The fact that Schopenhauer can for a moment so far forget himself as to express himself sceptically about ethics has its own deep-reaching explanation. It belongs to the essence of world- and life-denial, which he wishes to proclaim as ethics, that it cannot be thought out consistently to a conclusion, and that it cannot be put consistently into practice. Even with the Brahmans and the Buddha it keeps itself alive by inadmissible concessions to world- and life-affirmation. But with Schopenhauer it goes so far in that direction that he can no longer make any attempt to bring theory and practice into harmony, but must move about resolutely in an atmosphere of unveracity.
Schopenhauer does succeed in letting the ethical appearance which world- and life-denial can assume, shine out in brilliant colours. But of really producing an ethic out of world- and life-denial he is as little capable as the Indians.
Nietzsche’s criticism of current ethics
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in the early period of his activity is under the spell of Schopenhauer. 74 One of his Old-fashioned Reflexions bears the title: “Schopenhauer as Educator.” Later on he goes through a development which leads him to recognise as the ideal a scientifically deepened Positivism and Utilitarianism. He is his real self first when, starting with Joyous Science, he tries to establish his world-view of the higher life-affirmation, and thereby becomes anti-Schopenhauer, anti-Christian, and anti-Utilitarian.
The criticism he passes upon the philosophical and religious ethics which he finds accepted is passionate and spiteful. But it goes deep. He casts at them two reproaches, viz. that they have made a pact with unveracity, and that they do not allow men to become personalities. In [pg 175] this he says only what had long been due. Sceptics had already made public many such complaints. But he speaks as one who is searching for the truth, and who is concerned about the spiritual future of mankind, thus giving such complaints a new tone and a wider range. Whereas the current philosophy believed that it had in the main solved the ethical problem, and was united with biological and sociological utilitarianism in the conviction that in the department of individual ethics there were no more discoveries to be made, Nietzsche turns the whole game upside down, and shows that all ethics rest upon those of the individual. The question about the essential nature of good and evil which was generally accepted as settled, he puts forward again in elemental fashion. The truth that ethics in their essential nature are a process of self-perfecting shines out in him, as in Kant, although in a different light. Hence his place is in the first rank of the ethical thinkers of mankind. Those who were torn from their false certainty when his impassioned writings descended on the lowlands of the thought of the outgoing nineteenth century, as the south wind sweeps down from the high mountains in spring, can never forget the gratitude they owe to this upheaver of thought, with his preaching of veracity and personality.
Accepted ethics are deficient in veracity, according to Nietzsche, because the conceptions of good and evil which they make current do not spring out of man’s reflexion on the meaning of his life, but have been invented in order to keep individuals useful to the majority. The weak proclaim that sympathy and love are good, because that is to their advantage. Thus led astray, all men try to force themselves to the opinion that they fulfil the highest destiny of their existence by surrender of themselves and devotion to others. But this opinion never becomes with them a real inward conviction. They live out their lives without any thought of their own as to what makes their life valuable. They join the crowd in praising the morality of humility and self-sacrifice as the true morality, but they [pg 176] do not really believe in it. They feel self-assertion to be what is natural, and act accordingly without admitting the fact to themselves. The public ethical respect paid to humility and self-sacrifice they do not question; they help to maintain it, from fear that individuals stronger than themselves might become dangerous to them, if this method of taming men were abandoned.
Current ethics, then, are something with which mankind as a whole is deceived by means of traditional views, and with which individuals deceive themselves.
With indignant statements like these Nietzsche is so far in the right, that the ethic of humility and self-sacrifice does as a matter of principle avoid coming to a clear and practical understanding with reality. It lives by leaving quite undetermined the degree of life-denial which is involved in it. In theory it proclaims life-denial; in practice, however, it allows a life-affirmation which has thereby become unnatural and sickly to prevail. Stripped of all its passion, then, Nietzsche’s criticism means that only that ethic deserves to be accepted as current which springs from independent reflexion on the meaning of life, and comes to a straightforward understanding with reality.
Individual ethics come before social ethics. Not what ethics mean for society, but what they mean for the perfecting of the individual, is the first question which has to be put to them. Do they allow a man to become a personality or not? It is here, says Nietzsche, that current ethics fail. They do not allow men to grow straight up, but trains them like stunted trees on espaliers. They put humility and self-surrender before men as the content of perfection, but to the ethical, which consists in man being one with himself, and veracious through and through, they contribute nothing.
