THE ISSUE OF THE WESTERN STRUGGLE FOR A WORLD-VIEW
Academic thinkers: Sidgwick, Stephen, Alexander, Wundt, Paulsen,
Höffding
THE attempts of speculative philosophy to find a foundation for ethics
in knowledge of the nature of the world have come to grief. Ethics
based on science and sociology have shown themselves powerless.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, although they bring back into general
acceptance some elementary questions of ethics, are unable,
nevertheless, to establish a satisfying ethic.
In the later decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, ethics find
themselves in an unenviable position. They remain of good courage,
however, being confident that they have at their disposal a
sufficiency of “scientifically” recognized results to guarantee them
an assured existence.
This conviction is produced by a series of inter-related works—chiefly
academic manuals of ethics. Their authors are of the opinion that
ethics can be built, like the arch of a bridge, upon two piers. One of
their piers is the natural ethical disposition of man; the other they
allow themselves to find in those needs of society which influence the
spirit and temper of individuals. They consider their task to be the
bringing into actual existence of the arch (the possibility of
completing which they take for granted), with the solid material of
modern psychology, biology, and sociology, and the dividing of the
load in the best calculated way between the two piers. Fundamentally
they do nothing beyond restoring with new means the standpoint of
Hume.
The following writers try to carry through this adjustment of the
ethics which start from the standpoint of [pg 182] ethical personality
and those which start from that of society: Henry Sidgwick
(1838-1900),_(_76_)_ Leslie Stephen (1832-1904),_(_77_)_ Samuel
Alexander (b. 1859),_(_78_)_ Wilhelm Wundt (b. 1832),_(_79_)_
Friedrich Paulsen (1846-1908),_(_80_)_ Friedrich Jodl (b.
1849),_(_81_)_ Georg von Gizyki (1851-1895),_(_82_)_ Harald Höffding
(b. 1843),_(_83_)_ and others. Of these ethical writers who, in spite
of the variety of experience they bring to bear on the subject, are
essentially related to one another, the most original is Leslie
Stephen, the scientifically soundest is Wilhelm Wundt, the most
ethical is Harald Höffding.
Höffding makes the ethical originate partly out of a consideration
which limits the sovereignty of the present minute. “An action (he
says) is good which preserves the totality of life and gives fulness
and life to its content; an action is bad which has a more or less
decided tendency to break into and narrow the totality of life and its
content.” Supporting this consideration come also instincts of
sympathy, which make us feel pleasure in the pleasure of others, and
pain at their pain. The aim of ethics is general prosperity.
Of these ethical writers some put the chief emphasis on the ethical
disposition of the individual, while others hold that ethics are
constituted chiefly by their content, which aims at the good of
society. What is common to them all [pg 183] is that they try to
combine the ethic of ethical personality and the ethic of
utilitarianism without having inquired into their higher unity. That
is why the chapters in which they touch on the problem of the basic
principle of the moral are always the part of their works which is the
least clear and the least living. One is conscious of how happy they
feel when they have waded through this swamp, and can launch out into
consideration of the different ethical standpoints which have emerged
in history, or can face questions on single points in ethical
practice. And when they handle practical questions, it is obvious that
they are not in possession of any usable basic principle of the moral.
Their coming to terms with reality is a mere groping here and there.
The considerations on the strength of which they decide are set out
now in this sense, now in that. Hence these ethical writers frequently
offer very interesting discussions on ethical problems, but the
conception of the moral never gets from them any real explanation or
any deepening. The criterion of a real ethic is whether it allows
their full rights to the problems of personal morality and of the
relation of man to man, problems with which we are concerned every day
and every hour, and in which we must become ethical personalities.
These academical works do not do this. Therefore, although they may
arrive at results which deserve attention, they are not capable of
giving effective ethical impulses to the thought of their time.
The ethic of self-perfecting. Kant’s successors: Cohen, Herrmann
This mediating ethic is not left uncriticized. In Germany inheritors
of the Kantian spirit like Hermann Cohen (b. 1842)_(_84_)_ and Wilhelm
Herrmann (1846-1922)_(_85_)_ oppose [pg 184] it, and in
English-speaking countries successors of the Intuitionists like James
Martineau (1805-1900),_(_86_)_ F. H. Bradley (b. 1846),_(_87_)_ T. H.
Green (1836-1882),_(_88_)_ Simon Laurie (1829-1909),_(_89_)_ and James
Seth (b. 1860)._(_90_)_
In spite of wide differences in detail these thinkers agree in
refusing to derive ethics either from the ethical disposition of man
or from the claims of society. They represent them as produced
entirely through the ethical personality. To become ethical
personalities, however, (so they say) we step out of ourselves and
work for the good of the community.
