Nature-philosophy and ethics in Bergson, Chamberlain, Keyserling, Haeckel
Henri Bergson (b. 1860) 101 renounces altogether the attempt to bring together nature-philosophy and ethics. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (b. 1855) 102 and Count Hermann Keyserling (b. 1880) 103 make the attempt but without reaching any result.
In his philosophizing about nature, Bergson does not go beyond the rôle of the observing subject. He analyses in a masterly way the nature of the process of knowledge. His investigations into the origin of our conception of time and of the actions of our consciousness which are bound up with it, have taught us how to comprehend the course of nature in its living reality. Leading us on beyond the science which consists in external affirming and calculating, Bergson shows that the true knowledge of Being comes to us through a sort of intuition. Philosophizing means experiencing our consciousness as an emanation of the creative impulse which rules in the world. Bergson’s nature-philosophy has therefore a close inward connexion with that of Fouillée, but he does not find it necessary, as Fouillée does, to produce from it a world- and life-view. He limits himself to depicting it from the standpoint of the problem of the theory of knowledge. He does not attempt any analysis of the ethical consciousness. Year after year we have waited for him to complete his work, as he no doubt himself intended, with an attempt at producing an ethic on the basis of nature-philosophy. But he [pg 199] contented himself with developing in ever-new forms his theories about our inner knowledge of the real. He never comes to the recognition that all deepening of our knowledge of the world acquires its real meaning only so far as it teaches us to comprehend what we ought to aim at in life. He lets the waves of events roll past us, as if we were seated on an island in the stream, whereas we are in reality obliged to exert ourselves as swimmers in the stream.
During the war the German picture-houses were crammed. People went to see the pictures in order to forget their hunger. Bergson’s philosophy brings before us as living events the world which Kant depicted in motionless wall-pictures. But to satisfy the hunger of to-day for ethics he does nothing. He has no world-view to offer us in which we can find a life-view. Over the whole of his philosophy there prevails a quietistic, sceptical tone.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain tries to find a world-view which is based on nature-philosophy and is at the same time ethical. His work entitled Immanuel Kant (1905), which is really a journey through the problems raised by philosophy with attempts to solve them, ends in the thought that we have to combine Goethe’s nature-philosophy, which conceives Becoming as an eternal Being, with Kant’s judgement about the nature of duty, if we wish to reach a real civilization. He finds himself unable, however, to carry through to completion such a world-view.
Roused by Chamberlain, Hermann Keyserling goes in the aims of his thinking far beyond Bergson. He wants to reach clear ideas not only about knowledge of the world, but also about life and work in the world. From the pinnacle, however, to which he mounts, he sees only the field of wisdom; that of ethics is veiled in mist. The highest idea, so he declares at the conclusion of his work The Structure of the World, is that of truth. We want to know, because knowledge, “whether it visibly serves life at present or not, already implies in itself a purposive reaction to the outer world.” In correct knowledge the [pg 200] human spirit enters into reciprocal relations with the universe. Life carries within itself its own purposive character.
Keyserling finds it quite in order that the world-view of great men should be superior to ordinary moral standards. One must not reproach Leonardo da Vinci for working as willingly in the service of the French king, Francis I., as he had done previously in that of the Sforzas whom Francis expelled. “Almost every great spirit is a complete egoist.” If any one has experience of life in its full extent and depth and living force, and works in reciprocity with the universe, interest in the human race is for him a kind of specialization which is no longer incumbent on him.
In the Preface to the second edition of The Structure of the World (1920), Keyserling admits that he has not reached a decision about the ethical problem. In his Philosophy as Art (1920), he declares it to be the foremost duty of our time to “make the wise man a possible type, to draw him out by education, and give him all necessary publicity and scope for his activities.”
The wise man is the one man who is capable of veracity, the man who lets all the tones of life sound in him, and seeks to be in tune with the fundamental bass-note which is given in him. He has no universally valid world-view to impart to others. He has not even for himself one that is definite and final; he has only one which is liable to constant alteration for the better. He himself is unalterable only in this, that he wants to live his life in its entirety and in the most vital co-operation with the Universe, and at the same time ever strives to be himself. Veracious and emphatic life-affirmation is therefore the last word of this philosophizing about the world and life. . . .
Thus does nature-philosophy admit that it cannot produce an ethic.
With the lesser spirits self-deception goes further. The ordinary scientific monism, the greatness of which consists in its being an elemental movement towards veracity in an [pg 201] age which is weary of veracity, is still convinced that from its insight into the essential nature of life, into the development of lower life into higher, and into the inner connexion of the individual life with the life of the universe, it can somehow or other arrive at an ethic. But it is significant that its representatives take altogether different roads in the search for an ethic. An incredible absence of thought and of plan reigns in the ethical philosophizing of the ordinary scientific nature-philosophy. Many of its representatives have before their mind’s eye a conception of the moral as a becoming one with the universe, a conception which is related to that of the Stoics and Spinoza. Others, influenced by Nietzsche, entertain the thought that true ethics are an enhanced and aristocratic life-affirmation, and have nothing to do with the claims of the “democratic” social ethics. 104 Others again, like Johannes Unold in his work Monism and its Ideals (1908), try to bring together nature-philosophy and ethics just in such a way as to let them conceive of the human activity which is directed to social ends as the final result of the development of the organic world. There are also scientific nature-philosophers who are content to put together out of what is commonly regarded as moral an ethic which is universally accepted, and to exalt it, so far as they can, into a product of nature-philosophy. In Ernst Haeckel’s (1834-1919) work The Riddle of the Universe (1899), there is an ethic of that character built on to the palace of nature-philosophy like an outside kitchen. The basic principle of monistic ethical theory is (so it is here maintained) the equal justification of Egoism and of Altruism, and then a balance between them. Both are laws of nature. Egoism serves the preservation of the individual, altruism that of the species. This “golden rule of morality” is said to be of equal significance [pg 202] with the rule which Jesus and other ethical thinkers before him are said to have enunciated in the demand that we shall love our neighbour as ourselves. Spencer and water is poured out under a Christian label.
