SCHOPENHAUER AND NIETZSCHE
Schopenhauer. An ethic of world- and life-denial
AS bad luck will have it, the two most important ethical thinkers who
speak to us in the second half of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche, do not help the age in the search for what it needs,
viz., a social ethic which is also true ethics. Concerned only with an
individualist ethic out of which no social ethic can be developed,
they offer incitements which, however valuable in themselves, cannot
arrest the demoralisation in world-view which is in progress.
Common to both is the fact that they are elemental moralists. They
pursue no abstract cosmic speculations. Ethics are for them an
experience of the will-to-live. They are therefore, from their very
core, cosmic.
In Schopenhauer the will-to-live tries to become ethical by turning to
world- and life-denial; in Nietzsche by devoting itself to a deepened
world- and life-affirmation.
From the standpoint of their own elemental ethics these two thinkers,
who stand in such deep contrast to each other, rise as judges of what
they find accepted as ethics in their time.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) begins to publish at the beginning of
the century. His _The World as Will and Idea_ appears in 1819._(_68_)_
But he first obtains a hearing about 1860 when the speculative
philosophy had definitely gone bankrupt, and the unsatisfactory nature
of the ethic of [pg 166] popular utilitarianism, as also of that of
Kant’s successors, was generally acknowledged.
The most important among the earlier of these is Johann Friedrich
Herbart (1776-1841). His importance lies in the department of
psychological investigation. It is on a psychological foundation that
he tries to establish ethics in his _General Practical Philosophy_
(1808). He traces the moral back to five direct and ultimate
judgments, which are not derivable from anything beyond themselves,
and which may be compared with æsthetic judgments. They are these: the
ideas of inward freedom, of perfection, of benevolence, of right, and
of equity. By submitting itself to this mode of outlook, which starts
from pure intuition and is confirmed as correct for human beings by
the course of their experience, the will becomes ethical.
Instead, therefore, of seeking one basic principle only for the moral
Herbart accepts several ethical ideas which appear side by side. This
anæmic ethical theory possesses no convincing power. In his teaching,
however, about society and the State Herbart does produce something
solid.
To the earlier successors of Kant there belongs also Immanuel Hermann
Fichte (1797-1879), a son of J. G. Fichte, the so-called Younger
Fichte, with his _System of Ethics_ (2 vols., 1850-1853), which in its
time enjoyed considerable repute.
Schopenhauer is the first representative in Western thought of a
consistent world- and life-denying ethic. The suggestions which
brought him to it came to him from the philosophy of India, which
early in the nineteenth century began to be known in Europe._(_69_)_
For the exposition of his world-view he starts, like Fichte, from
Kant’s epistemological idealism. Like Fichte he defines the essence of
things in themselves (which is to be accepted as underlying all
phenomena) to be Will, not, however, like [pg 167] Fichte as will to
action, but more directly and more correctly as will-to-live. The
world, he says, I can understand only by analogy with myself. Myself,
looked at from outside, I conceive as a sensible phenomenon in space
and time, but looked at from within, as will-to-live. Correspondingly,
everything which meets me in the phenomenal world is a manifestation
of the will-to-live.
What is the meaning, then, of the world-process? Simply that countless
individualities which are rooted in the universal will-to-live are
continually seeking satisfaction in aims which they set before
themselves, in obedience to an inward impulse, and finding none. Again
and again they experience the disappointment that pleasure longed for,
not pleasure attained, is real pleasure; they have continually to
fight against hindrances; their own will-to-live continually comes
into conflict with other wills-to-live. The world is meaningless, and
all existence is suffering. The knowledge of this is attained to by
the will-to-live in the highest living creatures, who are gifted with
the power of remaining always conscious that the totality of what is
around them, outside themselves, is merely a world of appearances.
Surveying in this way the totality of existence, the will is then in a
position to reach clarity of thought about itself and about existence.
That it must effect something in the world that is worth while is the
obsession with which the will-to-live has befooled itself in European
philosophy. When it has attained to knowledge of itself, it knows that
optimistic world-affirmation is of no benefit to it. It can only hurry
it on from unrest to unrest, from disappointment to disappointment.
