1
WHEN the traveller, who had seen many countries
and nations and continents, was asked what common
attribute he had found everywhere existing among
men, he answered, "They have a tendency to sloth."
Many may think that the fuller truth would have
been, "They are all timid." They hide themselves
behind "manners" and "opinions." At bottom
every man knows well enough that he is a unique
being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary
chance will such a marvellously picturesque
piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put
together a second time. He knows this, but hides
it like an evil conscience;—and why? From fear
of his neighbour, who looks for the latest
conventionalities in him, and is wrapped up in them
himself. But what is it that forces the man to
fear his neighbour, to think and act with his herd,
and not seek his own joy? Shyness perhaps, in
a few rare cases, but in the majority it is idleness,
the "taking things easily," in a word the "tendency
to sloth," of which the traveller spoke. He was
right; men are more slothful than timid, and their
greatest fear is of the burdens that an
uncompromising honesty and nakedness of speech and
action would lay on them. It is only the artists
who hate this lazy wandering in borrowed manners
and ill-fitting opinions, and discover the secret of
the evil conscience, the truth that each human
being is a unique marvel. They show us, how in
every little movement of his muscles the man is
an individual self, and further—as an analytical
deduction from his individuality—a beautiful and
interesting object, a new and incredible phenomenon
(as is every work of nature), that can never become
tedious. If the great thinker despise mankind, it
is for their laziness; they seem mere indifferent
bits of pottery, not worth any commerce or
improvement. The man who will not belong to the
general mass, has only to stop "taking himself
easily"; to follow his conscience, which cries out
to him, "Be thyself! all that thou doest and
thinkest and desirest, is not thyself!"
Every youthful soul hears this cry day and night,
and quivers to hear it: for she divines the sum
of happiness that has been from eternity destined
for her, if she think of her true deliverance; and
towards this happiness she can in no wise be
helped, so long as she lies in the chains of Opinion
and of Fear. And how comfortless and unmeaning
may life become without this deliverance! There
is no more desolate or Ishmaelitish creature in nature
than the man who has broken away from his true
genius, and does nothing but peer aimlessly about
him. There is no reason to attack such a man at
all, for he is a mere husk without a kernel, a
painted cloth, tattered and sagging, a scarecrow
ghost, that can rouse no fear, and certainly no pity.
And though one be right in saying of a sluggard
that he is "killing time" yet in respect of an age
that rests its salvation on public opinion,—that is,
on private laziness,—one must be quite determined
that such a time shall be "killed," once and for all:
I mean that it shall be blotted from life's true
History of Liberty. Later generations will be
greatly disgusted, when they come to treat the
movements of a period in which no living men ruled,
but shadow-men on the screen of public opinion;
and to some far posterity our age may well be
the darkest chapter of history, the most unknown
because the least human. I have walked through
the new streets of our cities, and thought how of
all the dreadful houses that these gentlemen with
their public opinion have built for themselves, not
a stone will remain in a hundred years, and that
the opinions of these busy masons may well have
fallen with them. But how full of hope should
they all be who feel that they are no citizens of
this age! If they were, they would have to help
on the work of "killing their time," and of
perishing with it,—when they wish rather to quicken the
time to life, and in that life themselves to live.
But even if the future leave us nothing to hope
for, the wonderful fact of our existing at this
present moment of time gives us the greatest
encouragement to live after our own rule and measure;
so inexplicable is it, that we should be living just
to-day, though there have been an infinity of time
wherein we might have arisen; that we own
nothing but a span's length of it, this "to-day"
and must show in it wherefore and whereunto we
have arisen. We have to answer for our existence
to ourselves; and will therefore be our own true
pilots, and not admit that our being resembles a
blind fortuity. One must take a rather impudent
and reckless way with the riddle; especially as the
key is apt to be lost, however things turn out. Why
cling to your bit of earth, or your little business,
or listen to what your neighbour says? It is so
provincial to bind oneself to views which are no
longer binding a couple of hundred miles away.
East and West are signs that somebody chalks up
in front of us to fool such cowards as we are. "I
will make the attempt to gain freedom," says the
youthful soul; and will be hindered, just because
two nations happen to hate each other and go to
war, or because there is a sea between two parts
of the earth, or a religion is taught in the vicinity,
which did not exist two thousand years ago. "And
this is not—thyself," the soul says. "No one can
build thee the bridge, over which thou must cross
the river of life, save thyself alone. There are paths
and bridges and demi-gods without number, that
will gladly carry thee over, but only at the price
of thine own self: thy self wouldst thou have to
give in pawn, and then lose it. There is in the
world one road whereon none may go, except thou:
ask not whither it lead, but go forward. Who was
it that spake that true word—'A man has never
risen higher than when he knoweth not whither his
road may yet lead him'?"
But how can we "find ourselves" again, and how
can man "know himself"? He is a thing obscure
and veiled: if the hare have seven skins, man can
cast from him seventy times seven, and yet will
not be able to say "Here art thou in very truth;
this is outer shell no more." Also this digging
into one's self, this straight, violent descent into the
pit of one's being, is a troublesome and dangerous
business to start. A man may easily take such
hurt, that no physician can heal him. And again,
what were the use, since everything bears witness
to our essence,—our friendships and enmities, our
looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses,
our books and our writing! This is the
most effective way: to let the youthful soul look
back on life with the question, "What hast thou
up to now truly loved, what has drawn thy soul
upward, mastered it and blessed it too?" Set up
these things that thou hast honoured before thee,
and, maybe, they will show thee, in their being
and their order, a law which is the fundamental
law of thine own self. Compare these objects,
consider how one completes and broadens and
transcends and explains another, how they form
a ladder on which thou hast all the time been
climbing to thy self: for thy true being lies not
deeply hidden in thee, but an infinite height above
thee, or at least above that which thou dost
commonly take to be thyself. The true educators
and moulders reveal to thee the real groundwork
and import of thy being, something that in itself
cannot be moulded or educated, but is anyhow
difficult of approach, bound and crippled: thy
educators can be nothing but thy deliverers. And
that is the secret of all culture: it does not give
artificial limbs, wax noses, or spectacles for the
eyes—a thing that could buy such gifts is but
the base coin of education. But it is rather a
liberation, a removal of all the weeds and rubbish and
vermin that attack the delicate shoots, the streaming
forth of light and warmth, the tender dropping
of the night rain; it is the following and the
adoring of Nature when she is pitifully-minded as
a mother;—her completion, when it bends before
her fierce and ruthless blasts and turns them to
good, and draws a veil over all expression of her
tragic unreason—for she is a step-mother too, sometimes.
There are other means of "finding ourselves," of
coming to ourselves out of the confusion wherein
we all wander as in a dreary cloud; but I know
none better than to think on our educators. So
I will to-day take as my theme the hard teacher
Arthur Schopenhauer, and speak of others later.
2
In order to describe properly what an event my
first look into Schopenhauer's writings was for me, I
must dwell for a minute on an idea, that recurred
more constantly in my youth, and touched me more
nearly, than any other. I wandered then as I
pleased in a world of wishes, and thought that
destiny would relieve me of the dreadful and
wearisome duty of educating myself: some
philosopher would come at the right moment to do it
for me,—some true philosopher, who could be
obeyed without further question, as he would be
trusted more than one's self. Then I said within
me: "What would be the principles, on which he
might teach thee? "And I pondered in my mind
what he would say to the two maxims of education
that hold the field in our time. The first demands
that the teacher should find out at once the strong
point in his pupil, and then direct all his skill and
will, all the moisture and all the sunshine, to bring
the fruit of that single virtue to maturity. The
second requires him to raise to a higher power all
the qualities that already exist, cherish them and
bring them into a harmonious relation. But, we
may ask, should one who has a decided talent for
working in gold be made for that reason to learn
music? And can we admit that Benvenuto Cellini's
father was right in continually forcing
him back to the "dear little horn"—the "cursed
piping," as his son called it? We cannot think so
in the case of such a strong and clearly marked
talent as his, and it may well be that this maxim
of harmonious development applies only to weaker
natures, in which there is a whole swarm of desires
and inclinations, though they may not amount to
very much, singly or together. On the other hand,
where do we find such a blending of harmonious
voices—nay, the soul of harmony itself—as we
see in natures like Cellini's, where
everything—knowledge, desire, love and hate—tends towards a
single point, the root of all, and a harmonious
system, the resultant of the various forces, is built
up through the irresistible domination of this vital
centre? And so perhaps the two maxims are not
contrary at all: the one merely saying that man
must have a centre, the other, a circumference as
well. The philosophic teacher of my dream would
not only discover the central force, but would know
how to prevent its being destructive of the other
powers: his task, I thought, would be the welding
of the whole man into a solar system with life and
movement, and the discovery of its paraphysical
laws.
In the meantime I could not find my philosopher,
however I tried; I saw how badly we moderns
compare with the Greeks and Romans, even in the
serious study of educational problems. You can
go through all Germany, and especially all the
universities, with this need in your heart, and will
not find what you seek; many humbler wishes
than that are still unfulfilled there. For example,
if a German seriously wish to make himself an
orator, or to enter a "school for authors," he will
find neither master nor school: no one yet seems
to have thought that speaking and writing are arts
which cannot be learnt without the most careful
method and untiring application. But, to their
shame, nothing shows more clearly the insolent
self-satisfaction of our people than the lack of
demand for educators; it comes partly from
meanness, partly from want of thought. Anything will
do as a so-called "family tutor," even among our
most eminent and cultured people: and what a
menagerie of crazy heads and mouldy devices
mostly go to make up the belauded Gymnasium!
And consider what we are satisfied with in our
finishing schools,—our universities. Look at our
professors and their institutions! And compare
the difficulty of the task of educating a man to be
a man! Above all, the wonderful way in which
the German savants fall to their dish of knowledge,
shows that they are thinking more of Science than
mankind; and they are trained to lead a forlorn
hope in her service, in order to encourage ever
new generations to the same sacrifice. If their
traffic with knowledge be not limited and controlled
by any more general principles of education, but
allowed to run on indefinitely,—"the more the
better,"—it is as harmful to learning as the
economic theory of laisser faire to common
morality. No one recognises now that the
education of the professors is an exceedingly difficult
problem, if their humanity is not to be sacrificed
or shrivelled up:—this difficulty can be actually
seen in countless examples of natures warped and
twisted by their reckless and premature devotion to
science. There is a still more important testimony
to the complete absence of higher education,
pointing to a greater and more universal danger.
It is clear at once why an orator or writer cannot
now be educated,—because there are no teachers;
and why a savant must be a distorted and perverted
thing,—because he will have been trained by the
inhuman abstraction, science. This being so, let a
man ask himself: "Where are now the types of
moral excellence and fame for all our
generation—learned and unlearned, high and low—the visible
abstract of constructive ethics for this age? Where
has vanished all the reflection on moral questions
that has occupied every great developed society at
all epochs?" There is no fame for that now, and
there are none to reflect: we are really drawing on
the inherited moral capital which our predecessors
accumulated for us, and which we do not know
how to increase, but only to squander. Such things
are either not mentioned in our society, or, if at all,
with a naive want of personal experience that
makes one disgusted. It comes to this, that our
schools and professors simply turn aside from any
moral instruction or content themselves with
formulae; virtue is a word and nothing more, on
both sides, an old-fashioned word that they laugh
at—and it is worse when they do not laugh, for
then they are hypocrites.
An explanation of this faint-heartedness and
ebbing of all moral strength would be difficult and
complex: but whoever is considering the influence
of Christianity in its hour of victory on the
morality of the mediaeval world, must not forget
that it reacts also in its defeat, which is apparently
its position to-day. By its lofty ideal, Christianity
has outbidden the ancient Systems of Ethics and
their invariable naturalism, with which men came
to feel a dull disgust: and afterwards when they
did reach the knowledge of what was better and
higher, they found they had no longer the power,
for all their desire, to return to its embodiment in
the antique virtues. And so the life of the modern
man is passed in see-sawing between Christianity
and Paganism, between a furtive or hypocritical
approach to Christian morality, and an equally shy
and spiritless dallying with the antique: and he
does not thrive under it. His inherited fear of
naturalism, and its more recent attraction for him,
his desire to come to rest somewhere, while in the
impotence of his intellect he swings backwards and
forwards between the "good" and the "better"
course—all this argues an instability in the modern
mind that condemns it to be without joy or fruit.
Never were moral teachers more necessary and never
were they more unlikely to be found: physicians
are most in danger themselves in times when they
are most needed and many men are sick. For
where are our modern physicians who are strong
and sure-footed enough to hold up another or lead
him by the hand? There lies a certain heavy
gloom on the best men of our time, an eternal
loathing for the battle that is fought in their hearts
between honesty and lies, a wavering of trust in
themselves, which makes them quite incapable of
showing to others the way they must go.
So I was right in speaking of my "wandering in
a world of wishes" when I dreamt of finding a
true philosopher who could lift me from the slough
of insufficiency, and teach me again simply and
honestly—to be in my thoughts and life, in the
deepest sense of the word, "out of season"; simply
and honestly for men have now become such
complicated machines that they must be dishonest,
if they speak at all, or wish to act on their words.
With such needs and desires within me did I
come to know Schopenhauer.
I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who
know perfectly well, after they have turned the
first page, that they will read all the others, and
listen to every word that he has spoken. My trust
in him sprang to life at once, and has been the same
for nine years. I understood him as though he
had written for me (this is the most intelligible,
though a rather foolish and conceited way of
expressing it). Hence I never found a paradox
in him, though occasionally some small errors:
for paradoxes are only assertions that carry no
conviction, because the author has made them
himself without any conviction, wishing to appear
brilliant, or to mislead, or, above all, to pose.
Schopenhauer never poses: he writes for himself,
and no one likes to be deceived—least of all a
philosopher who has set this up as his law:
"deceive nobody, not even thyself," neither with
the "white lies" of all social intercourse, which
writers almost unconsciously imitate, still less
with the more conscious deceits of the platform,
and the artificial methods of rhetoric.
Schopenhauer's speeches are to himself alone; or if you
like to imagine an auditor, let it be a son whom
the father is instructing. It is a rough, honest,
good-humoured talk to one who "hears and loves."
Such writers are rare. His strength and sanity
surround us at the first sound of his voice: it is
like entering the heights of the forest, where we
breathe deep and are well again. We feel a
bracing air everywhere, a certain candour and
naturalness of his own, that belongs to men who
are at home with themselves, and masters of a
very rich home indeed: he is quite different from
the writers who are surprised at themselves if they
have said something intelligent, and whose
pronouncements for that reason have something
nervous and unnatural about them. We are just
as little reminded in Schopenhauer of the
professor with his stiff joints worse for want of
exercise, his narrow chest and scraggy figure, his
slinking or strutting gait. And again his rough
and rather grim soul leads us not so much to
miss as to despise the suppleness and courtly
grace of the excellent Frenchmen; and no one
will find in him the gilded imitations of
pseudo-gallicism that our German writers prize so highly.