The death-agony of the optimistic-ethical world-view
An inexorable development of thought, then, brings it about that the philosophy of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, either advances to a supra-ethical world-view, or finds itself living in an ethical ruin. What happens in the great German speculative philosophy of the beginning of the nineteenth century is a prelude to the dénouement of the drama. In that philosophy an ethical world-view tries to find itself a foundation in speculative nature-philosophy, and in doing so becomes, as stands confessed in Hegel, supra-ethical. Later, ethics believe themselves capable of providing a “scientific” conception of themselves, thanks to the results reached by psychology, biology, and sociology, but in proportion as they effect this, their energy decreases. Later still, when through the growth of science and the inward changes in thought a nature-philosophy which is in harmony with scientific observation of nature becomes the only possible philosophy, ethics have once more to make a real attempt to found themselves in a nature-philosophy which is directed upon the universe. There is nothing, however, but the enhancement and perfecting of life which nature-philosophy can give as the meaning of life. Hence ethics must struggle to conceive the enhancement and perfecting of life as something which comes to pass within the field of ethical ideas, and it is this that the most modern thought is striving for, on lines of development which are often apparently irreconcilable, without ever attaining its goal.
Whenever ethics really rely in any way upon nature-philosophy for the production of the convincing, ethical world-view which the age is longing for, they get wrecked [pg 203] upon it in one way or another. Either they actually attempt to give themselves out to be somehow a natural enhancement of life and thereby so alter their character that they cease to be really and truly ethics. Or they abdicate; perhaps, as with Keyserling, leaving the field free to supra-ethical world-view, perhaps, as with Bergson, leaving nature-philosophy and ethical questions with it, to rest in peace.
Thus the sun of ethics becomes darkened for our generation, nature-philosophy pushing forward like a wall of cloud. Just as an inundation overwhelms pastures and fields with its water-borne débris, so do the supra-ethical and the unethical ways of thinking break in upon our mentality. They bring about the most terrible devastations without anyone having any clear idea of what the catastrophe means, or indeed being conscious of anything wrong beyond that the spirit of the time is rendering all ethical standards powerless.
Everywhere there grows up an unethical conception of civilization. The masses reconcile themselves in an incomprehensible way to the theory of the relativity of all ethical standards and to thoughts of inhumanity. Freed from any obligation of ethical intention, the belief in progress suffers a process of externalization which increases from year to year, becoming finally nothing better than a wooden façade which conceals the pessimism behind it. That we have lapsed into pessimism is betrayed by the fact that the demand for the spiritual advance of society and mankind is no longer seriously made among us. We have now resigned ourselves, as if no explanation of it were needed, to the fate of being obliged to smile at the high-flying hopes of previous generations. There is no longer to be found among us the true world- and life-affirmation which reaches down to the depths of the spiritual nature of man. Unavowed pessimism has been consuming us for decades.
Delivered over to events in a temper and disposition which is powerless because it is entirely without any true [pg 204] and ethical ideals of progress, we are experiencing the collapse of material and spiritual civilization alike.
By its belief in an optimistic ethical world-view the modern age made itself capable of a mighty advance towards civilization. Its thought, however, has not been able to show this world-view to be founded in the nature of things, and we have therefore sunk, consciously and unconsciously, into a condition in which we have no world-view at all, a condition of pessimism, too, and of absence of all ethical conviction, so that we are on the point of complete shipwreck.
The bankruptcy of the optimistic-ethical world-view was announced beforehand as little as was the financial bankruptcy of the ruined states of Europe. But just as the latter was gradually revealed as having actually come about by the constantly diminishing value of the paper-money that was issued, so is the former being gradually revealed by the constantly diminishing power among us of the true and profound ideals of civilization.
CHAPTER XVII
THE NEW WAY
Why the optimistic-ethical world-view cannot be carried through to the logical conclusion
THE greatness of European philosophy consists in its having chosen the optimistic-ethical world-view; its weakness in its having again and again imagined that it was putting that world-view on a firm foundation, instead of making clear to itself the difficulties of doing so. The task before our generation is to strive with deepened thought to reach a truer and more serviceable world-view, and thus to bring to an end our living on and on without any world-view at all.
