As an immediate result of the wiping out of confessional differences the middle of the eighteenth century sees the beginning of a period of tolerance in place of the persecution of all rejecters of orthodoxy which had been common till then. The last serious act of confessional intolerance was expulsion of all evangelicals from the Salzburg district by the Archbishop of that town, Count von Firmian, in the years 1731 and 1732.
About the middle of the century there begins also the movement of opposition to the Jesuits, who were recognized as the enemies of tolerance, and this led to the suppression of the order in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV. 34
But the religion of reason fought superstition as well as intolerance. In 1704 the philosopher and jurist of Halle, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), published his essays condemning trial for witchcraft, 35 and about the middle of the century the law courts in most of the States of Europe refused to concern themselves any longer with the crime of magic. The last death sentence on a witch was passed in 1782 at Glarus, in Switzerland.
About the end of the century it became good form to detest anything which had even a remote connexion with superstitious convictions.
Again, the will-to-progress of the eighteenth century deals with nationalist prejudices in the same way as it deals with religious ones. Above and beyond individual nations it points to mankind as the great object towards which ideals are to be directed. Educated people accustom themselves to see in the State not so much an organ of national feeling as a mere organization for legal and economic purposes. Cabinets may carry on war with each other, but in the thought of the common people there grows up a recognition of the brotherhood of nations.
In the sphere of law, too, the will-to-progress acquires [pg 096] strength. The ideas of Hugo Grotius get accepted. The law of reason is exalted in the convictions of the men of the eighteenth century to a position above all traditional maxims of jurisprudence. It alone is allowed to have permanent authority, and legal decisions have to be in harmony with it. Fundamental principles of law, but principles equally indisputable everywhere, have to be deduced from human nature. To protect these and to ensure to every human being a human value with an inviolable measure of freedom of which he can never be robbed, is the first task of the State. The proclamation of “the Rights of Man” by the States of North America, and the French Revolution, do no more than give recognition and sanction to what, in the convictions of the time, had already been won.
The first State in which torture was abolished was Prussia, and this was secured by an administrative order of Frederick the Great’s in 1740. In France a certain amount of torture was practised down to the Revolution— and somewhat later, for the thumb-screw was used under the Directory during the examination which the royalist conspirators had to undergo. 36
Side by side with the fight against absence of law and the existence of inhuman laws, go efforts to adapt law to circumstances. Bentham raises his voice against laws which tolerate usury, against senseless customs duties, and against inhuman methods of colonization.
There dawns an age in which the purposive and the moral are the ruling authorities. Officialdom acquires during these generations familiarity with the notions of duty and honour, which later become natural to it. Far-reaching beneficial reforms are introduced into administration without any outcry.
The education of mankind in citizenship makes splendid progress. The general good becomes the criterion of [pg 097] excellence both for the commands of rulers and the obedience of their subjects, while at the same time a beginning is made of securing that everyone shall be educated in a manner corresponding to his human dignity and the needs of his personal welfare. The war against ignorance is begun.
The way is prepared, too, for a more rational method of living. Houses are built so as to be more comfortable, and the land is better cultivated. Even the pulpit uses its influence to promote improvements of this kind. The theory that reason has been given to man to be used consistently and in every department of life plays at this time an important and beneficent part in the preaching of the Gospel, even if the way in which this is done often makes queer demands on our belief. Sermons, for example, often treated incidentally of the best methods of manuring, irrigating, and draining the fields. That Jenner’s discovery of vaccination was so readily adopted in many districts was due to the enlightenment which was spread abroad by the clergy.
Characteristic of the age of rationalism are the private societies formed to promote the moral and utilitarian progress of mankind. In 1717 members of the higher ranks of society in London reorganize as “The Order of Freemasons” the brotherhood which in earlier times had been built up by the union in a single body of the members of the mediæval building-lodges, but was now in a state of decay, and to this new organization was assigned the duty of labouring to build up a new humanity. About the middle of the century this order had spread all over Europe, and reached the zenith of its success. Princes, officials, and intellectuals alike joined it in great numbers, and were inspired by it to the achievement of a huge amount of reform.
Similar aims were pursued by the “Order of the Illuminate” (or enlightened) which was founded in Bavaria in 1776, but was suppressed in 1784 by the reactionary Bavarian Government, which was still under the influence [pg 098] of the Jesuits. It is said to have been the intellectual counterpart of the Jesuit order, on the model of whose organization it was formed.
That private societies aiming at the rational and moral perfecting of mankind should work effectively seemed to the men of the eighteenth century so much a matter of course that they assumed them to have existed in earlier times. In a series of rationalist descriptions of the life of Jesus it is assumed that the sect of the Essenes, near the Dead Sea, of whom we learn from Josephus, the Jewish writer of the first century A.D., was such an order, and that it was in touch with similar brotherhoods in Egypt and India. Jesus, it is said, was trained by them, and then helped by them to carry through the rôle of the Messiah, in order that with the authority given by a holy yet popular personality he might work to spread true illumination. The famous Life of Jesus by Karl Venturini carries this assumption out in complete detail. According to him, the miracles of Jesus were staged by brothers of this secret association.
Be that as it may, the fact that the will-to-progress of the eighteenth century created for itself in these private societies organizations which spread throughout Europe, contributed much to its ability to influence the age.
