love of _this_ woman, not of _some_ woman. Ask such love what it sees
to love in this individual that could not just as well be found in
another, and the lover will laugh you out. You are not speaking his
language. You are looking for qualities, types, principles--what he
wants with all his soul is not a kind of a woman but just _his_ woman.
And to her he sings,
Who is it says the most? which can say more
Than this rich praise,--that you alone are you?
Or do you ask as the thing on which all your happiness hangs that death
keep his hands off just this child? Then what meaning would it have for
you if a condoling friend were to point out that you had other children
far more remarkable? It was not for his qualities you cared when
you cared for him, nor yet for his value as a unit in counting your
offspring.
I don’t pretend to explain why this is, or what it all means;[5]
but when Kant maintains that to will a principle and nothing but a
principle is not what we mean by willing, these instances of objects
of desire that are purely individual and can not be reduced to
principle naturally present themselves as facts of experience that may
help us to catch Kant’s meaning.
Of all principles of willing, the moral principle is the highest; but
the willing of individual human beings cannot from its very nature be
completely defined by principle. The only world in which will can have
an object; _i.e._, the only world in which there can be such a thing
as will, must be a world of individual things. If it is to be a moral
world, it must be possible to struggle for these individual things
without disobeying the law of duty.
Happiness, defined as getting the individual thing you want, must
be guaranteed, or else, since you can only want something that is
individual, willing is objectless. Who or what is to guarantee that
the world in which we willers of concrete things may will consistently
with moral principle exists? Not experience, surely; that has a way of
arranging things so that the woman one wants is just the one principle
denies one; the child one has set one’s heart on is just the one death
has set his seal on. The chapter of “life’s little ironies” is a full
one. Then does it not require the guarantee of a world maker or a world
ruler that life’s indifference or irony have not the last word? Does
not the possibility of a moral will hang upon the assurance of God? So
at least for Kant, God makes goodness possible.
* * * * *
“God, freedom and immortality,” these three are traits inseparable
from a world in which duty can speak and be obeyed; the Old Testament
world is not only _a_ moral world, it is _the only_ moral world. And
if, so far, Kant has clung very closely to the Old Testament, we should
find him in his later writing--his “Religion within the Domain of Pure
Reason”--clinging just as closely to the spirit of the New Testament.
Those who find his reasoning obscure and faulty, would explain all this
in terms of his personal psychology and his early environment, for
Kant was a child of that deep Pietism, one might say Quakerism, that
characterizes the Germany of the eighteenth century.
But if we look upon him as the child of his age in his devotion to
Christianity, he was no less profoundly influenced by that other
and equally characteristic movement of his day and generation--the
inheritance of Rationalism. The Old Testament and even the New
Testament world images may have deep truth hidden in their
symbolism--so the child of pietism would be likely to think--but the
authority of this truth was not to be sought in revelation. It must be
established, if at all, by one’s reason--so the disciple of rationalism
was bound to maintain. Now Kant is not only a rationalist, rejecting
revelation as a source of authority. He is also a critic, to whom the
arguments of rationalism for the existence of God appear flimsy and
irrational. Neither in reason nor in experience can we find grounds
for accepting the existence of God as a scientific fact. Hume could be
no more convinced than Kant that no aspect of the world with which our
experience acquaints us justifies a belief in divine purpose. Kant went
further--no extension of experience in future ages could give us the
assurance we now lack. God is unknown to our science and unknowable.
Well then, if neither the necessities of thought nor the facts of
experience, however we conceive our knowledge of them extended, can
force upon us a belief in God and all that hangs on him, what is left
of religion and of morality that cannot be separated from religion?
Kant’s answer to this question is so confusing that it is little wonder
the interpreters of Kant are confused, in disagreement with each
other and each doubtful of himself. I am obliged then, since we have
not the time to try out all the ifs and buts of the case, to present
dogmatically one line of thought that is to be found in Kant, the one
along which post-Kantian thought developed. If anyone tell me that he
fails to find this thought in his edition of Kant, or that he finds
others that do not run parallel with it, we shall not quarrel about a
matter commentators have always quarreled about.