What does “noble” mean? shouts Nietzsche to his age with harsh words as being the ethical question which has been forgotten. Those who, when the question re-echoed everywhere, were touched by the truth which was stirring, and by the anxiety which was trembling within it, [pg 177] have received from that solitary thinker all that he had to give to the world.
If life-denial brings with it so much that is unnatural and fraught with doubt, it cannot be ethics. Ethics, then, must consist of a higher life-affirmation.
Nietzsche’s ethic of higher life-affirmation
But what is the higher life-affirmation? Fichte and the speculative philosophers generally make it consist in this, that the will of man conceives itself within the infinite will and in consequence of this no longer belongs to the universe in merely natural fashion, but surrenders itself knowingly and willingly to the latter as an energy which acts in intelligent harmony with the infinite will. Nietzsche sees clearly that in this way they have not arrived at any convincing idea of the content of the higher life-affirmation, but are moving in the region of the abstract. He himself means to remain at all costs elemental, and he therefore avoids philosophizing about the universe, showing himself thereby to be a true moralist like Socrates. He jeers at those who, not content with belittling mankind, proceed further to profane the reality of the world by declaring that it exists merely in the human imagination. It is only on the essential nature of the will-to-live and the way to use it most completely in experience, that he himself wishes to reflect.
His original belief was that he could conceive the higher life-affirmation as the development to a higher spirituality of the will-to-live. When, however, he attempted to carry this idea through, it took on, without his being aware of it, another form. Higher spirituality means, of course, the repressing of natural impulses and natural claims on life, and is thereby connected in some way or other with life-denial. Higher life-affirmation, therefore, can only consist in the content of the will-to-live being raised to its highest conceivable power. Man carries out the meaning of his life by affirming with the clearest consciousness of [pg 178] himself everything that is within him—even his impulses to secure power and pleasure.
But the opposition between the spiritual and the natural Nietzsche cannot get rid of. Just in proportion as he emphasizes the natural does the spiritual shrink back. Under the visible influence of the mental disease which is threatening him the ideal man grows into the “superman,” who asserts himself triumphantly against all fate, and seeks his own ends without any consideration for the rest of mankind.
From the very outset Nietzsche is condemned, in his thinking out of what life-affirmation means, to arrive at the higher form of it by a more or less meaningless living out of life to the full. He wants to listen to the highest efforts of the will-to-live without putting it in any relation to the universe. But the higher life-affirmation can be a living thing only when life-affirmation tries to conceive itself in world-affirmation. Life-affirmation in itself, in whichever direction it turns, can only become enhanced life-affirmation, never a higher form of it. It careers about in circles unable to take any fixed course, like a ship with its steering apparatus tied firmly up.
Nietzsche, however, instinctively shrinks from fitting life-affirmation into world-affirmation, and bringing it by that method to development into a higher and ethical life-affirmation. Life-affirmation within world-affirmation means devotion to the world, but with that there follows somehow or other life-denial within the life-affirmation. But it is just this interplay of the two that Nietzsche wants to get rid of, because it is there that ordinary ethics come to grief. . . .
Nietzsche was not the first to put forward in Western thought the theory of living one’s own life to the full. Greek sophists and others after them anticipated him by this. There is a great difference, however, between him and his predecessors. They are for living a full life because it brings them enjoyment. He, on the other hand brings to the theory the much deeper thought that by living [pg 179] one’s own life victoriously to the full life itself is honoured, and that by raising life to a higher power the meaning of existence is brought out. Men of genius and strong individuality, therefore, should be intent only on allowing the greatness that is in them to become an actuality. 75
Nietzsche’s true predecessors are unknown to him. They have their home, like those of Spinoza, in China. In that country life-affirmation made the attempt to come to clear ideas about itself. In Lao-tse and his pupils it is still naïvely ethical. In Chwang-tse it becomes cheerful resignation; in Lie-tse the will to secret power over things; in Yang-tse it ends in an all-round living of life to the full. Nietzsche is a synthesis, showing itself in a European mentality, of Lie-tse and Yang-tse. It is only we Europeans who are capable of producing the philosophy of brutality.
Zarathustra is for Nietzsche the symbol of the thoughts which are forming within him: Zarathustra as the hero of veracity who ventures to value natural life as a good, and as the genius who is far removed from the Judaeo-Christian mode of thought.
