CHAPTER V.
ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM.
Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life to the foolish who do not know the true law. — Dhammapada.
To turn skeptic himself, we said, seemed the only
way open before our idealist. If only he had placed
his standard a little lower! If only he had not
insisted on getting his ideal by ideal methods!
Then he might have remained safe in some one of
the positions that he temporarily assumed. But
always he drove himself out of them. Some stupendous
external reality, some beautiful mental state,
would suggest itself to him, and he would say: “Lo,
here is the ideal that I seek.” But forthwith his
own doubt would arise, accusing him of faithlessness.
“What hast thou found save that this or that happens
to exist?” the doubt would say, and our idealist
would be constrained to answer, “Not because it
exists, but because I have freely chosen it for my
guide, is it the Ideal.” And then would come the
repeated accusation that caprice is the sole ground
for the choice of this ideal. Skepticism, then, total
skepticism as to the foundation of ethics, seems to
be the result that threatens us. We must face this
skepticism and consider its outcome.
I.
It is in fact in such skepticism as this that one
finds the real power and meaning of most genuine
modern Pessimism. Not so much in the hopelessness
of our efforts to reach our ideals once chosen as
in our perpetual hesitation or unsteadiness in the
choice of ideals, we most frequently find the deepest
ground for pessimistic despair. Choose an ideal,
and you have at least your part to play in the world.
The game may seem worth the trouble; for far off
as may be what you seek, there is the delight and
the earnestness of free self-surrender to a great aim.
But pessimism is almost inevitable if you have been
long trying to find an ideal to which you can devote
yourself, and if you have failed in your quest.
Therefore those advocates of pessimism are most
formidable who dwell less upon the ills of life, as
bare facts, and more upon the aimlessness of life.
Von Hartmann, therefore, to whom pessimism is
more the supposed result of a process of summation,
and thus is a belief that the sum of pains in life
overbalances the sum of pleasures, produces little
effect upon us by his balance-sheet. But Schopenhauer,
who dwelt not only upon the balance-sheet,
but still more upon the fundamental fact that life is
restless and aimless, — he is nearer to success in his
pessimistic efforts. It is here that one finds also
the true strength of Schopenhauer’s model, the
Buddhistic despair of life. Choose your aim in life,
says in effect Buddhism, let it be wife or child,
wealth or fame or power, and still your aim is only one among many, lost in the eternal strife, at war
with all the rest, and never able to prove its right to
supremacy in the world. From life to life you pass,
now a Brahman, now a king, now a worm, now a
tiger, now a beggar, now in hell, now among the
demons of the air; your aims alter everlastingly
with each new birth, and nowhere do you find life
anything but a succession of aims, no one of which
is intrinsically more significant than the others.
The world of aims is a world of strife, and no life
has any real significance. No desire is of any
essential worth. Therefore, seeing all this, give up
desire. Have it as your one aim to have no aim.
Such is the outcome of the insight into the eternal
warfare of aims. The Buddhist parables try to
make plain this insignificance of life both by dwelling
on the fact that men must finally fail to get their
aims, and by insisting that, if men temporarily
succeed, their condition is no less insignificant than it is
when they fail. The failure is used to show a man
not so much the difficulty of getting his aim in this
bad world, as the worthlessness of his aim. The
success when it comes is embittered for the successful
man by reminding him that all desire is transient,
and that what he now loves will come to seem
hateful to him. In both cases the lesson, whether of
the success or of the failure, is, not that the order of
things is diabolical, and therefore an enemy of
mankind, but that the desires themselves are hopelessly
confused and worthless. If Buddhism dwelt only
on the hopelessness of our efforts to get the good
things that we want, the doctrine would result in a sort of Promethean defiance of the physical world,
our powerful and cruel enemy. But Buddhism
insists upon it that we know not what are the good
things that we pretend to want. Our desires being
ignorant, and endlessly changeable, we have no right
to hope for success. The moral of their stories is
not a protest against the physical evils about us, but
a general condemnation of the vain aims that are
in us.
The same aimlessness of life is the subject of
lament in much of our modern romantic poetry.
Here is, for the melancholy romantic poet, the great
evil of existence, that we know not what is good.
