Schopenhauer

Here we have arrived at the thought which, in its various expressions, constitutes Schopenhauer's metaphysics. That this cannot be scientifically deduced he admits; but he regards it as furnishing such explanation as is possible of science itself. For science there is in everything an inexplicable element to which it runs back, and which is real, not merely phenomenal. From this reality we are most remote in pure mathematics and in the pure a priori science of nature as it was formulated by Kant. These owe their transparent clearness precisely to their absence of real content, or to the slightness of this. The attempt to reduce organic life to chemistry, this again to mechanism, and at last everything to arithmetic, could it succeed, would leave mere form behind, from which all the content of phenomena would have vanished. And the form would in the end be form of the subject. But the enterprise is vain. 'For in everything in nature there is something of which no ground can ever be given, of which no explanation is possible, no cause further is to be sought.' What for man is his inexplicable character, presupposed in every explanation of his deeds from motives, that for every inorganic body is its inexplicable quality, the manner of its acting.

The basis of this too is will, and 'groundless,' inexplicable will; but evidently the conception here is not identical with that of the Will that is one and all. How do we pass from the universal to that which has a particular character or quality? For of the Will as thing-in-itself we are told that there is not a greater portion in a man and a less in a stone. The relation of part and whole belongs exclusively to space. The more and less touches only the phenomenon, that is, the visibility, the objectivation. A higher degree of this is in the plant than in the stone, in the animal than in the plant, and so forth; but the Will that is the essence of all is untouched by degree, as it is beyond plurality, space and time, and the relation of cause and effect.

The answer to the question here raised is given in Schopenhauer's interpretation of the Platonic Ideas. These he regards as stages of objectivation of the Will. They are, as Plato called them, eternal forms related to particular things as models. The lowest stage of objectivation of the Will is represented by the forces of inorganic nature. Some of these, such as weight and impenetrability, appear in all matter. Some are divided among its different kinds, as rigidity, fluidity, elasticity, electricity, magnetism, chemical properties. They are not subject to the relation of cause and effect, but are presupposed by it. A force is neither cause of an effect nor effect of a cause. Philosophically, it is immediate objectivity of the will; in ætiology, qualitas occulta. At the lowest stages of objectivation, there is no individuality. This does not appear in inorganic things, nor even in merely organic or vegetative life, but only as we ascend the scale of animals. Even in the higher animals the specific enormously predominates over the individual character. Only in man is the Idea objectified in the individual character as such. 'The character of each individual man, so far as it is thoroughly individual and not entirely comprehended in that of the species, may be regarded as a particular Idea, corresponding to a peculiar act of objectivation of the Will.'

Schopenhauer warns us against substituting this philosophical explanation for scientific ætiology. The chain of causes and effects, he points out, is not broken by the differences of the original, irreducible forces. The ætiology and the philosophy of nature go side by side, regarding the same object from different points of view. Yet he also gives us in relation to his philosophy much that is not unsuggestive scientifically. His doctrine is not properly evolutionary, since the Ideas are eternal; but he has guarded incidentally against our supposing that all the natural kinds that manifest the Ideas phenomenally must be always represented in every world. For our particular world, comprising the sun and planets of the solar system, he sets forth in the Parerga an account of the process by which it develops from the nebula to man. This was referred to in the preceding chapter. In his fundamental work he describes a struggle, present through the whole of nature, in which the phenomenal manifestations of the higher Ideas conquer and subjugate those of the lower, though they leave them still existent and ever striving to get loose. Here has been seen an adumbration of natural selection: he himself admits the difficulty he has in making it clear. We must remember that it is pre-Darwinian.

Knowledge or intelligence he seeks to explain as an aid to the individual organism in its struggle to subsist and to propagate its kind. It first appears in animal life. It is represented by the brain or a large ganglion, as every endeavour of the Will in its self-objectivation is represented by some organ; that is, displays itself for presentation as such and such an appearance. Superinduced along with this contrivance for aid in the struggle, the world as presentation, with all its forms, subject and object, time, space, plurality and causality, is all at once there. 'Hitherto only will, it is now at the same time presentation, object of the knowing subject.' Then in man, as a higher power beyond merely intuitive intelligence, appears reason as the power of abstract conception. For the most part, rational as well as intuitive knowledge, evolved originally as a mere means to higher objectivation of the Will, remains wholly in its service. How, in exceptional cases, intellect emancipates itself, will be discussed under the heads of Æsthetics and Ethics.

That this view implies a teleology Schopenhauer expressly recognises. Indeed he is a very decided teleologist on lines of his own, and, in physiology, takes sides strongly with 'vitalism' as against pure mechanicism. True, the Will is 'endless' blind striving, and is essentially divided against itself. Everywhere in nature there is strife, and this takes the most horrible forms. Yet somehow there is in each individual manifestation of will a principle by which first the organism with its vital processes, and then the portion of it called the brain, in which is represented the intellect with its a priori forms, are evolved as aids in the strife. And, adapting all the manifestations to one another, there is a teleology of the universe. The whole world, with all its phenomena, is the objectivity of the one and indivisible Will; the Idea which is related to all other Ideas as the harmony to the single voices. The unity of the Will shows itself in the unison of all its phenomena as related to one another. Man, its clearest and completest objectivation, is the summit of a pyramid, and could not exist without this. Inorganic and organic nature, then, were adapted to the future appearance of man, as man is adapted to the development that preceded him. But in thinking the reality, time is to be abstracted from. The earlier, we are obliged to say, is fitted to the later, as the later is fitted to the earlier; but the relation of means to end, under which we cannot help figuring the adaptation, is only appearance for our manner of knowledge. And the harmony described does not get rid of the conflict inherent in all will.

