On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature · Arthur Schopenhauer
CHAPTER V.
In using such expressions as 'sound Reason teaches this,' or 'Reason should control passion,' we by no means imply that Reason furnishes material knowledge out of its own resources; but rather do we point to the results of rational reflection, that is, to logical inference from principles which abstract knowledge has gradually gathered from experience and by which we obtain a clear and comprehensive view, not only of what is empirically necessary, and may therefore, the case occurring, be foreseen, but even of the reasons and consequences of our own deeds also. _Reasonable_ or _rational_ is everywhere synonymous with _consistent_ or _logical_, and conversely; for Logic is only Reason's natural procedure itself, expressed in a system of rules; therefore these expressions (rational and logical) stand in the same relation to one another as theory and practice. Exactly in this same sense too, when we speak of a reasonable conduct, we mean by it one which is quite consistent, one therefore which proceeds from general conceptions, and is not determined by the transitory impression of the moment. By this, however, the morality of such conduct is in no wise determined: it may be good or bad indifferently. Detailed explanations of all this are to be found in my "Critique of Kant's Philosophy,"[137] and also in my "Fundamental Problems of Ethics."[138] Notions derived from _pure Reason_ are, lastly, those which have their source in the _formal_ part, whether intuitive or reflective, of our cognitive faculty; those, consequently, which we are able to bring to our consciousness _à priori_, that is, without the help of experience. They are invariably based upon principles which have transcendental or metalogical truth.
Alas! alas! the great mischief in academical hero-worship of this sort, and in the glorification of university celebrities by worthy colleagues in office or hopeful aspirants to it, is precisely, that ordinary intellects--Nature's mere manufactured ware--are presented to honest credulous youths of immature judgment, as master minds, exceptions and ornaments of mankind. The students forthwith throw all their energies into the barren study of the endless, insipid scribblings of such mediocrities, thus wasting the short, invaluable period allotted to them for higher education, instead of using it to attain the sound information they might have found in the works of those extremely rare, genuine, truly exceptional thinkers, _nantes in gurgite vasto_, who only rise to the surface every now and then in the course of ages, because Nature produced but one of each kind, and then "destroyed the mould." For this generation also those great minds might have had life, had our youth not been cheated out of its share in their wisdom by these exceedingly pernicious extollers of mediocrity, members of the vast league and brotherhood of mediocrities, which is as flourishing to-day as it ever was and still hoists its flag as high as it can in persistent antagonism to all that is great and genuine, as humiliating to its members.
Thanks to them, our age has declined to so low an ebb, that Kant's Philosophy, which it took our fathers years of study, of serious application and of strenuous effort to understand, has again become foreign to the present generation, which stands before it like ὄνος πρὸς λύραν, at times attacking it coarsely and clumsily--as barbarians throw stones at the statue of some Greek god which is foreign to them. Now, as this is the case, I feel it incumbent upon me to advise all champions of a Reason that perceives, comprehends, and knows directly--in short, that supplies material knowledge out of its own resources--to read, as something new to them, the _First Book_ of Locke's work, which has been celebrated throughout the world for the last hundred and fifty years, and in it especially to peruse §§ 21-26 of the Third Chapter, expressly directed against all innate notions. For although Locke goes too far in denying all innate truths, inasmuch as he extends his denial even to our _formal_ knowledge--a point in which he has been brilliantly rectified by Kant--he is nevertheless perfectly and undeniably right with reference to all _material_ knowledge: that is, all knowledge which gives substance.
I have already said in my Ethics what I must nevertheless repeat here, because, as the Spanish proverb says, "_No hay peor sordo que quien no quiere oir_" (None so deaf as those who will not hear): namely, that if Reason were a faculty specially designed for Metaphysics, a faculty which supplied the material of knowledge and could reveal that which transcends all possible experience, the same harmony would necessarily reign between men on metaphysical and religious subjects--for they are identical--as on mathematical ones, and those who differed in opinion from the rest would simply be looked upon as not quite right in their mind. Now exactly the contrary takes place, for on no subject are men so completely at variance with one another as upon these. Ever since men first began to think, philosophical systems have opposed and combated each other everywhere; they are, in fact, often diametrically contrary to one another. Ever since men first began to believe (which is still longer), religions have fought against one another with fire and sword, with excommunication and cannons. But in times when faith was most ardent, it was not the lunatic asylum, but the Inquisition, with all its paraphernalia, which awaited individual heretics. Here again, therefore, experience flatly and categorically contradicts the false assertion, that Reason is a faculty for direct metaphysical knowledge, or, to speak more clearly, of inspiration from above. Surely it is high time that severe judgment should be passed upon this Reason, since, _horribile dictu_, so lame, so palpable a falsehood continues after half a century to be hawked about all over Germany, wandering year by year from the professors' chair to the students' bench, and from bench to chair, and has actually found a few simpletons, even in France, willing to believe in it, and carry it about in that country also. Here, however, French _bon-sens_ will very soon send _la raison transcendentale_ about its business.
But where was this falsehood originally hatched? How did the fiction first come into the world? I am bound to confess that it was first originated by Kant's Practical Reason with its Categorical Imperative. For when this Practical Reason had once been admitted, nothing further was needed than the addition of a second, no less sovereign Theoretical Reason, as its counterpart, or twin-sister: a Reason which proclaims metaphysical truths _ex tripode_. I have described the brilliant success of this invention in my Fundamental Problems of Ethics[139] to which work I refer my reader. Now, although I grant that Kant first gave rise to this false assumption, I am, nevertheless, bound to add, that those who want to dance are not long in finding a piper. For it is surely as though a curse lay on mankind, causing them, in virtue of a natural affinity for all that is corrupt and bad, to prefer and hold up to admiration the inferior, not to say downright defective, portions of the works of eminent minds, while the really admirable parts are tolerated as merely accessory. Very few in our time know wherein the peculiar depth and true grandeur of Kant's philosophy lies; for his works have necessarily ceased to be comprehended since they have ceased to be studied.
