GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
AND POLITICS
BY
JOHN DEWEY
Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
The will of John Calvin McNair established a Foundation at the
University of North Carolina upon which public lectures are to be given
from time to time to the members of the University. This book contains
three lectures which were given in February of this year upon this
Foundation. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many courtesies enjoyed
during my brief stay at Chapel Hill, the seat of the University.
J. D.
Columbia University,
New York City, April, 1915.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: THE TWO WORLDS 3
II GERMAN MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 47
III THE GERMANIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 91
INDEX 133
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
I
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: THE TWO WORLDS
The nature of the influence of general ideas upon practical affairs is a
troubled question. Mind dislikes to find itself a pilgrim in an alien
world. A discovery that the belief in the influence of thought upon
action is an illusion would leave men profoundly saddened with
themselves and with the world. Were it not that the doctrine forbids any
discovery influencing affairs--since the discovery would be an idea--we
should say that the discovery of the wholly _ex post facto_ and idle
character of ideas would profoundly influence subsequent affairs. The
strange thing is that when men had least control over nature and their
own affairs, they were most sure of the efficacy of thought. The
doctrine that nature does nothing in vain, that it is directed by
purpose, was not engrafted by scholasticism upon science; it formulates
an instinctive tendency. And if the doctrine be fallacious, its pathos
has a noble quality. It testifies to the longing of human thought for a
world of its own texture. Yet just in the degree in which men, by means
of inventions and political arrangements, have found ways of making
their thoughts effective, they have come to question whether any
thinking is efficacious. Our notions in physical science tend to reduce
mind to a bare spectator of a machine-like nature grinding its
unrelenting way. The vogue of evolutionary ideas has led many to regard
intelligence as a deposit from history, not as a force in its making. We
look backward rather than forward; and when we look forward we seem to
see but a further unrolling of a panorama long ago rolled up on a cosmic
reel. Even Bergson, who, to a casual reader, appears to reveal vast
unexplored vistas of genuinely novel possibilities, turns out, upon
careful study, to regard _intellect_ (everything which in the past has
gone by the name of observation and reflection) as but an evolutionary
deposit whose importance is confined to the conservation of a life
already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or something akin to
instinct, for the future:--as if there were hope and consolation in
bidding us trust to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently
direct or control.
I do not see that the school of history which finds Bergson mystic and
romantic, which prides itself upon its hard-headed and scientific
character, comes out at a different place. I refer to the doctrine of
the economic interpretation of history in its extreme form--which, so
its adherents tell us, is its only logical form. It is easy to follow
them when they tell us that past historians have ignored the great part
played by economic forces, and that descriptions and explanations have
been correspondingly superficial. When one reflects that the great
problems of the present day are those attending economic reorganization,
one might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted confession that
historians are really engaged in construing the past in terms of the
problems and interests of an impending future, instead of reporting a
past in order to discover some mathematical curve which future events
are bound to describe. But no; our strictly scientific economic
interpreters will have it that economic forces present an inevitable
evolution, of which state and church, art and literature, science and
philosophy are by-products. It is useless to suggest that while modern
industry has given an immense stimulus to scientific inquiry, yet
nevertheless the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century comes
after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth. The dogma forbids
any connection.
But when we note that Marx gave it away that his materialistic
interpretation of history was but the Hegelian idealistic dialectic
turned upside down, we may grow wary. Is it, after all, history we are
dealing with or another philosophy of history? And when we discover that
the great importance of the doctrine is urged upon us, when we find that
we are told that the general recognition of its truth helps us out of
our present troubles and indicates a path for future effort, we
positively take heart. These writers do not seem to mean just what they
say. Like the rest of us, they are human, and infected with a belief
that ideas, even highly abstract theories, are of efficacy in the
conduct of human affairs influencing the history which is yet to be.
* * * * *
I have, however, no intention of entering upon this controversy, much
less of trying to settle it. These remarks are but preliminary to a
consideration of some of the practical affiliations of portions of the
modern history of philosophical thought with practical social affairs.
And if I set forth my own position in the controversy in question, the
statement is frankly a personal one, intended to make known the
prepossessions with which I approach the discussion of the political
bearings of one phase of modern philosophy. I do not believe, then, that
_pure_ ideas, or pure thought, ever exercised any influence upon human
action. I believe that very much of what has been presented as
philosophic reflection is in effect simply an idealization, for the sake
of emotional satisfaction, of the brutely given state of affairs, and is
not a genuine discovery of the practical influence of ideas. In other
words, I believe it to be esthetic in type even when sadly lacking in
esthetic form. And I believe it is easy to exaggerate the practical
influence of even the more vital and genuine ideas of which I am about
to speak.
