THE “I” PROBLEM AND GENIUS
“In the beginning the world was nothing but the Âtman, in the form of
a man. It looked around and saw nothing different to itself. Then it
cried out once, ‘It is I.’ That is how the word ‘I’ came to be. That
is why even at the present day, if any one is called, he answers, ‘It
is I,’ and then recalls his other name, the one he
bears.”--(Brihadâranyata-Upanishad.)
Many disputations about principles in psychology arise from individual
characterological differences in the disputants. Thus, in the mode that
I have already suggested, characterology might play an important part.
When one person thinks to have discovered this, the other that, by
introspection, characterology would have to show why the results in the
one case should differ from those in the other, or, at least, to point
out in what other respects the persons in question were unlike. I see no
other possible way of clearing up the disputed points of psychology.
Psychology is a science of experiences, and, therefore, it must
proceed from the individual to the general, and not, as in the
supra-individualistic laws of logic and ethics, proceed from the
universal to the individual case. There is no such thing as an empirical
general psychology; and it would be a mistake to approach such without
having fully reckoned with differential psychology.
It is a great pity that psychology has been placed between philosophy
and the analysis of perceptions. From whichever side psychologists
approached the subject, they have always been assured of the general
validity of their results. Perhaps even so fundamental a question as to
whether or no perception itself implies an actual and spontaneous act of
consciousness cannot be solved without a consideration of
characterological differences.
The purpose of this work is to apply characterology to the solution of a
few of these doubtful matters, with special reference to the
distinctions between the sexes. The different conceptions of the
I-problem, however, depend not so much on differences of sex as on
differences in giftedness. The dispute between Hume and Kant receives
its characterological explanation much in the same way as if I were to
distinguish two men in so far as the one held in the highest esteem the
works of Makart and Gounod, the other those of Rembrandt and Beethoven.
I would simply distinguish the two by their giftedness. So also the
judgments about the “I” must be very different in the cases of
differently gifted men. There have been no truly great men who were not
persuaded of the existence of the “I”; a man who denies it cannot be a
great man.
In the course of the following pages this proposition will be taken as
absolutely binding, and will be used really as a means of valuing
genius.
There has been no famous man who, at least some time in the course of
his life, and generally earlier in proportion to his greatness, has not
had a moment in which he was absolutely convinced of the possession of
an ego in the highest sense.
Let us compare the following utterances of three very great geniuses.
Jean Paul relates in his autobiographical sketch, “Truths from my own
Life”:
“I can never forget a circumstance which, so far, has been related by no
one--the birth of my own self-consciousness, the time and place of which
I can tell. One morning I was standing, as a very young child, at the
front door, and looking towards the wood-shed I suddenly saw, all at
once my inner likeness. ‘I’ am ‘I’ flashed like lightning from the skies
across me, and since then has remained. I saw myself then for the first
time and for ever. This cannot be explained as a confusion of memory,
for no alien narrative could have blended itself with this sacred event,
preserved permanently in my memory by its vividness and novelty.”
Novalis, in his “Miscellaneous Fragments,” refers to an identical
experience:
“This factor every one must experience for himself. It is a factor of
the higher order, and reveals itself only to higher men; but men should
strive to induce it in themselves. Philosophy is the exercise of this
factor, it is a true self-revelation, the stimulation of the real ego by
the ideal ego. It is the foundation of all other revelations; the
resolution to philosophise is a challenge to the actual ego, to become
conscious of itself, to grow and to become a soul.”
Schelling discusses the same phenomenon in his “Philosophical Letters
upon Dogmatism and Criticism,” a little known early work, in which occur
the following beautiful words:
“In all of us there dwells a secret marvellous power of freeing
ourselves from the changes of time, of withdrawing to our secret selves
away from external things, and of so discovering to ourselves the
eternal in us in the form of unchangeability. This presentation of
ourselves to ourselves is the most truly personal experience upon which
depends everything that we know of the supra-sensual world. This
presentation shows us for the first time what real existence is, whilst
all else only appears to be. It differs from every presentation of the
sense in its perfect freedom, whilst all other presentations are bound,
being overweighted by the burden of the object. Still there exists for
those who have not this perfect freedom of the inner sense some approach
to it, experiences approaching it from which they may gain some faint
idea of it.... This intellectual presentation occurs when we cease to be
our own object, when, withdrawing into ourselves, the perceiving self
merges in the self-perceived. At that moment we annihilate time and
duration of time; we are no longer in time, but time, or rather
eternity itself, is in us. The external world is no longer an object for
us, but is lost in us.”
