Kenny Anthony. An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy
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The rotation of the planets round the sun, in tension between centripetal and
centrifugal force, is no less an example of the universal essential conflict of the
manifestation of will.
What, then, is the nature of will, which is so universally present and active? All
willing, Schopenhauer says, arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and there-
fore from suffering. A wish may be granted; but it is succeeded by another and
we have ten times more desires than we can satisfy. The fleeting gratification of a
desire is ‘like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive today, that his
misery may be prolonged till the morrow’. So long as our consciousness is filled
by our will, we can never have happiness or peace; we can at best alternate pain
with boredom.
Is there any escape from the slavery of the will? In the third book of his
chief work Schopenhauer expounds a way of escape through Art. Always in
animals, and for most of the time in humans, knowledge is at the service of
the will, employed in securing the satisfaction of its desires. But it is possible to
rise above the consideration of objects as mere instruments for the satisfaction
of desire, and to adopt an attitude of pure contemplation. This attitude is
most easily adopted towards beauty, whether in nature or in art. We must lose
ourselves in a natural landscape or a piece of architecture; lose ourselves, literally,
by forgetting our will and our individuality. We must become a simple mirror
of the object of our contemplation, so that the perceiver and the perceived
become one. ‘In such contemplation the particular thing becomes at once
the Idea of its species, and the perceiving individual becomes pure subject of
knowledge.’
The Ideas which Schopenhauer is here talking of are not Lockean ideas of
perception, but the Platonic Idea of the species. It is through Art, the work of
genius, that we make contact with the universal which is independent of, and
more real than, the individual, like the single rainbow quietly resting on the
innumerable showering drops of the waterfall. Every human has the power of
knowing the Ideas in things, but the genius excels ordinary mortals in possessing
this knowledge more intensely and more continuously. In contemplation free
from will, we lose our concern with happiness and unhappiness, and we cease to
be individual. ‘We are only that one eye of the world which looks out from all
knowing creatures, but which can become perfectly free from the service of will in
man alone.’
The theory of the liberating effect of aesthetic contemplation is developed
in a detailed consideration of the various arts – architecture, painting, poetry,
drama, and above all, music, the most powerful of the arts. Music, Schopenhauer
says, is not, like the other arts, a copy of the Ideas, but is the copy of the
Will itself, whose objectification the Ideas are. Schopenhauer’s notion of
music emptying the self was echoed by T. S. Eliot, when he wrote in The Dry
Salvages of
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music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
But the person whose life was most affected by Schopenhauer’s writing on music
was Richard Wagner, who came to think of himself as the embodiment of
Schopenhauerian genius.
The liberation offered by aesthetic contemplation, however, is only a temporary
one. The only way to achieve complete freedom from the tyranny of the will is by
complete renunciation. What the will wills is always life; so if we are to renounce
the will we must renounce the will to live. This sounds like a recommendation of
suicide; but in fact Schopenhauer regarded suicide, if sought as an escape from
the miseries of the world, as a false step inspired by an over-estimate of the
importance of the individual life, and motivated by a concealed will to live.
What Schopenhauer meant by renunciation is best understood by following
the account he gives, in his fourth book, of different moral characters, starting
with wickedness and ending with saintliness or asceticism. Moral progress consists
in the gradual reduction of egoism: the tendency of the individual to make itself
the centre of the world and to sacrifice everything else to its own existence and
well-being.
A bad man is an egoist to the highest degree: he asserts his own will to live and
denies the presence of that will in others, destroying their existence if they get in
his way. A really wicked man goes beyond egoism, taking delight in the sufferings
of others not just as a means to his own ends, but as an end in itself. But though
the bad man regards his own person as separated by a great gulf from others, he
retains a dim awareness that his own will is just the phenomenal appearance of the
single will to live which is active in all. ‘He dimly sees that he, the bad man, is
himself this whole will; that consequently he is not only the inflicter of pain but
also the endurer of it.’ This is the origin of the sufferings of remorse.
Between the bad man and the good man, there is an intermediate character: the
just man. Unlike the bad man, the just man does not see individuality as being an
absolute wall of partition between himself and others; he is willing to recognize
the will to live in others on the same level as his own, up to the point of abstaining
from injury to his fellow humans. When the barrier of individuality is penetrated
to a higher degree than this, then we achieve benevolence, well-doing, the love of
mankind. Thus it is characteristic of the good man to make less distinction than
is usually made between himself and others. ‘He is just as little likely to allow
others to starve, while he himself has enough and to spare, as any one would be
to suffer hunger one day in order to have more the next day than he could enjoy.’