It must be admitted indeed that the men of the rationalistic period were smaller than their achievements. True, they all possessed personality, but it did not reach very deep. It was produced by the enthusiasm which they found in the mentality of the time and which they shared with all their contemporaries. The individual imbibed personality through the taking over of a ready-made world-view, which gave him firm standing-ground together with ideals. His own contribution was really nothing more than the capacity for enthusiasm. That is why the men of this age are so remarkably like one another. They all graze side by side in the same nourishing pasture land.
Nevertheless, the ideas of the purposive and the ethical [pg 099] have never exercised so much influence over reality as they did among these men of shallow optimism and sensitive morale. No book has been written yet which fully describes their achievements, doing justice to their origin, their character, their number, and their significance. We can then only really comprehend what they accomplished when we recognize the tragic fact that the most valuable part of it is lost to us, while we do not feel in ourselves any ability to reproduce it. They were masters of the facts of life to an extent which we are to-day quite unable to realize.
Only a world-view which accomplishes all that rationalism did has a right to condemn rationalism. The greatness of that philosophy is that its hands are blistered.
Obstacles to the reform movement. The French Revolution
The great work of reform is never completed, partly because external circumstances arise which check it, but also because the world-view of rationalism becomes convulsed from within. In its confidence in the enlightening power of all that is in accordance with reason the will-to-progress was inclined to underestimate the resisting power of the traditional, and to wish to carry through reforms where minds had not been sufficiently prepared for their reception. On these unsuccessful advances followed reaction which permanently injured the work. This was the case in south-eastern Europe. Joseph II. of Austria, who was emperor from 1764 to 1790, is the type of the reforming prince. He discontinued the use of torture, opposed the infliction of the death penalty, abolished serfdom, gave the Jews full civic rights, introduced a new method of legislation and a new system of legal administration, took away all class privileges, contended for the equality of all before the law, protected the oppressed, founded schools and hospitals, guaranteed the freedom of the Press and freedom of domicile, abolished all State monopolies, and promoted the development of agriculture and industry.
But he is a ruler in the wrong place. He decrees these reforms and then similar shocks, one after another, in countries which, being in spiritual things still wholly under the dominion of the Catholic Church of that time, are not prepared for them, and moreover in other things as well display a specially backward attitude, because they belong to the zone in which the Europe of that day passed over into Asia. The Emperor is therefore unable to count upon either any willingness to make sacrifices in the classes which are to give up their privileges, or upon any understanding of his ideas in the common people. In his attempts to organize the monarchy as a unity and in an effective way for practical purposes, he comes into conflict with the nationalities themselves of which it is composed. The reduction in the number of the religious houses, which he undertakes out of economic considerations, with the introduction of the freedom of the Press and of a system of State education, bring on him the hostility of the Church. Finally, because he is a ruler in the wrong place, this noble reforming emperor dies of a broken heart, while Europe, because the will-to-progress in Austria can accomplish nothing even at the time of its greatest strength, owing to unfavourable circumstances, is condemned to a period of the deepest misery over the problems of that huge State, which have in this way been rendered insoluble, and over the portion of Asia beyond it along the southern Danube.
In France, too, the wrong men are in control. There the spread of the new ideas prepares the way splendidly for reform, but the reforms are not undertaken, because its rulers cannot understand the signs of the times, and allow the State to collapse in ruin. Consequently the reform movement has to take the road of violence, whereby it slips away from the guidance of the educated, and falls into the hands of the mob, from which it is taken by the powerful genius of Napoleon. Native of an island in which the Europe of that day passed over into Africa, and lacking all [pg 101] deeper education, he is uninfluenced by the valuable convictions of his time. Guided solely by the force of his own personality, he decides what is to happen in Europe, and hurls it into wars through which it sinks into misery. Thus from East and from West alike disaster overtakes the work of the will-to-progress.
The French Revolution is a snowstorm falling upon trees in blossom. A transformation which promises great things is in progress, but everywhere softly and slowly. Extraordinarily valuable results are being prepared in the thoughts of men. Provided that circumstances remain even tolerably near the normal, there stands before humanity in Europe an extraordinarily desirable development. But in place of that there sets in a chaotic period of history in which the will-to-progress has to cease more or less completely from its work, and becomes a bewildered spectator. The first stage of the advance of reforming thought, thought bent with full consciousness of its aims on securing the practical and the ethical, comes to a complete stop.
An experience for which it was in no wise prepared now falls to the lot of the will-to-progress. Up to this time it had always been a more or less obsolescent reality with which it had had to come to terms. In the French Revolution, however, and in the following period, it becomes familiar with a reality which has at its disposal elemental forces. Up to this time the only factor to be reckoned with had been the force of originality exercised by rational thought. In Napoleon it has to learn to recognize as power a personality with creative genius of its own.
By his reorganization of France, a magnificent work but concerned only with the technical matters of administration, Napoleon creates a new State. His work, too, has had the way prepared for it by the labour of rationalism, so far as this upset the equilibrium of the old and made current the idea of something new but necessary. But the new State which now comes into existence is not the State [pg 102] which is ethical and in harmony with reason, but merely the State which works well. Its achievements compel our admiration. In the nursery garden which the will-to-progress was laying out in order to plant it with noble flowers an individual ploughs for himself a piece of ordinary arable land which at once produces an excellent crop. With the elemental creative forces of reality revealing their power in so imposing a fashion, the noble but unoriginal spirit of the age, with all its higher aims, finds itself in a state of instability from which it never completely recovers. Hegel, who saw Napoleon ride past after the Battle of Jena, tells us that he then saw the World-spirit on horseback. In these words we can hear all the confused spiritual experience of that time expressing itself.
