Evolution. The hero by nature possesses a strong self-will but recognizes the existence of a world-will, older than and superior to his own, and desires to align his will with its cause. Brand is such a hero, and none of Ibsen's later "realistic" male characters demonstrates the intensity and dedication of this Norwegian man of God. However, in Shaw's view Brand fails (as do Peer Gynt and Julian) because he is an idealist. He acts as if he were the new Adam in a perfect world where it is possible to live without compromise (Ibsenism 48). Finally, he and all he loves are crushed under the weight of his grand ideals.

Wagner's Siegfried received a similar, provisionally favorable critique from Shaw. He admired Siegfried's complete freedom from the old world's greed and lust for power and his independence from the gods' decrepit system of laws that no longer apply to him. The young hero "knows no law but his own humor. . . and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist . . . an anticipation of the 'overman' of Nietzsche" (Wagnerite 200). Siegfried typifies "the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law and order which accompany them".

People have always been fascinated by the individualist "delivered from conscience" but usually are hesitant to condone his actions for fear of heavenly disapproval. Now, however, with no God to strike him down, this "New Protestant" rejects not only the church's authority to direct his life but heaven's as well. Eventually this trend leads to anarchism – no rule but self rule – and at this point Shaw abandons Wagner's heroic prototype. Anarchy, like love and self-renunciation, was one of several idealistic panaceas to which Wagner succumbed toward the end of his career. Shaw concluded that "the only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from the Ring is not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which is continually driving onward and upward. . . growing from within, by its own inexplicable energy, into ever higher and higher forms of organization", a summary less of Wagner's creation than of Shaw's own religion of the Life-Force.

In the end we must turn to the dramatic creations of Shaw's own fertile imagination to find the true models for the Shavian superman. Shaw never clearly defines him; on purpose he keeps his man of the future enshrouded in mystery, for as John Tanner says, "The proof of the superman will be in the living" (Man and Superman 741). Nevertheless, we do know something of what Shaw admired in his heroes and heroines. Above all else, the greatest quality of the Shavian protagonist is his or her ability to get things done. His men are practical, straightforward, and know the way the world works (a trait Siegfried entirely lacks). His women efficiently manage both their households and their husbands. His historical characters, Napoleon and Caesar, may appear less grand than the legends about them, but they are more human, more in touch with the day-to-day matters of governing. They have no heroic illusions about themselves or others, and because of this, they accomplish the things only dreamt of by idealists. Their strength comes not from pride or courage, the traits Nietzsche admired, but from their common sense.

Alongside the men of action are the contemplative spirits, those artist-philosophers who inhabit Don Juan's heaven and those who represent advanced humanity in 31,920 AD. Shaw does not contrast these realms of thought and action; Don Juan insists, "In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are". Contemplation is not an escape from reality into some metaphysical dimension of ideas, but the goal of the Life-Force itself. Instead of indulging in hedonistic pleasures, the contemplative mind seeks purpose and direction: "To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer". Shaw's Ancients in his vision of the future do seem removed from physical reality, showing no interest in the arts and dances of the "children," but this apathy toward the world comes from Shaw's neo-Platonic idea that ultimate Mind seeks to escape the limitation of matter. The Ancients are "active" in contemplation; the subject of their thoughts is never revealed, but the point is that no one living today could understand or appreciate them anyway.

The Shavian hero lives by a higher ethic unencumbered by traditional values and outdated moral codes. John Tanner enjoys his reputation as a shameless anarchist, author of the “most blackguardly book that ever escaped burning," partly because it draws attention to his progressive views and partly because he delights in exposing would-be liberal thinkers. However, for the true superman the transition period to the advanced state will not be so easy. In his preface to The Sanity of Art Shaw remarked, "We cannot ask the superman simply to add a higher set of virtues to bent respectable morals, for he is undoubtedly going to empty a good deal of respectable morality out like so much dirty water and replace it by new and strange customs, shedding old obligations and accepting new and heavier ones." The superman who appears early, before the rest of the race has evolved to his level, will be called a madman whose conscience does not correspond to that of the majority: "The superman will certainly come as a thief in the night, and be shot accordingly". Man can no more understand the ways of the superman than the short-livers can comprehend the Ancient Ones in Shaw's future history.

In his two major dramatic works concerning the superman, Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah, Shaw prophesied of his coming in different ways but always by the prompting of the Life-Force. Shaw's doctrine of the Life-Force, the god of his only religion, was his response to Darwin's act of "banishing Mind from the universe" as Samuel Butler aptly put it (Methuselah 696). Darwin's contribution to the theory of evolution, the hypothesis of natural selection, provided a means to explain away the apparent sense of purpose and direction behind the life process formerly attributed to God. Instead of by a mysterious teleological force, evolution functions completely by chance. In an act of faith Shaw rejected this view of a mindless universe, choosing to believe in an impersonal but creative will that directs the development of all living things toward higher forms. Thus he promoted the earlier theory developed by Lamarck of Creative Evolution in which organisms change because they will to change. Shaw admitted to being a mystic in this matter, that the Life-Force is "a metaphysical hypothesis," a "miracle" and a "mystery," but it was the only way he could explain the difference between a live body and a dead one, something materialism cannot do (Agitations 119, 339).