His style in places reminds me a little of Goethe,
but is not otherwise on any German model. For
he knows how to be profound with simplicity,
striking without rhetoric, and severely logical
without pedantry: and of what German could he
have learnt that? He also keeps free from the
hair-splitting, jerky and (with all respect) rather
un-German manner of Lessing: no small merit
in him, for Lessing is the most tempting of all
models for prose style. The highest praise I can
give his manner of presentation is to apply his
own phrase to himself:—"A philosopher must be
very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry
or rhetoric." That honesty is something, and even
a virtue, is one of those private opinions which are
forbidden in this age of public opinion; and so I
shall not be praising Schopenhauer, but only giving
him a distinguishing mark, when I repeat that he
is honest, even as a writer: so few of them are
that we are apt to mistrust every one who writes
at all. I only know a single author that I can
rank with Schopenhauer, or even above him, in
the matter of honesty; and that is Montaigne.
The joy of living on this earth is increased by the
existence of such a man. The effect on myself,
at any rate, since my first acquaintance with that
strong and masterful spirit, has been, that I can
say of him as he of Plutarch—"As soon as I open
him, I seem to grow a pair of wings." If I had
the task of making myself at home on the earth,
I would choose him as my companion.
Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in
common with Montaigne, besides honesty; a joy
that really makes others joyful. "Aliis laetus, sibi sapiens."
There are two very different kinds
of joyfulness. The true thinker always communicates
joy and life, whether he is showing his serious
or comic side, his human insight or his godlike
forbearance: without surly looks or trembling
hands or watery eyes, but simply and truly, with
fearlessness and strength, a little cavalierly perhaps,
and sternly, but always as a conqueror: and it is
this that brings the deepest and intensest joy, to
see the conquering god with all the monsters that
he has fought. But the joyfulness one finds here
and there in the mediocre writers and limited
thinkers makes some of us miserable; I felt this,
for example, with the "joyfulness" of David Strauss.
We are generally ashamed of such a quality in our
contemporaries, because they show the nakedness
of our time, and of the men in it, to posterity.
Such fils de joie do not see the sufferings and
the monsters, that they pretend, as philosophers,
to see and fight; and so their joy deceives us, and
we hate it; it tempts to the false belief that they
have gained some victory. At bottom there is
only joy where there is victory: and this applies
to true philosophy as much as to any work of art.
The contents may be forbidding and serious, as
the problem of existence always is; the work will
only prove tiresome and oppressive, if the slipshod
thinker and the dilettante have spread the mist of
their insufficiency over it: while nothing happier
or better can come to man's lot than to be near
one of those conquering spirits whose profound
thought has made them love what is most vital,
and whose wisdom has found its goal in beauty.
They really speak: they are no stammerers or
babblers; they live and move, and have no part
in the danse macabre of the rest of humanity.
And so in their company one feels a natural man
again, and could cry out with Goethe—"What a
wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature!
How fitted to his surroundings, how true, and real!"
I have been describing nothing but the first,
almost physiological, impression made upon me
by Schopenhauer, the magical emanation of inner
force from one plant of Nature to another, that
follows the slightest contact. Analysing it, I find
that this influence of Schopenhauer has three
elements, his honesty, his joy, and his consistency.
He is honest, as speaking and writing for himself
alone; joyful, because his thought has conquered
the greatest difficulties; consistent, because he
cannot help being so. His strength rises like a
flame in the calm air, straight up, without a
tremor or deviation. He finds his way, without
our noticing that he has been seeking it: so surely
and cleverly and inevitably does he run his course,
as if by some law of gravitation. If any one have
felt what it means to find, in our present world of
Centaurs and Chimaeras, a single-hearted
and unaffected child of nature who moves unconstrained
on his own road, he will understand my joy and
surprise in discovering Schopenhauer: I knew in
him the educator and philosopher I had so long
desired. Only, however, in his writings: which
was a great loss. All the more did I exert myself
to see behind the book the living man whose
testament it was, and who promised his inheritance
to such as could, and would, be more than his
readers—his pupils and his sons.
3
I get profit from a philosopher, just so far as he
can be an example to me. There is no doubt that
a man can draw whole nations after him by his
example; as is shown by Indian history, which is
practically the history of Indian philosophy. But
this example must exist in his outward life, not
merely in his books ; it must follow the way of the
Grecian philosophers, whose doctrine was in their
dress and bearing and general manner of life rather
than in their speech or writing. We have nothing
yet of this "breathing testimony" in German
philosophical life; the spirit has, apparently, long
completed its emancipation, while the flesh has hardly
begun; yet it is foolish to think that the spirit can
be really free and independent when this victory
over limitation—which is ultimately a formative
limiting of one's self—is not embodied anew in
every look and movement. Kant held to his
university, submitted to its regulations, and
belonged, as his colleagues and students thought, to
a definite religious faith: and naturally his example
has produced, above all, University professors of
philosophy. Schopenhauer makes small account
of the learned tribe, keeps himself exclusive, and
cultivates an independence from state and society
as his ideal, to escape the chains of circumstance
here : that is his value to us. Many steps in the
enfranchisement of the philosopher are unknown
in Germany; they cannot always remain so. Our
artists live more bravely and honourably than our
philosophers; and Richard Wagner, the best
example of all, shows how genius need not fear a
fight to the death with the established forms and
ordinances, if we wish to bring the higher truth
and order, that lives in him, to the light. The
"truth," however, of which we hear so much from
our professors, seems to be a far more modest
being, and no kind of disturbance is to be feared
from her; she is an easy-going and pleasant
creature, who is continually assuring the powers
that be that no one need fear any trouble from
her quarter: for man is only "pure reason." And
therefore I will say, that philosophy in Germany
has more and more to learn not to be "pure
reason": and it may well take as its model
"Schopenhauer the man."
It is no less than a marvel that he should have
come to be this human kind of example: for he
was beset, within and without, by the most frightful
dangers, that would have crushed and broken a
weaker nature. I think there was a strong
likelihood of Schopenhauer the man going under, and
leaving at best a residue of "pure reason": and
only "at best"—it was more probable that neither
man nor reason would survive.
A modern Englishman sketches the most usual
danger to extraordinary men who live in a society
that worships the ordinary, in this manner:—"Such
uncommon characters are first cowed, then become
sick and melancholy, and then die. A Shelley
could never have lived in England: a race of
Shelleys would have been impossible." Our
Hölderlins and Kleists
were undone by their unconventionality, and were not strong enough for
the climate of the so-called German culture; and
only iron natures like Beethoven, Goethe, Schopenhauer
and Wagner could hold out against it. Even
in them the effect of this weary toiling and
moiling is seen in many lines and wrinkles; their
breathing is harder and their voice is forced. The
old diplomatist who had only just seen and spoken
to Goethe, said to a friend—"Voilà un homme qui a eu de grands chagrins!"
which Goethe translated to mean "That is a man who has taken great pains
in his life." And he adds, "If the trace of the
sorrow and activity we have gone through cannot
be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that
all that survives of us and our struggles should
bear the same impress." And this is the Goethe
to whom our cultured Philistines point as the
happiest of Germans, that they may prove their
thesis, that it must be possible to be happy among
them—with the unexpressed corollary that no one
can be pardoned for feeling unhappy and lonely
among them. Hence they push their doctrine, in
practice, to its merciless conclusion, that there is
always a secret guilt in isolation. Poor
Schopenhauer had this secret guilt too in his heart, the
guilt of cherishing his philosophy more than his
fellow-men; and he was so unhappy as to have
learnt from Goethe that he must defend his
philosophy at all costs from the neglect of his
contemporaries, to save its very existence: for there is a
kind of Grand Inquisitor's Censure in which the
Germans, according to Goethe, are great adepts:
it is called—inviolable silence. This much at least
was accomplished by it; the greater part of the
first edition of Schopenhauer's masterpiece had to
be turned into waste paper. The imminent risk that
his great work would be undone, merely by neglect,
bred in him a state of unrest—perilous and
uncontrollable;—for no single adherent of any note
presented himself. It is tragic to watch his search
for any evidence of recognition: and his piercing
cry of triumph at last, that he would now really be
read (legor et legar), touches us with a thrill of
pain. All the traits in which we do not see the
great philosopher show us the suffering man,
anxious for his noblest possessions; he was tortured
by the fear of losing his little property, and perhaps
of no longer being able to maintain in its purity
his truly antique attitude towards philosophy. He
often chose falsely in his desire to find real trust
and compassion in men, only to return with a heavy
heart to his faithful dog again. He was absolutely
alone, with no single friend of his own kind to
comfort him; and between one and none there lies
an infinity—as ever between something and
nothing. No one who has true friends knows what
real loneliness means, though he may have the
whole world in antagonism round him. Ah, I see
well ye do not know what isolation is! Whenever
there are great societies with governments and
religions and public opinions where there is a
tyranny, in short, there will the lonely philosopher
be hated: for philosophy offers an asylum to
mankind where no tyranny can penetrate, the inner
sanctuary, the centre of the heart's labyrinth: and
the tyrants are galled at it. Here do the lonely
men lie hid: but here too lurks their greatest
danger. These men who have saved their inner
freedom, must also live and be seen in the outer
world: they stand in countless human relations by
their birth, position, education and country, their
own circumstances and the importunity of others:
and so they are presumed to hold an immense
number of opinions, simply because these happen
to prevail: every look that is not a denial counts
as an assent, every motion of the hand that does
not destroy is regarded as an aid. These free and
lonely men know that they perpetually seem other
than they are. While they wish for nothing but
truth and honesty, they are in a net of
misunderstanding; and that ardent desire cannot prevent
a mist of false opinions, of adaptations and wrong
conclusions, of partial misapprehension and
intentional reticence, from gathering round their
actions, And there settles a cloud of melancholy
on their brows : for such natures hate the necessity
of pretence worse than death : and the continual
bitterness gives them a threatening and volcanic
character. They take revenge from time to time
for their forced concealment and self-restraint:
they issue from their dens with lowering looks:
their words and deeds are explosive, and may lead
to their own destruction. Schopenhauer lived
amid dangers of this sort. Such lonely men need
love, and friends, to whom they can be as open and
sincere as to themselves, and in whose presence the
deadening silence and hypocrisy may cease. Take
their friends away, and there is left an increasing
peril; Heinrich von Kleist was broken by the lack
of love, and the most terrible weapon against
unusual men is to drive them into themselves;
and then their issuing forth again is a volcanic
eruption. Yet there are always some demi-gods
who can bear life under these fearful conditions
and can be their conquerors: and if you would hear
their lonely chant, listen to the music of Beethoven.
So the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer
lived was—isolation. The second is called—doubting
of the truth. To this every thinker is
liable who sets out from the philosophy of Kant,
provided he be strong and sincere in his sorrows
and his desires, and not a mere tinkling
thought-box or calculating machine. We all know the
shameful state of things implied by this last
reservation, and I believe it is only a very few men
that Kant has so vitally affected as to change the
current of their blood. To judge from what one
reads, there must have been a revolution in every
domain of thought since the work of this unobtrusive
professor: I cannot believe it myself. For
I see men, though darkly, as themselves needing
to be revolutionised, before any "domains of
thought" can be so. In fact, we find the first
mark of any influence Kant may have had on the
popular mind, in a corrosive scepticism and
relativity. But it is only in noble and active
spirits who could never rest in doubt that the
shattering despair of truth itself could take the
place of doubt. This was, for example, the effect
of the Kantian philosophy on Heinrich von Kleist.
"It was only a short time ago," he writes in his
poignant way, "that I became acquainted with the
Kantian philosophy; and I will tell you my
thought, though I cannot fear that it will rack you
to your inmost soul, as it did me.—We cannot
decide, whether what we call truth is really truth,
or whether it only seems so to us. If the latter,
the truth that we amass here does not exist after
death, and all our struggle to gain a possession
that may follow us even to the grave is in vain.
If the blade of this thought do not cut your heart,
yet laugh not at another who feels himself wounded
by it in his Holy of Holies. My one highest aim
has vanished, and I have no more." Yes, when
will men feel again deeply as Kleist did, and learn
to measure a philosophy by what it means to the
"Holy of Holies"? And yet we must make this
estimate of what Schopenhauer can mean to us,
after Kant, as the first pioneer to bring us from
the heights of sceptical disillusionment or "critical"
renunciation, to the greater height of tragic
contemplation, the nocturnal heaven with its endless
crown of stars. His greatness is that he can stand
opposite the picture of life, and interpret it to us
as a whole: while all the clever people cannot
escape the error of thinking one comes nearer to
the interpretation by a laborious analysis of the
colours and material of the picture ; with the
confession, probably, that the texture of the canvas
is very complicated, and the chemical composition
of the colours undiscoverable. Schopenhauer knew
that one must guess the painter in order to
understand the picture. But now the whole learned
fraternity is engaged on understanding the colours
and canvas, and not the picture: and only he who
has kept the universal panorama of life and being
firmly before his eyes, will use the individual
sciences without harm to himself; for, without
this general view as a norm, they are threads that
lead nowhere and only confuse still more the maze
of our existence. Here we see, as I said, the
greatness of Schopenhauer, that he follows up
every idea, as Hamlet follows the Ghost, without
allowing himself to turn aside for a learned
digression, or be drawn away by the scholastic
abstractions of a rabid dialectic. The study of
the minute philosophers is only interesting for the
recognition that they have reached those stages
in the great edifice of philosophy where learned
disquisitions for and against, where hair-splitting
objections and counter-objections are the rule:
and for that reason they evade the demand of
every great philosophy to speak
sub specie aeternitatis—"this is the picture of the whole of
life: learn thence the meaning of thine own life."
And the converse: "read thine own life, and
understand thence the hieroglyphs of the universal
life." In this way must Schopenhauer's philosophy
always be interpreted ; as an individualist
philosophy, starting from the single man, in his
own nature, to gain an insight into his personal
miseries, and needs, and limitations, and find out
the remedies that will console them: namely, the
sacrifice of the ego, and its submission to the
nobler ends, especially those of justice and mercy.
He teaches us to distinguish between the true and
the apparent furtherance of man's happiness: how
neither the attainment of riches, nor honour, nor
learning, can raise the individual from his deep
despair at his unworthiness; and how the quest
for these good things can only have meaning
through a universal end that transcends and
explains them;—the gaining of power to aid our
physical nature by them and, as far as may be,
correct its folly and awkwardness. For one's self
only, in the first instance: and finally, through
one's self, for all. It is a task that leads to
scepticism: for there is so much to be made better yet,
in one and all!
Applying this to Schopenhauer himself, we
come to the third and most intimate danger in
which he lived, and which lay deep in the marrow
of his being. Every one is apt to discover a
limitation in himself, in his gifts of intellect as well
as his moral will, that fills him with yearning and
melancholy; and as he strives after holiness
through a consciousness of sin, so, as an intellectual
being, he has a deep longing after the "genius"
in himself. This is the root of all true culture;
and if we say this means the aspiration of man to
be "born again" as saint and genius, I know that
one need not be a Buddhist to understand the
myth. We feel a strong loathing when we find
talent without such aspiration, in the circle of the
learned, or among the so-called educated; for we
see that such men, with all their cleverness, are no
aid but a hindrance to the beginnings of culture
and the blossoming of genius, the aim of all
culture. There is a rigidity in them, parallel to
the cold arrogance of conventional virtue, which
also remains at the opposite pole to true holiness.