The undermining of the rationalistic world-view
There now sets in a development which works against the spirit of the times, and the hitherto unopposed authority of the rational ideal is undermined. Forces in reality which are not guided by it, obtain recognition.
While the will-to-progress remains an amazed spectator of events, respect for what is historical recovers itself, though it seemed to have been banished for ever. In religion, in art, and in law, men begin, though at first only quite shyly, to look again with other eyes on the traditional. It is no longer reckoned as merely something which is to be replaced, but men venture to admit to themselves that it conceals within itself original values. The forces of reality, which had been taken by surprise, now begin everywhere to act on the defensive, and a guerilla warfare develops against the will-to-progress.
The various religious bodies revoke the abdications which they had made before the religion of reason. The law which has grown up in the course of time begins to set itself in opposition to the law laid down by reason. In the atmosphere of passion produced by the Napoleonic wars, [pg 103] national thought takes on a new character, directing on itself, and beginning to absorb, the universal enthusiasm for ideals. The struggles carried on no longer by chancelleries but by whole nations are fatal to the ideals of cosmopolitanism and national brotherhood, and by this awakening of national thought a whole series of political problems affecting the whole of Europe are rendered insoluble. Just as the organization of Austria as a unified modern State has now become impossible, so also has the civilizing of Russia, and the destiny of Europe, viz. to be shipwrecked over these territories which are in it but not of it, begins to reveal itself.
At the close of the Napoleonic era the whole of Europe is in a condition of misery. Far-seeing ideas of reform can be neither thought out nor worked out; only extemporized palliative measures suit the time. The will-to-progress is therefore unable to recover its former vigour.
It is fatally affected, too, by the fact that everybody with any capacity for independent thought feels himself attracted by this new valuation of things and facts, and thereby drawn on to irritation at the one-sided, doctrinaire character of the rationalist way of looking at life.
Nevertheless, the position of the will-to-progress is far from being a critical one. The first attacks are made by Romanticism and the feeling for reality, but are mere outpost-skirmishes, and for a long time yet the will-to-progress remains master of the field. Bentham remains still the great authority. Alexander II. of Russia, Tsar from 1801 to 1825, instructs the legislative commission which he sets up to obtain on all doubtful points the opinion of the great Englishman. Madame de Staël expresses the opinion that the fateful period she has lived through will one day be called by posterity not the Napoleonic age but the Benthamite. 37
The noblest men of the period still live in the unshaken [pg 104] conviction that nothing can delay the speedy and conclusive victory of the purposive and moral. The philosophically minded mathematician and astronomer, the Marquis Marie Jean de Condorcet (1743-1794), though put by the Jacobins upon the list of the proscribed, writes, while living in concealment in Paris in a dismal room in the Rue des Fossoyeurs, his Historical Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit. 38 Then, having been betrayed, he wanders about the Clamart quarries, is recognized by the labourers, in spite of his disguise, as an aristocrat, and while confined in the prison of Bourg la Reine, puts an end to his life by poison. The document in which he gave his exposition of the ethical belief in progress concludes with a forward glance at the time, now soon to appear, when reason, having attained a position of permanent sovereignty, will put every human being in possession of the rights which belong to man as man, and will establish purposive and ethical relations in every department of life.
There is one thing, it must be admitted, which Condorcet and those who share his views overlook. Their belief that the final result will be good might be considered justifiable if the will-to-progress had been endangered only through unfavourable outward circumstances, the revival, that is, of the higher estimation of reality, and the romantic idealizing of the past. But it is threatened far more seriously by something else than it is by them. The assurance displayed by rationalism rests on the fact that it regards the optimistic-ethical world-view as something proved to be correct. But it is not that. It rests like the world-views of Confucius and the Later Stoics on a naïve interpretation of the world. All deeper thought, therefore, even if it is not directed against rationalism, or even if it aims at strengthening its position, must in the long run have a damaging effect upon it. Hence Kant and Spinoza mean doom to it. Kant undermines it by his attempt to [pg 105] provide a deeper foundation for the essence of the ethical. Spinoza, the thinker of the seventeenth century, brings it to confusion when his nature-philosophy begins, a hundred years after his death, to occupy people’s attention.
It is about the beginning of the new century, the nineteenth, just when the pressure exerted by material and spiritual circumstances alike begins to make itself felt, that the optimistic-ethical world-view begins to suspect the existence of the serious problems which are cropping up within it.
CHAPTER IX
THE OPTIMISTIC-ETHICAL WORLD-VIEW IN KANT
Kant’s ethics, deepened, but lacking content
SO far as the general tendency of his thought goes Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) lives entirely in the optimistic-ethical world-view of rationalism. 39 He has, however, a feeling that its foundations are not deep and firm enough, and he regards it as his task to put them on ground which is in every respect more secure. For this purpose a deeper ethic, and a less naïve positiveness in assertions about world-view which touch upon the supra-sensible, seem to him desirable.