In this account of Schopenhauer's metaphysical doctrine, I have tried to make the exposition as smooth as possible; but at two points the discontinuity can scarcely be concealed. First, the relation of the universal Will to the individual will is not made clear; and, secondly, the emergence of the world of presentation, with the knowledge in which it culminates, is left unintelligible because the will is conceived as mere blind striving without an aim. As regards the first point, disciples and expositors have been able to show that, by means of distinctions in his later writings, apparent contradictions are to some extent cleared away; and, moreover, that he came to recognise more reality in the individual will. On the second point, I think it will be necessary to admit that his system as such breaks down. But both points must be considered in their connection.

One of the most noteworthy features of Schopenhauer's philosophy is, as he himself thought, the acceptance from first to last of Kant's distinction between the 'empirical' and the 'intelligible' character of the individual. Every act of will of every human being follows with necessity as phenomenon from its phenomenal causes; so that all the events of each person's life are determined in accordance with scientific law. Nevertheless, the character empirically manifested in the phenomenal world, while it is completely necessitated, is the expression of something that is free from necessitation. This 'intelligible character' is out of time, and, itself undetermined, manifests itself through that which develops in time as a chain of necessary causes and effects. That this doctrine had been taken up, without any ambiguity as regards the determinism, by Schelling as well as by himself, he expressly acknowledges; and he finds it, as he also finds modern idealism, anticipated in various passages by the Neo-Platonists. His adaptation of it to his doctrine of the Ideas is distinctly Neo-Platonic in so far as he recognises 'Ideas of individuals'; but of course to make Will the essence belongs to his own system. 'The intelligible character,' he says, 'coincides with the Idea, or, yet more precisely, with the original act of will that manifests itself in it: in so far, not only is the empirical character of each man, but also of each animal species, nay, of each plant species, and even of each original force of inorganic nature, to be regarded as phenomenon of an intelligible character, that is, of an indivisible act of will out of time.' This is what he called the 'aseitas' of the will; borrowing a scholastic term to indicate its derivation (if we may speak of it as derived) from itself (a se), and not from a supposed creative act. Only if we adopt this view are we entitled to regard actions as worthy of moral approval or disapproval. They are such not because they are not necessitated, but because they necessarily show forth the nature of an essence the freedom of which consists in being what it is. Yet he could not but find a difficulty in reconciling this with his position that the one universal Will is identical in all things, and in each is 'individuated' only by space and time. For the Ideas, like the thing-in-itself, are eternal, that is, outside of time as well as space; and all the things now enumerated, forces of nature, plant and animal species, and individual characters of men, are declared to be in themselves Ideas.

He in part meets this difficulty by the subtlety that time and space do not, strictly speaking, determine individuality, but arise along with it. The diremption of individualities becomes explicit in those forms. Yet he must have perceived that this is not a complete answer, and various modifications can be seen going on. His first view clearly was that the individual is wholly impermanent, and at death simply disappears; nothing is left but the one Will and the universal Subject of contemplation identical in all. Metempsychosis is the best mythological rendering of what happens, but it is no more. Later, he puts forward the not very clearly defined theory of a 'palingenesia' by which a particular will, but not the intellect that formerly accompanied it, may reappear in the phenomenal world. And the hospitality he showed to stories of magic, clairvoyance, and ghost-seeing, is scarcely compatible with the view that the individual will is no more than a phenomenal differentiation of the universal will. A speculation (not put forward as anything more) on the appearance of a special providence in the destiny of the individual, points, as Professor Volkelt has noted, to the idea of a guidance, not from without, but by a kind of good daemon or genius that is the ultimate reality of the person. On all this we must not lay too much stress; but there is certainly one passage that can only be described as a definite concession that the individual is real in a sense not at first allowed. Individuality, it is said in so many words (Parerga, ii. § 117), does not rest only on the 'principle of individuation' (time and space), and is therefore not through and through phenomenon, but is rooted in the thing-in-itself. 'How deep its roots go belongs to the questions which I do not undertake to answer.'[1 - Werke, ed. Frauenstädt, vol. vi. p. 243.]

This tends to modify considerably, but does not overthrow, Schopenhauer's original system. In very general terms, he is in the number of the 'pantheistic' thinkers; and it is remarkable, on examination, how these, in Europe at least, have nearly always recognised in the end some permanent reality in the individual. This is contrary to first impressions: but the great names may be cited of Plotinus, John Scotus Erigena, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza (in Part v. of the Ethics), and finally of Schopenhauer's special aversion, Hegel, who has been supposed most unfavourable of all to any recognition of individuality as real. It is more true, Hegel maintains, that the individuality determines its world than that it is determined by it; and there is no explanation why the determination should be such and such except that the individuality was already what it is.[2 - Phänomenologie des Geistes, Jubiläumsausgabe, ed. G. Lasson, pp. 201-3.] And, if Schopenhauer's more imaginative speculations seek countenance from the side of empiricism, there is nothing in them quite so audacious as a speculation of J. S. Mill on disembodied mind, thrown out during the time when he was writing his Logic.[3 - Letter to Robert Barclay Fox, May 10, 1842. Printed in Appendix to Letters and Journals of Caroline Fox, third ed., vol. ii. pp. 331-2. 'To suppose that the eye is necessary to sight,' says Mill, 'seems to me the notion of one immersed in matter. What we call our bodily sensations are all in the mind, and would not necessarily or probably cease, because the body perishes.']