Nietzsche is at bottom no more unethical than Schopenhauer. He is misled by the ethical element which there is in life-affirmation into giving the status of ethics to life-affirmation as such. Thereby he falls into the absurdities which follows from an exclusive affirmation of life, just as Schopenhauer falls into those of an exclusive denial of life. Nietzsche’s will-to-power should cause no more offence than Schopenhauer’s will-to-self-annihilation, as it is explained in the passages in his works which deal with asceticism. It is interesting to note that neither of the two men lives in accordance with his view of life. Schopenhauer is no [pg 180] ascetic but a bon vivant, and Nietzsche does not lord it over his fellow men but lives in seclusion.
Life-affirmation and life-denial are both for a certain distance ethical; pursued to a conclusion both are unethical. This result, which was reached by the optimistic thought of China and the pessimistic thought of India, makes its appearance in Europe in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer because they are the only thinkers in this continent who philosophise in elemental fashion about the will-to-live, and venture to follow the paths of one-sidedness. Each completing the other, they pronounce sentence on the ethics of European philosophy by bringing into daylight again the elemental ethical thoughts contained in life-denial as well as in life-affirmation, thoughts which philosophy was keeping buried. Arriving as they do at the non-ethical by thinking out to a conclusion, one of them life-denial, the other life-affirmation, they corroborate, if taken together, the statement that the ethical consists neither of life-denial nor of life-affirmation, but is a mysterious combination of the two.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ISSUE OF THE WESTERN STRUGGLE FOR A WORLD-VIEW
Academic thinkers: Sidgwick, Stephen, Alexander, Wundt, Paulsen, Höffding
THE attempts of speculative philosophy to find a foundation for ethics in knowledge of the nature of the world have come to grief. Ethics based on science and sociology have shown themselves powerless. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, although they bring back into general acceptance some elementary questions of ethics, are unable, nevertheless, to establish a satisfying ethic.
In the later decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, ethics find themselves in an unenviable position. They remain of good courage, however, being confident that they have at their disposal a sufficiency of “scientifically” recognized results to guarantee them an assured existence.
This conviction is produced by a series of inter-related works—chiefly academic manuals of ethics. Their authors are of the opinion that ethics can be built, like the arch of a bridge, upon two piers. One of their piers is the natural ethical disposition of man; the other they allow themselves to find in those needs of society which influence the spirit and temper of individuals. They consider their task to be the bringing into actual existence of the arch (the possibility of completing which they take for granted), with the solid material of modern psychology, biology, and sociology, and the dividing of the load in the best calculated way between the two piers. Fundamentally they do nothing beyond restoring with new means the standpoint of Hume.
The following writers try to carry through this adjustment of the ethics which start from the standpoint of [pg 182] ethical personality and those which start from that of society: Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), 76 Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), 77 Samuel Alexander (b. 1859), 78 Wilhelm Wundt (b. 1832), 79 Friedrich Paulsen (1846-1908), 80 Friedrich Jodl (b. 1849), 81 Georg von Gizyki (1851-1895), 82 Harald Höffding (b. 1843), 83 and others. Of these ethical writers who, in spite of the variety of experience they bring to bear on the subject, are essentially related to one another, the most original is Leslie Stephen, the scientifically soundest is Wilhelm Wundt, the most ethical is Harald Höffding.
Höffding makes the ethical originate partly out of a consideration which limits the sovereignty of the present minute. “An action (he says) is good which preserves the totality of life and gives fulness and life to its content; an action is bad which has a more or less decided tendency to break into and narrow the totality of life and its content.” Supporting this consideration come also instincts of sympathy, which make us feel pleasure in the pleasure of others, and pain at their pain. The aim of ethics is general prosperity.