But I also believe that there are no such things as _pure_ ideas or
_pure_ reason. Every living thought represents a gesture made toward
the world, an attitude taken to some practical situation in which we
are implicated. Most of these gestures are ephemeral; they reveal the
state of him who makes them rather than effect a significant alteration
of conditions. But at some times they are congenial to a situation in
which men in masses are acting and suffering. They supply a model for
the attitudes of others; they condense into a dramatic type of action.
They then form what we call the "great" systems of thought. Not all
ideas perish with the momentary response. They are voiced and others
hear; they are written and others read. Education, formal and informal,
embodies them not so much in other men's minds as in their permanent
dispositions of action. They are in the blood, and afford sustenance to
conduct; they are in the muscles and men strike or retire. Even
emotional and esthetic systems may breed a disposition toward the world
and take overt effect. The reactions thus engendered are, indeed,
superficial as compared with those in which more primitive instincts are
embodied. The business of eating and drinking, buying and selling,
marrying and being given in marriage, making war and peace, gets somehow
carried on along with any and every system of ideas which the world has
known. But how, and when and where and for what men do even these things
is tremendously affected by the abstract ideas which get into
circulation.
* * * * *
I take it that I may seem to be engaged in an emphatic urging of the
obvious. However it may be with a few specialized schools of men, almost
everybody takes it as a matter of course that ideas influence action and
help determine the subsequent course of events. Yet there is a purpose
in this insistence. Most persons draw the line at a certain kind of
general ideas. They are especially prone to regard the ideas which
constitute philosophic theories as practically innocuous--as more or
less amiable speculations significant at the most for moments of
leisure, in moments of relief from preoccupation with affairs. Above
all, men take the particular general ideas which happen to affect their
own conduct of life as normal and inevitable. Pray what other ideas
would any sensible man have? They forget the extent to which these ideas
originated as parts of a remote and technical theoretical system, which
by multitudes of non-reflective channels has infiltrated into their
habits of imagination and behavior. An expert intellectual anatomist,
my friends, might dissect you and find Platonic and Aristotelian
tissues, organs from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Locke and
Descartes, in the make-up of the ideas by which you are habitually
swayed, and find, indeed, that they and other thinkers of whose names
you have never heard constitute a larger part of your mental structure
than does the Calvin or Kant, Darwin or Spencer, Hegel or Emerson,
Bergson or Browning to whom you yield conscious allegiance.
Philosophers themselves are naturally chiefly responsible for the
ordinary estimate of their own influence, or lack of influence. They
have been taken mostly at their own word as to what they were doing, and
what for the most part they have pretended to do is radically different
from what they have actually done. They are quite negligible as seers
and reporters of ultimate reality, or the essential natures of things.
And it is in this aspect that they have mostly fancied seeing
themselves. Their actual office has been quite other. They have told
about nature and life and society in terms of collective human desire
and aspiration as these were determined by contemporary difficulties
and struggles.
I have spoken thus far as if the influence of general ideas upon action
were likely to be beneficial. It goes against the grain to attribute
evil to the workings of intelligence. But we might as well face the
dilemma. What is called pure thought, thought freed from the empirical
contingencies of life, would, even if it existed, be irrelevant to the
guidance of action. For the latter always operates amid the circumstance
of contingencies. And thinking which is colored by time and place must
always be of a mixed quality. In part, it will detect and hold fast to
more permanent tendencies and arrangements; in part, it will take the
limitations of its own period as necessary and universal--even as
intrinsically desirable.
The traits which give thinking effectiveness for the good give it also
potency for harm. A physical catastrophe, an earthquake or
conflagration, acts only where it happens. While its effects endure, it
passes away. But it is of the nature of ideas to be abstract: that is to
say, severed from the circumstances of their origin, and through
embodiment in language capable of operating in remote climes and alien
situations. Time heals physical ravages, but it may only accentuate the
evils of an intellectual catastrophe--for by no lesser name can we call
a systematic intellectual error. To one who is professionally
preoccupied with philosophy there is much in its history which is
profoundly depressing. He sees ideas which were not only natural but
useful in their native time and place, figuring in foreign contexts so
as to formulate defects as virtues and to give rational sanction to
brute facts, and to oppose alleged eternal truths to progress. He sees
movements which might have passed away with change of circumstance as
casually as they arose, acquire persistence and dignity because thought
has taken cognizance of them and given them intellectual names. The
witness of history is that to think in general and abstract terms is
dangerous; it elevates ideas beyond the situations in which they were
born and charges them with we know not what menace for the future. And
in the past the danger has been the greater because philosophers have so
largely purported to be concerned not with contemporary problems of
living, but with essential Truth and Reality viewed under the form of
eternity.