The good man loses the illusion of individuation: he recognizes himself, his
will, in every being and consequently also in the sufferer. But goodness will take
him a step further than benevolence.
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If he takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as his own, and
therefore is not only benevolent in the highest degree, but even ready to sacrifice his
own individuality whenever such a sacrifice will save a number of other persons, then
it clearly follows that such a man, who recognizes in all beings 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.
This will lead him beyond virtue to asceticism; he will have such a horror of this
miserable world that it will no longer be enough to love others as himself, and to
give up his own pleasures when they stand in the way of others’ good. He will do
all he can to disown the nature of the world as expressed in his own body,
adopting chastity, poverty, abstinence, and self-chastisement, and welcoming every
injury, ignominy and insult offered him by others. Thus he will break down the
will, which he recognizes and abhors as the source of his own and the world’s
suffering existence; and when death comes he will welcome it as a deliverance.
Asceticism of this kind is not a vain ideal: it can be learned through suffering, and
it has been exhibited in life by many Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist saints.
Schopenhauer accepts that the life of many saints has been full of the most
absurd superstition. Religious systems, he believes, are the mythical clothing of
truths which are unattainable by the uneducated. But, he says, ‘it is just as little
needful that a saint should be a philosopher as that a philosopher should be a
saint’; and this no doubt is the answer which he would give to the many people
who have pointed out that his own life was very different from the ascetic ideal he
painted. ‘It is a strange demand upon a moralist,’ he wrote, ‘that he should teach
no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.’
Schopenhauer’s system is undeniably impressive, and each step in his argument
is made persuasive by his compelling prose and enchanting metaphors. But his
basic premise is untrue, and his ultimate conclusion is self-refuting. He presents
no valid reason to accept the starting point that the world is my idea, and offers
us no motive to adopt the ascetic programme with which he concludes. In order
to distinguish the world of will from the world of the idea, and to reach a thing-
in-itself distinct from mere phenomena, he has to persuade each of us that the
fundamental reality is our own individuality; in order to persuade us to ascend the
path through virtue to asceticism, he asks us to accept that our individuality is a
mere illusion.
The complete renunciation of the will seems to be a contradiction in terms: for
if the renunciation is voluntary, it is itself an act of the will; and if it is necessary
then it is no real renunciation. Schopenhauer sought to avoid this contradiction
by appealing, once again, to Kant’s distinction between the phenomenon and the
thing in itself. ‘Everything is as phenomenon absolutely necessary; in itself it is
will, which is perfectly free to all eternity.’ But a will which is free in eternity is a
will which is outside time, while the history of any saint belongs in the world of
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phenomena. One and the same act of self-denial cannot be both inside and
outside time.
Kierkegaard
In the same decade as the second edition of The World as Will and Idea appeared,
the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put forward a philosophy which in its
practical aspect had much in common with Schopenhauer, but which rests on a
totally different metaphysical foundation. Instead of being enunciated as a system
in a single work, Kierkegaard’s thought was presented in a variety of ways in
separate essays of different styles.
Most of Kierkegaard’s writings were written in his thirties, between 1843 and
1853. Brought up in a Copenhagen family of religious gloom, he revolted against
theology during his time at university, and turned to philosophy. He then acquired
a knowledge of, and a distaste for, Hegelianism. In 1838 he underwent a religious
conversion, and gained a conviction of his philosophical vocation, which became
more intense after he broke off, in 1841, his engagement to Regina Olsen. Between
1843 and 1846 he published, under different pseudonyms, a number of works,
of which the most important were Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, followed
by the Concluding Unscientific Postscript of 1846. After a mystical experience in
1848 he abandoned the use of pseudonyms and published a number of Christian
discourses and The Sickness unto Death. Much of the latter part of his life was
taken up in conflict with the established Danish Church, which he regarded as
Christian only in name. He died in 1855.
Like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard was an opponent of Hegel; but unlike
Schopenhauer, he thought that Hegel’s fundamental error was his undervaluation
of the concrete individual. Like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard sketches out for us a
spiritual career which ends with asceticism; but each upward phase in the career,
far from being a diminution or renunciation of individuality, is a stage in the
affirmation of one’s own unique personality.