Cohen and Herrmann attempt to reach an ethic which is a consistent
unity by using logic to put a content into the empty categorical
imperative of Kant. They wish to make good what he missed in his
_Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten_ (Foundations for a Metaphysic
of Morals) and in his _Metaphysik der Sitten_ (A Metaphysic of
Morals). Cohen finds the origin of ethics in the pure Will thinking
out the idea of one’s fellow-man and that of the associating of men to
form a state, his ethical ego being brought into existence by this
logical operation. The ethic thus attained consists in honesty,
modesty, loyalty, justice, and humanity, and culminates in the
representation of the state as the highest creation of the moral
spirit. But that this ethic is only the offspring of mental ability is
betrayed by the whole story of its appearance. The “pure will” is an
abstraction which cannot start anything.
Instead of obtaining an ethic by deduction, using abstract logical
methods, Wilhelm Herrmann opens for it the back-door of experience. He
does indeed make ethics consist in “the bowing of the individual
before the power [pg 185] of a something which is universally valid in
thought,” but that content of ethics which is a necessity of thought
we are to reach by seeing ourselves in each other as if in a mirror,
and deciding what kind of conduct makes us mutually “reliable.” The
thought of the unconditional claim originates, therefore,
spontaneously in us, but awakes to the fact that it is determined by
its content “through experience of human intercourse, and in the
relation of reliability.”
Herrmann did not carry this philosophic ethic through to completion.
He sketches it as an introduction to a not less artificial theological
ethic. His conception is allied to Adam Smith’s theory of the
impartial third party (see page 82).
Martineau, Green, Bradley, Laurie, Seth, and Royce
Martineau, Green, Bradley, Laurie, and Seth try to reach an ethic
which is a consistent unity by making the whole of ethics originate in
the need of self-perfecting. Of these, Martineau goes more on the
lines of the moralists of the eighteenth century, known as the
Cambridge Platonists. Ethics consist for him in thinking ourselves
into the ideal of perfection, which God gave us with our life, and
letting ourselves be determined by it. T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley,
Simon Laurie, and James Seth show more or less the influence of J. G.
Fichte. The ethical is with them founded on the fact that man wishes
to live his life out in the deepest way as an effective personality,
and thereby attain to true union with the infinite spirit. This
thought is expounded best by T. H. Green. He is also led at the same
time to the relation between civilization and ethics, and lays it down
that all the achievements of human activity, especially the political
and social perfecting of society, are nothing in themselves, and have
a real meaning only so far as they render more thorough inward
perfecting attainable by individuals. A spiritualized conception of
civilization is therefore now struggling [pg 186] for acceptance. An
upholder on American soil of this ethic of self-perfecting is Josiah
Royce (1855-1916)._(_91_)_
In the effort to conceive of ethics as a whole as being an ethic of
self-perfecting, that is to say of conduct which springs from inward
necessity, these thinkers express thoughts which belong to a living
ethic. To be energetically concerned with the basic principle of the
moral, even though one be led in the direction of the universal and
apparently abstract, always brings with it results which are valuable
for practice, even if the solution of the problem itself is not
thereby advanced beyond a certain point.
These thinkers go so far on these lines as to conceive of ethics as
higher life-affirmation, consisting in devoting ourselves to the
activity which the world-spirit wills for us. They represent the
mysticism of activity taught by J. G. Fichte, but without its
speculative foundation.
They leave unsolved, however, nay, they do not even put the question,
how the higher life-affirmation comes to give itself a content which
stands in contradiction to the course of nature. They conceive of
higher life-affirmation as self-devotion, that is to say as
life-affirmation within which life-denial is active. But how does this
paradox come about? How far is this direction of the will, which
contradicts the natural will-to-live, a necessity of thought? Why must
men become different from the world in order to exist and work in the
world in true harmony with the world-spirit? And what meaning has this
conduct of his for the happenings which take place in the universe?
Nature-philosophy and ethics. Fouillée, Guyau, Lange, Stern
The thought of Alfred Fouillée (1838-1913)_(_92_)_ and Jean [pg 187]
Marie Guyau (1854-1888)_(_93_)_ also circles round the conception of
ethics as higher life-affirmation. They too conceive of the ethical as
devotion, that is to say, as life-affirmation within which life-denial
is present, but they dig deeper than the English and American
representatives of the ethic of self-perfecting, in that they seek to
conceive of ethics within a nature-philosophy. Hence questions come to
be discussed which remain unnoticed in the former. The problems of the
basic principle of the moral and that of the optimistic-ethical
world-view are once more opened up and, for the first time, in a
comprehensive and elemental way.