In Shaw's version of Creative Evolution, for millions of years the Life-Force experimented blindly by trial and error until it became sentient with the arrival of the human being. Now it seeks higher levels of consciousness by developing human mental capacity. According to Don Juan, "[Life] needs a brain ... . lest in its ignorance it should resist itself" (Man and Superman 652). A true disciple of the Life-Force, Don Juan explains to the devil how it uses the games of love for its own purposes. Each sex has its role: man incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life, woman incarnates its fecundity. She is the primary player, doing all she can to get a husband and to continue the race. After doing his part, the man is free for intellectual pursuits which in turn increase the collective consciousness of the Life-Force. Rather than fighting it as Tanner tries to do, men and women should readily submit to this process. "This is the true joy in life," Shaw writes in the preface, "the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one". To cooperate fully with the Life-Force, Tanner in his handbook promotes a government sponsored program of eugenic breeding to accelerate the grand experiment toward producing the superman.

In Back to Methuselah the solution for Life's success is somewhat different. This monumental work chronicles the entire history of the human race from Adam to the Ancients of 30,000 AD. It presents Shaw's attempt at a utopia based on spiritual and mental evolution rather than the typical 19th century utopias based on technological advancement (Cole 89). According to the gospel of the Barnabas brothers (part three), mankind's salvation depends on increasing the average lifespan to somewhere around 300 years. They believe death is merely an acquired habit, an inconvenience which cuts off men and women before they can reach true maturity; at present "Life is too short for men to take it seriously”. However, the brothers propose no eugenics program or any secret formula to achieve this temporary immortality. Life will accomplish its mysterious goals without the cooperation of men, even against their wills if necessary. As Franklyn states, "If [Life] cannot [solve its problems] through us, it will produce more capable agents. You and I are not God’s last word". Moreover, in this later play the superman has been replaced or superseded by the ideal of pure Mind itself. Even after 30,000 years Life is not content to rest in its labors toward creating God.

In this brief history of ideas we have seen three comparable but distinct versions of the superman. Wagner's Siegfried liberated himself from divine jurisdiction but remained too much of a mindless brute to please Nietzsche. Zarathustra's ubermensch won the freedom to live beyond good and evil, but his acceptance of cruelty as a viable means to that goal made him a candidate for supreme tyrant, a possibility which Shaw abhorred. Shaw's vision of ultimate humanity elevated Mind so far above the level of sensuous reality as to leave most readers quite cold to his view of the future. In all three cases, however, the superman was a projection of the hope that these authors still held for the human race despite the evidence that the present specimen was unprepared to survive in a Godless universe. These latter-day romantics (and Shaw was, in this respect, as much an idealist as the others) provided a much needed counterbalance to the unquestioning faith in scientific and technological progress which from the perspective of the nuclear age seems fearfully misplaced. We may not believe in their prophecies of the superman, but in order to survive in the future, we need their belief in humanity.

Writings by Bernard Shaw:

Agitations: Letters to the Press. 1875-1950. Ungar, 1985.
Back to Methuselah. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw. vol. 5. Max Reinhardt, 1972.
"Giving the Devil His Due." Pen Portraits and Reviews. vol. 2. Constable, 1932.
Man and Superman. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw. vol. 2. Max Reinhardt, 1971.
Our Theater in the Nineties. vol. 2. Constable, 1932.
The Perfect Wagnerite. Major Critical Essays. Constable, 1932.
“Preface.” Major Barbara. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw. vol. 3. Max Reinhardt, 1971.
The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Major Critical Essays. Constable, 1932.
The Sanity of Art. Major Critical Essays. Constable, 1932.

Secondary Sources

Bailey, J. O. "Shaw's Life Force and Science Fiction. " Shaw Review 16 (May 1973): 48-58.
Barzun, Jacques. Darwin. Marx. Wagner: Critique of a Heritage. 2nd ed. Doubleday, 1958.
Bentley, Eric. The Cult of the Superman. Peter Smith, 1969.
Cole, Susan A. "The Evolutionary Fantasy: Shaw and Utopian Fiction." Shaw Review 16 (May 1973): 89-97.
Hollingdale, R. J. Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy. Routledge, 1965.
Hollinrake, Roger. Nietzsche, Wagner. and the Philosophy of Pessimism. Allen, 1982.
McCreless, Patrick. Wagner's Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Music. UKI Research, 1982.
Mills. Carl Henry. "Shaw's Superman: A Be-evaluation." Shaw Review 13 (May 1970): 48-58.
Mills. Carl Henry. "Shaw's Theory of Creative Evolution." Shaw Review 16 (Sept. 1973): 123-32.
Rather, L. J. The Dream of Self-Destruction: Wagner's Ring and the Modern World. LSU Press, 1979.
Wisenthal, J. L. "The Underside of Undershaft: A Wagnerian Motif in Major Barbara." Shaw Review 15 (May 1972): 56-64.