The positivist will perhaps only laugh at the self-deceived deceiver,
the philosopher who asserts that he has had such experiences. Well, it
is not easy to prevent it. It is also unnecessary. But I am by no means
of the opinion that this “factor of a higher order” plays the same part
in all men of genius of a mystical identity of subject and object as
Schelling describes it.
Whether there are undivided experiences in which the dualism of actual
life is overcome, as is indicated by Plotin and the Indian Mahatmas, or
whether this is only the highest intensification of experience, but in
principle similar to all others--does not signify here, the coincidence
of subject and object, of time and eternity, the representing of God
through living men, will neither be demonstrated as possible nor denied
as impossible. The experiencing of one’s own “I” is not to be begun by
theoretical knowledge, and no one has ever, so far, tried to put it in
the position of a systematic philosophy. I shall, therefore, not call
this factor of a higher order, which manifests itself in some men in one
way and in other men in another way, an essential manifestation of the
true ego, but only a phase of it.
Every great man knows this phase of the ego. He may become conscious of
it first through the love of a woman, for the great man loves more
intensely than the ordinary man; or it may be from the contrast given by
a sense of guilt or the knowledge of having failed; these, too, the
great man feels more intensely than smaller-minded people. It may lead
him to a sense of unity with the all, to the seeing of all things in
God, or, and this is more likely, it may reveal to him the frightful
dualism of nature and spirit in the universe, and produce in him the
need, the craving, for a solution of it, for the secret inner wonder.
But always it leads the great man to the beginning of a presentation of
the world for himself and by himself, without the help of the thought of
others.
This intuitive vision of the world is not a great synthesis elaborated
at his writing-table in his library from all the books that have been
written; it is something that has been experienced, and as a whole it is
clear and intelligible, although details may still be obscure and
contradictory. The excitation of the ego is the only source of this
intuitive vision of the world as a whole in the case of the artist as in
that of the philosopher. And, however different they may be, if they are
really intuitive visions of the cosmos, they have this in common,
something that comes only from the excitation of the ego, the faith that
every great man possesses, the conviction of his possession of an “I” or
soul, which is solitary in the universe, which faces the universe and
comprehends it.
From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great man, in
spite of lapses due to the most terrible feeling, the feeling of
mortality, will live in and by his soul.
And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative
powers, that the great man has so intense a self-consciousness. Nothing
can be more unintelligent than to talk of the modesty of great men, of
their inability to recognise what is within them. There is no great man
who does not well know how far he differs from others (except during
these periodical fits of depression to which I have already alluded).
Every great man feels himself to be great as soon as he has created
something; his vanity and ambition are, in fact, always so great that he
over-estimates himself. Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than
Kant. Nietzsche declared that “Thus spake Zarathustra” was the greatest
book in the world.
There is, however, a side of truth in the assertion that great men are
modest. They are never arrogant. Arrogance and self-realisation are
contradictories, and should never be confused although this is often
done. A man has just as much arrogance as he lacks of self-realisation,
and uses it to increase his own self-consciousness by artificially
lowering his estimation of others. Of course the foregoing holds true
only of what may be called physiological, unconscious arrogance; the
great man must occasionally comport himself with what seems rudeness to
contemptible persons.
All great men, then, have a conviction, really independent of external
proof, that they have a soul. The absurd fear must be laid aside that
the soul is a hyperempirical reality and that belief in it leads us to
the position of the theologists. Belief in a soul is anything rather
than a superstition and is no mere handmaid of religious systems.
Artists speak of their souls although they have not studied philosophy
or theology; atheists like Shelley use the expression and know very well
what they mean by it.
Others have suggested that the “soul” is only a beautiful empty word,
which people ascribe to others without having felt its need for
themselves. This is like saying that great artists use symbols to
express the highest form of reality without being assured as to the
existence of that reality. The mere empiricist and the pure physiologist
no doubt will consider that all this is nonsense, and that Lucretius is
the only great poet. No doubt there has been much misuse of the word,
but if great artists speak of their soul they know what they are about.
