The difference, however, is merely relative. Religious ethics appeal, indeed, to a supernatural authority, but that is rather the form which they assume. As a matter of fact, however high they rise, they still seek to find an independent basic principle of morality. In every religious genius there lives an ethical thinker, and every really deep philosophical moralist is in some way or other religious.
How indeterminate is the border-line is shown by Indian ethics. Are they religious, or are they philosophical? Originating in the thought of the priests, they claim to be a deeper exposition of the demands of religion, but in essential nature they are philosophical. With the Buddha and others, they venture to make the step from pantheism to atheism, but without giving up their claim to be religious. Spinoza and Kant, however, who are counted among philosophical moralists, do, if we judge by the general direction of their thought, belong at the same time to the religious ones.
It all depends on a relative difference in methods of thought. The one group works towards the basic principle of ethics by a more intuitive process, the other by a process which is more analytical. It is the depth, not the method of the thought, which decides the matter. The more intuitive thinker produces his ethical thought like an artist who with the production of an important work of art opens up new horizons. In deep-reaching moral sayings like the beatitudes of Jesus the basic principle of morality shines out. There comes progress in the recognition of what is moral, even if the provision of a foundation for it fails to advance in the same way.
On the other hand, the searching for the basic principle of the moral by the process of critical analysis may lead to an impoverished system of ethics, because there runs through it the effort to take into account only what is connected with the idea that seems to be what is being sought for. That is why philosophical ethics are as a rule so far behind practical ethics, and have so little direct influence. While religious moralists in one mighty word can get down to the [pg 026] waters flowing far below the surface, philosophical ethics often dig out nothing but a slight hollow in which a puddle forms.
Nevertheless, it is rational thinking alone which is able to pursue the search for the basic principle with perseverance and hope of success. It must find it at last, if it only goes deep enough, and is simple enough.
The weakness of all ethics hitherto, whether philosophical or religious, has lain in this, that they have not shown individuals how to deal directly and naturally with reality. To a large extent they merely talk “about it and about.” They do not touch a man’s daily experience, and therefore they exert no permanent pressure upon him. The result is lack of ethical thought, and mere platitudes about ethics.
The true basic principle of the ethical must be not only something universally valid, but something absolutely elementary and inward, which, once it has dawned upon a man, never lets him loose, which as a matter of course runs like a thread through all his meditation, which never lets itself be thrust aside, and which continually challenges him to come to an understanding with reality.
For centuries men who navigated the seas guided themselves by the stars. In time they rose above this imperfect method through the discovery of the magnetic needle, which by its natural principle of activity pointed them to the north. Now they can tell where they are in the darkest night on the most distant sea. That is the kind of progress that we have to seek in ethics. So long as we have nothing but an ethical system of ethical sayings, we direct our course by stars, which, however brilliant their shining, give us only more or less reliable guidance, and can be hidden from us by rising mist. During a stormy night they leave mankind, as we know by recent experiences, in the lurch. If, however, we have in our possession a system of ethics as a principle which is a necessity of thought and comes to clearness within ourselves, there begins a far-reaching ethical deepening of individuals, and steady ethical progress in mankind.
CHAPTER IV
RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL WORLD-VIEWS
The world-views of the world-religions
IN the world-religions we can see powerful attempts to establish an ethical world-view.
The religious thinkers of China, Lao-tse (born 604 B.C.), Kung-tse (Confucius, 537-479 B.C.), Meng-tse (372-289 B.C.) and Chwang-tse (fourth century B.C.), all try to ground the ethical in a world- and life-affirming nature-philosophy. In so doing they arrive at a world-view which, because it is optimistic-ethical, contains incentives to inward and outward civilization.
The religious thinkers of India also, the Brahmanic philosophers, the Buddha (560-480 B.C.), and the Hindus, start, like the Chinese, from thought about the existing world, i.e. from nature-philosophy. They do not, however, take a world- and life-affirming view of it, but a world- and life-denying one. Their world-view is pessimistic-ethical, and contains, therefore, incentives to inward civilization only, not to outward as well.
Chinese religiousness, and Indian, recognize only a single world-principle. They are monistic and pantheistic. Their world-view has to solve the problem of how far we can recognize the original source of the world as ethical, and how far, correspondingly, we become ethical by the surrender to it of our will.
In contrast to these monistic-pantheistic world-views we find dualistic ones in the religion of Zarathustra (sixth century B.C.), in that of the Jewish prophets (from the eighth century B.C. onwards), and in those of Jesus and Mohammed, this last, however, showing itself to be in [pg 028] all points unoriginal and decadent. These religious thinkers do not start from an investigation of the existence which manifests itself in the universe, but from a view of the ethical which is quite independent of it. They put it in opposition to natural happenings. Accordingly they assume the existence of two world-principles, the natural and the ethical. The first is in the world, and has to be overcome; the other is incorporated in an ethical personality which is outside the world and has been given the final authority in this sphere.
