complaining, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to
death--accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts.”
“Every human being and his course of life is but another short dream
of the endless spirit of nature, the persistent will to live; is
only another fleeting form which [nature] carelessly sketches in its
infinite pages ... allows to remain for a time so short it vanishes
into nothing ... and then obliterates to make new room.”
* * * * *
From a previous passage touching on the life and character of
Schopenhauer it may have been gathered that his was no very lovable
personality. And being unlovable, it is not surprising that he was
little loved; neither by wife nor child, which he had not; neither by
mother nor sister, which he had and offended; nor yet by close friends
which if he had for a moment he usually managed to estrange. It is
true, perhaps, that his dog loved him, the inseparable poodle whom the
children of the neighborhood used to call der junge Schopenhauer, for
the tenderest side of Schopenhauer’s make-up was turned toward dumb
animals. But the love of a dog is a poor substitute for all other
loves, and it is not surprising that certain minds to whom optimism
is a foregone conclusion should have dismissed Schopenhauer with the
observation that to him who looks through clouded glasses the world
must needs be dark.
If we are tempted to make this easy comment, we should remember the
note that Schopenhauer is never tired of appending to his pages, the
reminder that he stands not alone but is the expression of whole races
and civilizations. He is heir to the deep pessimism of the East,
of Brahminism, of Buddhism, that called life a “veil of illusion,”
and figured one attached to its purposeless turning as “tied to the
wheel of things.” He is the voice of that Christianity that fled to
the desert, and hid itself in monasteries. He could repeat after the
“Imitation of Christ,” “Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth.
The more spiritual a man desires to be, the more bitter does this life
become to him; because he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly
the defects of human corruption. For to eat and to drink, to sleep and
to watch, to labor and to rest, to be subject to the necessities of
nature is a great misery and affliction to a religious man, who would
gladly be set loose.”
No, Schopenhauer did not stand alone--the past was behind him, and
as it proved the future ready for his message. Not merely among the
technical philosophers is his influence to be traced, but in that
sensitive expression of what is passing in the heart of his age--the
artist. Never has art had the courage it now displays to conceive the
tragedy of life as Schopenhauer thought it out--not indeed the drama
of guilt and its punishment, the ideal of justice working itself
out at the cost of individual pain. This is the older conception of
tragedy--Schopenhauer would say it is not tragedy at all. To the modern
conception tragedy lies in the perception that there _is_ no justice
in the world--only indifference, only chance, only stupidity. One
might cite works of Flaubert, tales of Maupassant, pages of Anatole
France; but most notable of all, pretty much the whole literary output
of Thomas Hardy, that tireless recorder of “Life’s Little Ironies,”
that bold acknowledger of crass casualty as the only god of things.
Schopenhauer does not stand alone against a background of forgotten
gloom if one may still hear the voice of nature questioning as Hardy
heard it:
“When I look forth at dawning, pool,
Field, flock, and lonely tree
All seem to look at me
Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.
“Their faces dulled, constrained and worn,
As though the master’s ways
Through the long teaching days
Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne.
“And on them stirs, in lippings mere
(As if once in clear call,
But now scarce breathed at all)
‘We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here.
“‘Has some vast Imbecility
Mighty to build and blend
But impotent to tend
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardy?’
“Thus things around. No answer I ...”
It is time we come to the question: What then? Life is a misery, and
then what?
“The door is open,” said Marcus Aurelius. “The door is open, if the
house is smoky, leave it.” It is the solution of antiquity, and
Schopenhauer himself finds it much more reasonable than most of the
reasons that have been urged against it. Yet it is not through this
easily opened door that he sees a way of escape from the ironic will
to live. If that will had a date and a local habitation, then indeed
to kill the body in which it dwelt would put an end to the monster.
But such is not the case. Among the accidents of time and space you
happen to be one; but had you not been one, or were you no longer one,
the game would play itself out by the same rules, only another pawn
would be on the spot that was yours. Now the evil of the game is not
that _you_ happen to be one of the pieces, but rather that it should
be played at all. Not the pawn, but the player must be killed, and
the player is always that brutal Will to Live, pitted against itself,
winning as it loses and losing as it wins. Step out of it if you will,
what does he care? But stay in it, and by doing your part not with but
against him you may not only emancipate yourself but have your share in
putting an end to the game itself. What is this part to be played by
each against the Will to Live? We shall come to Schopenhauer’s account
of it in due time, meanwhile it is certainly _not_ the impatient
gesture of self-destruction.
From the past again comes another answer to the question: What then?
It takes the form of a wine song, and we catch its refrain from the
lips of singer after singer. “Another and another cup,” cries Omar, “to
drown the memory of this insolence.”
