CHAPTER XI
J. G. FICHTE’S OPTIMISTIC-ETHICAL WORLD-VIEW
Speculative philosophy and Gnosticism
THE vision of an optimistic-ethical philosophy cast in one mould hovers in front of speculative philosophy, which hopes to discover the meaning of the world by the most direct route. It will have nothing to do with analysing the phenomena of the universe in order to deduce its nature from them. It proceeds deductively, not inductively. In pure abstract thinking it hopes to learn for itself how the real world has evolved out of the notion of Being. It is imaginative nature-philosophy in a logical dress.
The right to deal with the world in this fashion is derived by speculative thought from the results of the theory of knowledge, according to which the world as we observe it is more or less our own representation of it. We have, somehow or other, a creative share in its coming into existence. It follows that the logic which is the rule with the finite ego is to be conceived as an emanation of that which holds good with the Absolute. The individual is therefore entitled to disclose in his own thinking the motives and the process of the emanation of the empirical world out of the notion of Being. Speculation, or in other words constructive logic, is the key to the secret door into knowledge of the world.
Generically, speculative German philosophy is essentially related to the Græco-Oriental Gnosticism, which in the first centuries of the Christian era advances its views concerning the emergence of the sensible world from the world of pure Being. 43 The Gnostic systems aim at establishing a world-view [pg 126] of redemption. They concentrate on the question how the spiritual individualities which find themselves in the material world came there, and how they can return from it into the world of pure Being. Speculative German philosophy on the other hand tries to obtain such a knowledge of the world as shall give a meaning to the activities of the spiritual individualities in the world. Speculative thinking at the beginning of the Christian era is dualistic and pessimistic; that at the beginning of the nineteenth is monistic and optimistic. In both cases, however, the method of obtaining the world-view is the same.
Among the representatives of the speculative philosophy the most eminent are: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). It is only Fichte and Hegel, however, who produce world-views with a characteristic stamp of their own. Schelling gets no further than a nature-philosophy, and stands almost completely aside from the struggle for an optimistic-ethical world-view with which his age is occupied. Kept in a perpetual state of flux, his thinking makes use of all possible starting-points one after another and is now more concerned with natural science, now more akin to Spinoza’s thought, and now to Christian. He never makes a definite, conscious attempt to found an ethic.
Fichte’s speculative founding of an ethic and of optimism
Fichte begins as the antipodes of Spinoza. 44 He aims at extracting from the universe a confession that it is a purely [pg 127] optimistic ethical one, by thinking Kant’s thoughts out to a conclusion.
Kant, according to him, made the mistake of not bringing his two discoveries, viz. epistemological idealism and the ethic of the categorical imperative into that inward connexion with one another in which they really stand.
What is the meaning of the fact that the moral law and the sensible world both become actual in me? That is the starting-point of Fichte’s philosophizing.
Through the categorical imperative I experience that my particular ego is a self-determined will to activity. Correspondingly, every “thing in itself” which I assume to exist behind phenomena as the real on which they are based, is similarly a self-determined will to activity. The essential nature of infinite Being also can consist of nothing else. The universe is, therefore, the phenomenal form of an infinite, self-determined will to activity.
Why does the absolute Ego appear as a phenomenon in a sensible world? Why is Being revealed as Becoming? If I understand this, I have comprehended the meaning of the world and of my own life.
Now the absolute Ego, because it is infinite will to activity cannot persist in being merely an Ego. It establishes a non-Ego to be a limit to itself in order that it may again and again overcome it, and thereby become conscious of itself as will to activity. This proceeding takes place amid the multiplicity of finite rational beings. In their power of intuition the sensible world becomes actual, and in their overcoming of it they recognize a duty which makes itself mysteriously felt within them and unites them with the world-spirit. This is the meaning of the philosophy of the identity of Ego and non-Ego.
It is not only, then, that the world exists merely in my mental creation of it: it is, further, only produced in me in order that I may have something on which my will to fulfilment of duty can exercise itself. The phenomena of becoming and disappearing which I project out of myself [pg 128] exist only that I may through them comprehend myself as an ethical being. In this way epistemological idealism and the categorical imperative, when they act together and one climbs on the shoulders of the other, can look behind the curtain which hides the secret of the world.
Kant protests against the idea that Fichte’s system is to be considered the completion of his philosophy. As a matter of fact, however, Fichte does with ingenious art continue the lines which were begun in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Practical Reason, and think out the ideas of the philosopher of Königsberg to a self-contained world- and life-affirming ethical world-view. He presents them in a generally intelligible form in The Destiny of Man, published in 1800. This book is one of the most powerful documents produced by the struggle for an ethical world-view.