If Kant as a critic has been keen to point out the inadequacy of any
proof of God, he has been no less earnest in his purpose of showing
that no disproof can come to us. This world is one that for aught we
know _may_ be God’s world, and if we choose to live as though it were
God’s world and we were of his kingdom, we need fear to meet no facts
that would block our way and deny us.
Doesn’t it lie near to hand to say--You can make this God’s world if
you want to? You can make yourself free, immortal and blest of heaven
if that is the deepest desire in you, for in all its moral aspects this
world of yours is a plastic world and will respond delicately to your
touch. Live then as though there were a God, and there will indeed be
one; the world will be divine.
I have called Kant’s world the Old Testament world and you have seen
in what sense it may be called so; but if you try to think of this
world as the mediaeval writers are supposed to have thought of it,
then Kant’s religion must be in flat contradiction with itself. If
God is such a God, if his creative act is such a gesture as a Michael
Angelo might paint, if life after death is such a life and spent in
such places as a Dante might describe, then all Kant’s religion is
but a leap in the dark. The thing reduces to something like Pascal’s
wager--bet on God, and if you lose you lose nothing; if you win you
win everything. If God, freedom, and immortality are facts hid behind
a curtain that we may never tear aside, we can only take a chance with
such facts. I have already made my bow to those who find other things
in Kant than the religion I pretend to have drawn from him--and I had
particularly in mind such as understand Kant throughout to be thinking
of the truths of religion as just such facts hid behind the curtain.
I have refused to quarrel with those interpreters because Kant does
think, because Kant can not cure himself of thinking in such terms
through many pages. But this I take to be obvious--if this fashion of
thinking were the only one possible in view of the situation in which
science and religion find themselves, if it is not merely a peculiarity
of the man Kant and his personal psychology, then those who followed on
him, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, were deeply deceived in supposing that
Kant was their inspiration; the post-Kantian development was not a
development but a new creation.
* * * * *
Viewing Kant then in the light of the appeal which he made to his own
times, we may see that for him religion is not a matter of what one
decides to believe, but of what one decides to do. And the religious
consciousness may express the law of its doing in the determination to
live as though there were a God. But we must ask it of Kant to explain
to us what sort of a life this religious life would be.
One can quite make it out that the first condition to the living of
such a life is to obey the voice of duty as though it were the voice
of God. That is, to obey it without letting our obedience hang on our
insight into the purpose to be worked out, or on the satisfaction we
are to find in or because of the doing. Just so was the Decalogue
presented for the acceptance of the Children of Israel. But for them
the way of duty was revealed by God himself; for Kant it must be
revealed by the reason which accepts it. What sort of a law does this
“practical reason,” as Kant calls it, reveal?
Kant’s first formulation is imperfect enough, and seems to be based
on an effort to deduce the content of moral law from the meaning of
law itself--as though to say, the command “Be law-abiding” furnished
one with all needed information respecting the law by which one was
to abide. For, as Kant puts the matter, law must prescribe a type
of action that is possible for everybody--a meaning of law which
is well rendered by the common phrase, “What is right for one is
right for all.” And just as one might try to convince a man of the
iniquity of some particular act of his by putting to him the question,
Suppose everybody were to do that? so Kant at this stage feels that
we could try out the validity of any given type of act by putting
the same question to ourselves. Suppose the right to lie were up for
consideration; if lying is morally right, then it must be possible for
everybody to lie. But if everybody tried to lie, there would be no such
thing as a lie, for a lie requires someone to believe it as well as
someone to utter it. Universal lying would be impossible; the maxim,
“Be a good liar,” could not be generalized into a law.