Our age is striking out unmeaningly in every direction like a fallen horse in the traces. It is trying with external measures and new organisation to solve the problems with which it has to deal, but all in vain. The horse cannot get on its feet again till it is unharnessed and allowed to get its head up. Our world will not get upon its feet again till it lets the truth come home to it that its cure is not to be found in active measures but in new ways of thinking.
But new ways of thinking can arise only if a true and serviceable world-view draws individuals within its influence.
The one serviceable world-view is the optimistic-ethical. Its renewal is a duty incumbent on us. Can we prove it to be true?
In the struggle of the thinkers who for centuries exerted themselves to demonstrate the truth of the optimistic-ethical world-view, and kept surrendering themselves comfortably to the illusion, always very soon shattered, that [pg 206] they had succeeded, the problem with which we are concerned reveals itself in outlines which become clearer and clearer. We are now in a position to reckon up why those or those paths, apparently so full of promise, have led to nothing, and can lead to nothing. By the insight into the problem thus won we shall be preserved from entering on impassable roads and forced to follow the only one which is practicable.
The most general result of the attempts made up to the present is this: that the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world, by which it was hoped to put the optimistic-ethical world-view on a firm foundation, cannot be carried through to a conclusion. Yet how logical and natural it seemed to tune up the meaning of life and the meaning of the world to the same note! How invitingly the path opened out of explaining our own existence from the nature and significance of the world! The path rises so naturally to the crest of the foothills that one could only believe it led up to the highest point of knowledge. But high up in the ascent it breaks off with chasms ahead.
The reflexion that the meaning of human life must be conceivable within the meaning of the world is such an obvious one to thought, that the latter never lets itself be led from its path by the failure, one after another, of all attempts in that direction. It merely concludes that it has not tackled the problem in the right way. It therefore has resort to the whisperings of the theory of knowledge, and undertakes to impugn the reality of the world in order to deal with it more successfully. In Kant, in the speculative philosophy, and in much “spiritualistic” popular philosophy which has been current almost down to our own day, it preserved its hope of reaching its goal by some sort of combination of epistemological with ethical realism. Hence the philosophy of academic manuals declaims against the unprejudiced thinking which tries to reach a world-view without first having been baptised by Kant with fire and the Holy Spirit. But this too is a vain proceeding. The refined and underhand attempts to form a [pg 207] conception of the world with an optimistic-ethical meaning meet with no better success than the naïve ones. What our thinking tries to proclaim as knowledge is never anything but an unjustifiable interpretation of the world.
Against the admission of this, thought guards itself with the courage of despair, because it fears it will find itself in that case with no idea of what to do in face of the problem of life. What meaning can we give to human existence, if we must renounce all pretence of knowing the meaning of the world? Nevertheless there remains only one thing for thought to do, and that is to adapt itself to facts.
The hopelessness of the attempt to find the meaning of life within the meaning of the world is shown first of all by the fact that in the course of nature there is no purposiveness to be seen in which the working of men, and of mankind as a whole, could in any way intervene. On one of the smaller among the millions of heavenly bodies there have lived for a short space of time some human beings. For how long will they continue so to live? Any lowering or raising of the temperature of the earth, any change in the inclination of the axis of their planet, a rise in the level of the ocean, or a change in the composition of the atmosphere, could put an end to their existence. Or the earth itself may fall, as so many other heavenly bodies have fallen, a victim to some cosmic catastrophe. We are entirely ignorant of what we mean for the earth. How much less then may we presume to try to attribute to the infinite universe a meaning which has us for its object, or which can be explained in terms of our existence!
It is not, however, merely the huge disproportion between the universe and human beings which makes it impossible for us to give the aims and objects of mankind a logical place in those of the universe. Any such attempt is made useless beforehand by the fact that we have not yet succeeded in discovering any general purposiveness in the course of nature. Whatever we do find of purposiveness in the world is never anything but isolated instances of it.
In the production and maintenance of some definite form of life nature does sometimes act purposively in a magnificent way. But in no way does she ever seem intent on uniting these instances of purposiveness which are directed to single objects into a collective purpose. She never undertakes to let life coalesce with life to form a collective life. She is wonderfully creative force, and at the same time senselessly destructive force. We face her, absolutely unable to form any notion of what to do. What is full of meaning within the meaningless, the meaningless within what is full of meaning: that is the essential nature of the universe
Life-view independent of world-view
These elemental established conclusions European thought has tried to ignore. It can do so no longer, and it is of no use to try. The facts have silently produced their consequences. While the optimistic-ethical world-view still maintains itself among us as a dogma, we no longer possess the ethical world- and life-affirmation with which it ought to provide us. Perplexity and pessimism have taken possession of us without our admitting it.
There remains, therefore, nothing for us to do but to admit that we understand nothing of the world, and are surrounded by nothing but enigmas. Our knowledge is becoming sceptical.
Just as thought has hitherto allowed world-view and life-view to hang together, mutually connected, so have we in consequence fallen similarly into a sceptical conception of life. But is it really the case that life-view is towed along by world-view, and that when the latter can no longer be kept afloat life-view must sink with it into the depths? Necessity bids us cut the tow-rope and try to let life-view continue its voyage independently.
This manœuvre is not such a surprising one as it seems. While people acted as though their life-view were taken from their world-view, the connexion between the two was really just the opposite, their world-view was formed from [pg 209] their life-view. What they put forward as their view of the world was an interpretation of the world in the light of their life-view.