In bringing these general considerations to a close, I face an
embarrassment. I must choose some particular period of intellectual
history for more concrete illustration of the mutual relationship of
philosophy and practical social affairs--which latter, for the sake of
brevity, I term Politics. One is tempted to choose Plato. For in spite
of the mystic and transcendental coloring of his thought, it was he who
defined philosophy as the science of the State, or the most complete and
organized whole known to man; it is no accident that his chief work is
termed the "Republic." In modern times, we are struck by the fact that
English philosophy from Bacon to John Stuart Mill has been cultivated by
men of affairs rather than by professors, and with a direct outlook upon
social interests. In France, the great period of philosophy, the period
of _les philosophes_, was the time in which were forged the ideas which
connect in particular with the French Revolution and in general with the
conceptions which spread so rapidly through the civilized world, of the
indefinite perfectibility of humanity, the rights of man, and the
promotion of a society as wide as humanity, based upon allegiance to
reason.
Somewhat arbitrarily I have, however, selected some aspects of classic
German thought for my illustrative material. Partly, I suppose, because
one is piqued by the apparent challenge which its highly technical,
professorial and predominantly _a priori_ character offers to the
proposition that there is close connection between abstract thought and
the tendencies of collective life. More to the point, probably, is the
fact that the heroic age of German thought lies almost within the last
century, while the creative period of continental thought lies largely
in the eighteenth century, and that of British thought still earlier. It
was Taine, the Frenchman, who said that all the leading ideas of the
present day were produced in Germany between 1780 and 1830. Above all,
the Germans, as we say, have philosophy in their blood. Such phrases
generally mean something not about hereditary qualities, but about the
social conditions under which ideas propagate and circulate.
Now Germany is the modern state which provides the greatest facilities
for general ideas to take effect through social inculcation. Its system
of education is adapted to that end. Higher schools and universities in
Germany are really, not just nominally, under the control of the state
and part of the state life. In spite of freedom of academic instruction
when once a teacher is installed in office, the political authorities
have always taken a hand, at critical junctures, in determining the
selection of teachers in subjects that had a direct bearing upon
political policies. Moreover, one of the chief functions of the
universities is the preparation of future state officials. Legislative
activity is distinctly subordinate to that of administration conducted
by a trained civil service, or, if you please, bureaucracy. Membership
in this bureaucracy is dependent upon university training. Philosophy,
both directly and indirectly, plays an unusually large role in the
training. The faculty of law does not chiefly aim at the preparation of
practicing lawyers. Philosophies of jurisprudence are essential parts of
the law teaching; and every one of the classic philosophers took a hand
in writing a philosophy of Law and of the State. Moreover, in the
theological faculties, which are also organic parts of state-controlled
institutions, the theology and higher criticism of Protestant Germany
have been developed, and developed also in close connection with
philosophical systems--like those of Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel. In
short, the educational and administrative agencies of Germany provide
ready-made channels through which philosophic ideas may flow on their
way to practical affairs.
Political public opinion hardly exists in Germany in the sense in which
it obtains in France, Great Britain or this country. So far as it
exists, the universities may be said to be its chief organs. They,
rather than the newspapers, crystallize it and give it articulate
expression. Instead of expressing surprise at the characteristic
utterances of university men with reference to the great war, we should
then rather turn to the past history in which the ideas now uttered were
generated.
In an account of German intellectual history sufficiently extensive we
should have to go back at least to Luther. Fortunately, for our
purposes, what he actually did and taught is not so important as the
more recent tradition concerning his peculiarly Germanic status and
office. All peoples are proud of all their great men. Germany is proud
of Luther as its greatest national hero. But while most nations are
proud of their great men, Germany is proud of itself rather for
producing Luther. It finds him as a Germanic product quite natural--nay,
inevitable. A belief in the universal character of his genius thus
naturally is converted into a belief of the essentially universal
quality of the people who produced him.
Heine was not disposed by birth or temperament to overestimate the
significance of Luther. But here is what he said:
"Luther is not only the greatest but the most _German_ man in
our history. . . . He possessed qualities that we seldom see
associated--nay, that we usually find in the most hostile
antagonism. He was at once a dreamy mystic and a practical man
of action. . . . He was both a cold scholastic word-sifter and
an inspired God-drunk prophet. . . . He was full of the awful
reverence of God, full of self-sacrificing devotion to
the Holy Spirit, he could lose himself entirely in pure
spirituality. Yet he was fully acquainted with the glories of
this earth; he knew how estimable they are; it was his lips
that uttered the famous maxim--
"'Who loves not woman, wine and song,
Remains a fool his whole life long.'
