A Handbook of Ethical Theory Part 20

May the man who denies it rest his a.s.sertion upon such general considerations as that satisfaction presupposes desire, and that desire implies a lack, and, hence, pain? The famous author of "Utopia" pointed out long ago that the pains of hunger begin before the pleasure of eating, and only die when it does. Shall we, then, regard a hearty appet.i.te as a curse, to be mitigated but not wholly neutralized by a series of good dinners?

To be sure, the pessimists do not depend wholly upon such general arguments, but point out in great detail that there is much suffering in the world, and that the fulfillment of desire, when it is attained, often results in disillusionment. But the fact remains that life, such as it is, is desired by men and other creatures generally; desired not as an exception, and under a misapprehension, but, as a rule, even by the enlightened and the far-seeing.

Is not the desirable what is desired by the rational will? We have seen that the rational social will does not aim at the suppression of desires generally, but only at the suppression of such desires as interfere with broader satisfactions. Viewed from this stand-point, the pessimist's "denial of the will to live" appears as an expression of the accidental or irrational will. It is not an expression of the nature of man, but of the nature of the pessimist.

(6) It is, perhaps, worth while to point out that there is nothing to prevent a given pessimist from being an intuitionist, an egoist, a utilitarian (of a sort), or an adherent of one of the other schools above discussed. He may a.s.sume intuitively that life is undesirable; in view of its undesirability he may act, either taking himself alone into consideration, or including his neighbor; he may invoke the doctrine of evolution; he may even, if he chooses, call it self-realization to annihilate himself, for he may argue that a will that comes to clear consciousness must see that it must be its own undoing. It is hardly necessary to point out, however, that the pessimist, as such, should not be in any wise confounded with the moralists discussed in the five chapters preceding.

CHAPTER XXIX

KANT, HEGEL AND NIETZSCHE

136. KANT.---It is impossible, in any brief compa.s.s, to treat of the many individual moralists, some of them men of genius and well worthy of our study, who offer us ethical systems characterized by differences of more or less importance. When we refer a man to this or that school and do no more, we say comparatively little about him, as has become evident in the preceding chapters. As we have seen, it has been necessary to cla.s.s together those who differ rather widely in many of their opinions. Here, I shall devote a few pages to three men only, partly because of their prominence, and partly because it is instructive to call attention to the contrast between them in their fundamental positions. I shall begin with Kant.

Kant held that the human reason issues "categorial imperatives," that is to say, unconditional commands to act in certain ways. The motive for moral action must not be the desire for pleasure, but solely the desire to do right.

He makes his fundamental rule abstract and formal: "So act that you could wish your maxim to be universal law." As no man could wish to be himself neglected when in distress, this law compels him to be benevolent, and a new form of the fundamental rule is developed: "Treat humanity, in yourself or any other, as an end always, and never as a means." [Footnote: _Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals_, Sec 2.]

Now Kant, although he maintains that it is not a man's duty to seek his own happiness--a thing which natural inclination would prompt him to do-- by no means overlooks happiness altogether. He thinks that virtue and happiness together const.i.tute the whole and perfect good desired by rational beings. The attainment of this good must be the supreme end of a will morally determined. [Footnote: _Dialectic of the Pure Practical Reason_, chapter ii.] We are morally bound to strive to be virtuous ourselves and to make others happy.

Still, each man's happiness means much to him; and Kant, convinced that virtue _ought_ to be rewarded with happiness, holds that our world is a moral world, where G.o.d will reward the virtuous. If we do not a.s.sume such a world, he claims, moral laws are reduced to idle dreams.

[Footnote: Ibid.]

Such utterances as the last may well lead the utilitarian to question whether Kant was quite whole-hearted in his doctrine of the unconditional commands of the practical reason of man. They appear to be not independent of all consideration of human happiness.

I shall not ask whether Kant was consistent. Great men, like lesser men, seldom are. But, in order that the contrast between his doctrine and those of the two writers whom I shall next discuss may be brought out clearly, I shall ask that the following points be kept well in mind:

(1) Kant was an out-and-out intuitionist. He goes directly to the practical reason of man for an enunciation of the moral law.

(2) Moral rules of lesser generality, such as those touching benevolence, justice and veracity, he traces to the practical reason, making them independent of all considerations of expediency. Thus he defends the body of moral truth accepted by so many of his fellow-moralists.

(3) His "practical reason" speaks directly to the individual. Kant looked within, not without. We may call him an ethical individualist. Socrates, when on trial for his life, listened for the voice of the divinity within him. He needed no other.

