Part 20 (2/2)

Herbart's psychology was preceded by a philosophy of nature, which construes matter from attraction and repulsion, and declares an actio in distans impossible. The intermediate link between physics and psychology is formed by the science of organic life (physiology or biology); and with this natural theology is connected by the following principles: The purposiveness which we notice with admiration in men and the higher animals compels us, since it can neither come from chance nor be explained on natural grounds alone, to a.s.sume as its author a supreme artificer, an intelligence which works by ends. It is true, indeed, that the existence of the Deity is not demonstrated by the teleological argument; this is only an hypothesis, but one as highly probable as the a.s.sumption that the human bodies by which we are surrounded are inhabited by human souls-a fact which we can only a.s.sume, not perceive nor prove. The a.s.surance of faith is different from that of logic and experience, but not inferior to it. Religion is based on humility and grateful reverence, which is favored, not injured, by the immeasurable sublimity of its object, the incompleteness of our idea of the Supreme Being, and the knowledge of our ignorance. If faith rests, on the one hand, on the teleological view of nature, it is, on the other, connected with moral need, and exercises, in addition, aesthetic influences. By comforting the suffering, setting right the erring, reclaiming and pacifying the sinner, warning, strengthening, and encouraging the morally sound, religion brings the spirit into a new and better land, shows it a higher order of things, the order of providence, which, amid all the mistakes of men, still furthers the good. The religious spirit always includes an ethical element, and the bond of the Church holds men together even where the state is destroyed. Indispensable theoretically as a supplement to our knowledge, and practically because of the moral imperfection of men, who need it to humble, warn, comfort, and lift them up, religion is, nevertheless, in its origin independent of knowledge and moral will. Faith is older than science and morals: the doctrine of religion did not wait for astronomy and cosmology, nor the erection of temples for ethics. Before the development of the moral concepts religion already existed in the form of wonder without a special object, of a gloomy awe which ascribed every sudden inner excitement to the impulse of an invisible power. Since a speculative knowledge of the nature of G.o.d is impossible, the only task which remains for metaphysics is the removal of improper determinations from that which tradition and phantasy have to say on the subject. We are to conceive G.o.d as personal, extramundane, and omnipotent, as the creator, not of the reals themselves, but of their purposive coexistence (Zusammen). In order, however, to rise from the idea of the original, most real, and most powerful being to that of the most excellent being we need the practical Ideas, without which the former would remain an indifferent theoretical concept. Man can pray only to a wise, holy, perfect, just, and good G.o.d.

This, in essential outline, is the content of the scattered observations on the philosophy of religion given by Herbart. Drobisch (Fundamental Doctrines of the Philosophy of Religion, 1840), from the standpoint of religious criticism and with a renewal of the moral argument, and Taute (1840-52) and Flugel (Miracles and the Possibility of a Knowledge of G.o.d, 1869) with an apologetic tendency and one toward a belief in miracles, have, among others, endeavored to make up for the lack of a detailed treatment of this discipline by Herbart-from which, moreover, much of value could hardly have been expected in view of the jejuneness of his metaphysical conceptions and the insufficiency of his appreciation of evil.

It remains only to glance at Herbart's Aesthetics. The beautiful is distinguished from the agreeable and the desirable, which, like it, are the objects of preference and rejection, by the facts, first, that it arouses an involuntary and disinterested judgment of approval; and second, that it is a predicate which is ascribed to the object or is objective. To these is added, thirdly, that while desire seeks for that which is to come, taste possesses in the present that which it judges.

That which pleases or displeases is always the form, never the matter; and further, is always a relation, for that which is entirely simple is indifferent. As in music we have succeeded in discovering the simplest relations, which please immediately and absolutely-we know not why-so this must be attempted in all branches of the theory of art. The most important among them, that which treats of moral beauty, moral philosophy, has therefore to inquire concerning the simplest relations of will, which call forth moral approval or disapproval (independently of the interest of the spectator), to inquire concerning the practical Ideas or pattern-concepts, in accordance with which moral taste, involuntarily and with unconditional evidence, judges concerning the worth or unworth of (actually happening or merely represented) volitions. Herbart enumerates five such primary Ideas or fundamental judgments of conscience.

(1) The Idea of inner freedom compares the will with the judgment, the conviction, the conscience of the agent himself. The agreement of his desire with his own judgment, with the precept of his taste, pleases, lack of agreement displeases. Since the power to determine the will according to one's own insight of itself establishes only an empty consistency and loyalty to conviction, and may also subserve immoral craft, the first Idea waits for its content from the four following.

