ETHICS
Permanent redemption from the suffering of the world is to be found only
in the holiness of the ascetic; but to this there are many stages,
constituting the generally accepted human virtues. Of these Schopenhauer
has a rational account to give in terms of his philosophy; and if the
last stage does not seem to follow by logical sequence from the others,
this is only what is to be expected; for it is reached, in his view, by
a sort of miracle. To the highest kind of intuitive knowledge, from
which the ascetic denial of the will proceeds, artistic contemplation
ought to prepare the way; and so also, on his principles, ought the
practice of justice and goodness. Yet he is obliged to admit that few
thus reach the goal. Of those that do reach it, the most arrive through
personal suffering, which may be deserved. A true miracle is often
worked in the repentant criminal, by which final deliverance is
achieved. Though the 'intelligible character' is unalterable, and the
empirical character can only be the unfolding of this, as every great
dramatist intuitively recognises, yet the 'convertites,' like Duke
Frederick in _As You Like It_, are not to be regarded as hypocrites. The
'second voyage' to the harbour, that of the disappointed egoist, on
condition of this miracle, brings the passenger to it as surely as the
first, that of the true saints, which is only for the few. And in these
equally a miraculous conversion of the will has to be finally worked.
At the entrance to his distinctive theory of ethics, Schopenhauer places
a restatement of his metaphysics as the possible basis of a mode of
contemplating life which, he admits, has some community with an
optimistic pantheism. The Will, through the presentation and the
accompanying intelligence developed in its service, becomes conscious
that that which it wills is precisely the world, life as it is. To call
it 'the will to live' is therefore a pleonasm. 'Will' and 'will to live'
are equivalent. For this will, life is everlastingly a certainty.
'Neither the will, the thing-in-itself in all phenomena, nor the subject
of knowledge, the spectator of all phenomena, is ever touched by birth
and death.' It is true that the individual appears and disappears; but
individuality is illusory. Past and future exist only in conceptual
thought. 'The form of life is a present without end, howsoever the
individuals, phenomena of the Idea, come into existence and vanish in
time, like fugitive dreams.' Only as phenomenon is each man different
from the other things of the world: as thing-in-itself he is the Will,
which appears in all, and death takes away the illusion that divides his
consciousness from the rest. 'Death is a sleep in which the
individuality is forgotten: everything else wakes again, or rather has
remained awake.' It is, in the expression adopted by Schopenhauer later,
an awakening from the dream of life: though this bears with it somewhat
different implications; and, as has been said, his theory of
individuality became modified.
With the doctrine of the eternal life of the Will are connected
Schopenhauer's theories, developed later, of the immortality of the
species and of individualised sexual love. The latter is by itself a
remarkable achievement, and constitutes the one distinctly new
development brought to completion in his later years; for the
modifications in his theory of individuality are only tentative. His
theory of love has a determinate conclusion, of great value for
science, and not really compatible, it seems to me, with his pessimism.
In its relation to ethics, on which he insisted, it is rightly placed in
the position it occupies, between the generalised statement of his
metaphysics just now set forth on the one side, and his theory of human
virtue on the other.
The teleology that manifests itself in individualised love is, in his
view, not related in reality to the interests of the individual life,
but to those of the species. That this is immortal follows from the
eternity of the Idea it unfolds.[4] The end sought is aimed at
unconsciously by the person. Fundamentally, for Schopenhauer, teleology
must of course be unconscious, since the will is blind, and will, not
intelligence, is primordial. Its typical case is the instinct of
animals; but the 'instinctive' character belongs also to the
accomplishment of the highest aims, as in art and virtue. What
characterises individualised love internally is the aim, attributed to
'nature' or 'the species,' at a certain typical beauty or perfection of
the offspring. The lover is therefore deluded in thinking that he is
seeking his own happiness. What looks through the eyes of lovers is the
genius of the race, meditating on the composition of the next
generation. It may, in the complexity of circumstances, be thwarted.
When it reaches its end, often personal happiness is sacrificed.
Marriages dictated by interest tend to be happier than love-matches.
Yet, though the sacrifice of the individual to the race is involuntary
in these, egoism is after all overcome; hence they are quite rightly the
object of a certain admiration and sympathy, while the prudential ones
are looked upon with a tinge of contempt. For here too that element
appears which alone gives nobility to the life either of intellect or of
art or of moral virtue, namely, the rising above a subjective interest
of the individual will.