At the lowest level, for Kierkegaard, the individual is no more than an anonym-
ous member of a crowd; accepting unquestioningly the opinions, sentiments, and
goals of the mob. The first stage towards self-realization is the entry into the
aesthetic sphere. In the aesthetic stage, the individual, like Aristotle’s intemperate
man, has a policy of pursuing the present pleasure. He may exercise taste and
discrimination: the pleasures pursued may be elegant and sophisticated. But the
essential feature of the aesthetic person is that he avoids taking on any commit-
ments, whether personal, social, or official, which would limit his field of choice
and prevent him from following whatever is immediately attractive. Kierkegaard
describes with great charm and insight the various forms and stages of the aesthetic
life. One of its most enticing forms, obviously enough, is the gratification of sex;
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Kierkegaard offers, as illustrations of three different stages of erotic pursuit, three
characters in Mozart’s operas: Cherubino, Papageno, and finally Don Giovanni.
The aesthetic person thinks of his existence as one of freedom: but in fact it is
extremely limited. A human being is like a two-storeyed house with a basement.
The finest apartments, on the piano nobile, are intended to be inhabited by spirit;
but the aesthetic person prefers to live in the cellar of sensuality. Such a person is
in a state of despair, even if he does not initially realize this; but gradually he will
become dissatisfied with the dissipation which is a dispersal of himself. He will
then be faced with the choice of abandoning himself to despair, or of moving up
to the next level by commiting himself to an ethical existence.
In the ethical stage the individual self-consciously takes his place within social
institutions and accepts the obligations which flow from them. He gives up the
perpetual holiday of the aesthetic life and takes a job; he forsakes the pleasures
of fleeting affairs for the constancy of married life. The ethical person is quite
different from the member of the crowd: he takes his place in society not un-
thinkingly but by an act of self-conscious choice. The ethical stage may make
strict demands on the individual, and call for heroic self-sacrifice. Faced with the
challenge, the individual becomes vividly conscious of human weakness; he may
try to overcome it by strength of will, but find himself unable to do so. He
becomes aware that his own powers are insufficient to meet the demands of the
moral law. This brings him to a sense of guilt, and a consciousness of sinfulness.
If he is to escape from this, he must rise from the ethical sphere to the religious
sphere. For this he must make ‘the leap of faith’.
The transition from the ethical to the religious sphere is most vividly portrayed
in Fear and Trembling, which takes as its text the biblical story of God’s com-
mand to Abraham to kill his son Isaac in sacrifice. Whereas an ethical hero, such
as Socrates, lays down his life for the sake of a universal moral law, Abraham’s
heroism lay in his obedience to an individual command of God. Moreover, the
command he offered to obey was a command to break a moral law: by the stand-
ards of ethics, Abraham should be convicted as a murderer. If Abraham is a hero,
as the Bible portrays him, it can only be from the standpoint of faith. ‘For faith is
this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal.’
Faith may demand what Kierkegaard calls ‘the teleological suspension of the
ethical’. Abraham’s act trangressed the ethical order in view of his higher end or
telos outside it. The demands of the unique relationship between God and an
individual may override all commitments arising from general ethical laws, such as
that a father should love his son more dearly than himself. But if an individual
feels a call to violate an ethical law, no one can tell him whether this is a genuine
command of God or a mere temptation. He cannot even know or prove it to
himself: he has to make a decision in blind faith.
Partly in reaction to Hegel’s rationalization of religion, Kierkegaard stresses that
faith is not the outcome of any objective reasoning. In his Concluding Unscientific
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Postscript he offers a number of arguments to this effect. The form of religious
faith that he has most often in mind is the Christian belief that Jesus saved the
human race by his death on the Cross: a belief which involves certain historical
elements. On this basis, he argues that faith cannot be rationally justified.
First of all, we can never achieve complete certainty about historical events.
But a mere judgement of probability is insufficient for a religious faith which is to
be the basis of eternal happiness. Secondly, historical research is never definitively
concluded, so if we are to use it as the basis of our religious commitment, we
must perpetually postpone that commitment. Thirdly, faith must be a passionate
devotion of oneself; but objective inquiry involves an attitude of detachment. We
must therefore give up the search for certainty, embrace the risk, and take the ‘leap’
of faith. ‘Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between
the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty.’
