Philosophies are world-conceptions presenting three main features:
(1) A systematic comprehension of the knowledge of their age; (2) An
emotional attitude toward the cosmos; and (3) A principle that will
serve as a basis for rules of conduct. The first feature determines the
worth of the several philosophical systems in the history of mankind,
being the gist of that which will last, and giving them strength and
backbone. The second one, however, appeals powerfully to the sentiments
of those who are imbued with the same spirit and thus constitutes its
immediate acceptability; while the ethics of a philosophy becomes the
test by which its use and practicability can be measured.
The author's ideal has been to harmonize these three features by making
the first the regulator of the second and a safe basis of the third.
What we need is truth; our fundamental emotion must be truthfulness,
and our ethics must be a living of the truth. Truth is not something
that we can fashion according to our pleasure; it is not subjective;
its very nature is objectivity. But we must render it subjective by a
love of truth; we must make it our own, and by doing so our conduct in
life will unfailingly adjust itself.
Former philosophies made the subjective element predominant, and thus
every philosopher worked out a philosophy of his own, endeavoring to
be individual and original. The aim of our own philosophy has been
to reduce the subjective to its proper sphere, and to establish, in
agreement with the scientific spirit of the age, a philosophy of
objective validity.
It is a well known experience that the march of progress does not
advance in a straight line but proceeds in epicycles. Man seems to tire
of the rigor of truth. From time to time he wants fiction. A strict
adherence to exact methods becomes monotonous to clever minds lacking
the power of concentration, and they gladly hail vagaries. Truth, they
claim, is relative, knowledge mere opinion, and poetry had better
replace science. Then they say: Error, be thou our guide; Error, thou
art a liberator from the tyranny of truth. Glory be to Error!
Similar retrograde movements take place from time to time in art.
Classical taste changes with romantic tendencies. Goethe, Schiller and
Lessing are followed by Schlegel and Tieck, Mozart and Beethoven by
Wagner.
The last half-century has been an age of unprecedented progress in
science and we would expect that with all the wonderful successes and
triumphs of scientific invention this age of science ought to find its
consummation in the adoption of a philosophy of science. But no! The
mass of mankind is weary of science, and anti-scientific tendencies
grow up like mushrooms, finding spokesmen in philosophers like William
James and Henri Bergson who have the ear of large masses, proclaiming
the superiority of subjectivism over objectivism, and the advantages of
animal instinct over human reason.
These subjective philosophies if considered as expressions of
sentiment, as sentimental attitudes toward the world, as poetical
effusions of a semi-philosophical nature, are perfectly legitimate and
can be indulged in as well as the several religions which in allegories
attune the minds of their followers toward the All of which they are
parts. There is no need to condemn arts or emotions for they have a
right to exist just as they are.
We protest against subjectivism in philosophy only when it denies the
possibility of an objective philosophy. We do not deny that the masses
of the world are not, cannot be and never will be scientific thinkers.
Science is the prerogative of the few, and the large masses of mankind
will always be of a pragmatist type. If the pragmatist considered
himself as a psychologist pure and simple showing how the majority
of mankind argues, how people are influenced by their own interest
and how their thoughts are warped by what they wish the facts to be,
pragmatism would be a commendable branch of the science of the soul.
Pragmatism explains the errors of philosophy and we can learn much from
a consideration of its principles. It becomes objectionable only in so
far as it claims to be philosophy in the strict sense of the word.
The name philosophy is used in two senses, first as we defined it
above, as a world-conception based upon critically sifted knowledge;
and secondly it is used in a vague general sense as wisdom in the
practical affairs of life. And if pragmatism claims to be a philosophy
in this second sense it ought not to deny that philosophy as a science
is possible.
Philosophy as a science is philosophy _par excellence_. It is the only
philosophy of objective validity. All other philosophies are effusions
of subjective points of view, of attitudes, of sentiment. But we must
insist that these two contrasts may exist side by side just as art does
not render mathematics supererogatory, and as a physicist who in his
profession devotes himself to a study of nature according to methods of
an objective exactness may in his leisure hours paint a _Stimmungsbild_
to give an artistic expression to a subjective mood.
This world is not merely the object of science. There are innumerable
tendencies which exist and have a right to exist, but they ought not to
banish science, scientific enquiry and scientific ideals from the place
they hold; for science is the mariners' compass which guides us over
the ocean of life, and though the majority of the passengers do not
and need not worry about it, science is after all the only means which
makes for progress and lifts mankind to higher and higher levels.
If we criticize men like James and Bergson and other philosophers of
subjectivism we do it as a defence of the indispensable character of
the objectivity of science as well as of philosophy as a science.