Artists, like philosophers, know well when they approach the greatest
possible reality, but Hume had no sense of this.
The scientific man ranks, as I have already said, and as I shall
presently prove, below the artist and the philosopher. The two latter
may earn the title of genius which must always be denied to the
scientific man. Without any good reason having been assigned for it, it
has usually been the case that the voice of genius on any particular
problem is listened to before the voice of science. Is there justice in
this preference? Can the genius explain things as to which the man of
science, as such, can say nothing? Can he peer into depths where the man
of science is blind?
The conception genius concludes universality. If there were an absolute
genius (a convenient fiction) there would be nothing to which he could
not have a vivid, intimate, and complete relation. Genius, as I have
already shown, would have universal comprehension, and through its
perfect memory would be independent of time. To comprehend anything one
must have within one something similar. A man notices, understands, and
comprehends only those things with which he has some kinship. The genius
is the man with the most intense, most vivid, most conscious, most
continuous, and most individual ego. The ego is the central point, the
unit of comprehension, the synthesis of all manifoldness.
The ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal
comprehension, the centre of infinite space; the great man contains the
whole universe within himself; genius is the living microcosm. He is not
an intricate mosaic, a chemical combination of an infinite number of
elements; the argument in chap. iv. as to his relation to other men and
things must not be taken in that sense; he is everything. In him and
through him all psychical manifestations cohere and are real
experiences, not an elaborate piece-work, a whole put together from
parts in the fashion of science. For the genius the ego is the all,
lives as the all; the genius sees nature and all existences as whole;
the relations of things flash on him intuitively; he has not to build
bridges of stones between them. And so the genius cannot be an empirical
psychologist slowly collecting details and linking them by associations;
he cannot be a physicist, envisaging the world as a compound of atoms
and molecules.
It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius
always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything
within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that
for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. And so the man
of genius is the profound man, and profound only in proportion to his
genius. That is why his views are more valuable than those of all
others. He constructs from everything his ego that holds the universe,
whilst others never reach a full consciousness of this inner self, and
so, for him, all things have significance, all things are symbolical.
For him breathing is something more than the coming and going of gases
through the walls of the capillaries; the blue of the sky is more than
the partial polarisation of diffused and reflected light; snakes are not
merely reptiles that have lost limbs. If it were possible for one single
man to have achieved all the scientific discoveries that have ever been
made, if everything that has been done by the following: Archimedes and
Lagrange, Johannes Müller and Karl Ernst von Baer, Newton and Laplace,
Konrad Sprengel and Cuvier, Thucydides and Niebuhr, Friedrich August
Wolf and Franz Bopp, and by many more famous men of science, could have
been achieved by one man in the short span of human life, he would still
not be entitled to the denomination of genius, for none of these have
pierced the depths. The scientist takes phenomena for what they
obviously are; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea
and mountain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm,
dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but
he recognises in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not
produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome
of a process of oxidation.
And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and
strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems
to be only a special aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego
have become one in him, and he is not obliged to set his experience
together piece by piece according to rule. The greatest poly-historian,
on the contrary, does nothing but add branch to branch and yet creates
no completed structure. That is another reason why the great scientist
is lower than the great artist, the great philosopher. The infinity of
the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity
in his own breast; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all
totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself. Although these
remarks apply more to genius than to the nature of the productions of
genius, although the occurrence of artistic ecstasy, philosophic
conceptions, religious fervour remain as puzzling as ever, if merely the
conditions, not the actual process of a really great achievement has
been made clearer, yet this is nevertheless to be the final definition
of genius:
A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious connection with
the whole universe. It is only then that the genius becomes the really
divine spark in mankind.
The great idea of the soul of man as the microcosm, the most important
discovery of the philosophy of the Renaissance--although traces of the
idea are to be found in Plato and Aristotle--appears to be quite
disregarded by modern thinkers since the death of Leibnitz. It has
hitherto been held as only holding good for genius, as the prerogative
of those masters of men.
But the incongruity is only apparent. All mankind have some of the
quality of genius, and no man has it entirely. Genius is a condition to
which one man draws close whilst another is further away, which is
attained by some in early days, but with others only at the end of life.