Fichte gives a content to the abstract, absolute duty of Kant, making it consist in this, that man, as the instrument of the ever-active absolute Ego, assigns to himself the destiny of working with the latter “to bring the whole sensible world under the sovereignty of reason.”
Since his fundamental moral principle possesses a content, Fichte is able to deduce particular demands from it, but that content is so general and vague that the code of duty which is drawn out from it has but little vital force. Nothing can really be got out of this fundamental principle beyond the demand that man shall in every situation of life fulfil the duties which from time to time fall to him as a result of his destiny of having to help forward the sovereignty of reason over nature. Fichte therefore distinguishes the general duties which man, as such, has to fulfil, and the special ones which are incumbent on him according to his natural gifts, his social position, and his profession. The latter are emphasized as specially important.
By defining ethics as activity which aims at subjecting the sensible world to reason, Fichte gives a cosmic formulation to the utilitarian ethic of rationalism, and thus [pg 129] produces a comprehensive and deep foundation for the ethical enthusiasm which was a discovery of his time. In this matter also he carries through something which hovered before the mind of Kant.
Thereby he opposes the representatives of the popular philosophy of the Illumination, and in a polemical pamphlet he criticizes very severely Christoph Friedrich Nicolai. At bottom, however, the only reproach he can level at them is that they wish to go on housing ethics and belief in progress in the naïve world-view arrived at by the healthy human reason instead of accepting both of them from the world-view produced by the union of epistemological idealism and the categorical imperative. To persist in imperfect rationalism when the perfect has been made a reality by Kant and himself is, in his opinion, a crime against truth. To him the beginning of wisdom is insight into the paradox that “consciousness of the world of actuality springs from our need of action and not, vice versâ, our need of action from our consciousness of the world.”
The spirit of Fichte’s world-view, then, is completely that of rationalism, only that it believes it has found itself at home with him in the real nature of Being, and now comes forward with still stronger conviction and a still more burning enthusiasm. In Fichte’s writings, men are positively driven with the lash to work for the improvement of the world. With impressive pathos he teaches them to obey the inner voice which urges them on to activity, and indicates to them their definite duty whatever may be the special circumstances of their existence, and to recognize in so doing that they are thus fulfilling the highest, and indeed the only destiny of their lives.
It is as the result of this inner urge to activity that we long for a better world than the one which we see around us, and belief in that better world is the food by which we live. Fichte makes confession of unbounded optimism. “All those outbreaks of untamed force before which human power is annihilated, those devastating hurricanes, [pg 130] those earthquakes, those volcanic eruptions, can be nothing else than the last wrestlings of the wild mass of nature against the uniformly progressive, purposive, and life-promoting course to which, in opposition to its own tendencies, it is being compelled.” . . . “Nature is to become to us more and more transparent and capable of examination even to its innermost secret, and enlightened human power, armed with its own inventions, is destined to master it without trouble, and then to exploit peacefully its once for all made conquest.” 45 Here Fichte gives us the triumphant pagan of the belief in progress which the spirit of the modern age, that lives on the achievements of its knowledge and power, has been composing since the Renaissance. He is as thoroughly convinced as the staunchest rationalist that nature is the buffalo which has remained refractory so long, but will at last be brought beneath the yoke.
That mankind will perfect itself and reach a condition of unbroken peace, is to him as certain as the perfection that nature will one day arrive at. At present, it is true, we are in a period of arrested progress with temporary setbacks, but when this is past, and all useful things which have been discovered at one end of the world, get known to and distributed to all, then mankind, using its powers in complete co-operation and marching forward in step, will raise itself uninterruptedly, without arrest of progress or setback, to a culture of which we can form no conception.
To the State Fichte assigns in his early writings a not very important rôle, but in his later ones a great one. In The Foundations of the Law of Nature (Grundlage des Naturrechts) (1796), it is for him only the maintainer of law and order. In his work The Complete Commercial State (Der geschlossene Handelsstaat), which appeared in 1800, he allows it to organize industry and to take over social duties. In his Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation, 1808), he makes it a moral educator and a protector of the virtue of humanity.
The man who, with the help of epistemological idealism, has made his way through to the higher rationalism, is safe from losing his optimism, even though he goes through the cruellest experiences. He has grasped the fact that the sensible world is only the limit which the infinitely active will has created on purpose to be overcome. This lends him inward independence in the face of all happenings. He has no need to understand them individually. He can let a large proportion of them be put aside as puzzling to his finite spirit. What is essential he knows: viz. that what is real in the world is not matter, but spirit only.