The association with pantheism Schopenhauer accepts in principle, though the name is not congenial to him. In his system the Will is one and all, like the 'Deus' of Spinoza. The difference is that, instead of ascribing perfection to the universe that is its manifestation, he regards the production of a world as a lapse from which redemption is to be sought. His doctrine has been rightly described, in common with the predominant philosophical doctrines of his period, as a resultant of the deepened subjective analysis brought by Kant into modern philosophy on the one side, and of the return to Spinoza in the quest for unity of principle on the other. Why, then, it may be asked, are Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel the constant objects of his attack? The true explanation is not the merely external one, that they were his successful rivals for public favour, but is to be found in a real antithesis of thought. Within the limits of the idealism they all hold in common, Schopenhauer is at the opposite pole. In spite of his attempt to incorporate the Platonic Ideas, and in spite of his following of Kant, whose 'intelligible world' was in essence Platonic or neo-Platonic, he could find no place in his system for a rational order at the summit. Now this order was precisely what Fichte and Hegel aimed at demonstrating. If Schopenhauer is less unsympathetic in his references to Schelling, that is because Schelling's world-soul appeared to him to prefigure his own attempt to discover in nature the manifestation of a blindly striving will or feeling rather than reason. Suspicious as he shows himself of possible plagiarisms by others, the charge cannot be retorted against himself. The supreme principle of Fichte, it has been pointed out, has an actively volitional character and was formulated before Schopenhauer's: but then it is essentially rational. For Hegel, what is supreme is the world-reason. Hence they are at one with Plato in holding that in some sense 'mind is king.' For Schopenhauer, on the contrary, mind, or pure intellect, is an emancipated slave. Having reached its highest point, and seen through the work of the will, it does not turn back and organise it, but abolishes it as far as its insight extends.

Yet to say merely this is to give a wrong impression of Schopenhauer. Starting though he does with blind will, and ending with the flight of the ascetic from the suffering inherent in the world that is the manifestation of such a will, he nevertheless, in the intermediate stages, makes the world a cosmos and not a chaos. And the Platonists on their side have to admit that 'the world of all of us' does not present itself on the surface as a manifestation of pure reason, and that it is a serious task to 'rationalise' it. Where he completely fails is where the Platonic systems also fail, though from the opposite starting-point. His attempt to derive presentation, intellect, knowledge, from blind striving, is undoubtedly a failure. But so also is the attempt of the Platonising thinkers to deduce a world of mixture from a principle of pure reason without aid from anything else empirically assumed. Not that in either case there is failure to give explanations in detail; but in both cases much is taken from experience without reduction to the principles of the system. What we may say by way of comparison is this: that if Schopenhauer had in so many words recognised an immanent Reason as well as Will in the reality of the universe, he would have formally renounced his pessimism; while it cannot be said that on the other side a more explicit empiricism in the account of the self-manifestation of Reason would necessarily destroy the optimism.

CHAPTER IV

ÆSTHETICS

A portion of Schopenhauer's system by which its pessimism is considerably mitigated is his theory of the Beautiful and of Fine Art. The characteristic of æsthetic contemplation is, he finds, that intellect throws off the yoke and subsists purely for itself as clear mirror of the world, free from all subjection to practical purposes of the will. In this state of freedom, temporary painlessness is attained.

The theory starts from his adaptation of the Platonic Ideas. Regarded purely as an æsthetic theory, it departs from Plato, as he notes; for, with the later Platonists, who took up the defence of poetic myths and of the imitative arts as against their master, he holds that Art penetrates to the general Idea through the particular, and hence that the work of art is no mere 'copy of a copy.' The difference of the Idea from the Concept is that it is not merely abstract and general, but combines with generality the characters of an intuition.

The Ideas, as we have seen, constitute the determinate stages of objectivation of the Will. The innumerable individuals of which the Ideas are the patterns are subject to the law of sufficient reason. They appear, that is to say, under the forms of time, space, and causality. The Idea is beyond these forms, and therefore is clear of plurality and change. Since the law of sufficient reason is the common form under which stands all the subject's knowledge so far as the subject knows as individual, the Ideas lie outside the sphere of knowledge of the individual as such. If, therefore, the Ideas are to be the object of knowledge, this can only be by annulling individuality in the knowing subject.

As thing-in-itself, the Will is exempt even from the first of the forms of knowledge, the form of being 'object for a subject.' The Platonic Idea, on the other hand, is necessarily an object, something known, a presentation. It has laid aside, or rather has not taken on, the subordinate forms; but it has retained the first and most general form. It is the immediate and most adequate possible objectivity of the Will; whereas particular things are an objectivation troubled by the forms of which the law of sufficient reason is the common expression.

When intellect breaks loose from the service of the will, for which it was originally destined in the teleology of nature, then the subject ceases to be merely individual and becomes pure will-less subject of knowledge. In this state the beholder no longer tracks out relations in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason—which is the mode of scientific as well as of common knowledge—but rests in fixed contemplation of the given object apart from its connection with anything else. The contemplator thus 'lost' in the object, it is not the single thing as such that is known, but the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the Will at this stage. The correlate of this object—the pure Subject exempt from the principle of sufficient reason—is eternal, like the Idea.

The objectivation of the Will appears faintly in inorganic things,—clouds, water, crystals,—more fully in the plant, yet more fully in the animal, most completely in man. Only the essential in these stages of objectivation constitutes the Idea. Its development into manifold phenomena under the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, is unessential, lies merely in the mode of knowledge for the individual, and has reality only for this. It is not otherwise with the unfolding of that Idea which is the completest objectivation of the Will. To the Idea of Man, the occurrences of human history are as unessential as the shapes they assume to the clouds, as the figures of its whirlpools and foam-drift to the stream, as its frost-flowers to the ice. The same underlying passions and dispositions everlastingly recur in the same modes. It is idle to suppose that anything is gained. But also nothing is lost: so the Earth-spirit might reply to one who complained of high endeavours frustrated, faculties wasted, promises of world-enlightenment brought to nought; for there is infinite time to dispose of, and all possibilities are for ever renewed.

