Part 11

Happiness, defined as getting the individual thing you want, must be guaranteed, or else, since you can only want something that is individual, willing is objectless. Who or what is to guarantee that the world in which we willers of concrete things may will consistently with moral principle exists? Not experience, surely; that has a way of arranging things so that the woman one wants is just the one principle denies one; the child one has set one’s heart on is just the one death has set his seal on. The chapter of “life’s little ironies” is a full one. Then does it not require the guarantee of a world maker or a world ruler that life’s indifference or irony have not the last word? Does not the possibility of a moral will hang upon the assurance of God? So at least for Kant, God makes goodness possible.

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“God, freedom and immortality,” these three are traits inseparable from a world in which duty can speak and be obeyed; the Old Testament world is not only a moral world, it is the only moral world. And if, so far, Kant has clung very closely to the Old Testament, we should find him in his later writing--his “Religion within the Domain of Pure Reason”--clinging just as closely to the spirit of the New Testament. Those who find his reasoning obscure and faulty, would explain all this in terms of his personal psychology and his early environment, for Kant was a child of that deep Pietism, one might say Quakerism, that characterizes the Germany of the eighteenth century.

But if we look upon him as the child of his age in his devotion to Christianity, he was no less profoundly influenced by that other and equally characteristic movement of his day and generation--the inheritance of Rationalism. The Old Testament and even the New Testament world images may have deep truth hidden in their symbolism--so the child of pietism would be likely to think--but the authority of this truth was not to be sought in revelation. It must be established, if at all, by one’s reason--so the disciple of rationalism was bound to maintain. Now Kant is not only a rationalist, rejecting revelation as a source of authority. He is also a critic, to whom the arguments of rationalism for the existence of God appear flimsy and irrational. Neither in reason nor in experience can we find grounds for accepting the existence of God as a scientific fact. Hume could be no more convinced than Kant that no aspect of the world with which our experience acquaints us justifies a belief in divine purpose. Kant went further--no extension of experience in future ages could give us the assurance we now lack. God is unknown to our science and unknowable.

Well then, if neither the necessities of thought nor the facts of experience, however we conceive our knowledge of them extended, can force upon us a belief in God and all that hangs on him, what is left of religion and of morality that cannot be separated from religion? Kant’s answer to this question is so confusing that it is little wonder the interpreters of Kant are confused, in disagreement with each other and each doubtful of himself. I am obliged then, since we have not the time to try out all the ifs and buts of the case, to present dogmatically one line of thought that is to be found in Kant, the one along which post-Kantian thought developed. If anyone tell me that he fails to find this thought in his edition of Kant, or that he finds others that do not run parallel with it, we shall not quarrel about a matter commentators have always quarreled about.

If Kant as a critic has been keen to point out the inadequacy of any proof of God, he has been no less earnest in his purpose of showing that no disproof can come to us. This world is one that for aught we know may be God’s world, and if we choose to live as though it were God’s world and we were of his kingdom, we need fear to meet no facts that would block our way and deny us.

Doesn’t it lie near to hand to say--You can make this God’s world if you want to? You can make yourself free, immortal and blest of heaven if that is the deepest desire in you, for in all its moral aspects this world of yours is a plastic world and will respond delicately to your touch. Live then as though there were a God, and there will indeed be one; the world will be divine.

I have called Kant’s world the Old Testament world and you have seen in what sense it may be called so; but if you try to think of this world as the mediaeval writers are supposed to have thought of it, then Kant’s religion must be in flat contradiction with itself. If God is such a God, if his creative act is such a gesture as a Michael Angelo might paint, if life after death is such a life and spent in such places as a Dante might describe, then all Kant’s religion is but a leap in the dark. The thing reduces to something like Pascal’s wager--bet on God, and if you lose you lose nothing; if you win you win everything. If God, freedom, and immortality are facts hid behind a curtain that we may never tear aside, we can only take a chance with such facts. I have already made my bow to those who find other things in Kant than the religion I pretend to have drawn from him--and I had particularly in mind such as understand Kant throughout to be thinking of the truths of religion as just such facts hid behind the curtain. I have refused to quarrel with those interpreters because Kant does think, because Kant can not cure himself of thinking in such terms through many pages. But this I take to be obvious--if this fashion of thinking were the only one possible in view of the situation in which science and religion find themselves, if it is not merely a peculiarity of the man Kant and his personal psychology, then those who followed on him, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, were deeply deceived in supposing that Kant was their inspiration; the post-Kantian development was not a development but a new creation.