He was a complete man, I might say an absolute man, in whom
there was no discord between matter and spirit. To call
him a spiritualist would be as erroneous as to call him a
sensualist. . . . Eternal praise to the man whom we have to
thank for the deliverance of our most precious possessions."
And again speaking of Luther's work:
"Thus was established in Germany spiritual freedom, or as it
is called, freedom of thought. Thought became a right and the
decisions of reason legitimate."
The specific correctness of the above is of slight importance as
compared with the universality of the tradition which made these ideas
peculiarly Germanic, and Luther, therefore, a genuine national hero and
type.
It is, however, with Kant that I commence. In Protestant Germany his
name is almost always associated with that of Luther. That he brought to
consciousness the true meaning of the Lutheran reformation is a
commonplace of the German historian. One can hardly convey a sense of
the unique position he occupies in the German thought of the last two
generations. It is not that every philosopher is a Kantian, or that the
professed Kantians stick literally to his text. Far from it. But Kant
must always be reckoned with. No position unlike his should be taken up
till Kant has been reverently disposed of, and the new position
evaluated in his terms. To scoff at him is fair sacrilege. In a genuine
sense, he marks the end of the older age. He _is_ the transition to
distinctively modern thought.
One shrinks at the attempt to compress even his leading ideas into an
hour. Fortunately for me, few who read my attempt will have sufficient
acquaintance with the tomes of Kantian interpretation and exposition to
appreciate the full enormity of my offense. For I cannot avoid the
effort to seize from out his highly technical writings a single idea and
to label that his germinal idea. For only in this way can we get a clew
to those general ideas with which Germany characteristically prefers to
connect the aspirations and convictions that animate its deeds.
Adventuring without further preface into this field, I find that Kant's
decisive contribution is the idea of a dual legislation of reason by
which are marked off two distinct realms--that of science and that of
morals. Each of these two realms has its own final and authoritative
constitution: On one hand, there is the world of sense, the world of
phenomena in space and time in which science is at home; on the other
hand, is the supersensible, the noumenal world, the world of moral duty
and moral freedom.
Every cultivated man is familiar with the conflict of science and
religion, brute fact and ideal purpose, what is and what ought to be,
necessity and freedom. In the domain of science causal dependence is
sovereign; while freedom is lord of moral action. It is the proud boast
of those who are Kantian in spirit that Kant discovered laws deep in the
very nature of things and of human experience whose recognition puts an
end forever to all possibility of conflict.
In principle, the discovery is as simple as its application is
far-reaching. Both science and moral obligation exist. Analysis shows
that each is based upon laws supplied by one and the same reason (of
which, as he is fond of saying, reason is the legislator); but laws of
such a nature that their respective jurisdictions can never compete. The
material for the legislation of reason in the natural world is sense. In
this sensible world of space and time, causal necessity reigns: such is
the decree of reason itself. Every attempt to find freedom, to locate
ideals, to draw support for man's moral aspirations in nature, is
predoomed to failure. The effort of reason to do these things is
contrary to the very nature of reason itself: it is self-contradictory,
suicidal.
When one considers the extent in which religion has been bound up with
belief in miracles, or departures from the order of nature; when one
notes how support for morals has been sought in natural law; how morals
have been tied up with man's natural tendencies to seek happiness and
with consequences in the way of reward of virtue and punishment of vice;
how history has been explained as a play of moral forces--in short, the
extent to which both the grounds and the sanctions for morality have
been sought within the time and space world, one realizes the scope of
the revolution wrought by Kant, provided his philosophy be true. Add to
this the fact that men in the past have not taken seriously the idea
that every existence in space, every event in time, is connected by
bonds of causal necessity with other existences and events, and
consequently have had no motive for the systematic pursuit of science.
How is the late appearance of science in human history to be accounted
for? How are we to understand the comparatively slight influence which
science still has upon the conduct of life? Men, when they have not
consciously looked upon nature as a scene of caprice, have failed to
bring home to themselves that nature is a scene of the legislative
activity of reason in the material of sense. This fact the Kantian
philosophy brings home to man once for all; it brings it home not as a
pious wish, nor as a precarious hope confirmed empirically here and
there by victories won by a Galileo or a Newton, but as an indubitable
fact necessary to the existence of any cognitive experience at all. The
reign of law in nature is the work of the same reason which proceeds
empirically and haltingly to the discovery of law here and there. Thus
the acceptance of the Kantian philosophy not only frees man at a single
stroke from superstition, sentimentalism and moral and theological
romanticism, but gives at the same stroke authorization and stimulation
to the detailed efforts of man to wrest from nature her secrets of
causal law. What sparse groups of men of natural science had been doing
for the three preceding centuries, Kant proclaimed to be the
manifestation of the essential constitution of man as a knowing being.