The kind of knowledge for which the Ideas are the object of contemplation finds its expression in Art, the work of genius. Art repeats in its various media the Ideas grasped by pure contemplation. Its only end is the communication of these. While Science, following the stream of events according to their determinate relations, never reaches an ultimate end, Art is always at the end. 'It stops the wheel of time; relations vanish for it: only the essence, the Idea, is its object.' The characteristic of genius is a predominant capacity for thus contemplating things independently of the principle of sufficient reason. Since this requires a forgetting of one's own person and the relations between it and things, the attitude of genius is simply the completest 'objectivity.' The 'subjectivity' opposed to this, in Schopenhauer's phraseology, is preoccupation with the interests of one's own will. It is, he says, as if there fell to the share of genius a measure of intelligence far beyond the needs of the individual will: and this makes possible the setting aside of individual interests, the stripping off of the particular personality, so that the subject becomes 'pure knowing subject,' 'clear world-eye,' in a manner sufficiently sustained for that which has been grasped to be repeated in the work of art. A necessary element in genius is therefore Imagination. For without imagination to represent, in a shape not merely abstract, things that have not come within personal experience, genius would remain limited to immediate intuition, and could not make its vision apprehensible by others. Nor without imagination could the particular things that express the Idea be cleared of the imperfections by which their limited expression of it falls short of what nature was aiming at in their production. 'Inspiration' is ascribed to genius because its characteristic attitude is intermittent. The man of genius cannot always remain on a height, but has to fall back to the level of the common man, who can scarcely at all regard things except as they affect his interests,—have a relation to his will, direct or indirect.

This is the statement in its first outline of a theory that became one of Schopenhauer's most fruitful topics. Many are the pages he has devoted to the contrast between the man of genius and 'the wholesale ware of nature, which she turns out daily by thousands.' The genius is for him primarily the artist. Scientific genius as a distinctive thing he does not fully recognise; and he regards men of action, and especially statesmen, rather as men of highly competent ability endowed with an exceptionally good physical constitution than as men of genius in the proper sense. Philosophers like himself, who, as he frankly says, appear about once in a hundred years, he classes in the end with the artists; though this was left somewhat indeterminate in his first exposition. The weakness of the man of genius in dealing with the ordinary circumstances of life he allows, and even insists on. Genius, grasping the Idea in its perfection, fails to understand individuals. A poet may know man profoundly, and men very ill. He admits the proximity of genius to madness on one side, and explains it in this way. What marks the stage of actual madness, as distinguished from illusion or hallucination, is complete disruption of the memory of past life, of the history of the personality as something continuous; so that the particular thing is viewed by itself, out of relation. This gives a kind of resemblance to the attitude of genius, for which present intuition excludes from view the relations of things to each other. Or, as we may perhaps sum up his thought in its most general form, 'alienation' or dissolution of personality has the resemblance often noted between extremes to the impersonality, or, as he calls it, 'objectivity,' that is super-personal.

In spite of his contempt for the crowd, he has to admit, of course, that the capacity of genius to recognise the Ideas of things and to become momentarily impersonal must in some measure belong to all men; otherwise, they could not even enjoy a work of art when produced. Genius has the advantage only in the much higher degree and the greater prolongation of the insight. Since, then, the actual achievement of the artist is to make us look into the world through his eyes, the feelings for the beautiful and the sublime may be treated irrespectively of the question whether they are aroused by nature and human life directly or by means of art.

Æsthetic pleasure in contemplation of the beautiful proceeds partly from recognition of the individual object not as one particular thing but as Platonic Idea, that is, as the enduring form of this whole kind of things; partly from the consciousness the knower has of himself not as individual, but as pure, will-less Subject of Knowledge. All volition springs out of need, therefore out of want, therefore out of suffering. No attained object of will can give permanent satisfaction. Thus, there can be no durable happiness or rest for us as long as we are subjects of will. 'The Subject of Will lies continually on the turning wheel of Ixion, draws ever in the sieve of the Danaides, is the eternally thirsting Tantalus. But in the moment of pure objective contemplation, free from all interest of the particular subjectivity, we enter a painless state: the wheel of Ixion stands still. The Flemish painters produce this æsthetic effect by the sense of disinterested contemplation conveyed in their treatment of insignificant objects. There are certain natural scenes that have power in themselves, apart from artistic treatment, to put us in this state; but the slightest obtrusion of individual interest destroys the magic. Past and distant objects, through their apparent detachment, have the same power. The essential thing æsthetically, whether we contemplate the present or the past, the near or the distant, is that only the world of presentation remains; the world as will has vanished.

The difference between the feelings of the Beautiful and of the Sublime is this. In the feeling of the beautiful, pure intelligence gains the victory without a struggle, leaving in consciousness only the pure subject of knowledge, so that no reminiscence of the will remains. In the feeling of the sublime, on the other hand, the state of pure intelligence has to be won by a conscious breaking loose from relations in the object that suggest something threatening to the will; though there must not be actual danger; for in that case the individual will itself would come into play, and æsthetic detachment would cease. Elevation above the sense of terror has not only to be consciously won but consciously maintained, and involves a continuous reminiscence, not indeed of any individual will, but of the will of man in general, so far as it is expressed through its objectivity, the human body, confronted by forces hostile to it. Pre-eminently this feeling arises from contrast between the immensities of space and time and the apparent insignificance of man. It means in the last resort that the beholder is upheld by the consciousness that as pure subject of knowledge (not as individual subject) he himself bears within him all the worlds and all the ages, and is eternal as the forces that vainly seem to threaten him with annihilation.