Partaking of the eternally active spirit, man is raised above the world, and is eternal. The sufferings he meets with afflict nature only “with which he is connected in a marvellous way,” but not himself, the being who is exalted above the whole of nature. Of death he has no fear. He does not die to himself, but merely to those who survive him. . . . “All death in nature is birth. . . . Nature is throughout nothing but life. It is not death which kills, but the living life which, concealed behind the old one, now begins and proceeds to develop. Death and birth are nothing but the struggle of life with itself in an effort to reveal itself more and more clearly and more and more like its real self.” It is in similar words that the Chinese monist, Chwang-tse, announces that life is eternal and the dying of an individual only means that one existence is being re-cast to form another. .
Fichte’s mysticism of activity incapable of being carried through
Fichte’s philosophy of absolute activity is the expression of his own strong ethical personality, which with impetuosity and self-sacrifice takes problems in hand, and uses itself up in the strain involved. But even he is unable to make a genuine combination of epistemological idealism and ethical so as to produce an ethical world-view which is a [pg 132] necessity of thought. The impossibility of the undertaking reveals itself everywhere.
In order to conceive ethics as a part of the normal course of world-happenings, Fichte, like all others who make the same attempt, gives up as hopeless any differentiation between human action and world-happenings. The world-spirit’s impulse to activity, he says, experiences itself in man as will to ethical action. But, indeed, the whole world is filled with this will to activity which is for ever surging against the limitations it has set up for itself. Everything that happens is only an expression of it. What difference, then, is there between natural happenings and ethical? Between activity in itself and ethical activity? Purposive activity directed with knowledge and intention to the subjection of the sensible world to reason is ethical, decides Fichte. But what does that mean, when closely examined? It means that the finite spirit becomes moral by entering into and taking seriously the play of the infinite spirit which aims at overcoming its own self-created limitations. Looking in this way at Fichte’s thought, we see clearly that with the world-view which results from the combination of ethical and epistemological idealism, ethics have no longer any meaning.
Again, what is the meaning of “bringing the whole of the sensible world under the sovereignty of reason”? This conception of the ethical is not only too wide, but fantastic also. To a limited extent man is able to harness the forces of nature for his service, and with a little stretching of language he can, with Fichte, describe such action as not purposive merely, but also in the widest sense ethical. Upon this terrestrial globe he has some “influence,” but upon the world none. That he gives names to the mighty heavenly bodies and can calculate the orbits of many of them, cannot mean that he brings them under the sovereignty of reason. Upon deep-sea life, too, he exercises no other influence than catching specimens of it and giving them names.
That he may be able to assert that there is such a thing [pg 133] as an ethical purpose in the world, Fichte falsifies the world’s birth certificate, and gives it the categorical imperative for father and epistemological idealism for mother. But this is of no use. The ethical purpose thus produced cannot satisfy ethical thought.
By conceiving the infinite spirit, in which the finite spirit has a share, as will to activity, Fichte tries to make possible a world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation. In reality, however, this takes him no further than a more emphatic world- and life-affirmation, into which, with the help of speculative thought, he smuggles the idea of duty, thereupon proclaiming it to be ethical. It fares with him just as with the Chinese philosophers, who similarly exert themselves in vain to produce an ethic out of world- and life-affirmation.
Absorption in the Absolute by means of action is, as Fichte thinks, something prodigious, but, just like its counterpart, absorption in the Absolute which is effected by an act of thought, it is not ethical but supra-ethical. The element which is needed by the mysticism of absorption in the Absolute to make it ethical cannot be secured either by enhancing or by depreciating the will to activity.
Fichte’s mysticism of activity in which man lets loose his energy in the world is related to the ethic of deed, just as Spinoza’s mysticism of knowledge in which man is absorbed in the world is related to that of self-perfecting, but it is only very incompletely that either can develop itself into a real ethic.