[4] The disappearance of species in time raises difficulties in more
than one way for his philosophy; but he formally escapes refutation by
the suggestion, already noted, that the Idea need not always be
manifested phenomenally in the same world. This, however, he did not
work out.
No doubt there are touches of pessimism in this statement; but the
general theory does not seem reconcilable finally with pessimism as
Schopenhauer understands it. For it is a definitely stated position of
his that nature keeps up the process of the world by yielding just
enough to prevent discontinuance of the striving for an illusory end.
Yet he admits here in the result something beyond bare continuance of
life; for this is already secured without the particular modification of
feeling described. What the feeling is brought in to secure is a better
realisation of the type in actual individuals; and such realisation is
certainly more than bare subsistence with the least possible expenditure
of nature's resources.
As the immediate preliminary to his ethics proper, Schopenhauer restates
his doctrine on the intelligible and the empirical character in man, and
lays down a generalised psychological position regarding the suffering
inherent in life. Everything as phenomenon, we have seen already, is
determined because it is subject to the law of sufficient reason. On the
other hand, everything as thing-in-itself is free; for 'freedom' means
only non-subjection to that law. The intelligible character of each man
is an indivisible, unalterable act of will out of time; the developed
and explicit phenomenon of this in time and space is the empirical
character. Man is his own work, not in the light of knowledge, but
before all knowledge; this is secondary and an instrument. Ultimately,
freedom is a mystery, and takes us beyond even will as the name for the
thing-in-itself. In reality, that which is 'will to live' need not have
been such (though we cannot see how this is so), but has become such
from itself and from nothing else. This is its '_aseitas_.' Hence it is
in its power to deny itself as will to live. When it does this, the
redemption (like the fall) comes from itself. This denial does not mean
annihilation, except relatively to all that we know under the forms of
our understanding. For the will, though the nearest we can get to the
thing-in-itself, is in truth a partially phenomenalised expression of
this. As the will to live expresses itself phenomenally, so also does
the denial of the will to live, when this, by special 'grace,' is
achieved. Only in man does the freedom thus attained find phenomenal
expression. That man can attain to it proves that in him the will has
reached its highest possible stage of objectivation; for, after it has
turned back and denied itself, there is evidently nothing more that we
can call existence, that is to say, phenomenal existence, beyond. What
there is beyond in the truth of being is something that the mystics
know--or rather, possess, for it is beyond knowledge--but cannot
communicate.
The psychological reason that can be assigned for the ascetic flight
from the world is that all pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, is merely
negative. The will is a striving that has no ultimate aim. It is
sustained only by hindrances. Hindrance means suffering; and every
satisfaction attained is only temporary, a mere liberation from need,
want, pain, which is positive. Suffering increases with the degree of
consciousness. The life of civilised man is an alternation between pain
and _ennui_, which can itself become as intolerable a suffering as
anything. The problem of moral philosophy, then, is ultimately how
redemption from such a world is to be attained, but only so far as this
is a matter of conceptual knowledge. For philosophy, being from
beginning to end theoretical, cannot work the practical miracle by which
the will denies itself.
The intuitive, as distinguished from merely conceptual, knowledge by
which the return is made, consists essentially in a clear insight into
the identity of the suffering will in all things and the necessity of
its suffering as long as it is will to live. This, then, is the true
foundation of morality. The universe as metaphysical thing-in-itself, as
noumenon, has an ethical meaning. All its stages of objectivation,
though in the process what seems to be aimed at is preservation of the
will as manifested, have in truth for their ultimate aim its redemption
by suppression of the phenomenal world in which it manifests itself.
Affirmation of the will is affirmation of the body, which is the
objectivity of the will. The sexual impulse, since it affirms life
beyond the death of the individual, is the strongest of
self-affirmations. In it is found the meaning of the mythical
representation that has taken shape in the theological dogma of original
sin. For by this affirmation going beyond the individual body, suffering
and death, as the necessary accompaniment of the phenomenon of life, are
reaffirmed, and the possibility of redemption this time declared
fruitless. But through the whole process there runs eternal justice. The
justification of suffering is that the will affirms itself; and the
self-affirmation is justified by payment of the penalty.