Here is the great disappointment of life, that we
have no object in life. Here is the great failure,
that we cannot make up our minds to undertake
anything. Here is the great emptiness, that we
have nothing to fill. And thus the ethical
skepticism that has so far beset our path in the present
investigation becomes, when we dwell upon it and
fully realize its meaning, an ethical pessimism. We
shall then illustrate afresh our problem if we
consider how this difficulty of the choice of an ideal
has affected the search of certain among our modern
romantic poets for what they would call the ideal
emotion.
II.
Of all the subjects of reflection in romantic poetry,
none is more familiar than the question of the
meaning and worth of human life as a whole. The first
and natural answer of the modern poet to this question is well known. Human life means for him the
emotional side of life. The highest good, when
found, must be an emotional good. The romantic
poet, criticising life, must aim to make clear what
kind of emotional condition is the most satisfactory
one. In this view we have no mere truism. Many
forms of Hedonism would oppose the doctrine that
in the intenser emotions can be found the ideal
states of consciousness. The common sense of men
of the world sees in the more moderate pleasures of
polite leisure, in the attainment of practical
knowledge, in a successful professional or business career,
the sources of permanent satisfaction. Several
schools of ancient philosophy regarded tranquillity
as constituting the essence of a blessed life. But to
all this the spirit of modern poetry was from the
outset violently opposed. Tranquillity, once
exchanged for storm and stress, is not again regarded
as the goal. Active emotion, intense in quality,
unlimited in quantity, is what the poets of the
revolution desire. One need only mention “Werther,”
“The Robbers,” “The Revolt of Islam,” “Manfred,”
“Faust,” to suggest what is meant by this
spirit of the revolutionary poetry.
Life, then, can be of worth only in so far as it is
full of the desirable forms of poetic emotion. But
is such fullness of life possible? Is the view that
makes it the ideal a tenable view? Must not the
consistent following of this view lead ultimately to
pessimism? The answer to this problem is the
history of the whole romantic movement. Here must
suffice a sketch of some of the principal results of
the movement. The stir of modern life, then, has awakened
sensibility, quickened desire, aroused the passion for
freedom, disturbed old traditions. Above all, the
theological ideals of life have been, for the romantic poet,
disturbed, perhaps shattered. His highest good must
be sought in his own soul. What is the consequence?
First, of course, a sense of splendid independence, a
lofty spiritual pride. The joy of freed emotion is
equaled by few delights on earth. The self-worship of
poetic genius is surpassed by few forms of conceit.
Shelley, rejoicing in his strength, writing “The
Necessity of Atheism,” and defending, in all innocence
of evil, adultery and incest, is a good example of the
expression of this spirit. Lavatar’s account of the
nature of genius is another instance: “As the
apparitions of angels do not come, but are present, do not
go away, but are gone, as they strike the innermost
marrow, influence by their immortality the immortal
in men, vanish and yet still influence, leave behind
them sweet shuddering and tears of terror, and on
the countenance pale joy, so the operation of genius.
Describe genius as you will, — name it fruitfulness of
soul, faith, hope, love, — the unlearned, the unlearnable,
— the inimitable, the divine, — that is genius.
’Tis inspiration, revelation, that may be felt, but not
willed or desired; ’tis art above art, its way is the
way of the lightning.” We cannot quote a tenth
part of this rhapsody, wherein the self-admiration
and the mutual admiration of the young men about
Goethe, in the years just before and after 1780,
receive a characteristic expression. This pride leads directly to the effort to build up a wholly new set of ideals. The patience of the statesman, of the student of science, of the business man, is unknown to these forceful young men. They must make a world of their own, and in a day too. At the same time they are without any definite faith. In fact, definite faith would endanger for them the freshness of their emotions. They fear any creed but one self-made. And they can more easily tear down than build up. One of the most interesting of the young geniuses of the age of the German romantic development is the early lost Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), a representative, like Shelley after him, of the emotional or romantic poetry in its pristine innocence. A truly noble soul, joined to a weak body, oppressed by many troubles, unable to grow to full manly spiritual stature, he shows us the beauty and imperfection of the emotional movement in close union. He writes pages of vague philosophy, which afterwards impressed the young Carlyle as an embodiment of a sense of the deep mystery of life. You find delight in wandering through the flowery labyrinths of such speculation; you learn much by the way, but you come nowhere. Only this is clear: the young poet persists that the world must in some way conform to the emotional needs of man. And he persists, too, that a harmonious scheme of life can be formed on a purely romantic plan, and only on such a plan. He actually explains no reality and completes no scheme of life.