Schopenhauer's nature contained an extraordinarily
dangerous dualism. Few thinkers have felt
as he did the complete and unmistakable certainty
of genius within them; and his genius made him
the highest of all promises,—that there could be no
deeper furrow than that which he was ploughing
in the ground of the modern world. He knew one
half of his being to be fulfilled according to its
strength, with no other need; and he followed
with greatness and dignity his vocation of
consolidating his victory. In the other half there was
a gnawing aspiration, which we can understand,
when we hear that he turned away with a sad look
from the picture of Rancé,
the founder of the Trappists, with the words: "That is a matter of
grace." For genius evermore yearns after holiness
as it sees further and more clearly from its
watch-tower than other men, deep into the reconciliation
of Thought and Being, the kingdom of peace and
the denial of the will, and up to that other shore,
of which the Indians speak. The wonder is, that
Schopenhauer's nature should have been so
inconceivably stable and unshakable that it could
neither be destroyed nor petrified by this yearning.
Every one will understand this after the measure
of his own character and greatness: none of us will
understand it in the fulness of its meaning.
The more one considers these three dangers, the
more extraordinary will appear his vigour in
opposing them and his safety after the battle.
True, he gained many scars and open wounds:
and a cast of mind that may seem somewhat too
bitter and pugnacious. But his single ideal
transcends the highest humanity in him. Schopenhauer
stands as a pattern to men, in spite of all those
scars and scratches. We may even say, that what
was imperfect and "all too human" in him, brings
us nearer to him as a man, for we see a sufferer
and a kinsman to suffering, not merely a dweller
on the unattainable heights of genius.
These three constitutional dangers that
threatened Schopenhauer, threaten us all. Each one
of us bears a creative solitude within himself,
and his consciousness of it forms an exotic aura of
strangeness round him. Most men cannot endure
it, because they are slothful, as I said, and because
their solitude hangs round them a chain of troubles
and burdens. No doubt, for the man with this
heavy chain, life loses almost everything that one
desires from it in youth—joy, safety, honour: his
fellow-men pay him his due of—isolation! The
wilderness and the cave are about him, wherever
he may live. He must look to it that he be not
enslaved and oppressed, and become melancholy
thereby. And let him surround himself with the
pictures of good and brave fighters such as
Schopenhauer.
The second danger, too, is not rare. Here and
there we find one dowered by nature with a keen
vision ; his thoughts dance gladly in the witches'
Sabbath of dialectic; and if he uncautiously give
his talent the rein, it is easy to lose all humanity
and live a ghostly life in the realm of "pure
reason": or through the constant search for the
"pros and cons" of things, he may go astray from
the truth and live without courage or confidence,
in doubt, denial and discontent, and the slender
hope that waits on disillusion: "No dog could live
long thus!"
The third danger is a moral or intellectual
hardening: man breaks the bond that united him
to his ideal: he ceases to be fruitful and reproduce
himself in this or that province, and becomes an
enemy or a parasite of culture. The solitude of
his being has become an indivisible, unrelated
atom, an icy stone. And one can perish of this
solitude as well as of the fear of it, of one's self as
well as one's self-sacrifice, of both aspiration and
petrifaction: and to live is ever to be in danger.
Beside these dangers to which Schopenhauer
would have been constitutionally liable, in whatever
century he had lived, there were also some produced
by his own time; and it is essential to distinguish
between these two kinds, in order to grasp the
typical and formative elements in his nature. The
philosopher casts his eye over existence, and wishes
to give it a new standard value; for it has been
the peculiar task of all great thinkers to be
law-givers for the weight and stamp in the mint of
reality. And his task will be hindered if the men
he sees near him be a weakly and worm-eaten
growth. To be correct in his calculation of
existence, the unworthiness of the present time
must be a very small item in the addition. The
study of ancient or foreign history is valuable, if
at all, for a correct judgment on the whole destiny
of man; which must be drawn not only from an
average estimate but from a comparison of the
highest destinies that can befall individuals or
nations. The present is too much with us; it
directs the vision even against the philosopher's
will: and it will inevitably be reckoned too high
in the final sum. And so he must put a low figure
on his own time as against others, and suppress
the present in his picture of life, as well as in
himself; must put it into the background or paint
it over; a difficult, and almost impossible task.
The judgment of the ancient Greek philosophers
on the value of existence means so much more
than our own, because they had the full bloom of
life itself before them, and their vision was
untroubled by any felt dualism between their wish
for freedom and beauty on the grand scale, and
their search after truth, with its single question
"What is the real worth of life? "Empedocles lived
when Greek culture was full to overflowing with
the joy of life, and all ages may take profit from
his words; especially as no other great philosopher
of that great time ventured to contradict them.
Empedocles is only the clearest voice among
them—they all say the same thing, if a man will but
open his ears. A modern thinker is always in the
throes of an unfulfilled desire; he is looking for
life,—warm, red life,—that he may pass judgment
on it: at any rate he will think it necessary to be
a living man himself, before he can believe in his
power of judging. And this is the title of the
modern philosophers to sit among the great aiders
of Life (or rather of the will to live), and the reason
why they can look from their own out-wearied
time and aspire to a truer culture, and a clearer
explanation. Their yearning is, however, their
danger; the reformer in them struggles with the
critical philosopher. And whichever way the
victory incline, it also implies a defeat. How was
Schopenhauer to escape this danger ?
We like to consider the great man as the noble
child of his age, who feels its defects more strongly
and intimately than the smaller men: and therefore
the struggle of the great man against his age is
apparently nothing but a mad fight to the death
with himself. Only apparently, however: he only
fights the elements in his time that hinder his own
greatness, in other words his own freedom and
sincerity. And so, at bottom, he is only an enemy
to that element which is not truly himself, the
irreconcilable antagonism of the temporal and
eternal in him. The supposed "child of his age"
proves to be but a step-child. From boyhood
Schopenhauer strove with his time, a false and
unworthy mother to him, and as soon as he had
banished her, he could bring back his being to its
native health and purity. For this very reason we
can use his writings as mirrors of his time; it is no
fault of the mirror if everything contemporary
appear in it stricken by a ravaging disease, pale
and thin, with tired looks and hollow eyes,—the
step-child's sorrow made visible. The yearning
for natural strength, for a healthy and simple
humanity, was a yearning for himself: and as soon
as he had conquered his time within him, he was
face to face with his own genius. The secret of
nature's being and his own lay open, the
step-mother's plot to conceal his genius from him was
foiled. And now he could turn a fearless eye
towards the question, "What is the real worth of
life?" without having any more to weigh a
bloodless and chaotic age of doubt and hypocrisy. He
knew that there was something higher and purer
to be won on this earth than the life of his time,
and a man does bitter wrong to existence who
only knows it and criticises it in this hateful form.
Genius, itself the highest product of life, is now
summoned to justify life, if it can: the noble
creative soul must answer the question:—"Dost
thou in thy heart say 'Yea!' unto this existence?
Is it enough for thee? Wilt thou be its advocate
and its redeemer? One true 'Yea' from thy lips,
and the sorely accused life shall go free." How
shall he answer? In the words of Empedocles.
4
The last hint may well remain obscure for a
time: I have something more easy to explain,
namely how Schopenhauer can help us to educate
ourselves in opposition to our age, since we have
the advantage of really knowing our age, through
him;—if it be an advantage! It may be no longer
possible in a couple, of hundred years. I
sometimes amuse myself with the idea that men may
soon grow tired of books and their authors, and
the savant of to-morrow come to leave directions
in his will that his body be burned in the midst of
his books, including of course his own writings.
And in the gradual clearing of the forests, might
not our libraries be very reasonably used for straw
and brushwood? Most books are born from the
smoke and vapour of the brain: and to vapour and
smoke may they well return. For having no fire
within themselves, they shall be visited with fire.
And possibly to a later century our own may count
as the "Dark age," because our productions heated
the furnace hotter and more continuously than
ever before. We are anyhow happy that we can
learn to know our time; and if there be any sense
in busying ourselves with our time at all, we may
as well do it as thoroughly as we can, so that no
one may have any doubt about it. The possibility
of this we owe to Schopenhauer.
Our happiness would of course be infinitely
greater, if our inquiry showed that nothing so
hopeful and splendid as our present epoch had
ever existed. There are simple people in some
corner of the earth to-day—perhaps in Germany—who
are disposed to believe in all seriousness that
the world was put right two years ago,
and that all stern and gloomy views of life are now
contradicted by "facts." The foundation of the New
German Empire is, to them, the decisive blow that
annihilates all the "pessimistic" philosophers,—no
doubt of it. To judge the philosopher's
significance in our time, as an educator, we must oppose
a widespread view like this, especially common in
our universities. We must say, it is a shameful
thing that such abominable flattery of the
Time-Fetish should be uttered by a herd of so-called
reflective and honourable men; it is a proof that
we no longer see how far the seriousness of
philosophy is removed from that of a newspaper.
Such men have lost the last remnant of feeling, not
only for philosophy, but also for religion, and have
put in its place a spirit not so much of optimism as
of journalism, the evil spirit that broods over the
day—and the daily paper. Every philosophy that
believes the problem of existence to be shelved,
or even solved, by a political event, is a sham
philosophy. There have been innumerable states
founded since the beginning of the world; that is
an old story. How should a political innovation
manage once and for all to make a contented race
of the dwellers on this earth? If any one believe
in his heart that this is possible, he should report
himself to our authorities : he really deserves to be
Professor of Philosophy in a German university,
like Harms in Berlin, Jürgen Meyer in Bonn, and
Carriere in Munich.
We are feeling the consequences of the doctrine,
preached lately from all the housetops, that the
state is the highest end of man and there is no
higher duty than to serve it: I regard this not a
relapse into paganism, but into stupidity. A man
who thinks state-service to be his highest duty,
very possibly knows no higher one; yet there are
both men and duties in a region beyond,—and one
of these duties, that seems to me at least of higher
value than state-service, is to destroy stupidity in
all its forms—and this particular stupidity among
them. And I have to do with a class of men
whose teleological conceptions extend further than
the well-being of a state, I mean with philosophers—and
only with them in their relation to the world
of culture, which is again almost independent of the
"good of the state." Of the many links that make
up the twisted chain of humanity, some are of gold
and others of pewter.
How does the philosopher of our time regard
culture? Quite differently, I assure you, from the
professors who are so content with their new state.
He seems to see the symptoms of an absolute
uprooting of culture in the increasing rush and
hurry of life, and the decay of all reflection and
simplicity. The waters of religion are ebbing, and
leaving swamps or stagnant pools : the nations are
drawing away in enmity again, and long to tear
each other in pieces. The sciences, blindly driving
along, on a laisser faire system, without a
common standard, are splitting up, and losing hold
of every firm principle. The educated classes are
being swept along in the contemptible struggle for
wealth. Never was the world more worldly, never
poorer in goodness and love. Men of learning are
no longer beacons or sanctuaries in the midst of
this turmoil of worldliness; they themselves are
daily becoming more restless, thoughtless, loveless.
Everything bows before the coming barbarism, art
and science included. The educated men have
degenerated into the greatest foes of education, for
they will deny the universal sickness and hinder
the physician. They become peevish, these poor
nerveless creatures, if one speak of their weakness
and combat the shameful spirit of lies in them.
They would gladly make one believe that they
have outstripped all the centuries, and they walk
with a pretence of happiness which has something
pathetic about it, because their happiness is so
inconceivable. One would not even ask them, as
Tannhäuser did Biterolf, "What hast thou, poor
wretch, enjoyed!" For, alas! we know far better
ourselves, in another way. There is a wintry sky
over us, and we dwell on a high mountain, in
danger and in need. Short-lived is all our joy,
and the sun's rays strike palely on our white
mountains. Music is heard; an old man grinds
an organ, and the dancers whirl round, and the
heart of the wanderer is shaken within him to see
it: everything is so disordered, so drab, so
hopeless. Even now there is a sound of joy, of clear
thoughtless joy! but soon the mist of evening
closes round, the note dies away, and the wanderer's
footsteps are heard on the gravel; as far as his
eye can reach there is nothing but the grim and
desolate face of nature.
It may be one-sided, to insist only on the blurred
lines and the dull colours in the picture of modern
life: yet the other side is no more encouraging,
it is only more disturbing. There is certainly
strength there, enormous strength; but it is wild,
primitive and merciless. One looks on with a
chill expectancy, as though into the caldron of a
witch's kitchen; every moment there may arise
sparks and vapour, to herald some fearful
apparition. For a century we have been ready for a
world-shaking convulsion; and though we have
lately been trying to set the conservative strength
of the so-called national state against the great
modern tendency to volcanic destructiveness, it
will only be, for a long time yet, an aggravation
of the universal unrest that hangs over us. We
need not be deceived by individuals behaving as if
they knew nothing of all this anxiety: their own
restlessness shows how well they know it. They
think more exclusively of themselves than men
ever thought before; they plant and build for their
little day, and the chase for happiness is never
greater than when the quarry must be caught
to-day or to-morrow: the next day perhaps there is
no more hunting. We live in the Atomic Age, or
rather in the Atomic Chaos. The opposing forces
were practically held together in mediaeval times
by the Church, and in some measure assimilated
by the strong pressure which she exerted. When
the common tie broke and the pressure relaxed,
they rose once more against each other. The
Reformation taught that many things were
"adiaphora"—departments that needed no guidance
from religion: this was the price paid for its
own existence. Christianity paid a similar one to
guard itself against the far more religious antiquity:
and laid the seeds of discord at once. Everything
nowadays is directed by the fools and the knaves,
the selfishness of the money-makers and the brute
forces of militarism. The state in their hands
makes a good show of reorganising everything,
and of becoming the bond that unites the warring
elements; in other words, it wishes for the same
idolatry from mankind as they showed to the
Church.
And we shall yet feel the consequences. We
are even now on the ice-floes in the stream of the
Middle Ages : they are thawing fast, and their
movement is ominous : the banks are flooded, and
giving way. The revolution, the atomistic
revolution, is inevitable: but what are those smallest
indivisible elements of human society?
There is surely far more danger to mankind in
transitional periods like these than in the actual
time of revolution and chaos; they are tortured
by waiting, and snatch greedily at every moment;
and this breeds all kinds of cowardice and
selfishness in them: whereas the true feeling of a great
and universal need ever inspires men, and makes
them better. In the midst of such dangers, who
will provide the guardians and champions for
Humanity, for the holy and inviolate treasure that
has been laid up in the temples, little by little, by
countless generations? Who will set up again
the Image of Man, when men in their selfishness
and terror see nothing but the trail of the serpent
or the cur in them, and have fallen from their high
estate to that of the brute or the automaton?
There are three Images of Man fashioned by our
modern time, which for a long while yet will urge
mortal men to transfigure their own lives; they
are the men of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schopenhauer.
The first has the greatest fire, and is most
calculated to impress the people: the second is
only for the few, for those contemplative natures
"in the grand style" who are misunderstood by
the crowd. The third demands the highest activity
in those who will follow it: only such men will
look on that image without harm, for it breaks
the spirit of that merely contemplative man, and
the rabble shudder at it. From the first has come
forth a strength that led and still leads to fearful
revolution: for in all socialistic upheavals it is ever
Rousseau's man who is the Typhoeus under the
Etna. Oppressed and half crushed to death by
the pride of caste and the pitilessness of wealth,
spoilt by priests and bad education, a laughing-stock
even to himself, man cries in his need on
"holy mother Nature," and feels suddenly that she
is as far from him as any god of the Epicureans.