For those who accept the Kantian philosophy, it is accordingly the
_magna charta_ of scientific work: the adequate formulation of the
constitution which directs and justifies their scientific inquiries. It
is a truism to say that among the Germans as nowhere else has developed
a positive reverence for science. In what other land does one find in
the organic law mention of Science, and read in its constitution an
express provision that "Science and its teaching are free"?
But this expresses only half of Kant's work. Reason is itself
supersensible. Giving law to the material of sense and so constituting
nature, it is in itself above sense and nature, as a sovereign is above
his subjects. The supersensible world is thus a more congenial field for
its legislative activity than the physical world of space and time. But
is any such field open to human experience? Has not Kant himself closed
and locked the gates in his assertion that the entire operation of man's
knowing powers is confined to the realm of sense in which causal
necessity dominates? Yes, as far as knowledge is concerned. No, as far
as moral obligation is concerned. The fact of duty, the existence of a
categorical command to act thus and so, no matter what the pressure of
physical surroundings or the incitation of animal inclinations, is as
much a fact as the existence of knowledge of the physical world. Such a
command cannot proceed from nature. What is cannot introduce man to what
ought to be, and thus impose its own opposite upon him. Nature only
enmeshes men in its relentless machine-like movement. The very existence
of a command in man to act for the sake of what ought to be--no matter
what actually is--is thus of itself final proof of the operation of
supersensible reason within human experience: not, indeed, within
theoretical or cognitive experience, but within moral experience.
The moral law, the law of obligation, thus proceeds from a source in man
above reason. It is token of his membership as a moral being in a
kingdom of absolute ends above nature. But it is also directed to
something in man which is equally above nature: it appeals to and
demands freedom. Reason is incapable of anything so irrational, so
self-contradictory, as imposing a law of action to which no faculty of
action corresponds. The freedom of the moral will is the answer to the
unqualified demand of duty. It is not open to man to accept or reject
this truth as he may see fit. It is a principle of reason which is
involved in every exercise of reason. In denying it in name, man none
the less acknowledges it in fact. Only men already sophisticated by vice
who are seeking an excuse for their viciousness ever try to deny, even
in words, the response which freedom makes to the voice of duty. Since,
however, freedom is an absolute stranger to the natural and sensible
world, man's possession of moral freedom is the final sign and seal of
his membership in a supersensible world. The existence of an ideal or
spiritual realm with its own laws is thus certified to by the fact of
man's own citizenship within it. But, once more, this citizenship and
this certification are solely moral. Scientific or intellectual warrant
for it is impossible or self-contradictory, for science works by the
law of causal necessity with respect to what is, ignorant of any law of
freedom referring to what should be.
With the doors to the supersensible world now open, it is but a short
step to religion. Of the negative traits of true religion we may be sure
in advance. It will not be based upon intellectual grounds. Proofs of
the existence of God, of the creation of nature, of the existence of an
immaterial soul from the standpoint of knowledge are all of them
impossible. They transgress the limits of knowledge, since that is
confined to the sensible world of time and space. Neither will true
religion be based upon historic facts such as those of Jewish history or
the life of Jesus or the authority of a historic institution like a
church. For all historic facts as such fall within the realm of time
which is sensibly conditioned. From the points of view of natural
theology and historic religions Kant was greeted by his contemporaries
as the "all-shattering." Quite otherwise is it, however, as to moral
proofs of religious ideas and ideals. In Kant's own words: "I have found
it necessary to deny knowledge of God, freedom and immortality in order
to find a place for faith"--faith being a moral act.
Then he proceeds to reinterpret in terms of the sensuous natural
principle and the ideal rational principle the main doctrines of
Lutheran Protestantism. The doctrines of incarnation, original sin,
atonement, justification by faith and sanctification, while baseless
literally and historically, are symbols of the dual nature of man, as
phenomenal and noumenal. And while Kant scourges ecclesiastical
religions so far as they have relied upon ceremonies and external
authority, upon external rewards and punishments, yet he ascribes
transitional value to them in that they have symbolized ultimate moral
truths. Although dogmas are but the external vesture of inner truths,
yet it may be good for us "to continue to pay reverence to the outward
vesture since that has served to bring to general acceptance a doctrine
which really rests upon an authority within the soul of man, and which,
therefore, needs no miracle to commend it."