Like the English intellectualists and intuitionists, Kant is offended by the idea that the ethic in which the modern age finds satisfaction and its impulse to activity is rooted merely in considerations of the universal advantage of morally good actions. Like them, he feels that it is something more than this, and that in the ultimate analysis it has its origin in the compulsion which men experience to strive for self-perfecting. But while his predecessors stick fast in the matter provided by semi-scholastic philosophy and theology, he attacks the problem along the lines of pure ethical thought. It follows for him that the fundamental origin and the exalted character of the moral can be preserved only if we always consciously make it an end in itself, and never merely a means to an end. Even if moral conduct prove itself to be always advantageous and practical, our motive to it must nevertheless always be a [pg 107] purely inward compulsion. The utilitarian ethic must abdicate before that of immediate and sovereign duty. That is the meaning of the doctrine of the categorical imperative.
The English anti-utilitarians had in common with the utilitarians the thought that the moral law was related in its essence to empirical natural law. Kant, however, asserts that it has nothing to do with the order of nature, and has its origin in supra-natural impulses. He is the first since Plato to feel, like him, that the ethical is the mysterious fact within us. In powerful language he proves in the Critique of the Practical Reason that ethics are a volition which raises us above ourselves, makes us free from the natural order of the world, and attaches us to a higher world-order. That is his great discovery.
In the development of it, however, he is not happy. Whoever asserts the absoluteness of moral duty, must also give the moral an absolute and completely universal content. He must specify a principle of conduct which shows itself as absolutely binding, and as lying at the foundations of the most varied ethical duties. If he does not succeed in doing this, his work is only a fragment.
When Plato announces that ethics are something supra-natural and puzzling, his world-view provides him with a basic principle of the ethical which corresponds to these qualities, and also has a definite content. He is in a position to define ethics as a process of becoming pure and free from the world of sense. This, his own special ethic, he develops in the passages where he is consistent with himself. Then, when he cannot complete his argument without an active ethic, he has recourse to the popular theory of virtue.
Kant, however, as a child of the modern spirit, cannot let world- and life-denial rank as an ethic. Therefore, since he can go only a part of the way with Plato, he sees himself faced with the confusing task of letting a purposive, activist ethic which is directed on the empirical world originate in impulses which are not determined by any adaptation to the empirical.
He can find no solution of the problem thus set. In the form which he gives it it is in fact insoluble. But he never even realises that he has arrived at the problem of finding a basic principle of the moral which is a necessity of thought. He is content with formally characterizing ethical duty as absolutely binding. That duty, unless a real content is at once given to it, remains an empty concept, he is unwilling to admit. For the exalted character of his basic principle of the moral he pays the price of having it devoid of all content.
Beginnings of an attempt to establish a basic moral principle which has a content are to be found in his treatise, Prolegomena to a Metaphysic of Morals (1785), and again later in A Metaphysic of Morals (1797). In the 1785 volume he arrives at the dictum: “Act in such a way that you use every human being both in your own person and in everyone else’s always as an end, never merely as a means.” But instead of seeing how far the totality of ethical duties can be developed out of this principle, he prefers in the 1797 treatise to set before ethics two ends to be aimed at, viz. the perfecting of oneself and the happiness of others, and to enlarge upon the virtues which promote them.
In his investigation of the ethic which aims at personal perfecting, he drives his gallery with sure instinct towards the recognition that all virtues which contribute thereto must be conceived of as manifestations of sincerity and of reverence for one’s own spiritual being. He does not, however, go the length of comprehending these two as a unity, just as little does he concern himself to make clear the inner connexion between self-perfecting and effort directed to the common good, and in that way to dig down to the roots of the ethical as such.
How far Kant is from understanding the problem of finding a basic moral principle which has a definite content can be seen from the fact that he never gets beyond an utterly narrow conception of the ethical. He persists obstinately in drawing the boundary of his ethic as close [pg 109] as possible, making it concerned with no duties beyond those of man to man. The relation of man to non-human existences he does not draw within it. It is only indirectly that he includes in it the prohibition of cruelty to animals, putting this among the duties of man to himself. By inhuman treatment of animals, he says, sympathy with their sufferings is blunted in us, and thereby “comes a weakening of a natural disposition which is very helpful to our morality in relation to other men, and it gradually dies out.”
Again as to the vandalism of the destruction of what is beautiful, in the form, that is, of natural objects which are viewed as entirely without feeling, this is said to be unethical only because it violates the duty of man to himself by undermining the desire—itself a support to morality—of having something to love without regard to utility.
If the sphere of the ethical is limited to the relations of man to man, then all attempts to reach a basic principle of the moral with an absolutely binding content are rendered hopeless beforehand. The absolute demands the universal. If there really is a basic principle for the moral, it must be concerned in some way or other with the relations between man and life as such in all its manifestations.
Kant, then, does not essay the task of developing an ethic which corresponds to his deepened conception of the ethical. On the whole he does nothing more than put the current utilitarian ethic under the Protectorate of the Categorical Imperative. Behind a magnificent façade he constructs a block of tenements.
His influence on the ethics of his time is twofold. He furthers it by challenging it to profounder reflection on the nature of the ethical and the ethical destiny of man. At the same time he is a danger to it in that he robs it of its simplicity. The strength of the ethic of the age of reason lies in its naïve utilitarian enthusiasm. It directly enlists men in its service by offering them good aims and objects. Kant makes it insecure by bringing this directness in question and calling for an ethic which is derived from much less elementary considerations. Depth is gained at [pg 110] the cost of vitality, because he fails to establish at the same time a basic moral principle with a content, a principle which compels acceptance from deep and yet elementary considerations.
