Part 2 (1/2)
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, const.i.tuting 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 'convert.i.tes,' 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 pa.s.senger 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 s.e.xual love. The latter is by itself a remarkable achievement, and const.i.tutes 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 n.o.bility 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.signed 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 ident.i.ty 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 s.e.xual 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 const.i.tuted. 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sailed 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 circ.u.mstances: different circ.u.mstances 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 s.p.a.ce 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.