As is obvious from all this, Kierkegaard was a deeply religious thinker; it is
odd that he has had less influence within religious circles than on atheist philo-
sophers. He saw, for instance, the progress through the aesthetic, ethical, and
religious stages as a gradual appropriation of the individual’s existence. To have
an authentic existence one must not be a mere spectator or passenger in life, but
seize control of one’s own destiny. This aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought was
taken as a charter for ‘existentialist’ thinkers in the twentieth century; though
some of the most influential existentialists, such as Karl Jaspers in Germany and
Jean-Paul Sartre in France, severed the notion of self-appropriation from the
theological conclusion which was its raison d’être in Kierkegaard himself.
Nietzsche
In the nineteenth century, all that Kierkegaard stood for was bombastically re-
jected by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). While for
Kierkegaard aesthetic enjoyment was the lowest form of individual existence and
Christian self-denial the highest, Nietzsche regarded Christianity as the lowest
debasement of the human ideal which finds its highest expression in purely
aesthetic values.
After a Lutheran upbringing by his pious mother and aunts, Nietzsche felt a
sense of liberation when, at the University of Leipzig in 1865, he encountered
Schopenhauer’s atheism. Henceforth he presented himself consistently as an op-
ponent of the Christian ethos and the personality of Jesus. His conviction that art
was the highest form of human activity found expression in his own philosophical
style, which is poetic and aphoristic rather than argumentative or deductive.
Appointed at the age of twenty-four to a Chair in philology at Basel, he dedicated
to Richard Wagner his first book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.
In it he draws a contrast between two aspects of the Greek psyche: the wild
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irrational passions personified in Dionysus, and the disciplined and harmonious
beauty represented by Apollo. The greatness of Greek culture lay in the synthesis
of the two, which was disrupted by the rationalism of Socrates; contemporary
Germany could be saved from the decadence which then overtook Greece only if
it looked for its salvation to Wagner.
By 1876 Nietzsche had broken with Wagner and lost his admiration for
Schopenhauer. In Human, all too Human, he was uncharacteristically sympathetic
to utilitarian morality and appeared to value science above art. But he regarded this
phase of his philosophy as something to be sloughed off like the skin of a snake.
After giving up his Basel Chair in 1879 he began a series of works affirming the
value of Life, and denouncing, as elements hostile to life, Christian self-denial,
altruistic ethics, democratic politics, and scientific positivism. The most famous
of these works were Joyful Wisdom (1882), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–5),
Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and The Genealogy of Morals (1887). By 1889 he
had begun to show signs of madness, and lived in senile retirement until his death
in 1900.
Nietzsche believed that history exhibits two different kinds of morality. Aristo-
crats, feeling themselves to belong to a higher order than their fellows, use words
like ‘good’ to describe themselves, their ideals, and their characteristics: noble
birth, riches, bravery, truthfulness, and blondeness. They despise others as plebe-
ian, vulgar, cowardly, untruthful, and dark-coloured, and designate these charac-
teristics as ‘evil’. This is master-morality. The poor and weak, resenting the power
and riches of the aristocrats, set up their own contrasting system of values, a slave-
morality or herd-morality which puts a premium on character traits such as humility,
sympathy, and benevolence, which benefit the underdog. The erection of this new
system Nietzsche calls a ‘transvaluation of values’ and he attributes it to the Jews.
It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic
= beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the
contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound
hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely ‘the wretched alone
are the good; the poor, the weak, the lowly are alone good; the suffering, the needy,
the sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are
blessed, for them alone is salvation – but you, on the other hand, you aristocrats, you
men of power, you are to all eternity the evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate,
the godless; eternally also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the damned!’
The revolt of the slaves, begun by the Jews, has now, Nietzsche said, achieved
victory. Jewish hatred has triumphed under the mask of the Christian gospel of
love. In Rome itself, once the paragon of aristocratic virtue, men now bow down
to four Jews: Jesus, Peter, Paul, and Mary. Modern man, as a result, is a mere
dwarf, who has lost the will to be truly human. Vulgarity and mediocrity become
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the norm: only rarely there still flashes out an embodiment of the aristocratic
ideal, as in Napoleon.
The opposition between good and evil is a feature of the slave morality, now
dominant. Aristocrats despised the herd as bad, but the slaves, with greater
venom, condemned the aristocrats as not just bad but evil. We must fight against
the domination of the slave morality: the way forward is to transcend the bounds
of good and evil, and introduce a second transvaluation of values. If we can do
that, then there will rise, as a synthesis to the thesis and antithesis of master and
slave, the Superman.