The absorption in the Absolute which comes into actuality in an act of thought lies nearer to nature-philosophy than that which completes itself in an active deed. The Brahmans, the Buddha, Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, Spinoza, and the mystics of every age, have experienced the becoming one with the Absolute as a coming-to-rest in it. Fichte’s mysticism of activity lies more in the path of dualistic thinking than in that of real nature-philosophy. It is something which has been extorted by enthusiasm, but Fichte [pg 134] is devoted to it, and rightly, because he has a feeling that the interests of an active ethic are better guarded by it than by the other. Since, however, he thus once and for all decides for a nature-philosophy, he comes, dominated though he is by the ideal of an active ethic, more and more to the natural quietist consequences of a nature-philosophy. He goes through a process of evolution which brings him nearer to Spinoza’s world-view. In his Instruction Concerning the Blessed Life, which appeared in 1806, six years later than The Destiny of Man, it is to him no longer the ethical which in itself is the highest, but the religious. The ultimate meaning of life, as he now recognizes, is not to act in God, but to be merged in Him. “Self-annihilation is the gateway into the higher life.”
He believes, indeed, that he is thereby merely deepening his world-view without diminishing its ethical energy, and he remains himself, right to the end, the fiery spirit which consumes itself in activity for promoting the progress of the world. But his thought has bent under the weight of nature-philosophy. Without clearly admitting it to himself, he recognizes that out of nature-philosophy there can be drawn only an intellectual, not an ethical meaning for the world and life. Spinoza observes with a smile how he retires upon the thought beyond which a nature philosophy cannot advance.
Fichte is the first philosopher to declare plainly that no world-view is ethical which does not enable man to explain that an enthusiastic active devotion to the universe is something grounded in the nature of the world and of life. But the road he takes in order to develop this thought leads him astray. Instead of going more deeply into the question how ethical happenings, though coming from the world-spirit, and directed upon the world, are nevertheless different from normal world-happenings, and investigating the nature of this difference, he employs the trick, which had been made possible by Kant, of declaring, with the help of epistemological idealism, that the ethical world-view is a necessity of thought. Many of his contemporaries [pg 135] believe with him that it has thereby really reached a position of supremacy, and even those who cannot go with him the whole length of the philosophy of the Ego and Non-Ego, are gripped by the force of the ethical personality which speaks from Fichte’s writings.
The direct effect, then, of Fichte’s philosophy is that the optimistic, ethical spirit of rationalism maintains its position and becomes stronger and deeper. His philosophy is a source of inspiration which produces a mighty impulse to ethics and civilization. But the vessel in which, with a magnificent wind behind him, he starts with his companions on a voyage over the sea of knowledge is a leaky one. A catastrophe is only a question of time.
Fichte’s belief that he has obtained from the nature of the universe the living compulsion to ethical duty and ethical work which he feels within himself, is an illusion. The manner, however, in which he conceives the problem of the optimistic-ethical world-view, and perceives that for its solution the ordinary processes of life afford no help, so that more or less violent ones must be allowed to take their turn, reveals him as a great thinker.
CHAPTER XII
SCHILLER; GOETHE; SCHLEIERMACHER
Schiller’s ethical world-view; Goethe’s world-view based on nature-philosophy
VERY important is the fact that the deepened optimistic-ethical world-view of Kant and Fichte finds a champion in Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), who brings it to the mass of the people with the force, added by poetical language. He is himself philosophically gifted, and undertakes in addition to develop it further. He wishes to broaden the foundation of the ethical by showing its relation to the æsthetic.
In his Letters Concerning the Æsthetic Education of Mankind (1795), he works out the idea that art and ethics belong together as far as this, that man maintains with the sensible world a relation which is free and creative. “The transition from the passive condition of feeling to the active one of thinking and willing comes about in no other way than through an intermediate condition of æsthetic freedom. . . . There is no way of making the sentient man rational other than first making him æsthetic.” In what way the capacity for freedom which is built up in man by æsthetic practice really disposes him to morality, Schiller does not work out in further detail. His treatise, in spite of all the notice it attracted and deserves, is more rhetorical than substantial. He has not gone to the bottom of the problem of the relations between the æsthetic and the ethical.
In contrast to Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), stands in almost as cold an attitude to the world-view of the deepened rationalism as he does to that of ordinary rationalism. To him it is impossible to share [pg 137] the confidence with which others, looking around, regard optimistic and ethical convictions as well founded. What separates him from Kant, and Fichte, and Schiller, is reverence for the reality of nature. Nature is to him something in herself, not merely something existing with a view to mankind. He does not require from her that she shall fit herself completely into our optimistic-ethical designs. He does no violence to her either through epistemological and ethical idealism or through presumptuous speculation, but lives in her as a human being who looks at existence with wonder and does not know how to bring her relation to the world-spirit within any formula.
