Part 2 (2/2)

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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sages in Schopenhauer's writings prove his firm belief in the future triumph of reason over superst.i.tion. 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 pa.s.s 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 chast.i.ty. 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 pa.s.s, 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 Mainlander, 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 sanct.i.ty when cleared of all the superst.i.tious 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d '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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d,' 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 kins.h.i.+p 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d of Semitic derivation, adopted by historical Christianity. Indeed he is one of the most p.r.o.nounced 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 a.n.a.logue 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 uncompa.s.sionate. 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.

CHAPTER VI

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE

Schopenhauer is not one of the philosophers who have founded a school, though he has had many disciples and enthusiastic admirers. The pessimism that was for a time a watchword with certain literary groups has pa.s.sed as a mode, and his true significance must be sought elsewhere. Of the thinkers who have followed him in his pessimism, two indeed stand out as the architects of distinct systems, Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp Mainlander (both already incidentally referred to); but while they are to be cla.s.sed unquestionably as philosophers, their systems contain an element that their master would have regarded as mythological. Schopenhauer declared as clearly as any of the Greeks that the phenomenal world is without beginning and without end. Kant's positing of an 'antinomy' on this point he regarded as wholly without rational justification. What Kant calls the 'ant.i.thesis,' namely, the infinite series, can be logically proved for phenomena. The 'thesis,'

which a.s.serts a beginning in time, is defended by mere fallacies. Now Hartmann and Mainlander both hold, though in different fas.h.i.+ons, that there is a world-process from a beginning to an end, namely, the extinction of consciousness. This is the redemption of the world. Their affinity, therefore, seems to be with the Christian Gnostics rather than with the pure philosophers of the Greek tradition, continued in modern times by Bruno, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer.

Whatever may be thought of the pessimism by which Schopenhauer's mood is distinguished from that of his precursors, few will fail to recognise that special doctrines of his system contain at least a large portion of truth. His theories of Art, of Genius, and of Love are enough to found an enduring reputation for any thinker, even if there were nothing else of value in his writings. But there is much else, both in systematic construction and in the illumination of detail. I have been inclined to put forward first of all the translation into idealistic terms of the universal sentiency held by the Ionian thinkers to be inherent in the primordial elements of nature. While they viewed the world as an objective thing having psychological qualities, Schopenhauer, after the long intermediate process of thought, could treat it as phenomenal object with a psychological or subjective essence. For both doctrines alike, however, mind or soul is immanent. Still, it must be allowed that a difference remains by which Schopenhauer was even more remote than they were from the later Greek idealism. As they were not materialists, so they did not exclude reason from the psychical properties of their substances. Schopenhauer, while he rejected the materialism of their ancient and modern successors alike, took the step of formally derationalising the elements of mind. This, no doubt, is unsustainable ultimately, if reason is ever to emerge from them. Yet the one-sidedness of the position has had a peculiar value in combating an equally one-sided rationalistic idealism. This is recognised by clear-sighted opponents. And Schopenhauer's calling the non-rational or anti-rational element in the world 'will' helps to make plainer the real problem of evil. There is truth in the Hegelian paradox that 'pessimism is an excellent basis for optimism.' An optimist like Plotinus saw that, even if good comes of evil, the case of the optimist must fail unless evil can be shown to be a necessary const.i.tuent of the world. The Platonic and Neo-Platonic 'matter,' a principle of diremption or individuation, like time and s.p.a.ce for Schopenhauer, was an attempt to solve this problem; but something more positive seemed to be needed as the source of the stronger manifestations of evil. To the strength of these Plato drew attention in a pa.s.sage (_Republic_, x. 610[5]) where it is acknowledged that injustice confers a character of vitality and sleeplessness upon its possessor. In the notion of a blind and vehement striving, Schopenhauer supplies something adequate; only, to maintain a rational optimism, it must be regarded as a necessary element in a mixture, not as the spring of the whole.

[5] Cited in one of the introductory essays to Jowett and Campbell's edition, vol. ii.

Much might be said on the teleology by which he tries to educe intelligence from the primordial strife. Against his view, that it is evolved as a mere instrument for preserving races in a struggle, another may be set that is ready to hand in a dialogue of Plutarch.[6] The struggle among animals, it is there incidentally argued, has for its end to sharpen their intelligence. Both these theories are on the surface compatible with evolution. If, leaving aside the problem of mechanism, we try to verify them by the test of results, the latter undoubtedly seems the more plausible. For if the struggle was a means to the improvement of intelligence, nature has succeeded more and more; whereas, if her intention was to preserve races, she has continually failed. This argument is at any rate perfectly valid against Schopenhauer himself; for he holds in common with the optimistic teleologists that 'nature does nothing in vain.'

[6] _De Sollertia Animalium_, 27.

I will conclude with a few detached criticisms on the ethical doctrine which he regarded as the culmination of his system. The ant.i.thesis, it may first be noted, between the temporary release from the vehemence of the will that is gained through art, and the permanent release through asceticism, is not consistently maintained. Schopenhauer admits that the knowledge which for the ascetic is the 'quietive' of the will has to be won anew in a perpetual conflict. 'No one can have enduring rest on earth.' Again, revision of his doctrine concerning the reality of the individual would, I think, necessitate revision also of the position that not only asceticism but 'all true and pure love, nay, even freely rendered justice, proceeds from seeing through the _principium individuationis_.' If the individual is in some sense ultimately real, then love must be to a certain extent literally altruism. We are brought down to the elementary fact, in terms of the metaphysics of ethics, that the object of love is a real being that is itself and not ourselves, though having some resemblance to us and united in a larger whole. An objection not merely verbal might indeed be taken to Schopenhauer's metaphysics of ethics strictly on his own ground. If it is purely and simply the essence of ourselves that we recognise in everything, does not this reduce all love finally to a well-understood egoism? The genuine fact of sympathy seems to escape his mode of formulation. And, in the end, we shall perhaps not find the ascetic to be the supreme ethical type. Of the self-tormenting kind of asceticism, it is not enough to say with Schopenhauer that, since it is a world-wide phenomenon of human nature, it calls for some account from philosophy.

The account may be sufficiently rendered by historical psychology; the result being to cla.s.s it as an aberration born of the illusions incident to a certain type of mind at a certain stage. Indeed, that seems to be the conclusion of the Buddhists, who claim to have transcended it by finding it superfluous for the end it aims at. Let us then take, as our example of the completed type, not the monks of the Thebaid, but the mild ascetics of the Buddhist communities. Does not this type, even in its most attractive form, represent a 'second best'? Is not the final judgment that of Plato, that to save oneself is something, but that there is no full achievement unless for the life of the State also the ideal has been brought nearer realisation? When there is nothing in the world but irredeemable tyranny or anarchy, flight from it may be the greatest success possible as far as the individual life is concerned; but this is not the normal condition of humanity. Finally, may not some actual achievement, either practical or, like that of Schopenhauer, speculative, even if accompanied by real imperfections of character, possess a higher human value than the sanct.i.ty that rests always in itself?

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