The man to whom we have accorded the possession of genius, is only he
who has begun to see, and to open the eyes of others. That they then can
see with their own eyes proves that they were only standing before the
door.
Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect
relationship to everything: his idea of the “whole” is only a glimpse,
he does not succeed in identifying himself with it. But he is not
without the possibility of following this identification in another, and
so attaining a composite image. Through some vision of the world he can
bind himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can make
each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite strange to him, and in
all a band of sympathy exists between him and the things of the world.
It is not so with plants or animals. They are limited, they do not know
the whole but only one element; they do not populate the whole earth,
and where they are widely dispersed it is in the service of man, who has
allotted to them everywhere the same task. They may have a relation to
the sun or to the moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the
“starry vault” and “the moral law.” For the latter originates in the
soul of man, in which is hidden all totality, which can see everything
because it is universal itself: the starry heavens and the moral law are
fundamentally one and the same. The universalism of the categorical
imperative is the universalism of the universe.
The infinity of the universe is only the “thought-picture” of the
infinity of the moral volition.
This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles that mighty
magician.
Γαίῃ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι δ’ ὕδωρ,
Αἰθέρι δ’ αἰθέρα δῖον, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀίδηλον,
Στοργῇ δὲ στοργήν, νεῖχος δέ τε νείχεϊ λυγρῷ.
And Plotinus;
Οὐ γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἴδεν
ὀφθαλμὸς ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος,
which Goethe imitated in the famous verse:
“Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne könnt’ es nie erblicken;
Läg’ nicht in uns des Gottes eig’ne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?”
Man is the only creature, he is _the_ creature in Nature, that has in
himself a relation to every thing.
He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete
consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things,
the man who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is
called a genius. He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom
an interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own
accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely a man.
The theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, that the
lower monads are a mirror of the world without being conscious of this
capacity of theirs, expresses the same idea. The man of genius lives in
a state of complete understanding, an understanding of the whole; the
whole world is also in ordinary men, but not in a condition that can
become creative. The one lives in conscious active relation with the
whole, the other in an unconscious relation; the man of genius is the
actual, the common man the potential, microcosm. The genius is the
complete man; the manhood that is latent in all men is in him fully
developed.
Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other
parts; he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws,
but he himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as
the world whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is
unconditioned. The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he
does not forget himself, and because forgetting, being a functional
subjection to time, is neither free nor ethical. He is not brought
forward on the wave of a historical movement as its child, to be
swallowed up by the next wave, because all, all the past and all the
future is contained in his inward vision. He it is whose consciousness
of immortality is most strong because the fear of death has no terror
for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to symbols
and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that is within
him and all that is outside him. He is the freest and the wisest and the
most moral of men, and for these reasons he suffers most of all from
what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within him.
How does the morality of great men reveal itself in their relations to
other men? This, according to the popular view, is the only form which
morality can assume, apart from contraventions of the penal code. And
certainly in this respect, great men have displayed the most dubious
qualities. Have they not laid themselves open to accusations of base
ingratitude, extreme harshness, and much worse faults?
It is certainly true that the greater an artist or philosopher may be,
the more ruthless he will be in keeping faith with himself, in this very
way often disappointing the expectations of those with whom he comes in
contact in every-day life; these cannot follow his higher flights and
so try to bind the eagle to earth (Goethe and Lavater) and in this way
many great men have been branded as immoral.
Goethe, fortunately for himself, preserved a silence about himself so
complete that modern people who think that they understand him
completely as the light-living Olympian, only know a few specks of him
taken from his marvellous delineation of Faust; we may be certain, none
the less, that he judged himself severely, and suffered in full measure
for the guilt he found in himself. And when an envious Nörgler, who
never grasped Schopenhauer’s doctrine of detachment and the meaning of
his Nirwana, throws the reproach at the latter that he got the last
value out of his property, such a mean yelping requires no answer.
The statement that a great man is most moral towards himself stands on
sure ground; he will not allow alien views to be imposed on him, so
obscuring the judgment of his own ego; he will not passively accept the
interpretation of another, of an alien ego, quite different from his
own, and if ever he has allowed himself to be influenced, the thought
will always be painful to him. A conscious lie that he has told will
harass him throughout his life, and he will be unable to shake off the
memory in Dionysian fashion. But men of genius will suffer most when
they become aware afterwards that they have unconsciously helped to
spread a lie in their talk or conduct with others. Other men, who do not
possess this organic thirst for truth, are always deeply involved in
lies and errors, and so do not understand the bitter revolt of great men
against the “lies of life.”