Of these ethical writers some put the chief emphasis on the ethical disposition of the individual, while others hold that ethics are constituted chiefly by their content, which aims at the good of society. What is common to them all [pg 183] is that they try to combine the ethic of ethical personality and the ethic of utilitarianism without having inquired into their higher unity. That is why the chapters in which they touch on the problem of the basic principle of the moral are always the part of their works which is the least clear and the least living. One is conscious of how happy they feel when they have waded through this swamp, and can launch out into consideration of the different ethical standpoints which have emerged in history, or can face questions on single points in ethical practice. And when they handle practical questions, it is obvious that they are not in possession of any usable basic principle of the moral. Their coming to terms with reality is a mere groping here and there. The considerations on the strength of which they decide are set out now in this sense, now in that. Hence these ethical writers frequently offer very interesting discussions on ethical problems, but the conception of the moral never gets from them any real explanation or any deepening. The criterion of a real ethic is whether it allows their full rights to the problems of personal morality and of the relation of man to man, problems with which we are concerned every day and every hour, and in which we must become ethical personalities. These academical works do not do this. Therefore, although they may arrive at results which deserve attention, they are not capable of giving effective ethical impulses to the thought of their time.
The ethic of self-perfecting. Kant’s successors: Cohen, Herrmann
This mediating ethic is not left uncriticized. In Germany inheritors of the Kantian spirit like Hermann Cohen (b. 1842) 84 and Wilhelm Herrmann (1846-1922) 85 oppose [pg 184] it, and in English-speaking countries successors of the Intuitionists like James Martineau (1805-1900), 86 F. H. Bradley (b. 1846), 87 T. H. Green (1836-1882), 88 Simon Laurie (1829-1909), 89 and James Seth (b. 1860). 90
In spite of wide differences in detail these thinkers agree in refusing to derive ethics either from the ethical disposition of man or from the claims of society. They represent them as produced entirely through the ethical personality. To become ethical personalities, however, (so they say) we step out of ourselves and work for the good of the community.
Cohen and Herrmann attempt to reach an ethic which is a consistent unity by using logic to put a content into the empty categorical imperative of Kant. They wish to make good what he missed in his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Foundations for a Metaphysic of Morals) and in his Metaphysik der Sitten (A Metaphysic of Morals). Cohen finds the origin of ethics in the pure Will thinking out the idea of one’s fellow-man and that of the associating of men to form a state, his ethical ego being brought into existence by this logical operation. The ethic thus attained consists in honesty, modesty, loyalty, justice, and humanity, and culminates in the representation of the state as the highest creation of the moral spirit. But that this ethic is only the offspring of mental ability is betrayed by the whole story of its appearance. The “pure will” is an abstraction which cannot start anything.
Instead of obtaining an ethic by deduction, using abstract logical methods, Wilhelm Herrmann opens for it the back-door of experience. He does indeed make ethics consist in “the bowing of the individual before the power [pg 185] of a something which is universally valid in thought,” but that content of ethics which is a necessity of thought we are to reach by seeing ourselves in each other as if in a mirror, and deciding what kind of conduct makes us mutually “reliable.” The thought of the unconditional claim originates, therefore, spontaneously in us, but awakes to the fact that it is determined by its content “through experience of human intercourse, and in the relation of reliability.”
Herrmann did not carry this philosophic ethic through to completion. He sketches it as an introduction to a not less artificial theological ethic. His conception is allied to Adam Smith’s theory of the impartial third party (see page 82).
Martineau, Green, Bradley, Laurie, Seth, and Royce
Martineau, Green, Bradley, Laurie, and Seth try to reach an ethic which is a consistent unity by making the whole of ethics originate in the need of self-perfecting. Of these, Martineau goes more on the lines of the moralists of the eighteenth century, known as the Cambridge Platonists. Ethics consist for him in thinking ourselves into the ideal of perfection, which God gave us with our life, and letting ourselves be determined by it. T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Simon Laurie, and James Seth show more or less the influence of J. G. Fichte. The ethical is with them founded on the fact that man wishes to live his life out in the deepest way as an effective personality, and thereby attain to true union with the infinite spirit. This thought is expounded best by T. H. Green. He is also led at the same time to the relation between civilization and ethics, and lays it down that all the achievements of human activity, especially the political and social perfecting of society, are nothing in themselves, and have a real meaning only so far as they render more thorough inward perfecting attainable by individuals. A spiritualized conception of civilization is therefore now struggling [pg 186] for acceptance. An upholder on American soil of this ethic of self-perfecting is Josiah Royce (1855-1916). 91
In the effort to conceive of ethics as a whole as being an ethic of self-perfecting, that is to say of conduct which springs from inward necessity, these thinkers express thoughts which belong to a living ethic. To be energetically concerned with the basic principle of the moral, even though one be led in the direction of the universal and apparently abstract, always brings with it results which are valuable for practice, even if the solution of the problem itself is not thereby advanced beyond a certain point.