What it must try to do is to step out from the terrible game in which,
bedazzled, it is taking part, and settle itself to rest in world- and
life-denial.
For Spinoza the meaning of the world-process is that supreme
individualities arise, who find their experience within the Absolute;
for Fichte that the urge to activity of the Absolute comprehends
itself in supreme individualities as ethical; for Hegel that the
Absolute comes in supreme [pg 168] individualities to adequate
consciousness of itself; for Schopenhauer that in individualities the
Absolute attains to knowledge of itself, and finds deliverance from
the blind urge to life-affirmation which is within it. The meaning of
the world-process, therefore, is always found in this: that the Finite
and the Infinite blend their experiences of one another. Spinoza,
Fichte, and Hegel—and this is the weakness of their world-view—cannot
make it properly intelligible how far this experience in the Finite
can be said to have really a meaning for the Absolute. In
Schopenhauer, however, it has such a meaning. In man the universal
will-to-live begins to turn from the path of unrest and suffering into
that of peace.
The transition from Being to nothingness is introduced. This
nothingness is nothingness, it is true, only to the will-to-live,
which is still filled with urge to life-affirmation and with its
conception of the world. What it is in itself, this Nirvana of the
Buddhists, cannot be defined with our conceptions, which come to us
through our senses.
That Schopenhauer carries through his pessimistic-ethical world-view,
as Fichte does his optimistic-ethical, with the material provided by
epistemological idealism has not the importance that he himself
attributes to this fact. Indian predecessors have made this connexion
easier for him. In itself, pessimism can be developed just as well
without epistemological idealism. The drama of the tragical experience
of the will-to-live remains the same whatever the decorations and the
costumes with which it is played.
Although, therefore, it makes its appearance in the dress of Kant’s
theory of knowledge, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is elemental
nature-philosophy.
What then are the ethical elements in his ethic?
Like that of the Indians it appears in a threefold shape: as an ethic
of resignation, as an ethic of universal pity, and as an ethic of
world-renunciation.
About resignation Schopenhauer speaks in forcible words. In language
which rises to the level of poetry, he [pg 169] describes how the man
who is intent on his own self-perfecting does not meet the destinies
of his existence in childish resistance to what is hard, but feels
them as incitements to become free from the world. In the
disagreeables which poison existence for him, and in the misfortune
which threatens to crush him, he suddenly feels himself lifted out of
everything on which he sets value, and brought to the triumphant
feeling that nothing can any longer do him any harm. The field of
resignation, which the philosophical ethics of modern times had
allowed to lie fallow for generations, is replanted by Schopenhauer.
Ethics are pity. All life is suffering. The will-to-live which has
attained to knowledge is therefore seized with deep pity for all
creatures. It experiences not only the woe of mankind, but that of all
creatures with it. What is called in ordinary ethics “love” is in its
real essence pity. In this powerful feeling of pity the will-to-live
is diverted from itself. Its purification begins.
How anxious Kant and Hegel and others are in their ethics to deprive
direct pity of its rights, because it does not suit their theories!
Schopenhauer takes the gag out of its mouth and bids it speak. Those
who, like Fichte, Schleiermacher, and others, ground ethics on a
painfully thought out world-scheme, expect man to run every time to
the topmost attic of his reflexions to fetch down his motives to moral
action. According to the sociological utilitarians he should always
first sit down and calculate what is ethical. Schopenhauer bids him do
something never yet heard of in philosophical ethics—listen to his own
heart. The elemental ethical which has by the others been pushed into
the corner, can now, thanks to him, takes its proper place again.
The others, in order not to get embarrassed with their theories, have
to limit ethics exclusively to the conduct of man to man. They
anxiously insist upon it that pity for animals is not ethical in
itself, but has importance only in view of the kindly disposition
which must ever be [pg 170] maintained among men. Schopenhauer tears
down these fences, and teaches love to the most insignificant being in
creation.