He hints, at length, that the Catholic church is the
best expression of the needs of man. With this
unsatisfactory suggestion, the little career of wandering
ends in death. But in what could it have ended
had life continued?
Perhaps in what was called by the close friend of
Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the romantic irony.
This is the next stage in the growth, or, if you like,
in the decay of the romantic spirit. Emotion is our
guide and our goal. But what is emotion? Something
changeable and by nature inconsistent. Each
emotion sets up a claim to fill the whole of life. For
each new one, the earnest poetic soul feels willing to
die. Yet each is driven away by its follower. The
feet of them that shall bear it out are before the
door even while the triumphant emotion is reigning
over the heart within. Fullness of such life means
fickleness. Novalis, upon the death of his betrothed,
made a sort of divinity of the departed, and dated a
new era from the day of her death. His diary was
for a while full of spiritual exercises, suggested by
his affliction. He resolved to follow her to the grave
in one year. Within this year he was betrothed
anew. If such is Novalis, what will be a lesser
spirit? Conscious of this inevitable decay of each
emotion, Friedrich Schlegel suggests that one should
make a virtue of necessity, and declare that the
higher life consists in a sort of enthusiastic fickleness.
The genius must wander like a humming-bird
in the garden of divine emotions. And he must be
conscious and proud of his wanderings. Activity, or rather agility, is his highest perfection. The
more numerous his emotions, the nobler the man.
The fickler the man, the more numerous his
emotions. This conscious union of nobility and fickleness
is the romantic irony, which consists in receiving
each new enthusiasm with a merry pride. ’Twas
not the first, and will not be the last. We see
through it, even while we submit to it. We are
more than it is, and will survive it. Long live King
Experience, who showers upon us new feelings!
So much for an ingenious and thoroughly detestable
view of life, in which there is for an earnest man
no rest. This irony, what is it but the laughter of
demons over the miserable weakness of human
character? The emotion was to be our god. It turns
out to be a wretched fetich, and we know it as such.
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to
thousands. It is gone, though we trusted in it. It was
our stay, and it has flowed away like water. This
is not fullness, but hollowness, of life. And how
shall the romantic irony supply the vacancy? This
irony is but the word of Mephistopheles about the
ruin of Gretchen: Sie ist die erste nicht. Not the
first change of emotion is this present one; not the
first breaking up of the fountains of the great deep
within us; but what misery in that thought! Then
there is nothing sure, nothing significant. In our
own hearts were we to find life, and there is no true
life there; only masks with nothing beneath them;
only endless and meaningless change.
The consciousness of this result is present in
another form of the romantic spirit. The consequence is what Hegel, in the Phänomenologie des Geistes,
described under the name of Das Unglückliche
Bewusstsein, and what is more familiarly known to
us as the Byronic frame of mind. The very strength
of the previous emotion renders this consciousness
of the hollowness of emotion the more
insupportable: —
“When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead.”
The brighter the lamp, the deeper the darkness that
follows its breaking.
The romantic despair thus described took many
forms in the poetry of the early part of the century.
To describe them all were to go far beyond our
limits. A few forms suggest themselves. If we are
condemned to fleeting emotions, we are still not
deprived of the hope that some day we may by chance
find an abiding emotion. Thus, then, we find many
poets living in a wholly problematic state of mind,
expecting the god stronger than they, who, coming,
shall rule over them. Such a man is the dramatist
and writer of tales, Heinrich von Kleist. “It can
be,” writes this poet to a friend, December, 1806,
“it can be no evil spirit that rules the world, only a
spirit not understood.” In such a tone of restless
search for the ideal of action, Kleist remains throughout
his life. No poet of the romantic school had a
keener love of life-problems purely as problems.
Each of his works is the statement of a question.
In so far Kleist resembles that more recent
representative of the problematic school of poetry,
Arthur Hugh Clough. Kleist answered his own questions at last by suicide. Others have other ways of
fleeing misery. Ludwig Tieck, after running through
the whole round of romantic questions, rids himself
of his demons by turning his attention to other literary
work, and lets most of the old romantic ideals
alone, or playfully writes amusing stories about
them. Friedrich Schlegel finally escapes from himself
by means of a scholarly toil and Catholic faith.
