Part 13

There is in the Louvre a somewhat dirty piece of marble whose size and weight with the story of how it came to be where it is, may be found in the guide books. This at least is its individual description. But to the many human beings who have stood rapt before the Venus de Milo there has appeared not this dirt, nor yet this marble, nor yet the effigy of a woman; but just the vision of womanhood. And therewith, Schopenhauer would suggest, we have taken a step out of the contentious world. It is no longer a human being but human nature we are in presence of, and to lose oneself in nature is, while the vision lasts, to have forgotten the will to live in its troublesome individuality.

While the vision lasts! But the trouble here is that such visions will not last. In the contemplation of beauty we have the foretaste of peace; but not the peace eternal. And the question comes back upon us: What is to be done?

The answer now in progressive completeness comes from three sources. The first suggestion, imperfect though it is, we catch from the institution of civil law. Now law, and the penalties it provides, is a conscious effort to restrain the individual from doing wrong. “Wrong,” meanwhile, Schopenhauer defines as “that quality of the conduct of an individual in which he extends the assertion of the will appearing in his own body so far that it becomes the denial of the will appearing in the bodies of others.” It is then the province of law to fix as best it can the boundaries that enclose a man’s rights to the exercise of his individual will and to prevent his trespassing or being trespassed upon.

But this rough and partial method of restraining the will to live from multiplying the misery which it creates in proportion as it is untrammeled is but palliative. A deeper suggestion than that offered by formal law comes from an examination of the moral sense. For the distinction between right and wrong as drawn by temporal justice is by no means identical with that between good and bad as intuited by the conscience of man. For wrong, as we have seen, means merely aggression, and right, the exercise of will that commits none of the aggressions law recognizes. But it is by no means enough to keep within one’s rights to possess moral worth. “For example,” our philosopher points out, “the refusal of help to another in great need, the quiet contemplation of the death of another from starvation while we ourselves have more than enough, is certainly cruel and fiendish, but it is not a wrong.”

What then constitutes goodness? The quality of goodness consists in an infinite sympathy, such an intuition of the misery of others as gives us a horror of inflicting pain, a delicate skill in alleviating it. Now all the misery of life comes from the assertion of the individual will, which if justice may indeed feebly hold in check, goodness alone can effectively still by destroying the distinction between soul and soul. “To the noble man,” we find Schopenhauer writing, “this distinction is not significant.... The suffering which he sees in others touches him quite as his own. He therefore tries to strike a balance between them, denies himself pleasures, practices renunciation, in order to mitigate the sufferings of others. He sees that the distinction between himself and others, which to the wicked man is so great a gulf, only belongs to a fleeting and illusive phenomenon. He recognizes directly and without reasoning that the in-itself of his own manifestation is also that of others, the will to live which constitutes the inner nature of everything and lives in all; indeed, that this applies also to the brutes and the whole of nature, and therefore he will not cause suffering even to a brute.” And yet this conception of the good life, this living in sympathy and doing works of love, beautiful as the ideal of it is, is not the final cure for the world’s misery. The will to live, even so chastened, has not lost all of its genius for harm.

“If the veil of Maya,” our thinker has it, “is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egotistical distinction between his person and that of another, ... then it clearly follows that such a man, who recognizes all beings as his own inmost and true self, must also regard the infinite suffering of all suffering beings as his own, and take on himself the pain of the whole world.... All the miseries of others which he sees and is so seldom able to alleviate, all the miseries he knows directly, and even those which he only knows as possible, work upon his mind as his own.... Why should he now, with such knowledge of the world assert this very life through constant acts of will, and thereby bind himself ever more closely to it, hug it ever more closely to himself?” Should not rather, we ask, this bitter world-knowledge become a permanent and final quieter of all and of every volition? Should not the will now turn away from life, shuddering at the pleasures it once craved, but in which it has come to recognize that assertion of life which is the fountain of misery?