Fouillée philosophises in a noble way about the will-to-live. The
ideas which arise in us, directed towards ethical ideals, are (he
says), like our ideas generally, not simply something produced by
thought, but are the expression of forces which press within us
towards making existence full and complete._(_94_)_ Speaking
generally, we must in this matter clearly understand that the
evolution which in the course of the world produces and maintains
existence is the work of re-presentative forces (_idées-forces_), and
is therefore to be explained in the last analysis as psychic. It
reaches its highest point in man’s ideas, which will their ends with
clear consciousness. In this highest being, man, reality gets so far
as to produce ideals which go out beyond reality, and by their means
to be led on beyond itself. Ethics are therefore a result of the
evolution of the world. The idea of self-perfecting through devotion,
which we experience as the puzzling element within us, is after all a
natural manifestation of the will-to-live. The ego which has reached
the farthest height of willing and representing enlarges itself by
overflowing upon other human existences. Devotion is, therefore, not a
surrender of the self, but a [pg 188] manifestation of its
expansion._(_95_)_ The man who analyses himself more deeply learns by
experience that the highest life-affirmation comes about, not by the
natural will-to-live simply rising into will-to-power, but by its
“expanding.” “Act towards others as if you became conscious of them at
the same time as you become conscious of yourself.”_(_96_)_
Jean Marie Guyau, a pupil and friend of Fouillée’s, in his _Sketch of
an Ethic without Obligation or Sanction_, tries to work out the
thought of this ethical life-affirmation through expansion. Ordinary
ethics, he says, stand helpless before this insoluble cleft between
the ego and other men, but living nature makes no stop at that point.
The individual life is expansive because it is life. As in the
physical sphere it carries within itself the impulse to produce fresh
life like itself, so in the spiritual sphere also it wishes to widen
its own existence by linking it on to other life like itself. Life
includes not feeding only, but also production and fruitfulness; real
living is not a taking in only, but a giving out of oneself as well.
Man is an organism which imparts itself to others; its perfection
consists in the most complete imparting of itself. In this
philosophizing, then, Hume’s notion of sympathy is given more profound
expression.
Fouillée and Guyau, both of them invalids, lived together at Nice and
Mentone. Trying in one another’s company to realise the ethical higher
life-affirmation, they take their exercise on the very shore on which
Nietzsche that same year thought out his heightened life-affirmation
of _Beyond Good and Evil_. He knows their works, as they also know
his, but as men they remain personally unknown to each other._(_97_)_
[pg 189]
Fouillée and Guyau, because they think deeply, are led to
nature-philosophy by their philosophizing about the way in which the
will-to-live is to become ethical. They wish to conceive ethics,
within a world- and life-affirming nature-philosophy, as a deepening,
which is a necessity of thought, of life-affirmation. They thus join
the procession of the Chinese monists. That which these, like Spinoza
and Fichte, attempted and failed to do, they attempt again in the
confidence that their nature-philosophy will be fairer to the
conception of living existence than that of the others was.
Navigating the rushing stream of heightened life-affirmation, they try
with mighty efforts at the oars to reach the bank of the ethical. They
believe that they will be able to land there . . . but the waves carry
them past it, as they did all those who attempted the journey before
them.
That life-affirmation in its highest form, by a paradox which lies in
the nature of things, becomes ethical devotion to others they cannot
show convincingly. This proposition, in which they would transform the
natural world-view into an ethical one, is truth only for the thought
which dares to make the same jump because it sees no possibility
otherwise of reaching land from the drifting boat.
The ethic of Fouillée and Guyau, then, is an enthusiastic conception
of life to which man pulls himself up when coming to terms with
reality, in order to assert himself and exert himself in the universe
in accordance with a higher value which he feels in himself.
Fouillée and Guyau are, therefore, elemental moralists like
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They are not, however, like the latter,
making a voyage with their rudder tightly lashed in the circle of
world- and life-denial or of world- and life-affirmation; they hold on
their course with sure feeling towards the mysterious union of
world-affirmation, life-affirmation, and life-denial which constitutes
ethical life-affirmation. . . . But this course takes them out over
the boundless ocean. They never reach land.
[pg 190]
In order to understand themselves as a direction of the will-to-live
which is a necessity of thought, and to think themselves out to an
ethical world-view, ethics must come to terms with nature-philosophy.
