When we are discussing egotism need we speak of Hegel? The tone of this
philosopher, especially in his later writings, was full of contempt
for everything subjective: the point of view of the individual, his
opinions and wishes, were treated as of no account unless they had been
brought into line with the providential march of events and ideas in
the great world. This realism, pronounced and even acrid as it was,
was still idealistic in the sense that the substance of the world was
conceived not to be material but conceptual--a law or logic which
animated phenomena and was the secret of their movement. The world was
like a riddle or confused oracle; and the solution to the puzzle lay in
the romantic instability or self-contradiction inherent in every finite
form of being, which compelled it to pass into something different.
The direction of this movement we might understand sympathetically in
virtue of a sort of vital dialectic or dramatic necessity in our own
reflection. Hegel was a solemn sophist: he made discourse the key to
reality.
[Pg 85] This technical realism in Hegel was reinforced by his
historical imagination, which continually produces an impression of
detachment, objectivity, and impersonal intelligence; he often seems to
be lost in the events of his story and to be plucking the very heart
out of the world. Again, he adored the state, by which in his view
the individual should be entirely subjugated, not for the benefit of
other individuals (that would be a sort of vicarious selfishness no
less barren than private profit), but in the rapt service of common
impersonal ends.
The family was a first natural group in which the individual should be
happy to lose himself, the trade-guild was another, and the state was
the highest and most comprehensive of all; there was nothing worthy or
real in a man except his functions in society.
Nevertheless this denial of egotism is apparent only. It is a play
within the play. On the smaller stage the individual--save for his
lapses and stammerings--is nothing but the instrument and vehicle
of divine decrees; in fact he is a puppet, and the only reality of him
is the space he fills in the total spectacle. But that little stage is
framed in by another, often overlooked, but ever present; and on this
larger and nearer stage the ego struts alone. It is I that pull the
strings, enjoy the drama, supply its plot and moral, and possess the
freedom and actuality which [Pg 86] my puppets lack. On the little
stage the soul of a man is only one of God's ideas, and his whole worth
lies in helping out the pantomime; on the big stage, God is simply my
idea of God and the purpose of the play is to express my mind. The
spectacle in which every individual dances automatically to the divine
tune is only my dream.
The philosophy of Hegel is accordingly subjective and all its realism
is but a pose and a tone wilfully assumed. That this is the truth of
the matter might be inferred, apart from many continual hints and
implications, from the fact that the system is transcendental and
founded on Kant. Objectivity can, therefore, be only a show, a matter
of make-believe, something imputed to things and persons by the mind,
whose poetic energies it manifests. Everything must be set down as
a creation of mind, simply because it is an object of thought or
knowledge.
This underlying subjectivism also explains the singular satisfaction of
Hegel, whose glance was comprehensive enough, with so strangely limited
a world as he describes to us. He described what he knew best or had
heard of most, and felt he had described the universe. This illusion
was inevitable, because his principle was that the universe was created
by description and resided in it. The mission of Hegel, as he himself
conceived it, was not to [Pg 87] discover the real world or any part
of it: in theory he retracted all belief in a real world and set in its
place his conception or knowledge of it--therefore quite adequate
to its object. If China was the oldest country he had heard of, the
world began with China, and if Prussia was the youngest and he (as he
had to be) its latest philosopher, the world ended with Prussia and
with himself. This seems a monstrous egotism, but it is not arbitrary;
in one sense it was the least pretentious of attitudes, since it was
limited to the description of a current view, not of a separate or
prior object. The value of a philosophy could lie only in the fullness
and fidelity with which it might focus the conceptions of the age in
which it arose. Hegel hoped to do this for his own times; he did not
covet truth to anything further.
The same attitude explains the servility of his moral philosophy, which
is simply an apology for the established order of things and for the
prejudices of his time and country. His deepest conviction was that
no system of ethics could be more, and if it tried to be more would
be less, because it would be merely personal. When, for instance,
he condemned harshly the Roman _patria potestas_ it was because it
offended the individualism of the Protestant and modern conscience;
and if in the next breath he condemned even more harshly the
sentimentalists [Pg 88] who made tender feeling and good intentions the
test of virtue, it was because these individual consciences absolved
themselves from conformity to the established church and state. To
inquire whether in itself or in respect to human economy generally,
the morality of Buddha, or Socrates, or Rousseau was the best would
have seemed to him absurd: the question could only be what approaches
or contributions each of these made to the morality approved by the
Lutheran community and by the Prussian ministry of education and
public worship. The truth, then as now, was whatever every good German
believed. This pious wish of Hegel's to interpret the orthodoxy of his
generation was successful, and the modest hopes of his philosophy were
fulfilled. Never perhaps was a system so true to its date and so false
to its subject.
The egotism of Hegel appears also in his treatment of mathematical and
physical questions. The infinite he called the false infinite, so as to
avoid the dilemmas which it placed him in, such as why the evolution of
the Idea began six thousand years ago, or less; what more could happen
now that in his self-consciousness that evolution was complete; why it
should have gone on in this planet only, or if it had gone on elsewhere
also, why the Idea evolving there might not have been a different Idea.