Hölderlin takes refuge in a mad-house. Shelley
manages to endure his brief life, by dint of childlike
submissiveness to his emotions, joined with earnest
hope for yet better things. Schiller had joined with
Goethe in a search for perfection in the ancient
Greek world. There are many fashions of quieting
the restlessness that belonged to the time, yet what
one of them really answers the problems of the
romantic spirit? There is still the great question:
How may mankind live the harmonious emotional
life, when men are driven for their ideals back upon
themselves, when traditional faith is removed, when
the age is full of wretchedness and of blind striving,
when the very strength of poetic emotion implies
that it is transient and changeable? The conscious
failure to answer this question is more or less
decided pessimism.
Could modern poetry free itself from that reflective
tendency in which we have found its most prominent
characteristic, the pessimism could disappear with
the criticism of life. But this is impossible. Omit
part of our lyric poetry, some of our comedy and of
our satire, and the rest of our best nineteenth century
poetic work is a more or less conscious struggle with pessimism. The grounds and the nature of this
struggle have been set forth in the foregoing. The
poet once for all accepts the emotional criterion of
the worth of life. Determining to see in the
harmonious emotional life the best life, feeling as the most
certain of principles that “there is a lower and a
higher,” the poet seeks to picture the perfect
existence thus defined. Failure means for him
pessimism; not von Hartmann’s really quite harmless
“eudämonologischer Pessimismus,” but the true
pessimism of the broken will, that has tried all and
failed. The life that ought to be, cannot be; the
life that is, is hollow and futile: such will be the
result of disappointed idealism. In our time, the
idealistic poets that are not pessimists have all
fought more or less consciously the same battle with
pessimism. Think only of the “Excursion,” or of
the “In Memoriam,” or again of “Faust,” that
epitome of the thought of our century.
But before we allow ourselves a word on the
relation of “Faust” to our problem, let us look a little
more closely at Byron. “Faust” is the crown of
modern poetic effort. If that fails as a solution, all
in this field has thus far been lost. But in Byron
there is a confessed, one may add a professed, moral
imperfection, whose nature throws light, not so much
on the solution of the problem of pessimism, as on
the problem itself.
The development of Byron’s poetry has two very
marked periods, the sentimental and the critical.
The sentimental Byron of the years before 1816 is
not of very great present interest. The Byron of “Manfred,” “Cain,” and “Don Juan,” represents an
independent phase of the romantic movement, whose
faults are as instructive as its beauties. This
period of Byron’s poetry is of course but very roughly
described by the word critical, yet that word is at
any rate suggestive. A sensitive man, and yet
heroic, strong in spirit, but without fixed ideals of life,
a rebel by nature who yet finds no greater soul to
lead him, no faithful band to follow him in any
definite effort for mankind, Byron is a modern likeness
of him that in the legend afterwards became St.
Christopher. Only Byron seeks the strongest without
finding him, learns to despise the devil, and never
meets the devil’s master. Worn out with the search,
the poet flings himself down in the woods of doubt
and dreams “Don Juan.” We look in vain for
the right adjective with which to qualify this poem:
it is so full of strength, so lavish of splendid resources,
and yet in sum so disappointing. It has no
true ending, and never could have had one. It is a
mountain stream, plunging down dreadful chasms,
singing through grand forests, and losing itself in a
lifeless gray alkali desert. Here is romantic self-criticism
pushed to its farthest consequences. Here
is the self-confession of an heroic soul that has made
too high demands on life, and that has found in its
own experience and in the world nothing worthy of
true heroism. We feel the magnitude of the blunder,
we despise (with the author, as must be noticed,
not in opposition to him) the miserable petty round
of detestable experiences — intrigues, amours,
dinners — in brief, the vulgarity to which human life is reduced; but the tragedy is everywhere to be
read between the lines, not in what is said. The
romantic spirit has sought in vain for the satisfactory
emotional state, and for the worthy deed to
perform, and now rests, scornful and yet terrified, in
dizzy contemplation of the confused and meaningless
maze of sensations into which the world has
resolved itself. “There is nothing there to fear or
hope,” this spirit seems to say.
“When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, ’twas no matter what he said.”
Or again: —
“‘To be or not to be?’ Ere I decide
I should be glad to know that which is being;
’Tis true we speculate both far and wide,
And deem, because we see, we are all-seeing.