We find them, then, attempting—as did the Rationalists, and Kant, and
the speculative philosophers—to read into the world, in simple or in
detailed thought, an optimistic-ethical meaning, or at least, as with
Spinoza, to give an ethical character in some way or other to the
relation of the individual to the universe. These two men also,
Fouillée and Guyau, wrestle with nature-philosophy in order from it to
justify ethics and an ethical world-view as not without meaning. At
the same time, however, they dare—and this is the new element which
appears in them—to look straight in the face the possibility that it
will perhaps be impossible to carry their undertaking through. What
will then become of ethics and world-view? Although they ought really
to totter and fall, they do nevertheless remain standing—so Fouillée
and Guyau judge.
Whether the idea of the good can finally claim any objective validity
cannot be asserted with complete confidence, says Fouillée in his
_Morale des Idées-forces_. Man must finally be content to force
himself to acceptance of the ethically expansive life-affirmation,
merely because he feels it to be the only thing which is capable of
making life valuable. Out of love for the ideal he triumphs over all
doubt, and sacrifices himself to it, untroubled about whether or no
anything results from his doing so.
Guyau’s _Sketch of a Morality without Obligations or Sanctions_ ends
in similar thoughts. An inner force, he says, works upon us and drives
us forward. Do we go forward alone, or will the idea eventually win
for itself some influence upon nature? . . . Anyhow let us go forward!
. . . “Perhaps the earth, perhaps mankind, will one day reach some as
yet unknown goal which they themselves have created. There is no hand
leading us, no eye watching on our behalf; the rudder was broken long
ago, [pg 191] or rather there never was one at all; it has to be
provided. That is a big task, and it is our task.” . . . Ethical men
are crossing the ocean of events on a rudderless and mastless
derelict, so to say, hoping nevertheless that they will some day and
somewhere reach land.
In these sentences there is announced from a distance the
disappearance of the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world.
Because they venture on renouncing this, and proclaim in principle the
sovereign independence of ethics, Fouillée and Guyau belong to the
greatest thinkers who have had a share in shaping our world-view.
They do not, however, follow to the end the path on which they have
stumbled. While they make ethics independent of whether its activity
can or cannot prove itself legitimate as significant and effective in
the totality of world-happenings, they assume the existence of a
conflict between world-view and life-view, which philosophy down to
their day had actually not noticed. But they do not investigate its
nature, and do not show how it is that life-view can venture to assert
itself in opposition to world-view, and even to exalt itself as the
more important. They are content to prophesy that ethics and ethical
world-view will grow green again as mighty oases, fed by subterranean
springs, even if the sand-storms of scepticism should have turned into
a desert the broad territory of the optimistic-ethical knowledge of
the world, in which we once wanted to make our home. At bottom,
however, they hope that nothing like this will happen, and their
confidence that a nature-philosophy which deals in the proper way with
the nature of Being will after all finally reach an ethic and a
world-view, is not completely overthrown.
Since they at first claim only a hypothetical validity for their new
view, and do not carry it through as a matter of principle, Fouillée
and Guyau do not exercise upon the thought of the end of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the influence
which they ought to have. Their age was, indeed, not ready for that
[pg 192] renunciation of knowledge for which their writings were
preparing the way.
A forerunner of their ethic is to be found in that which Friedrich
Albert Lange sketches as his own at the end of his _History of
Materialism_ (1866). Ethics, he says, are an imaginative creation on
which we determine, because we carry an ideal within ourselves. We
rise above the actual because we find no satisfaction in it. We are
ethical because our life thereby obtains a definite character such as
we long for. . . . Ethics mean becoming free from the world.
Lange also, then, has already reached the view that from direct
philosophizing about the world and life an ethical world-view results,
not as a necessity of thought, but as a necessity for life. But like
the two French thinkers he just throws out the thought instead of
following it out into all its presuppositions and consequences.
A peculiar supplement which completes the ethics of Fouillée, Guyau,
and Lange, without actually going back to them, is provided by the
Berlin physician, Wilhelm Stern, in an inquiry, which has attracted
far too little notice, into the evolutionary origin of ethics. The
essential nature of the moral, he says, is the impulse to maintenance
of life by the repelling of all injurious attacks upon it, an impulse
through which the individual being experiences a feeling of
relationship to all other animate beings in face of nature’s injurious
attacks upon them. How has this mentality arisen in us? Through the
fact that animate beings of the most varied kinds have been obliged
through countless generations to fight side by side for existence
against the forces of nature, and in their common distress have ceased
to be hostile to one another, so that they might attempt a common
resistance to the annihilation which threatened them, instead of
succumbing in a common ruin. This experience, which began with their
first and lowest stage of existence and has become through thousands
of millions of generations more and more [pg 193] pronounced, has
given its special character to the psychology of all living beings.