(2) The Idea of perfection has reference to the quant.i.tative relations of the manifold strivings of a subject, in intensity, extension, and concentration. The strong is pleasing in contrast with the weak, the greater (more extended, richer) in contrast with the smaller, the collected in contrast with the scattered; in other words, in the individual desires it is energy which pleases, in their sum variety, in the system co-operation. While the first two Ideas have compared the will of the individual man with itself, the remaining ones consider its relation to the will of other rational beings, the third to a merely represented will, and the last two to an actual one.

(3) According to the Idea of benevolence or goodness, which gives the most immediate and definite criterion of the worth of the disposition, the will pleases if it is in harmony with the (represented) will of another, i.e., makes the satisfaction of the latter its aim.

(4) The Idea of right is based on the fact that strife displeases. If several wills come together at one point without ill-will (in claiming a thing), the parties ought to submit themselves to right as a rule for the avoidance of strife.

(5) In retribution and equity, also, the original element is displeasure, displeasure in an unrequited act as a disturbance of equilibrium. This last Idea demands that no deed of good or evil remain unanswered; that in reward, thanks, and punishment, a quantum of good and evil equal to that of which he has been the cause return upon the agent. The one-sided deed of good or ill is a disturbance, the removal of which demands a corresponding requital.

Herbart warns us against the attempt to derive the five original Ideas (which scientific a.n.a.lysis alone separates, for in life we always judge according to all of them together) from a single higher Idea, maintaining that the demand for a common principle of morals is a prejudice. From the union of several beings into one person proceed five other pattern-concepts, the derived or social Ideas of the ethical inst.i.tutions in which the primary Ideas are realized. These correspond to the primary Ideas in the reverse order: The system of rewards, which regulates punishment; the legal society, which hinders strife; the system of administration, aimed at the greatest possible good of all; the system of culture, aimed at the development of the greatest possible power and virtuosity; finally, as the highest, and that which unites the others in itself, society as a person, which, when it is provided with the necessary power, is termed the state.

If we combine the totality of the original Ideas into the unity of the person the concept of virtue arises. If we reflect on the limitations which oppose the full realization of the ideal of virtue, we gain the concepts of law and duty. An ethics, like that of Kant, which exclusively emphasizes the imperative or obligatory character of the good, is one-sided; it considers morality only in arrest, a mistake which goes with its false doctrine of freedom. On the other hand, it was a great merit in Kant that he first made clear the unconditional validity of moral judgment, independent of all eudemonism. Politics and pedagogics are branches of the theory of virtue. The end of education is development in virtue, and, as a means to this, the arousing of varied interests and the production of a stable character.

In conclusion, we may sum up the points in which Herbart shows himself a follower of Kant-he calls himself a ”Kantian of the year 1828.” His practical philosophy takes from Kant its independence of theoretical philosophy, the disinterested character of aesthetic judgment, the absoluteness of ethical values, the non-empirical origin of the moral concepts: ”The fundamental ethical relations are not drawn from experience.” His metaphysics owes to Kant the critical treatment of the experience-concepts (its task is to make experience comprehensible), in which the leading idea in the Kantian doctrine of the antinomies, the inevitableness of contradictions, is generalized, extended to all the fundamental concepts of experience, and, as it were, transferred from the Dialectic to the a.n.a.lytic; it owes to him, further, the conception of being as absolute position, and, finally, the dualism of phenomena and things in themselves. Herbart (with Schopenhauer) considers the renewal of the Platonic distinction between seeming and being the chief service of the great critical philosopher, and finds his greatest mistake in the a priori character ascribed to the forms of cognition. In the doctrine of the pure intuitions and the categories, and the Critique of Judgment, he rejects, and with full consciousness, just those parts of Kant on which the Fichtean school had built further. Finally, Herbart's method of thought, his impersonality, the at times anxious caution of his inquiry, and the neatness of his conceptions, are somewhat akin to Kant's, only that he lacked the gift of combination to a much greater degree than his great predecessor on the Konigsberg rostrum. His remarkable acuteness is busier in loosening than in binding; it is more happy in the discovery of contradictions than in their resolution. Therefore he does not belong to the kings who have decided the fate of philosophy for long periods of time; he stands to one side, though it is true he is the most important figure among these who occupy such a position.