Before the final redemption--which is not for the world but for the
individual--there are many stages of ethical progress. These consist in
the gradual overcoming of egoism by sympathy. And here Schopenhauer
proceeds to set forth a practical scheme for the social life of man,
differing from ordinary utilitarianism only by reducing all sympathy to
pity, in accordance with his view that there can be no such thing as
positive happiness.
He begins with a theory of justice, legal and moral, very much on the
lines of Hobbes, except that he regards it as up to a certain point _a
priori_. Here he is consistent throughout. As in his philosophical
account of mathematics and physics, so also in his aesthetics and
ethics, he retained, side by side with a strong empirical tendency,
belief in certain irreducible _a priori_ forms without which our
knowledge cannot be constituted. The pure ethical theory of justice, he
says, bears to the political theory the relation of pure to applied
mathematics. Injustice he holds to be the positive conception. It means
the breaking into the sphere of another person's will to live. The
self-affirmation of the will that appears in one individual body is
extended to denial of the will that appears in other bodies. Justice
consists in non-encroachment. There is a 'natural right,' or 'moral
right,' of resistance to injustice by infliction of what, apart from the
attempted encroachment, would be wrong. Either force or deception may be
used; as either may be the instrument of injustice. The purely ethical
doctrine of justice applies only to action; since only the not doing of
injustice depends on us. With the State and its laws, the relation is
reversed. The object of these is to prevent the suffering of injustice.
The State is not directed against egoism, but has sprung out of a
rationalised collective egoism. It has for its purpose only to avoid the
inconvenient consequences of individual aggressions on others. Outside
of the State, there is a right of self-defence against injustice, but no
right of punishment. The punishment threatened by the State is
essentially a motive against committing wrong, intended to supply the
place of ethical motives for those who are insufficiently accessible to
them. Actual infliction of it is the carrying out of the threat when it
has failed, so that in general the expectation of the penalty may be
certain. Revenge, which has a view to the past, cannot be justified
ethically: punishment is directed only to the future. There is no right
in any one to set himself up as a moral judge and inflict pain; but man
has a right to do what is needful for social security. The criminal's
acts are of course necessitated; but he cannot justly complain of being
punished for them, since it is ultimately from himself, from what he is,
that they sprang.
With the doctrine of 'eternal justice,' touched on above, we pass into a
different region of thought. What is responsible for the guilt in the
world is the Will by which everything exists, and the suffering
everlastingly falls where the guilt is. Take the case of apparently
unpunished injustice (from the human point of view) expressing itself in
the extreme form of deliberate cruelty. Through this also, eternal
justice, from which there is no escape, is fulfilled. 'The torturer and
the tortured are one. The former errs in thinking he has no share in the
torture; the latter in thinking he has no share in the guilt.' For all
the pain of the world is the expiation of the sin involved in the
self-affirmation of will, and the Will as thing-in-itself is one and the
same in all.
If this could satisfy any one, there would be no need to go further. The
whole being as it ought to be, why try to rectify details that are
absolutely indifferent? But of course the implication is that
individuality is simply illusory; and this, as has been said, was a
position that Schopenhauer neither could nor did consistently maintain.
Indeed, immediately after setting forth this theory of 'eternal
justice,' he goes on to a relative justification of those acts of
disinterested vengeance by which a person knowingly sacrifices his own
life for the sake of retribution on some extraordinary criminal. This,
he says, is a form of punishment, not mere revenge, although it involves
an error concerning the nature of eternal justice. Suicide involves a
similar error, in so far as it supposes that the real being of the
individual can be assailed through its phenomenal manifestation. It is
not a denial of the will to live, but a strong affirmation of it, only
not in the given circumstances: different circumstances are desired with
such intensity that the present cannot be borne. Therefore the
individual manifestation of the will is not suppressed. Yet, one might
reply, if individuality is an illusion attached to the appearance in
time and space of a particular organism, it would seem that, with the
disappearance of this, all that distinguishes the individual must
disappear also.