All ethics are an affirmation of life, the character of which is
determined by perception of the dangers to existence which living
beings experience in common.
How much deeper Wilhelm Stern digs than Darwin did! According to
Darwin, experience of the never-ceasing, universal danger to existence
produces finally nothing but the herd-instinct, which holds together
creatures of the same species. According to Stern, there is developed
by the same experience a kind of solidarity with everything that
lives. The barriers fall. Man experiences sympathy with animals, as
they experience it, only less completely, with him. Ethics are not
only something peculiar to man, but something which, though in a less
developed form, is to be seen also in the animal world as such.
Self-devotion is an experience of the deepened impulse to
self-preservation. In the active as well as in the passive meaning of
the word the whole animate creation is to be included within the basic
principle of the moral.
The fundamental commandment of ethics, then, is that we cause no
suffering to any living creature, not even the lowest, unless it is to
effect some necessary protection for ourselves, and that we be ready
to undertake, whenever we can, positive action for the benefit of
other creatures.
In Fouillée, Guyau, and Lange ethics come to terms with
nature-philosophy, but without any advance towards making themselves
cosmic. They fall into the anachronism of regarding themselves still,
even at that date, as nothing beyond the regulating of the temper and
disposition of man towards his fellow-men, instead of widening
themselves out so as to deal with the conduct of man towards every
living creature and towards Being in general. In Stern they take this
obvious, further step.
No ethic short of one that has made itself universal and cosmic is
capable of taking in hand the investigation of the basic principle of
the moral; only such an ethic can [pg 194] really come to terms in
intelligible fashion with nature-philosophy.
Nature-philosophy and ethics in Eduard von Hartmann
In Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906)_(_98_)_ also, ethics try to
comprehend themselves within nature-philosophy. His _Philosophy of the
Unconscious_ is largely in line with the thoughts of Fouillée, but in
the matter of world-view he goes off in another direction. Instead of
allowing ethics, when they are coming to terms with nature-philosophy,
to experience their freedom from it, he compels them to base
themselves on such a philosophy. His nature-philosophy is pessimistic.
It confesses to being unable to discover any principle which contains
a meaning in the course of nature. Therefore (so Hartmann concludes,
as do the Indians and Schopenhauer), the world-process is something
which must come to a standstill. Everything that exists must gradually
enter on the blessed condition of will-lessness. Ethics are the
disposition which brings this development into action.
In language obscure enough von Hartmann formulates at the end of his
_Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness_ his pessimistic-ethical
world-view as follows: “Existence in the world of matter is the
Incarnation of the Godhead; the world-process is the history of the
Passion of the Incarnate God, and at the same time the way to the
Redemption of Him who is crucified in the flesh; but morality is
co-operation for the shortening of this road of suffering and
redemption.”
Then, however, instead of unfolding what this ethic is, and how it is
to come into force, he undertakes to show that all ethical standpoints
which have ever made their appearance in any way in history have their
own justification. He wants to house them all within an evolution
which necessarily leads to a pessimistic ethic.
[pg 195]
Every moral principle which shows itself in history (von Hartmann
asserts) changes itself by starting on a search for the completion
which lies nearest to it. It lives itself out, and then makes way for
the higher moral principle which issues logically from it. That is how
the ethical consciousness in individuals and in mankind works itself
up from one moral principle to another till it reaches the highest
knowledge. From the primitive moral principle of aiming at individual
pleasure it travels past the authoritarian, the æsthetic, the
sentimental, and the intellectual moral systems, which are one and all
subjective, to the objective morality of care for the general
happiness. But still beyond this it is led to the evolutionary moral
principle of the development of civilisation, and here it learns to
think on supra-moral lines. It grasps the notion that for moral
consideration there is still something higher than the prosperity of
individuals and of society, namely “contest and struggle for the
maintenance and enhancing of civilization.” This according to usual
ideas unethical conception of ethics has to live itself out
completely, so that it may then be resolved into an ethic of world-
and life-denial.