The first to give his adherence to Herbart in essential positions, and so to furnish occasion for the formation of an Herbartian school, was Drobisch (born 1802), in two critiques which appeared in 1828 and 1830. Besides Drobisch, from whom we have valuable discussions of Logic (1836, 5th ed., 1887) and Empirical Psychology (1842), and an interesting essay on Moral Statistics and the Freedom of the Will (1867), L. Strumpell (born 1812; The Princ.i.p.al Points in Herbart's Metaphysics Critically Examined, 1840), is a professor in Leipsic. The organ of the school, the Zeitschrift fur exakte Philosophie, now edited by Flugel (the first volume, 1860, contained a survey of the literature of the school), was at first issued by T. Ziller, the pedagogical thinker, and Allihn. The Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, from 1859, edited by M. Lazarus (born 1824; The Life of the Soul, 3 vols., 1856 seq., 3d ed., 1883 seq.) and H. Steinthal (born 1823; The Origin of Language, 4th ed., 1888; Sketch of the Science of Language, part i. 2d ed., 1881; General Ethics, 1885) of Berlin, also belongs to the Herbartian movement. Distinguished service has been done in psychology by Nahlowsky (The Life of Feeling, 1862, 2d. ed., 1884), Theodor Waitz in Marburg (1821-84; Foundation of Psychology, 1846; Text-book of Psychology, 1849), and Volkmann in Prague (1822-77; Text-book of Psychology, 3d. ed., by Cornelius, 1884 and 1885); while Friedrich Exner (died 1853) was formerly much spoken of as an opponent of the Hegelian psychology (1843-44). Robert Zimmermann in Vienna (born 1824) represents an extreme formalistic tendency in aesthetics (History of Aesthetics, 1858; General Esthetics as Science of Form, 1865; further, a series of thorough essays on subjects in the history of philosophy). Among historians of philosophy Thilo has given a rather one-sided representation of the Herbartian standpoint. The school's philosophers of religion have been mentioned above (p. 532). Beneke, whom we have joined with Fries on account of his anthropological standpoint, stands about midway between Herbart and Schopenhauer. He shares in the former's interest in psychology, in the latter's foundation of metaphysical knowledge on inner experience, and in the dislike felt by both for Hegel; while, on the other hand, he differs from Herbart in his empirical method, and from Schopenhauer in the priority ascribed to representation over effort.

3. Pessimism: Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer is in all respects the antipodes of Herbart. If in Herbart philosophy breaks up into a number of distinct special inquiries, Schopenhauer has but one fundamental thought to communicate, in the carrying out of which, as he is convinced, each part implies the whole and is implied by the whole. The former operates with sober concepts where the latter follows the lead of gifted intuition. The one is cool, thorough, cautious, methodical to the point of pedantry; the other is pa.s.sionate, ingenious, unmethodical to the point of capricious dilettantism. In the one case, philosophy is as far as possible exact science, in which the person of the thinker entirely retires behind the substance of the inquiry; in the other, philosophy consists in a sum of artistic conceptions, which derive their content and value chiefly from the individuality of the author. The history of philosophy has no other system to show which to the same degree expresses and reflects the personality of the philosopher as Schopenhauer's. This personality, notwithstanding its limitations and its whims, was important enough to give interest to Schopenhauer's views, even apart from the relative truth which they contain.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the son of a merchant in Dantzic and his wife Johanna, nee Trosiener, who subsequently became known as a novelist. His early training was gained from foreign travel, but after the death of his father he exchanged the mercantile career, which he had begun at his father's request, for that of a scholar, studying under G.E. Schulze in Gottingen, and under Fichte at Berlin. In 1813 he gained his doctor's degree in Jena with a dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Then he moved from Weimar, the residence of his mother, where he had a.s.sociated considerably with Goethe and had been introduced to Indian philosophy by Fr. Mayer, to Dresden (1814-18). In the latter place he wrote the essay On Sight and Colors (1816; subsequently published by the author in Latin), and his chief work, The World as Will and Idea (1819; new edition, with a second volume, 1844). After the completion of the latter he began his first Italian journey, while his second tour fell in the interval between his two quite unsuccessful attempts (in Berlin 1820 and 1825) to propagate his philosophy from the professor's desk. From 1831 until his death he lived in learned retirement in Frankfort-on-the-Main. Here he composed the opuscule On Will in Nature, 1836, the prize treatises On the Freedom of the Human Will and On the Foundation of Ethics (together, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, 1841), and the collection of minor treatises Parerga and Paralipomena, 2 vols., 1851 (including an essay ”On Religion”). J. Frauenstadt has published a considerable amount of posthumous material (among other things the translation, B. Gracians Handorakel der Weltklugheit); the Collected Works (6 vols., 1873-74, 2d ed., 1877, with a biographical notice); Lichtstrahlen aus Schopenhauers Werken, 1861, 5th ed. 1885; and a Schopenhauer Lexicon, 2 vols., 1871.[1]