These thinkers go so far on these lines as to conceive of ethics as higher life-affirmation, consisting in devoting ourselves to the activity which the world-spirit wills for us. They represent the mysticism of activity taught by J. G. Fichte, but without its speculative foundation.
They leave unsolved, however, nay, they do not even put the question, how the higher life-affirmation comes to give itself a content which stands in contradiction to the course of nature. They conceive of higher life-affirmation as self-devotion, that is to say as life-affirmation within which life-denial is active. But how does this paradox come about? How far is this direction of the will, which contradicts the natural will-to-live, a necessity of thought? Why must men become different from the world in order to exist and work in the world in true harmony with the world-spirit? And what meaning has this conduct of his for the happenings which take place in the universe?
Nature-philosophy and ethics. Fouillée, Guyau, Lange, Stern
The thought of Alfred Fouillée (1838-1913) 92 and Jean [pg 187] Marie Guyau (1854-1888) 93 also circles round the conception of ethics as higher life-affirmation. They too conceive of the ethical as devotion, that is to say, as life-affirmation within which life-denial is present, but they dig deeper than the English and American representatives of the ethic of self-perfecting, in that they seek to conceive of ethics within a nature-philosophy. Hence questions come to be discussed which remain unnoticed in the former. The problems of the basic principle of the moral and that of the optimistic-ethical world-view are once more opened up and, for the first time, in a comprehensive and elemental way.
Fouillée philosophises in a noble way about the will-to-live. The ideas which arise in us, directed towards ethical ideals, are (he says), like our ideas generally, not simply something produced by thought, but are the expression of forces which press within us towards making existence full and complete. 94 Speaking generally, we must in this matter clearly understand that the evolution which in the course of the world produces and maintains existence is the work of re-presentative forces (idées-forces), and is therefore to be explained in the last analysis as psychic. It reaches its highest point in man’s ideas, which will their ends with clear consciousness. In this highest being, man, reality gets so far as to produce ideals which go out beyond reality, and by their means to be led on beyond itself. Ethics are therefore a result of the evolution of the world. The idea of self-perfecting through devotion, which we experience as the puzzling element within us, is after all a natural manifestation of the will-to-live. The ego which has reached the farthest height of willing and representing enlarges itself by overflowing upon other human existences. Devotion is, therefore, not a surrender of the self, but a [pg 188] manifestation of its expansion. 95 The man who analyses himself more deeply learns by experience that the highest life-affirmation comes about, not by the natural will-to-live simply rising into will-to-power, but by its “expanding.” “Act towards others as if you became conscious of them at the same time as you become conscious of yourself.” 96
Jean Marie Guyau, a pupil and friend of Fouillée’s, in his Sketch of an Ethic without Obligation or Sanction, tries to work out the thought of this ethical life-affirmation through expansion. Ordinary ethics, he says, stand helpless before this insoluble cleft between the ego and other men, but living nature makes no stop at that point. The individual life is expansive because it is life. As in the physical sphere it carries within itself the impulse to produce fresh life like itself, so in the spiritual sphere also it wishes to widen its own existence by linking it on to other life like itself. Life includes not feeding only, but also production and fruitfulness; real living is not a taking in only, but a giving out of oneself as well. Man is an organism which imparts itself to others; its perfection consists in the most complete imparting of itself. In this philosophizing, then, Hume’s notion of sympathy is given more profound expression.
Fouillée and Guyau, both of them invalids, lived together at Nice and Mentone. Trying in one another’s company to realise the ethical higher life-affirmation, they take their exercise on the very shore on which Nietzsche that same year thought out his heightened life-affirmation of Beyond Good and Evil. He knows their works, as they also know his, but as men they remain personally unknown to each other. 97
Fouillée and Guyau, because they think deeply, are led to nature-philosophy by their philosophizing about the way in which the will-to-live is to become ethical. They wish to conceive ethics, within a world- and life-affirming nature-philosophy, as a deepening, which is a necessity of thought, of life-affirmation. They thus join the procession of the Chinese monists. That which these, like Spinoza and Fichte, attempted and failed to do, they attempt again in the confidence that their nature-philosophy will be fairer to the conception of living existence than that of the others was.