Schopenhauer had no will thus to escape from life; nor did he afterwards
devote himself to expounding further his theory of eternal justice. What
he wrote later, either positively or as mere speculation, implies both
greater reality in the individual and more of cosmic equity to
correspond. His next step, even at his first stage, is to continue the
exposition of a practicable ethics for human life. His procedure
consists in adding beneficence to justice, with the proviso already
mentioned, which is required by his psychology, that all beneficence can
consist only in the relief of pain. For Schopenhauer, as for Comte,
what is to be overcome is 'egoism,' an excessive degree of which is the
mark of the character we call 'bad.' The 'good' is what Comte and
Spencer call the 'altruistic' character. This difference between
characters Schopenhauer goes on to explain in terms of his metaphysics.
The egoist is so deluded by the principle of individuation that he
supposes an absolute cleft between his own person and all others. The
remorse of conscience from which he suffers proceeds in part from an
obscure perception that the principle of individuation is illusory.
Genuine virtue springs out of the intuitive (not merely abstract)
knowledge that recognises in another individuality the same essence as
in one's own. The characteristic of the good man is that he makes less
difference than is customary between himself and others. Justice is an
intermediate stage between the encroaching egoism of the bad and
positive goodness. In the renunciation of rights of property, and
provision for all personal needs without aid from others, practised by
some religious and philosophical ascetics, it is passing over into
something more. There is, however, a certain misunderstanding involved
in so interpreting strict justice; for there are many ways in which the
rich and powerful can be positively beneficent. At the other extreme,
when they simply live on their inherited wealth, without doing anything
in return, their mode of life is morally, though not legally, unjust.
Rights of property Schopenhauer derived from labour spent on the things
appropriated. The injustice, in many ways, of the present social order
he quite recognises. If he has no sympathy with revolutions, it is
because he has no belief in the realisation of an ideal state. This
follows from his view of history. Human life, it is his conviction,
never has been and never will be different as a whole. Redemption from
evil can be attained only by the individual. All that the State can do
is to provide certain very general conditions of security under which
there will be no hindrance to those who desire to live in accordance
with a moral ideal.
Yet there are qualifications to make. Many passages in Schopenhauer's
writings prove his firm belief in the future triumph of reason over
superstition. It is to the honour of humanity, he says, that so
detestable a form of evil as organised religious persecution has
appeared only in one section of history. And, in his own personal case,
he has the most complete confidence that the truths he has put forth
cannot fail sometime to gain a hearing. In all cases, error is only
temporary, and truth will prevail. His language on this subject, and
indeed often on others, is indistinguishable from that of an optimist.
In the last resort, his pessimism entrenches itself behind the
psychological proposition that every satisfaction is negative, being
only the removal of a pain. If this is unsustainable, there is nothing
finally in his Metaphysics of Will to necessitate the pessimistic
conclusion drawn. The mode of deduction by which he proceeds is to argue
first to the position already noticed: that all that love of others on
which morality is based is fundamentally pity. True benevolence can only
be the desire to relieve others' pain, springing from the identification
of this with our own. For that reason, moral virtue must finally pass
over into asceticism--the denial of the will to live. In others, if we
are able to see through the principle of individuation, we recognise the
same essence as in ourselves, and we perceive that as long as this wills
it must necessarily suffer. The end then is to destroy the will to live.
This is to be done by _askesis_, self-mortification. The first step is
complete chastity. If, says Schopenhauer, the highest phenomenon of
will, that is, man, were to disappear through a general refusal to
affirm life beyond the individual body, man's weaker reflexion in the
animal world would disappear also, and the consciousness of the whole
would cease. Knowledge being taken away, the rest would vanish into
nothingness, since there is 'no object without subject.' That this will
come to pass, however, he certainly did not believe. He has no
cosmogony, like that of Hartmann, ending in a general redemption of the
universe by such a collective act. Nor did he hold, like his later
successor Mainlaender, that through the conflict and gradual extinction
of individualities, 'this great world shall so wear out to nought.' The
world for him is without beginning and without end. But the exceptional
individual can redeem himself. What he does when he has reached the
height of holiness is by voluntary poverty and all other privations,
inflicted for their own sake, to break and kill the will, which he
recognises as the source of his own and of the world's suffering
existence. In his case not merely the phenomenon ends at death, as with
others, but the being is taken away. To be a 'world-overcomer' in this
sense (as opposed to a 'world-conqueror') is the essence of sanctity
when cleared of all the superstitious dogmas by which the saints try to
explain their mode of life to themselves.