Several times Kant actually makes it his object to block the natural sources of morality. He will not, for example, allow direct sympathy to be regarded as ethical. The inner feeling for the suffering of another as if it were one’s own is not to count as duty in the real sense of the word, but only as a weakness by which the evil in the world is doubled. All help to others must have its source in a reasoned consideration of the duty of contributing to the happiness of others.
By taking from ethics their simplicity and directness, Kant also loosens the connexion which they and the belief in progress had formed with one another, and through which the two together had proved so productive of good. The disastrous separation between them which later on, in the course of the nineteenth century, became complete, was partly due to him.
In consequence of his wishing to drive out the naïve rationalistic conception of the ethical in favour of a deepened one without at the same time being in a position to establish a basic principle of it which has been correspondingly deepened, has a definite content of its own, and is directly convincing, Kant brings the ethics of his time into danger. He labours at the provision of new foundations without remembering that the house will develop cracks, if it is not propped up sufficiently.
Kant’s attempt to reach an ethical world-view
Kant passes by the problem of finding a basic principle of the moral with a definite content, because, while attempting to deepen the concept of the ethical, he pursues an object which lies outside ethics. He wishes to bring ethical idealism into connexion with an idealistic representation of the world which has its source in a theory of knowledge. But [pg 111] from that source he hopes there will come an ethical world-view able to satisfy critical thought.
Why has Kant with a rigorism which intentionally depreciates ordinary moral experience ventured forward to the discovery that the moral law has nothing to do with the natural world-order, but is something super-sensible? Because he refuses, similarly, to let the sensible world which is experienced by us in space and time be accepted as anything more than a manifestation of something nonsensible which makes up true reality. The concept of a moral which contains none but inward and spiritual duties is for him the expanding ladder which he draws out so as to reach by means of it the region of Being in itself. He has no feeling of dizziness when in company with ethics, he mounts above all empirical experience and all empirical aims and objects. He is determined to go right up with her, and she can never be sufficiently a priori for him, because he sets up another ladder of the same length, that of epistemological idealism, and tries to lean one against the other, so that they may give each other mutual support.
How does it come about that the theoretical assumption that the world of sensible phenomena has a non-sensible world of Being lying behind it, has any importance for world-view? Because within the notion of absolute duty which man experiences at work within himself there lies a fact of the world-order of that same non-sensible world. Hence arises the possibility, so Kant thinks, of raising to certainty by means of ethics those great elements in the non-sensible world which are of value for the optimistic-ethical world-view, viz. the ideas of God, of the ethical freedom of the will, and of immortality, which otherwise would always remain merely problematical.
So far as rationalism affirms unhesitatingly from the standpoint of theoretical knowledge the ideas of God, of the ethical freedom of the will (i.e., of virtue), and of immortality, which make up its optimistic-ethical world-view, it builds upon a foundation which cannot bear the weight of critical thought. Kant wishes, therefore, to erect the [pg 112] optimistic-ethical world-view as a lake-dwelling upon piles rammed into place by ethics. These three ideas are to be able to claim real existence for themselves as necessary postulates of the ethical consciousness.
This plan, however, of thus securing the position of the optimistic-ethical world-view cannot be carried out. It is only the idea of the ethical freedom of the will that can be made a postulate of the moral consciousness. To establish the ideas of God and immortality as equally “postulates,” Kant has to abandon all honourable logic and argue with bold and ever bolder sophisms.
There is no way of uniting epistemological and ethical idealism, however enticing the undertaking looks at first sight. When they are set side by side, the happenings which take place according to a law of causation subordinate to freedom, and become conscious in man through the moral law, become identified with the happenings which are universal in the world of things in themselves. There ensues a disastrous confusion of the ethical with the intellectual. If the sensible world is only a manifestation of an immaterial world, then all the happenings which come about in the space and time sphere of causation produced by necessity are only parallel appearances of the events which are brought about in the intellectual sphere of causation produced by freedom. All happenings, therefore, human activity just as much as natural happening, are, according to the point of view, at once intellectual and free, and at once natural and necessary. If ethical activity produced by freedom is represented as analogous with the results of epistemological idealism, then either everything that happens in the world, conceived as intellectual happening, is ethical, or there is no such thing as an ethical happening. Because it has chosen to put side by side these two things, human activity and natural happening, Kant’s way of looking at the question has to renounce all ability to maintain the difference between them. But the very life of ethics depends on this difference being there and effective.
Epistemological idealism is a dangerous companion for the ethical. The world-order of immaterial happening has a supra-ethical character. From the setting side by side of ethical and epistemological idealism there can never result an ethical world-view: it will always be a supra-ethical one.
From epistemological idealism, therefore, ethics have nothing to expect, but everything to fear. By its depreciation of the reality of the empirical world the ethical world-view is not helped: it is injured.
Ethics have materialist instincts. They want to concern themselves with empirical happenings and transform the circumstances of the empirical world. But if that world is only “appearance,” derived from an intellectual world which functions within it or behind it, ethics have nothing on which to act. To wish to influence a self-determined play of appearances has no sense. Ethics can therefore allow validity to the view that the empirical world is mere appearance only with the limitation that activity exerted upon the appearance does at the same time influence the reality lying behind it. But thereby they come into conflict with all epistemological idealism.
