Part 11 (1/2)
There is, however, a general advantage in possessing more varied possibilities of enjoyment, and in being on the side of the strongest forces, those of progress.
Extreme self-sacrifice is sometimes demanded of a man by his moral principles. Is the sacrifice worth making? Would Regulus have suffered, from remorse, pain worse than death, had he chosen life at the cost of honor, or would he have found, as many do, that remorse is amongst the pa.s.sions most easily lived down? To these questions can only be answered that morality must often involve pain, but that the virtuous man nevertheless chooses it.
We must thus conclude, leaving one great difficulty unsolved; and this is because this difficulty is intrinsically insoluble; there is no absolute coincidence between virtue and happiness. The scientific moralist has to do with facts; beyond these he cannot go. From the scientific point of view, we may hold that evolution implies progress, and that progress implies a solution of many discords and an extirpation of many evils; but there is no reason for supposing that all evil will be extirpated and perfect harmony attained. New sensibilities bring with them new dangers; even sympathy, when not guided by knowledge, may lead to rash changes productive of evil as well as good. To improve, whether for the race or the individual, whether in knowledge or in sympathy, is to be put in a position where a new set of experiments has to be tried, and experience to be bought at the price of pain.
It is true that beyond the science lies the art; we must incite the intrinsic motives to good through the pressure of the social factor. A certain disadvantage to the individual cannot form a reason for our not endeavoring to make him moral as far as possible; the good of society as a whole is involved; and even the man who is himself immoral sees the advantage of living in a moral medium, and would prefer that the world at large should not be guided by his own principles.
B. CARNERI
Carneri begins his book on ”Morality and Darwinism” (”Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus,” 1871), with the rejection of the older Spiritualism in favor of Idealism, on the ground that modern investigation has made it impossible for philosophy to a.s.sume any foundation but one sanctioned by science; and with a rejection of dualism in favor of monism, on the ground that the investigations of Wundt and others have shown the psychical and the physical to be identical.
Instinct is defined by Carneri as thought upon the standpoint of mere sensation, but following the laws of the same logic as governs conscious thought. There is, thus, according to his view, no exception to be taken to the conception which represents instinct as the action of mental force, the difference between it and human reason as one of degree only.
It is nevertheless a confusion which ascribes reason to the animals.
Even their intelligence is one-sided, since it does not reach self-consciousness, and it is not to be regarded as an unqualified improvement upon instinct, since the latter loses both in intensity and in certainty of action when it no longer governs undisturbed by other influences: only such animals as are endowed with intelligence ever eat of injurious food. In human beings instinct has almost disappeared;--almost, we say, since savages do many things in an instinctive manner, and even civilized men at times perform acts which, on account of the exceeding rapidity of their execution, cannot be regarded as the results of reflection. Instinct may be compared to polarity in magnetism, according to which opposites are attracted.
Instinct was evolved by natural selection. But intelligence and judgment are doubtless also to be found even far down in the scale of species.
The brute consciousness is, nevertheless, only a transition-stage, in which the individual is still lost in the species; and, as such, it is not to be confused with human reason. Consciousness in the brutes is purely subjective, a consciousness ”fur sich”; while in human beings it is consciousness ”an und fur sich,” consciousness that becomes subject-object through the concepts developed by language.
Man is as unconditionally subject to the law of causality, psychically and physically, as the merest atom. There is no such thing as chance; but in this very fact lies a consolation. In the concept of individualization in its broadest sense, is included the conception of freedom, and in the very nature of man there is an indestructible impulse to freedom; his being, as self-conscious, is identical with the latter impulse. This increases with increasing civilization, and has finally become the problem by the solution of which alone man can attain to self-satisfaction. It is true that the power of choice is inconsistent with the law of causality; but in the manner in which the man, as a thinking being, takes his stand over against the species, he becomes a person, an individuality. As one of the species, he shares the characteristics of the species, is an expression of the species-idea, and his action is determined outwardly by things; but it is so determined only mediately by means of thought, of concepts; these are the immediate determinants. Hence, man's relation to things is a different one according to the grade of his knowledge. In so far as this is adequate, that is, corresponds to the truth of actuality, his relation is an active one; in so far as it is, on the contrary, inadequate, the relation is a pa.s.sive one.
Character is inborn and can never be effaced but only clarified, though this least through the bitter experience of the results of action. As the horse loses his sure-footedness after one fall, and falls again more easily, so we lose, through many a deed, the motive furnished by the consciousness of never having committed it, and have a greater tendency to repeat it. If an act has bad results, it is more likely that an attempt to avoid these results by cunning will be made at later opportunities for the act, than that the act itself will be avoided.