The life-view held by European thought being optimistic-ethical, the same character was attributed by everybody to their world-view in defiance of facts. The will, without admitting it, overpowered knowledge. Life-view prompted and world-view recited. The belief that their life-view was derived from their world-view was therefore only a fiction.
In Kant this overpowering of knowledge, which had till then been just naïvely allowed, was worked out systematically. His doctrine of the “Postulates of the Practical Reason” means just this: that the will claims for itself the decisive word in the last pronouncements of the world-view. Only Kant manages to arrange the matter so cleverly that the will never forces its supremacy on knowledge, but receives it from the latter as a free gift, and then makes use of it in carefully chosen parliamentary ways. It proceeds as if it had been invoked by the theoretical reason to provide possible truths with reality belonging to truths which are necessities of thought.
In Fichte the will dictates to knowledge its world-view without any regard at all for the arts of diplomacy.
From the middle of the nineteenth century onward there can be discerned a tendency in natural science no longer to claim that world-view shall accommodate itself to scientifically established facts. The valuable convictions of the traditional world-view are to hold good, even if they cannot be brought into harmony with the accepted knowledge of the world. After the publication of Du Bois-Raymond’s (1818-1896) lectures “On the Limits of our Knowledge of Nature” it begins with a certain school of natural science to be considered almost a part of good manners to declare oneself incompetent in questions of world-view. There grows up gradually what one may call a modern doctrine of the two-fold nature of truth. To this movement expression is given by the “Keplerbund,” which was [pg 210] founded in 1907 by representatives of natural science, and goes so far as to declare acceptable to natural science the valuable pronouncements of the current world-view, even when given in formulas provided by ecclesiastical authority. This new doctrine of the two-fold nature of truth is brought to philosophical expression by the theory of the solidity of “value-judgments.” By means of this theory Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889) and his imitators try to uphold the validity of a religious world-view side by side with a scientific one. Almost the whole religious world, so far as it tries to remain a thinking body, grasps at such expedients. Next, in William James’s (1842-1910) philosophy of Pragmatism the will admits in half-naïve, half-cynical fashion that all the knowledge professed by its world-view has been produced by itself.
That the valuable assertions made by the world-view are to be traced back to the will which has been determined by valuable convictions is therefore a fact, and since Kant’s day the fact has been admitted in the most varied directions. The shock given to the feeling for veracity, which accompanies this no longer naïve but half-conscious and insidiously employed interpretation of the world, plays a fatal part in the mentality of our time.
But why go on with this want of candour? Why keep knowledge in subservience to the will by means of a kind of infamous secret police? Any world-view deduced therefrom must ever be a poor weak thing. Let us allow the will and knowledge to come together in a relation which is honourable to both.
In what has hitherto been called world-view there are two things united: view of the world and life-view. So long as it was possible to cherish the illusion that the two were harmonious and each completed the other, there was nothing to be said against this combination. Now, however, when the divergence can no longer be concealed, the wider conception of world-view which includes life-view organically within itself, must be given up. It is no longer permissible to go on naïvely believing that we get our life-view [pg 211] from our view of the world, or furtively elevating in some way or other our life-view into a view of the world. We are standing at a turning-point of thought. Critical action which clears away all prevailing naïvetés and dishonesties has become necessary. We must make up our minds to leave life-view and view of the world mutually independent of each other, and see that a straightforward understanding between the two is reached. We have to admit that because our life-view is made up of convictions which are given in our will-to-live but are not confirmed by knowledge of the world, we have allowed it to go beyond the varied knowledge which makes up our view of the world.
This renunciation of world-view in the old sense, that is of a unitary world-view which is complete in itself, means a painful experience for our thought. We come hereby to a dualism against which we at every moment instinctively rebel. But we must surrender to facts. Our will to live has to accommodate itself to the inconceivable fact that it is unable with its own valuable convictions to discover itself again in the manifold will-to-live which is seen manifested in the world. We wanted to form a life-view for ourselves out of items of knowledge gathered from the world. But it is our destiny to live by means of convictions which an inward necessity makes a part of our thought.
In the old rationalism reason undertook to investigate the world. In the new it has to take as its task the attaining to clarity about the will-to-live. Thus we return to an elemental philosophising which is once more busied with questions of world- and life-view as they directly affect men, and seeks to give a safe foundation to, and to keep alive, the valuable ideas which we find in ourselves. It is in a life-view which is dependent on itself alone, and has come in a straightforward way to an understanding with world-knowledge, that we hope to find once more power to attain to ethical world- and life-affirmation.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FOUNDATIONS OF OPTIMISM SECURED FROM THE WILL-TO-LIVE
The pessimistic result of knowledge
THERE are two things which thought has to do for us; it must lead us up out of the naïve world- and life-affirmation to a deepened one, and it must let us go on from mere ethical impulses to an ethic which is a necessity of thought.