By this insight into the logic of the course of ethical evolution, von
Hartmann is saved from making any protest, as an ordinary ethical
thinker would, against the unethical civilization-ethics of the close
of the nineteenth century. He knows, on the contrary, that he is
helping the cause of rightly understood ethical progress, if he treats
them with respect as a necessary phenomenon, and urges that they be
allowed to live themselves out with the utmost completeness. We have
learnt (he therefore proclaims) to see through the ethic which aims at
making men and peoples happy as being a piece of sentimentality, and
we ought now to make up our minds to deal seriously with the
supra-ethical ethic of the enhancing of life and civilization. We must
learn to regard as good whatever is necessary for the development of
civilization, and we [pg 196] are no longer at liberty to condemn war
in the name of ethics. “The principle of the development of
civilization compels us to recognize all these protests as unsound,
since wars are the chief means of carrying on the struggle between
races, _i.e._, the process of natural selection within mankind, and
preparation for the effective waging of war has formed one of the most
important means of education and training for mankind in every phase
of the development of their civilization, as it will also, so far as
we can see, in the future.”_(_99_)_ Economic misery too, and the
struggles which arise from it, are seen by the ethical spirit which
looks further ahead to subserve a higher objective. The sufferings
under the wage system, which are far greater than those under slavery,
are necessary for the course of civilization. The struggle which they
evoke calls forces into being and has an educative result. The course
of civilization needs a favoured minority to serve as bearers of its
ideas. Beneficence and charity to the poor must therefore be practised
with moderation. The need which spurs men on to active work must not
be banished from the world.
Another element in the course of civilization is the taking into
possession of the whole earth by the race with the highest
civilization, which must therefore increase its numbers as much as
possible. In order to make the female population keen about the task
which thus falls to them, women must be raised intellectually, _i.e._,
their patriotism and national feeling must be increased as much as
possible, their historical sense must be aroused, and they must be
filled with enthusiasm for the principle of civilization which
underlies evolution. “To effect this object, the history of
civilization must be made the foundation of all instruction in the
upper classes of girl-schools.”_(_100_)_
It is desirable, therefore, to make efforts to secure the “improvement
of the human type,” and the attainment [pg 197] of an enhancement of
civilization in which “the world-spirit becomes in increasing measure
conscious of itself.”
In his nature-philosophy and his philosophy of history, then, Eduard
von Hartmann reaches a supra-ethical world-view in which Hegel and
Nietzsche drink to brotherhood, and the principles of inhumanity and
relativity, which underlie biologico-sociological ethics, sit at table
with garlands on their heads.
How and when the supra-ethical ethic of enhanced world- and
life-affirmation passes over into the highest ethic of world- and
life-denial, and in what way this highest ethic, in which we function
as Redeemers of the Absolute, is to be carried out in practice, von
Hartmann is, however, unable to make clear. The abstruse modulations
with which, in the last chapters of his work, he tries to get from one
to the other provide us with ample proof of the unnatural character of
the undertaking. To produce a world-view with Hegel for body and
Schopenhauer for head, is an absurdity. By his resolve to attempt it,
von Hartmann admits his inability to make enhanced life-affirmation
become in a natural way ethical.
Eduard von Hartmann prefers to the profession of moralist that of
philosopher of the history of morals. Instead of serving the world
with an ethical system of morals, he makes it happy with the discovery
of the principle of inherent progress in the history of morals, and
thus helps to befool completely the thought of his age, which is
living its life in an unethical and unspiritual optimism.
From the history of ethics nothing is to be obtained except a certain
amount of clearness about the problem of ethics. Anyone who discovers
in it principles which promise automatic progress in the ethical
development of mankind has by his miserably faulty construction of
that history read these principles into the facts without any
justification.
[pg 198]
Nature-philosophy and ethics in Bergson, Chamberlain, Keyserling,
Haeckel
Henri Bergson (b. 1860)_(_101_)_ renounces altogether the attempt to
bring together nature-philosophy and ethics. Houston Stewart
Chamberlain (b. 1855)_(_102_)_ and Count Hermann Keyserling (b.
1880)_(_103_)_ make the attempt but without reaching any result.
In his philosophizing about nature, Bergson does not go beyond the
_rôle_ of the observing subject. He analyses in a masterly way the
nature of the process of knowledge. His investigations into the origin
of our conception of time and of the actions of our consciousness
which are bound up with it, have taught us how to comprehend the
course of nature in its living reality. Leading us on beyond the
science which consists in external affirming and calculating, Bergson
shows that the true knowledge of Being comes to us through a sort of
intuition. Philosophizing means experiencing our consciousness as an
emanation of the creative impulse which rules in the world. Bergson’s
nature-philosophy has therefore a close inward connexion with that of
Fouillée, but he does not find it necessary, as Fouillée does, to
produce from it a world- and life-view. He limits himself to depicting
it from the standpoint of the problem of the theory of knowledge. He
does not attempt any analysis of the ethical consciousness. Year after
year we have waited for him to complete his work, as he no doubt
himself intended, with an attempt at producing an ethic on the basis
of nature-philosophy. But he [pg 199] contented himself with
developing in ever-new forms his theories about our inner knowledge of
the real. He never comes to the recognition that all deepening of our
knowledge of the world acquires its real meaning only so far as it
teaches us to comprehend what we ought to aim at in life. He lets the
waves of events roll past us, as if we were seated on an island in the
stream, whereas we are in reality obliged to exert ourselves as
swimmers in the stream.