The artificial and curious pleas, too, which the rest produce to put
man into an ethical relation to organised society disappear in
Schopenhauer. Fichte’s and Hegel’s ethical over-valuation of the State
makes him smile. He himself is left free from the necessity of
dragging into ethics things of the world which refuse to be fitted
into them. He can allow the conviction that ethics consist in being
different from the world to flame up in blinding clearness. He is
pledged to no concessions, since he does not, like the others,
represent an ethic which wishes to do something purposive in the
world. Because his world-view is world- and life-denying he can be an
elemental moralist when others have to renounce being such. Nor does
he need, like them, to sever all connexion with Jesus and religious
ethics. He can appeal as often as he likes to the fact that his
philosophy only establishes what has always been accepted by the piety
of Christianity and of the Indians as the essential element in the
moral. It is well-known that Schopenhauer judged Christianity to have
the Indian spirit, and to be probably, in some way or other, of Indian
origin._(_70_)_
Elemental ethics now obtain once more their right place in a thinking
world-view, and this explains the enthusiasm which Schopenhauer
arouses when he at last gets known. That it was possible to ignore for
nearly forty years the very significant matter which he gave to the
world remains one of the most remarkable events in the history of
European thought. The optimistic world-view passed at that time for so
self-evident that the man who laid hands upon it even in the directly
illuminating thoughts upon ethics to which Schopenhauer gave
utterance, could not obtain a hearing. At a later period also many
attach themselves to Schopenhauer only because of his ethical maxims
with their natural and interesting appeal, and refuse to accept [pg
171] his consistent world-view of world- and life-denial. It is a
right feeling which guides them.
Absorption of ethics in world- and life-denial
Schopenhauer’s world-view, like that of the Brahmans, because it
reveals itself as consistent world- and life-denial, is in the last
resort not ethical but supra-ethical. Even though through several
chapters of his ethics he can speak in more elemental fashion than
Spinoza, Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, he is nevertheless in
reality no more ethical than they are. He ends, as they do, in the
frozen sea of the supra-ethical point of view, only at the South Pole
instead of at the North. The price which he pays for being able to
outbid them in elemental ethics is his world view of world- and
life-denial. But the price is a ruinous one.
With Schopenhauer, as with the Indians, ethics are only a phase of
world- and life-denial. They are nothing in themselves but merely what
they are in the frame provided by that world-view. And everywhere
there peeps through his ethically tinted world- and life-denial world-
and life-denial as such. Like a strange sun in the sky it devours
ethics, just as the real sun devours a cloud from which men are vainly
hoping to get a refreshing shower of rain.
On the assumption of world- and life-denial all ethical action is
illusory. Schopenhauer’s pity is merely deliberative. Of pity which
brings help he can have no real knowledge any more than the Indian
thinkers can. Like all will-to-action in the world, such pity has no
meaning. It has no power to lighten the misery of the rest of
creation, since that misery lies in the will-to-live, which is
incurably full of suffering. The one thing, therefore, that pity can
do is to enlighten the will-to-live everywhere about the delusion in
which it is held captive, and bring it to the apathy and peace offered
by world- and life-denial. Schopenhauer’s pity, like that of the
Brahmans and the [pg 172] Buddha, is at bottom merely theoretical. It
can use as its own the words of the religion of love, but it stands at
a far lower level than the latter. Obstructing the way to any real
ethic of love it has before it, as the Indian thinkers also have, the
ideal of absolute inactivity.
The ethic of self-perfecting also is present in Schopenhauer more in
word than in reality. The attainment of inward freedom from the world
is really ethical only if the personality is thereby enabled to work
as a more direct force in the world, but this thought is not to be
found either in Schopenhauer or in the Indians. World- and life-denial
is with them an end in itself, and it continues to assert itself when
its ethical character has ceased. Higher than ethics, says
Schopenhauer, stands asceticism. Everything which helps to deaden the
will-to-live, is to him significant. Men and women who renounce love
and the hope of offspring so that there may be less life in the world,
are to him in the right. Those who deliberately choose religious
suicide, and after employing every conceivable device for deadening
the will-to-live allow the lamp of life to be extinguished, as the
Brahmans do, by withholding all nourishment from the body, these
similarly act as truly enlightened. Only suicide as the outcome of
despair is to be rejected. That is, of course, not a result of the
true life-denial, but is, on the contrary, the act of a life-affirming
will, which is only discontented with the conditions in which it finds
itself._(_71_)_
With Schopenhauer, then, ethics reach only so far as world- and
life-denial has willed and is in a position to declare itself ethical.