“So act that the maxim of your conduct could become a universal
law.”[6] This is the formula that Kant finds first of all for the full
duty of man. But of course on this basis one could not sell a share of
stock, for if everybody were to try it, there would be no market. On
the other hand Kant himself has only a tortured and inadequate account
to give of the reason why one should not commit suicide, for it looks
as though we might all do that much together.
More interesting is Kant’s second attempt to formulate the law of duty.
Almost against his will, one would say, Kant is forced to consider the
act from the point of view of its purpose. The purpose of a moral act
must be such that everybody may pursue the same purpose.[7] An immoral
world is one in which many want a thing that can not be shared--Kant
recalls with humor the remark of King Francis, that he and his brother
Charles were in perfect accord for both wanted the same thing--namely
the possession of Milan. A moral world is one in which no desires are
contradictory.
The moment Kant has said this he has made the moral world an ideal,
an image of a world not identical with this present one, but into
which our faith demands that the present one may by our effort evolve.
It is impossible so far as I can see to make Kant’s first impression
of duty square with this account of it. It cannot be that duty is a
simple certain command that the humblest understanding can grasp.
It must be that duty is a more or less vague striving toward this
ideal, a striving to make the world in which we live with one another
approximate more and more closely to this beautiful republic whose
motto might be modeled after Rabelais, “‘Fays ce que vouldras,’ et
ne nuis pas à ton voisin.”[8] Religion then is the determination to
allow nothing to divert us from this struggle which it would not be
out of place to call the struggle after divinity. Immortality would be
a direction, not a condition. Happiness--the religious happiness--the
sense of the progress to which we are contributing. All this seems
to flow naturally from the Kantian conception, but Kant has that in
him which will not let such results follow. He stands divided against
himself. His theory of duty as decalogue law, his less confident but
no less enduring conception of the object of religion as facts behind
a veil, stand in contradiction with his view of duty as a struggle
that must be more or less blind, baffled, and empirical toward a goal
infinitely remote.
* * * * *
In this contradiction we must leave him. Religion, as the name for a
search after the kind of reality in which the multiple strivings that
leave us divided each within himself and one from another, was the
deep inspiration of those who followed Kant. They thought they owed
this inspiration to the master, and so indeed they did; but it is
not surprising that Kant himself refused to recognize his immediate
offspring (Fichte) and would probably have been greatly shocked at the
speculations of his more remote progeny. Nor is it surprising to one
accustomed to the disappointments of which the history of thought is
the living chronicle that one of those inspired by Kant to this very
search should have ended his seeking with the tragic finding that the
harmonious will is an illusion and a contradiction. Will is essentially
war, cries Schopenhauer. There is that in the experience of every man
which forces him to give ear to this cry, voicing though it does the
deepest and final denial of all that is religious.
VI
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
1788-1860
We live in a room that has a dark corner. The shadows are there and we
know they are there; but we will not look their way. We busy ourselves
with a thousand things that are doubtless important; we sit by the lamp
and are doubtless full of cheerful thoughts. It is held to be wise
to behave in this way, and if the things we busy ourselves with are
really important then it may be admitted that our conduct is really
wise. But back there among the shadows, the darkest of them all, lurks
the spirit of questioning. “What is the use?” it keeps asking, “What
is the use?” If we listen we are lost, yet those who have listened and
lost themselves tell us that there is such peace to be had of knowing
the worst that compared with it the prizes of struggling life are but
children’s toys.
“To see where the worst problems of life lie,” writes a philosopher of
our own day, “is a very black experience. And yet, so much does human
reason live on insight that I have never met a man who was alive to
those deepest problems and who repented him of his insight.”[9]
Now the one to whom of all men this insight into the deep abyss has
been vouchsafed was Arthur Schopenhauer. According to the older ideas
of tragedy, the world has at times and in spots seemed sad enough; but
Schopenhauer invented a new conception of tragedy, more ingeniously
painful than any that had gone before, and then he showed that the play
which most completely set forth this idea was just the whole of life.