Kant is defeated by the same fate which rules in Stoic, Indian, and Chinese monism alike. As soon as thought tries in any way to comprehend ethics in connexion with the world-process, it falls at once, whether it is conscious of it or not, into the supra-ethical manner of regarding it. Fully to shape ethics to an ethical world-view means letting them come to terms with nature-philosophy. Ethics are thereupon, as a matter of fact, devoured in one way or another by that philosophy, even if they are in word saved from that fate. The coupling of ethical idealism with epistemological is only bringing ethics and nature-philosophy into relation with one another in a roundabout way by which it is hoped to outwit the logic of facts. But this logic cannot be outwitted. The tragical result lies in the identification which has been made of the ethical with the intellectual.
The ethical is not something irrational which becomes explicable when we betake ourselves from the world of appearance to the region of immaterial Being that lies behind it. Its intellectual character is of a peculiar kind, and rests upon the fact that the world-process, as such, comes in man into contradiction with itself. It follows that the ethical will and ethical freedom of the will are not explicable by any theory of knowledge, and cannot, moreover, serve as a support to any such theory.
As a result of conceiving the moral law and empirical obedience to natural law as in absolute opposition to each other, Kant finds himself on the road which leads to a dualistic world-view. Afterwards, however, in order to satisfy the claims of the unitary and optimistic world-view which the spirit of the age prescribes to him, he manages with the stratagems which are provided for him by the combination of ethical and epistemological idealism, to work himself back on to the road which leads to the monistic point of view.
Kant is great as an ethical thinker, great too with his theory of knowledge, but as shaper of a world-view he is not in the first rank. By his deepened conception of the nature of the ethical, a conception which lands him in dualistic thought, the problem of the optimistic-ethical world-view is unfolded in an entirely new way. Difficulties reveal themselves which till then no one could have imagined to exist. But he does not deal with them. He is blinded by his ambition to be the Copernicus of the optimistic-ethical world-view, believing that he can show the difficulties inherent in that view to be misunderstandings which explain themselves away as soon as, by means of his epistemological idealism, actual circumstances and relations take the place of these which are apparent but inexplicable. In reality he does nothing but replace the naïve optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world which was the basis of action for the rationalists by an artfully contrived one.
He does not take the trouble to ask in what the optimistic [pg 115] ethical world-view consists, to what final items of knowledge and demands it leads, and how far these are confirmed by experience of the moral law. He takes it over without examination in the formula: “God, Freedom (or Virtue), and Immortality,” which was supplied to it by rationalism, and wishes to raise it in this naïve form to a certainty.
There is thus in Kant’s philosophy the most terrible want of thought interwoven with the deepest thinking. New truths, weighty in their novelty, make their appearance in it. But they get only half-way on their journey. The absoluteness of ethical duty is grasped, but its content is not investigated. Experience of the ethical is recognized as the great secret by means of which we comprehend ourselves as “other than the world”; but the dualistic thinking which goes with it is not worked out any further. That the final items of our knowledge of our world-view are assertions of the ethical will is admitted, but the consequences of this supremacy of the will over knowledge are not thought out to a conclusion.
Kant stimulates powerfully the men of his time, but is unable to make secure for them the optimistic-ethical world-view in which they have lived. His mission is, although both he and they are content to deceive themselves in the matter, to deepen it, and ... to let it become less secure than before.
CHAPTER X
NATURE-PHILOSOPHY AND WORLD-VIEW IN SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ
Spinoza’s attempt to reach an optimistic-ethical nature-philosophy
JUST when Kant is beginning to influence men’s minds, the entirely different ideas of a thinker who had now been dead for a century, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), 40 begin to interest those who are searching for a world-view. The Critique of Pure Reason appears in 1781. In 1785 F. H. Jacobi in his letters addressed to Moses Mendelssohn, Concerning the Teaching of Spinoza, draws attention once more to the philosopher whom hitherto everyone had attacked without making any effort to understand him.
Spinoza desires to obtain an ethic from a real nature-philosophy. He makes no attempt to give an optimistic-ethical interpretation of the universe, or to refashion it with any theory of knowledge. He accepts it just as it is in every respect. His philosophy is therefore elementary nature-philosophy, but his method of expounding it is by no means elementary. Acquiescing in the way Descartes puts the problem and the language he uses, he makes his own thought about the universe proceed “in geometrical fashion” in a series of axioms, definitions, precepts, and proofs. Nature-philosophy is embodied in his philosophizing in a magnificent way, but it is as stiff as an ice-bound landscape.
His chief work—published after his death, because he could not venture to publish it himself—he entitles Ethics. The [pg 117] title is confusing, because the nature-philosophy in it is developed almost as completely as the ethics. It is only when the reader has shaken himself free of all naïve conceptions in his thought about the universe that he can be permitted, according to Spinoza, to begin upon ethics. The fact that ethics too are broken up into precepts which are given as proved is very prejudicial to their exposition.
In his attempt to found ethics upon nature-philosophy, Spinoza proceeds as follows. Everything that exists, he says, is given in that infinite Being, which may be called either God or Nature. For us, and to us, it presents itself in two forms: as thought (spirit) and as corporeity (matter). Within this divine nature everything, human activity included, is determined by necessity. There is no such thing as doing, there are only happenings. The meaning of human life, therefore, cannot consist in action, but only in coming to an ever clearer understanding of man’s relation to the universe. Man becomes happy when besides belonging to the universe naturally, he also surrenders himself to it consciously and willingly, and loses himself spiritually within it.