They are only an introduction to, and a preparation for, liberation
from the world. It is, at bottom, by an intellectual act that the
suspension of the will-to-live is consummated. If I have won my way
through to the understanding that the whole phenomenal world is
delusion and misery, and that my will-to-live has no need to take
seriously the world and itself, then I am released. How far and to
what extent I then take part in [pg 173] the game of life with the
consciousness that I am but a player in it, has no importance.
Schopenhauer does not think out the pessimistic world-view in the
great and calm manner of the wise men of India. He behaves under its
influence like a nervous and ailing European. While they, on the
ground of the liberating knowledge they have reached, advance with
majestic gait from the ethical to the supra-ethical, and leave behind
them good and evil as two things, over both of which they have equally
triumphed, he reveals himself as a miserable Western sceptic._(_72_)_
Incapable of living out the world-view which he preaches, he clings to
life as to money, appreciates the pleasures of the table as well as
those of love, and has more contempt than pity for mankind. As though
to justify himself in this, he in _The World as Will and Idea_, where
he has just been speaking about the deadening of the will-to-live,
rebels against the notion that anyone who teaches a saintly course of
life must also live like a saint. “It is indeed,” so runs the famous
passage, “a strange demand to make of a moralist that he shall
recommend no other virtue than those which he himself possesses. To
sum up in a series of conceptions the whole essence of the world, in
abstract terms, in general terms, and with clearness, and to offer it
thus as a reflected copy in permanent rational conceptions which are
always ready to hand; that and nothing else is philosophy.”_(_73_)_
With these sentences Schopenhauer’s philosophy commits suicide. Hegel
has a right to say that philosophy is not imperative but only
reflective thinking, for his own philosophy does not claim to be
anything more. But _The World as Will and Idea_ protests with
illuminating language and in a tone of urgent entreaty against the
will-to-live. It ought therefore to be the life-creed of the man whose
voice it is.
[pg 174]
The fact that Schopenhauer can for a moment so far forget himself as
to express himself sceptically about ethics has its own deep-reaching
explanation. It belongs to the essence of world- and life-denial,
which he wishes to proclaim as ethics, that it cannot be thought out
consistently to a conclusion, and that it cannot be put consistently
into practice. Even with the Brahmans and the Buddha it keeps itself
alive by inadmissible concessions to world- and life-affirmation. But
with Schopenhauer it goes so far in that direction that he can no
longer make any attempt to bring theory and practice into harmony, but
must move about resolutely in an atmosphere of unveracity.
Schopenhauer does succeed in letting the ethical appearance which
world- and life-denial can assume, shine out in brilliant colours. But
of really producing an ethic out of world- and life-denial he is as
little capable as the Indians.
Nietzsche’s criticism of current ethics
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in the early period of his activity is
under the spell of Schopenhauer._(_74_)_ One of his _Old-fashioned
Reflexions_ bears the title: “Schopenhauer as Educator.” Later on he
goes through a development which leads him to recognise as the ideal a
scientifically deepened Positivism and Utilitarianism. He is his real
self first when, starting with _Joyous Science_, he tries to establish
his world-view of the higher life-affirmation, and thereby becomes
anti-Schopenhauer, anti-Christian, and anti-Utilitarian.
The criticism he passes upon the philosophical and religious ethics
which he finds accepted is passionate and spiteful. But it goes deep.
He casts at them two reproaches, viz. that they have made a pact with
unveracity, and that they do not allow men to become personalities. In
[pg 175] this he says only what had long been due. Sceptics had
already made public many such complaints. But he speaks as one who is
searching for the truth, and who is concerned about the spiritual
future of mankind, thus giving such complaints a new tone and a wider
range. Whereas the current philosophy believed that it had in the main
solved the ethical problem, and was united with biological and
sociological utilitarianism in the conviction that in the department
of individual ethics there were no more discoveries to be made,
Nietzsche turns the whole game upside down, and shows that all ethics
rest upon those of the individual. The question about the essential
nature of good and evil which was generally accepted as settled, he
puts forward again in elemental fashion. The truth that ethics in
their essential nature are a process of self-perfecting shines out in
him, as in Kant, although in a different light. Hence his place is in
the first rank of the ethical thinkers of mankind. Those who were torn
from their false certainty when his impassioned writings descended on
the lowlands of the thought of the outgoing nineteenth century, as the
south wind sweeps down from the high mountains in spring, can never
forget the gratitude they owe to this upheaver of thought, with his
preaching of veracity and personality.