If among the Chinese and the Hindus the basic principle of morality was life in harmony with the world-will, so among dualists it is an attempt to be something different from the world in harmony with an ethical divine personality which is outside and above the world.
The weakness of dualistic religions is that their world-view, because it rejects every kind of nature-philosophy, is always naïve. Their strength lies in the fact that they have the ethical within themselves, directly present and with undiminished force. They have no need to strain it and explain it, as monists have to, so as to be able to conceive it as an effluence from the world-will which reveals itself in nature.
The world-views of the dualistic world-religions, taken as a whole, are optimistic. They live in the confident belief that ethical force will prove superior to natural, and so raise the world and mankind to true perfection. Zarathustra and the older Jewish prophets represent this process as a kind of world-reform. The optimistic element in their world-view asserts itself in a quite natural way. They have the will, and the hope of being able to transform human society and to make the races of the world fit for their higher destiny. Progress in any department of life means for them something gained, for they think of inward and outward civilization together.
With Jesus the value of the optimistic element in his world-view is impaired by the fact that he looks forward to the perfected world as a result of a catastrophic end to the natural one, and while with Zarathustra and the older [pg 029] Jewish prophets the Divine intervention is to a certain extent only the completion of the human activities which have been directed to the perfecting of the world, it is with Jesus the only thing which has to be taken into account. The kingdom of God is to appear in a supernatural way; it is in no way prepared for by any effort made by mankind to attain to civilization.
The world-view of Jesus, because it is fundamentally optimistic, accepts the ends aimed at by outward civilization. Being, however, entangled in the expectation of the end of the world, it is indifferent to all attempts made to improve the temporal, natural world by a civilization which organizes itself on lines of outward progress, and it busies itself only with the inward ethical perfecting of individuals.
Just in proportion, however, as the Christian world-view draws the consequences of the world’s not coming to an end, and accepts the idea that the kingdom of God must be established by a process of development which transforms the natural world, it begins to understand and be interested in the completing of social organization, and in all such progress in outward civilization as contributes to it. Then the optimistic element in the world-view can again work unhindered side by side with the ethical. Thus we get an explanation of the fact that Christianity, which in the ancient world showed itself hostile to civilization, seeks in modern times with more or less success to conduct itself as the world-view which is for progress in every sphere of activity.
The world-views of the world-religions and that of Western thought
The questions which press for an answer from the world-religions in their struggle to reach an ethical and an optimistic-ethical world-view, are the same as those which present themselves to Western philosophy also. The great problem is to think out a connexion between the universe and ethics.
The three types of world-view which show themselves in the world-religions, recur also in Western philosophy. The latter, too, attempts to find an ethical code either in a world- and life-affirming, or in a world- and life-denying, nature-philosophy, or it attempts, rejecting more or less completely all nature-philosophy, to reach a world-view which is in itself ethical. Only, it at the same time does its best to avoid acknowledging, and indeed to conceal, the naïve and dualistic element which is inevitably encountered when this last method of procedure is followed.
The world-views, then, of the world-religions, and that of Western philosophy, do not belong to different worlds, but stand in close inward relations to one another. Further, the distinctions between a religious world-view and a philosophical one is a quite superficial one. The religious world-view which seeks to comprehend itself in thought becomes philosophical, as is the case among the Chinese and the Hindus. On the other hand a philosophical world-view which goes really deep, assumes a religious character.
Although Western thought does, in principle, approach the problem of world-view without any presuppositions, it has not been able to keep itself entirely from being influenced by religious world-views. From Christianity it has received impulses of a decisive character, and the attempt to convert the naïve-ethical world-view of Jesus into a philosophical one has cost it more attention and effort than it admits to itself. With Schopenhauer and his successors the pessimistic monism of India finds expression, and it enriches their reflexion upon the nature of the ethical.
Thus the energies of all the great world-views stream into Western thought, and through the co-operation of these varied forms of thought and energy the latter is enabled to exalt into a universal conviction the optimistic-ethical world-view which hovers before its mind, and that too in a strength which it has never displayed in any previous age or in any other part of the world. And that is why Western thought has advanced farthest both in inward civilization and in outward.
To give a real foundation to the optimistic-ethical world-view Western thought is indeed as little able as any of the world-religions were, and because the West experiences the problem of world-view in its most universal and most pressing form it is the scene of the greatest advances made by the civilized mind, but also of its greatest catastrophes. It experiences portentous changes in its world-view, and is familiar, too, with terrible periods when it has no world-view at all.