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Viewing Kant then in the light of the appeal which he made to his own times, we may see that for him religion is not a matter of what one decides to believe, but of what one decides to do. And the religious consciousness may express the law of its doing in the determination to live as though there were a God. But we must ask it of Kant to explain to us what sort of a life this religious life would be.

One can quite make it out that the first condition to the living of such a life is to obey the voice of duty as though it were the voice of God. That is, to obey it without letting our obedience hang on our insight into the purpose to be worked out, or on the satisfaction we are to find in or because of the doing. Just so was the Decalogue presented for the acceptance of the Children of Israel. But for them the way of duty was revealed by God himself; for Kant it must be revealed by the reason which accepts it. What sort of a law does this “practical reason,” as Kant calls it, reveal?

Kant’s first formulation is imperfect enough, and seems to be based on an effort to deduce the content of moral law from the meaning of law itself--as though to say, the command “Be law-abiding” furnished one with all needed information respecting the law by which one was to abide. For, as Kant puts the matter, law must prescribe a type of action that is possible for everybody--a meaning of law which is well rendered by the common phrase, “What is right for one is right for all.” And just as one might try to convince a man of the iniquity of some particular act of his by putting to him the question, Suppose everybody were to do that? so Kant at this stage feels that we could try out the validity of any given type of act by putting the same question to ourselves. Suppose the right to lie were up for consideration; if lying is morally right, then it must be possible for everybody to lie. But if everybody tried to lie, there would be no such thing as a lie, for a lie requires someone to believe it as well as someone to utter it. Universal lying would be impossible; the maxim, “Be a good liar,” could not be generalized into a law.

“So act that the maxim of your conduct could become a universal law.” This is the formula that Kant finds first of all for the full duty of man. But of course on this basis one could not sell a share of stock, for if everybody were to try it, there would be no market. On the other hand Kant himself has only a tortured and inadequate account to give of the reason why one should not commit suicide, for it looks as though we might all do that much together.

More interesting is Kant’s second attempt to formulate the law of duty. Almost against his will, one would say, Kant is forced to consider the act from the point of view of its purpose. The purpose of a moral act must be such that everybody may pursue the same purpose. An immoral world is one in which many want a thing that can not be shared--Kant recalls with humor the remark of King Francis, that he and his brother Charles were in perfect accord for both wanted the same thing--namely the possession of Milan. A moral world is one in which no desires are contradictory.

The moment Kant has said this he has made the moral world an ideal, an image of a world not identical with this present one, but into which our faith demands that the present one may by our effort evolve. It is impossible so far as I can see to make Kant’s first impression of duty square with this account of it. It cannot be that duty is a simple certain command that the humblest understanding can grasp. It must be that duty is a more or less vague striving toward this ideal, a striving to make the world in which we live with one another approximate more and more closely to this beautiful republic whose motto might be modeled after Rabelais, “‘Fays ce que vouldras,’ et ne nuis pas à ton voisin.” Religion then is the determination to allow nothing to divert us from this struggle which it would not be out of place to call the struggle after divinity. Immortality would be a direction, not a condition. Happiness--the religious happiness--the sense of the progress to which we are contributing. All this seems to flow naturally from the Kantian conception, but Kant has that in him which will not let such results follow. He stands divided against himself. His theory of duty as decalogue law, his less confident but no less enduring conception of the object of religion as facts behind a veil, stand in contradiction with his view of duty as a struggle that must be more or less blind, baffled, and empirical toward a goal infinitely remote.