It is a precarious undertaking to single out some one thing in German
philosophy as of typical importance in understanding German national
life. Yet I am committed to the venture. My conviction is that we have
its root idea in the doctrine of Kant concerning the two realms, one
outer, physical and necessary, the other inner, ideal and free. To this
we must add that, in spite of their separateness and independence, the
primacy always lies with the inner. As compared with this, the
philosophy of a Nietzsche, to which so many resort at the present time
for explanation of what seems to them otherwise inexplicable, is but a
superficial and transitory wave of opinion. Surely the chief mark of
distinctively German civilization is its combination of self-conscious
idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organization in the
varied fields of action. If this is not a realization in fact of what is
found in Kant, I am totally at loss for a name by which to characterize
it. I do not mean that conscious adherence to the philosophy of Kant has
been the cause of the marvelous advances made in Germany in the natural
sciences and in the systematic application of the fruits of intelligence
to industry, trade, commerce, military affairs, education, civic
administration and industrial organization. Such a claim would be
absurd. But I do mean, primarily, that Kant detected and formulated the
direction in which the German genius was moving, so that his philosophy
is of immense prophetic significance; and, secondarily, that his
formulation has furnished a banner and a conscious creed which in solid
and definite fashion has intensified and deepened the work actually
undertaken.
In bringing to an imaginative synthesis what might have remained an
immense diversity of enterprises, Kantianism has helped formulate a
sense of a national mission and destiny. Over and above this, his
formulation and its influence aids us to understand why the German
consciousness has never been swamped by its technical efficiency and
devotion, but has remained self-consciously, not to say
self-righteously, idealistic. Such a work as Germany has undertaken
might well seem calculated to generate attachment to a positivistic or
even materialistic philosophy and to a utilitarian ethics. But no; the
teaching of Kant had put mechanism forever in its subordinate place at
the very time it inculcated devotion to mechanism in its place. Above
and beyond as an end, for the sake of which all technical achievements,
all promotion of health, wealth and happiness, exist, lies the realm of
inner freedom, of the ideal and the supersensible. The more the Germans
accomplish in the way of material conquest, the more they are conscious
of fulfilling an ideal mission; every external conquest affords the
greater warrant for dwelling in an inner region where mechanism does not
intrude. Thus it turns out that while the Germans have been, to employ a
catchword of recent thought, the most technically pragmatic of all
peoples in their actual conduct of affairs, there is no people so
hostile to the spirit of a pragmatic philosophy.
The combination of devotion to mechanism and organization in outward
affairs and of loyalty to freedom and consciousness in the inner realm
has its obvious attractions. Realized in the common temper of a people
it might well seem invincible. Ended is the paralysis of action arising
from the split between science and useful achievements on one side and
spiritual and ideal aspirations on the other. Each feeds and reinforces
the other. Freedom of soul and subordination of action dwell in harmony.
Obedience, definite subjection and control, detailed organization is the
lesson enforced by the rule of causal necessity in the outer world of
space and time in which action takes place. Unlimited freedom, the
heightening of consciousness for its own sake, sheer reveling in noble
ideals, the law of the inner world. What more can mortal man ask?
It would not be difficult, I imagine, to fill the three hours devoted to
these lectures with quotations from representative German authors to the
effect that supreme regard for the inner meaning of things, reverence
for inner truth in disregard of external consequences of advantage or
disadvantage, is the distinguishing mark of the German spirit as
against, say, the externality of the Latin spirit or the utilitarianism
of Anglo-Saxondom. I content myself with one quotation, a quotation
which also indicates the same inclination to treat historic facts as
symbolic of great truths which is found in Kant's treatment of church
dogmas. Speaking of the Germanic languages, an historian of German
civilization says:
"While all other Indo-European languages allow a wide liberty
in placing the accent and make external considerations,
such as the quantity of the syllables and euphony, of
deciding influence, the Germanic tribes show a remarkable
and intentional transition to an internal principle of
accentuation. . . . Of all related peoples the Germanic alone
puts the accent on the root syllable of the word, that is, on
the part that gives it its meaning. There is hardly an
ethnological fact extant which gives so much food for thought
as this. What leads these people to give up a habit which must
have been so old that it had become instinctive, and to evolve
out of their own minds a principle which indicates a power of
discrimination far in advance of anything we are used to
attribute to the lower stages of civilization? Circumstances
of which we are not now aware must have compelled them to
distinguish the inner essence of things from their external
form, and must have taught them to appreciate the former as of
higher, indeed as of sole, importance. It is this accentuation
of the real substance of things, the ever-powerful desire to
discover this real substance, and the ever-present impulse to
give expression to this inner reality which has become the
controlling trait of the Germanic soul. Hence the conviction
gained by countless unfruitful efforts, that reason alone will
never get at the true foundation of things; hence the
thoroughness of German science; hence a great many of the
qualities that explain Germanic successes and failures; hence,
perhaps, a certain stubbornness and obstinacy, the
unwillingness to give up a conviction once formed; hence the
tendency to mysticism; hence that continuous struggle which
marks the history of German art,--the struggle to give to the
contents powerful and adequate expression, and to satisfy at
the same time the requirements of esthetic elegance and
beauty, a struggle in which the victory is ever on the side of
truth, though it be homely, over beauty of form whenever it
appears deceitful; hence the part played by music as the only
expression of those imponderable vibrations of the soul for
which language seems to have no words; hence the faith of the
German in his mission among the nations as a bringer of truth,
as a recognizer of the real value of things as against the
hollow shell of beautiful form, as the doer of right deeds for
their own sake and not for any reward beyond the natural
outcome of the deed itself."