It is because our Western thought is so sensitive in both these directions, that it reveals most clearly the questions and difficulties amid which the search for an optimistic world-view moves.
How far does the history of our thought give to us Westerners the explanation of our fate? What road does it indicate to us as the best for our future search after a world-view in which the individual can find inwardness and strength, and mankind progress and peace?
CHAPTER V
CIVILIZATION AND ETHICS IN THE GRÆCO-ROMAN PHILOSOPHY
The beginnings: Socrates.
IN the seventh century before Christ the Greek spirit begins to free itself from the world-view which underlay the traditional religion, and undertakes the task of establishing another on a foundation of knowledge and thought.
First there comes a nature-philosophy, the result of investigation of Being with reflexion upon what it really is. Then criticism begins its work. Belief in the gods is found unsatisfying, not only because the course of nature is not made intelligible by the rule of dwellers in Olympus, but also because these personalities no longer answer to the demands of feeling which is thoughtful and moral. These two elements, nature-philosophy and criticism, are found united in Xenophanes and Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.
In the course of the fifth century B.C. Sophists appear, and begin to concern themselves critically with the accepted standards of value current for social life and individual activities. 3 The result is annihilating. The more moderate of these “Enlighteners” proclaim the overwhelming majority of these standards which pass for moral to be merely claims made by society on its members, leaving open thereby the possibility that a small remainder may be able to prove themselves to rational consideration as moral in [pg 033] themselves. But the younger radical sophists maintain the position that all morality, like all current law, has been invented by organized society in its own interest. Hence the thinking man who is freeing himself from this tutelage will make his own moral standards, and will follow in them nothing but his own pleasure and interests. Thus Western philosophical thought about the problem of ethics and civilisation starts with a shrill dissonance.
What was Socrates (470-399 B.C.) able to contribute, when he came forward to oppose this tendency?
In the place of the simply pleasurable he put the rationally pleasurable.
By rational consideration, he asserts, it is possible to establish a standard of action in which the happiness of the individual, rightly understood, is in harmony with the interests of society. Virtue consists in right knowledge.
That the rationally moral is that which procures for the agent true pleasure, or, what means the same thing, true profit, Socrates draws out into the most diverse applications in the simple everyday discussions which Xenophon has transmitted to us in his Memorabilia. 4 The dialogues of Plato show him going beyond this primitive utilitarianism, and seeking a conception of the good which has been made something inward and aims at the well-being of the soul; which stands, too, in relationship with the beautiful. 5 How much of these more advanced views are the Master’s own, and how much of his own thoughts his pupil has in this way put into his mouth, cannot now be decided.
That Socrates spoke of an inner, mysterious voice, the “daimonion”, as being the highest moral authority in man is indeed certain, for it is mentioned in his indictment. His [pg 034] utilitarian rationalism is therefore completed by a kind of mysticism. An empirical ethic, that is, one established out of past experience and with a view to future experience, and an intuitive ethic live in him side by side and undistinguished from one another, to be separated later and developed in contrast to one another in his pupils, the Cynics and Cyrenaics on the one hand, and Plato on the other.
Was Socrates at all conscious that with the bringing back of the moral to that which is rationally pleasurable he builds the road only a short way further, and stops exactly at the point where the real difficulty makes its appearance, viz. that of defining the most general content of the moral as given by reason? Or was he so simple as to regard the general formula he had arrived at as the solution of the difficulty?
The confidence which he displays in all his public life leads us to suppose the latter. In his unaffected simplicity lies his strength. In that perilous hour when Western thought comes to the point of having to philosophize about the moral in order to arrest the dissolution of Greek society which has been begun by a body of unstable and disputatious teachers, the wise man of Athens shatters all scepticism by the mighty earnestness of his conviction that what is moral can be determined by thought. Beyond that general statement he does not go, but he is the source of that serious spirit in which antiquity after his day busied itself with the problem. What would that ancient world have become without him?
Characteristic for this prologue to Western philosophizing about the moral is the indifference with which Socrates stands outside the philosophic efforts to reach a complete world-view. He troubles himself neither about the results of natural science, nor about inquiries into the nature of knowledge, but is busied simply with man in his relation to himself and to society. Lao-tse, Confucius, the Indian philosophers, the Jewish prophets, and Jesus seek to comprehend ethics as somehow or other derived from, or [pg 035] forming part of, a world-view. Socrates gives them no foundation but themselves. On this stage, which has no scenery to form a background, there will appear in succession to him the utilitarians of every age.