But all such questions [Pg 89] are excluded when one understands that
this philosophy is only a point of view: the world it describes is a
vista not separable from the egotistical perspectives that frame it in.
The extent of the world need not be discussed, because that extent is
an appearance only; in reality the world has no extent, because it is
only my present idea.
The infinite thus lost its application; but the word was too idealistic
to be discarded. Accordingly the title of true infinite was bestowed
on the eventual illusion of completeness, on an alleged system of
relations out of relation to anything beyond. That nothing existent,
unless it was the bad infinite, could be absolute in this manner did
not ruffle Hegel, for the existent did not really concern him but
only "knowledge," that is, a circle of present and objectless ideas.
Knowledge, however limited in fact, always has the completeness in
question for the egotist, whose objects are not credited with existing
beyond himself. Egotism could hardly receive a more radical expression
than this: to declare the ego infinite because it can never find
anything that is beyond its range.
The favourite tenet of Hegel that everything involves its opposite is
also a piece of egotism; for it is equivalent to making things conform
to words, not words to things; and the ego, particularly in [Pg 90]
philosophers, is a nebula of words. In defining things, if you insist
on defining them, you are constrained to define them by their relation
to other things, or even exclusion of them. If, therefore, things are
formed by your definitions of them, these relations and exclusions will
be the essence of things. The notion of such intrinsic relativity in
things is a sophism even in logic, since elementary terms can never be
defined yet may be perfectly well understood and arrested in intuition;
but what here concerns us is rather the egotistical motive behind that
sophism: namely, that the most verbal and subjective accidents to which
the names of things are subject in human discourse should be deputed to
be the groundwork of the things and their inmost being.
Egotistical, too, was Hegel's tireless hatred of what he called the
abstract understanding. In his criticisms of this faculty and the
opinions it forms there is much keenness and some justice. People
often reason in the abstract, floating on words as on bladders: in
their knowingness they miss the complexity and volume of real things.
But the errors or abuses into which verbal intelligence may fall
would never produce that implacable zeal with which Hegel persecutes
it. What obsesses him is the fear that, in spite of its frivolity,
the understanding may some day understand: that it may correct its
inadequacies, [Pg 91] trace the real movement of things, and seeing
their mechanism lose that _effet d'ensemble_, that dramatic illusion,
which he calls reason.
Imagine a landscape-painter condemned to have a naturalist always at
his elbow: soon it would not be merely the errors of the naturalist
that would irritate him, but the naturalist himself. The artist intent
on panoramic effects does not wish to be forced to look through a
microscope; in changing his focus he loses his subjective object: not
reality but appearance is the reality for him. Hegel, since it was his
mission to substitute so-called knowledge for being, had to go further;
he had to convince himself, not only that the structure of nature
discovered by the understanding was irrelevant to his own conceptual
mythology, but that such a structure did not exist. He was not willing
to confess (as the landscape-painter might) that he _was_ an egotist;
that it was the subjective that interested him, and that in so great a
world the subjective too has its place. No! he must pretend that his
egotism was not egotism, but identity with the absolute, and that those
who dared to maintain that the world wagged in its own way, apart from
the viewing mind, were devils, because they suggested that the viewing
mind was not God.
It is this latent but colossal egotism that makes [Pg 92] plausible
the strange use which Hegel sometimes makes of the word substance. His
substance is but his grammar of discourse; for he was not looking for
substance, in which he could not consistently believe, but only for the
ultimate synthetic impression which he might gather from appearances.
For the theatre-goer, the function of scenery and actors is that they
should please and impress him: but what, in the end, impresses and
pleases him? The cumulative burden and force of the play; the enhanced
life which it has stimulated in himself. This, for that ruthless
egotist, the aesthete, is the _substance_ of all things theatrical. Of
course, in fact, nothing could be falser, for the author and actors are
real people, with lives far outrunning their function in the theatre
and truly grounding it. Even the stage machinery has its natural
history, and the artisans who made it have theirs, both full of mute
inglorious tragedies. These real substances behind his entertainment
the spectator, in his æsthetic egotism, laughs at as irrelevant; for
him, as for Hamlet, the play's the thing. What is most his own, his
imaginative reaction on the spectacle, the terms in which he finds
it easiest and most exciting to describe it, he calls the substance
of it: a term which betrays the profound impudence of the deliberate
egotist; the deepest reality he will recognise is merely specious,
[Pg 93] existing only for the mind that imagines it. What is supposed
to rescue the system of Hegel from subjectivism is the most subjective
of things--a dialectic which obeys the impulses of a theoretical
_parti pris_, and glorifies a fixed idea.
When we have understood all this, those traits of Hegel's which at
first sight seem least egotistical--his historical insight and
his enthusiasm for organised society--take on a new colour.
That historical insight is not really sympathetic; it is imperious,
external, contemptuous, feigned. If you are a modern reading the
Greeks, especially if you read them in the romantic spirit of Goethe's
classicism, and know of them just what Hegel knew, you will think
his description wonderfully penetrating, masterly, and complete: but
would Æschylus or Plato have thought it so? They would have laughed,
or rather they would not have understood that such a description
referred to them at all. It is the legend of the Greeks, not the life
of the Greeks, that is analysed by him. So his account of mediæval
religion represents the Protestant legend, not the Catholic experience.