His prayers do not reach her; so deeply sunk is
he in the Chaos of the unnatural. He contemptuously
throws aside all the finery that seemed his
truest humanity a little while ago—all his arts
and sciences, all the refinements of his life,—he
beats with his fists against the walls, in whose
shadow he has degenerated, and goes forth to seek
the light and the sun, the forest and the crag.
And crying out, "Nature alone is good, the natural
man alone is human," he despises himself and
aspires beyond himself: a state wherein the soul
is ready for a fearful resolve, but calls the noble
and the rare as well from their utter depths.
Goethe's man is no such threatening force; in
a certain sense he is a corrective and a sedative to
those dangerous agitations of which Rousseau's
man is a prey. Goethe himself in his youth
followed the "gospel of kindly Nature" with all
the ardour of his soul: his Faust was the highest
and boldest picture of Rousseau's man, so far at
any rate as his hunger for life, his discontent and
yearning, his intercourse with the demons of the
heart could be represented. But what comes from
these congregated storm-clouds? Not a single
lightning flash! And here begins the new Image
of man the man according to Goethe. One
might have thought that Faust would have lived
a continual life of suffering, as a revolutionary and
a deliverer, as the negative force that proceeds
from goodness, as the genius of ruin, alike religious
and daemonic, in opposition to his utterly
un-daemonic companion ; though of course he could
not be free of this companion, and had at once to
use and despise his evil and destructive scepticism—which
is the tragic destiny of all revolutionary
deliverers. One is wrong, however, to expect
anything of the sort: Goethe's man here parts
company with Rousseau's; for he hates all violence,
all sudden transition that is, all action: and the
universal deliverer becomes merely the universal
traveller. All the riches of life and nature, all
antiquity—arts, mythologies and sciences—pass
before his eager eyes, his deepest desires are
aroused and satisfied, Helen herself can hold him
no more and the moment must come for which
his mocking companion is waiting. At a fair spot
on the earth, his flight comes to an end: his pinions
drop, and Mephistopheles is at his side. When
the German ceases to be Faust, there is no danger
greater than of becoming a Philistine and falling
into the hands of the devil—heavenly powers alone
can save him. Goethe's man is, as I said, the
contemplative man in the grand style, who is only
kept from dying of ennui by feeding on all the
great and memorable things that have ever existed,
and by living from desire to desire. He is not the
active man; and when he does take a place among
active men, as things are, you may be sure that no
good will come of it (think, for example, of the zeal
with which Goethe wrote for the stage!); and
further, you may be sure that "things as they are"
will suffer no change. Goethe's man is a
conciliatory and conservative spirit, though in danger
of degenerating into a Philistine, just as Rousseau's
man may easily become a Catiline. All his virtues
would be the better by the addition of a little brute
force and elemental passion. Goethe appears to
have seen where the weakness and danger of his
creation lay, as is clear from Jarno's word to
Wilhelm Meister: "You are bitter and ill-tempered—which
is quite an excellent thing: if you could
once become really angry, it would be still better."
To speak plainly, it is necessary to become really
angry in order that things may be better. The
picture of Schopenhauer's man can help us here.
Schopenhauer's man voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth:
this pain serves to quench his individual will and make him ready for
the complete transformation of his being, which it
is the inner meaning of life to realise. This openness
in him appears to other men to be an effect
of malice, for they think the preservation of their
shifts and pretences to be the first duty of humanity,
and any one who destroys their playthings to be
merely malicious. They are tempted to cry out to
such a man, in Faust's words to Mephistopheles:—
"So to the active and eternal
Creative force, in cold disdain
You now oppose the fist infernal"—
and he who would live according to Schopenhauer
would seem to be more like a Mephistopheles than
a Faust—that is, to our weak modern eyes, which
always discover signs of malice in any negation.
But there is a kind of denial and destruction that
is the effect of that strong aspiration after holiness
and deliverance, which Schopenhauer was the first
philosopher to teach our profane and worldly
generation. Everything that can be denied, deserves to
be denied; and real sincerity means the belief in
a state of things which cannot be denied, or in
which there is no lie. The sincere man feels that
his activity has a metaphysical meaning. It can
only be explained by the laws of a different and
a higher life; it is in the deepest sense an
affirmation: even if everything that he does seem utterly
opposed to the laws of our present life. It must
lead therefore to constant suffering; but he knows,
as Meister Eckhard did, that "the quickest beast
that will carry you to perfection is suffering."
Every one, I should think, who has such an ideal
before him, must feel a wider sympathy; and he
will have a burning desire to become a
"Schopenhauer man";—pure and wonderfully patient, on
his intellectual side full of a devouring fire, and
far removed from the cold and contemptuous
"neutrality" of the so-called scientific man; so
high above any warped and morose outlook on
life as to offer himself as the first victim of the
truth he has won, with a deep consciousness of the
sufferings that must spring from his sincerity.
His courage will destroy his happiness on earth,
he must be an enemy to the men he loves and
the institutions in which he grew up, he must spare
neither person nor thing, however it may hurt him,
he will be misunderstood and thought an ally of
forces that he abhors, in his search for righteousness
he will seem unrighteous by human standards:
but he must comfort himself with the words that
his teacher Schopenhauer once used: "A happy
life is impossible, the highest thing that man can
aspire to is a heroic life; such as a man lives, who
is always fighting against unequal odds for the
good of others; and wins in the end without any
thanks. After the battle is over, he stands like
the Prince in the re corvo of Gozzi, with dignity
and nobility in his eyes, but turned to stone. His
memory remains, and will be reverenced as a
hero's; his will, that has been mortified all his life
by toiling and struggling, by evil payment and
ingratitude, is absorbed into Nirvana." Such a
heroic life, with its full "mortification"—corresponds
very little to the paltry ideas of the people
who talk most about it, and make festivals in
memory of great men, in the belief that a great
man is great in the sense that they are small,
either through exercise of his gifts to please himself
or by a blind mechanical obedience to this inner
force ; so that the man who does not possess the
gift or feel the compulsion has the same right to
be small as the other to be great. But "gift" and
"compulsion" are contemptible words, mere means
of escape from an inner voice, a slander on him
who has listened to the voice—the great man; he
least of all will allow himself to be given or
compelled to anything: for he knows as well as any
smaller man how easily life can be taken and how
soft the bed whereon he might lie if he went the
pleasant and conventional way with himself and
his fellow-creatures: all the regulations of mankind
are turned to the end that the intense feeling of
life may be lost in continual distractions. Now
why will he so strongly choose the opposite, and
try to feel life, which is the same as to suffer from
life? Because he sees that men will tempt him to
betray himself, and that there is a kind of agreement
to draw him from his den. He will prick
up his ears and gather himself together, and say,
"I will remain mine own." He gradually comes
to understand what a fearful decision it is. For
he must go down into the depths of being, with a
string of curious questions on his lips—"Why am
I alive? what lesson have I to learn from life?
how have I become what I am, and why do I
suffer in this existence?" He is troubled, and
sees that no one is troubled in the same way; but
rather that the hands of his fellow-men are
passionately stretched out towards the fantastic drama of
the political theatre, or they themselves are
treading the boards under many disguises, youths, men
and graybeards, fathers, citizens, priests, merchants
and officials,—busy with the comedy they are all
playing, and never thinking of their own selves.
To the question "To what end dost thou live?"
they would all immediately answer, with pride,
"To become a good citizen or professor or
statesman,"—and yet they are something which can
never be changed: and why are they just—this?
Ah, and why nothing better? The man who only
regards his life as a moment in the evolution of a
race or a state or a science, and will belong merely
to a history of "becoming," has not understood
the lesson of existence, and must learn it over
again. This eternal "becoming something" is a
lying puppet-show, in which man has forgot himself;
it is the force that scatters individuality to
the four winds, the eternal childish game that the
big baby time is playing in front of us—and with
us. The heroism of sincerity lies in ceasing to be
the plaything of time. Everything in the process
of "becoming" is a hollow sham, contemptible and
shallow: man can only find the solution of his
riddle in "being" something definite and
unchangeable. He begins to test how deep both "becoming"
and "being" are rooted in him—and a fearful task
is before his soul; to destroy the first, and bring
all the falsity of things to the light. He wishes to
know everything, not to feed a delicate taste, like
Goethe's man, to take delight, from a safe place,
in the multiplicity of existence: but he himself is
the first sacrifice that he brings. The heroic man
does not think of his happiness or misery, his
virtues or his vices, or of his being the measure of
things; he has no further hopes of himself and
will accept the utter consequences of his
hopelessness. His strength lies in his self-forgetfulness:
if he have a thought for himself, it is only to
measure the vast distance between himself and his
aim, and to view what he has left behind him as
so much dross. The old philosophers sought for
happiness and truth, with all their strength: and
there is an evil principle in nature that not one
shall find that which he cannot help seeking. But
the man who looks for a lie in everything, and
becomes a willing friend to unhappiness, shall have
a marvellous disillusioning: there hovers near him
something unutterable, of which truth and happiness
are but idolatrous images born of the night; the
earth loses her dragging weight, the events and
powers of earth become as a dream, and a gradual
clearness widens round him like a summer evening.
It is as though the beholder of these things began
to wake, and it had only been the clouds of a
passing dream that had been weaving about him.
They will at some time disappear: and then will
it be day.
5
But I have promised to speak of Schopenhauer,
as far as my experience goes, as an educator and
it is far from being sufficient to paint the ideal
humanity which is the "Platonic idea" in
Schopenhauer; especially as my representation is an
imperfect one. The most difficult task remains; to
say how a new circle of duties may spring from
this ideal, and how one can reconcile such a
transcendent aim with ordinary action; to prove, in
short, that the ideal is educative. One might otherwise
think it to be merely the blissful or intoxicating
vision of a few rare moments, that leaves us
afterwards the prey of a deeper disappointment. It is
certain that the ideal begins to affect us in this
way when we come suddenly to distinguish light
and darkness, bliss and abhorrence; this is an
experience that is as old as ideals themselves. But
we ought not to stand in the doorway for long; we
should soon leave the first stages, and ask the
question, seriously and definitely, "Is it possible to
bring that incredibly high aim so near us, that it
should educate us, or 'lead us out' as well as lead
us upward?"—in order that the great words of
Goethe be not fulfilled in our case—"Man is born
to a state of limitation: he can understand ends
that are simple, present and definite, and is
accustomed to make use of means that are near to
his hand; but as soon as he comes into the open,
he knows neither what he wishes nor what he ought
to do, and it is all one whether he be confused by
the multitude of objects or set beside himself by
their greatness and importance. It is always his
misfortune to be led to strive after something which
he cannot attain by any ordinary activity of his
own." The objection can be made with apparent
reason against Schopenhauer's man, that his
greatness and dignity can only turn our heads, and put
us beyond all community with the active men of
the world: the common round of duties, the
noiseless tenor of life has disappeared. One man may
possibly get accustomed to living in a reluctant
dualism, that is, in a contradiction with
himself;—becoming unstable, daily weaker and less
productive:—while another will renounce all action
on principle, and scarcely endure to see others
active. The danger is always great when a man
is too heavy-laden, and cannot really accomplish
any duties. Stronger natures may be broken by
it; the weaker, which are the majority, sink into
a speculative laziness, and at last, from their
laziness, lose even the power of speculation.
With regard to such objections, I will admit that
our work has hardly begun, and so far as I know,
I only see one thing clearly and definitely—that it
is possible for that ideal picture to provide you and
me with a chain of duties that may be accomplished;
and some of us already feel its pressure.
In order, however, to be able to speak in plain
language of the formula under which I may gather
the new circle of duties, I must begin with the
following considerations.
The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for
animals, because they suffer from life and have
not the power to turn the sting of the suffering
against themselves, and understand their being
metaphysically. The sight of blind suffering is
the spring of the deepest emotion. And in many
quarters of the earth men have supposed that the
souls of the guilty have entered into beasts, and
that the blind suffering which at first sight calls
for such pity has a clear meaning and purpose to
the divine justice,—of punishment and atonement:
and a heavy punishment it is, to be condemned to
live in hunger and need, in the shape of a beast,
and to reach no consciousness of one's self in this
life. I can think of no harder lot than the wild
beast's; he is driven to the forest by the fierce
pang of hunger, that seldom leaves him at peace;
and peace is itself a torment, the surfeit after horrid
food, won, maybe, by a deadly fight with other
animals. To cling to life, blindly and madly, with
no other aim, to be ignorant of the reason, or even
the fact, of one's punishment, nay, to thirst after
it as if it were a pleasure, with all the perverted
desire of a fool—this is what it means to be an
animal. If universal nature leads up to man, it is
to show us that he is necessary to redeem her from
the curse of the beast's life, and that in him
existence can find a mirror of itself wherein life appears,
no longer blind, but in its real metaphysical
significance. But we should consider where the beast
ends and the man begins—the man, the one concern
of Nature. As long as any one desires life as a
pleasure in itself, he has not raised his eyes above
the horizon of the beast; he only desires more
consciously what the beast seeks by a blind impulse.
It is so with us all, for the greater part of our lives.
We do not shake off the beast, but are beasts
ourselves, suffering we know not what.
But there are moments when we do know; and
then the clouds break, and we see how, with the
rest of nature, we are straining towards the man,
as to something that stands high above us. We
look round and behind us, and fear the sudden
rush of light; the beasts are transfigured, and
ourselves with them. The enormous migrations of
mankind in the wildernesses of the world, the cities
they found and the wars they wage, their ceaseless
gatherings and dispersions and fusions, the doctrines
they blindly follow, their mutual frauds and deceits,
the cry of distress, the shriek of victory—are all a
continuation of the beast in us: as if the education
of man has been intentionally set back, and his
promise of self-consciousness frustrated; as if, in
fact, after yearning for man so long, and at last
reaching him by her labour, Nature should now
recoil from him and wish to return to a state
of unconscious instinct. Ah! she has need of
knowledge, and shrinks before the very knowledge
she needs: the flame flickers unsteadily and fears
its own brightness, and takes hold of a thousand
things before the one thing for which knowledge
is necessary. There are moments when we all
know that our most elaborate arrangements are
only designed to give us refuge from our real
task in life; we wish to hide our heads somewhere,
as if our Argus-eyed conscience could not find us
out; we are quick to send our hearts on
state-service, or money-making, or social duties, or
scientific work, in order to possess them no longer
ourselves; we are more willing and instinctive
slaves of the hard day's work than mere living
requires, because it seems to us more necessary not
to be in a position to think. The hurry is universal,
because every one is fleeing before himself;
its concealment is just as universal, as we wish to seem
contented and hide our wretchedness from the
keener eyes; and so there is a common need for
a new carillon of words to hang in the temple of
life, and peal for its noisy festival. We all know
the curious way in which unpleasant memories
suddenly throng on us, and how we do our best
by loud talk and violent gestures to put them out
of our minds; but the gestures and the talk of our
ordinary life make one think we are all in this
condition, frightened of any memory or any inward
gaze. What is it that is always troubling us? what
is the gnat that will not let us sleep ? There are
spirits all about us, each moment of life has
something to say to us, but we will not listen to the
spirit-voices. When we are quiet and alone, we
fear that something will be whispered in our ears,
and so we hate the quiet, and dull our senses in
society.