On the objective side, and apart from the subjective distinction just set forth, the sublime and the beautiful are not essentially different. In both cases alike, the object of æsthetic contemplation is not the single thing, but the Idea that is striving towards manifestation in it. Whatever is viewed æsthetically is viewed out of relation to time and space: 'along with the law of sufficient reason the single thing and the knowing individual are taken away, and nothing remains over but the Idea and the pure Subject of Knowledge, which together make up the adequate objectivity of the Will at this stage.' There is thus a sense in which everything is beautiful; since the Will appears in everything at some stage of objectivity, and this means that it is the expression of some Idea. But one thing can be more beautiful than another by facilitating æsthetic contemplation. This facilitation proceeds either from the greater clearness and perfection with which the particular thing shows forth the Idea of its kind, or from the higher stage of objectivation to which that Idea corresponds. Man being the highest stage of objectivation of the Will, the revelation of his essence is the highest aim of art. In æsthetic contemplation of inorganic nature and vegetative life, whether in the reality or through the medium of art, and in appreciation of architecture, the subjective aspect, that is to say, the enjoyment of pure will-less knowledge, is predominant; the Ideas themselves being here lower stages of objectivity. On the other hand, when animals and men are the object of æsthetic contemplation or representation, the enjoyment consists more in the objective apprehension of those Ideas in which the essence of the Will is most clearly and fully manifested.

Of all Schopenhauer's work, its æsthetic part has met with the most general appreciation. Here especially he abounds in observations drawn directly, in his own phrase, from intuition. To make a selection of these, however, is not appropriate to a brief sketch like the present. I pass on, therefore, to those portions of his theory of Art by which he makes the transition, in terms of his system, to Morality.

From Architecture onward the arts are obliged to represent the Will as divided. Here, at the first stage, its division subsists only in a conflict of inorganic forces which have to be brought to equilibrium. The conflict between weight and rigidity is in truth the only æsthetic material of architecture as a fine art. When we come to animal and lastly to human life, which, in the Plastic Arts and in Poetry, as form, individualised expression, and action, is the highest object of æsthetic representation, the vehemence of divided will is fully revealed; and here too is revealed the essential identity of every will with our own. In the words of the Indian wisdom, 'Tat twam asi'; 'that thou art.' Under the head of Ethics it will be shown expressly that by this insight, when it reacts on the will, the will can deny itself. For the temporary release from its striving, given in æsthetic contemplation, is then substituted permanent release. To this 'resignation,' the innermost essence of all virtue and holiness, and the final redemption from the world, Art itself, at its highest stages, points the way.

The summits of pictorial and poetic art Schopenhauer finds in the great Italian painters so far as they represent the ethical spirit of Christianity, and in the tragic poets, ancient and modern. It is true that the poverty of their sacred history or mythology puts the Christian artists at a disadvantage; but events are merely the accidents of their art. Not in these, as related according to the law of sufficient reason, is the essence, but in the spirit we divine through the forms portrayed. In their representation of men full of that spirit, and especially in the eyes, we see mirrored the knowledge that has seized the whole essence of the world and of life, and that has reacted on the will, not so as to give it motives, but as a 'quietive'; whence proceeds complete resignation, and with it the annulling of the will and of the whole essence of this world. Of tragedy, the subject-matter is the conflict of the will with itself at its highest stage of objectivity. Here also the end is the resignation brought on by complete knowledge of the essence of the world. The hero, on whom at last this knowledge has acted as a quietive, gives up, not merely life, but the whole will to live. 'The true meaning of tragedy is the deeper insight, that what the hero expiates is not his particular sins, but original sin, that is, the guilt of existence itself.' To illustrate this position Schopenhauer is fond of quoting a passage from Calderon which declares that the greatest sin of man is to have been born.

It seems strange that, after deriding as he does the popular notion of 'poetic justice' so detached a thinker should imagine an at least equally one-sided view to receive its final confirmation from the Spanish dramatist's poetic phrasing of a Christian dogma. The great tragic poets, for Schopenhauer also, are Æschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare. Now it is safe to say that by none of these was any such general doctrine held either in conceptual or in intuitive form. The whole effect of any kind of art, of course he would admit, cannot be packed into a formula; but if we seek one as an aid to understanding, some adaptation of his own theory of the sublime would probably serve much better as applied to tragedy than his direct theory of the drama. In the case of pictorial art, all that is proved by what he says about the representation of ascetic saintliness, is that this, like many other things, can be so brought within the scope of art as to make us momentarily identify ourselves with its Idea in the impersonal manner he has himself described. His purely æsthetic theory is quite adequate to the case, without any assumption that this is the representation of what is best. Art, pictorial or poetic, can no more prove pessimism than optimism. We pick out expressions of one or the other for quotation according to our moods or subjective preferences; but, if we have the feeling for art itself, our sense of actual æsthetic value ought to be independent of these.

Schopenhauer's æsthetic theory, however, does not end here. There follows the part of it by which he has had an influence on artists themselves. For him, a position separate from all the other arts is held by music. While the rest objectify the Will mediately, that is to say, by means of the Ideas, Music is as immediate an objectivation of the whole Will as the world itself, or as the Ideas, of which the pluralised phenomenon constitutes the sum of particular things. The other arts speak of the shadow, music of the substance. There is indeed a parallelism, an analogy, between Music and the Ideas; yet Music never expresses the phenomenon in which these are manifested, but only the inner essence behind the appearance, the Will itself. In a sense it renders not feeling in its particularity, but feeling in abstracto; joy, sorrow, not a joy, a sorrow. The phenomenal world and music are to be regarded as two different expressions of the same thing. The world might be called embodied Music as well as embodied Will. 'Melodies are to a certain extent like general concepts, an abstract of reality.' A complete explanation of music, that is, a detailed repetition of it in concepts, were this possible, would be a complete explanation of the world (since both express the same thing) and therefore a true and final philosophy. As music only reaches its perfection in the full harmony, 'so the one Will out of time finds its perfect objectivation only in complete union of all the stages which in innumerable degrees of heightened distinctness reveal its essence.' But here, too, Schopenhauer adds, the Will is felt, and can be proved, to be a divided will; and the deliverance wrought by this supreme art, as by all the others, is only temporary.