During the war the German picture-houses were crammed. People went to
see the pictures in order to forget their hunger. Bergson’s philosophy
brings before us as living events the world which Kant depicted in
motionless wall-pictures. But to satisfy the hunger of to-day for
ethics he does nothing. He has no world-view to offer us in which we
can find a life-view. Over the whole of his philosophy there prevails
a quietistic, sceptical tone.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain tries to find a world-view which is based
on nature-philosophy and is at the same time ethical. His work
entitled _Immanuel Kant_ (1905), which is really a journey through the
problems raised by philosophy with attempts to solve them, ends in the
thought that we have to combine Goethe’s nature-philosophy, which
conceives Becoming as an eternal Being, with Kant’s judgement about
the nature of duty, if we wish to reach a real civilization. He finds
himself unable, however, to carry through to completion such a
world-view.
Roused by Chamberlain, Hermann Keyserling goes in the aims of his
thinking far beyond Bergson. He wants to reach clear ideas not only
about knowledge of the world, but also about life and work in the
world. From the pinnacle, however, to which he mounts, he sees only
the field of wisdom; that of ethics is veiled in mist. The highest
idea, so he declares at the conclusion of his work _The Structure of
the World_, is that of truth. We want to know, because knowledge,
“whether it visibly serves life at present or not, already implies in
itself a purposive reaction to the outer world.” In correct knowledge
the [pg 200] human spirit enters into reciprocal relations with the
universe. Life carries within itself its own purposive character.
Keyserling finds it quite in order that the world-view of great men
should be superior to ordinary moral standards. One must not reproach
Leonardo da Vinci for working as willingly in the service of the
French king, Francis I., as he had done previously in that of the
Sforzas whom Francis expelled. “Almost every great spirit is a
complete egoist.” If any one has experience of life in its full extent
and depth and living force, and works in reciprocity with the
universe, interest in the human race is for him a kind of
specialization which is no longer incumbent on him.
In the Preface to the second edition of _The Structure of the World_
(1920), Keyserling admits that he has not reached a decision about the
ethical problem. In his _Philosophy as Art_ (1920), he declares it to
be the foremost duty of our time to “make the wise man a possible
type, to draw him out by education, and give him all necessary
publicity and scope for his activities.”
The wise man is the one man who is capable of veracity, the man who
lets all the tones of life sound in him, and seeks to be in tune with
the fundamental bass-note which is given in him. He has no universally
valid world-view to impart to others. He has not even for himself one
that is definite and final; he has only one which is liable to
constant alteration for the better. He himself is unalterable only in
this, that he wants to live his life in its entirety and in the most
vital co-operation with the Universe, and at the same time ever
strives to be himself. Veracious and emphatic life-affirmation is
therefore the last word of this philosophizing about the world and
life. . . .
Thus does nature-philosophy admit that it cannot produce an ethic.
With the lesser spirits self-deception goes further. The ordinary
scientific monism, the greatness of which consists in its being an
elemental movement towards veracity in an [pg 201] age which is weary
of veracity, is still convinced that from its insight into the
essential nature of life, into the development of lower life into
higher, and into the inner connexion of the individual life with the
life of the universe, it can somehow or other arrive at an ethic. But
it is significant that its representatives take altogether different
roads in the search for an ethic. An incredible absence of thought and
of plan reigns in the ethical philosophizing of the ordinary
scientific nature-philosophy. Many of its representatives have before
their mind’s eye a conception of the moral as a becoming one with the
universe, a conception which is related to that of the Stoics and
Spinoza. Others, influenced by Nietzsche, entertain the thought that
true ethics are an enhanced and aristocratic life-affirmation, and
have nothing to do with the claims of the “democratic” social
ethics._(_104_)_ Others again, like Johannes Unold in his work _Monism
and its Ideals_ (1908), try to bring together nature-philosophy and
ethics just in such a way as to let them conceive of the human
activity which is directed to social ends as the final result of the
development of the organic world. There are also scientific
nature-philosophers who are content to put together out of what is
commonly regarded as moral an ethic which is universally accepted, and
to exalt it, so far as they can, into a product of nature-philosophy.