Well, for this solution too Schopenhauer has his sympathy. Not for
the wine that is red, to be sure,--its intoxication is too brief, the
awakening too bitter--but for the wine of beauty wherever it is to be
found in nature or in art. It is most natural that Schopenhauer--for
whom the woe of life springs from the possession of an aggressive,
fighting selfhood--should have looked for solace to that beauty in
which, we say, we forget ourselves, before which we stand rapt. The
effect every one knows--the cause? That was Schopenhauer’s peculiar
contribution to the theory of the beautiful. In a word his explanation
is this. We forget our own individuality with all its torment, because
we are seduced by the beauty of the thing we look at to forget _its_
individuality.
There is in the Louvre a somewhat dirty piece of marble whose size and
weight with the story of how it came to be where it is, may be found
in the guide books. This at least is its individual description. But
to the many human beings who have stood rapt before the Venus de Milo
there has appeared not this dirt, nor yet this marble, nor yet the
effigy of a woman; but just the vision of womanhood. And therewith,
Schopenhauer would suggest, we have taken a step out of the contentious
world. It is no longer a human being but human nature we are in
presence of, and to lose oneself in nature is, while the vision lasts,
to have forgotten the will to live in its troublesome individuality.
While the vision lasts! But the trouble here is that such visions will
_not_ last. In the contemplation of beauty we have the foretaste of
peace; but not the peace eternal. And the question comes back upon us:
What is to be done?
The answer now in progressive completeness comes from three sources.
The first suggestion, imperfect though it is, we catch from the
institution of civil law. Now law, and the penalties it provides, is a
conscious effort to restrain the individual from doing wrong. “Wrong,”
meanwhile, Schopenhauer defines as “that quality of the conduct of an
individual in which he extends the assertion of the will appearing in
his own body so far that it becomes the denial of the will appearing in
the bodies of others.” It is then the province of law to fix as best it
can the boundaries that enclose a man’s rights to the exercise of his
individual will and to prevent his trespassing or being trespassed upon.
But this rough and partial method of restraining the will to live
from multiplying the misery which it creates in proportion as it is
untrammeled is but palliative. A deeper suggestion than that offered
by formal law comes from an examination of the moral sense. For the
distinction between right and wrong as drawn by temporal justice is
by no means identical with that between good and bad as intuited by
the conscience of man. For wrong, as we have seen, means merely
aggression, and right, the exercise of will that commits none of the
aggressions law recognizes. But it is by no means enough to keep within
one’s rights to possess moral worth. “For example,” our philosopher
points out, “the refusal of help to another in great need, the quiet
contemplation of the death of another from starvation while we
ourselves have more than enough, is certainly cruel and fiendish, but
it is not a wrong.”
What then constitutes goodness? The quality of goodness consists in an
infinite sympathy, such an intuition of the misery of others as gives
us a horror of inflicting pain, a delicate skill in alleviating it. Now
all the misery of life comes from the assertion of the individual will,
which if justice may indeed feebly hold in check, goodness alone can
effectively still by destroying the distinction between soul and soul.
“To the noble man,” we find Schopenhauer writing, “this distinction
is not significant.... The suffering which he sees in others touches
him quite as his own. He therefore tries to strike a balance between
them, denies himself pleasures, practices renunciation, in order to
mitigate the sufferings of others. He sees that the distinction between
himself and others, which to the wicked man is so great a gulf, only
belongs to a fleeting and illusive phenomenon. He recognizes directly
and without reasoning that the in-itself of his own manifestation
is also that of others, the will to live which constitutes the inner
nature of everything and lives in all; indeed, that this applies also
to the brutes and the whole of nature, and therefore he will not cause
suffering even to a brute.” And yet this conception of the good life,
this living in sympathy and doing works of love, beautiful as the ideal
of it is, is not the final cure for the world’s misery. The will to
live, even so chastened, has not lost all of its genius for harm.
“If the veil of Maya,” our thinker has it, “is lifted from the eyes
of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egotistical
distinction between his person and that of another, ... then it clearly
follows that such a man, who recognizes all beings as his own inmost
and true self, must also regard the infinite suffering of all suffering
beings as his own, and take on himself the pain of the whole world....
All the miseries of others which he sees and is so seldom able to
alleviate, all the miseries he knows directly, and even those which he
only knows as possible, work upon his mind as his own.... Why should
he now, with such knowledge of the world assert this very life through
constant acts of will, and thereby bind himself ever more closely to
it, hug it ever more closely to himself?” Should not rather, we ask,
this bitter world-knowledge become a permanent and final _quieter_ of
all and of every volition? Should not the will now turn away from life,
shuddering at the pleasures it once craved, but in which it has come to
recognize that assertion of life which is the fountain of misery?