Deepened world- and life-affirmation consists in this, that we have the will to maintain our own life and every kind of existence that we can in any way influence, and to bring them to their highest value. It demands from us that we think out all ideals of the material and spiritual perfecting of individual men, of society, and of mankind as a whole, and let ourselves be determined by them to steady activity and steady hope. It does not allow us to withdraw into ourselves, but orders us to bring to bear a living and so far as possible an active interest on everything which happens around us. To endure a state of unrest through our relation to the world, when by withdrawing into ourselves we might enjoy rest; that is the burden which deeper world- and life-affirmation lays upon us.
We begin our life-course in an unsophisticated world- and life-affirmation. The will-to-live which is in us gives it to us as something which is a matter of course. But later, when thought awakes, the questions crop up which make a problem of what has hitherto been a matter of course. What meaning will you give your life? What do you mean to do in the world? When, along with these [pg 213] questions, we begin trying to reconcile knowledge and will-to-live, facts get in the way of this with confusing suggestions. Life attracts us, they say, with a thousand expectations, and fulfils hardly one of them. And the fulfilled expectation is almost a disappointment, for only anticipated pleasure is really pleasure; in pleasure which is fulfilled its opposite is already stirring. Unrest, disappointment, and pain are our lot in the short span of time which lies between our entrance on life and our departure from it. The spiritual is in a dreadful state of dependence on the bodily. Our existence is at the mercy of meaningless happenings and can be brought to an end by them at any moment. The will-to-live gives me an impulse to action, but the action is just as if I wanted to plough the sea, and to sow in the furrows. What did those who worked before me effect? What significance in the endless chain of world-happenings have their efforts had? With all its illusive promises the will-to-live only means to mislead me into prolonging my existence, and allowing to enter on existence, so that the game may go on without interruption, other beings to whom the same miserable lot has been assigned as to myself.
The discoveries in the field of knowledge against which the will-to-live knocks when it begins to think, are therefore altogether pessimistic. It is not by accident that all religious world-views, except the Chinese, have a more or less pessimistic tone and bid man expect nothing from his existence here.
Who will stop us from making use of the freedom we are allowed, and casting existence from us? Every thinking human being makes acquaintance with this thought. We let it take a deeper hold of us than we suspect from one another, as indeed we are all more oppressed by the riddles of existence than we allow others to notice.
What determines us, so long as we are comparatively in our right mind, to reject the thought of putting an end to our existence? An instinctive feeling of repulsion from such a deed. The will-to-live is stronger than pessimistic [pg 214] facts of knowledge. An instinctive Reverence for Life is within us, for we are will-to-live. . . .
Even the consistently pessimistic thought of Brahmanism makes to the will-to-live the concession that voluntary death may only come about when the individual has put behind him a considerable portion of life. The Buddha goes still further, rejecting any violent exit from existence and demanding only that we let the will-to-live within us die out.
All pessimism, then, is inconsistent. It does not push open the door to freedom, but makes concessions to the obvious fact of existence. In Indian thought, which tends to pessimism, it attempts to make these concessions as small as possible, and to maintain the impossible fiction that merely the bare life is being lived with complete abstinence from any share in the happenings which are taking place here, there, and everywhere about it. With us the concessions are larger, since the conflict between the will-to-live and pessimistic recognition of facts is to a certain extent damped down, and obscured by the optimistic world-view which prevails in the general mode of thought. There arises an unthinking will-to-live which lives out its life trying to snatch possession of as much happiness as possible, and meaning to do something active without having made clear to itself what its intentions really are.
Whether somewhat more or somewhat less of world- and life-affirmation is retained matters little. Whenever the deepened world- and life-affirmation is not reached there remains only a depreciated will-to-live, which is not equal to the tasks of life. Thought usually deprives the will-to-live of the force lent it by its freedom from pre-conceptions, without being able to induce it to adopt a practice of reflexion in which it would find new and higher force. Thus it still possesses energy enough to continue in life, but not enough to overcome pessimism. The stream becomes a swamp.
That is the experience which determines the character [pg 215] of men’s existence, without their confessing it to themselves. They nourish themselves scantily on a little bit of happiness and many vain thoughts, which life puts in their manger. It is only by the pressure of necessity, exerted by elementary duties which throng upon them, that they are kept in the path of life.
Often their will-to-live is changed into a kind of intoxication. Spring sunshine, trees in flower, passing clouds, fields of waving corn provoke it. A will-to-live which announces itself in many forms in magnificent phenomena all around them, carries their own will-to-live along with it. Full of delight, they want to take part in the mighty symphony which they hear. They find the world beautiful. . . . But the transport passes. Horrid discords allow them once more to hear only noise, where they thought they perceived music. The beauty of nature is darkened for them by the suffering which they discover everywhere within it. Now they see once more that they are drifting like shipwrecked men over a waste of waters, only that their boat is at one moment raised aloft on mountainous waves and the next sinks into the valleys between them, and that now sunbeams, and now heavy clouds, rest upon the heaving billows.
Now they would like to persuade themselves that there is land in the direction in which they are drifting. Their will-to-live befools their thinking, so that it makes efforts to see the world as it would like to see it. It compels it also to hand them a chart which confirms their hopes of land. Once more they bend to the oars, till once more their arms drop with fatigue, and their gaze wanders, disappointed, from billow to billow.
That is the voyage of the will-to-live which has abjured thought.