And here a remarkable prospect opens to us. To all efforts to determine the content of the moral more help is afforded by the ethic which keeps clear of all connexion with a complete world-view than by any other. Such an ethic is the most practical. And yet this isolation is unnatural. The idea that ethics are rooted in a complete world-view, or must find their completion in one—that is, the idea that one’s relations to one’s fellow-men and to society are in the last resort rooted in some relation to the world—never loses its natural claim. Hence again and again—already in Plato, then in Epicurus and in the Stoic philosophy—ethics feel the need of again connecting themselves with world-view, and the same process continues in modern thought. But the practical search for the content of the ethical remains the prerogative of those who are busied with ethics in themselves.
In Socrates the ethical mysticism of devotion to the inner voice takes the place of the complete world-view, which was in future to be the foundation of the ethical determination of mankind.
Epicureanism and Stoicism. The Ethic of Resignation
Three tasks were left by Socrates to his successors: to determine more exactly the content of the rationally useful; to give the world the most universal general-notion of the good; and to think ethics into a complete world-view.
What conclusions are come to by those who concern themselves with the first question, and seek to determine the rationally useful from a corresponding experience of pleasure?
As soon as the notion of pleasure is brought into connexion with ethics it shows disturbances, as the magnetic [pg 036] needle does in the neighbourhood of the poles. Immediate pleasure shows itself as incapable in every respect of being reconciled with the demands of ethics, and it is therefore given up. Lasting pleasure is called on to take its place, but this retreat does not suffice. Lasting pleasure, interpreted seriously, can be nothing but pleasure of the mind. Even this position, however, is not tenable. Reflexion upon the ethic which is to produce happiness sees itself compelled at last to give up the positive notion of pleasure in any form. It has to reconcile itself to the negative notion which conceives pleasure as somehow or other a liberation from the need of pleasure. Thus the individualistic, utilitarian ethic, also called Eudæmonism, destroys itself as soon as it ventures to be consistent. This is the paradox which reveals itself in the ethics of antiquity.
Instead of coming to maturity in the following generations, the ethically-rational life-ideal put forward by Socrates succumbs to an incurable decline, because the notion of pleasure, which lives in it, denies itself as soon as it makes any attempt to think itself out.
Aristippus (c. 435-355 B.C.), the founder of the Cyrenaic school, Democritus of Abdera (c. 450-360 B.C.), the author of the atomic theory, and Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) seek to retain as much as possible of the positive notion of pleasure. The Cynic school of Antisthenes (born c. 440 B.C.), and the Stoicism which originated with Zeno, a native of Kittium in Cyprus (c. 336-264 B.C.), keep from the very beginning to the negative notion. 6 But the final result is the same with both. Epicurus sees himself compelled at last to exalt the [pg 037] absence of desire for pleasure as being itself the purest pleasure, landing thereby on the shore of resignation where the Stoics take their exercise. The fundamental difference between the two great philosophical schools of antiquity does not lie in what they offer to men as ethical. About what the “wise man” does and leaves undone, they both frequently express themselves in the same way. What separates them is the world-view with which their ethic is combined. Epicureanism accepts the atomistic materialism of Democritus, is atheistic, asserts that the soul perishes, and is in every respect irreligious. Stoicism is pantheistic.
With Epicurus and Zeno ethics no longer trust themselves, as with Socrates, to maintain an independent existence. They see the necessity of attaching themselves to some sort of world-view. Travelling along this road, Epicurus is guided solely by the effort after veracity. He leaves the talking to the purely scientific knowledge of the world, not allowing ethics to join in the investigation of Being and introduce into it what might be of advantage to itself. How poor, or how rich, it will finally become is to him a matter of indifference. The one thing he is concerned about is that the world-view be a true one, and therein lies the greatness of Epicurus with its claim to our respect.
Stoicism seeks to satisfy the need for an inward, stable world-view; like the Chinese monists it tries to find a meaning in the world. It tries to widen out the ethical rationalism of Socrates into cosmic rationalism. The moral is to show itself to be conduct agreeable to the pronouncements of world-reason.
Stoicism has a vision of an optimistic-ethical affirmation of life, grounded in the nature of the cosmos, but it fails to reach it. It is not untutored enough to acquiesce in the ethical simplicity of a nature-philosophy such as can be seen in Lao-tse and in the older philosophical Taoism. It is ever struggling to discover in world-reason the notion of purposive activity, and is ever mercilessly thrust back upon that of activity pure and simple. Hence the ethic with which it is operating never has a sufficiently universalist [pg 038] character to let it form a natural connexion with world-reason. As might be expected from its origin, it is dominated by the problem of pleasure and not-pleasure, and therefore no longer possesses any efficacious instinct for effort. Its horizons, because still determined by the questions arising out of ancient citizenship and the ancient city-state, are narrow. It is, therefore, not advanced enough to engage in thought on nature-philosophic lines, concerned with both the world and man, although it does feel the inner necessity for doing so.