Accepted ethics are deficient in veracity, according to Nietzsche,
because the conceptions of good and evil which they make current do
not spring out of man’s reflexion on the meaning of his life, but have
been invented in order to keep individuals useful to the majority. The
weak proclaim that sympathy and love are good, because that is to
their advantage. Thus led astray, all men try to force themselves to
the opinion that they fulfil the highest destiny of their existence by
surrender of themselves and devotion to others. But this opinion never
becomes with them a real inward conviction. They live out their lives
without any thought of their own as to what makes their life valuable.
They join the crowd in praising the morality of humility and
self-sacrifice as the true morality, but they [pg 176] do not really
believe in it. They feel self-assertion to be what is natural, and act
accordingly without admitting the fact to themselves. The public
ethical respect paid to humility and self-sacrifice they do not
question; they help to maintain it, from fear that individuals
stronger than themselves might become dangerous to them, if this
method of taming men were abandoned.
Current ethics, then, are something with which mankind as a whole is
deceived by means of traditional views, and with which individuals
deceive themselves.
With indignant statements like these Nietzsche is so far in the right,
that the ethic of humility and self-sacrifice does as a matter of
principle avoid coming to a clear and practical understanding with
reality. It lives by leaving quite undetermined the degree of
life-denial which is involved in it. In theory it proclaims
life-denial; in practice, however, it allows a life-affirmation which
has thereby become unnatural and sickly to prevail. Stripped of all
its passion, then, Nietzsche’s criticism means that only that ethic
deserves to be accepted as current which springs from independent
reflexion on the meaning of life, and comes to a straightforward
understanding with reality.
Individual ethics come before social ethics. Not what ethics mean for
society, but what they mean for the perfecting of the individual, is
the first question which has to be put to them. Do they allow a man to
become a personality or not? It is here, says Nietzsche, that current
ethics fail. They do not allow men to grow straight up, but trains
them like stunted trees on espaliers. They put humility and
self-surrender before men as the content of perfection, but to the
ethical, which consists in man being one with himself, and veracious
through and through, they contribute nothing.
What does “noble” mean? shouts Nietzsche to his age with harsh words as
being the ethical question which has been forgotten. Those who, when
the question re-echoed everywhere, were touched by the truth which was
stirring, and by the anxiety which was trembling within it, [pg 177]
have received from that solitary thinker all that he had to give to
the world.
If life-denial brings with it so much that is unnatural and fraught
with doubt, it cannot be ethics. Ethics, then, must consist of a
higher life-affirmation.
Nietzsche’s ethic of higher life-affirmation
But what is the higher life-affirmation? Fichte and the speculative
philosophers generally make it consist in this, that the will of man
conceives itself within the infinite will and in consequence of this
no longer belongs to the universe in merely natural fashion, but
surrenders itself knowingly and willingly to the latter as an energy
which acts in intelligent harmony with the infinite will. Nietzsche
sees clearly that in this way they have not arrived at any convincing
idea of the content of the higher life-affirmation, but are moving in
the region of the abstract. He himself means to remain at all costs
elemental, and he therefore avoids philosophizing about the universe,
showing himself thereby to be a true moralist like Socrates. He jeers
at those who, not content with belittling mankind, proceed further to
profane the reality of the world by declaring that it exists merely in
the human imagination. It is only on the essential nature of the
will-to-live and the way to use it most completely in experience, that
he himself wishes to reflect.
His original belief was that he could conceive the higher
life-affirmation as the development to a higher spirituality of the
will-to-live. When, however, he attempted to carry this idea through,
it took on, without his being aware of it, another form. Higher
spirituality means, of course, the repressing of natural impulses and
natural claims on life, and is thereby connected in some way or other
with life-denial. Higher life-affirmation, therefore, can only consist
in the content of the will-to-live being raised to its highest
conceivable power. Man carries out the meaning of his life by
affirming with the clearest consciousness of [pg 178] himself
everything that is within him—even his impulses to secure power and
pleasure.