The Superman will be the highest form of life. People are beginning to real-
ize, Nietzsche says, that Christianity is unworthy of belief, and that God is dead.
The concept of God has been the greatest obstacle to the fullness of human life:
now we are free to express our will to live. But our will to live must not be,
like Schopenhauer’s, one which favours the weak; it must be a will to power.
The will to power is the secret of all life; every living thing seeks to discharge its
force, to give full scope to its ability. Knowledge is merely the instrument of
power; there is no absolute truth, but only fictions which serve better or worse to
fortify life. Pleasure is not the aim of action, but simply the consciousness of the
exercise of power. The greatest realization of human power will be the creation of
Superman.
Humanity is merely a stage on the way to Superman, who is the meaning of the
earth. But Superman will not be achieved by evolution, but by an exercise of will.
‘Let your will say “Superman is to be the meaning of the earth”.’ Zarathustra says:
You could surely create the Superman! Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers!
But you could transform yourselves into forefathers and ancestors of the Superman:
and let this be your finest creating!
The arrival of Superman will be the perfection of the world; but it will not be the
end of history. For Nietzsche held the doctrine of eternal recurrence: history goes
in cycles, and whatever has happened will happen all over again, down to the
smallest detail.
It is difficult to evaluate Nietzsche coolly: the bilious unfairness of his criticism
of others generates in the reader a corresponding irritable impatience with his
own writing. One could say of The Genealogy of Morals, his last work, what he
himself said of his own early work: ‘It is poorly written, heavy-handed, embarrass-
ing. The imagery is both frantic and confused. It lacks logical nicety and is so sure
of its message that it dispenses with any kind of proof.’
Nietzsche quite fails to give any consistent presentation of the moral viewpoint
from which he criticizes conventional morality. The nature of Superman is too
sketchily described for his character to present any standard by which to make a
judgement of human virtue and vice. It is difficult to find where Nietzsche himself
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stands on an issue such as the evaluation of cruelty. When denouncing religion
and the role played by guilt in slave-morality, he describes with eloquent outrage
the bitter sufferings and barbarous tortures which bigots and persecutors have
inflicted. But when he describes the excesses of his aristocratic ‘blonde beasts’,
who perhaps come from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with
bravado and a moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student’s prank had
been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an ample theme to sing
and celebrate
he seems to regard this as a peccadillo, a necessary outlet for their ebullient high
spirits. It would be unphilosophical to regard Nietzsche’s final insanity as a reason
for discounting his philosophy; but on the other hand, it is not easy to feel much
pity for one who regarded pity as the most despicable of all emotions.
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XX
THREE MODERN
MASTERS
Charles Darwin
In his funeral oration on Karl Marx, Engels described the materialist conception
of history as a scientific breakthrough comparable with Darwin’s discovery of
evolution by natural selection. Unlike Marx’s theory, Darwin’s discovery was a
genuine scientific advance, and the detailed discussion of it belongs to the history
of science. But it casts a backward light on several philosophical issues we have
encountered earlier, and philosophical as well as scientific conclusions have been
drawn from it. Hence even an outline history of philosophy would be incomplete
without a brief account of the theory and its philosophical implications.
Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury in 1809 and attended the school there
before university studies in Edinburgh and Christ’s College, Cambridge. After
taking his degree in 1831 he joined HMS Beagle on a five-year tour of the
globe as resident naturalist; he published a record of his botanical and geological
researches on the cruise in a series of works between 1839 and 1846. During the
1840s he began to develop the theory of natural selection which he eventually
published in his great work The Origin of Species in 1859. This was followed by
The Descent of Man in 1871 and a series of treatises on variations of structure
and behaviour within and across species, which continued almost up to his death
in 1882.
Before Darwin, biologists had worked out a classification of animals and plants
into genera and species. All lions, for instance, belong to the lion species, which
is a member of a genus of cats which includes also the tiger and the leopard. It
is characteristic of a species that its members can breed with other members
to produce offspring of the same species, and that unions between members of
different species are commonly sterile.
The similarities between species which lead to their classification within a single
genus may be explained in various ways. The most famous of those who drew up
the classification into genus and species, the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, thought
that each species had been separately created and the resemblances and difference
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