The great man, he who stands high, he in whom the ego, unconditioned by
time, is dominant, seeks to maintain his own value in the presence of
his intelligible ego by his intellectual and moral conscience. His pride
is towards himself; there is the desire in him to impress his own self
by his thoughts, actions, and creations. This pride is the pride
peculiar to genius, possessing its own standard of value, and it is
independent of the judgment of others, since it possesses in itself a
higher tribunal. Soft and ascetic natures (Pascal is an example)
sometimes suffer from this self-pride, and yet try in vain to shake it
off. This self-pride will always be associated with pride before others,
but the two forms are really in perpetual conflict.
Can it be said that this strong adaptation to duty towards oneself
prejudices the sense of duty towards one’s neighbours? Do not the two
stand as alternatives, so that he who always keeps faith with himself
must break it with others? By no means. As there is only one truth, so
there can be only one desire for truth--what Carlyle called
sincerity--that a man has or has not with regard both to himself and to
the world; it is never one of two, a view of the world differing from a
view of oneself, a self-study without a world-study; there is only one
duty and only one morality. Man acts either morally or immorally, and if
he is moral towards himself he is moral towards others.
There are few regions of thought, however, so full of false ideas, as
the conception of moral duty towards one’s neighbours and how it is to
be fulfilled. Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, the
theoretical systems of morality which are based on the maintenance of
human society, and which attach less importance to the concrete feelings
and motives at the moment of action than to the effect on the general
system of morality, we come at once to the popular idea which defines
the morality of a man by his “goodness,” the degree to which his
compassionate disposition is developed. From the philosophical point of
view, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith saw in sympathy the nature and source
of all ethical conduct, and this view received a very strong support
from Schopenhauer’s sympathetic morality. Schopenhauer’s “Essay on the
Foundations of Morality” shows in its motto “It is easy to preach
morality, difficult to find a basis for it,” the fundamental error of
the sympathetic ethics which always fails to recognise that the science
of ethics is not merely an explanation and description of conduct, but a
search for a guide to it. Whoever will be at the pains diligently to
listen to the inner voice of man, in order to establish what he ought
to do, will certainly reject every system of ethics, the aim of which is
to be a doctrine of the requirements which man has invented for himself
and others instead of being a relation of what he actually does in
furthering these requirements or in stifling them. The object of all
moral science is not what is happening but what ought to happen.
All attempts to explain ethics by psychology overlook the fact that
every psychic event in man is appraised by man himself, and the
appraiser of the psychic event cannot be a psychic event. This standard
can only be an idea, or a value which is never fully realised, and which
cannot be altered by any experience because it remains constant, even if
all experience is in opposition to it. Moral conduct can be only conduct
controlled by an idea. And so we can choose only from systems of
morality which set up some idea or maxim for the regulation of conduct,
and there are only two to choose from, the ethical socialism or social
ethics, founded by Bentham and Mill, but imported to the Continent and
diligently propagated in Germany and Norway, and ethical individualism
such as is taught by Christianity and German idealism.
The second failure of all the systems of ethics founded on sympathy is
that they attempt to find a foundation for morality, to explain
morality, whilst the very conception of morality is that it should be
the ultimate standard of human conduct, and so must be inexplicable and
non-derivative, must be its own purpose, and cannot be brought into
relation of cause and effect with anything outside itself. This
attempted derivation of morality is simply another aspect of the purely
descriptive, and therefore necessarily, relative, ethics, and is
untenable from the fact that however diligently the search be made, it
is impossible to find in the sphere of causes and effects a high aim
that would be applicable to every moral action. The inspiring motive of
an action cannot come from any nexus of cause and effect; it is much
more in the nature of things for cause and effect to be linked with an
inspiring moral aim. Outside the domain of first causes there lies a
domain of moral aims, and this latter domain is the inheritance of
mankind. The complete science of existence is a linking together of
first causes until the first cause of all is reached, and a complete
science of “oughts” leads to a union of all in one great aim, the
culminating moral imperative.