We understand this sometimes, as I say, and
stand amazed at the whirl and the rush and the
anxiety and all the dream that we call our life; we
seem to fear the awakening, and our dreams too
become vivid and restless, as the awakening draws
near. But we feel as well that we are too weak to
endure long those intimate moments, and that we
are not the men to whom universal nature looks as
her redeemers. It is something to be able to raise
our heads but for a moment and see the stream in
which we are sunk so deep. We cannot gain even
this transitory moment of awakening by our own
strength; we must be lifted up—and who are they
that will uplift us?
The sincere men who have cast out the beast,
the philosophers, artists and saints.
Nature—quæ nunquam facit saltum—has made her one
leap in creating them; a leap of joy, as she feels
herself for the first time at her goal, where she
begins to see that she must learn not to have goals
above her, and that she has played the game of
transition too long. The knowledge transfigures
her, and there rests on her face the gentle weariness
of evening that men call "beauty." Her words
after this transfiguration are as a great light shed
over existence: and the highest wish that mortals
can reach is to listen continually to her voice with
ears that hear. If a man think of all that
Schopenhauer, for example, must have heard in his life,
he may well say to himself—"The deaf ears, the
feeble understanding and shrunken heart,
everything that I call mine, how I despise them! Not
to be able to fly but only to flutter one's wings!
To look above one's self and have no power to
rise! To know the road that leads to the wide
vision of the philosopher, and to reel back after
a few steps! Were there but one day when the
great wish might be fulfilled, how gladly would
we pay for it with the rest of life! To rise as high
as any thinker yet into the pure icy air of the
mountain, where there are no mists and veils, and
the inner constitution of things is shown in a
stark and piercing clarity! Even by thinking of
this the soul becomes infinitely alone; but were
its wish fulfilled, did its glance once fall straight as
a ray of light on the things below, were shame and
anxiety and desire gone for ever—one could find
no words for its state then, for the mystic and
tranquil emotion with which, like the soul of
Schopenhauer, it would look down on the
monstrous hieroglyphics of existence and the
petrified doctrines of "becoming"; not as the
brooding night, but as the red and glowing day
that streams over the earth. And what a destiny
it is only to know enough of the fixity and
happiness of the philosopher to feel the complete
unfixity and unhappiness of the false philosopher,
'who without hope lives in desire': to know one's
self to be the fruit of a tree that is too much in the
shade ever to ripen, and to see a world of sunshine
in front, where one may not go!"
There were sorrow enough here, if ever, to make
such a man envious and spiteful: but he will turn
aside, that he may not destroy his soul by a vain
aspiration; and will discover a new circle of duties.
I can now give an answer to the question whether
it be possible to approach the great ideal of
Schopenhauer's man "by any ordinary activity of our own."
In the first place, the new duties are certainly not
those of a hermit; they imply rather a vast community,
held together not by external forms but
by a fundamental idea, namely that of culture;
though only so far as it can put a single task
before each of us—to bring the philosopher, the
artist and the saint, within and without us, to the
light, and to strive thereby for the completion of
Nature. For Nature needs the artist, as she needs
the philosopher, for a metaphysical end, the
explanation of herself, whereby she may have a
clear and sharp picture of what she only saw
dimly in the troubled period of transition,—and
so may reach self-consciousness. Goethe, in an
arrogant yet profound phrase, showed how all
Nature's attempts only have value in so far as the
artist interprets her stammering words, meets her
half-way, and speaks aloud what she really means.
"I have often said, and will often repeat," he
exclaims in one place, "the causa finalis of natural
and human activity is dramatic poetry. Otherwise the stuff is of no use at all."
Finally, Nature needs the saint. In him the
ego has melted away, and the suffering of his life
is, practically, no longer felt as individual, but as
the spring of the deepest sympathy and intimacy
with all living creatures: he sees the wonderful
transformation scene that the comedy of "becoming"
never reaches, the attainment, at length, of
the high state of man after which all nature is
striving, that she may be delivered from herself.
Without doubt, we all stand in close relation to
him, as well as to the philosopher and the artist:
there are moments, sparks from the clear fire of
love, in whose light we understand the word "I"
no longer; there is something beyond our being
that comes, for those moments, to the hither side
of it: and this is why we long in our hearts for a
bridge from here to there. In our ordinary state
we can do nothing towards the production of the
new redeemer, and so we hate ourselves in this
state with a hatred that is the root of the pessimism
which Schopenhauer had to teach again to our age,
though it is as old as the aspiration after
culture.—Its root, not its flower; the foundation, not the
summit; the beginning of the road, not the end:
for we have to learn at some time to hate something
else, more universal than our own personality
with its wretched limitation, its change and its
unrest—and this will be when we shall learn to love
something else than we can love now. When we
are ourselves received into that high order of
philosophers, artists and saints, in this life or a
reincarnation of it, a new object for our love and hate will
also rise before us. As it is, we have our task and
our circle of duties, our hates and our loves. For
we know that culture requires us to make ready
for the coming of the Schopenhauer man;—and
this is the "use" we are to make of him;—we must
know what obstacles there are and strike them
from our path—in fact, wage unceasing war against
everything that hindered our fulfilment, and prevented
us from becoming Schopenhauer's men ourselves.
6
It is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than
to understand it; many will feel this when they
consider the proposition—"Mankind must toil
unceasingly to bring forth individual great men:
this and nothing else is its task." One would like
to apply to society and its ends a fact that holds
universally in the animal and vegetable world;
where progress depends only on the higher
individual types, which are rarer, yet more
persistent, complex and productive. But traditional
notions of what the end of society is, absolutely
bar the way. We can easily understand how in
the natural world, where one species passes at
some point into a higher one, the aim of their
evolution cannot be held to lie in the high level
attained by the mass, or in the latest types
developed;—but rather in what seem accidental
beings produced here and there by favourable
circumstances. It should be just as easy to
understand that it is the duty of mankind to
provide the circumstances favourable to the birth
of the new redeemer, simply because men can
have a consciousness of their object. But there
is always something to prevent them. They find
their ultimate aim in the happiness of all, or the
greatest number, or in the expansion of a great
commonwealth. A man will very readily decide
to sacrifice his life for the state; he will be much
slower to respond if an individual, and not a state,
ask for the sacrifice. It seems to be out of reason
that one man should exist for the sake of another :
"Let it be rather for the sake of every other, or,
at any rate, of as many as possible!" O upright
judge! As if it were more in reason to let the
majority decide a question of value and
significance! For the problem is—"In what way may
your life, the individual life, retain the highest
value and the deepest significance? and how may
it least be squandered? "Only by your living for
the good of the rarest and most valuable types,
not for that of the majority,—who are the most
worthless types, taken as individuals. This way
of thinking should be implanted and fostered in
every young man's mind: he should regard himself
both as a failure of Nature's handiwork and a
testimony to her larger ideas. "She has succeeded
badly," he should say; "but I will do honour to
her great idea by being a means to its better success."
With these thoughts he will enter the circle
of culture, which is the child of every man's
self-knowledge and dissatisfaction. He will approach
and say aloud: "I see something above me, higher
and more human than I: let all help me to reach
it, as I will help all who know and suffer as I do,
that the man may arise at last who feels his
knowledge and love, vision and power, to be
complete and boundless, who in his universality
is one with nature, the critic and judge of existence."
It is difficult to give any one this courageous
self-consciousness, because it is impossible to teach
love; from love alone the soul gains, not only the
clear vision that leads to self-contempt, but also
the desire to look to a higher self which is yet
hidden, and strive upward to it with all its strength.
And so he who rests his hope on a future great
man, receives his first "initiation into culture."
The sign of this is shame or vexation at one's self,
a hatred of one's own narrowness, a sympathy with
the genius that ever raises its head again from our
misty wastes, a feeling for all that is struggling
into life, the conviction that Nature must be helped
in her hour of need to press forward to the man,
however ill she seem to prosper, whatever success
may attend her marvellous forms and projects :
so that the men with whom we live are like the
debris of some precious sculptures, which cry
out—"Come and help us! Put us together, for we long
to become complete."
I called this inward condition the "first
initiation into culture." I have now to describe the
effects of the "second initiation," a task of greater
difficulty. It is the passage from the inner life to
the criticism of the outer life. The eye must be
turned to find in the great world of movement the
desire for culture that is known from the immediate
experience of the individual; who must use his
own strivings and aspirations as the alphabet to
interpret those of humanity. He cannot rest here
either, but must go higher. Culture demands from
him not only that inner experience, not only the
criticism of the outer world surrounding him, but
action too to crown them all, the fight for culture
against the influences and conventions and institutions
where he cannot find his own aim,—the production of genius.
Any one who can reach the second step, will
see how extremely rare and imperceptible the
knowledge of that end is, though all men busy
themselves with culture and expend vast labour
in her service. He asks himself in amazement—"Is
not such knowledge, after all, absolutely
necessary? Can Nature be said to attain her
end, if men have a false idea of the aim of their
own labour?" And any one who thinks a great
deal of Nature's unconscious adaptation of means
to ends, will probably answer at once: "Yes, men
may think and speak what they like about their
ultimate end, their blind instinct will tell them the
right road." It requires some experience of life
to be able to contradict this: but let a man be
convinced of the real aim of culture—the
production of the true man and nothing else; let
him consider that amid all the pageantry and
ostentation of culture at the present time the
conditions for his production are nothing but a
continual "battle of the beasts": and he will see
that there is great need for a conscious will to take
the place of that blind instinct. There is another
reason also;—to prevent the possibility of turning
this obscure impulse to quite different ends, in a
direction where our highest aim can no longer be
attained. For we must beware of a certain kind
of misapplied and parasitical culture; the powers
at present most active in its propagation have
other casts of thought that prevent their relation
to culture from being pure and disinterested.
The first of these is the self-interest of the
business men. This needs the help of culture,
and helps her in return, though at the price of
prescribing her ends and limits. And their favourite
sorites is: "We must have as much knowledge
and education as possible; this implies as great
a need as possible for it, this again as much
production, this again as much material wealth and
happiness as possible."—This is the seductive
formula. Its preachers would define education as
the insight that makes man through and through
a "child of his age" in his desires and their
satisfaction, and gives him command over the
best means of making money. Its aim would
be to make "current" men, in the same sense as
one speaks of the "currency" in money ; and in
their view, the more "current" men there are,
the happier the people. The object of modern
educational systems is therefore to make each
man as "current" as his nature will allow him,
and to give him the opportunity for the greatest
amount of success and happiness that can be got
from his particular stock of knowledge. He is
required to have just so much idea of his own
value (through his liberal education) as to know
what he can ask of life; and he is assured that
a natural and necessary connection between
"intelligence and property" not only exists, but
is also a moral necessity. All education is
detested that makes for loneliness, and has an aim
above money-making, and requires a long time:
men look askance on such serious education, as
mere "refined egoism" or "immoral Epicureanism."
The converse of course holds, according
to the ordinary morality, that education must be
soon over to allow the pursuit of money to be
soon begun, and should be just thorough enough
to allow of much money being made. The amount of
education is determined by commercial interests. In
short, "man has a necessary claim to worldly happiness;
only for that reason is education necessary."
There is, secondly, the self-interest of the state,
which requires the greatest possible breadth and
universality of culture, and has the most effective
weapons to carry out its wishes. If it be firmly
enough established not only to initiate but control
education and bear its whole weight, such breadth
will merely profit the competition of the state with
other states. A "highly civilised state "generally
implies, at the present time, the task of setting
free the spiritual forces of a generation just so far as
they may be of use to the existing institutions,—as
a mountain stream is split up by embankments
and channels, and its diminished power made to
drive mill-wheels, its full strength being more
dangerous than useful to the mills. And thus
"setting free" comes to mean rather "chaining
up." Compare, for example, what the self-interest
of the state has done for Christianity. Christianity
is one of the purest manifestations of the impulse
towards culture and the production of the saint:
but being used in countless ways to turn the mills
of the state authorities, it gradually became sick
at heart, hypocritical and degenerate, and in
antagonism with its original aim. Its last phase,
the German Reformation, would have been nothing
but a sudden flickering of its dying flame, had it
not taken new strength and light from the clash
and conflagration of states.
In the third place, culture will be favoured by
all those people who know their own character to
be offensive or tiresome, and wish to draw a veil
of so-called "good form" over them. Words,
gestures, dress, etiquette, and such external things,
are meant to produce a false impression, the inner
side to be judged from the outer. I sometimes
think that modern men are eternally bored with
each other and look to the arts to make them
interesting. They let their artists make savoury
and inviting dishes of them; they steep themselves
in the spices of the East and West, and have a
very interesting aroma after it all. They are ready
to suit all palates: and every one will be served,
whether he want something with a good or bad
taste, something sublime or coarse, Greek or
Chinese, tragedy or gutter-drama. The most
celebrated chefs among the moderns who wish to
interest and be interested at any price, are the
French the worst are the Germans. This is
really more comforting for the latter, and we have
no reason to mind the French despising us for our
want of interest, elegance and politeness, and being
reminded of the Indian who longs for a ring
through his nose, and then proceeds to tattoo himself.
Here I must digress a little. Many things in
Germany have evidently been altered since the
late war with France, and new requirements for
German culture brought over. The war was for
many their first venture into the more elegant half
of the world: and what an admirable simplicity
the conqueror shows in not scorning to learn
something of culture from the conquered! The applied
arts especially will be reformed to emulate our more
refined neighbours, the German house furnished
like the French, a "sound taste" applied to the
German language by means of an Academy on the
French model, to shake off the doubtful influence
of Goethe—this is the judgment of our new Berlin
Academician, Dubois-Raymond. Our
theatres have been gradually moving, in a dignified way,
towards the same goal, even the elegant German
savant is now discovered—and we must now
expect everything that does not conform to this
law of elegance, our music, tragedy and philosophy
to be thrust aside as un-German. But there were
no need to raise a ringer for German culture, did
German culture (which the Germans have yet to
find) mean nothing but the little amenities that
make life more decorative—including the arts of
the dancing-master and the upholsterer;—or were
they merely interested in academic rules of
language and a general atmosphere of politeness.
The late war and the self-comparison with the
French do not seem to have aroused any further
desires, and I suspect that the German has a strong
wish for the moment to be free of the old obligations
laid on him by his wonderful gifts of seriousness
and profundity. He would much rather play
the buffoon and the monkey, and learn the arts
that make life amusing. But the German spirit
cannot be more dishonoured than by being treated
as wax for any elegant mould.