For my part, I’ll enlist on neither side,
Until I see both sides for once agreeing.
For me, I sometimes think that life is death,
Rather than life, a mere affair of breath.”
In “Manfred” the same spirit seeks another, and
not quite so successful, a form of expression. The
only peace that can come to this world-weary spirit,
Manfred expresses at the sight of a quiet sunset.
The only freedom from eternal self-examination is
found in an occasional glance at peaceful nature.
“It will not last.
But it is well to have known it though but once;
It hath enlarged my thoughts with a new sense,
And I within my tablets would note down
That there is such a feeling.”
The famous last words of Manfred, —
“Old man, ’tis not so difficult to die,” — coming as they do after all Manfred’s vacillation
upon just this point, indicate the final resolution of
despair to brave all possible wretchedness from
without for the sake of feeling within, in all its strength,
though but for a moment, the fierce defiance of the
rebellious Titan. Hungry for deeds, finding nothing
to do, fearing the possible future life, and hating
the present, the hero at last resorts to an untrue but
stirring assertion of absolute personal independence
of all the hateful universe here and hereafter; —
“Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me.
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey —
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.”
This is pessimism that overleaps itself. The
outcome of self -analyzing romanticism is the determination
to build afresh a world that shall be nobler than
this poor world of decaying passive emotions. Feeling
will not do. Manfred attains something by
action, even though he first acts in the moment of
death. Doing work of some kind is, then, that to
which we are necessarily driven. But if the action
of defiance can make death tolerable, why might not
some kind of activity make life tolerable? Is not
the worthy life then to be found, not in emotion,
but in work? Is not the ideal state the ideal
activity, not the ideal feeling? This suggestion had
been at the foundation of the prototype of Manfred,
the Faust of Goethe.
Praise of the first part of Goethe’s “Faust” is
nowadays superfluous. Doubtless the work is a torso, but so is the life of man. Extravagant
encomium of “Faust,” such as that wherewith
Hermann Grimm has marred, as with a showman’s
harangue, the conclusion of his otherwise most instructive
“Lectures on Goethe,” seems as out of place as
applause in a cathedral. The poem is grand and
profound, because the life problems it so truthfully
portrays are grand and profound; in form, if you
except digressions, it is sublimely simple and
unassuming. Its imperfections are as open to view as is
its grandeur. The doctrine of the poem may be thus
briefly suggested. Here is a world wherein nature,
the expression of divine intelligence, is perfect;
wherein man, by the same divine wisdom, is left in
darkness and confusion. The angels, who simply
contemplate nature’s perfection, are the “true sons
of God.” But they do nothing. They only see and
think. Man is to act. By his action he is freely to
create such perfection as already passively exists in
nature. That is, his life is to become an harmonious
whole. The postulate of the Lord is that this is
possible. Mephistopheles holds the opposite opinion.
The question is to be solved by the case of Faust.
Faust is a man in whom are combined all the strength and weakness of the romantic spirit. No excellence he deems of worth so long as any excellence is beyond his grasp. Therefore his despair at the sight of the great world of life. So small a part of it is his. He knows that he can never grow great enough to grasp the whole, or any finite part of the whole. Yet there remains the hopeless desire for this wholeness. Nothing but the infinite can be satisfying. Hence the despair of the early scenes of the first part. Like Byron’s Manfred, Faust seeks death; but Faust is kept from it by no fear of worse things beyond, only by an accidental reawakening of old childish emotions. He thereafter feels that he has no business with life, and is a creature of accident. He is clearly conscious only of a longing for a full experience. But this experience he conceives as mainly a passive one. He does not wish as yet to do anything, only to get everything. But at the same time with this desire for a tempest of new feelings, Faust has the consciousness that there never can be a satisfactory feeling. Mephistopheles, stating the case of the contented man of the world, assures him that the time will come for enjoying good things in peace. Faust indignantly replies that pleasure can never deceive him, the tolerable moment never come. In making this very assertion, however, and in concluding his pact with Mephistopheles upon the basis of this assertion, Faust rises above his first position, and assumes a new one. The satisfactory pleasure can never be given to him, and why? Because he will always remain active. Satisfaction would mean repose, repose would mean death. Life is activity. The meaning of the pact is of course that, for good or for evil, all the existence of a man is work, and that
no one is ever wholly lost so long as the power of
accomplishment remains his. But if work is the
essence of life, then satisfaction must be found not in
feelings but in deeds. The world is good if we can
make it so, not otherwise. The problem of Faust is
therefore the discovery of the perfect kind of activity.
