THE NEW WAY
Why the optimistic-ethical world-view cannot be carried through to the
logical conclusion
THE greatness of European philosophy consists in its having chosen the
optimistic-ethical world-view; its weakness in its having again and
again imagined that it was putting that world-view on a firm
foundation, instead of making clear to itself the difficulties of
doing so. The task before our generation is to strive with deepened
thought to reach a truer and more serviceable world-view, and thus to
bring to an end our living on and on without any world-view at all.
Our age is striking out unmeaningly in every direction like a fallen
horse in the traces. It is trying with external measures and new
organisation to solve the problems with which it has to deal, but all
in vain. The horse cannot get on its feet again till it is unharnessed
and allowed to get its head up. Our world will not get upon its feet
again till it lets the truth come home to it that its cure is not to
be found in active measures but in new ways of thinking.
But new ways of thinking can arise only if a true and serviceable
world-view draws individuals within its influence.
The one serviceable world-view is the optimistic-ethical. Its renewal
is a duty incumbent on us. Can we prove it to be true?
In the struggle of the thinkers who for centuries exerted themselves
to demonstrate the truth of the optimistic-ethical world-view, and
kept surrendering themselves comfortably to the illusion, always very
soon shattered, that [pg 206] they had succeeded, the problem with
which we are concerned reveals itself in outlines which become clearer
and clearer. We are now in a position to reckon up why those or those
paths, apparently so full of promise, have led to nothing, and can
lead to nothing. By the insight into the problem thus won we shall be
preserved from entering on impassable roads and forced to follow the
only one which is practicable.
The most general result of the attempts made up to the present is
this: that the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world, by
which it was hoped to put the optimistic-ethical world-view on a firm
foundation, cannot be carried through to a conclusion. Yet how logical
and natural it seemed to tune up the meaning of life and the meaning
of the world to the same note! How invitingly the path opened out of
explaining our own existence from the nature and significance of the
world! The path rises so naturally to the crest of the foothills that
one could only believe it led up to the highest point of knowledge.
But high up in the ascent it breaks off with chasms ahead.
The reflexion that the meaning of human life must be conceivable
within the meaning of the world is such an obvious one to thought,
that the latter never lets itself be led from its path by the failure,
one after another, of all attempts in that direction. It merely
concludes that it has not tackled the problem in the right way. It
therefore has resort to the whisperings of the theory of knowledge,
and undertakes to impugn the reality of the world in order to deal
with it more successfully. In Kant, in the speculative philosophy, and
in much “spiritualistic” popular philosophy which has been current
almost down to our own day, it preserved its hope of reaching its goal
by some sort of combination of epistemological with ethical realism.
Hence the philosophy of academic manuals declaims against the
unprejudiced thinking which tries to reach a world-view without first
having been baptised by Kant with fire and the Holy Spirit. But this
too is a vain proceeding. The refined and underhand attempts to form a
[pg 207] conception of the world with an optimistic-ethical meaning
meet with no better success than the naïve ones. What our thinking
tries to proclaim as knowledge is never anything but an unjustifiable
interpretation of the world.
Against the admission of this, thought guards itself with the courage
of despair, because it fears it will find itself in that case with no
idea of what to do in face of the problem of life. What meaning can we
give to human existence, if we must renounce all pretence of knowing
the meaning of the world? Nevertheless there remains only one thing
for thought to do, and that is to adapt itself to facts.
The hopelessness of the attempt to find the meaning of life within the
meaning of the world is shown first of all by the fact that in the
course of nature there is no purposiveness to be seen in which the
working of men, and of mankind as a whole, could in any way intervene.
On one of the smaller among the millions of heavenly bodies there have
lived for a short space of time some human beings. For how long will
they continue so to live? Any lowering or raising of the temperature
of the earth, any change in the inclination of the axis of their
planet, a rise in the level of the ocean, or a change in the
composition of the atmosphere, could put an end to their existence. Or
the earth itself may fall, as so many other heavenly bodies have
fallen, a victim to some cosmic catastrophe. We are entirely ignorant
of what we mean for the earth. How much less then may we presume to
try to attribute to the infinite universe a meaning which has us for
its object, or which can be explained in terms of our existence!
It is not, however, merely the huge disproportion between the universe
and human beings which makes it impossible for us to give the aims and
objects of mankind a logical place in those of the universe. Any such
attempt is made useless beforehand by the fact that we have not yet
succeeded in discovering any general purposiveness in the course of
nature. Whatever we do find of purposiveness in the world is never
anything but isolated instances of it.
[pg 208]
In the production and maintenance of some definite form of life nature
does sometimes act purposively in a magnificent way. But in no way
does she ever seem intent on uniting these instances of purposiveness
which are directed to single objects into a collective purpose. She
never undertakes to let life coalesce with life to form a collective
life. She is wonderfully creative force, and at the same time
senselessly destructive force. We face her, absolutely unable to form
any notion of what to do. What is full of meaning within the
meaningless, the meaningless within what is full of meaning: that is
the essential nature of the universe
Life-view independent of world-view
These elemental established conclusions European thought has tried to
ignore. It can do so no longer, and it is of no use to try. The facts
have silently produced their consequences. While the
optimistic-ethical world-view still maintains itself among us as a
dogma, we no longer possess the ethical world- and life-affirmation
with which it ought to provide us. Perplexity and pessimism have taken
possession of us without our admitting it.