CHAPTER V

ETHICS

Permanent redemption from the suffering of the world is to be found only in the holiness of the ascetic; but to this there are many stages, constituting the generally accepted human virtues. Of these Schopenhauer has a rational account to give in terms of his philosophy; and if the last stage does not seem to follow by logical sequence from the others, this is only what is to be expected; for it is reached, in his view, by a sort of miracle. To the highest kind of intuitive knowledge, from which the ascetic denial of the will proceeds, artistic contemplation ought to prepare the way; and so also, on his principles, ought the practice of justice and goodness. Yet he is obliged to admit that few thus reach the goal. Of those that do reach it, the most arrive through personal suffering, which may be deserved. A true miracle is often worked in the repentant criminal, by which final deliverance is achieved. Though the 'intelligible character' is unalterable, and the empirical character can only be the unfolding of this, as every great dramatist intuitively recognises, yet the 'convertites,' like Duke Frederick in As You Like It, are not to be regarded as hypocrites. The 'second voyage' to the harbour, that of the disappointed egoist, on condition of this miracle, brings the passenger to it as surely as the first, that of the true saints, which is only for the few. And in these equally a miraculous conversion of the will has to be finally worked.

At the entrance to his distinctive theory of ethics, Schopenhauer places a restatement of his metaphysics as the possible basis of a mode of contemplating life which, he admits, has some community with an optimistic pantheism. The Will, through the presentation and the accompanying intelligence developed in its service, becomes conscious that that which it wills is precisely the world, life as it is. To call it 'the will to live' is therefore a pleonasm. 'Will' and 'will to live' are equivalent. For this will, life is everlastingly a certainty. 'Neither the will, the thing-in-itself in all phenomena, nor the subject of knowledge, the spectator of all phenomena, is ever touched by birth and death.' It is true that the individual appears and disappears; but individuality is illusory. Past and future exist only in conceptual thought. 'The form of life is a present without end, howsoever the individuals, phenomena of the Idea, come into existence and vanish in time, like fugitive dreams.' Only as phenomenon is each man different from the other things of the world: as thing-in-itself he is the Will, which appears in all, and death takes away the illusion that divides his consciousness from the rest. 'Death is a sleep in which the individuality is forgotten: everything else wakes again, or rather has remained awake.' It is, in the expression adopted by Schopenhauer later, an awakening from the dream of life: though this bears with it somewhat different implications; and, as has been said, his theory of individuality became modified.

With the doctrine of the eternal life of the Will are connected Schopenhauer's theories, developed later, of the immortality of the species and of individualised sexual love. The latter is by itself a remarkable achievement, and constitutes the one distinctly new development brought to completion in his later years; for the modifications in his theory of individuality are only tentative. His theory of love has a determinate conclusion, of great value for science, and not really compatible, it seems to me, with his pessimism. In its relation to ethics, on which he insisted, it is rightly placed in the position it occupies, between the generalised statement of his metaphysics just now set forth on the one side, and his theory of human virtue on the other.

The teleology that manifests itself in individualised love is, in his view, not related in reality to the interests of the individual life, but to those of the species. That this is immortal follows from the eternity of the Idea it unfolds.[4 - The disappearance of species in time raises difficulties in more than one way for his philosophy; but he formally escapes refutation by the suggestion, already noted, that the Idea need not always be manifested phenomenally in the same world. This, however, he did not work out.] The end sought is aimed at unconsciously by the person. Fundamentally, for Schopenhauer, teleology must of course be unconscious, since the will is blind, and will, not intelligence, is primordial. Its typical case is the instinct of animals; but the 'instinctive' character belongs also to the accomplishment of the highest aims, as in art and virtue. What characterises individualised love internally is the aim, attributed to 'nature' or 'the species,' at a certain typical beauty or perfection of the offspring. The lover is therefore deluded in thinking that he is seeking his own happiness. What looks through the eyes of lovers is the genius of the race, meditating on the composition of the next generation. It may, in the complexity of circumstances, be thwarted. When it reaches its end, often personal happiness is sacrificed. Marriages dictated by interest tend to be happier than love-matches. Yet, though the sacrifice of the individual to the race is involuntary in these, egoism is after all overcome; hence they are quite rightly the object of a certain admiration and sympathy, while the prudential ones are looked upon with a tinge of contempt. For here too that element appears which alone gives nobility to the life either of intellect or of art or of moral virtue, namely, the rising above a subjective interest of the individual will.

No doubt there are touches of pessimism in this statement; but the general theory does not seem reconcilable finally with pessimism as Schopenhauer understands it. For it is a definitely stated position of his that nature keeps up the process of the world by yielding just enough to prevent discontinuance of the striving for an illusory end. Yet he admits here in the result something beyond bare continuance of life; for this is already secured without the particular modification of feeling described. What the feeling is brought in to secure is a better realisation of the type in actual individuals; and such realisation is certainly more than bare subsistence with the least possible expenditure of nature's resources.

As the immediate preliminary to his ethics proper, Schopenhauer restates his doctrine on the intelligible and the empirical character in man, and lays down a generalised psychological position regarding the suffering inherent in life. Everything as phenomenon, we have seen already, is determined because it is subject to the law of sufficient reason. On the other hand, everything as thing-in-itself is free; for 'freedom' means only non-subjection to that law. The intelligible character of each man is an indivisible, unalterable act of will out of time; the developed and explicit phenomenon of this in time and space is the empirical character. Man is his own work, not in the light of knowledge, but before all knowledge; this is secondary and an instrument. Ultimately, freedom is a mystery, and takes us beyond even will as the name for the thing-in-itself. In reality, that which is 'will to live' need not have been such (though we cannot see how this is so), but has become such from itself and from nothing else. This is its 'aseitas.' Hence it is in its power to deny itself as will to live. When it does this, the redemption (like the fall) comes from itself. This denial does not mean annihilation, except relatively to all that we know under the forms of our understanding. For the will, though the nearest we can get to the thing-in-itself, is in truth a partially phenomenalised expression of this. As the will to live expresses itself phenomenally, so also does the denial of the will to live, when this, by special 'grace,' is achieved. Only in man does the freedom thus attained find phenomenal expression. That man can attain to it proves that in him the will has reached its highest possible stage of objectivation; for, after it has turned back and denied itself, there is evidently nothing more that we can call existence, that is to say, phenomenal existence, beyond. What there is beyond in the truth of being is something that the mystics know—or rather, possess, for it is beyond knowledge—but cannot communicate.