He who rates sympathy as a positive moral factor has treated as moral
something that is a feeling, not an act. Sympathy may be an ethical
phenomenon, the expression of something ethical, but it is no more an
ethical act than are the senses of shame and pride; we must clearly
distinguish between an ethical act and an ethical phenomenon. Nothing
must be considered an ethical act that is not a confirmation of the
ethical idea by action; ethical phenomena are unpremeditated,
involuntary signs of a permanent tendency of the disposition towards the
moral idea. It is in the struggle between motives that the idea presses
in and seeks to make the decision; the empirical mixture of ethical and
unethical feelings, sympathy and malice, self-confidence and
presumption, gives no help towards a conclusion. Sympathy is, perhaps,
the surest sign of a disposition, but it is not the moral purpose
inspiring an action. Morality must imply conscious knowledge of the
moral purpose and of value as opposed to worthlessness. Socrates was
right in this, and Kant is the only modern philosopher who has followed
him. Sympathy is a non-logical sensation, and has no claim to respect.
The question now before us is to consider how far a man can act morally
with regard to his fellow men.
It is certainly not by unsolicited help which obtrudes itself on the
solitude of another and pierces the limits that he has set for himself;
not by compassion but rather by respect. This respect we owe only to
man, as Kant showed; for man is the only creature in the universe who is
a purpose to himself.
But how can I show a man my contempt, and how prove to him my respect?
The first by ignoring him, the second by being friendly with him.
How can I use him as a means to an end, and how can I honour him by
regarding him himself as an end? In the first case, by looking upon him
as a link in the chain of circumstances with which I have to deal; in
the second, by endeavouring to understand him. It is only by interesting
oneself in a man, without exactly telling him so, by thinking of him, by
grasping his work, by sympathising with his fate, and by seeking to
understand him, that one can respect one’s neighbour. Only he who,
through his own afflictions, has become unselfish, who forgets small
wranglings with his fellow man, who can repress his impatience, and who
endeavours to understand him, is really disinterested with regard to his
neighbour; and he behaves morally because he triumphs over the strongest
enemy to his understanding of his neighbour--selfishness.
How does the famous man stand in this respect? He who understands the
most men, because he is most universal in disposition, and who lives in
the closest relation to the universe at large, who most earnestly
desires to understand its purpose, will be most likely to act well
towards his neighbour.
As a matter of fact, no one thinks so much or so intently as he about
other people (even although he has only seen them for a moment), and no
one tries so hard to understand them if he does not feel that he already
has them within him in all their significance. Inasmuch as he has a
continuous past, a complete ego of his own, he can create the past which
he did not know for others. He follows the strongest bent of his inner
being if he thinks about them, for he seeks only to come to the truth
about them by understanding them. He sees that human beings are all
members of an intelligible world, in which there is no narrow egoism or
altruism. This is the only explanation of how it is that great men stand
in vital, understanding relationship, not only with those round about
them, but with all the personalities of history who have preceded them;
this is the only reason why great artists have grasped historical
personalities so much better and more intensively than scientific
historians. There has been no great man who has not stood in a personal
relationship to Napoleon, Plato, or Mahomet. It is in this way that he
shows his respect and true reverence for those who have lived before
him. When many of those who have been intimate with artists feel
aggrieved when later on they recognise themselves in their works; when
writers are reproached for treating everything as copy, it is easy
enough to understand the feeling. But the artist or author who does not
heed the littlenesses of mankind has committed no crime, he has simply
employed his creative act of understanding with regard to them, by a
single-minded representation and reproduction of the world around him,
and there can be no higher relation between men than this. The following
words of Pascal, which have already been mentioned, are specially
applicable here: “A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit, on trouve qu’il y a
plus d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de
différence entre les hommes.” It follows from the foregoing that the
greater a man is the greater efforts he will make to understand things
that are most strange to him, whilst the ordinary man readily thinks
that he understands a thing, although it may be something he does not at
all understand, so that he fails to perceive the unfamiliar spirit which
is appealing to him from some object of art or from a philosophy, and at
most attains a superficial relation to the subject, but does not rise to
the inspiration of its creator. The great man who attains to the highest
rungs of consciousness does not easily identify himself and his opinion
with anything he reads, whilst those with a lesser clarity of mind
adopt, and imagine that they absorb, things that in reality are very
different. The man of genius is he whose ego has acquired consciousness.