137. HEGEL.--In strongest contrast to the individualism of Kant stands the doctrine of Hegel. To the latter, duty consists in the realization of the free reasonable will--but this will is identical in all individuals, [Footnote: _The Philosophy of Right_, Sec 209] and its realization reveals itself in the customs, laws and inst.i.tutions of the state. From this point of view the individual is an accidental thing; the ethical order revealed in society is permanent, and has absolute authority. It is true, however, that it is not something foreign to the individual; he is conscious of it as his own being. In duty he finds his liberation.

[Footnote: _Ibid_., Sec Sec 145-149]

But what is a man's duty? "What a man ought to do," says Hegel, [Footnote: _Ibid_., Sec 150] "what duties he should fulfill in order to be virtuous, is in an ethical community easy to say--the man has only to do what is presented, expressed and recognized in the established relations in which he finds himself."

In other words, he ought to do just what his community prescribes! This seems, taken quite literally, a startling doctrine.

It would be a wrong to Hegel to take him quite literally, for he elsewhere [Footnote: _Ibid_., Introduction.] makes it plain that he by no means approves of all the laws and customs that have obtained in various societies. Still, he exalts the law of the state and regards any opposition to it on the authority of private conviction as "stupendous presumption." [Footnote: Op. _cit_., Sec 138.] This is a serious rebuke to the reformer. The individual must, according to Hegel, look for the moral law outside of himself--of himself as an individual, at least.

He must find it in the State.

138. NIETZSCHE.--Again a startling contrast: after Hegel, Nietzsche--the voice of one crying in the wilderness, exquisitely, pa.s.sionately, but scarcely with articulate scientific utterance. A prophet of revolt and emanc.i.p.ation; a cave-dweller, who would flee organized society and the refinements of civilization; the rabid individualist, to whom the community is the "herd," and common notions of right and wrong are absurdities to be visited with scorn and denunciation. He makes a strong appeal to young men, even after the years during which the carrying of one's own latch-key is a source of elation. He appeals also to those perennially young persons who never attain to the stature which befits those who are to take a responsible share in the organized efforts of communities of men.

With Nietzsche the man, his suffering life, and the melancholy eclipse of his brilliant intellect, ethics as science is little concerned. In Nietzsche the marvellous literary artist it can have no interest. These things are the affair of literature and biography.

Here we are concerned only with his contribution to ethics. Just what that has been it is more difficult to determine than would be the case in a writer more systematic and scientific. But he makes it very clear that he repudiates the morals which have been accepted heretofore by moralists and communities of men generally.

He confesses himself an "immoralist." He despises man as he is, and hails the "Superman," a creature inspired by the "will to have power" and free from all moral prejudices, including that of sympathy with the weak and the helpless.

"Full is the world of the superfluous," he sings in his famous dithyramb, [Footnote: _Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, xi_. It is a pity to read NIETZSCHE in any translation. His diction is exquisite. But those who can only read him in English may be referred to the translations of his works edited by LEVY. New York, 1911.] "marred is life by the many-too- many."... "Many too many are born; for the superfluous ones was the State devised."..."There, where the State ceaseth--there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous."

Man, says Nietzsche, should regard himself as a "bridge" over which he can pa.s.s to something higher. [Footnote: _Ibid._, Prologue, and I, IV, XI, _et pa.s.sim_.] Upon the fact that the Superman may have the same reason for regarding himself as a "bridge" as the most commonplace of mortals, and may begin anew with loathing and self-contempt, he does not dwell. Yet, as long as progress is possible, man may always be regarded as a "bridge." The reader of Nietzsche is tempted to believe that hatred and contempt must always be the predominant emotions in the mind of the "superior" man. Darwin, who knew much more about man and nature than did our pa.s.sionate poet, was still able to regard man as "the crown and glory of the universe." Not so, Nietzsche.

Those who have read little in ethics are inclined to attribute to Nietzsche a greater measure of originality than he can reasonably claim.

More than two milleniums before him, Plato conceived an ideal Republic in which moral laws, as commonly accepted, were to be set aside. Marriage was to be done away with; births were to be scientifically regulated; children were to be taken from their mothers; sickly infants were to be destroyed. In Sparta the committee of the elders did not permit the promptings of sympathy and the cries of wounded maternal love to influence the decision touching the life or death of the new-born.

Here was an attempt at bridge-building, but it was conceived as a scientific matter, to be taken in hand by the State, and for the good of the State. But Nietzsche would destroy the State. His Superman appears as individualistic as a "rogue" elephant, a few pa.s.sages to the contrary notwithstanding. Are we to regard him as a mere lawless egoist, or as something more? We are left in the dark. [Footnote: See the volume, _Beyond Good and Evil,_ "What is n.o.ble?" Sec 265.] But we note that Nietzsche disagrees with most moralists, in that he refuses to regard Caesar Borgia as a morbid growth. [Footnote: _Ibid., The Natural History of Morals,_ Sec 197. DOSTOIEVSKY'S genius has portrayed for us an admirable Superman in the person of the Russian convict Orloff. See his _House of the Dead_, chapter v.]