Descartes led modern philosophy astray by cutting the world up into objects which have extension and objects which think, and by going on, moreover, to refuse to each of them the possibility of influencing the other. Following in his steps, thinkers rack their brains over the problem of these two parallel kinds of existence, and try to embrace the world in formulas. That the world is life, and that in life lies the riddle of riddles, never enters their minds. Hence they overlook in their philosophizing what is most important. Because Descartes preceded them, the two great spirits who adhere to nature-philosophy, Spinoza and Leibniz, cannot get further than a nature-philosophy which is more or less dead. Being in the line of descent from Descartes, Kant and Fichte renounce all philosophizing over the real world.
Descartes and the ethical belief-in-progress, therefore, agree in a common neglect of nature. Both alike overlook the fact that she is living, and that she exists for her own sake, and it is because he cannot join them in this that Goethe dares to confess that he understands nothing about philosophy. His greatness is this: that in a time of abstract and speculative thought he had the courage to remain elemental.
Overwhelmed by the mysterious individual life in nature, he persists in maintaining a magnificently imperfect [pg 138] world-view. With the spirit of an investigator he looks within into everything; in that of an inquirer he looks around upon everything. He wants to think optimistically. Shaftesbury’s thoughts exercise their charm upon him also. But in the chorus of optimism which makes itself heard so loudly around him, he cannot join. World- and life-affirmation is for him not such a simple thing as it is for Fichte and Schiller. He strives to reach an ethical world-view, but admits to himself that he cannot carry it through, and he therefore does not venture to attribute a meaning to nature. To life, however, he will attribute one. He seeks it in serviceable activity. To make the world-view of activity at home in nature-philosophy is to him an inner necessity. The conviction that activity provides the only real satisfaction that is to be found in life and that therein lies the mysterious meaning of existence is shown by him in Faust as something which he has laboriously gained during his pilgrimage through existence and to which he will hold fast, without being able to explain it completely.
Goethe struggles to arrive at a conception of ethical activity, but cannot reach one because nature-philosophy is unable to provide him with any criterion of what is ethical. What that philosophy had to refuse to the Chinese monists and to Spinoza, she cannot give to him either.
The range of this world-view of Goethe’s which deals thus with reality remains hidden from his contemporaries. Its incompleteness alienates their sympathies and irritates them. For knowledge of the world and of life which cannot be reduced to a system, but sticks fast in facts, they have no understanding. They hold to their optimism and their ethic.
Schleiermacher’s attempt at a nature-philosophy
Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), stands apart both from the ordinary and from the deepened rationalism because he cannot free himself from the influence of [pg 139] Spinoza. 46 His life-work is directed to preaching the Spinozan nature-philosophy as being, as far as he can make it so, both an ethic and the Christian religion. Hence he always dresses it up as one or the other of these.
The accepted ethical code, in Schleiermacher’s opinion, makes man merely run about the earth as an ethical individual bent on improving the world. Living in this way, in a constant state of enthusiasm, he becomes in danger of losing himself and becoming unpersonal. He forgets that his primary duty is, first of all to be alone with himself, to look within himself, and, instead of being a mere human creature, to make himself into a personality.
This renunciation of rationalism’s enthusiasm for activity is to be found in the Monologues, those splendid introspective meditations meant for the first New Year’s Day of the nineteenth century. One seems to hear in them Lao-tse and Chwang-tse criticising the moralism and the fanaticism for progress of Confucius.
Man’s first task is, according to Schleiermacher, to realize his oneness with the Infinite and in the Infinite to see the world. Only that which results from this as action is really significant, and has importance for morality.
Spinoza’s ethic consisted in keeping oneself at the highest level and living one’s life more after the fashion of a life of thought than after that of a life of corporeal existence. Schleiermacher’s ethic has the same objective except that he seeks to combine with it a more comprehensive interest in the world than is to be found in Spinoza. He is helped in this direction by his belief that progress is something immanent.
We have, he says, no other perfecting to bring about in things than that which is inherent in them. Ethics, therefore, are not a setting up of laws, but the recognition and the description of the tendencies working for perfection which appear in the world itself, together with behaviour [pg 140] in accord with their spirits. The moral law is not distinct from the law of nature and pursues no other aims than the latter does. It is only the law of nature arriving in man at the consciousness of itself.
Schleiermacher, therefore, feels that his task is not, as Fichte conceived his to be, the bringing of the universe under the sovereignty of reason; it consists solely in supporting the oneness of nature and reason in the sphere of human action, which is ever striving to realize itself within that universe. “All ethical knowledge is the expression of the ever-beginning but never completed efforts of reason to become nature.” Ethics are a contemplative “science.” They revolve around the two poles of natural science and human history.