What we know little or nothing about seems to us in Hegel admirably
characterised: what we know intimately seems to us painted with the eye
of a pedantic, remote, and insolent foreigner. It is but an idea of his
own that he is foisting upon us, calling it our soul. [Pg 94] He is
creating a world in his head which might be admirable, if God had made
it.
Every one is subject to such illusions of perspective and to the pathos
of distance, now favourable, now unfavourable to what he studies; but
Hegel, thinking he had the key to the divine design, fancied himself
deeply sympathetic because he saw in everything some fragment of
himself. But no part of the world was that; every part had its own
inalienable superiority, which to transcend was to lose for ever. To
the omniscient egotist every heart is closed. The past will never give
away its secret except to some self-forgetful and humble lover who by
nature has a kindred destiny. The egotist who thinks to grasp it, so
as to serve it up at his philosophic banquet, or exhibit it in his
museum of antiquities, grasps only himself; and in that sense, to his
confusion, his egotism turns out true.
The egotism that appears in this lordly way of treating the past is
egotism of the imagination, the same that was expressed in the romantic
love of nature, which was really a very subtle, very studious, very
obstinate love of self, intent on finding some reference and deference
to oneself in everything. But there is also an egotism of passion,
which in Hegel appears in his worship of the state. "The passions" is
the old and fit name for what the Germans call [Pg 95] ideals. The
passions are not selfish in the sense in which the German moralists
denounce selfishness; they are not contrived by him who harbours them
for his ulterior profit. They are ideal, dangerous, often fatal. Even
carnal passions are not selfish, if by the self we understand the
whole man: they are an obsession to which he sacrifices himself. But
the transcendental philosophy with its migratory ego can turn any
single passion, or any complex of passions, into a reputed centre of
will, into a moral personage. As the passion usurps more and more of
the man's nature it becomes a fierce egotist in his place; it becomes
fanaticism or even madness.
This substitution of a passion for a man, when nobody thought the ego
migratory, seemed a disease. What folly, we said to the human soul,
to sacrifice your natural life to this partial, transitory, visionary
passion! But the German idealist recognises no natural life, no
natural individual. His ego can migrate into any political body or any
synthetic idea. Therefore, his passions, far from seeming follies to
him, seem divine inspirations, calls to sacrifice, fidelities to the
ideal.
I am far from wishing to say that a German idealist is commonly just to
all the passions and raises them in turn to be his highest and absolute
will. His passions are generally few and mental. Accidents of [Pg 96]
training or limitations of temperament keep him respectable; but he is
never safe. Dazzle him with a sophism, such, for instance, as that "the
more evil the more good," or hypnotise him with a superstition, such as
that "organisation is an end in itself," and nothing more is needed to
turn him into a romantic criminal.
Even the absolute requires an enemy to whet its edge upon, and the
state, which according to Hegel is morally absolute, requires rival
states in order that its separate individuality may not seem to vanish,
and with it the occasion for blessed and wholesome wars. Hegel rejects
the notion that nations have any duties to one another because, as
he asserts, there is no moral authority or tribunal higher than the
state, to which its government could be subject. This assertion is
evidently false, since in the first place there is God or, if the
phrase be preferred, there is the highest good of mankind, hedging
in very narrowly the path that states should follow between opposite
vices; and in the second place there is the individual, whose natural
allegiance to his family, friends, and religion, to truth and to art,
is deeper and holier than his allegiance to the state, which for the
soul of man is an historical and geographical accident. No doubt at
the present stage of civilisation there is more to be gained than lost
by [Pg 97] co-operating loyally with the governments under which we
happen to live, not because any state is divine, but because as yet no
less cumbrous machinery is available for carrying on the economy of
life with some approach to decency and security. For Hegel, however,
the life of the state was the moral substance, and the souls of men but
the accidents; and as to the judgment of God he asserted that it was
none other than the course of history. This is a characteristic saying,
in which he seems to proclaim the moral government of the world, when
in truth he is sanctifying a brutal law of success and succession.
The best government, of course, succumbs in time like the worst,
and sooner; the dark ages followed upon the Roman Empire and lasted
twice as long. But Hegel's God was simply the world, or a formula
supposed to describe the world. He despised every ideal not destined
to be realised on earth, he respected legality more than justice, and
extant institutions more than moral ideals; and he wished to flatter a
government in whose policy war and even crime were recognised weapons.
This reign of official passion is not, let me repeat, egotism in the
natural man who is subject to it; it is the sacrifice of the natural
man and of all men to an abstract obsession, called an ideal. The vice
of absoluteness and egotism is transferred [Pg 98] to that visionary
agent. The man may be docile and gentle enough, but the demon he
listens to is ruthless and deaf. It forbids him to ask, "At what price
do I pursue this ideal? How much harm must I do to attain this good?"
No; this imperative is categorical. The die is cast, the war against
human nature and happiness is declared, and an idol that feeds on
blood, the Absolute State, is set up in the heart and over the city.
[Pg 99] CHAPTER IX