The psychological reason that can be assigned for the ascetic flight from the world is that all pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, is merely negative. The will is a striving that has no ultimate aim. It is sustained only by hindrances. Hindrance means suffering; and every satisfaction attained is only temporary, a mere liberation from need, want, pain, which is positive. Suffering increases with the degree of consciousness. The life of civilised man is an alternation between pain and ennui, which can itself become as intolerable a suffering as anything. The problem of moral philosophy, then, is ultimately how redemption from such a world is to be attained, but only so far as this is a matter of conceptual knowledge. For philosophy, being from beginning to end theoretical, cannot work the practical miracle by which the will denies itself.

The intuitive, as distinguished from merely conceptual, knowledge by which the return is made, consists essentially in a clear insight into the identity of the suffering will in all things and the necessity of its suffering as long as it is will to live. This, then, is the true foundation of morality. The universe as metaphysical thing-in-itself, as noumenon, has an ethical meaning. All its stages of objectivation, though in the process what seems to be aimed at is preservation of the will as manifested, have in truth for their ultimate aim its redemption by suppression of the phenomenal world in which it manifests itself.

Affirmation of the will is affirmation of the body, which is the objectivity of the will. The sexual impulse, since it affirms life beyond the death of the individual, is the strongest of self-affirmations. In it is found the meaning of the mythical representation that has taken shape in the theological dogma of original sin. For by this affirmation going beyond the individual body, suffering and death, as the necessary accompaniment of the phenomenon of life, are reaffirmed, and the possibility of redemption this time declared fruitless. But through the whole process there runs eternal justice. The justification of suffering is that the will affirms itself; and the self-affirmation is justified by payment of the penalty.

Before the final redemption—which is not for the world but for the individual—there are many stages of ethical progress. These consist in the gradual overcoming of egoism by sympathy. And here Schopenhauer proceeds to set forth a practical scheme for the social life of man, differing from ordinary utilitarianism only by reducing all sympathy to pity, in accordance with his view that there can be no such thing as positive happiness.

He begins with a theory of justice, legal and moral, very much on the lines of Hobbes, except that he regards it as up to a certain point a priori. Here he is consistent throughout. As in his philosophical account of mathematics and physics, so also in his aesthetics and ethics, he retained, side by side with a strong empirical tendency, belief in certain irreducible a priori forms without which our knowledge cannot be constituted. The pure ethical theory of justice, he says, bears to the political theory the relation of pure to applied mathematics. Injustice he holds to be the positive conception. It means the breaking into the sphere of another person's will to live. The self-affirmation of the will that appears in one individual body is extended to denial of the will that appears in other bodies. Justice consists in non-encroachment. There is a 'natural right,' or 'moral right,' of resistance to injustice by infliction of what, apart from the attempted encroachment, would be wrong. Either force or deception may be used; as either may be the instrument of injustice. The purely ethical doctrine of justice applies only to action; since only the not doing of injustice depends on us. With the State and its laws, the relation is reversed. The object of these is to prevent the suffering of injustice. The State is not directed against egoism, but has sprung out of a rationalised collective egoism. It has for its purpose only to avoid the inconvenient consequences of individual aggressions on others. Outside of the State, there is a right of self-defence against injustice, but no right of punishment. The punishment threatened by the State is essentially a motive against committing wrong, intended to supply the place of ethical motives for those who are insufficiently accessible to them. Actual infliction of it is the carrying out of the threat when it has failed, so that in general the expectation of the penalty may be certain. Revenge, which has a view to the past, cannot be justified ethically: punishment is directed only to the future. There is no right in any one to set himself up as a moral judge and inflict pain; but man has a right to do what is needful for social security. The criminal's acts are of course necessitated; but he cannot justly complain of being punished for them, since it is ultimately from himself, from what he is, that they sprang.

With the doctrine of 'eternal justice,' touched on above, we pass into a different region of thought. What is responsible for the guilt in the world is the Will by which everything exists, and the suffering everlastingly falls where the guilt is. Take the case of apparently unpunished injustice (from the human point of view) expressing itself in the extreme form of deliberate cruelty. Through this also, eternal justice, from which there is no escape, is fulfilled. 'The torturer and the tortured are one. The former errs in thinking he has no share in the torture; the latter in thinking he has no share in the guilt.' For all the pain of the world is the expiation of the sin involved in the self-affirmation of will, and the Will as thing-in-itself is one and the same in all.

If this could satisfy any one, there would be no need to go further. The whole being as it ought to be, why try to rectify details that are absolutely indifferent? But of course the implication is that individuality is simply illusory; and this, as has been said, was a position that Schopenhauer neither could nor did consistently maintain. Indeed, immediately after setting forth this theory of 'eternal justice,' he goes on to a relative justification of those acts of disinterested vengeance by which a person knowingly sacrifices his own life for the sake of retribution on some extraordinary criminal. This, he says, is a form of punishment, not mere revenge, although it involves an error concerning the nature of eternal justice. Suicide involves a similar error, in so far as it supposes that the real being of the individual can be assailed through its phenomenal manifestation. It is not a denial of the will to live, but a strong affirmation of it, only not in the given circumstances: different circumstances are desired with such intensity that the present cannot be borne. Therefore the individual manifestation of the will is not suppressed. Yet, one might reply, if individuality is an illusion attached to the appearance in time and space of a particular organism, it would seem that, with the disappearance of this, all that distinguishes the individual must disappear also.