He is enabled by it to distinguish the fact that others are different,
to perceive the “ego” of other men, even when it is not pronounced
enough for them to be conscious of it themselves. But it is only he who
feels that every other man is also an ego, a monad, an individual
centre of the universe, with specific manner of feeling and thinking and
a distinct past, he alone is in a position to avoid making use of his
neighbours as means to an end, he, according to the ethics of Kant, will
trace, anticipate, and therefore respect the personality in his
companion (as part of the intelligible universe), and will not merely be
scandalised by him. The psychological condition of all practical
altruism, therefore, is theoretical individualism.
Here lies the bridge between moral conduct towards oneself and moral
conduct towards one’s neighbour, the apparent want of which in the
Kantian philosophy Schopenhauer unjustly regarded as a fault, and
asserted to arise necessarily out of Kant’s first principles.
It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons
take absolutely no interest in their fellow men; they live as if they
were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on
them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour,
and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of his
being behaves to a second man as if the latter were not a man and had no
personality of his own. “I” and “thou” are complementary terms. A man
soonest gains consciousness of himself when he is with other men. This
is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is
alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self-confidence is
damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the
whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime
because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in
practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism; if there is
no “thou,” there is certainly no “I,” and that would mean there is
nothing.
There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that
which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And
this is it: he who feels his own personality, feels it also in others.
For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The
highest individualism is the highest universalism. Ernest Mach is in
great error when he denies the subject, and thinks it is only after the
renunciation of the individual “I” that an ethical relation, which
excludes neglect of the strange “I” and over-estimation of the
individual “I,” may be expected. It has already been seen where the want
of one’s own I leads in relation to one’s neighbour. The I is the
fundamental ground of all social morality. I should never be able to
place myself, as an actual psychological being, in an ethical relation
to a mere bundle of elements. It is possible to imagine such a
relationship; but it is entirely opposed to practical conduct; because
it eliminates the psychological condition necessary for making the moral
idea an actual reality.
We are preparing for a real ethical relation to our fellow men when we
make them conscious that each of them possesses a higher self, a soul,
and that they must realise the souls in others.
This relation is, however, manifested in the most curious manner in the
man of genius. No one suffers so much as he with the people, and,
therefore, for the people, with whom he lives. For, in a certain sense,
it is certainly only “by suffering” that a man knows. If compassion is
not itself clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge,
it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the acquisition of
knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius understands men. And
the genius suffers most because he suffers with and in each and all; but
he suffers most through his understanding.
Although I tried to show in an earlier chapter that genius is the factor
which primarily elevates man above the animals, and in connection with
that fact that it is man alone who has a history (this being explained
by the presence in all men of some degree of the quality of genius), I
must return to that earlier side of my argument. Genius involves the
living actuality of the intelligible subject. History manifests itself
only as a social thing, as the “objective spirit,” the individuals as
such playing no part in it, being, in fact, non-historical. Here we see
the threads of our argument converging. If it be the case, and I do not
think that I am wrong, that the timeless, human personality is the
necessary condition of every real ethical relation to our fellow men,
and if individuality is the necessary preliminary to the collective
spirit, then it is clear why the “metaphysical animal” and the
“political animal,” the possessor of genius and the maker of history,
are one and the same, are humanity. And the old controversy is settled;
which comes first, the individual or the community? Both must be equal
and simultaneous.
I think that I have proved at every point that genius is simply the
higher morality. The great man is not only the truest to himself, the
most unforgetful, the one to whom errors and lies are most hateful and
intolerable; he is also the most social, at the same time the most
self-contained, and the most open man. The genius is altogether a higher
form, not merely intellectually, but also morally. In his own person,
the genius reveals the idea of mankind. He represents what man is; he is
the subject whose object is the whole universe which he makes endure for
all time.
Let there be no mistake. Consciousness and consciousness alone is in
itself moral; all unconsciousness is immoral, and all immorality is
unconscious. The “immoral genius,” the “great wicked man,” is,
therefore, a mythical animal, invented by great men in certain moments
of their lives as a possibility, in order (very much against the will of
the Creator) to serve as a bogey for nervous and timid natures, with
which they frighten themselves and other children. No criminal who
prided himself in his deed would speak like Hagen in the
“Götterdämmerung” over Siegfried’s dead body: “Ha, ha, I have slain him;
I, Hagen, gave him his death blow.”