And even if it were to be avoided, such avoidance would not const.i.tute an improvement of the character; the latter would but hide itself under a mask to reappear at the first prospect of exemption from punishment.
That which alone can modify character is a considerable extension of knowledge. For, since all things influence us only in proportion to the worth we attribute to them, their power over us must differ according to the correctness or incorrectness of our judgment. Therefore, the more we regard things in the light of their actual worth and hence also in their relations to each other, the more our character, beholding in these relations the general as the true, will incline to avoid extremes in action. A preponderantly sensual character remains such through life; but there is no doubt that a careful education, which makes it acquainted with n.o.bler principles and develops a sensibility to true beauty, may enn.o.ble it; while, if the education is, on the contrary, neglected, it must sink deeper and deeper into the mire of coa.r.s.eness and vulgarity.
Character is the sum of its ”affections,” that is, of all states and motions of the disposition. These are divisible into ”pa.s.sions,”--included under selfishness, which is the general, all-embracing pa.s.sion,--and the active conditions of existence. These two divisions are also identical with pain and pleasure, pa.s.sion with pain, and activity with pleasure. All desires have their root in the primary instinct of self-preservation and self-propagation, the instinct of self-propagation being only the racial form of the instinct of self-preservation. The instinct of self-propagation is the highest of all the pa.s.sions, yet, as Spinoza says, every form of love which recognizes another cause than mental freedom is easily turned to hate,--if it is not already a sort of madness, nourished rather by discord than concord. The various forms of family love, the love of country, and friends.h.i.+p, n.o.ble sisters of love in the narrower sense, result in desirable activity only as they exist in the form of concepts.
Civilization is nothing but the struggle of inadequate and adequate concepts, in which, as in the struggle for existence in nature, only that is triumphant which, instead of a.s.suming a position of separation, makes the general and the conditions of existence its own; so that charity in the widest sense of the term is, of all humane feelings, that to which the palm has been given. In this feeling, the dialectic movement of the concept ”man” is completed and perfected, the single man, instead of peris.h.i.+ng in the struggle of all against all, first working his way upward out of his species and then taking up, in his own being, the whole of mankind through the medium of benevolence. By this evolution he raises himself to the level of the general. Far higher than that confused sympathy which, in lending temporary aid to one, brings lasting harm to many, is this adequate concept; true benevolence is founded upon the clearest reasoning, and is the activity of the mind's fullest power. The discord which self-consciousness has caused in man can be done away with only by the greatest possible clarification of self-consciousness: man returns mentally to the bosom of the universal, when every living thing causes him to exclaim in the words of the Indian philosopher: ”Behold thyself.”
Ethics ranks higher than morals, the latter merely comprising a collection of particular rules of conduct which, as particular, bear the stamp of the individual, the non-universal. The details of morality change according to epochs and peoples. This change has been regarded as an argument that there is no absolute but only relative good. But the concept of the Good is, like the concept of the Beautiful, the fruit of education; that is, it is the product of mind, which, through its own evolution, arrives at Knowledge. When we do away with all concessions to one-sided, extravagant desires, abstain from placing mind above the universal law of causality, and are content with the facts made known to us by science, we perceive that the absolute True, Beautiful, and Good, bears the character of the Universal. In this universal character it has always finally found expression in human life, and in this character it will always find expression. The idea which reaches perfect expression in the dialectic movement of these three concepts, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, has come into existence by the mediation of the self-individualizing self-consciousness, just as the evolution on the earth, which reaches its completion in man, is the outcome of the first chemical process. Not only have the two one law,--(mind is only in so far realized[65] as nature is expressed through it, and the actuality of nature is its expression in mind) but both are, in fact, one, the succession in their development on the earth being a succession only in relation to the earth, and for us in this respect. Although to our notion of time, thousands of millions of years lie between the two, their separation does not represent a second for the universe and its eternity, for the comprehension of which it must be disregarded.
The good man is he who does good for its own sake, without effort, not out of momentary caprice, but out of perfect knowledge and conviction.
He is free, since he acts out of his own character, the law of nature appearing as the law of his own mind; freedom lies in the absence of discord and strife in the mind. The good man has strength of soul, just as the man who lifts a weight without effort, not he who lifts it only with the greatest effort, possesses strength of body.
There is no absolute Evil in contrast to the absolute Good. Evil is negative. The perfection of man is identical with the attainment of absolute Good through evolution.