Schopenhauer had no will thus to escape from life; nor did he afterwards devote himself to expounding further his theory of eternal justice. What he wrote later, either positively or as mere speculation, implies both greater reality in the individual and more of cosmic equity to correspond. His next step, even at his first stage, is to continue the exposition of a practicable ethics for human life. His procedure consists in adding beneficence to justice, with the proviso already mentioned, which is required by his psychology, that all beneficence can consist only in the relief of pain. For Schopenhauer, as for Comte, what is to be overcome is 'egoism,' an excessive degree of which is the mark of the character we call 'bad.' The 'good' is what Comte and Spencer call the 'altruistic' character. This difference between characters Schopenhauer goes on to explain in terms of his metaphysics. The egoist is so deluded by the principle of individuation that he supposes an absolute cleft between his own person and all others. The remorse of conscience from which he suffers proceeds in part from an obscure perception that the principle of individuation is illusory. Genuine virtue springs out of the intuitive (not merely abstract) knowledge that recognises in another individuality the same essence as in one's own. The characteristic of the good man is that he makes less difference than is customary between himself and others. Justice is an intermediate stage between the encroaching egoism of the bad and positive goodness. In the renunciation of rights of property, and provision for all personal needs without aid from others, practised by some religious and philosophical ascetics, it is passing over into something more. There is, however, a certain misunderstanding involved in so interpreting strict justice; for there are many ways in which the rich and powerful can be positively beneficent. At the other extreme, when they simply live on their inherited wealth, without doing anything in return, their mode of life is morally, though not legally, unjust. Rights of property Schopenhauer derived from labour spent on the things appropriated. The injustice, in many ways, of the present social order he quite recognises. If he has no sympathy with revolutions, it is because he has no belief in the realisation of an ideal state. This follows from his view of history. Human life, it is his conviction, never has been and never will be different as a whole. Redemption from evil can be attained only by the individual. All that the State can do is to provide certain very general conditions of security under which there will be no hindrance to those who desire to live in accordance with a moral ideal.

Yet there are qualifications to make. Many passages in Schopenhauer's writings prove his firm belief in the future triumph of reason over superstition. It is to the honour of humanity, he says, that so detestable a form of evil as organised religious persecution has appeared only in one section of history. And, in his own personal case, he has the most complete confidence that the truths he has put forth cannot fail sometime to gain a hearing. In all cases, error is only temporary, and truth will prevail. His language on this subject, and indeed often on others, is indistinguishable from that of an optimist.

In the last resort, his pessimism entrenches itself behind the psychological proposition that every satisfaction is negative, being only the removal of a pain. If this is unsustainable, there is nothing finally in his Metaphysics of Will to necessitate the pessimistic conclusion drawn. The mode of deduction by which he proceeds is to argue first to the position already noticed: that all that love of others on which morality is based is fundamentally pity. True benevolence can only be the desire to relieve others' pain, springing from the identification of this with our own. For that reason, moral virtue must finally pass over into asceticism—the denial of the will to live. In others, if we are able to see through the principle of individuation, we recognise the same essence as in ourselves, and we perceive that as long as this wills it must necessarily suffer. The end then is to destroy the will to live. This is to be done by askesis, self-mortification. The first step is complete chastity. If, says Schopenhauer, the highest phenomenon of will, that is, man, were to disappear through a general refusal to affirm life beyond the individual body, man's weaker reflexion in the animal world would disappear also, and the consciousness of the whole would cease. Knowledge being taken away, the rest would vanish into nothingness, since there is 'no object without subject.' That this will come to pass, however, he certainly did not believe. He has no cosmogony, like that of Hartmann, ending in a general redemption of the universe by such a collective act. Nor did he hold, like his later successor Mainländer, that through the conflict and gradual extinction of individualities, 'this great world shall so wear out to nought.' The world for him is without beginning and without end. But the exceptional individual can redeem himself. What he does when he has reached the height of holiness is by voluntary poverty and all other privations, inflicted for their own sake, to break and kill the will, which he recognises as the source of his own and of the world's suffering existence. In his case not merely the phenomenon ends at death, as with others, but the being is taken away. To be a 'world-overcomer' in this sense (as opposed to a 'world-conqueror') is the essence of sanctity when cleared of all the superstitious dogmas by which the saints try to explain their mode of life to themselves.

The absolutely pure expression of this truth is to be found only in philosophy; but of the religions Buddhism comes nearest to expressing it without admixture. For the Buddhist saint asks aid from no god. True Christianity, however,—the Christianity of the New Testament and of the Christian mystics,—agrees both with Buddhism and with Brahmanism in ultimate aim. What spoils it for Schopenhauer is the Judaic element. This, on one side, infects it with the optimism of the Biblical story of creation, in which God 'saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.' On the other side, it contaminates the myth of original sin, which bears in itself a profound philosophical truth, by this same doctrine of a creative God; from which follows all the injustice and irrationality necessarily involved in the Augustinian theology, and not to be expelled except with its theism. Nevertheless, the story of the Fall of Man, of which that theology, in its fundamentally true part, is a reasoned expression, is the one thing, Schopenhauer avows, that reconciles him to the Old Testament. The truth that it clothes he finds also among the Greeks; Empedocles, after the Orphics and Pythagoreans, having taught that the soul had been doomed to wander because of some antenatal sin. And the mysticism that accompanies all these more or less pure expressions of one metaphysical truth he finds represented by the Sufis even in optimistic Islam; so that he can claim for his philosophy a world-wide consent.