Navigating the rushing stream of heightened life-affirmation, they try with mighty efforts at the oars to reach the bank of the ethical. They believe that they will be able to land there . . . but the waves carry them past it, as they did all those who attempted the journey before them.
That life-affirmation in its highest form, by a paradox which lies in the nature of things, becomes ethical devotion to others they cannot show convincingly. This proposition, in which they would transform the natural world-view into an ethical one, is truth only for the thought which dares to make the same jump because it sees no possibility otherwise of reaching land from the drifting boat.
The ethic of Fouillée and Guyau, then, is an enthusiastic conception of life to which man pulls himself up when coming to terms with reality, in order to assert himself and exert himself in the universe in accordance with a higher value which he feels in himself.
Fouillée and Guyau are, therefore, elemental moralists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They are not, however, like the latter, making a voyage with their rudder tightly lashed in the circle of world- and life-denial or of world- and life-affirmation; they hold on their course with sure feeling towards the mysterious union of world-affirmation, life-affirmation, and life-denial which constitutes ethical life-affirmation. . . . But this course takes them out over the boundless ocean. They never reach land.
In order to understand themselves as a direction of the will-to-live which is a necessity of thought, and to think themselves out to an ethical world-view, ethics must come to terms with nature-philosophy. We find them, then, attempting—as did the Rationalists, and Kant, and the speculative philosophers—to read into the world, in simple or in detailed thought, an optimistic-ethical meaning, or at least, as with Spinoza, to give an ethical character in some way or other to the relation of the individual to the universe. These two men also, Fouillée and Guyau, wrestle with nature-philosophy in order from it to justify ethics and an ethical world-view as not without meaning. At the same time, however, they dare—and this is the new element which appears in them—to look straight in the face the possibility that it will perhaps be impossible to carry their undertaking through. What will then become of ethics and world-view? Although they ought really to totter and fall, they do nevertheless remain standing—so Fouillée and Guyau judge.
Whether the idea of the good can finally claim any objective validity cannot be asserted with complete confidence, says Fouillée in his Morale des Idées-forces. Man must finally be content to force himself to acceptance of the ethically expansive life-affirmation, merely because he feels it to be the only thing which is capable of making life valuable. Out of love for the ideal he triumphs over all doubt, and sacrifices himself to it, untroubled about whether or no anything results from his doing so.
Guyau’s Sketch of a Morality without Obligations or Sanctions ends in similar thoughts. An inner force, he says, works upon us and drives us forward. Do we go forward alone, or will the idea eventually win for itself some influence upon nature? . . . Anyhow let us go forward! . . . “Perhaps the earth, perhaps mankind, will one day reach some as yet unknown goal which they themselves have created. There is no hand leading us, no eye watching on our behalf; the rudder was broken long ago, [pg 191] or rather there never was one at all; it has to be provided. That is a big task, and it is our task.” . . . Ethical men are crossing the ocean of events on a rudderless and mastless derelict, so to say, hoping nevertheless that they will some day and somewhere reach land.
In these sentences there is announced from a distance the disappearance of the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world. Because they venture on renouncing this, and proclaim in principle the sovereign independence of ethics, Fouillée and Guyau belong to the greatest thinkers who have had a share in shaping our world-view.
They do not, however, follow to the end the path on which they have stumbled. While they make ethics independent of whether its activity can or cannot prove itself legitimate as significant and effective in the totality of world-happenings, they assume the existence of a conflict between world-view and life-view, which philosophy down to their day had actually not noticed. But they do not investigate its nature, and do not show how it is that life-view can venture to assert itself in opposition to world-view, and even to exalt itself as the more important. They are content to prophesy that ethics and ethical world-view will grow green again as mighty oases, fed by subterranean springs, even if the sand-storms of scepticism should have turned into a desert the broad territory of the optimistic-ethical knowledge of the world, in which we once wanted to make our home. At bottom, however, they hope that nothing like this will happen, and their confidence that a nature-philosophy which deals in the proper way with the nature of Being will after all finally reach an ethic and a world-view, is not completely overthrown.
Since they at first claim only a hypothetical validity for their new view, and do not carry it through as a matter of principle, Fouillée and Guyau do not exercise upon the thought of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the influence which they ought to have. Their age was, indeed, not ready for that [pg 192] renunciation of knowledge for which their writings were preparing the way.