The Superman has always been with us, in somewhat varying types. From Alexander the Great to Napoleon, and before and after, he adorns the pages of history. Attila, among others, may enter his claim to consideration. It remains for the serious student of ethics to estimate scientifically his value as an ethical ideal, and to judge how far this type of character may profitably be taken as a pattern. Nietzsche stands at the farthest possible remove from Hegel. Does he, as an individualist, stand within hail of Kant? It scarcely seems so. When we examine Kant's "practical reason," in other words, the moral law as it revealed itself to Kant, we find that it had taken up into itself the moral development of the ages preceding. Kant's practical reason, his conscience, to speak plain English, was not the practical reason of, for example, Aristotle.

The latter could speak of a slave as an "animated tool," and could believe there were men intended by nature for slavery. Kant could not. In theory an individualist, the Sage of Konigsberg stands, in reality, not far from Hegel. He does not break with the past. But Nietzsche is revolt incarnate.

PART VIII

THE ETHICS OF THE SOCIAL WILL

CHAPTER x.x.x

ASPECTS OF THE ETHICS OF REASON

139. THE DOCTRINE SUPPORTED BY THE OTHER SCHOOLS.--- I urge the more confidently the Ethics of Reason, or the Ethics of the Rational Social Will, because there is so little in it that is really new. It only makes articulate what we all know already, and strives to get rid of certain exaggerations into which many men who reason, and who reason well, have unwittingly fallen.

The fundamentals of the doctrine have been exhibited in Parts V and VI of this volume, and the exaggerations alluded to have been treated in Part VII. Hence, I may speak very briefly in indicating how the Ethics of Reason finds a many-sided support in schools which appear, on the surface, to be in the opposition.

It is evident, to begin with, that the Ethics of the Social Will cannot dispense with Moral Intuitions, but must regard them as indispensable; as, indeed, the very foundation of the moral life. That the individual may, and if he is properly equipped for the task, ought, to examine critically his own moral intuitions and those of the community in which he finds himself, and should, with becoming modesty and hesitation, now and then suggest an innovation, means no more than that he and the community are not dead, but are living, and that progress is a possibility, at least.

As for the Egoist, unless he is an absurd extremist, we must admit that he says much that is worth listening to. Was not Bentham quite right in maintaining that if all A's interests were committed to B, and all B's to A, the world would get on very badly? A charity that begins at the planet Mars would arrive nowhere. The Ethics of Reason has room for a very careful consideration of the interests of the self. But it may object to the position that the moral mathematician may regard as the only important number the number One.

With the Utilitarian our doctrine need have, as we have seen, no quarrel.

Did not that learned, enlightened, and most fair-minded of utilitarians, Sidgwick, ultimately resolve the happiness which men seek into anything which may be the object of the mind in willing? Did not a critical utilitarianism resolve itself into the doctrine of the Rational Social Will? Why take less critical utilitarians as the only exponents of the school? Besides, is there any reason why the social will should be blind to the fact that men generally do desire to gain pleasure and to avoid pain? It is only the exaggeration of this truth that we need to combat.

To Nature, properly understood, we can enter no objection. Who objects to Perfection as a "counsel of perfection?" Can the Social Will object to a man's striving to Realize his Capacities--under proper control, and with a regard to others? The Pessimist is an unhealthy creature, and the Social Will represents normal and healthy humanity. Here we have disparity. But to Evolution our doctrine offers no opposition. It is only by a process of development that the Actual Social Will has come to be what it is; and the Rational Social Will looks to a further development under the guidance of reason.

The fact is that thoughtful men belonging to different schools tend to introduce into their statement of their doctrines modifying clauses; and in the end we find them not as far apart as they seemed at the beginning.

The tendency is, I think, in the direction of the recognition of the Rational Social Will. This doctrine belongs to n.o.body in particular; it is the. common property of us all. It contains little that is startling.

140. ITS METHOD OF APPROACH TO PROBLEMS.---He who looks to the Rational Social Will for guidance is given a compa.s.s which may be of no small service to him. For example:

(1) He will see that moral phenomena are not to be isolated. He will accept the historic order of society and judge man and his emotions and actions in the light of it. He will never feel tempted to say, with Bentham, that the pleasure which has its roots in malice, envy, cruelty, "taken by itself, is good." [Footnote: _Principles of Morals and Legislation,_ chapter x, Sec 10, note.]

He will simply say, it is pleasure. That it is, of course; but he will maintain that nothing "taken by itself" is either good or bad, from the moralist's point of view. The cruel man may will to see suffering, and may enjoy it. The moral man may hold that the cruel man, his act of will, and his pleasure, should all be snuffed out, in the interest of humanity, as an unmitigated evil.