James and Bergson were by no means the originators of their method of
philosophizing. There have been many sages before them who deemed the
spectacles through which they viewed the world to be the most important
or even the only significant issue of life's problems. The Ionian
physicists were outdone by the sophists, and in modern times Friedrich
Nietzsche expressed the most sovereign contempt for science.
Among all the philosophies of modern times there is perhaps none which
in its inmost principle is more thoroughly opposed to our own than
Nietzsche's, and yet there are some points of mutual contact which
are well worth pointing out. The problem which is at the basis of
Nietzsche's thought is the same as in our philosophy, but our solution
is radically different from his.
Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher who astonishes his readers by the
boldness with which he rebels against every tradition, tearing down
the holiest and dearest things, preaching destruction of all rule, and
looking with disdain upon the heap of ruins in which his revolutionary
thoughts would leave the world.
For more than a century Germany has been the storm-center of
philosophical thought. The commotions that started in the Fatherland
reached other countries, France, England, and the United States, after
they had lost their force at home. Kant's transcendentalism and Hegel's
phenomenalism began to flourish among the English-speaking races after
having become almost extinct in the home of their founders. Prof. R.
M. Wenley of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., expresses
this truth with his native Scotch wit in the statement which I do
not hesitate to endorse, that "German professors when they die go to
Oxford," and we may add that from Oxford they travel west to settle for
a while in Concord, Boston, Washington, or other American cities.
Hegelianism had scarcely died out in the United States when
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche began to become fashionable. The influence
of the former has been felt in a quiet way for some time while the
Nietzsche movement is of more recent date and also of a more violent
character.
Nietzsche represents a type of most modern date. His was a genius after
the heart of Lombroso. He was eccentric and atypical.
Lombroso's psychology is an outgrowth of nominalism which does not
recognize an objective norm for truth, health, reason, or normality
of any kind, and regards the average as the sole method of finding a
norm. If, however, the average type is the standard of measurement, the
unusually excellent specimens, being rare in number, must be classed
together with all other deviations from the average, and thus a genius
is regarded as abnormal as much as a criminal--a theory which has found
many admirers in this age that is sicklied over with agnosticism, the
modern offshoot of nominalism. The truth is that true genius (not
the pseudo-genius of erratic minds, not the would-be genius of those
who make a failure of life) is uncommonly normal--I had almost said
"abnormally normal."
A perfect crystal is rare; so the perfectly normal man is an exception;
yet for all that he is a better representative of the ideal of his type
than the average.
Nietzsche was most assuredly very ingenious; he was unusually talented
but he was not a genius in the full sense of the word. He was abnormal,
titanic in his pretensions and aims, and erratic. Breaking down under
the burden of his own thought, he ended his tragical career in an
insane asylum.
The mental derangement of Nietzsche may be an unhappy accident but
it appears to have come as the natural result of his philosophy.
Nietzsche, by nature modest and tractable, almost submissive, was, as a
thinker, too proud to submit to anything, even to truth. Schopenhauer
had taught him that the intellect, with its comprehension of truth,
is a mere slave of the will, ancilla voluntatis. Our cognition of the
truth has a purpose; it must accommodate itself to our own interest.
But the self is sovereign; the self wants to assert itself; the self
alone has a right to exist; and the self that does not dare to be
itself is a servile, menial creature. Therefore Nietzsche preaches the
ethics of self-assertion and pride. He is too proud to recognize the
duty of inquiry, the duty of adapting his mind to the world, or of
recognizing the cosmic order of the universe as superior to his self.
He feels bigger than the cosmos; he is himself; and he wants to be
himself. His own self is sovereign; and if the world is not satisfied
to submit to his will, the world may go to ruin. If the world breaks to
pieces, it will only cause him to laugh; on the other hand, if his very
self is forced to the wall in this conflict, he will still, from sheer
pride, not suffer himself to abandon his principle of the absolute
sovereignty of selfhood. He will not be a man, human and humane, but
an overman (_Uebermensch_), a superhuman despiser of humanity and
humaneness. The multitudes are to him like cattle to be used, to be
milked, fleeced and butchered, and Nietzsche calls them herds, animals
of the flock, _Heerdentiere_.
Nietzsche's philosophy is unique in being throughout the expression of
an emotion--the proud sentiment of a self-sufficient sovereignty of
self. It rejects with disdain both the methods of the intellect, which
submit the problems of life to an investigation, and the demands of
morality, which recognize the existence of duty.
Other philosophers have claimed that rights imply duties and duties,
rights. Nietzsche knows of rights only. Nietzsche claims that there is
no objective science save by the permission of the sovereign self, nor
is there any "ought," except for slaves and fools. He prides himself
on being "the first Unmoralist," implying the absolute sovereignty of
man--of the overman--and the foolishness as well as falsity of moral
maxims.