Spinoza demands therefore a higher experience of life. With the Stoics and the thinkers of India and China, he belongs to the great family of the monistic and pantheistic nature-philosophers. Like them, he conceives of God merely as the sum-total of nature, and accepts as valid only the notion of God which makes him in this way an independent unity. The attempts, made in the interests of the ethical world-view, to allow God to be at the same time an ethical personality standing outside the universe, are to him an offence against thought. Their only object is, of course, to obtain with the help of a confessed or unconfessed dualism a starting-point for an optimistic-ethical world-view. They are striving to reach along naïve-religious by-roads the goal for which the rationalistic optimistic-ethical interpretation of the universe is making along the direct, but not less naïve, main-road.
The tragic result of monistic thinking in the Stoic, the Indian, and the Chinese philosophies is that nature-philosophy, when consistent, arrives only at resignation, not at ethics. Has Spinoza escaped this fate?
Like Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, Lie-tse, and the Chinese thinkers as a body, Spinoza champions an optimistic monism without suspecting that under a far-away heaven and in a far-off age, he had such great predecessors. 41 His resignation is of a world- and life-affirming character. He conceives of infinite Being not as something devoid of qualities, as the Indians do, but as life with a full content. The self-perfecting, therefore, for which man is to strive is not for him, as it is for them, in any way an anticipation of a state of death, but a living out of life which is guided by deep reflexion. An elegantly egoistic world- and life-affirmation speaks through him, as through Chwang-tse.
The efforts of the man who refuses to deceive himself about himself are not directed, therefore, to any sort of action which is recognized as serviceable, but are concerned with maintaining his own Being and giving it the fullest possible experience of life. Whatever good he does to others he never does for their sakes, but always for his own.
Spinoza rejects the achievement of modern ethics as influenced by Christianity, viz. the regarding of altruism as something that belongs to the essence of ethics, and confines himself to the thought that in the last resort all ethical action aims at our own interests, though it may be at our highest spiritual ones. In order to avoid thinking anything which is not a necessity of thought, he goes back of his own free will into the captivity in which ancient ethics lived.
If he could let himself go, he would, like Chwang-tse, conduct a campaign against the morality of love and duty. But since he already has as thoroughgoing opponents the [pg 119] authorities, the theologians, whether Jewish or Christian, and almost every philosopher, he has to speak cautiously and offer mankind without attracting notice the life-view which advocates profound and thinking egoism.
Just as God, the totality of universal Being, acts not with any aim or object but from an inner necessity, so also does the man who has attained to insight. He does only what contributes to complete experience of life, nothing else. Virtue is capacity for self-maintenance at the highest level, and this self-maintenance is attained to when reason is the highest motive to action, and efforts after knowledge and freedom from passion take possession of the man and make him free, that is, allow his conduct to be determined by himself alone and on purely inward grounds. The ordinary man is unstable, moved hither and thither in all sorts of ways by outward causes, with no idea of his future fortune or his final fate, like a ship that is tossed about, now here, now there, on a stormy sea. Ethics, therefore, consists in living our life more in the form and fashion given it by thought than in bodily actuality.
Acting, therefore, with a deep, enlightened egoism and purely from intellectual impulses, a man behaves nobly in every relation of life. He strives to requite hatred, indignation, and contempt with love and noble feeling, because he knows that hatred causes him discomfort. He seeks at any price to create around him an atmosphere of peace. He never acts deceitfully, but always straightforwardly. He has no need to feel sympathy. Since he lives entirely under the guidance of reason, he does good whenever the opportunity offers, on principle, and therefore does not need to be roused to noble feeling by any experience of discomfort. In fact he avoids sympathy. Again and again he makes it clear to himself that everything that happens is brought about by some necessity in the divine nature and in obedience to eternal laws. Just as he finds nothing in the world which deserves hatred, mockery, and contempt, so he finds in it nothing to evoke sympathy. [pg 120] Man must be ever striving to be virtuous and happy, and if he is conscious of having done good within the limits of what is commanded him, he can with an easy mind leave his fellow-men and the world to their fate. Beyond the possibilities of his own immediate activities he need have nothing to do with them.
The wise man who practises the higher life-affirmation possesses power. He has power over himself, power over his fellow-men, and power over circumstances. How very similar is the tone of Spinoza’s thought to that of Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, and Lie-tse!
Spinoza lives out his own ethic. In contented independence he passes his life, till consumption brings it to an early close. He declines an invitation to be lecturer in philosophy at Heidelberg University. He is strict with himself, but his resignation is lighted up by a mild trait of considered humanity and friendliness. The persecutions to which he is exposed fail to embitter him.
Intent though he is on thinking only in accordance with pure nature-philosophy, Spinoza does not concern himself so exclusively with the two natural entities, nature herself and the individual man, as do many of his Chinese predecessors, but maintains an interest in organized society. He is convinced that it betokens progress when men change, from the “natural” stage of society to the “civic.” Being formed for living with his fellows, man is freer if he settles by general agreement what belongs to each, and what the relations are to be between himself and society. The State must, therefore, have power to issue general orders as to how people are to live, and to secure respect for its laws by means of penalties.
A real devotion of oneself to the common weal appears, however, to Spinoza not to be called for. According to him the perfect human society appears of itself just in proportion as its individual members live according to reason. In contrast, therefore, to his contemporary, Hobbes, Spinoza looks for the progress of society not to the [pg 121] measures taken by the authorities, but to a growth towards perfection in the dispositions of their subjects. The State is to educate its citizens not to submissiveness, but to the right use of freedom. In no way must it do any injury to their sincerity, and it must therefore tolerate all religious views.