And Schopenhauer expounds his meaning in a parable. “If we compare life
to a course which we must unceasingly run--a path of glowing coals,
with a few cool places here and there; then he who is entangled in
illusion is consoled by the cool places, on which he now stands or
which he sees near him, and sets out to run the course. But he who sees
through the [illusion that separates the ‘here’ and ‘there’] and thus
recognizes the whole, is no longer susceptible of such consolation; he
sees himself at all places at once--and withdraws.”
* * * * *
This is the transition from virtue to asceticism and here we have the
last word of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the cure. Suicide is a mistake;
enjoyment of beauty a true solace, but a momentary one. Restrictions
devised by society are a corrective, but the misery they can prevent is
as a drop to an ocean; morality which is at bottom a charity born of
sympathy is the best the world has dreamed, it destroys more and more
the individual will and makes all things one, but though men in the
ideal state morality might produce would suffer together, they would
still suffer, for from Schopenhauer’s point of view the disjunction is
final; “Either desire unsatisfied, which is pain, or satisfied desire,
which is ennui.”
Well, this infinite wretchedness of the man who has made the round
of experience in seeking relief, who has rejected suicide, who has
awakened from the dream of beauty to find the old pain still there,
who has tried, then lost faith in, the devices of law, who has become
at last a “Beautiful Soul,” to find himself then the sharer of all the
world’s misery,--the infinite wretchedness of such a man is a disease,
not of the wrong kind of will, but of will itself. All will is evil
will, and if one would have an end of pain one must refuse to will at
all; is not this, the asceticism of Indian sage and Christian saint,
the oldest and the ultimate wisdom?
Schopenhauer takes his word “asceticism” quite seriously. To this
last expression of human insight it no longer suffices that a man
should love others as himself and do as much for them as for himself;
“but there arises within him a horror of the nature of which his own
(phenomenal) existence is an expression, the will to live, the kernel
and inner being of that world which is recognized as full of misery.
He therefore disowns his own nature which appears in him and is already
expressed through his body. His body, healthy and strong, expresses the
sexual impulse; but he denies the will and gives the lie to the body.
It thereby denies the assertion of the will which extends beyond the
individual life, and gives the assurance that with the life of this
body, the will, whose manifestation it is, ceases.
“Asceticism shows itself further in voluntary poverty, which not
only arises _per accidens_ because the possessions are given away
to mitigate the sufferings of others, but is here an end in itself,
is meant to serve as a constant mortification of will, so that the
satisfaction of the wishes, the sweet of life shall not again arouse
the will against which self-knowledge has conceived a horror. He who
has attained to this point compels himself to refrain from doing all
that he would like to do, and to do all that he would not like to do,
even if this has no further end than that of serving as a mortification
of will.”[11]
And Schopenhauer becomes the exponent of that aspect of Christianity,
as of other ascetic creeds, which is so unintelligible to the pagan
ideals of manhood,--the doctrine of meekness. Since the ascetic
“himself denies the will which appears in his own person, he will
not resist if another does the same, _i.e._ inflicts wrongs upon him.
Therefore, every suffering coming to him from without, through chance
or the wickedness of others, is welcome, every injury, ignominy, and
insult; he receives them gladly as the opportunity of learning with
certainty that he no longer asserts the will, but gladly sides with
every enemy of the manifestation of will which is his own person.”
In his manner of life the Schopenhauerian ascetic is in every detail a
copy of the Eastern and Western monk. His body he nourishes sparingly,
lest its excessive vigor should animate the will. When at last death
comes, it is most welcome, and is gladly received as a longed-for
deliverance. “For him who thus ends, the world has ended also.”
* * * * *
“For him who thus ends, the world has ended also.” The seriousness with
which this statement is taken marks the difference between the two
great philosophies of asceticism, the Buddhistic and the Christian.
Whatever the Master may himself have taught, the Christianity of the
Church, say of Augustine, is a pessimism respecting the world we know,
backed by an optimism respecting the world we know not, in which
however the meaning of the whole plot is made clear. The _nothingness
of the world_ as it appears to the eyes of the Christian ascetic
is then the nothingness of _this_ world, but for him who leaves it
there awaits a much richer life in another. For the Buddhist saint,
no optimism of this kind supplements his pessimism, no other world is
called upon to explain this one, and when he leaves this one through
the door of asceticism it is into the eternal peace of Nirvana, of
nothingness, that he sinks.
It is the latter understanding of the outcome that Schopenhauer accepts
at the hands of the mystic East. “We have recognized,” he writes, “the
inmost nature of the world to be will, and all its phenomena to be but
embodiments of the will, and we have followed this embodiment from the
unconscious working of the obscure forms of nature up to the completely
conscious action of man. Therefore we shall by no means evade the
consequence that with the free denial, the surrender of the will, all
these phenomena are also abolished; that constant strain and effort
without end and without rest at all the grades of objectivity in which
and through which the world consists; the multifarious forms succeeding
each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will and
finally the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space, and
also its last fundamental form, subject and object, all are abolished.