And if, unfortunately, a good many Germans will
allow themselves to be thus moulded, one must
continually say to them, till at last they listen:—"The
old German way is no longer yours: it was
hard, rough, and full of resistance; but it is still
the most valuable material—one which only the
greatest modellers can work with, for they alone
are worthy to use it, What you have in you now
is a soft pulpy stuff: make what you will out of
it,—elegant dolls and interesting idols—Richard
Wagner's phrase will still hold good, 'The German
is awkward and ungainly when he wishes to be
polite; he is high above all others, when he begins
to take fire.'" All the elegant people have reason to
beware of this German fire; it may one day devour
them with all their wax dolls and idols. The
prevailing love of "good form" in Germany may
have a deeper cause in the breathless seizing at
what the moment can give, the haste that plucks
the fruit too green, the race and the struggle that
cut the furrows in men's brows and stamp the same
mark on all their actions. As if there were a
poison in them that would not let them breathe,
they rush about in disorder, anxious slaves of the
"three m's," the moment, the mode and the mob:
they see too well their want of dignity and fitness,
and need a false elegance to hide their galloping
consumption. The fashionable desire of "good
form" is bound up with a loathing of man's inner
nature : the one is to conceal, the other to be
concealed. Education means now the concealment
of man's misery and wickedness, his wild-beast
quarrels, his eternal greed, his shamelessness in
fruition. In pointing out the absence of a German
culture, I have often had the reproach flung at me:
"This absence is quite natural, for the Germans
have been too poor and modest up to now. Once
rich and conscious of themselves, our people will
have a culture too." Faith may often produce
happiness, yet this particular faith makes me
unhappy, for I feel that the culture whose future
raises such hopes—the culture of riches, politeness,
and elegant concealments—is the bitterest foe of
that German culture in which I believe. Every
one who has to live among Germans suffers from
the dreadful grayness and apathy of their lives,
their formlessness, torpor and clumsiness, still
more their envy, secretiveness and impurity: he is
troubled by their innate love of the false and the
ignoble, their wretched mimicry and translation of
a good foreign thing into a bad German one. But
now that the feverish unrest, the quest of gain and
success, the intense prizing of the moment, is added
to it all, it makes one furious to think that all this
sickness can never be cured, but only painted over,
by such a "cult of the interesting." And this
among a people that has produced a Schopenhauer
and a Wagner! and will produce others, unless we
are blindly deceiving ourselves; for should not
their very existence be a guarantee that such forces
are even now potential in the German spirit? Or
will they be exceptions, the last inheritors of the
qualities that were once called German? I can
see nothing to help me here, and return to my
main argument again, from which my doubts and
anxieties have made me digress. I have not yet
enumerated all the forces that help culture without
recognising its end, the production of genius.
Three have been named; the self-interest of
business, of the state, and of those who draw the
cloak of "good form" over them. There is
fourthly the self-interest of science, and the
peculiar nature of her servants—the learned.
Science has the same relation to wisdom as
current morality to holiness: she is cold and dry,
loveless, and ignorant of any deep feeling of
dissatisfaction and yearning. She injures her servants
in helping herself, for she impresses her own
character on them and dries up their humanity.
As long as we actually mean by culture the
progress of science, she will pass by the great
suffering man and harden her heart, for science
only sees the problems of knowledge, and suffering
is something alien and unintelligible to her
world—though no less a problem for that!
If one accustom himself to put down every
experience in a dialectical form of question and
answer, and translate it into the language of "pure
reason," he will soon wither up and rattle his bones
like a skeleton. We all know it: and why is it
that the young do not shudder at these skeletons
of men, but give themselves blindly to science
without motive or measure? It cannot be the
so-called "impulse to truth": for how could there
be an impulse towards a pure, cold and objectless
knowledge? The unprejudiced eye can see the
real driving forces only too plainly. The vivisection
of the professor has much to recommend it, as he
himself is accustomed to finger and analyse all
things—even the worthiest! To speak honestly,
the savant is a complex of very various impulses
and attractive forces he is a base metal throughout.
Take first a strong and increasing desire for
intellectual adventure, the attraction of the new
and rare as against the old and tedious. Add
to that a certain joy in nosing the trail of dialectic,
and beating the cover where the old fox, Thought,
lies hid; the desire is not so much for truth as the
chase of truth, and the chief pleasure is in surrounding
and artistically killing it. Add thirdly a love
of contradiction whereby the personality is able to
assert itself against all others: the battle's the
thing, and the personal victory its aim,—truth only
its pretext. The impulse to discover "particular
truths" plays a great part in the professor, coming
from his submission to definite ruling persons,
classes, opinions, churches, governments, for he
feels it a profit to himself to bring truth to their side.
The following characteristics of the savant are
less common, but still found.—Firstly, downrightness
and a feeling for simplicity, very valuable if
more than a mere awkwardness and inability to
deceive, deception requiring some
mother-wit.—(Actually, we may be on our guard against too
obvious cleverness and resource, and doubt the
man's sincerity.)—Otherwise this downrightness
is generally of little value, and rarely of any use
to knowledge, as it follows tradition and speaks
the truth only in "adiaphora"; it being lazier to
speak the truth here than ignore it. Everything
new means something to be unlearnt, and your
downright man will respect the ancient dogmas
and accuse the new evangelist of failing in the
sensus recti. There was a similar opposition, with
probability and custom on its side, to the theory
of Copernicus. The professor's frequent hatred of
philosophy is principally a hatred of the long
trains of reasoning and artificiality of the proofs.
Ultimately the savants of every age have a fixed
limit; beyond which ingenuity is not allowed, and
everything suspected as a conspirator against honesty.
Secondly, a clear vision of near objects, combined
with great shortsightedness for the distant and
universal. The professor's range is generally very
small, and his eye must be kept close to the object.
To pass from a point already considered to another,
he has to move his whole optical apparatus. He
cuts a picture into small sections, like a man using
an opera-glass in the theatre, and sees now a head,
now a bit of the dress, but nothing as a whole.
The single sections are never combined for him,
he only infers their connection, and consequently
has no strong general impression. He judges a
literary work, for example, by certain paragraphs
or sentences or errors, as he can do nothing more;
he will be driven to see in an oil painting nothing
but a mass of daubs.
Thirdly, a sober conventionality in his likes and
dislikes. Thus he especially delights in history
because he can put his own motives into the
actions of the past. A mole is most comfortable
in a mole-hill. He is on his guard against all
ingenious and extravagant hypotheses; but digs
up industriously all the commonplace motives of
the past, because he feels in sympathy with them.
He is generally quite incapable of understanding
and valuing the rare or the uncommon, the great
or the real.
Fourthly, a lack of feeling, which makes him
capable of vivisection. He knows nothing of the
suffering that brings knowledge, and does not fear
to tread where other men shudder. He is cold
and may easily appear cruel. He is thought
courageous, but he is not,—any more than the
mule who does not feel giddiness.
Fifthly, diffidence, or a low estimate of himself.
Though he live in a miserable alley of the world,
he has no sense of sacrifice or surrender; he appears
often to know in his inmost heart that he is not
a flying but a crawling creature. And this makes
him seem even pathetic.
Sixthly, loyalty to his teachers and leaders.
From his heart he wishes to help them, and knows
he can do it best with the truth. He has a grateful
disposition, for he has only gained admittance
through them to the high hall of science; he would
never have entered by his own road. Any man
to-day who can throw open a new province where
his lesser disciples can work to some purpose, is
famous at once; so great is the crowd that presses
after him. These grateful pupils are certainly a
misfortune to their teacher, as they all imitate him;
his faults are exaggerated in their small persons,
his virtues correspondingly diminished.
Seventhly, he will follow the usual road of all
the professors, where a feeling for truth springs
from a lack of ideas, and the wheel once started
goes on. Such natures become compilers,
commentators, makers of indices and herbaria; they
rummage about one special department because
they have never thought there are others. Their
industry has something of the monstrous stupidity
of gravitation; and so they can often bring their
labours to an end.
Eighthly, a dread of ennui. While the true
thinker desires nothing more than leisure, the
professor fears it, not knowing how it is to be
used. Books are his comfort; he listens to everybody's
different thoughts and keeps himself amused
all day. He especially chooses books with a
personal relation to himself, that make him feel some
emotion of like or dislike; books that have to do
with himself or his position, his political, aesthetic,
or even grammatical doctrines; if he have mastered
even one branch of knowledge, the means to flap
away the flies of ennui will not fail him.
Ninthly, the motive of the bread-winner, the
"cry of the empty stomach," in fact. Truth is
used as a direct means of preferment, when she
can be attained; or as a way to the good graces
of the fountains of honour—and bread. Only,
however, in the sense of the "particular truth":
there is a gulf between the profitable truths that
many serve, and the unprofitable truths to which
only those few people devote themselves whose
motto is not ingenii largitor venter.
Tenthly, a reverence for their fellow-professors
and a fear of their displeasure—a higher and rarer
motive than the last, though not uncommon. All
the members of the guild are jealously on guard,
that the truth which means so much bread and
honour and position may really be baptized in the
name of its discoverer. The one pays the other
reverence for the truth he has found, in order to
exact the toll again if he should find one himself.
The Untruth, the Error is loudly exploded, that the
workers may not be too many; here and there
the real truth will be exploded to let a few bold
and stiff-necked errors be on show for a time; there
is never a lack of "moral idiosyncrasies,"—formerly
called rascalities.
Eleventhly, the "savant for vanity," now rather
rare. He will get a department for himself somehow,
and investigate curiosities, especially if they
demand unusual expenditure, travel, research, or
communication with all parts of the world. He is
quite satisfied with the honour of being regarded
as a curiosity himself, and never dreams of earning
a living by his erudite studies.
Twelfthly, the "savant for amusement." He
loves to look for knots in knowledge and to untie
them; not too energetically however, lest he lose
the spirit of the game. Thus he does not penetrate
the depths, though he often observes something
that the microscopic eyes of the bread-and-butter
scientist never see.
If I speak, lastly, of the "impulse towards
justice" as a further motive of the savant, I may
be answered that this noble impulse, being metaphysical
in its nature, is too indistinguishable from
the rest, and really incomprehensible to mortal
mind; and so I leave the thirteenth heading with
the pious wish that the impulse may be less rare
in the professor than it seems. For a spark in his
soul from the fire of justice is sufficient to irradiate
and purify it, so that he can rest no more and is
driven for ever from the cold or lukewarm condition
in which most of his fellows do their daily work.
All these elements, or a part of them, must be
regarded as fused and pounded together, to form
the Servant of Truth. For the sake of an absolutely
inhuman thing—mere purposeless, and therefore
motiveless, knowledge—a mass of very human
little motives have been chemically combined, and
as the result we have the professor,—so transfigured
in the light of that pure unearthly object that the
mixing and pounding which went to form him are
all forgotten! It is very curious. Yet there are
moments when they must be remembered,—when
we have to think of the professor's significance to
culture. Any one with observation can see that he
is in his essence and by his origin unproductive,
and has a natural hatred of the productive; and
thus there is an endless feud between the genius
and the savant in idea and practice. The latter
wishes to kill Nature by analysing and comprehending
it, the former to increase it by a new living
Nature. The happy age does not need or know
the savant; the sick and sluggish time ranks him
as its highest and worthiest.
Who were physician enough to know the health
or sickness of our time? It is clear that the
professor is valued too highly, with evil consequences
for the future genius, for whom he has no compassion,
merely a cold, contemptuous criticism, a
shrug of the shoulders, as if at something strange and
perverted for which he has neither time nor
inclination. And so he too knows nothing of the
aim of culture.
In fact, all these considerations go to prove that
the aim of culture is most unknown precisely where
the interest in it seems liveliest. The state may
trumpet as it will its services to culture, it merely
helps culture in order to help itself, and does not
comprehend an aim that stands higher than its own
well-being or even existence. The business men
in their continual demand for education merely
wish for—business. When the pioneers of "good
form" pretend to be the real helpers of culture,
imagining that all art, for example, is merely to serve
their own needs, they are clearly affirming themselves
in affirming culture. Of the savant enough has
already been said. All four are emulously thinking
how they can benefit themselves with the help of
culture, but have no thoughts at all when their own
interests are not engaged. And so they have
done nothing to improve the conditions for the
birth of genius in modern times; and the
opposition to original men has grown so far that no
Socrates could ever live among us, and certainly
could never reach the age of seventy.
I remember saying in the third chapter that our
whole modern world was not so stable that one
could prophesy an eternal life to its conception of
culture. It is likely that the next millennium may
reach two or three new ideas that might well make
the hair of our present generation stand on end.
The belief in the metaphysical significance of
culture would not be such a horrifying thing, but
its effects on educational methods might be so.
It requires a totally new attitude of mind to be
able to, look away from the present educational
institutions to the strangely different ones that will
be necessary for the second or third generation,
At present the labours of higher education produce
merely the savant or the official or the business
man or the Philistine or, more commonly, a mixture
of all four; and the future institutions will have a
harder task;—not in itself harder, as it is really
more natural, and so easier; and further, could
anything be harder than to make a youth into a savant
against nature, as now happens?—But the difficulty
lies in unlearning what we know and setting up a
new aim; it will be an endless trouble to change
the fundamental idea of our present educational
system, that has its roots in the Middle Ages and
regards the mediaeval savant as the ideal type of
culture. It is already time to put these objects
before us; for some generation must begin the
battle, of which a later generation will reap the
victory. The solitary man who has understood
the new fundamental idea of culture is at the
parting of the ways; on the one he will be
welcomed by his age, laurels and rewards will be
his, powerful parties will uphold him, he will have
as many in sympathy behind him as in front, and
when the leader speaks the word of deliverance,
it will echo through all the ranks. The first duty
is to "fight in line," the second to treat as foes all
who will not "fall in." On the other way he will
find fewer companions; it is steeper and more
tortuous. The travellers on the first road laugh
at him, as his way is the more troublesome and
dangerous; and they try to entice him over. If
the two ways cross, he is ill-treated, cast aside or
left alone. What significance has any particular
form of culture for these several travellers? The
enormous throng that press to their end on the
first road, understand by it the laws and institutions
that enable them to go forward in regular fashion
and rule out all the solitary and obstinate people
who look towards higher and remoter objects. To
the small company on the other road it has quite
a different office: they wish to guard themselves,
by means of a strong organisation, from being
swept away by the throng, to prevent their
individual members from fainting on the way or
turning in spirit from their great task. These
solitary men must finish their work; that is why
they should all hold together; and those who have
their part in the scheme will take thought to prepare
themselves with ever-increasing purity of aim for
the birth of the genius, and ensure that the time
be ripe for him. Many are destined to help on
the labour, even among the second-rate talents,
and it is only in submission to such a destiny that
they can feel they are living for a duty, and have
a meaning and an object in their lives. But at
present these talents are being turned from the
road their instinct has chosen by the seductive
tones of the "fashionable culture," that plays on
their selfish side, their vanities and weaknesses;
and the time-spirit ever whispers in their ears its
flattering counsel:—"Follow me and go not thither!
There you are only servants and tools,
overshadowed by higher natures with no scope for
your own, drawn by threads, hung with fetters,
slaves and automatons. With me you may enjoy
your true personality, and be masters, your talents
may shine with their own light, and yourselves
stand in the front ranks with an immense following
round you; and the acclamation of public opinion
will rejoice you more than a wandering breath of
approval sent down from the cold ethereal heights
of genius." Even the best men are snared by such
allurements, and the ultimate difference comes not
so much from the rarity and power of their talent,
as the influence of a certain heroic disposition at
the base of them, and an inner feeling of kinship
with genius. For there are men who feel it as
their own misery when they see the genius in
painful toil and struggle, in danger of self-destruction,
or neglected by the short-sighted selfishness
of the state, the superficiality of the business men,
and the cold arrogance of the professors; and I
hope there may be some to understand what I
mean by my sketch of Schopenhauer's destiny,
and to what end Schopenhauer can really educate.
7
But setting aside all thoughts of any educational
revolution in the distant future;—what provision
is required now, that our future philosopher
may have the best chance of opening his eyes to a
life like Schopenhauer's—hard as it is, yet still
livable? What, further, must be discovered that
may make his influence on his contemporaries
more certain? And what obstacles must be removed
before his example can have its full effect
and the philosopher train another philosopher?
Here we descend to be practical.