A forerunner of their ethic is to be found in that which Friedrich Albert Lange sketches as his own at the end of his History of Materialism (1866). Ethics, he says, are an imaginative creation on which we determine, because we carry an ideal within ourselves. We rise above the actual because we find no satisfaction in it. We are ethical because our life thereby obtains a definite character such as we long for. . . . Ethics mean becoming free from the world.
Lange also, then, has already reached the view that from direct philosophizing about the world and life an ethical world-view results, not as a necessity of thought, but as a necessity for life. But like the two French thinkers he just throws out the thought instead of following it out into all its presuppositions and consequences.
A peculiar supplement which completes the ethics of Fouillée, Guyau, and Lange, without actually going back to them, is provided by the Berlin physician, Wilhelm Stern, in an inquiry, which has attracted far too little notice, into the evolutionary origin of ethics. The essential nature of the moral, he says, is the impulse to maintenance of life by the repelling of all injurious attacks upon it, an impulse through which the individual being experiences a feeling of relationship to all other animate beings in face of nature’s injurious attacks upon them. How has this mentality arisen in us? Through the fact that animate beings of the most varied kinds have been obliged through countless generations to fight side by side for existence against the forces of nature, and in their common distress have ceased to be hostile to one another, so that they might attempt a common resistance to the annihilation which threatened them, instead of succumbing in a common ruin. This experience, which began with their first and lowest stage of existence and has become through thousands of millions of generations more and more [pg 193] pronounced, has given its special character to the psychology of all living beings. All ethics are an affirmation of life, the character of which is determined by perception of the dangers to existence which living beings experience in common.
How much deeper Wilhelm Stern digs than Darwin did! According to Darwin, experience of the never-ceasing, universal danger to existence produces finally nothing but the herd-instinct, which holds together creatures of the same species. According to Stern, there is developed by the same experience a kind of solidarity with everything that lives. The barriers fall. Man experiences sympathy with animals, as they experience it, only less completely, with him. Ethics are not only something peculiar to man, but something which, though in a less developed form, is to be seen also in the animal world as such. Self-devotion is an experience of the deepened impulse to self-preservation. In the active as well as in the passive meaning of the word the whole animate creation is to be included within the basic principle of the moral.
The fundamental commandment of ethics, then, is that we cause no suffering to any living creature, not even the lowest, unless it is to effect some necessary protection for ourselves, and that we be ready to undertake, whenever we can, positive action for the benefit of other creatures.
In Fouillée, Guyau, and Lange ethics come to terms with nature-philosophy, but without any advance towards making themselves cosmic. They fall into the anachronism of regarding themselves still, even at that date, as nothing beyond the regulating of the temper and disposition of man towards his fellow-men, instead of widening themselves out so as to deal with the conduct of man towards every living creature and towards Being in general. In Stern they take this obvious, further step.
No ethic short of one that has made itself universal and cosmic is capable of taking in hand the investigation of the basic principle of the moral; only such an ethic can [pg 194] really come to terms in intelligible fashion with nature-philosophy.
Nature-philosophy and ethics in Eduard von Hartmann
In Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906) 98 also, ethics try to comprehend themselves within nature-philosophy. His Philosophy of the Unconscious is largely in line with the thoughts of Fouillée, but in the matter of world-view he goes off in another direction. Instead of allowing ethics, when they are coming to terms with nature-philosophy, to experience their freedom from it, he compels them to base themselves on such a philosophy. His nature-philosophy is pessimistic. It confesses to being unable to discover any principle which contains a meaning in the course of nature. Therefore (so Hartmann concludes, as do the Indians and Schopenhauer), the world-process is something which must come to a standstill. Everything that exists must gradually enter on the blessed condition of will-lessness. Ethics are the disposition which brings this development into action.
In language obscure enough von Hartmann formulates at the end of his Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness his pessimistic-ethical world-view as follows: “Existence in the world of matter is the Incarnation of the Godhead; the world-process is the history of the Passion of the Incarnate God, and at the same time the way to the Redemption of Him who is crucified in the flesh; but morality is co-operation for the shortening of this road of suffering and redemption.”
Then, however, instead of unfolding what this ethic is, and how it is to come into force, he undertakes to show that all ethical standpoints which have ever made their appearance in any way in history have their own justification. He wants to house them all within an evolution which necessarily leads to a pessimistic ethic.