And Schopenhauer expounds his meaning in a parable. “If we compare life to a course which we must unceasingly run--a path of glowing coals, with a few cool places here and there; then he who is entangled in illusion is consoled by the cool places, on which he now stands or which he sees near him, and sets out to run the course. But he who sees through the [illusion that separates the ‘here’ and ‘there’] and thus recognizes the whole, is no longer susceptible of such consolation; he sees himself at all places at once--and withdraws.”

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This is the transition from virtue to asceticism and here we have the last word of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the cure. Suicide is a mistake; enjoyment of beauty a true solace, but a momentary one. Restrictions devised by society are a corrective, but the misery they can prevent is as a drop to an ocean; morality which is at bottom a charity born of sympathy is the best the world has dreamed, it destroys more and more the individual will and makes all things one, but though men in the ideal state morality might produce would suffer together, they would still suffer, for from Schopenhauer’s point of view the disjunction is final; “Either desire unsatisfied, which is pain, or satisfied desire, which is ennui.”

Well, this infinite wretchedness of the man who has made the round of experience in seeking relief, who has rejected suicide, who has awakened from the dream of beauty to find the old pain still there, who has tried, then lost faith in, the devices of law, who has become at last a “Beautiful Soul,” to find himself then the sharer of all the world’s misery,--the infinite wretchedness of such a man is a disease, not of the wrong kind of will, but of will itself. All will is evil will, and if one would have an end of pain one must refuse to will at all; is not this, the asceticism of Indian sage and Christian saint, the oldest and the ultimate wisdom?

Schopenhauer takes his word “asceticism” quite seriously. To this last expression of human insight it no longer suffices that a man should love others as himself and do as much for them as for himself; “but there arises within him a horror of the nature of which his own (phenomenal) existence is an expression, the will to live, the kernel and inner being of that world which is recognized as full of misery. He therefore disowns his own nature which appears in him and is already expressed through his body. His body, healthy and strong, expresses the sexual impulse; but he denies the will and gives the lie to the body. It thereby denies the assertion of the will which extends beyond the individual life, and gives the assurance that with the life of this body, the will, whose manifestation it is, ceases.

“Asceticism shows itself further in voluntary poverty, which not only arises per accidens because the possessions are given away to mitigate the sufferings of others, but is here an end in itself, is meant to serve as a constant mortification of will, so that the satisfaction of the wishes, the sweet of life shall not again arouse the will against which self-knowledge has conceived a horror. He who has attained to this point compels himself to refrain from doing all that he would like to do, and to do all that he would not like to do, even if this has no further end than that of serving as a mortification of will.”

And Schopenhauer becomes the exponent of that aspect of Christianity, as of other ascetic creeds, which is so unintelligible to the pagan ideals of manhood,--the doctrine of meekness. Since the ascetic “himself denies the will which appears in his own person, he will not resist if another does the same, i.e. inflicts wrongs upon him. Therefore, every suffering coming to him from without, through chance or the wickedness of others, is welcome, every injury, ignominy, and insult; he receives them gladly as the opportunity of learning with certainty that he no longer asserts the will, but gladly sides with every enemy of the manifestation of will which is his own person.”

In his manner of life the Schopenhauerian ascetic is in every detail a copy of the Eastern and Western monk. His body he nourishes sparingly, lest its excessive vigor should animate the will. When at last death comes, it is most welcome, and is gladly received as a longed-for deliverance. “For him who thus ends, the world has ended also.”

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“For him who thus ends, the world has ended also.” The seriousness with which this statement is taken marks the difference between the two great philosophies of asceticism, the Buddhistic and the Christian. Whatever the Master may himself have taught, the Christianity of the Church, say of Augustine, is a pessimism respecting the world we know, backed by an optimism respecting the world we know not, in which however the meaning of the whole plot is made clear. The nothingness of the world as it appears to the eyes of the Christian ascetic is then the nothingness of this world, but for him who leaves it there awaits a much richer life in another. For the Buddhist saint, no optimism of this kind supplements his pessimism, no other world is called upon to explain this one, and when he leaves this one through the door of asceticism it is into the eternal peace of Nirvana, of nothingness, that he sinks.