Nature always desires the greatest utility, but
does not understand how to find the best and
handiest means to her end; that is her great sorrow,
and the cause of her melancholy. The impulse
towards her own redemption shows clearly her wish
to give men a significant existence by the generation
of the philosopher and the artist: but how unclear
and weak is the effect she generally obtains with
her artists and philosophers, and how seldom is
there any effect at all ! She is especially perplexed
in her efforts to make the philosopher useful; her
methods are casual and tentative, her failures
innumerable; most of her philosophers never touch
the common good of mankind at all. Her actions
seem those of a spendthrift; but the cause lies in
no prodigal luxury, but in her inexperience. Were
she human, she would probably never cease to be
dissatisfied with herself and her bungling. Nature
shoots the philosopher at mankind like an arrow;
she. does not aim, but hopes that the arrow will
stick somewhere. She makes countless mistakes,
that give her pain. She is as extravagant in the
sphere of culture as in her planting and sowing. She
fulfils her ends in a large and clumsy fashion, using
up far too much of her strength. The artist has
the same relation to the connoisseurs and lovers of
his art as a piece of heavy artillery to a flock of
sparrows. It is a fool's part to use a great avalanche
to sweep away a little snow, to kill a man in order
to strike the fly on his nose. The artist and the
philosopher are witnesses against Nature's
adaptation of her means, however well they may show the
wisdom of her ends. They only reach a few and
should reach all—and even these few are not struck
with the strength they used when they shot. It is
sad to have to value art so differently as cause and
effect; how huge in its inception, how faint the
echo afterwards! The artist does his work as
Nature bids him, for the benefit of other men no
doubt of it; but he knows that none of those men
will understand and love his work as he understands
and loves it himself. That lonely height of love
and understanding is necessary, by Nature's clumsy
law, to produce a lower type; the great and noble
are used as the means to the small and ignoble.
Nature is a bad manager; her expenses are far
greater than her profits: for all her riches she must
one day go bankrupt. She would have acted more
reasonably to make the rule of her household—small
expense and hundredfold profit; if there had
been, for example, only a few artists with moderate
powers, but an immense number of hearers to
appreciate them, stronger and more powerful
characters than the artists themselves; then the effect
of the art-work, in comparison with the cause, might
be a hundred-tongued echo. One might at least
expect cause and effect to be of equal power; but
Nature lags infinitely behind this consummation.
An artist, and especially a philosopher, seems often
to have dropped by chance into his age, as a
wandering hermit or straggler cut off from the main
body. Think how utterly great Schopenhauer is,
and what a small and absurd effect he has had!
An honest man can feel no greater shame at the
present time than at the thought of the casual
treatment Schopenhauer has received and the evil powers
that have up to now killed his effect among men.
First there was the want of readers,—to the eternal
shame of our cultivated age;—then the inadequacy
of his first public adherents, as soon as he had any;
further, I think, the crassness of the modern man
towards books, which he will no longer take
seriously. As an outcome of many attempts to
adapt Schopenhauer to this enervated age, the new
danger has gradually arisen of regarding him as an
odd kind of pungent herb, of taking him in grains,
as a sort of metaphysical pepper. In this way he
has gradually become famous, and I should think
more have heard his name than Hegel's; and, for
all that, he is still a solitary being, who has failed
of his effect.—Though the honour of causing the
failure belongs least of all to the barking of his
literary antagonists; first because there are few
men with the patience to read them, and secondly,
because any one who does, is sent immediately to
Schopenhauer himself; for who will let a donkey-driver
prevent him from mounting a fine horse, however much he praise his donkey?
Whoever has recognised Nature's unreason in our
time, will have to consider some means to help her;
his task will be to bring the free spirits and the
sufferers from this age to know Schopenhauer;
and make them tributaries to the flood that is to
overbear all the clumsy uses to which Nature even
now is accustomed to put her philosophers. Such
men will see that the identical obstacles hinder the
effect of a great philosophy and the production of
the great philosopher; and so will direct their aims
to prepare the regeneration of Schopenhauer, which
means that of the philosophical genius. The real
opposition to the further spread of his doctrine in
the past, and the regeneration of the philosopher in
the future, is the perversity of human nature as it
is; and all the great men that are to be must spend
infinite pains in freeing themselves from it. The
world they enter is plastered over with
pretence—including not merely religious dogmas, but such
juggling conceptions as "progress," "universal
education," "nationalism," "the modern state" ;
practically all our general terms have an artificial
veneer over them that will bring a clearer-sighted
posterity to reproach our age bitterly for its warped
and stunted growth, however loudly we may boast
of our "health." The beauty of the antique vases,
says Schopenhauer, lies in the simplicity with which
they express their meaning and object; it is so
with all the ancient implements; if Nature produced
amphorae, lamps, tables, chairs, helmets, shields,
breastplates and the like, they would resemble
these. And, as a corollary, whoever considers how
we all manage our art, politics, religion and
education—to say nothing of our vases!—will find in
them a barbaric exaggeration and arbitrariness of
expression. Nothing is more unfavourable to the
rise of genius than such monstrosities. They are
unseen and undiscoverable, the leaden weights on
his hand when he will set it to the plough; the
weights are only shaken off with violence, and his
highest work must to an extent always bear the
mark of it.
In considering the conditions that, at best, keep
the born philosopher from being oppressed by the
perversity of the age, I am surprised to find they
are partly those in which Schopenhauer himself
grew up. True, there was no lack of opposing
influences; the evil time drew perilously near him in
the person of a vain and pretentious mother. But
the proud republican character of his father rescued
him from her and gave him the first quality of a
philosopher—a rude and strong virility. His father
was neither an official nor a savant; he travelled
much abroad with his son,—a great help to one
who must know men rather than books, and worship
truth before the state. In time he got accustomed
to national peculiarities: he made England, France
and Italy equally his home, and felt no little
sympathy with the Spanish character. On the whole,
he did not think it an honour to be born in Germany,
and I am not sure that the new political conditions
would have made him change his mind. He held
quite openly the opinion that the state's one object
was to give protection at home and abroad, and
even protection against its "protectors," and to
attribute any other object to it was to endanger its
true end. And so, to the consternation of all the
so-called liberals, he left his property to the survivors
of the Prussian soldiers who fell in 1848 in the fight
for order. To understand the state and its duties
in this single sense may seem more and more henceforth
the sign of intellectual superiority; for the man
with the furor philosophicus in him will no longer
have time for the furor politicus and will wisely
keep from reading the newspapers or serving a
party; though he will not hesitate a moment to
take his place in the ranks if his country be in real
need. All states are badly managed, when other
men than politicians busy themselves with politics;
and they deserve to be ruined by their political
amateurs.
Schopenhauer had another great advantage—that
he had never been educated for a professor,
but worked for some time (though against his will)
as a merchant's clerk, and through all his early
years breathed the freer air of a great commercial
house. A savant can never become a philosopher:
Kant himself could not, but remained in a chrysalis
stage to the end, in spite of the innate force of his
genius. Any one who thinks I do Kant wrong in
saying this does not know what a philosopher is—not
only a great thinker, but also a real man; and
how could a real man have sprung from a savant?
He who lets conceptions, opinions, events, books
come between himself and things, and is born for
history (in the widest sense), will never see anything
at once, and never be himself a thing to be "seen
at once"; though both these powers should be
in the philosopher, as he must take most of his
doctrine from himself and be himself the copy
and compendium of the whole world. If a man
look at himself through a veil of other people's
opinions, no wonder he sees nothing but—those
opinions. And it is thus that the professors see
and live. But Schopenhauer had the rare happiness
of seeing the genius not only in himself, but also
outside himself—in Goethe; and this double reflection
taught him everything about the aims and
culture of the learned. He knew by this experience
how the free strong man, to whom all artistic culture
was looking, must come to be born; and could he,
after this vision, have much desire to busy himself
with the so-called "art," in the learned, hypocritical
manner of the moderns? He had seen something
higher than that—an awful unearthly judgment-scene
in which all life, even the highest and completest,
was weighed and found too light; he had
beheld the saint as the judge of existence. We
cannot tell how early Schopenhauer reached this
view of life, and came to hold it with such intensity
as to make all his writings an attempt to mirror it;
we know that the youth had this great vision, and
can well believe it of the child. Everything that
he gained later from life and books, from all the
realms of knowledge, was only a means of colour
and expression to him ; the Kantian philosophy
itself was to him an extraordinary rhetorical
instrument for making the utterance of his vision, as he
thought, clearer; the Buddhist and Christian
mythologies occasionally served the same end. He
had one task and a thousand means to execute it;
one meaning, and innumerable hieroglyphs to
express it.
It was one of the high conditions of his existence
that he really could live for such a task—according
to his motto vitam impendere vero—and none
of life's material needs could shake his resolution;
and we know the splendid return he made his father
for this. The contemplative man in Germany
usually pursues his scientific studies to the
detriment of his sincerity, as a "considerate fool," in
search of place and honour, circumspect and
obsequious, and fawning on his influential superiors.
Nothing offended the savants more than Schopenhauer's unlikeness to them.
8
These are a few of the conditions under which
the philosophical genius can at least come to light
in our time, in spite of all thwarting influences;—a
virility of character, an early knowledge of
mankind, an absence of learned education and
narrow patriotism, of compulsion to earn his
livelihood or depend on the state,—freedom in
fact, and again freedom; the same marvellous and
dangerous element in which the Greek philosophers
grew up. The man who will reproach him, as
Niebuhr did Plato,
with being a bad citizen, may
do so, and be himself a good one; so he and
Plato will be right together! Another may call
this great freedom presumption; he is also right,
as he could not himself use the freedom properly
if he desired it, and would certainly presume too
far with it. This freedom is really a grave burden
of guilt; and can only be expiated by great
actions. Every ordinary son of earth has the
right of looking askance on such endowments;
and may Providence keep him from being so
endowed—burdened, that is, with such terrible
duties! His freedom and his loneliness would be
his ruin, and ennui would turn him into a fool, and
a mischievous fool at that.
A father may possibly learn something from
this that he may use for his son's private education,
though one must not expect fathers to have only
philosophers for their sons. It is possible that
they will always oppose their sons becoming
philosophers, and call it mere perversity; Socrates
was sacrificed to the fathers' anger, for "corrupting
the youth,' and Plato even thought a new ideal
state necessary to prevent the philosophers' growth
from being dependent on the fathers' folly. It
looks at present as though Plato had really
accomplished something; for the modern state counts
the encouragement of philosophy as one of its
duties and tries to secure for a number of men
at a time the sort of freedom that conditions the
philosopher. But, historically, Plato has been
very unlucky; as soon as a structure has risen
corresponding actually to his proposals, it has
always turned, on a closer view, into a goblin-child,
a monstrous changeling; compare the ecclesiastical
state of the Middle Ages with the government of
the "God-born king" of which Plato dreamed!
The modern state is furthest removed from the
idea of the Philosopher-king (Thank Heaven for
that ! the Christian will say); but we must think
whether it takes that very "encouragement of
philosophy" in a Platonic sense, I mean as seriously
and honestly as if its highest object were to
produce more Platos. If the philosopher seem, as
usual, an accident of his time, does the state make
it its conscious business to turn the accidental into
the necessary and help Nature here also?
Experience teaches us a better way—or a worse:
it says that nothing so stands in the way of the
birth and growth of Nature's philosopher as the
bad philosophers made "by order." A poor
obstacle, isn't it? and the same that Schopenhauer
pointed out in his famous essay on University
philosophy. I return to this point, as men must
be forced to take it seriously, to be driven to
activity by it; and I think all writing is useless
that does not contain such a stimulus to activity.
And anyhow it is a good thing to apply Schopenhauer's
eternal theories once more to our own
contemporaries, as some kindly soul might think
that everything has changed for the better in
Germany since his fierce diatribes. Unfortunately
his work is incomplete on this side as well,
unimportant as the side may be.
The "freedom" that the state, as I said, bestows
on certain men for the sake of philosophy is,
properly speaking, no freedom at all, but an
office that maintains its holder. The
"encouragement of philosophy" means that there are to-day
a number of men whom the state enables to make
their living out of philosophy; whereas the old
sages of Greece were not paid by the state, but at
best were presented, as Zeno was, with a golden
crown and a monument in the Ceramicus. I
cannot say generally whether truth is served by
showing the way to live by her, since everything
depends on the character of the individual who
shows the way. I can imagine a degree of pride
in a man saying to his fellow-men, "take care of
me, as I have something better to do—namely to
take care of you." We should not be angry at
such a heightened mode of expression in Plato
and Schopenhauer; and so they might properly
have been University philosophers,—as Plato, for
example, was a court philosopher for a while
without lowering the dignity of philosophy. But
in Kant we have the usual submissive professor,
without any nobility in his relations with the
state; and thus he could not justify the University
philosophy when it was once assailed. If there be
natures like Schopenhauer's and Plato's, which can
justify it, I fear they will never have the chance, as
the state would never venture to give such men
these positions, for the simple reason that every
state fears them, and will only favour philosophers
it does not fear. The state obviously has a special
fear of philosophy, and will try to attract more
philosophers, to create the impression that it has
philosophy on its side,—because it has those men
on its side who have the title without the power.
But if there should come one who really proposes
to cut everything to the quick, the state included,
with the knife of truth, the state, that affirms its
own existence above all, is justified in banishing
him as an enemy, just as it bans a religion that
exalts itself to be its judge. The man who
consents to be a state philosopher, must also consent
to be regarded as renouncing the search for truth
in all its secret retreats. At any rate, so long as
he enjoys his position, he must recognise
something higher than truth the state. And not only
the state, but everything required by it for existence—a
definite form of religion, a social system, a
standing army; a noli me tangere is written
above all these things. Can a University
philosopher ever keep clearly before him the
whole round of these duties and limitations? I
do not know. The man who has done so and
remains a state-official, is a false friend to truth;
if he has not,—I think he is no friend to truth either.
But general considerations like these are always
the weakest in their influence on mankind. Most
people will find it enough to shrug their shoulders
and say, "As if anything great and pure has ever
been able to maintain itself on this earth without
some concession to human vulgarity! Would you
rather the state persecuted philosophers than paid
them for official services? "Without answering
this last question, I will merely say that these
"concessions" of philosophy to the state go rather
far at present. In the first place, the state chooses
its own philosophical servants, as many as its
institutions require; it therefore pretends to be
able to distinguish the good and the bad
philosophers, and even assumes there must be
a sufficient supply of good ones to fill all the
chairs. The state is the authority not only for
their goodness but their numbers. Secondly, it
confines those it has chosen to a definite place and
a definite activity among particular men; they
must instruct every undergraduate who wants
instruction, daily, at stated hours. The question
is whether a philosopher can bind himself, with a
good conscience, to have something to teach every
day, to any one who wishes to listen. Must he not
appear to know more than he does, and speak,
before an unknown audience, of things that he
could mention without risk only to his most
intimate friends? And above all, does he not
surrender the precious freedom of following his
genius when and wherever it call him, by the mere
fact of being bound to think at stated times on a
fixed subject? And before young men, too! Is
not such thinking in its nature emasculate? And
suppose he felt some day that he had no ideas just
then—and yet must be in his place and appear to
be thinking What then?
