Ethics

This chapter is connected with §§ 55, 62, 67 of the first volume.

Here is the great gap which occurs in these supplements, on account of the circumstance that I have already dealt with moral philosophy in the narrower sense in the two prize essays published under the title, “Die Grundprobleme der Ethik,” an acquaintance with which is assumed, as I have said, in order to avoid useless repetition.

Therefore there only remains for me here a small gleaning of isolated reflections which could not be discussed in that work, the contents of which were, in the main, prescribed by the Academies; least of all those reflections which demand a higher point of view than that which is common to all, and which I was there obliged to adhere to. Accordingly it will not surprise the reader to find these reflections here in a very fragmentary collection. This collection again has been continued in the eighth and ninth chapters of the second volume of the Parerga.

That moral investigations are incomparably more difficult than physical, and in general than any others, results from the fact that they are almost immediately concerned with the thing in itself, namely, with that manifestation of it in which, directly discovered by the light of knowledge, it reveals its nature as will.

Physical truths, on the other hand, remain entirely in the province of the idea, i.e., of the phenomenon, and merely show how the lowest manifestations of the will present themselves in the idea in conformity to law. Further, the consideration of the world[403] from the physical side, however far and successfully it may be pursued, is in its results without any consolation for us: on the moral side alone is consolation to be found; for here the depths of our own inner nature disclose themselves to the consideration. But my philosophy is the only one which confers upon ethics its complete and whole rights; for only if the true nature of man is his own will, and consequently he is, in the strictest sense, his own work, are his deeds really entirely his and to be ascribed to him.

On the other hand, whenever he has another origin, or is the work of a being different from himself, all his guilt falls back upon this origin, or originator. For operari sequitur esse.

To connect the force which produces the phenomenon of the world, and consequently determines its nature, with the morality of the disposition or character, and thus to establish a moral order of the world as the foundation of the physical,—this has been since Socrates the problem of philosophy. Theism solved it in a childish manner, which could not satisfy mature humanity.

Therefore pantheism opposed itself to it whenever it ventured to do so, and showed that nature bears in itself the power by virtue of which it appears. With this, however, ethics had necessarily to be given up. Spinoza, indeed, attempts here and there to preserve it by means of sophistry, but for the most part gives it up altogether, and, with a boldness which excites astonishment and repugnance, explains the distinction between right and wrong, and in general between good and evil, as merely conventional, thus in itself empty (for example, Eth. iv., prop. 37, schol.

2. After having met with unmerited neglect for more than a hundred years, Spinoza has, in general, become too much esteemed in this century through the reaction caused by the swing of the pendulum of opinion. All pantheism must ultimately be overthrown by the inevitable demands of ethics, and then by the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany, then all that man, or even the brute, does is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be censurable, and nothing more praiseworthy than the rest: thus there is no ethics.

Hence, in consequence of the revived Spinozism of our own day, thus of pantheism, the treatment of ethics has sunk so low and become so shallow that it has been made a mere instruction as to the proper life of a citizen and a member of a family, in which the ultimate end of human existence is supposed to consist: thus in methodical, complete, smug, and comfortable philistinism. Pantheism, indeed, has only led to such shallow vulgarisms through the fact that (by a shameful misuse of the e quovis ligno fit Mercurius) a common mind, Hegel, has, by the well-known means, been falsely stamped as a great philosopher, and a herd of his disciples, at first suborned, afterwards only stupid, received his weighty words. Such outrages on the human mind do not remain unpunished: the seed has sprouted.

In the same spirit it was then asserted that ethics should have for its material not the conduct of individuals, but that of nations, that this alone was a theme worthy of it. Nothing can be more perverse than this view, which rests on the most vulgar realism. For in every individual appears the whole undivided will to live, the thing in itself, and the microcosm is like the macrocosm. The masses have no more content than each individual. Ethics is concerned not with actions and their results, but with willing, and willing itself takes place only in the individual.

Not the fate of nations, which exists only in the phenomenon, but that of the individual is decided morally. Nations are really mere abstractions; individuals alone actually exist. Thus, then, is pantheism related to ethics. But the evil and misery of the world are not in accord even with theism; hence it sought assistance from all kinds of evasions, theodicies, which yet were irretrievably overthrown by the arguments of Hume and Voltaire. Pantheism, however, is completely untenable in the presence of that bad side of the world. Only when the world is regarded entirely from without[405] and from the physical side alone, and nothing else is kept in view but the constant restorative order, and the comparative imperish- ableness of the whole which is thereby introduced, is it perhaps possible to explain it as a god, yet always only symbolically. But if one enters within, thus considers also the subjective and moral side, with its preponderance of want, suffering, and misery, of dissension, wickedness, madness, and perversity, then one soon becomes conscious with horror that the last thing imaginable one has before one is a theophany. I, however, have shown, and especially in my work “Ueber den Willen in der Natur” have proved, that the force which works and acts in nature is identical with the will in us. Thereby the moral order of the world is brought into direct connection with the force which produces the phenomenon of the world. For the phenomenon of the will must exactly correspond to its nature. Upon this depends the exposition of eternal justice given in §§ 63 and 64 of the first volume, and the world, although subsisting by its own power, receives throughout a moral tendency. Accordingly the problem which has been discussed from the time of Socrates is now for the first time really solved, and the demand of thinking reason directed to morality is satisfied. Yet I have never professed to propound a philosophy which leaves no questions unanswered.

In this sense philosophy is really impossible: it would be the science of omniscience. But est quadam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra: there is a limit to which reflection can penetrate and can so far lighten the night of our existence, although the horizon always remains dark. My doctrine reaches this limit in the will to live, which in its own manifestation asserts or denies itself. To wish, however, to go beyond this is, in my eyes, like wishing to fly beyond the atmosphere. We must stop there; even although new problems arise out of those which have been solved. Besides this, however, we must refer to the fact that the validity of the [406] principle of sufficient reason is limited to the phenomenon; this was the theme of my first essay on that principle, which was published as early as 1813.

I now go on to supplement particular points, and shall begin by supporting, with two passages from classical poetry, my ex- planation of weeping given in § 67 of the first volume, that it springs from sympathy the object of which is one’s own self. At the end of the eighth book of the “Odyssey,” Ulysses, who in all his many sorrows is never represented as weeping, bursts into tears, when, still unknown, he hears his early heroic life and deeds sung by the bard Demodocus in the palace of the Phæacian king, for this remembrance of the brilliant period of his life contrasts with his present wretchedness. Thus not this itself directly, but the objective consideration of it, the picture of his present summoned up by his past, calls forth his tears; he feels sympathy with himself. Euripides makes the innocently condemned Hypolytus, bemoaning his own fate, express the same feeling:

(Heu, si liceret mihi, me ipsum extrinsecus spectare, quanto- pere deflerem mala, quæ patior.)

Finally, as a proof of my explanation, an anecdote may be given here which I take from the English journal The Herald of the 16th July 1836. A client, when he had heard his case set forth by his counsel in court, burst into a flood of tears, and cried, “I never knew I had suffered half so much till I heard it here to-day.”