The vacillation which is characteristic of Stoicism comes, then, from the fact that the results it attains to do not match its aspirations, but are much poorer than the latter. The spirit of antiquity tries to find an optimistic-ethical life-affirmation in nature-philosophy, and to find in it also the justification of those instincts for reliable activity which it has possessed since the days when it was entirely untutored, but it cannot do so. Whenever it acknowledges what has happened it sees clearly that thinking about the universe leads only to resignation, and that a life in harmony with the world means quiet surrender to being carried along in the flood of world-happenings, and, when the hour comes, sinking into it without a murmur.
Stoicism talks, it is true, with deep earnestness of responsibility and duty, but since it cannot draw either from nature-philosophy or from ethics a well-established and living notion of activity, it shows us in these words nothing but beautiful corpses. It is impotent to command anything whatever that is bound up with voluntary activity which is conscious of its aim. Again and again evidence breaks through that its thinking has been pushed aside on to the track of passivity. Nature-philosophy only provides the cosmic background for the resignation to which ethics have come. The ideal which gives life to Chinese Monism, of the perfecting of a world through ethical and ethically organized mankind, is not really discerned, much less securely grasped.
One watches with dismay the shaping of the fate of [pg 039] ancient ethics in Epicureanism and Stoicism. In place of the vigorous life-affirming ethic which Socrates expects from rational thinking, resignation steps in. An inconceivable impoverishment takes place in the representation of the moral. The notion of action cannot be worked out to completion. Even so much of it as, thanks to tradition, still survives in the simple thought-methods of the Greek world in general, is lost.
The ancient Greek was more citizen than man. Active devotion to the cause of the community was to him a matter of course. Socrates presupposes it. In the conversations which Xenophon hands down to us in the Memorabilia he is ever insisting on it that the individual must improve himself in order to become an active citizen. The natural course would have been that the thought which originated with him should deepen this mentality by setting before it the highest social aims. It was, however, never at all in a position to maintain the mentality as it received it. More and more it leads the individual to withdraw himself from the world and from all that goes on in it.
By a never-ceasing process of change the ethics of Greek thought become in Epicureanism and Stoicism ethics of decadence. Not being capable of producing ideals of progressive development for collective bodies, they are also impotent to become really ethics of civilization. In place of the ideal of the man who works for civilization they set the ideal of the “wise man.” It is only the inward individual civilization of refined and reflective self-liberation from the world that now floats before its eyes, but this in all its depth.
It is true that there is power in the preaching of resignation which ancient thought, now become knowing about life, allows to go forth to mankind. Resignation is the lofty porch through which one enters upon ethics. But Epicurus and the Stoics stop in this porch. Resignation becomes for them an ethical world-view. Hence they are incapable of leading ancient society from its untutored life- and world-affirmation to one based on thought.
The conception of the rationally pleasurable, which was the legacy of Socrates, is not productive enough to keep a world alive. It is impossible to develop out of it the ideas of a utilitarianism directed to the welfare of the community, although he believed he found them in it. Ethical thought remains confined within the circle of the self-regarding. Every attempt to ennoble the rationally pleasurable ends in life-affirmation changing into life-denial. On this logical fact was wrecked the ancient West, which, after the critical awakening of the Greek spirit, could have been saved only by means of a reflective optimistic-ethical world-view. It was able to develop seriously what Socrates gave it, but not to make it capable of producing life and civilization.
Plato’s abstract basic principle of the ethical. The ethic of world-negation
Plato, too (427-347 B.C.), and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), the two great independent thinkers of antiquity, are incapable of producing an ethic of action, and so giving civilization a firm foundation.
Plato seeks the general notion of the Good, but he abandons the path which was pointed out, even if not followed to the end, by Socrates, viz. the determination of it by a process of induction. He gives up trying to arrive at the nature of the Good by considerations of the kind, the object, and the results of action, that is to say, by its content. He wants to establish it by a purely formal process, by abstract logical thinking.
In order to arrive at an ethic he uses a detour through the theory of ideas. All similar phenomena, he says, are to be conceived of as varying copies of an original—to express which he uses the word “idea.” In trees there is to be seen the idea of tree, in horses, that of horse. The idea does not come to us, as we are inclined to think, by our abstracting from trees the idea of tree, and from horses that of horse. We have it within us already. It originates, not in our [pg 041] experience of the empirical world but in the recollection which our soul brought with it from the supra-sensuous, pure world of ideas, when it began its existence in a body. In the same way we have brought with us the idea of the Good.