Napoleon and Bacon, who are given as counter-instances, were
intellectually much over-rated or wrongly represented. And Nietzsche is
the least reliable in these matters, when he begins to discuss the
Borgia type. The conception of the diabolical, of the anti-Christ, of
Ahriman, of the “radical evil in human nature,” is exceedingly powerful,
yet it concerns genius only inasmuch as it is the opposite of it. It is
a fiction, created in the hours in which great men have struggled
against the evil in themselves.
Universal comprehension, full consciousness, and perfect timelessness
are an ideal condition, ideal even for gifted men; genius is an innate
imperative, which never becomes a fully accomplished fact in human
beings. Hence it is that a man of genius will be the last man to feel
himself in the position to say of himself: “I am a genius.” Genius is,
in its essence, nothing but the full completion of the idea of a man,
and, therefore, every man ought to have some quality of it, and it
should be regarded as a possible principle for every one.
Genius is the highest morality, and, therefore, it is every one’s duty.
Genius is to be attained by a supreme act of the will, in which the
whole universe is affirmed in the individual. Genius is something which
“men of genius” take upon themselves; it is the greatest exertion and
the greatest pride, the greatest misery and the greatest ecstasy to a
man. A man may become a genius if he wishes to.
But at once it will certainly be said: “Very many men would like very
much to be ‘original geniuses,’” and their wish has no effect. But if
these men who “would like very much” had a livelier sense of what is
signified by their wish, if they were aware that genius is identical
with universal responsibility--and until that is grasped it will only be
a wish and not a determination--it is highly probable that a very large
number of these men would cease to wish to become geniuses.
The reason why madness overtakes so many men of genius--fools believe it
comes from the influence of Venus, or the spinal degeneration of
neurasthenics--is that for many the burden becomes too heavy, the task
of bearing the whole world on the shoulders, like Atlas, intolerable for
the smaller, but never for the really mighty minds. But the higher a man
mounts, the greater may be his fall; all genius is a conquering of
chaos, mystery, and darkness, and if it degenerates and goes to pieces,
the ruin is greater in proportion to the success. The genius which runs
to madness is no longer genius; it has chosen happiness instead of
morality. All madness is the outcome of the insupportability of
suffering attached to all consciousness. Sophocles derived his idea that
a man might wish to become mad for this reason, and lets Aias, whose
mind finally gives way, give utterance to these words:
εν τω φρονειν γαρ μηδεν ἡδιστος βιος.
I shall conclude this chapter with the solemn words, similar to the best
moments of Kant’s style, of Johann Pico von Mirandola, to whom I may
bring some measure of recognition. In his address “on the dignity of
man” the Supreme Being addresses the following words to man:
“Nec certam sedem, nec propriam faciem, nec munus ullum peculiare tibi
dedimus, O Adam: ut quam sedem, quam faciem, quae munera tute optaveris,
ea pro voto, pro tua sententia, habeas et possideas. Definita caeteris
natura intra praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur; tu nullis angustiis
coercitus, pro tuo arbitrio, in cuius manu te posui, tibi illam
praefinies. Medium te mundi posui, ut circumspiceres inde commodius
quicquid est in mundo. Nec te caelestem, neque terrenum, neque mortalem,
neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque
plastes et fictor in quam malueris tute formam effingas. Poteris in
inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare, poteris in superiora quae sunt
divina, ex tui animi sententia regenerari.
O summam Dei Patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis
felicitatem: cui datum id habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta
simul atque nascuntur id secum afferunt e bulga matris, quod possessura
sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt
futuri in perpetuas aeternitates. _Nascenti homini omniferaria semina et
omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater_; quae quisque excoluerit, illa
adolescent et fructus suos ferent in illo: si vegetalia, planta fiet,
si sensualia, obbrutescet, si rationalia, caeleste evadet animal, si
intellectualia, angelus erit et Dei filius. _Et si nulla creaturarum
sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suac se receperit, unus cum Deo
spiritus factus, in solitaria Patris caligine qui est super omnia
constitutus omnibus antestabit”._