The division established between the outer realm, in which of course
acts fall, and the inner realm of consciousness explains what is
otherwise so paradoxical to a foreigner in German writings: The constant
assertion that Germany brought to the world the conscious recognition of
the principle of freedom coupled with the assertion of the relative
incompetency of the German folk _en masse_ for political self-direction.
To one saturated by the English tradition which identifies freedom with
power to act upon one's ideas, to make one's purposes effective in
regulation of public affairs, the combination seems self-contradictory.
To the German it is natural. Readers who have been led by newspaper
quotations to regard Bernhardi as preaching simply a gospel of superior
force will find in his writings a continual assertion that _the_ German
spirit is the spirit of freedom, of complete intellectual
self-determination; that the Germans have "always been the standard
bearers of free thought." We find him supporting his teachings not by
appeal to Nietzsche, but by the Kantian distinction between the
"empirical and rational ego."
It is Bernhardi who says:
"Two great movements were born from the German intellectual
life, on which, henceforth, _all the intellectual and moral
progress of mankind must rest_:--The Reformation and the
critical philosophy. The Reformation that broke the
intellectual yoke imposed by the Church, which checked all
free progress; and the Critique of Pure Reason which put a
stop to the caprice of philosophic speculation by defining for
the human mind the limitations of its capacities for
knowledge, and at the same time pointed out the way in which
knowledge is really possible. On this substructure was
developed the intellectual life of our time, whose deepest
significance consists in the attempt to reconcile the result
of free inquiry with the religious needs of the heart, and
thus to lay a foundation for the harmonious organization of
mankind. . . . The German nation not only laid the foundations
of this great struggle for a harmonious development of humanity
but took the lead in it. We are thus incurring an obligation
for the future from which we cannot shrink. We must be
prepared to be the leader in this campaign which is being
fought for the highest stake that has been offered to human
efforts. . . . To no nation except the German has it been given
to enjoy in its inner self 'that which is given to mankind as
a whole.' . . . It is this quality which especially fits us for
leadership in the intellectual domain and _imposes upon us the
obligation to maintain that position_."[35:A]
[35:A] Bernhardi, "Germany and the Next War," pp.
73-74. Italics not in the original text.
More significant than the words themselves are their occasion and the
occupation of the one who utters them. Outside of Germany, cavalry
generals who employ philosophy to bring home practical lessons are, I
think, rare. Outside of Germany, it would be hard to find an audience
where an appeal for military preparedness would be reinforced by
allusions to the Critique of Pure Reason.
Yet only by taking such statements seriously can one understand the
temper in which opinion in Germany meets a national crisis. When the
philosopher Eucken (who received a Nobel prize for contributing to the
idealistic literature of the world) justifies the part taken by Germany
in a world war because the Germans alone do not represent a
particularistic and nationalistic spirit, but embody the "universalism"
of humanity itself, he utters a conviction bred in German thought by the
ruling interpretation of German philosophic idealism. By the side of
this _motif_ the glorification of war as a biologic necessity, forced by
increase of population, is a secondary detail, giving a totally false
impression when isolated from its context. The main thing is that
Germany, more than any other nation, in a sense alone of all nations,
embodies the essential principle of humanity: freedom of spirit,
combined with thorough and detailed work in the outer sphere where
reigns causal law, where obedience, discipline and subordination are
the necessities of successful organization. It is perhaps worth while to
recall that Kant lived, taught and died in Koenigsberg; and that
Koenigsberg was the chief city of east Prussia, an island still cut off
in his early years from western Prussia, a titular capital for the
Prussian kings where they went for their coronations. His lifework in
philosophy coincides essentially with the political work of Frederick
the Great, the king who combined a regime of freedom of thought and
complete religious toleration with the most extraordinary display known
in history of administrative and military efficiency. Fortunately for
our present purposes, Kant, in one of his minor essays, has touched upon
this combination and stated its philosophy in terms of his own thought.