Every moral principle which shows itself in history (von Hartmann asserts) changes itself by starting on a search for the completion which lies nearest to it. It lives itself out, and then makes way for the higher moral principle which issues logically from it. That is how the ethical consciousness in individuals and in mankind works itself up from one moral principle to another till it reaches the highest knowledge. From the primitive moral principle of aiming at individual pleasure it travels past the authoritarian, the æsthetic, the sentimental, and the intellectual moral systems, which are one and all subjective, to the objective morality of care for the general happiness. But still beyond this it is led to the evolutionary moral principle of the development of civilisation, and here it learns to think on supra-moral lines. It grasps the notion that for moral consideration there is still something higher than the prosperity of individuals and of society, namely “contest and struggle for the maintenance and enhancing of civilization.” This according to usual ideas unethical conception of ethics has to live itself out completely, so that it may then be resolved into an ethic of world- and life-denial.
By this insight into the logic of the course of ethical evolution, von Hartmann is saved from making any protest, as an ordinary ethical thinker would, against the unethical civilization-ethics of the close of the nineteenth century. He knows, on the contrary, that he is helping the cause of rightly understood ethical progress, if he treats them with respect as a necessary phenomenon, and urges that they be allowed to live themselves out with the utmost completeness. We have learnt (he therefore proclaims) to see through the ethic which aims at making men and peoples happy as being a piece of sentimentality, and we ought now to make up our minds to deal seriously with the supra-ethical ethic of the enhancing of life and civilization. We must learn to regard as good whatever is necessary for the development of civilization, and we [pg 196] are no longer at liberty to condemn war in the name of ethics. “The principle of the development of civilization compels us to recognize all these protests as unsound, since wars are the chief means of carrying on the struggle between races, i.e., the process of natural selection within mankind, and preparation for the effective waging of war has formed one of the most important means of education and training for mankind in every phase of the development of their civilization, as it will also, so far as we can see, in the future.” 99 Economic misery too, and the struggles which arise from it, are seen by the ethical spirit which looks further ahead to subserve a higher objective. The sufferings under the wage system, which are far greater than those under slavery, are necessary for the course of civilization. The struggle which they evoke calls forces into being and has an educative result. The course of civilization needs a favoured minority to serve as bearers of its ideas. Beneficence and charity to the poor must therefore be practised with moderation. The need which spurs men on to active work must not be banished from the world.
Another element in the course of civilization is the taking into possession of the whole earth by the race with the highest civilization, which must therefore increase its numbers as much as possible. In order to make the female population keen about the task which thus falls to them, women must be raised intellectually, i.e., their patriotism and national feeling must be increased as much as possible, their historical sense must be aroused, and they must be filled with enthusiasm for the principle of civilization which underlies evolution. “To effect this object, the history of civilization must be made the foundation of all instruction in the upper classes of girl-schools.” 100
It is desirable, therefore, to make efforts to secure the “improvement of the human type,” and the attainment [pg 197] of an enhancement of civilization in which “the world-spirit becomes in increasing measure conscious of itself.”
In his nature-philosophy and his philosophy of history, then, Eduard von Hartmann reaches a supra-ethical world-view in which Hegel and Nietzsche drink to brotherhood, and the principles of inhumanity and relativity, which underlie biologico-sociological ethics, sit at table with garlands on their heads.
How and when the supra-ethical ethic of enhanced world- and life-affirmation passes over into the highest ethic of world- and life-denial, and in what way this highest ethic, in which we function as Redeemers of the Absolute, is to be carried out in practice, von Hartmann is, however, unable to make clear. The abstruse modulations with which, in the last chapters of his work, he tries to get from one to the other provide us with ample proof of the unnatural character of the undertaking. To produce a world-view with Hegel for body and Schopenhauer for head, is an absurdity. By his resolve to attempt it, von Hartmann admits his inability to make enhanced life-affirmation become in a natural way ethical.
Eduard von Hartmann prefers to the profession of moralist that of philosopher of the history of morals. Instead of serving the world with an ethical system of morals, he makes it happy with the discovery of the principle of inherent progress in the history of morals, and thus helps to befool completely the thought of his age, which is living its life in an unethical and unspiritual optimism.
From the history of ethics nothing is to be obtained except a certain amount of clearness about the problem of ethics. Anyone who discovers in it principles which promise automatic progress in the ethical development of mankind has by his miserably faulty construction of that history read these principles into the facts without any justification.