"But," one will say, "he is not a thinker but
mainly a depository of thought, a man of great
learning in all previous philosophies. Of these
he can always say something that his scholars
do not know." This is actually the third, and the
most dangerous, concession made by philosophy
to the state, when it is compelled to appear in the
form of erudition, as the knowledge (more
specifically) of the history of philosophy. The genius
looks purely and lovingly on existence, like a poet,
and cannot dive too deep into it;—and nothing is
more abhorrent to him than to burrow among the
innumerable strange and wrong-headed opinions.
The learned history of the past was never a true
philosopher's business, in India or Greece; and
a professor of philosophy who busies himself with
such matters must be, at best, content to hear it
said of him, "He is an able scholar, antiquary,
philologist, historian,"—but never, "He is a
philosopher." I said, "at best": for a scholar
feels that most of the learned works written by
University philosophers are badly done, without
any real scientific power, and generally are dread-
fully tedious. Who will blow aside, for example,
the Lethean vapour with which the history of
Greek philosophy has been enveloped by the dull
though not very scientific works of Ritter, Brandis
and Zeller? I, at any rate, would rather read
Diogenes Laertius than
Zeller, because at least the
spirit of the old philosophers lives in Diogenes,
but neither that nor any other spirit in Zeller.
And, after all, what does the history of philosophy
matter to our young men Are they to be
discouraged by the welter of opinions from having
any of their own; or taught to join the chorus
that approves the vastness of our progress? Are
they to learn to hate or perhaps despise philosophy?
One might expect the last, knowing the torture
the students endure for their philosophical
examinations, in having to get into their unfortunate
heads the maddest efforts of the human mind as
well as the greatest and profoundest. The only
method of criticising a philosophy that is possible
and proves anything at all—namely to see whether
one can live by it—has never been taught at the
universities; only the criticism of words, and
again words, is taught there. Imagine a young
head, without much experience of life, being stuffed
with fifty systems (in the form of words) and fifty
criticisms of them, all mixed up together,—what
an overgrown wilderness he will come to be, what
contempt he will feel for a philosophical education!
It is, of course, not an education in philosophy
at all, but in the art of passing a philosophical
examination: the usual result being the pious
ejaculation of the wearied examinee, "Thank God
I am no philosopher, but a Christian and a good
citizen!"
What if this cry were the ultimate object of the
state, and the "education" or leading to philosophy
were merely a leading from philosophy? We may
well ask.—But if so, there is one thing to fear—that
the youth may some day find out to what
end philosophy is thus mis-handled. "Is the
highest thing of all, the production of the
philosophical genius, nothing but a pretext, and
the main object perhaps to hinder his production?
And is Reason turned to Unreason?" Then woe
to the whole machinery of political and professorial
trickery!
Will it soon become notorious? I do not know;
but anyhow university philosophy has fallen into
a general state of doubting and despair. The
cause lies partly in the feebleness of those who
hold the chairs at present: and if Schopenhauer
had to write his treatise on university philosophy
to-day, he would find the club no longer necessary,
but could conquer with a bulrush. They are the
heirs and successors of those slip-shod thinkers
whose crazy heads Schopenhauer struck at: their
childish natures and dwarfish frames remind one of
the Indian proverb: " men are born according to
their deeds, deaf, dumb, misshapen." Those fathers
deserved such sons, "according to their deeds," as
the proverb says. Hence the students will, no
doubt, soon get on without the philosophy taught
at their university, just as those who are not
university men manage to do without it already.
This can be tested from one's own experience:
in my student-days, for example, I found the
university philosophers very ordinary men indeed,
who had collected together a few conclusions from
the other sciences, and in their leisure hours read
the newspapers and went to concerts; they were
treated by their academic colleagues with politely
veiled contempt. They had the reputation of
knowing very little, but of never being at a loss for
obscure expressions to conceal their ignorance.
They had a preference for those obscure regions
where a man could not walk long with clear
vision. One said of the natural sciences, "Not
one of them can fully explain to me the origin of
matter; then what do I care about them all?"—
Another said of history, "It tells nothing new to
the man with ideas": in fact, they always found
reasons for its being more philosophical to know
nothing than to learn anything. If they let
themselves be drawn to learn, a secret instinct made
them fly from the actual sciences and found a dim
kingdom amid their gaps and uncertainties. They
"led the way" in the sciences in the sense that the
quarry "leads the way" for the hunters who are
behind him. Recently they have amused themselves
with asserting they are merely the watchers
on the frontier of the sciences. The Kantian
doctrine is of use to them here, and they
industriously build up an empty scepticism on it, of which
in a short time nobody will take any more notice.
Here and there one will rise to a little metaphysic
of his own, with the general accompaniment of
headaches and giddiness and bleeding at the nose
After the usual ill-success of their voyages into the
clouds and the mist, some hard-headed young
student of the real sciences will pluck them down
by the skirts, and their faces will assume the
expression now habitual to them, of offended
dignity at being found out. They have lost their
happy confidence, and not one of them will venture
a step further for the sake of his philosophy. Some
used to believe they could find out new religions
or reinstate old ones by their systems. They
have given up such pretensions now, and have
become mostly mild, muddled folk, with no
Lucretian boldness, but merely some spiteful
complaints of the "dead weight that lies on the
intellects of mankind"! No one can even learn
logic from them now, and their obvious knowledge
of their own powers has made them discontinue
the dialectical disputations common in the old
days. There is much more care and modesty,
logic and inventiveness, in a word, more
philosophical method in the work of the special sciences
than in the so-called "philosophy," and every one
will agree with the temperate words of
Bagehot
on the present system builders: "Unproved abstract
principles without number have been eagerly caught
up by sanguine men, and then carefully spun out
into books and theories, which were to explain the
whole world. But the world goes clear against
these abstractions, and it must do so, as they
require it to go in antagonistic directions. The
mass of a system attracts the young and impresses
the unwary; but cultivated people are very
dubious about it. They are ready to receive hints
and suggestions, and the smallest real truth is
ever welcome. But a large book of deductive
philosophy is much to be suspected. Who is not
almost sure beforehand that the premises will
contain a strange mixture of truth and error, and
therefore that it will not be worth while to spend
life in reasoning over their consequences?" The
philosophers, especially in Germany, used to sink
into such a state of abstraction that they were in
continual danger of running their heads against
a beam; but there is a whole herd of Laputan
flappers about them to give them in time a gentle
stroke on their eyes or anywhere else. Sometimes
the blows are too hard; and then these scorners of
earth forget themselves and strike back, but the
victim always escapes them. " Fool, you do not
see the beam," says the flapper; and often the
philosopher does see the beam, and calms down.
These flappers are the natural sciences and history;
little by little they have so overawed the German
dream-craft which has long taken the place of
philosophy, that the dreamer would be only too
glad to give up the attempt to run alone: but
when they unexpectedly fall into the others' arms,
or try to put leading-strings on them that they may
be led themselves, those others flap as terribly as
they can, as if they would say, "This is all that is
wanting,—that a philosophaster like this should lay
his impure hands on us, the natural sciences and
history! Away with him!" Then they start
back, knowing not where to turn or to ask the way.
They wanted to have a little physical knowledge
at their back, possibly in the form of empirical
psychology (like the Herbartians),
or perhaps a little history; and then they could at least make a
public show of behaving scientifically, although in
their hearts they may wish all philosophy and all
science at the devil.
But granted that this herd of bad philosophers is
ridiculous—and who will deny it?—how far are
they also harmful? They are harmful just because
they make philosophy ridiculous. As long as this
imitation-thinking continues to be recognised by
the state, the lasting effect of a true philosophy
will be destroyed, or at any rate circumscribed;
nothing does this so well as the curse of ridicule
that the representatives of the great cause have
drawn on them, for it attacks that cause itself.
And so I think it will encourage culture to deprive
philosophy of its political and academic standing,
and relieve state and university of the task,
impossible for them, of deciding between true and
false philosophy. Let the philosophers run wild,
forbid them any thoughts of office or civic position,
hold them out no more bribes,—nay, rather persecute
them and treat them ill,—you will see a wonderful
result. They will flee in terror and seek a roof
where they can, these poor phantasms; one will
become a parson, another a schoolmaster, another
will creep into an editorship, another write
school-books for young ladies' colleges, the wisest of them
will plough the fields, the vainest go to court.
Everything will be left suddenly empty, the birds
flown: for it is easy to get rid of bad
philosophers,—one only has to cease paying them. And that
is a better plan than the open patronage of any
philosophy, whatever it be, for state reasons.
The state has never any concern with truth, but
only with the truth useful to it, or rather, with
anything that is useful to it, be it truth, half-truth,
or error. A coalition between state and philosophy
has only meaning when the latter can promise to
be unconditionally useful to the state, to put its
well-being higher than truth. It would certainly
be a noble thing for the state to have truth as a
paid servant; but it knows well enough that it is
the essence of truth to be paid nothing and serve
nothing. So the state's servant turns out to be
merely "false truth," a masked actor who cannot
perform the office required from the real truth—the
affirmation of the state's worth and sanctity.
When a mediaeval prince wished to be crowned
by the Pope, but could not get him to consent,
he appointed an antipope to do the business for
him. This may serve up to a certain point ; but
not when the modern state appoints an "anti-philosophy"
to legitimise it; for it has true
philosophy against it just as much as before, or
even more so. I believe in all seriousness that it
is to the state's advantage to have nothing further
to do with philosophy, to demand nothing from it,
and let it go its own way as much as possible.
Without this indifferent attitude, philosophy may
become dangerous and oppressive, and will have
to be persecuted.—The only interest the state can
have in the university lies in the training of
obedient and useful citizens; and it should hesitate
to put this obedience and usefulness in doubt by
demanding an examination in philosophy from the
young men. To make a bogey of philosophy may
be an excellent way to frighten the idle and
incompetent from its study; but this advantage is
not enough to counterbalance the danger that this
kind of compulsion may arouse from the side of
the more reckless and turbulent spirits. They
learn to know about forbidden books, begin to
criticise their teachers, and finally come to
understand the object of university philosophy and its
examinations; not to speak of the doubts that
may be fostered in the minds of young theologians,
as a consequence of which they are beginning to
be extinct in Germany, like the ibexes in the Tyrol.
I know the objections that the state could bring
against all this, as long as the lovely Hegel-corn
was yellowing in all the fields; but now that hail
has destroyed the crop and all men's hopes of it,
now that nothing has been fulfilled and all the
barns are empty,—there are no more objections
to be made, but rather rejections of philosophy
itself. The state has now the power of rejection;
in Hegel's time it only wished to have it—and
that makes a great difference. The state needs
no more the sanction of philosophy, and
philosophy has thus become superfluous to it. It
will find advantage in ceasing to maintain its
professors, or (as I think will soon happen) in
merely pretending to maintain them; but it is of
still greater importance that the university should
see the benefit of this as well. At least I believe
the real sciences must see that their interest lies
in freeing themselves from all contact with sham
science. And further, the reputation of the
universities hangs too much in the balance for
them not to welcome a severance from methods
that are thought little of even in academic circles.
The outer world has good reason for its wide-spread
contempt of universities; they are reproached
with being cowardly, the small fearing
the great, and the great fearing public opinion; it
is said that they do not lead the higher thought
of the age but hobble slowly behind it, and cleave
no longer to the fundamental ideas of the
recognised sciences. Grammar, for example, is
studied more diligently than ever without any one
seeing the necessity of a rigorous training in speech
and writing. The gates of Indian antiquity are
being opened, and the scholars have no more idea
of the most imperishable works of the Indians—their
philosophies—than a beast has of playing
the harp; though Schopenhauer thinks that the
acquaintance with Indian philosophy is one of the
greatest advantages possessed by our century.
Classical antiquity is the favourite playground
nowadays, and its effect is no longer classical and
formative; as is shown by the students, who are
certainly no models for imitation. Where is now
the spirit of Friedrich August Wolf to be found,
of whom Franz Passow could say that he seemed
a loyal and humanistic spirit with force enough
to set half the world aflame? Instead of that a
journalistic spirit is arising in the university, often
under the name of philosophy; the smooth
delivery—the very cosmetics of speech—with
Faust and Nathan the Wise for ever on the lips,
the accent and the outlook of our worst literary
magazines and, more recently, much chatter
about our holy German music, and the demand
for lectures on Schiller and Goethe,—all this is a
sign that the university spirit is beginning to be
confused with the Spirit of the Age. Thus the
establishment of a higher tribunal, outside the
universities, to protect and criticise them with
regard to culture, would seem a most valuable
thing, and as soon as philosophy can sever itself
from the universities and be purified from every
unworthy motive or hypocrisy, it will be able to
become such a tribunal. It will do its work with-
out state help in money or honours, free from the
spirit of the age as well as from any fear of it ; being
in fact the judge, as Schopenhauer was, of the
so-called culture surrounding it And in this way
the philosopher can also be useful to the university,
by refusing to be a part of it, but criticising it
from afar. Distance will lend dignity.
But, after all, what does the life of a state or the
progress of universities matter in comparison with
the life of philosophy on earth! For, to say quite
frankly what I mean, it is infinitely more important
that a philosopher should arise on the earth than
that a state or a university should continue. The
dignity of philosophy may rise in proportion as
the submission to public opinion and the danger
to liberty increase; it was at its highest during the
convulsions marking the fall of the Roman
Republic, and in the time of the Empire, when the
names of both philosophy and history became
ingrata principibus nomina. Brutus shows its
dignity better than Plato; his was a time when
ethics cease to have commonplaces. Philosophy
is not much regarded now, and we may well ask
why no great soldier or statesman has taken it up;
and the answer is that a thin phantom has met him,
under the name of philosophy, the cautious wisdom
of the learned professor; and philosophy has soon
come to seem ridiculous to him. It ought to have
seemed terrible; and men who are called to
authority should know the heroic power that has
its source there. An American may tell them
what a centre of mighty forces a great thinker can
prove on this earth. "Beware when the great God
lets loose a thinker on this planet," says
Emerson.
"Then all things are at risk. It is as when a
conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no
man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
There is not a piece of science, but its flank may
be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary
reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame,
that may not be revised and condemned. . . . The
things which are dear to men at this hour are so
on account of the ideas which have emerged on
their mental horizon, and which cause the present
order of things as a tree bears its apples. A new
degree of culture would instantly revolutionise the
entire system of human pursuits." If such thinkers
are dangerous, it is clear why our university
thinkers are not dangerous; for their thoughts
bloom as peacefully in the shade of tradition "as
ever tree bore its apples." They do not frighten;
they carry away no gates of Gaza; and to all their
little contemplations one can make the answer of
Diogenes when a certain philosopher was praised:
"What great result has he to show, who has
so long practised philosophy and yet has hurt
nobody?" Yes, the university philosophy should
have on its monument, "It has hurt nobody." But
this is rather the praise one gives to an old woman
than "to a goddess of truth; and it is not surprising
that those who know the goddess only as an old
woman are the less men for that, and are naturally
neglected by the real men of power.
If this be the case in our time, the dignity of
philosophy is trodden in the mire ; and she seems
herself to have become ridiculous or insignificant.
All her true friends are bound to bear witness
against this transformation, at least to show that
it is merely her false servants in philosopher's
clothing who are so. Or better, they must prove
by their own deed that the love of truth has itself
awe and power.
Schopenhauer proved this and will continue to
prove it, more and more.
Notes
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.
Original:
This work was published before January 1, 1931, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
Translation:
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1931.
This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
Uncharted Knowledge
Wisdom From Previous Realities
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