[Footnote 1: From the remaining Schopenhauer literature (F. Laban has published a chronological survey of it, 1880) we may call attention to the critiques of the first edition of the chief work by Herbart and Beneke, and that of the second edition by Fortlage (Jenaische Litteratur Zeitung, 1845, Nos. 146-151); J.E. Erdmann Herbart und Schopenhauer, eine Ant.i.these (Zeitschrift fur Philosophie, 1851); Wilh. Gwinner, Schopenhauers Leben, 1878 (the second edition of Schopenhauer aus personlichem Umgang dargestellt, 1862); Fr. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Unzeitgema.s.se Betrachtungen, Stuck iii., 1874); O. Busch, A. Schopenhauer, 2d. ed., 1878; K. Peters, Schopenhauer als Philosoph und Schriftsteller, 1880; R. Koeber, Die Philosophie A. Schopenhauers, 1888. [The English reader may be referred to Haldane and Kemp's translation of The World as Will and Idea, 3 vols., 1883-86; the translation of The Fourfold Root and the Will in Nature in Bohn's Philosophical Library, 1889; Saunders's translations from the Parerga and Paralipomena, 1889 seq.; Helen Zimmern's Arthur Schopenhauer, his Life and his Philosophy, 1876; W. Wallace's Schopenhauer, Great Writers Series, 1890 (with a bibliography by Anderson, including references to numerous magazine articles, etc.); Sully's Pessimism, 2d ed., 1882, chap. iv.; and Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy, chap, viii., 1892.-TR.]]

In regard to subjective idealism Schopenhauer confesses himself a thoroughgoing Kantian. That sensations are merely states in us has long been known; Kant opened the eyes of the world to the fact that the forms of knowledge are also the property of the subject. I know things only as they appear to me, as I represent them in virtue of the const.i.tution of my intellect; the world is my idea. The Kantian theory, however, is capable of simplification, the various forms of cognition may be reduced to a single one, to the category of causality or principle of sufficient reason-which was preferred by Kant himself-as the general expression of the regular connection of our representations. This principle, in correspondence with the several cla.s.ses of objects, or rather of representations-viz., pure (merely formal) intuitions, empirical (complete) intuitions, acts of will, abstract concepts-has four forms: it is the principium rationis essendi, rationis fiendi, rationis agendi, rationis cognoscendi. The ratio essendi is the law which regulates the coexistence of the parts of s.p.a.ce and the succession of the divisions of time. The ratio fiendi demands for every change of state another from which it regularly follows as from its cause, and a substance as its unchangeable substratum-matter. All changes take place necessarily, all that is real is material; the law of causality is valid for phenomena alone, not beyond them, and holds only for the states of substances, not for substances themselves. In inorganic nature causes work mechanically, in organic nature as stimuli (in which the reaction is not equal to the action), and in animated nature as motives. A motive is a conscious (but not therefore a free) cause; the law of motivation is the ratio agendi. This serial order, ”mechanical cause, stimulus, and motive,” denotes only distinctions in the mode of action, not in the necessity of action. Man's actions follow as inevitably from his character and the motives which influence him as a clock strikes the hours; the freedom of the will is a chimera. Finally, the ratio cognoscendi determines that a judgment must have a sufficient ground in order to be true. Judgment or the connection of concepts is the chief activity of the reason, which, as the faculty of abstract thought and the organ of science, const.i.tutes the difference between man and the brute, while the possession of the understanding with its intuition of objects is common to both. In opposition to the customary overestimation of this gift of mediate representations, of language, and of reflection, Schopenhauer gives prominence to the fact that the reason is not a creative faculty like the understanding, but only a receptive power, that it clarifies and transforms the content furnished by intuition without increasing it by new representations.

Objective cognition is confined within the circle of our representations; all that is knowable is phenomenon. s.p.a.ce, time, and causality spread out like a triple veil between us and the per se of things, and prevent a vision of the true nature of the world. There is one point, however, at which we know more than mere phenomena, where of these three disturbing media only one, time-form, separates us from the thing in itself. This point is the consciousness of ourselves.