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In this contradiction we must leave him. Religion, as the name for a search after the kind of reality in which the multiple strivings that leave us divided each within himself and one from another, was the deep inspiration of those who followed Kant. They thought they owed this inspiration to the master, and so indeed they did; but it is not surprising that Kant himself refused to recognize his immediate offspring (Fichte) and would probably have been greatly shocked at the speculations of his more remote progeny. Nor is it surprising to one accustomed to the disappointments of which the history of thought is the living chronicle that one of those inspired by Kant to this very search should have ended his seeking with the tragic finding that the harmonious will is an illusion and a contradiction. Will is essentially war, cries Schopenhauer. There is that in the experience of every man which forces him to give ear to this cry, voicing though it does the deepest and final denial of all that is religious.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

1788-1860

We live in a room that has a dark corner. The shadows are there and we know they are there; but we will not look their way. We busy ourselves with a thousand things that are doubtless important; we sit by the lamp and are doubtless full of cheerful thoughts. It is held to be wise to behave in this way, and if the things we busy ourselves with are really important then it may be admitted that our conduct is really wise. But back there among the shadows, the darkest of them all, lurks the spirit of questioning. “What is the use?” it keeps asking, “What is the use?” If we listen we are lost, yet those who have listened and lost themselves tell us that there is such peace to be had of knowing the worst that compared with it the prizes of struggling life are but children’s toys.

“To see where the worst problems of life lie,” writes a philosopher of our own day, “is a very black experience. And yet, so much does human reason live on insight that I have never met a man who was alive to those deepest problems and who repented him of his insight.”

Now the one to whom of all men this insight into the deep abyss has been vouchsafed was Arthur Schopenhauer. According to the older ideas of tragedy, the world has at times and in spots seemed sad enough; but Schopenhauer invented a new conception of tragedy, more ingeniously painful than any that had gone before, and then he showed that the play which most completely set forth this idea was just the whole of life.

The work in which this thought is most systematically developed bears the double title, “On the World as Will and Idea (Vorstellung),” whose first edition appeared in 1818. We may safely confine ourselves to this single work in our present study of Schopenhauer, for his life was one of those lives that move rapidly to a moment of maturity then subside into a ruminating reflection on their achievement.

To have reached at thirty a life-view from which one never afterwards departs might be taken to argue either a certain shallowness of mind or an unusual depth of conviction. One recalls the sixty-year-old Kant, painfully struggling with a bare theory of method, and then for some twenty years more laboring to apply this method to the problems of life with results so vigorously reacting on the method itself as to have created a suspicion of change of view. It is certain that in contrast with Kant, Schopenhauer leaves an impression of facility in thought and style. This effect is no doubt partly to be accounted for by a difference in upbringing and in the circumstances surrounding production. Kant was the very complete university professor; Schopenhauer, a man of the world whose one early experiment in academic life was a most convincing failure. He alone of all the great names that recognize Kant as master--Fichte, Schelling, Hegel--had the assured position and material means to spare himself the laborious training of one who would enter the academic lists. Free then to live as he would, he develops the tastes and the methods of the private scholar of means, reflecting the experience of an easy bachelor existence of inns, and travel, and wide unsystematic reading.

It is the early training doubtless of one intended for a higher social stratum, that imposes on Schopenhauer a sense of obligation to be lordly; a style that is free, rather grand, perhaps a bit overdressed; a certain insolence of tone from which even his friends suffer at times, and which when it is question of his enemies sinks to a level of abuse whose epithets must be shadowed forth with initial and dash.

But apart from these external conditions, one recognizes in Schopenhauer the spirit of the fighter rather than that of the critic. He is a man of one idea, embraced as soon as encountered, then defended with boldness and eloquence and wit. Such a character hardly develops the great thinker; but it may well be possessed of a great thought. The thought of Schopenhauer is none the less great for being gloomy and repellant.

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The double title, “The World as Will and Idea,” hints at a double aspect that experience presents, the one to the eye of the observer, the other to the mind of the thinker. To the observing eye, it is a spread of bodies in space and time, obeying the laws of mechanical necessity; just such a world as Kant has described in his “Kritik der reinen Vernunft.” Schopenhauer, following Kant, calls this the world of appearance, the phenomenal world.