The ethic which results from this fundamental conception is, like those of Lao-tse and Chwang-tse, so toned down that there is no longer any real power in it. However completely Schleiermacher may try to conceal this fact by his wonderful powers of description, it plays only a subordinate rôle. What gives a meaning to human existence is something which is independent of deeds; it is the oneness with the Infinite which is experienced in feeling.
With its clever dialectic, but not in reality, Schleiermacher’s ethic shows itself finally to be superior to that of Spinoza. His world-view is that of Spinoza, only enriched by his belief in the immanence of the power of progress. Hence his ethic is iridescent with somewhat more brilliant colours.
Thus do a living nature-philosophy in Goethe and a Spinozan one in Schleiermacher undermine the ground on which stand the men of the now beginning nineteenth century, whose thinking is so enthusiastically optimistic-ethical. The crowd pays no attention to their dangerous proceedings. It gazes at the fireworks which Kant and Fichte let off, while Schiller recites his poetry. And now there begin to rise bursts of rockets which throw a peculiarly brilliant light. The past-master in the art of firework display, Hegel, has come into action!
CHAPTER XIII
HEGEL’S SUPRA-ETHICAL OPTIMISTIC WORLD-VIEW
Ethics in Hegel’s nature-philosophy, and in his philosophy of history
IN his speculative philosophy Fichte’s first and chief interest was ethical. Hegel, deeper and more objective than he, aims at truth before everything. 47 While using any helpful considerations which are provided by facts, his aim is to discover the meaning of Being. He therefore cannot join Fichte in the violent procedure, suggested by his ethic, of giving the world the categorical imperative for father and epistemological idealism for mother. Before going so far as to write out a birth-certificate for the world, he undertakes some material investigations. He studies the laws which govern events, as they are revealed in history. He then lays these as the foundation for the constructive operations which are to explain the origin of the world out of the notion of Being. His philosophy, therefore, is a philosophy of history become cosmic. The building, so far as one can measure it externally, is solidly constructed. That is why it is still convincing even where its lines lose themselves in infinity.
What, then, does Hegel discover to be the principle underlying the course of events in history? He discovers that every process of becoming advances with natural progress, and that this progress realizes itself in the occurrence of a consecutive series of contradictions which invariably issue in reconciliation! In thoughts as in facts, [pg 142] every thesis evokes an antithesis. Then these unite in a synthesis which preserves what is valuable in either of them. Every synthesis that is reached becomes again a thesis for a new antithesis. From these there results again a new synthesis, and so on for ever.
With the aid of this scheme Hegel can expound the course of history. From it he is also able to develop the basic principles of logic. Hence he is sure that from it it must be possible to make intelligible how the notional world which can be logically developed out of the notion of Being passes over into being the world of reality. He carries this fancy through to its conclusion in such magnificent fashion, that even we, who are proof against its charm, can understand how it was possible to become intoxicated with it.
While Fichte seeks to give an ethical meaning to the expansion of pure Being into the world of reality, Hegel from the very outset takes his stand upon the assertion that in its ultimate analysis the meaning of the world can only be an intellectual one. The Absolute has no other object in bringing a world into existence than to become conscious of itself. It is infinitely creative spirit, but not, as in Fichte’s thought, with the object of endlessly working, but with that of returning into itself by the road of its own creations.
In nature the Absolute comprehends itself only very dimly. It is first in man that it really experiences itself, and that in three ascending stages. In the man who is concerned merely with himself and nature it is still subjective spirit. In the communal spirit of men who cooperate for the legal and ethical organization of human society, it expands to objective spirit and at the same time, on a basis of notions provided within this spirit, shows itself capable of being creative. In art, in religion, and in philosophy it becomes conscious of itself as absolute spirit, existing in and for itself and having overcome the contradictions of subject and object, thought and Being. In art it contemplates itself as such; in religious devotion [pg 143] it presents itself as such; in philosophy, which is pure thought, it comprehends itself as such. With the world represented as thought, the Absolute experiences itself.
Before the destiny to which Spinoza submits with a smile, against which Fichte and Schleiermacher rebel, Hegel bows in courageous reverence for truth. His world-view is supra-ethical mysticism. The ethical is to him only a phase in the development of intellectuality. Civilization he conceives not as something ethical, but only as something intellectual.