There remains, therefore, nothing for us to do but to admit that we
understand nothing of the world, and are surrounded by nothing but
enigmas. Our knowledge is becoming sceptical.
Just as thought has hitherto allowed world-view and life-view to hang
together, mutually connected, so have we in consequence fallen
similarly into a sceptical conception of life. But is it really the
case that life-view is towed along by world-view, and that when the
latter can no longer be kept afloat life-view must sink with it into
the depths? Necessity bids us cut the tow-rope and try to let
life-view continue its voyage independently.
This manœuvre is not such a surprising one as it seems. While people
acted as though their life-view were taken from their world-view, the
connexion between the two was really just the opposite, their
world-view was formed from [pg 209] their life-view. What they put
forward as their view of the world was an interpretation of the world
in the light of their life-view.
The life-view held by European thought being optimistic-ethical, the
same character was attributed by everybody to their world-view in
defiance of facts. The will, without admitting it, overpowered
knowledge. Life-view prompted and world-view recited. The belief that
their life-view was derived from their world-view was therefore only a
fiction.
In Kant this overpowering of knowledge, which had till then been just
naïvely allowed, was worked out systematically. His doctrine of the
“Postulates of the Practical Reason” means just this: that the will
claims for itself the decisive word in the last pronouncements of the
world-view. Only Kant manages to arrange the matter so cleverly that
the will never forces its supremacy on knowledge, but receives it from
the latter as a free gift, and then makes use of it in carefully
chosen parliamentary ways. It proceeds as if it had been invoked by
the theoretical reason to provide possible truths with reality
belonging to truths which are necessities of thought.
In Fichte the will dictates to knowledge its world-view without any
regard at all for the arts of diplomacy.
From the middle of the nineteenth century onward there can be
discerned a tendency in natural science no longer to claim that
world-view shall accommodate itself to scientifically established
facts. The valuable convictions of the traditional world-view are to
hold good, even if they cannot be brought into harmony with the
accepted knowledge of the world. After the publication of Du
Bois-Raymond’s (1818-1896) lectures “On the Limits of our Knowledge of
Nature” it begins with a certain school of natural science to be
considered almost a part of good manners to declare oneself
incompetent in questions of world-view. There grows up gradually what
one may call a modern doctrine of the two-fold nature of truth. To
this movement expression is given by the “Keplerbund,” which was [pg
210] founded in 1907 by representatives of natural science, and goes
so far as to declare acceptable to natural science the valuable
pronouncements of the current world-view, even when given in formulas
provided by ecclesiastical authority. This new doctrine of the
two-fold nature of truth is brought to philosophical expression by the
theory of the solidity of “value-judgments.” By means of this theory
Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889) and his imitators try to uphold the
validity of a religious world-view side by side with a scientific one.
Almost the whole religious world, so far as it tries to remain a
thinking body, grasps at such expedients. Next, in William James’s
(1842-1910) philosophy of Pragmatism the will admits in half-naïve,
half-cynical fashion that all the knowledge professed by its
world-view has been produced by itself.
That the valuable assertions made by the world-view are to be traced
back to the will which has been determined by valuable convictions is
therefore a fact, and since Kant’s day the fact has been admitted in
the most varied directions. The shock given to the feeling for
veracity, which accompanies this no longer naïve but half-conscious
and insidiously employed interpretation of the world, plays a fatal
part in the mentality of our time.
But why go on with this want of candour? Why keep knowledge in
subservience to the will by means of a kind of infamous secret police?
Any world-view deduced therefrom must ever be a poor weak thing. Let
us allow the will and knowledge to come together in a relation which
is honourable to both.
In what has hitherto been called world-view there are two things
united: view of the world and life-view. So long as it was possible to
cherish the illusion that the two were harmonious and each completed
the other, there was nothing to be said against this combination. Now,
however, when the divergence can no longer be concealed, the wider
conception of world-view which includes life-view organically within
itself, must be given up. It is no longer permissible to go on naïvely
believing that we get our life-view [pg 211] from our view of the
world, or furtively elevating in some way or other our life-view into
a view of the world. We are standing at a turning-point of thought.
Critical action which clears away all prevailing _naïvetés_ and
dishonesties has become necessary. We must make up our minds to leave
life-view and view of the world mutually independent of each other,
and see that a straightforward understanding between the two is
reached. We have to admit that because our life-view is made up of
convictions which are given in our will-to-live but are not confirmed
by knowledge of the world, we have allowed it to go beyond the varied
knowledge which makes up our view of the world.
This renunciation of world-view in the old sense, that is of a unitary
world-view which is complete in itself, means a painful experience for
our thought. We come hereby to a dualism against which we at every
moment instinctively rebel. But we must surrender to facts. Our will
to live has to accommodate itself to the inconceivable fact that it is
unable with its own valuable convictions to discover itself again in
the manifold will-to-live which is seen manifested in the world. We
wanted to form a life-view for ourselves out of items of knowledge
gathered from the world. But it is our destiny to live by means of
convictions which an inward necessity makes a part of our thought.
In the old rationalism reason undertook to investigate the world. In
the new it has to take as its task the attaining to clarity about the
will-to-live. Thus we return to an elemental philosophising which is
once more busied with questions of world- and life-view as they
directly affect men, and seeks to give a safe foundation to, and to
keep alive, the valuable ideas which we find in ourselves. It is in a
life-view which is dependent on itself alone, and has come in a
straightforward way to an understanding with world-knowledge, that we
hope to find once more power to attain to ethical world- and
life-affirmation.
[pg 212]