It is the latter understanding of the outcome that Schopenhauer accepts at the hands of the mystic East. “We have recognized,” he writes, “the inmost nature of the world to be will, and all its phenomena to be but embodiments of the will, and we have followed this embodiment from the unconscious working of the obscure forms of nature up to the completely conscious action of man. Therefore we shall by no means evade the consequence that with the free denial, the surrender of the will, all these phenomena are also abolished; that constant strain and effort without end and without rest at all the grades of objectivity in which and through which the world consists; the multifarious forms succeeding each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will and finally the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space, and also its last fundamental form, subject and object, all are abolished. No will: no idea, no world.”

“Before us there is certainly only nothingness,” Schopenhauer concludes, but if this prospect be anything but grateful to a man, it must be because he has not really seen or accepted the truth that Schopenhauer would demonstrate and impart. “That we abhor annihilation,” he insists, “is simply another expression of the fact that we so strenuously will life.” Of that folly and the pain of it enough has been said. “But if we turn our glances from our own needy and embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world ... then instead of the useless striving and effort, ... instead of the never satisfied and never dying hope which constitutes the life of the man who wills, we shall see that peace which passeth understanding, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable confidence and serenity, the mere reflection of which in the countenance as Raphael or Correggio has represented it is an entire and certain gospel; only knowledge remains, the will has vanished.”

And it is exactly in this way “by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and, with the stamp of entire truth, by art, that we may banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark ... What remains after the abolition of the will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but conversely to those in whom the will has denied itself, this world which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways--is nothing.”

VII

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

1844-1900

“God is dead. God is dead: He died of pity”--the phrase runs refrain-like through the “Sayings of Zarathustra.” It is the bright news that Nietzsche brings as his peculiar contribution to the cause of human hope. These are the glad tidings for whose bringing he expects that his feet shall be called beautiful upon the mountain. Therefore they dance, these feet, and bear toward us one who laughs and sings. At least Nietzsche would have us believe that truth--his truth--“comes on light feet” and that it steps to music. “Let the day be counted lost,” he cries, “in which we have not somewhat danced, and let us know that truth to be false which brings no laughter with it.” Yet, whether it was that truth--Nietzsche’s truth--had somehow not the quality of joyousness in it, or whether the poor messenger of these “glad tidings” was the victim of ironical chance, certain it is that his dance brought him to the doors of the mad-house, and that behind these melancholy doors he died.

There is however nothing but a certain strangeness of phrase that would lead one to associate this particular message of Nietzsche with his later insanity. It is no new idea that God is dead, no new expectation that the news will be grateful to all who understand its import. Xenophanes near the beginning, Epicurus and Lucretius toward the end of pagan thought had brought the same intelligence. Only, according to Xenophanes the Gods had died not of pity but of vice. “Liars, adulterers, cheats are the vaunted Lords of Olympus.” And according to Lucretius it was again not of pity but of their cruelty the Gods were dead, the gods of that religion

Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans.

Nor are the ancients the only ones to whom the world has appeared godless. If for Hume God was only suspiciously silent, for Schopenhauer he was conspicuously absent. Still, it was far enough from Schopenhauer’s thought that a God could die of pity. Pity was for him the one divine thing left to a Godforsaken world; it at least might soften, even if it could not cure the fundamental cruelty of life. It was rather the unreason of the world that forbade us to see in its course a divine guidance. For Schopenhauer, God had died quite mad.

Vice, cruelty, reticence, irrationality--these had been variously recognized as ills of which a God might die. It remained for Nietzsche to suggest that the most fatal of all disorders, whether in God or man, was just that gentlest of all Christian virtues--Pity or, as the German tongue has it, Mitleid: fellow-suffering. In the understanding of the motives that led Nietzsche to this utterance lies the key to his whole philosophy--if the “lightning flashes” of his thought may, somewhat against his will, be called a “philosophy.”

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