The work in which this thought is most systematically developed bears
the double title, “On the World as Will and Idea (Vorstellung),” whose
first edition appeared in 1818. We may safely confine ourselves to this
single work in our present study of Schopenhauer, for his life was one
of those lives that move rapidly to a moment of maturity then subside
into a ruminating reflection on their achievement.
To have reached at thirty a life-view from which one never afterwards
departs might be taken to argue either a certain shallowness of mind
or an unusual depth of conviction. One recalls the sixty-year-old
Kant, painfully struggling with a bare theory of method, and then for
some twenty years more laboring to apply this method to the problems
of life with results so vigorously reacting on the method itself as
to have created a suspicion of change of view. It is certain that in
contrast with Kant, Schopenhauer leaves an impression of facility in
thought and style. This effect is no doubt partly to be accounted for
by a difference in upbringing and in the circumstances surrounding
production. Kant was the very complete university professor;
Schopenhauer, a man of the world whose one early experiment in academic
life was a most convincing failure. He alone of all the great names
that recognize Kant as master--Fichte, Schelling, Hegel--had the
assured position and material means to spare himself the laborious
training of one who would enter the academic lists. Free then to live
as he would, he develops the tastes and the methods of the private
scholar of means, reflecting the experience of an easy bachelor
existence of inns, and travel, and wide unsystematic reading.
It is the early training doubtless of one intended for a higher social
stratum, that imposes on Schopenhauer a sense of obligation to be
lordly; a style that is free, rather grand, perhaps a bit overdressed;
a certain insolence of tone from which even his friends suffer at
times, and which when it is question of his enemies sinks to a level of
abuse whose epithets must be shadowed forth with initial and dash.
But apart from these external conditions, one recognizes in
Schopenhauer the spirit of the fighter rather than that of the critic.
He is a man of one idea, embraced as soon as encountered, then defended
with boldness and eloquence and wit. Such a character hardly develops
the great thinker; but it may well be possessed of a great thought. The
thought of Schopenhauer is none the less great for being gloomy and
repellant.
* * * * *
The double title, “The World as Will and Idea,” hints at a double
aspect that experience presents, the one to the eye of the observer,
the other to the mind of the thinker. To the observing eye, it is a
spread of bodies in space and time, obeying the laws of mechanical
necessity; just such a world as Kant has described in his “Kritik der
reinen Vernunft.” Schopenhauer, following Kant, calls this the world of
appearance, the phenomenal world.
But when we say “a world of appearances” we seem to hint at a something
that appears, and appears not to the eye that follows the mechanical
behavior of bodies in space and time but as revealed to the thought of
one who asks: Wherefore this agitated phenomenon? Just as, watching my
neighbor move and gesticulate, I ask myself: What is it all about? so,
seeing Nature a-quiver, I ask myself: What does she mean? And just as
my neighbor’s conduct is understood when I have caught the purpose,
the motive that inspires it, so I may be expected to have reached the
“real nature” of the fleeting world if I can but find the _will_ which
it expresses.
It is then the World as Will that profoundly interests Schopenhauer, as
it has profoundly interested all men, from the most primitive that have
implored the gods, to the most cautiously reflective who, like Kant,
have felt confident of at least this much, that no definition of a good
life was possible that did not postulate a world-purpose.
Now the plainest man can assure himself that there are enough--alas,
too many--purposes to be found in nature for the looking. There are
mine and yours, that of our country, of our human race, of other races
too, for the lower animals have disputed the world with us, as the
vegetables have disputed it with them. But when one asks oneself:
What ultimate purpose is served by all this disputing for a foothold?
then indeed one’s imagination is put to the test. There are too many
purposes, there is too little purpose, to let this search for nature’s
will with us end in a quick and happy finding.
All this is matter of common knowledge and common experience, yet how
few have had the courage to give up hope in an ultimate happy finding,
and how easily is this hope deceived with dreams, how willingly does
it dispense with proof. Here indeed is the region in which “the heart
has its reasons that the reason does not understand.” Well, it is
Schopenhauer’s great act of courage that the purpose he was unable
to find he refused to hope for; the reason that the reason could not
understand he closed his heart to. Resolutely, he searched the dark
corner and finally stared at the shadow.
“Everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict and alternation of
victory.”
“Every kind of being fights for the matter, the space, and the time
of the others. This strife may be followed throughout the whole of
nature, but most distinctly in the animal kingdom. For the animals have
the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, while within the
animal kingdom every beast is the prey and food of another. So does
the will to live everywhere prey upon itself till finally we come to
the human race. This, because it subdues all others, regards nature as
a manufactory of things for its use. Yet even the human race reveals
within itself with terrible distinctness the same conflict; the same
variance with itself of the will to live, and we cry _homo homini
lupus_.”[10]
This picture of universal warfare is the first scene in Schopenhauer’s
world-tragedy; but it is far from the climax. It is in itself not even
tragic, for is it not an aspect of nature that however much it may
suggest of defeat and suffering it must reveal just as much of triumph
and glory? For every victim a victor, and may we not suppose that some
principle of justice awards the pains and pleasures of it all?
But no, Schopenhauer goes relentlessly on. The conqueror is crowned
with vanity and his spoils are illusions:
“The inner being of nature is a striving without rest and without
respite.... a willing and striving that may very well be compared
to an unquenchable thirst. But since the basis of all willing is
need, deficiency and thus pain, the nature of brute and man alike
is originally and of its very essence subject to pain. If on the
other hand, it is deprived of objects of desire through too easy
satisfaction, such void and ennui fills the heart that existence
becomes an unbearable burden to it. Thus life swings like a pendulum
from pain to ennui, from ennui to pain.” And Schopenhauer finds an
odd unconscious recognition of this truth in the popular imaginings
concerning heaven and hell. “After man had transferred all pain and
torments to hell,” he notes with an amused cynicism, “there then
remained nothing but ennui to furnish heaven with.”
The survivor of the struggle for existence is on these terms hardly
a being to be envied, and the “_terque quaterque beati_” must often
come to his lips as he recalls those who have fallen. Indeed, it is
exactly that place in the scale of existence which gives advantage in
the struggle, that brings with it a consciousness of the vanity of this
same struggle. It is exactly to man, who in his moment of pride has
thought nature a “manufactory of things for his use,” that is given
the most poignant sense of alternating hunger and satiety. This most
necessitous of all beings “stands upon the earth, left to himself,
uncertain about everything except his own lack and misery. Consequently
the care for the maintenance of that existence under exacting demands
which are renewed every day occupies as a rule the whole of human life.
To this is directly related a second claim, the propagation of the
species. Here he is threatened from all sides by the most different
kinds of danger, from which it requires constant watchfulness to
escape. With cautious steps and casting anxious glances around he
pursues his path--thus he went as a savage, thus he goes in civilized
life; and there is no security for him.
“Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis
Degitur hoc oevi, quodcumquest.
“Life is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools which man avoids with
the greatest care and solicitude, although he knows that even if he
succeeds in getting through with all his efforts and skill, he comes
thus but the nearer at every tack to the greatest, the total, the
inevitable shipwreck, death.”
And Schopenhauer rounds off the whole with these lines, “Thus, between
desiring and attaining all human life flows on. The wish is in its
nature pain, the attainment ... satiety: the end is an illusion and
possession takes away charm. The wish, the need, presents itself under
a new form, or when it does not, follows desolateness, emptiness,
ennui against which the conflict is just as painful as against want.”
And just as the superior animal is the most suffering of all animals,
so the superior man is the most suffering of all men. The calm joy of
science, the pleasure of the beautiful, the delight in art--“these
things demanding rare talents are granted to very few, and to those few
only as a passing dream. And then even these few on account of their
higher intellectual power are made susceptible of far greater suffering
than duller minds can ever feel. Moreover such men are placed in lonely
isolation by a nature obviously different from that of others, so that
here too accounts are squared.”