Morality knows nothing of either reward or punishment; for it there are only causes and effects. This truth, on which morality is based, lends to the freedom out of which its activity proceeds a deeper worth. The eternal laws of mind point the way by which mankind has to proceed; it is the same way by which man has become man and by which he must proceed, even if he did not will to advance thus. In the struggle for existence, which knows only victory or destruction, progress is a necessity of nature, but it is less painful and more rapid the more clearly these laws come to be perceived by consciousness. Yet, however clear they may be, it is only by a tireless endeavor which shrinks from no sacrifice, that progress takes place. The end which morality has in view is distant, for it is high; but only with its attainment will mankind fully deserve its name when ”struggle has been transformed to labor, when no insignia are recognized but those of right, no weapon used but intelligence, no banner raised but that of civilization.”
In the volume, ”Man the 'End' of Man” (”Der Mensch als Selbstzweck,”
1877), ”a positive criticism of Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious,” Carneri defines instinct as no form of real thought, nothing dependent upon perception, but merely an inherited, mechanical dexterity dependent upon sensation. For the a.s.sumption that thought is the source of instinct must lead us naturally, on account of the existence of the latter where the centralizing organ of thought is absent, to the theory that thought is universal in nature; that is, we shall arrive at a theory of atom-souls. It is evident here that not Carneri's definition of instinct so much as his conception of thought is changed from the one adopted in ”Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus,”
thought being now limited, as it was not in the former book, to self-conscious mental activity, a.s.sumed to be dependent upon nervous centralization in the brain. In this book also, the author defines the idea as something having mental existence, though not, he says, in any metaphysical sense. His idealism is not of such sort that he recognizes any other way to the attainment of ideas than that of science; and to him ”the service of the materialist who gives us information concerning the function of the smallest nerve-fibres is of more worth than that of the idealist who originates a whole philosophical system.” The work of philosophy lies in the rejection of all that is contrary to science, and the clarification of ideals.
The will may be defined, not as a definite, separate power, but as the self-conscious impulse to action resulting from excitation. Any other definition is inconsistent with the theory of evolution, according to which that individuation which is the first condition of the struggle for existence, is nevertheless but the expression of all previously existing oppositions. To make of the will or of the impulse to self-preservation anything separate and individual, is as childish as to personify death. The individual is totality as unity. Darwinism teaches us, not that the world together with man has been created according to any teleological principle, but that it has developed by virtue of motion. The human being moves by virtue of reciprocal action and reaction with the world. Yet only by virtue of his unity as feeling does he think and will. Individuality is that which stamps all our activity with the mark of the ego, which causes us to recognize every impulse that moves in us as our impulse, to call all our willing ours. The psychical, the summation of functions to which we give this name, reaches consummation in the clarification of feeling to consciousness, in which the desire of an action or of abstinence from an action appears to us as our will. As thought is based on perception, so will is based on impulse; and since thought and will appear as the two highest opposites of feeling, and this, according to our definition, springs from sensation by way of perception, the will, including action and abstinence from action, arises out of the general sensitivity. The progress of science authorizes the expectation that the close relation of sensitivity to simple reaction will one day be discovered.
The conceptions of teleology are groundless. The so-called ”ends” of nature have the peculiarity that they are according to the means. It does not rain in order that there may be vegetation, but vegetation exists because it is conditioned by the rain. Only with thinking man, in his struggle for existence, arises the concept of ends; man has not attained to civilization by help of a friend; rather has he wrung civilization from nature as an enemy; compelled by it to the exertion of his whole strength, and growing in cunning by exercise, he has learned to use the weaknesses of his foe to his own advantage. To want he owes the greatest things that he has accomplished. By way of labor alone can victory over nature be achieved and salvation won.
The standpoint of faith is childlike. Faith does not reason, and may not do so if it wishes to remain faith. The child can comprehend nature and man's relation to it only by the language of faith, and there are large cla.s.ses of people who, for a long time, will be accessible to no other language but this. But faith must decrease in the same ratio as mankind outgrows intellectual childhood. In the same measure, the worth of the philosophical solution of certain problems must increase; and among the most important of these problems must be reckoned that of bridging the chasm between the individual and the world, which has grown wider with the awakening of consciousness. It lies in the nature of self-conscious thought to reach out beyond itself, just as it lies in the nature of sense-perception to regard this ”beyond” as the world to come. Hence the endless longing which seeks the ruler of the world to come, and despairs without him; until the supposed right to a future life is perceived to be the right to the Only Whole, and an end is set in the attainment of this whole. For the thinking man an aimless life has no meaning; there is only one means of bridging the chasm; namely, that mankind shall set itself an end.
A final destruction of life upon the earth must surely come, whether it be in the shape of a sudden catastrophe or as the result of a slow process. But such an end can no more be regarded as the ”end” in the philosophical sense than death can be regarded, in the same sense, as the ”end” of the individual life. By the development of ideas, which are concepts of reason in distinction from concepts of the understanding, we arrive at a notion of the ideal as end.