In Ernst Haeckel’s (1834-1919) work _The Riddle of the Universe_
(1899), there is an ethic of that character built on to the palace of
nature-philosophy like an outside kitchen. The basic principle of
monistic ethical theory is (so it is here maintained) the equal
justification of Egoism and of Altruism, and then a balance between
them. Both are laws of nature. Egoism serves the preservation of the
individual, altruism that of the species. This “golden rule of
morality” is said to be of equal significance [pg 202] with the rule
which Jesus and other ethical thinkers before him are said to have
enunciated in the demand that we shall love our neighbour as
ourselves. Spencer and water is poured out under a Christian label.
The death-agony of the optimistic-ethical world-view
An inexorable development of thought, then, brings it about that the
philosophy of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth, either advances to a supra-ethical world-view, or finds
itself living in an ethical ruin. What happens in the great German
speculative philosophy of the beginning of the nineteenth century is a
prelude to the _dénouement_ of the drama. In that philosophy an
ethical world-view tries to find itself a foundation in speculative
nature-philosophy, and in doing so becomes, as stands confessed in
Hegel, supra-ethical. Later, ethics believe themselves capable of
providing a “scientific” conception of themselves, thanks to the
results reached by psychology, biology, and sociology, but in
proportion as they effect this, their energy decreases. Later still,
when through the growth of science and the inward changes in thought a
nature-philosophy which is in harmony with scientific observation of
nature becomes the only possible philosophy, ethics have once more to
make a real attempt to found themselves in a nature-philosophy which
is directed upon the universe. There is nothing, however, but the
enhancement and perfecting of life which nature-philosophy can give as
the meaning of life. Hence ethics must struggle to conceive the
enhancement and perfecting of life as something which comes to pass
within the field of ethical ideas, and it is this that the most modern
thought is striving for, on lines of development which are often
apparently irreconcilable, without ever attaining its goal.
Whenever ethics really rely in any way upon nature-philosophy for the
production of the convincing, ethical world-view which the age is
longing for, they get wrecked [pg 203] upon it in one way or another.
Either they actually attempt to give themselves out to be somehow a
natural enhancement of life and thereby so alter their character that
they cease to be really and truly ethics. Or they abdicate; perhaps,
as with Keyserling, leaving the field free to supra-ethical
world-view, perhaps, as with Bergson, leaving nature-philosophy and
ethical questions with it, to rest in peace.
Thus the sun of ethics becomes darkened for our generation,
nature-philosophy pushing forward like a wall of cloud. Just as an
inundation overwhelms pastures and fields with its water-borne
_débris_, so do the supra-ethical and the unethical ways of thinking
break in upon our mentality. They bring about the most terrible
devastations without anyone having any clear idea of what the
catastrophe means, or indeed being conscious of anything wrong beyond
that the spirit of the time is rendering all ethical standards
powerless.
Everywhere there grows up an unethical conception of civilization. The
masses reconcile themselves in an incomprehensible way to the theory
of the relativity of all ethical standards and to thoughts of
inhumanity. Freed from any obligation of ethical intention, the belief
in progress suffers a process of externalization which increases from
year to year, becoming finally nothing better than a wooden façade
which conceals the pessimism behind it. That we have lapsed into
pessimism is betrayed by the fact that the demand for the spiritual
advance of society and mankind is no longer seriously made among us.
We have now resigned ourselves, as if no explanation of it were
needed, to the fate of being obliged to smile at the high-flying hopes
of previous generations. There is no longer to be found among us the
true world- and life-affirmation which reaches down to the depths of
the spiritual nature of man. Unavowed pessimism has been consuming us
for decades.
Delivered over to events in a temper and disposition which is
powerless because it is entirely without any true [pg 204] and ethical
ideals of progress, we are experiencing the collapse of material and
spiritual civilization alike.
By its belief in an optimistic ethical world-view the modern age made
itself capable of a mighty advance towards civilization. Its thought,
however, has not been able to show this world-view to be founded in
the nature of things, and we have therefore sunk, consciously and
unconsciously, into a condition in which we have no world-view at all,
a condition of pessimism, too, and of absence of all ethical
conviction, so that we are on the point of complete shipwreck.
The bankruptcy of the optimistic-ethical world-view was announced
beforehand as little as was the financial bankruptcy of the ruined
states of Europe. But just as the latter was gradually revealed as
having actually come about by the constantly diminishing value of the
paper-money that was issued, so is the former being gradually revealed
by the constantly diminishing power among us of the true and profound
ideals of civilization.
[pg 205]