Is there, then, nothing else that the will-to-live can do but drift along without thought, or sink in pessimistic knowledge? Yes, there is. It must indeed voyage across this boundless sea; but it can hoist sails, and steer a definite course.
The world- and life-affirmation of the will-to-live
The will-to-live which tries to know the world is a shipwrecked castaway; the will-to-live which gets to know itself is a bold mariner.
The will-to-live is not restricted to maintaining its existence on what the ever unsatisfying knowledge of the world offers it; it can feed on the life-forces which it finds in itself. The knowledge which I acquire from my will-to-live is richer than that which I win by observation of the world. There are given in it values and incitements bearing on my relation to the world and to life which find no justification in my reflexion upon the world and existence. Why then tune down one’s will-to-live to the pitch of one’s knowledge of the world, or undertake the meaningless task of tuning up one’s knowledge of the world to the higher pitch of one’s will-to-live. The right and obvious course is to let the ideas which are given in our will-to-live be accepted as the higher and decisive kind of knowledge.
My knowledge of the world is a knowledge from outside, and remains for ever incomplete. The knowledge derived from my will-to-live is direct, and takes me back to the mysterious movements of life as it is in itself.
The highest knowledge, then, is the knowing that I must be true to the will-to-live. It is this knowledge that hands me the compass for the voyage I have to make in the night without the aid of a chart. To live out one’s life in the direction of its course, to raise it to a higher power, and to ennoble it, is natural. Every depreciation of the will-to-live is an act of unveracity towards myself, or a symptom of unhealthiness.
The essential nature of the will-to-live is determination to live itself to the full. It carries within it the impulse to realise itself in the highest possible perfection. In the flowering tree, in the strange forms of the medusa, in the blade of grass, in the crystal; everywhere it strives to reach the perfection with which it is endowed. In everything [pg 217] that exists there is at work an imaginative force, which is determined by ideals. In us, beings who can move about freely and are capable of pre-considered, purposive working, the impulse to perfection is given in such a way that we aim at raising to their highest material and spiritual value both ourselves and every existing thing which is open to our influence.
How this striving originated within us, and how it has developed, we do not know, but it is given with our existence. We must act upon it, if we would not be unfaithful to the mysterious will-to-live which is within us.
When the will-to-live arrives at the critical point where its early unsophisticated world- and life-affirmation has to be changed into a reflective one, it is the part of thought to assist it by holding it to the thinking out of all the ideas which are given within it and to the surrender of itself to them. That the will-to-live within us becomes true to itself and remains so; that it experiences no degeneration but develops itself to complete vitality, that is what decides the fate of our existence.
When it comes to clearness about itself, the will-to-live knows that it is dependent on itself alone. It is meant to attain to freedom from the world. Its knowledge of the world can prove to it that its striving to raise to their highest value its own life and every living thing which can be influenced by it remains in the course of the world-whole, something problematic. In this it has not been misled. Its world- and life-affirmation carries its meaning in itself. It follows from an inward necessity, and is sufficient for itself. By its means my existence joins in pursuing the aims of the mysterious universal will of which I am a manifestation. In my deepened world- and life-affirmation, I manifest reverence for life. With consciousness and with volition I devote myself to Being. I become of service to the ideals which it thinks out in me; I become imaginative force like that which works enigmatically in nature, and thus I give my existence a meaning from within outwards.
Reverence for life means to be in the grasp of the infinite, inexplicable, forward-urging Will in which all Being is grounded. It raises us above all knowledge of things and lets us become a tree which is safe against drought, because it is planted among running streams. All living piety flows from reverence for life and the compulsion towards ideals which is given in it. In reverence for life lies piety in its most elemental and deepest form, in which it has not yet involved itself with any explanation of the world or no longer does so, but is piety which comes simply from inward necessity, and therefore asks no questions about ends to be pursued.
The will-to-live, too, which has become reflective and has made its way through to deeper world- and life-affirmation, tries to secure happiness and success, for as will-to-live it is will to the realizing of ideals. It does not, however, live on happiness and success. Whatever of these it obtains is a strengthening of itself which it thankfully accepts, though it is resolved on action, even if happiness and success must be denied it. It sows as one who does not count on living to reap the harvest.
The will-to-live is not a flame which burns only when events provide suitable fuel; it blazes up, and that with the purest light, when it is forced to feed on what it derives from itself. Then, too, when events seem to leave no future for it but suffering, it still holds out as an active will. In deep reverence for life it makes the existence which according to usual ideas is no longer in any way worth living, precious, because even in such an existence it experiences its own freedom from the world. Quiet and peace radiate from a being like that upon others, and cause them also to be touched by the secret that we must all, whether active or passive, preserve our freedom in order truly to live.
True resignation is not a becoming weary of the world but the quiet triumph which the will-to-live celebrates at the hour of its greatest need over the circumstances of life. [pg 219] It flourishes only in the soil of deep world- and life-affirmation.
In this way our life is a coming to an understanding between our will-to-live and the world, along with which we have continually to be on our guard against allowing any deterioration in our will-to-live. The struggle between optimism and pessimism is never fought to a finish within us. We are ever wandering on slipping rubble above the abyss of pessimism. When that which we experience in our own existence or learn from the history of mankind, falls oppressively upon our will-to-live and robs us of our freshness and our power of deliberation, we might lose hold, and be carried away with the moving boulders into the abyss below. But knowing that what awaits us below is death, we work our way up to the path again. . . .