Thus in a tortured doctrine which is disfigured everywhere with fancies and obscurities, Plato tries to found ethics on a theory about the character of our knowledge of the world of sense, and he is encouraged to this undertaking by the consideration that it is not from reflexion that we obtain our conception of the Beautiful, which is closely allied with that of the Good: we bring that conception also with us, ready made.
Plato is the first of all thinkers who feels that the presence of the ethical idea in man is what it is: something profoundly puzzling. That is his greatest distinction. Hence he cannot profess to be satisfied with the attempt of the historic Socrates to explain the Good as that which is rationally pleasure-giving. It is clear to him that it is something unconditional, with a compelling force of its own, and to preserve for it this character seems to him, as later to Kant, to be the great task of thought.
But what is the result of his undertaking? A fundamental principle for ethics which is devoid of content. In order to secure its lofty character it is allowed to be born of abstract considerations in the country of the supra-sensuous. It can, therefore, never find itself at home in reality and become familiar with it, nor can any rules for concrete ethical conduct be developed from it. Thus Plato, when he treats practically of ethics, is compelled to abide by the chief virtues, as popularly conceived. In the Republic he names four of them: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice, and he founds them not on his general idea of the Good, but on his psychology.
But the characteristic ethic of Plato has nothing whatever to do with such virtues. If the conception of the Good is supra-sensible and the immaterial world is the only real one, then it is only thought and conduct which deal with the [pg 042] immaterial that can have any ethical character. In the world of appearance there is nothing of value to be made actual. Man is simply compelled to be an impotent spectator of its shadow-play. All willing must be directed to enabling oneself to turn away from this, and get sight of that true activity which goes on in the light.
The true ethic, then, is world-negation. To this view Plato was committed the moment he allowed the ethical to find its home in the world of pure Being. Thoughts of ascetic inactivity find expression in him side by side with the Greek feeling for reality, and it is confusing that he does not recognize the conflict between them, but speaks now in one sense, now in the other. His ethic is a chaos, and he himself an expert in inconsistency.
Plato’s ethic of world-denial is not an original creation; he takes it over in the Indian setting in which it is offered to him by Orphism and Pythagoreanism. By what route there found its way into Greek thought this pessimism which has been thought out to a system and provided with the doctrine of re-incarnation, we do not know, and shall probably never learn. The presence side by side in Greek thought of an artless optimism and a mature pessimism will always remain for us the great puzzle of Greek civilization. But if the pessimism had not been there, Plato must have introduced it. The abstract basic principle of morality which he adopts in order to preserve the absolute character of morality which he was the first to pronounce to be a necessity, precludes any other content than that of the denial of the sensible world and of natural life.
Aristotle. Instruction about virtue in place of ethics
Plato’s fate alarms Aristotle. He refuses to soar to the heights where Plato lost himself. How then does he fare?
His object is the establishment of a serviceable ethic which is in harmony both as to extent and content with reality. What he accomplished lies before us in the [pg 043] so-called Nicomachean Ethics, the comprehensive work which he composed for the benefit of his son, Nicomachus. The general thought of Socrates, that ethics are a striving after happiness, he acknowledges. But at the same time he makes quite clear his opinion that the part played by activity in ethics must be a much more important one than is given to it in Plato or in the other post-Socratics. Aristotle feels that the crux of the question is the conception of activity, and this he wants to save. He therefore avoids Plato’s paths of abstract thinking, and rejects the ethic of pleasure and not-pleasure over which the Cyrenaics and Cynics work so hard. In his ethical thinking the vitality of the ancient world tries to find expression.
In magnificent fashion he lays down the pre-suppositions which are necessary for the carrying through of his undertaking. He finds the motive to activity in the conception of pleasure, a thing he can do because his whole philosophy has indeed for its aim and object the conceiving of Being as formative activity. Hence the essential element in human nature also is activity. Happiness is to be defined as activity in accordance with the law of excellence. Rational pleasure is experience of the perfecting of one’s activity.
Starting from the conception of pleasure which experiences itself as activity, Aristotle is on the way to comprehend ethics as deepened life-affirmation, and to attack the problem of leading the ancient world up from a naïve and unreflecting world-affirmation to a thinking one. But on the way he diverges from the high-road.
When he has to ask the decisive question as to what make activity moral, he shrinks from discussing the problem of the basic principle of the moral. Ethics are not some sort of knowledge which gives a content to activity, he says in opposition to Socrates. The content of the will is already given. No reflexion and no knowledge can put anything new into it, or alter it.