For proof that the ethical is nothing in itself but only a phenomenon of the intellectual, Hegel appeals to French usage. “The moral,” he says, “must be taken in the wider sense in which it signifies not the morally good alone. ‘Le moral’ is in French opposed to the physical and means the spiritual, the intellectual, or the non-material in general.” 48
The notion of the ethical with which Hegel works is extraordinarily wide. It consists in “the will having for its objects not subjective, i.e., selfish, interests, but a universal content.” 49 It is the business of thought to define this universal content in particular instances.
If Hegel had fully explored the fact that the individual will comes to assign itself universal objects, and had felt this fact to be the mysterious one that it is, he could not have passed so lightly as he does over the ethical problem. He would have had to admit to himself that the spiritual element which manifests itself in it is unique in character, and cannot be included in any higher one, or classified under any other at all. The problem of the mutual relationship between the spiritual and the moral would have been clearly posed.
But Hegel is so anxious to find some sort of shelter for his speculative optimistic world-view that he estimates the birth of the ethical in man not by and for itself, but simply [pg 144] as a phenomenon of the rise of the supra-individual spirit. Instead of directing his thought to the question of how the individual spirit in each several person can be at the same time supra-individual and conscious of its oneness with the Absolute, Hegel sets out to make intelligible the higher experience of the individual by means of the mutual relations between it and the universal spirit of the collective body to which it belongs. He says it is presumption for the individual spirit as such to seek, as it does in Indian thought, to comprehend its relation to the Absolute. Becoming one with the Absolute is an experience of the universal spirit of collective humanity when it has reached its loftiest height. Only when it stands in connection with this, as a river with the waters of a lake through which it had flowed, can the individual spirit obtain experience of the Absolute. This is the fatal turning towards the general and supra-personal at which the Hegelian philosophy makes itself superficial.
Ethics, then, for Hegel have at bottom only the significance that they make possible the growth of a society in the collective spirit of which the absolute spirit can come to a consciousness of itself. Man becomes moral by submitting voluntarily to the demands which society recognizes as expedient with a view to the creation of the higher spirituality.
Hegel has no ethic for the individual. The deep problems of ethical self-perfecting and of the relations between man and man do not concern him. When he does come to talk about ethics his subject is the family, society, and the State.
With Bentham ethics complete law. Hegel works the two in together. It is significant that he wrote no treatise on ethics. All that he does publish about ethics is to be found in his philosophy of law.
His first concern is to show that the State, correctly conceived, is not merely a legal, but a legal-ethical body. Fichte had made it the ethical educator of the individual. For Hegel it is the essential element in all moral happenings, [pg 145] “the self-conscious moral substance,” as he expresses it. What is most valuable in the moral comes to actuality in it and through it. This overvaluing of the State is a natural consequence of his low valuation of the spiritual significance of individuality as such.
Hegel’s supra-ethical world-view. His belief in progress
With Fichte’s idea, which he found it impossible to work out completely, of giving ethics a cosmic foundation in such a way that its content might be the bringing of the world under the sovereignty of reason, Hegel can have nothing to do. His feeling for the real debars him from anything so fantastic. But that he altogether gives up the cosmic notion of ethics is fatal. Instead of allowing ethics and nature-philosophy to come to an understanding together in his speculative thought, he makes a sacrifice of ethics from the start. He refuses them the liberty (which they enjoyed with Spinoza, Fichte, and Schleiermacher), of trying to get themselves conceived as the relation of the individual to the universe. They are forbidden, further, to try (as they can do with the Chinese monists), to get accepted as a relation which forms part of the meaning of the universe. They are restricted to being a standard for the regulation of the relations between individuals and society. They may not be active as a formative idea in the creation of a world-view upon a foundation of nature-philosophy. They are simply built into the edifice as an already shaped and dressed stone.
In consequence of Hegel’s allowing ethics no significance beyond that of a preparatory motive to realizing the spiritual meaning of the world, his teaching becomes remarkably analogous to the Brahmanic. Hegel and the Brahmans are akin because, as consistent thinkers, they venture to admit that thought about the world and the Absolute which lies behind it can reach only an intellectual, never an ethical meaning in the union of the finite spirit [pg 146] with the infinite, and therefore value ethics only as a preparatory motive thereto. With the Brahmans ethics prepare the individual for the intellectual act in which he experiences the Absolute in himself and himself dies in it. With Hegel they help in the formation of society, in the communal spirit of which the Absolute first becomes capable of experiencing itself.
It is only a relative difference between Hegel and the Brahmans that the latter make their intellectualist mysticism individualist and world- and life-denying, while Hegel carries his through as world- and life-affirming, and makes the intellectual act take place only when a society has produced the requisite spirituality. The inner similarity in character of the two world-views is not affected thereby. One is the complement of the other. Both give value to ethics only as a phase of intellectuality.