With this insight the romantic spirit has risen
beyond itself. The essence of romanticism is the
desire for fullness of personal experience. The essence
of this new spirit is the eagerness to accomplish
something. The difference is vast. Faust, following
this new tendency, might be led to an obscure toiling
life of endless self-sacrifice. His pessimism (for in
the early scenes he is a pessimist) might give way
before unquestioning heroic devotion to some great
end. Does this take place? We know too well the
answer. The whole poem is indeed a conflict between
the two tendencies in Faust, but the first, the
desire for manifold passive experiences, is until the
last scenes of the second part predominant. Faust
is active, but his activity is mainly a continual
pursuit of new experiences. Even at the end he is not
active as other men are active; his work is done by
magic; and the accomplishment for whose sake he
is at last willing to say, This is the highest moment,
is an anticipation, not a reality. In the real world
the satisfactory work is never found. And thus the
solution of the problem is not fully given, though
the poet, while suggesting it, has done more than
any other modern poet. The revolution had furnished
as life-ideals grand emotion and heroic action. The two cannot wholly be harmonized. The
highest forms of activity imply self-sacrifice, drudgery,
routine, cool-headed calculation. The highest
forms of emotion, pursued by themselves, intoxicate
and enervate. It is the purpose of Goethe to lead
his hero through the various stages of emotional life,
for the sake of making him prefer in the end a mode
of action to all forms of simple emotion. The result
is to be a man above the deadness of ordinary work-a-day
realism, yet as devoted to toil as the stupidest
realist. There is to be a free surrender of a full
self to the service of some high end. Nothing is
lacking to the conquest over pessimism, except the
clear statement of that for which the converted
Faust is to work. The goal of activity once found,
the problem will be solved, and the devil’s wager
lost. But the dim allegorical suggestions of the
second part will not suffice to give us the account of
what is wanted. Faust is to work for human
progress, and progress means the existence of a whole
nation of hard-laboring, fearless men who fight
forever for their freedom. To have been the father of
such a people is the highest blessedness. Good,
indeed, we say; but to have wrought by the devil’s
aid, through magic and oppression, is this the
highest? Is this the type of the best activity? And is the
great problem after all really solved? For what is
the ultimate good of the eternal warfare with nature
in which mankind are thus left? Faust leaves
behind him a nation of toilers, whose business it will
be to build dikes to keep the sea out. A worthy
end of romantic hopes, truly! That Goethe himself is not wholly content therewith is proven by the
epilogue in heaven, which means, if it means
anything, that the highest end of human activity is
something very fine, but altogether inexpressible,
invisible, inconceivable, indefinite, a thing of ether
and dreams. One longs in this last scene for the
presence of Mephistopheles, who surely has as much
right there as in the prologue, and who would be
sure to say, in his terse and sinewy fashion, just the
right and the last word about the whole business.
The incompleteness of “Faust” is the incompleteness
of modern thought. The poet is silent about
the final problem, because modern thought is still
toiling away on the definition of the highest human
activity.
Thus we have found that our moral problem is
shared by others than the moral philosophers.
Almost at random we have taken a few suggestive
illustrations of this same moral problem as it
appears to the poets. Had we made use of the poets
of the present day, we could have illustrated still
other aspects of the question. The restless dramatic
genius of Browning, for instance, always giving us
glimpses of new ideals that men of strange fashions
have or may have, unweariedly warns us not to
pretend to narrow the possible objects of life down to
one, however sacred we may think that one to be.
Life, thus viewed, seems a grand everlasting
warfare of ideals, among which peace is impossible.
And with this insight into the actual and seemingly
irreconcilable warfare of human aims, ethical
doctrine must begin. The outlook is gloomy, but the
problem must be faced.
III.
Such are some of the motives that give genuine
meaning to modern pessimism. This instability of
all ideals is the greatest danger to which idealism
can be subject. And the problem is not one of mere
theory, nor yet even of poetic emotion alone. The
problem is one of daily life. We choose some
fashion of life in the morning, and we reject it before
night. Our devotional moments demand that all
life shall be devotional; our merry moments that all
life shall be merry; our heroic moments that all life
shall be lived in defiance of some chosen enemy.