Far as Spinoza goes to meet the spirit of the age, there is one point on which he cannot agree with it, viz. that there are ethical aims and objects, aims and objects practical and purposive, to be realized in the world.
Advancing far ahead of his contemporaries, he reaches a universal notion of ethics, and recognizes that from the standpoint of consistent thinking, every ethical relation is nothing but an expression of the relation of the individual to the universe. When, however, ethics have in this way become universal, they are faced by the question how the relation of the individual to the universe is conceivable as producing an effect upon the universe. On the answer to this question it depends whether a real activist ethic can be established, or whether the ethical is only so far present as resignation can be explained as ethical.
That is the reef which threatens danger to all nature-philosophy, and whenever a thinker imagines that with clever seamanship and a favourable wind he can sail round it without coming to grief upon it, he is nevertheless finally driven upon it, as by submarine currents, and suffers the same fate as his predecessors. Like Lao-tse and Chwang-tse, like the Indians, the Stoics, and all self-consistent thinkers before him, Spinoza is unable to furnish what ethics demand, viz. that the relation of man to the universe shall be conceived of as not merely a spiritual relation, but as active devotion to it in the world of sense. The opponents of this solitary thinker are instinctively conscious that with the re-establishment of an independent nature-philosophy there appears something which means danger to the optimism and the ethics of their world-view. Hence [pg 122] we find in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries everyone uniting to suppress Spinoza’s philosophy.
It is on behalf of optimism that the age is most troubled. The terrible earthquake which in 1755 destroyed Lisbon, sets the mass of men asking whether the world is really ruled by a wise and kindly Creator. Voltaire, Kant, and many other thinkers of the age seize on the occurrence as a topic for discussion, partly confessing their perplexity, partly seeking new ways out of the difficulty for their optimism.
Leibniz’s optimistic-ethical world-view side by side with nature-philosophy
How little optimism and ethics have to expect from a real nature-philosophy is shown not only in Spinoza, but also in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). 42 In his Theodicée (1710) he tries to be fair to the optimistic world-view. He is helped in this by the fact that his nature-philosophy is much more living and adaptable than Spinoza’s. He is also determined to employ every possible device to attach an optimistic meaning to reality. He nevertheless gets no further than a laborious establishment of the conclusion that the actually existing world is the best of all possible ones.
Moreover, so much of optimism as he rescues is useless for his world-view because it contains no energies which can be directed to ethical action upon the world. When he is consistent with himself he remains, like Spinoza, a prisoner within nature-philosophy. All the difficulties for ethics which Spinoza’s deterministic nature-philosophy contains within itself, are to be found also in his. Owing to the fact that he does not put the union of thought (spirit) and extension (matter) far away in the Absolute, but allows it to be realized in countless tiny individualities [pg 123] which in their totality constitute the universe—he calls them monads—his nature-philosophy corresponds to the multiform character of reality much better than Spinoza’s does. He anticipates to a considerable extent the modern nature-philosophy which is based on the cell-theory of matter. Yet he, too, remains under the spell of the way the problem is put by Descartes. He does not allow the individualities in which thought and extension are united, to enter into living relations with each other, but limits their existence to being merely forces with powers of conception. Their being consists in being conscious of the universe, more clearly some, more confusedly others, but each independent of the rest.
In Spinoza there is a possibility of reaching an ethic, inasmuch as an attempt can be made to give an ethical interpretation to the mystical relation between man and the Absolute. Leibniz bars this path against himself in that he does not recognize such an abstract Absolute as the content of the universe. It is, therefore, not the result of chance that he nowhere philosophizes searchingly about ethics. In no way can an ethic be deduced from his nature-philosophy.
Instead of admitting to himself this result and unfolding the problem of the relation between ethics and nature-philosophy, he weaves into his philosophy traditional dicta about ethics, and defines the Good as love to God and man.
In nature-philosophy Leibniz is greater than Spinoza, because he deals with living reality more thoroughly than the latter does. In the struggle for a correct world-view, however, he is far behind him, because Spinoza, a man with a simpler mental endowment than his, recognizes the reconciliation of ethics and nature-philosophy as the central problem of world-view, and proceeds to deal with it.
If Leibniz had remained consistent, he would have ended in atheism, as does the Indian Samkhya philosophy, which similarly makes the world consist of a multiplicity of [pg 124] eternal individualities. Instead of that, he introduces into his nature-philosophy, in order to rescue for himself a satisfactory world-view, a theistic notion of God, and by giving it an optimistic, ethical, and theistic expression, he makes it acceptable to the eighteenth century. His philosophy, popularized till it is almost unrecognizable by Christian Wolff (1679-1754), helps to lay the foundations of German rationalism.
But in spite of the treason of which he is thus, though with the best intentions, guilty against nature-philosophy, Leibniz cannot undo the fact that thinking on nature-philosophy lines awoke at that time to activity through him. Without wishing it, he too contributes to making Spinoza an influence.
But to let oneself be mixed up with nature-philosophy is for the spirit of the time to step into the dangerous unknown. It therefore resists as long as possible. At last, however, since Kant and Spinoza together are undermining the optimistic-ethical world-view of rationalism which has been built upon the real world and so conveniently fitted up, it has to make up its mind to rebuild, and attempt the process of arriving at a conception of optimism and ethics by direct thinking on the essential nature of the world. For the carrying out of this undertaking the German speculative philosophy offers its services.