No will: no idea, no world.”
“Before us there is certainly only nothingness,” Schopenhauer
concludes, but if this prospect be anything but grateful to a man,
it must be because he has not really seen or accepted the truth
that Schopenhauer would demonstrate and impart. “That we abhor
annihilation,” he insists, “is simply another expression of the fact
that we so strenuously will life.” Of that folly and the pain of it
enough has been said. “But if we turn our glances from our own needy
and embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world ... then
instead of the useless striving and effort, ... instead of the never
satisfied and never dying hope which constitutes the life of the man
who wills, we shall see that peace which passeth understanding, that
perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable confidence
and serenity, the mere reflection of which in the countenance as
Raphael or Correggio has represented it is an entire and certain
gospel; only knowledge remains, the will has vanished.”
And it is exactly in this way “by contemplation of the life and conduct
of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our
own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written
history, and, with the stamp of entire truth, by art, that we may
banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind
all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as
children fear the dark ... What remains after the abolition of the
will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing;
but conversely to those in whom the will has denied itself, this world
which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways--is nothing.”
VII
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
1844-1900
“God is dead. God is dead: He died of pity”--the phrase runs
refrain-like through the “Sayings of Zarathustra.” It is the bright
news that Nietzsche brings as his peculiar contribution to the cause of
human hope. These are the glad tidings for whose bringing he expects
that his feet shall be called beautiful upon the mountain. Therefore
they dance, these feet, and bear toward us one who laughs and sings.
At least Nietzsche would have us believe that truth--his truth--“comes
on light feet” and that it steps to music. “Let the day be counted
lost,” he cries, “in which we have not somewhat danced, and let us know
that truth to be false which brings no laughter with it.” Yet, whether
it was that truth--Nietzsche’s truth--had somehow not the quality of
joyousness in it, or whether the poor messenger of these “glad tidings”
was the victim of ironical chance, certain it is that his dance brought
him to the doors of the mad-house, and that behind these melancholy
doors he died.
There is however nothing but a certain strangeness of phrase that would
lead one to associate this particular message of Nietzsche with his
later insanity. It is no new idea that God is dead, no new expectation
that the news will be grateful to all who understand its import.
Xenophanes near the beginning, Epicurus and Lucretius toward the end
of pagan thought had brought the same intelligence. Only, according
to Xenophanes the Gods had died not of pity but of vice. “Liars,
adulterers, cheats are the vaunted Lords of Olympus.” And according to
Lucretius it was again not of pity but of their cruelty the Gods were
dead, the gods of that religion
Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans.
Nor are the ancients the only ones to whom the world has appeared
godless. If for Hume God was only suspiciously silent, for Schopenhauer
he was conspicuously absent. Still, it was far enough from
Schopenhauer’s thought that a God could die of pity. Pity was for him
the one divine thing left to a Godforsaken world; it at least might
soften, even if it could not cure the fundamental cruelty of life. It
was rather the unreason of the world that forbade us to see in its
course a divine guidance. For Schopenhauer, God had died quite mad.
Vice, cruelty, reticence, irrationality--these had been variously
recognized as ills of which a God might die. It remained for Nietzsche
to suggest that the most fatal of all disorders, whether in God or man,
was just that gentlest of all Christian virtues--Pity or, as the German
tongue has it, Mitleid: fellow-suffering. In the understanding of the
motives that led Nietzsche to this utterance lies the key to his whole
philosophy--if the “lightning flashes” of his thought may, somewhat
against his will, be called a “philosophy.”
* * * * *
Virtues like races--perhaps I should say _with_ races--have their
ascendancy and their decline. The quality of pity is not greatly
admired of strong young peoples. The virtues of triumphant pagandom
were made of sterner stuff: one hears much of temperance, of courage,
of wisdom, of justice; little indeed of compassion. It is with
Christianity that faith, hope, and charity are introduced into our
culture, and throughout Christendom the greatest of these remains
charity. Thus it is that Nietzsche always refers to these virtues as
the “modern idea,” and since modernity is to his mind desperately sick,
he seeks the cause of its disease in its “fixed idea.”
Now in imagining that charity or pity might well be a symptom of
weakness, Nietzsche does not stand alone even among modern thinkers.
Spinoza for one is inclined to be critical of the excellence of pity.
Why pity one’s neighbor more than oneself? And Why pity oneself at all?
Is not such self-pity a form of repining? But the cure for repining is
understanding--the understanding that all things are of God. One might
as well regret that the area of one’s field is not greater than the
product of its base and side, as that the length of one’s days does
not exceed three-score years and ten. And Kant again is no sympathetic
witness to the virtue of pity. “There is but one thing good,” he has
said, “and that is a good will”--the will, namely, to obey the command
of duty. If one have this one cannot need pity; if one have it not one
cannot deserve pity.