The essay in question is that entitled "What is the Enlightenment?" His
reply in substance is that it is the coming of age on the part of
humanity: the transition from a state of minority or infancy wherein man
does not dare to think freely to that period of majority or maturity in
which mankind dares to use its own power of understanding. The growth of
this power of free use of reason is the sole hope of progress in human
affairs. External revolutions which are not the natural expression of an
inner or intellectual revolution are of little significance. Genuine
growth is found in the slow growth of science and philosophy and in the
gradual diffusion throughout the mass of the discoveries and conclusions
of those who are superior in intelligence. True freedom is inner
freedom, freedom of thought together with the liberty consequent upon it
of teaching and publication. To check this rational freedom "is a sin
against the very nature of man, the primary law of which consists in
just the advance in rational enlightenment."
In contrast with this realm of inner freedom stands that of civil and
political action, the principle of which is obedience or subordination
to constituted authority. Kant illustrates the nature of the two by the
position of a military subordinate who is given an order to execute
which his reason tells him is unwise. His sole duty in the realm of
practice is to obey--to do his duty. But as a member not of the State
but of the kingdom of science, he has the right of free inquiry and
publication. Later he might write upon the campaign in which this event
took place and point out, upon intellectual grounds, the mistake
involved in the order. No wonder that Kant proclaims that the age of the
enlightenment is the age of Frederick the Great. Yet we should do
injustice to Kant if we inferred that he expected this dualism of
spheres of action, with its twofold moral law of freedom and obedience,
to endure forever. By the exercise of freedom of thought, and by its
publication and the education which should make its results permeate the
whole state, the habits of a nation will finally become elevated to
rationality, and the spread of reason will make it possible for the
government to treat men, not as cogs in a machine, but in accord with
the dignity of rational creatures.
Before leaving this theme, I must point out one aspect of the work of
reason thus far passed over. Nature, the sensible world of space and
time, is, as a knowable object, constituted by the legislative work of
reason, although constituted out of a non-rational sensible stuff. This
determining work of reason forms not merely the Idealism of the Kantian
philosophy but determines its emphasis upon the _a priori_. The
functions of reason through which nature is rendered a knowable object
cannot be derived from experience, for they are necessary to the
existence of experience. The details of this _a priori_ apparatus lie
far outside our present concern. Suffice it to say that as compared with
some of his successors, Kant was an economical soul and got along with
only two _a priori_ forms and twelve _a priori_ categories. The mental
habitudes generated by attachment to _a priori_ categories cannot
however be entirely neglected in even such a cursory discussion as the
present.
If one were to follow the suggestion involved in the lately quoted
passage as to the significant symbolism of the place of the accent in
German speech, one might discourse upon the deep meaning of the
Capitalization of Nouns in the written form of the German language,
together with the richness of the language in abstract nouns. One might
fancy that the dignity of the common noun substantive, expressing as it
does the universal or generic, has bred an intellectual deference. One
may fancy a whole nation of readers reverently bowing their heads at
each successively capitalized word. In such fashion one might arrive at
a picture, not without its truth, of what it means to be devoted to _a
priori_ rational principles.
A number of times during the course of the world war I have heard
someone remark that he would not so much mind what the Germans did if it
were not for the reasons assigned in its justification. But to
rationalize such a tangled skein as human experience is a difficult
task. If one is in possession of antecedent rational concepts which are
legislative for experience, the task is much simplified. It only remains
to subsume each empirical event under its proper category. If the
outsider does not see the applicability of the concept to the event, it
may be argued that his blindness shows his ineptness for truly universal
thinking. He is probably a crass empiric who thinks in terms of material
consequences instead of upon the basis of antecedent informing
principles of reason.
Thus it has come about that no moral, social or political question is
adequately discussed in Germany until the matter in hand has been
properly deduced from an exhaustive determination of its fundamental
_Begriff_ or _Wesen_. Or if the material is too obviously empirical to
allow of such deduction, it must at least be placed under its
appropriate rational form. What a convenience, what a resource, nay,
what a weapon is the Kantian distinction of _a priori_ rational form and
_a posteriori_ empirical matter. Let the latter be as brutely
diversified, as chaotic as you please. There always exists a form of
unity under which it may be brought. If the empirical facts are
recalcitrant, so much the worse for them. It only shows how empirical
they are. To put them under a rational form is but to subdue their
irrational opposition to reason, or to invade their lukewarm neutrality.
Any violence done them is more than indemnified by the favor of bringing
them under the sway of _a priori_ reason, the incarnation of the
Absolute on earth.