But we are false to all these our ideals, even while
we pretend to have them. And the most
disheartening aspect of the whole matter lies in the fact
that we cannot prove even our faithlessness to be
unworthy, unless we can bring ourselves steadfastly to
accept some ideal by which our faithlessness itself
can be judged. And this would imply that we were
no longer faithless.
We have thus reached the root of moral skepticism.
The worst that moral skeptics can say is that
all choice of ideals is an accidental caprice, that
ideals have no basis but this caprice, and that a
moral code depends for its successful propagation
wholly on the persuasive personal force of the man
that happens to have it and to teach it.
For the first, then, we provisionally accept this
skeptical view. We shall regard the moral ideals in
this light. We shall seek no impossible proof for
any of them. But we shall try to see whither the
skeptical view itself leads us. If we look now for a final and perfectly cold-blooded
statement of this moral skepticism, a statement
that shall let us see once for all its meaning, its
foundation, and its scope, the present author knows
of no better expression of it than the one that is
contained in the appendix to Mr. Arthur Balfour’s
“Defense of Philosophic Doubt,” under the title
“The Idea of a Philosophy of Ethics.” Mr. Balfour
has shown us by the book in question that he
has a very useful office in philosophic discussion,
and we can only thank him for having made positive
advance in ethics easier, by his clear statement
of the difficulties that in the past have barred the
way.
“Scientific judgments and ethical judgments deal,” says Mr. Balfour, “with essentially different subject-matters.” Scientific propositions state “facts or events, real or hypothetical.” Ethical propositions do not “announce an event,” nor yet do they tell any “fact of the external or internal world.” Ethical writers too often consider the “psychology of the individual holding the moral law.” But this is no matter for ethics, but only for psychological science. In fact, “if a proposition announcing obligation require proof at all, one term of that proof must always be a proposition announcing obligation, which itself requires no proof.” “There is no artifice by which an ethical proposition can be evolved from a scientific or metaphysical proposition, or any combination of such.” “The origin of an ultimate ethical belief can never supply a reason for believing it, since the origin of this belief, as of any other
mental phenomenon, is a matter to be dealt with by
science; and my thesis is that (negatively speaking)
scientific truth alone cannot serve as a foundation
for a moral system; or (to put it positively), if we
have a moral system at all, there must be contained
in it, explicitly or implicitly, at least one ethical
proposition, of which no proof can be given or
required.”
The reader may ask: Is all this the loftiest idealism,
or is it simply philosophic skepticism about the
basis of ethics? We may leave the reader to
examine for himself Mr. Balfour’s very ingenious
discussion, but one or two very obvious and simple
consequences may be quoted from the rest of the
essay, and these will serve well enough to show here
the drift of the discussion.
“An ethical proposition is one that prescribes an
action with reference to an end.” Every such
proposition “belongs to a system.” “The fundamental
proposition of every such system states an end, which
the person who receives that system regards as final
— as chosen for itself alone.” “When two such
systems conflict, their rival claims can only be
decided by a judgment or proposition not contained in
either of them, which shall assert which of these
respective fundamental ‘ends’ shall have precedence.”
“If revenge against a particular individual is for
me an end-in-itself, a proposition which prescribes
shooting him from behind a hedge may be one of the
dependent propositions belonging to that particular
system.” “Though under the name ethical are included not only moral, but also non-moral and
immoral systems, the distinctions regarded from the
outside between these subdivisions are not essential,
and have no philosophic import.” Such then is the
skeptical outcome of this very idealistic position from
which we ourselves started. Thus viewed, the moral
world seems essentially chaotic. Each end, if chosen,
has its own way of marshaling acts as good and bad.
But one end cannot establish itself theoretically
over against another. The warfare among them is
practical, but is not rationally to be judged or ended.
Each says, “In me is the truth about right and
wrong. I am the Way.” But for one another they
have, not arguments, but anathemas. They give no
proof, only assertion and condemnation. It is the
contemplation of this chaos that has suggested to us
that plausible and yet dreadful pessimism of which
modern thought has had so much to say, and of
which this chapter has tried to give some notion.
Notes
Uncharted Knowledge
Wisdom From Previous Realities
View as JSON for agents & LLMs