But the opposition between the spiritual and the natural Nietzsche
cannot get rid of. Just in proportion as he emphasizes the natural
does the spiritual shrink back. Under the visible influence of the
mental disease which is threatening him the ideal man grows into the
“superman,” who asserts himself triumphantly against all fate, and
seeks his own ends without any consideration for the rest of mankind.
From the very outset Nietzsche is condemned, in his thinking out of
what life-affirmation means, to arrive at the higher form of it by a
more or less meaningless living out of life to the full. He wants to
listen to the highest efforts of the will-to-live without putting it
in any relation to the universe. But the higher life-affirmation can
be a living thing only when life-affirmation tries to conceive itself
in world-affirmation. Life-affirmation in itself, in whichever
direction it turns, can only become enhanced life-affirmation, never a
higher form of it. It careers about in circles unable to take any
fixed course, like a ship with its steering apparatus tied firmly up.
Nietzsche, however, instinctively shrinks from fitting
life-affirmation into world-affirmation, and bringing it by that
method to development into a higher and ethical life-affirmation.
Life-affirmation within world-affirmation means devotion to the world,
but with that there follows somehow or other life-denial within the
life-affirmation. But it is just this interplay of the two that
Nietzsche wants to get rid of, because it is there that ordinary
ethics come to grief. . . .
Nietzsche was not the first to put forward in Western thought the
theory of living one’s own life to the full. Greek sophists and others
after them anticipated him by this. There is a great difference,
however, between him and his predecessors. They are for living a full
life because it brings them enjoyment. He, on the other hand brings to
the theory the much deeper thought that by living [pg 179] one’s own
life victoriously to the full life itself is honoured, and that by
raising life to a higher power the meaning of existence is brought
out. Men of genius and strong individuality, therefore, should be
intent only on allowing the greatness that is in them to become an
actuality._(_75_)_
Nietzsche’s true predecessors are unknown to him. They have their
home, like those of Spinoza, in China. In that country
life-affirmation made the attempt to come to clear ideas about itself.
In Lao-tse and his pupils it is still naïvely ethical. In Chwang-tse
it becomes cheerful resignation; in Lie-tse the will to secret power
over things; in Yang-tse it ends in an all-round living of life to the
full. Nietzsche is a synthesis, showing itself in a European
mentality, of Lie-tse and Yang-tse. It is only we Europeans who are
capable of producing the philosophy of brutality.
Zarathustra is for Nietzsche the symbol of the thoughts which are
forming within him: Zarathustra as the hero of veracity who ventures
to value natural life as a good, and as the genius who is far removed
from the Judaeo-Christian mode of thought.
Nietzsche is at bottom no more unethical than Schopenhauer. He is
misled by the ethical element which there is in life-affirmation into
giving the status of ethics to life-affirmation as such. Thereby he
falls into the absurdities which follows from an exclusive affirmation
of life, just as Schopenhauer falls into those of an exclusive denial
of life. Nietzsche’s will-to-power should cause no more offence than
Schopenhauer’s will-to-self-annihilation, as it is explained in the
passages in his works which deal with asceticism. It is interesting to
note that neither of the two men lives in accordance with his view of
life. Schopenhauer is no [pg 180] ascetic but a _bon vivant_, and
Nietzsche does not lord it over his fellow men but lives in seclusion.
Life-affirmation and life-denial are both for a certain distance
ethical; pursued to a conclusion both are unethical. This result,
which was reached by the optimistic thought of China and the
pessimistic thought of India, makes its appearance in Europe in
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer because they are the only thinkers in this
continent who philosophise in elemental fashion about the
will-to-live, and venture to follow the paths of one-sidedness. Each
completing the other, they pronounce sentence on the ethics of
European philosophy by bringing into daylight again the elemental
ethical thoughts contained in life-denial as well as in
life-affirmation, thoughts which philosophy was keeping buried.
Arriving as they do at the non-ethical by thinking out to a
conclusion, one of them life-denial, the other life-affirmation, they
corroborate, if taken together, the statement that the ethical
consists neither of life-denial nor of life-affirmation, but is a
mysterious combination of the two.
[pg 181]