Or it may perhaps be that pessimism comes over us, like the bliss of complete rest over those who, tired out, sit down in the snow. No longer to be obliged to hope for and aim at what is commanded us by the ideals which are forced upon us by the deepened will-to-live! No longer to be in a state of unrest when by lessening our efforts we can have rest! . . . Gently comes the appeal from knowledge to our will to tune itself down to the facts. . . .
That is the fatal state of complete rest in which men, and civilised mankind as a whole, grow numb and die.
And when we think that the enigmas by which we are surrounded can no longer harm us, there once more rises up before us somewhere or other the most terrifying of them all, the fact that the will-to-live can be shattered in suffering or in spiritual night. This enigma, too, before which our will-to-live shudders as before the most inexplicable of all inexplicable things, we must learn to leave unsolved.
Thus does pessimistic knowledge pursue us closely right on to our last breath. That is why it is so profoundly significant that the will-to-live rouses itself at last and once for all to insist on its freedom from having to understand the world, and shows itself capable of letting itself be [pg 220] determined solely by that which is given within itself. With humility and courage it makes its way through the endless chaos of enigmas, fulfilling its mysterious destiny, making a reality of its union with the infinite will-to-live.
CHAPTER XIX
THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS, STARTING FROM THE HISTORY OF ETHICS
An ethic of self-devotion, or an ethic of self-perfecting?
THOUGHT, then, which reaches bottom, arrives at an unshakeable world-and-life affirmation. Let it now try whether it can lead us to an ethic. But that it may not proceed with us, as it so often does, merely at random, it shall gather from the thought which has hitherto been devoted to ethics all the guidance which is there to be found.
What does the history of ethics teach?
As a quite general principle we learn from it, that the object of all ethical enquiry is the discovery of the universal basic principle of the moral.
The basic principle of the moral must show itself to be a necessity of thought, and must bring man to an unceasing, living, and practical conflict and understanding with reality.
The principles of the moral which have hitherto been offered us are absolutely unsatisfying. This is clear from the fact that they cannot be thought out to a conclusion without leading to paradoxes, or losing in ethical content.
Classical thought tries to conceive of the ethical as that which brings rational pleasure. It did not succeed, however, from that starting-point in arriving at an ethic of active devotion. Shut up within the egoistic-utilitarian, it ends in an ethically-coloured resignation.
The ethical thought of modern times is from the outset social-utilitarian. It is to it a matter of course that the individual must devote himself in every respect to his fellow-individuals, and to society. But when it tries to [pg 222] give a firm foundation to this ethic of devotion which seems to it so much a matter of course, and to think it out to a conclusion, it is driven to the most remarkable consequences, which are inconsistent with each other in the most varied directions. At one time it explains devotion as a refined egoism; at another as something which society forcibly imposes on individuals; at another as something which it develops in him by education; at another, as in Bentham, as something which he adopts as one of his convictions on the ground of the urgent representations of society; at another as an instinct which he obeys. The first assumption cannot be carried through; the second, third, and fourth are unsatisfying because they allow ethics to reach men from the outside; the last leads to a cul-de-sac. If, for example, devotion is an instinct, it must, of course, be made conceivable how thought can work upon it, and raise it to the level of a considered, widely inclusive, voluntary activity at which level it first becomes ethical. This, which is its peculiar problem, utilitarianism does not recognise, much less solve. It is always in too much of a hurry to come to practical results. At last it gives its bond to biology and social science, which bring it to conceiving itself as herd-mentality, wonderfully developed and capable of still further development. It thereby bring itself to a halt far below the level of real ethics.
The ethic of devotion fails therefore most remarkably, although it starts from what is most elementary and essential in ethics, to shape itself in a way which satisfies thought. It is as if it had the true basic principle of ethics within its reach, yet always grasped to right or left of it.
By the side of these two attempts to understand ethics as effort to procure rational pleasure, or as devotion to one’s fellow-men and to society, there is a third, which tries to explain ethics as effort after self-perfecting. This attempt has in it something abstract and venturesome. It disdains to start from a universally acknowledged content of the ethical, as utilitarianism does, and in contrast to that [pg 223] sets before thought the task of deriving the whole content of ethics from the effort after self-perfecting.
Plato, the first representative in the West of the ethics of self-perfecting, and Schopenhauer try to solve the problem by setting up, as do the Indians, world- and life-denial to be the basic principle of the ethical. That, however, is no solution. World- and life-denial, if consistently thought out and carried through, does not produce an ethic but reduces ethics to impotence.
Kant, the modern restorer of the ethic of self-perfecting, sets up the conception of absolute duty, but without giving it any content. He thereby admits his inability to derive the content of ethics from the effort after self-perfecting.
If the ethic of self-perfecting tries really to acquire a content, it must allow that ethics consist either in world- and life-denial or in higher world- and life-affirmation. The first need not be considered; there remains, therefore, only the other.