With Hegel, as with the Brahmans, ethics are indeed given a shelter, but they are not shown to be necessary. For the production of the consciousness of oneness with the Absolute the decisive element for the Brahmans is, in the last resort, only a sufficient advance in world- and life-denial, and depth of meditation. With Hegel, society, which has to produce the spirituality in which the absolute spirit experiences itself in the finite, could come into existence just as well by means of law alone, as by means of ethics and law together. His ethic is, in truth, only a species of law.
With the Brahmans ethics are a colouring which their world- and life-denial takes on for a certain distance; with Hegel they are a similar mode of self-manifestation of his world- and life-affirmation. Hegel’s world-view is in and by itself supra-ethical mysticism with world- and life-affirmation, just as that of the Brahmans is supra-ethical mysticism with world- and life-denial.
That his world-view is this and nothing else Hegel admits in the fit of brutal frankness under the influence of which he wrote on June 25th, 1820, the famous Preface to his Philosophy of Law. Our task (he there explains,) is not to [pg 147] re-fashion reality in accordance with ideals which have arisen in our spirit, but we have to listen to the way in which the real world affirms itself, and us within itself, in its own immanent impulse to progress. “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” The eternal which is present under the form of the temporal and transient and is developing within this, it is worth our while to recognize and thereby to become reconciled with reality. It is not for philosophy to set up ideas about what is to be. Her task is to understand what is. She does not produce any new age, but is only “her own age comprehended in thought.” She always arrives too late to be an instructor as to what the world ought to be, and she begins to speak only when reality has completed its process of construction. “Minerva’s owl does not begin her flight till darkness is closing in.” Beneficent peace will be brought us by the sincere recognition of reality.
Rationalism is an ethical belief in progress combined with an ethical will-to-progress. It was as such that Kant and Fichte had undertaken to deepen it. After passing through Hegel’s mind it is only a belief in progress . . . belief in a progress which is immanent in things. It is this alone that this powerful speculative thinker believes himself able to place upon a cosmic foundation, and in this he is in contact with Schleiermacher. On the whole, and reduced to the simplest possible expression, his world-view and Schleiermacher’s lie not very far apart. The secret feud in which the two thinkers lived with one another had in reality no objective justification.
The extent of the strategical retreat on which Hegel enters remains hidden from his contemporaries. They rejoice unreservedly at the magnificent energy which his system displays, and with the less reservation because he himself only once, viz. in the Preface to his Philosophy of Law, expresses himself freely about the final results of his thinking. The fact that with him the moon of ethics is obscured does not evoke the excitement that might [pg 148] normally have been expected, because, in compensation, he allows the sun of the cosmically founded belief in progress to shine all the brighter. Being still under the influences of rationalism, the men of that time are so accustomed to regard ethics and belief in progress as organically connected that they look on the strengthening of optimism effected by Hegel as being also a strengthening of ethics.
Hegel’s formal assumption that progress comes about through a succession of antitheses which are always finally reconciled in valuable syntheses has kept optimism alive through most critical times right on to the present day. Hegel is the creator of that confident feeling for reality with which Europe staggered into the second half of the nineteenth century without becoming aware that ethics have at some point or other been left behind. And that being so, he is able to hold his optimistic philosophy of history out of which his world-view grows, only because he lives in a period when a general temper which works with ethical energies of extraordinary strength is carrying Humanity forward in an extraordinary way. Whence the progress comes, which he experiences all around him, the great philosophic historian does not recognize. He explains as produced through natural forces what has originated from ethical ones.
In Hegel’s world-view the connexion between ethics and belief in progress, in which the spiritual energy of modern times has always rested, is broken, and with the separation both are ruined. Ethics languish, and the belief in progress, now left to itself, becomes spiritless and powerless because it is now only a belief in immanent progress, and no longer a belief in progress of all kinds which is produced by enthusiasm. With Hegel there rises the spirit which borrows its ideals empirically from reality and believes in the progress of Humanity more than it labours to promote it. Hegel stands on the bridge of an ocean liner and explains to the passengers the wonders of the machinery in the vessel that is carrying them, and the mysteries of the [pg 149] calculation of its course. But he gives no thought to the necessary maintenance as before of the fires under the boilers. Hence the speed gradually diminishes until the vessel comes at last to a standstill. It no longer obeys the helm, and becomes a plaything of storms.