The absolutely pure expression of this truth is to be found only in
philosophy; but of the religions Buddhism comes nearest to expressing it
without admixture. For the Buddhist saint asks aid from no god. True
Christianity, however,--the Christianity of the New Testament and of the
Christian mystics,--agrees both with Buddhism and with Brahmanism in
ultimate aim. What spoils it for Schopenhauer is the Judaic element.
This, on one side, infects it with the optimism of the Biblical story of
creation, in which God 'saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it
was very good.' On the other side, it contaminates the myth of original
sin, which bears in itself a profound philosophical truth, by this same
doctrine of a creative God; from which follows all the injustice and
irrationality necessarily involved in the Augustinian theology, and not
to be expelled except with its theism. Nevertheless, the story of the
Fall of Man, of which that theology, in its fundamentally true part, is
a reasoned expression, is the one thing, Schopenhauer avows, that
reconciles him to the Old Testament. The truth that it clothes he finds
also among the Greeks; Empedocles, after the Orphics and Pythagoreans,
having taught that the soul had been doomed to wander because of some
antenatal sin. And the mysticism that accompanies all these more or less
pure expressions of one metaphysical truth he finds represented by the
Sufis even in optimistic Islam; so that he can claim for his philosophy
a world-wide consent.
Religion, if we take this to include mysticism, at once rises above
philosophy and falls below it. As 'metaphysics of the people,' it is a
mythological expression of philosophical truth: as mysticism, it is a
kind of 'epi-philosophy.' Beyond pure philosophy Schopenhauer does not
profess to go; but he accepts what the mystics say as the description of
a positive experience which becomes accessible when supreme insight is
attained intuitively. For the philosopher as such, insight into that
which is beyond the forms of our knowledge and even beyond the will
itself, remains only conceptual; though it is within the province of
philosophy to mark out the place for this. The 'something else' that is
left when the will has been denied, is indicated by the 'ecstasy,'
'illumination,' 'union with God,' spoken of by the mystics.
Paradoxically, some of the mystics themselves even have identified it
with 'nothing'; but the result of the denial of the will to live is to
be called nothing only in relation to the world as we know it. 'On the
other hand, to those in whom the will has turned back and denied itself,
this so very real world of ours with all its suns and milky ways
is--nothing.'
In this terminus of his philosophy, Schopenhauer recognised his kinship
with Indian thought, of which he was a lifelong student. To call his
doctrine a kind of Buddhism is, however, in some ways a misapprehension.
Undoubtedly he accepts as his ideal the ethical attitude that he finds
to be common to Buddhism and the Christianity of the New Testament; but
metaphysical differences mark him off from both. We have seen that he
rejects the extra-mundane God of Semitic derivation, adopted by
historical Christianity. Indeed he is one of the most pronounced
anti-Jehovists of all literature. But equally his belief in a positive
metaphysical doctrine marks him off from Buddhism, according to the
account given of it by its most recent students, who regard it either as
ultimately nihilistic or as having no metaphysics at all, but only a
psychology and ethics. Nor can he be precisely identified with the
Vedantists of orthodox Hinduism. Their ultimate reality, if we are to
find an analogue for it in European metaphysics, seems to resemble the
hypostasised _ego_ of Fichte, or the Kantian 'transcendental unity of
apperception', much more than it resembles Schopenhauer's blindly
striving will as thing-in-itself. Even in practical ethics, he does not
follow the Indian systems at all closely. Philosophical doctrines of
justice are of course purely European; and Schopenhauer himself points
out the sources of his own theory. In his extension of ethics to
animals, on which he lays much stress, he cites the teachings of Eastern
non-Semitic religions as superior to the rest; but he does not follow
the Indians, nor even the Pythagoreans, so far as to make abstinence
from flesh part of the ideal. He condemns vivisection on the ground that
animals have rights: certain ways of treating them are unjust, not
simply uncompassionate. The discussion here again is of course wholly
within European thought. Thus, in trying to determine his significance
for modern philosophy, we may consider his system in its immediate
environment, leaving it to more special students to determine how far it
received a peculiar colouring from the Oriental philosophies, of which,
in his time, the more exact knowledge was just beginning to penetrate to
the West.