Spinoza conceives the higher world- and life-affirmation as a thinking absorption in the universe. He does not, however, arrive thereby at a real ethic, but only at an ethically-coloured resignation. Schleiermacher uses much art to lend this ethical colouring a more brilliant tone. Nietzsche avoids the paths of resignation, but reaches thereby a world- and life-affirmation which is ethical only so far as it feels itself to be an effort after self-perfecting.
The only thinker who succeeds to some extent in giving to self-perfecting within world- and life-affirmation an ethical content is J. G. Fichte. The result, however, is valueless, because it presupposes an optimistic-ethical view of the nature of the universe and of the position of man within it, which is based upon inadmissible speculation.
The ethic of self-perfecting is therefore not capable of so establishing the basic principle of the moral, that it has a content which is ethically satisfying; the ethic of devotion, on the other hand, starting from the content which it [pg 224] presupposes, cannot reach a basic principle of ethics which is grounded in thought. The attempt made by antiquity to conceive ethics as that which brings rational pleasure we need no longer consider. It is only too clear that it does not take sufficiently into account the enigma of devotion, and can never solve it. There remain, therefore, for consideration only the two undertakings, so strangely opposed to one another, one of which starts from devotion as a generally accepted content of the ethical in order to conceive it as belonging to the self-perfecting of man, while the other starts from self-perfecting and seeks to conceive devotion as an item in its content which is a necessity of thought.
Is there a synthesis of these two? In other words, do devotion and self-perfecting belong together in such a way that the one is contained in the other?
If this inward unity has not been visible hitherto, may not the cause be that reflexion, whether upon devotion or upon self-perfecting, did not go deep enough and was not sufficiently inclusive?
Ethics and a theory of knowledge. Ethics and natural happenings. The enthusiastic element in ethics
Before thought attempts to investigate more deeply and completely the nature of devotion and that of self-perfecting, it must proceed further to put clearly before itself what there is offered to it in the way of different kinds of knowledge and other considerations on its journey through the Western search for ethics.
It may be accepted as something fully recognised that ethics have nothing to expect from any theory of knowledge. Depreciation of the reality of the sensible world brings them merely apparent profit. Thought believes it can draw from the possibility of a spiritualising of the world some advantage for the optimistic-ethical interpretation of it. It has been, however, established by this [pg 225] time that ethics can no more be derived from an ethical interpretation of the world than world- and life-affirmation can be referred back to an optimistic interpretation of it, and that they must instead of that find their foundation in themselves in a world which is recognised as absolutely enigmatic. At once and for ever, then, all attempts to bring ethical and epistemological idealism into connexion with one another have to be recognised as useless for ethics. Ethics can let space and time go hang.
In epistemological investigations into the nature of space and time ethics feel a satisfaction which is strong but uninterested. They view them as efforts after knowledge which must be made, but they know that the results can never touch what is essential in any world- and life-view. It suffices them to know that the whole world of sense is a manifestation of forces, that is to say of an enigmatically manifold will-to-live. In this their thought is spiritualistic. It is materialistic, however, so far as it presupposes manifestation and force to be connected in such a way that any effect produced upon the former influences the force which lies behind it. Ethics feel that if it were not thus possible for one will-to-live to produce through the manifestation effects on another will-to-live, they would have no reason for existing. But to investigate how this relation between force and its manifestation is to be explained from the standpoint of epistemology, and whether it can be explained at all, ethics can leave undecided as being none of their business; they claim for themselves, just as does natural science, the right to remain free from preconceptions.
In this connexion it is interesting to observe that it is among the representatives of scientific materialism that enthusiastic ethical idealism is often to be met with, while the adherents of spiritualistic philosophy are usually moralists with an unemotional temperament.
With renunciation of all help from epistemological [pg 226] idealism, it follows that ethics ask for nothing and expect nothing from speculative philosophy. They declare they have nothing to do with any kind of ethical interpretation of the world.
Thought gathers, further, from the history of ethics that the latter cannot be conceived as being merely a natural happening which continues itself in man. In the ethical man natural happenings come into contradiction with themselves. Nature knows only a blind affirmation of life. The will-to-live which animates natural forces and living beings is concerned to work itself out unhindered. But in man this natural effort is in a state of tension with a mysterious effort of a different kind. Life-affirmation exerts itself to take up life-denial into itself in order to serve other living beings by self-devotion, and to protect them, even eventually by self-sacrifice, from injury or destruction. It is true that self-devotion plays a certain rôle in non-human living beings. As a temporary instinct it rules in sexual love and in parental love; as a permanent instinct it is found in certain individual members of animal species (e.g., ants, bees) which, because sexless, are incomplete individualities. These manifestations are in a certain way a prelude to the interplay of life-affirmation and life-denial which is at work in the ethical man. They do not, however, explain it. That which is active elsewhere only as a temporary instinct, or as an instinct in incomplete individualities and that, too, always within special relations of solidarity with others, becomes now, in man, a steady, voluntary, unlimited form of action, a result of thought, in which individuals endeavour to realise the higher life-affirmation. How does this come about?
Here one is faced once more by the problem of the rôle which thought plays in the origin of ethics. It seizes on something of which a preliminary form is seen in an instinct, in order to extend it and bring it to perfection. It comprehends the content of an instinct, and tries to give it practical application in new and consistent action.