Ethics consist, then, not in a guiding of the will by aims and objects which knowledge puts before it, but in the will’s [pg 044] own regulation of itself. The right thing to do is to establish the correct balance between the different elements in the given contents of the will. Left to itself, the latter rushes to extremes. Rational reflexion keeps it in the correct middle path. Thus brought to a state of harmony, human activity can be conceived as motived and ethical. Virtue, therefore, is readiness to observe the correct mean which is to be acquired by practice.
Instead of creating an ethic, Aristotle contents himself with a doctrine of virtue. This depreciation of the ethical is the price he pays in order to reach an ethic which ends neither in the abstract nor in resignation. While he shirks the problem of the basic principle of the moral, he still remains able to establish an ethic of activity, though the latter contains indeed no live forces, only dead ones.
Aristotle’s ethic is therefore an æsthetic of the impulses of the will. It consists in a catalogue of virtues and in the demonstration that they are to be conceived as a mean. Thus courage lies between rashness and cowardice, temperance between sensuality and insensibility, truthfulness between boastfulness and irony, 7 liberality between prodigality and avarice, high-mindedness between conceit and small-mindedness, gentleness between quarrelsomeness and characterless good-nature.
On this excursion through the field of the ethical, there open up many interesting views. In an acute and living discussion Aristotle lets his readers survey the questions of the relations of man to his fellow-men and to society. How much that is deep and true there is in the chapter on moral excellence and in that on friendship! How he wrestles with the problem of justice!
No one can fail to feel the charm of the Nicomachean Ethics. There is revealed in them a noble personality with abundant experience of life, depicted with a magnificent simplicity. But just in proportion as the method followed [pg 045] is advantageous technically, it is valueless in itself. The ethical is reconciled with reality without having first tried to come to clear understanding of itself. It is in this reconciliation that the understanding is to be found, so Aristotle thinks, but he is mistaken. His mind is seduced through his having observed that some virtues—but even these more or less under compulsion—allow themselves to be conceived as real means between two extremes, and he is misled into developing on these lines the whole of his ethical system.
But a more or less natural quality, which in ordinary speech is called a virtue, is one thing, virtue in the really ethical sense is another. The middle quality between prodigality and avarice is not the ethical virtue of liberality, out the quality of rational economy. The middle quality between rashness and cowardice is not the ethical virtue of courage, but the quality of rational prudence. The combination of two qualities only produces a single one. But virtue, in the ethical sense, means a quality guiding itself by an ideal of self-perfection, and being serviceable for some object which looks towards the universal. Liberality as an ethical virtue means a process of spending which serves some object recognized by the person practising it as valuable in principle, and in such a way that any natural tendency to prodigality, should there be such in the giver, plays no part, while the tendency to avarice is paralysed.
Devotion of one’s property or one’s life to an object which is valuable in principle is under all circumstances ethical, while prodigality and avarice, rashness and cowardice as simple qualities not inspired by any higher aim have never any ethical character; they are merely something natural. Whether the devotion of one’s property or of one’s life for an object valuable in principle is made more completely than need be or exactly to the extent required by the circumstances, does not alter in any way the ethical character of the decision and the action. Such excess or defect only shows how much or how little the ethical will has allowed [pg 046] itself to be at the same time influenced by considerations of prudence.
Aristotle’s representation, then, rests on the fact that he allows virtue in ordinary speech and virtue in the ethical sense to get mixed up. He smuggles in the really ethical, and then offers it as the resultant of two natural qualities, each of which is an extreme.
In the chapter on temperance—Ethics, Bk. III., 10—he has to allow that the theory which makes the ethical a mean between two extremes cannot be carried through completely. The love of beauty, he says plainly, however strong it becomes, remains what it is; there can never be any question of excess. He throws out this admission without seeing that he thereby undermines his feeble definition of the ethical as the appropriate relative mean, and, like Socrates and Plato, acknowledges that there can be something which its content allows to be reckoned as good in itself.
Aristotle is so firmly resolved not to let himself be entangled in the problem of the basic principle of ethics, that he will allow nothing to lead him to the discussion of it. He means to voyage along the coast, keep to facts, and deal with ethics as if they were a branch of natural science. Only he forgets that in science we can confine ourselves to venturing from definite given happenings through hypotheses to the nature of the Being which lies behind them, while in ethics, on the contrary, we have to establish a basic principle through the application of which we secure our happenings.
It is because he misunderstands their nature that Aristotle cannot help ethics forward. Plato rides off over the head of Socrates and loses himself in abstractions. Aristotle, in order to maintain the connexion with reality goes down below Socrates. He brings together material for a monumental building, and runs up a wooden shack. Among teachers of virtue he is one of the greatest. Nevertheless, the least of those who venture on the search for the basic principle of the ethical, is greater than he.