On the one hand, I appear to myself as body. My body is a temporal, spatial, material object, an object like all others, and with them subject to the laws of objectivity. But besides this objective cognition, I have, further, an immediate consciousness of myself, through which I apprehend my true being-I know myself as willing. My will is more than a mere representation, it is the original element in me, the truly real which appears to me as body. The will is related to the intellect as the primary to the secondary, as substance to accident; it is related to the body as the inner to the outer, as reality to phenomenon. The act of will is followed at once and inevitably by the movement of the body willed, nay, the two are one and the same, only given in different ways: will is the body seen from within, body the will seen from without, the will become visible, objectified. After the a.n.a.logy of ourselves, again, who appear to ourselves as material objects but in truth are will, all existence is to be judged. The universe is the mac-anthropos; the knowledge of our own essence, the key to the knowledge of the essence of the world. Like our body, the whole world is the visibility of will. The human will is the highest stage in the development of the same principle which manifests its activity in the various forces of nature, and which properly takes its name from the highest species. To penetrate further into the inner nature of things than this is impossible. What that which presents itself as will and which still remains after the negation of the latter (see below) is in itself, is for us absolutely unknowable.

The world is per se will. None of the predicates are to be attributed to the primal will which we ascribe to things in consequence of our subjective forms of thought-neither determination by causes or ends, nor plurality: it stands outside the law of causality, as also outside s.p.a.ce and time, which form the principium individuationis. The primal will is groundless, blind stress, unconscious impulse toward existence; it is one, the one and all, [Greek: en nai pan]. That which manifests itself as gravity, as magnetic force, as the impulse to growth, as the vis medicatrix naturae, is only this one world-will, whose unity (not conscious character!) shows itself in the purposiveness of its embodiments. The essence of each thing, its hidden quality, at which empirical explanation finds its limit, is its will: the essence of the stone is its will to fall; that of the lungs is the will to breathe; teeth, throat, and bowels are hunger objectified. Those qualities in which the universal will gives itself material manifestation form a series with grades of increasing perfection, a realm of unchangeable specific forms or eternal Ideas, which (with a real value difficult to determine) stand midway between the one primal will and the numberless individual beings. That the organic individual does not perfectly correspond to the ideal of its species, but only approximates this more or less closely, is grounded in the fact that the stadia in the objectification of the will, or the Ideas, contend, as it were, for matter; and whatever of force is used up in the victory of the higher Ideas over the lower is lost for the development of the examples of the former. The higher the level on which a being stands the clearer the expression of its individuality. The most general forces of nature, which const.i.tute the raw ma.s.s, play the fundamental ba.s.s in the world-symphony, the higher stages of inorganic nature, with the vegetable and animal worlds, the harmonious middle parts, and man the guiding treble, the significant melody. With the human brain the world as idea is given at a stroke; in this organ the will has kindled a torch in order to throw light upon itself and to carry out its designs with careful deliberation; it has brought forth the intellect as its instrument, which, with the great majority of men, remains in a position of subservience to the will. Brain and thought are the same; the former is nothing other than the will to know, as the stomach is will to digest. Those only talk of an immaterial soul who import into philosophy-where such ideas do not belong-concepts taught them when they were confirmed.

Schopenhauer's philosophy is as rich in inconsistencies as his personality was self-willed and unharmonious. ”He carries into his system all the contradictions and whims of his capricious nature,” says Zeller. From the most radical idealism (the objective world a product of representation) he makes a sharp transition to the cra.s.sest materialism (thought a function of the brain); first matter is to be a mere idea, now thought is to be merely a material phenomenon! The third and fourth books of The World as Will and Idea, which develop the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of their author, stand in as sharp a contradiction to the first (poetical) and the second (metaphysical) books as these to each other. While at first it was maintained that all representation is subject to the principle of sufficient reason, we are now told that, besides causal cognition, there is a higher knowledge, one which is free from the control of this principle, viz., aesthetic and philosophical intuition. If, before, it was said that the intellect is the creature and servant of the will, we now learn that in favored individuals it gains the power to throw off the yoke of slavery, and not only to raise itself to the blessedness of contemplation free from all desire, but even to enter on a victorious conflict with the tyrant, to slay the will. The source of this power-is not revealed. R. Haym (A. Schopenhauer, 1864, reprinted from the Preussische Jahrbucher) was not far wrong in characterizing Schopenhauer's philosophy as a clever novel, which entertains the reader by its rapid vicissitudes.

The contemplation which is free from causality and will is the essence of aesthetic life; the partial and total sublation, the quieting and negation of the will, that of ethical life. It is but seldom, and only in the artistic and philosophical genius, that the intellect succeeds in freeing itself from the supremacy of the will, and, laying aside the question of the why and wherefore, where and when, in sinking itself completely in the pure what of things. While with the majority of mankind, as with animals, the intellect always remains a prisoner in the service of the will to live, of self-preservation, of personal interests, in gifted men, in artists and thinkers, it strips off all that is individual, and, in disinterested vision of the Ideas, becomes pure, timeless subject, freed from the will. Art removes individuality from the subject as well as from the object; its c

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