Ethical theory is no more ethics than cartilage is bone. But how strange is this inability to establish the basic principle of ethical action which Socrates regarded as the certain, and from the very first sure and certain, product of thoughtful reflexion on the ethical! Why do all the ancient thinkers who in succession to Socrates search for it, always miss it? Why does Aristotle cease to concern himself with it, and so condemn himself to a doctrine of virtue in which, as a matter of fact, there is hardly any more living ethical force than there is in the abstract ethical system of Plato or in the ethics of resignation of the rest?
The Ideal of the Civilized State in Plato and Aristotle
How little Plato and Aristotle are capable of establishing an ethic of action can be seen from the way in which they sketch their ideal of the civilized State. Plato develops his in the Republic, Aristotle his in the Politics. At this very time, Mencius (Meng-tse) is putting before the princes of China a doctrine of the civilized State.
That the State must be something more than a union which regulates in the most practical way the common life of a number of persons whom natural conditions compel to depend upon one another, is quite clear to both of them. They also agree in demanding that the State shall promote the true prosperity of its citizens. This is, however, unthinkable and impossible without virtue, and the State must therefore develop into an ethical institution. “Honourable and virtuous conduct is the object which the political community aims at,” is the way Aristotle puts it.
The State, which is given by history, is therefore to come under the influence of a representation of its nature as a political body which is both ethical and rational. In the Republic Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates the following sentiment: “Unless it happen that either philosophers acquire the kingly power in States, or those who are to-day called kings and potentates cultivate philosophy truly and sufficiently, and thus political power and philosophy [pg 048] become as one . . . there can be no deliverance from evil for States, nor ever, so I think, for the human race” (Bk. V, 473, C and D).
When, however, it comes to a more detailed carrying out of the ideal of the civilized State, Plato and Aristotle betray remarkable embarrassment. First of all, their vision of the State of the future is not that of a community which embraces a whole nation, but is always just a copy of the Greek city-republic with appropriate improvements. That they think out their ideal within such narrow limits is historically intelligible, but for the development of the philosophical idea of the civilized State it is deplorable.
One result of these narrow limits is that both are anxiously concerned to provide that the well-being of the city-republic shall not be endangered by the increase of the population. The number of the inhabitants is to be kept as far as possible always near the same figure. Aristotle is not frightened by the proposal that weakly children shall be allowed to die of hunger, and that unborn children shall be got rid of by intentional abortion. That the Spartan State, on the contrary, regards the increase of the population as desirable, and exempts a citizen from all imposts as soon as he has four children, does not seem to him to be reasonable.
Again, just as these two thinkers cannot work themselves up to a general idea of a national State, so they are unable to reach the idea of mankind. They make a strict line of division between the unfree on the one side, and the free on the other. The former they regard merely as creatures made for work, who are to maintain the material well-being of the State. What becomes of them as human beings is to them a matter of very little interest. Such beings as they are not meant to have any share in the growth towards perfection which is to be brought about by means of the civilized State.
Slavery was, indeed, attacked now and again by the Sophists from their point of view, not, however, on the [pg 049] ground of humanity but from a desire to raise doubts about the accepted justification of existing institutions. Aristotle defends it as a natural arrangement, but recommends kindly treatment.
Artisans, and in general all who earn their living by the labour of their hands, are not to be allowed to be citizens. “One cannot practise virtue, if one leads the life of an artisan, or of one who labours for pay,” says Aristotle. An ethical valuation of labour as such is still something unknown to him, even though he conceives of happiness as “activity in accordance with the law of excellence.” Plato and he are still entirely under the influence of the ancient view that only the “free” man can have full value as a man.
In details of the ideal of the State, however, the two part company, and Aristotle argues against Plato, though, unfortunately, just those parts of the Politics in which he sketches his ideal State have not come down to us complete. The main difference is that Aristotle keeps closer than Plato to the historically given. He builds his State upon the family; Plato makes the State into a family. In his Republic the free men live with property, wives, and children owned in common. They are to possess nothing as their own, so that they may not by private interests be held back from working for the general welfare. Moreover, the general welfare allows the State to breed its citizens systematically. He prescribes the connections which men and women are to form, and permits only such as allow the expectation of a new generation which is sound both in body and mind. The offspring of unions not approved by the authorities are either to be killed before birth, or got rid of by starvation.
Aristotle contents himself with guaranteeing the quality of the offspring by legal regulation of the age for marriage. Women may get married at eighteen, men not till they are thirty-seven. Moreover, marriages are to take place preferably in winter, and as far as possible, when the wind is in the north.