In fact, they are now only cursorily read, for historical purposes, by those who are under the delusion that philosophy has advanced, not to say begun, since Kant. We soon perceive therefore, that in spite of all their talk about Kantian philosophy, these people really know nothing of it but the husk, the mere outer envelope, and that if perchance they may here or there have caught up a stray sentence or brought away a rough sketch of it, they have never penetrated to the depths of its meaning and spirit. People of this sort have always been chiefly attracted, in Kant's Philosophy, first of all by the Antinomies, on account of their oddity, but still more by his Practical Reason with its Categorical Imperative, nay even by the Moral Theory he placed on the top of it, though with this last he was never in earnest; for a theoretical dogma which has only practical validity, is very like the wooden guns we allow our children to handle without fear of danger: properly speaking, it belongs to the same category as: "Wash my skin, but without wetting it."
Now, as regards the Categorical Imperative, Kant never asserted it as a fact, but, on the contrary, protests repeatedly against this being done; he merely served it up as the result of an exceedingly curious combination of thoughts, because he stood in need of a sheet-anchor for morality. Our professors of philosophy, however, never sifted the matter to the bottom, so that it seems as if no one before me had ever thoroughly investigated it. Instead of this, they made all haste to bring the Categorical Imperative into credit as a firmly established fact, calling it in their purism "the moral law"--which, by the way, always reminds me of Bürger's "Mam'zelle Larègle;" indeed, they have made out of it something as massive as the stone tables of Moses, whose place it entirely takes, for them. Now in my Essay upon the Fundament of Morality, I have brought this same Practical Reason with its Categorical Imperative under the anatomical knife, and proved so clearly and conclusively that they never had any life or truth, that I should like to see the man who can refute me with reasons, and so help the Categorical Imperative honestly on its legs again. Meanwhile, our professors of philosophy do not allow themselves to be put out of countenance by this.
They can no more dispense with their "moral law of practical Reason," as a convenient _deus ex machina_ on which to found their morality, than with Free Will: both are essential points in their old woman's philosophy. No matter if I have made an end of both, since, for them, both continue to exist, like deceased sovereigns who for political reasons are occasionally allowed to continue reigning for a few days after their death. These worthies simply pursue their tactics of old against my merciless demolition of those two antiquated fictions: silence, silence; and so they glide past noiselessly, feigning ignorance, to make the public believe that I and the like of me are not worth listening to. Well, to be sure, their philosophical calling comes to them from the ministry, while mine only comes from Nature. True, we may at last perhaps discover that these heroes act upon the same principle as that idealistic bird, the ostrich, which imagines that by closing its eyes it does away with the huntsman. Ah well! we must bide our time; if the public can only be brought to take up meantime with the barren twaddle, the unbearably tiresome repetitions, the arbitrary constructions of the Absolute, and the infant-school morality of these gentlemen--say, till I am dead and they can trim up my works as they like--we shall then see.
Morgen habe denn das Rechte Seine Freunde wohlgesinnet, Wenn nur heute noch das Schlechte Vollen Platz und Gunst gewinnet. GÖTHE, _West-Oestlicher Divan_. [139] Schopenhauer, "Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik," p. 148 and _sqq._ (p. 146 _et seq._ of 2nd edition.) But do these gentlemen know what time of day it is? A long predicted epoch has set in; the church is beginning to totter, nay it totters already to such a degree, that it is doubtful whether it will ever be able to recover its centre of gravity; for faith is lost. The light of revelation, like other lights, requires a certain amount of darkness as an indispensable condition. The number of those who have been unfitted for belief by a certain degree and extent of knowledge, is already very large. Of this we have evident signs in the general diffusion of that shallow Rationalism which is showing its bulldog face daily more and more overtly. It quietly sets to work to measure those profound mysteries of Christianity over which centuries have brooded and disputed with its draper's ell, and thinks itself wondrous wise withal. It is, however, the very quintessence of Christianity, the dogma of Original Sin, which these shallow-brained Rationalists have especially singled out for a laughing-stock; precisely because nothing seems clearer or more certain to them, than that existence should begin for each of us with our birth: nothing therefore so impossible as that we can have come into the world already burdened with guilt. How acute!
And just as in times of prevailing poverty and neglect, wolves begin to make their appearance in villages; so does Materialism, ever lying in wait, under these circumstances lift up its head and come to the front hand in hand with Bestialism, its companion, which some call Humanism. Our thirst after knowledge augments with our incapacity for belief. There comes a boiling-point in the scale of all intellectual development, at which all faith, all revelation, and all authority evaporate, and Man claims the right to judge for himself; the right, not only to be taught, but to be convinced. The leading-strings of his infancy have fallen off, and henceforth he demands leave to walk alone. Yet his craving for Metaphysics can no more be extinguished than any physical want. Then it is, that the desire for philosophy becomes serious and that mankind invokes the spirits of all the genuine thinkers who have issued from its ranks. Then, too, empty verbiage and the impotent endeavours of emasculated intellects no longer suffice; the want of a serious philosophy is felt, having other aims in view than fees and salaries, and caring little therefore whether it meets the approbation of cabinet-ministers, or councillors, whether it serves the purposes of this or that religious faction, or not; a philosophy which, on the contrary, clearly shows that it has a very different mission in view from that of procuring a livelihood for the poor in spirit.
But I return to my argument. By means of an amplification which only needed a little audacity, a _theoretical_ oracle had been added to the _practical_ oracle with which Kant had wrongly endowed Reason. The credit of this invention is no doubt due to F. H. Jacobi, from whom the professional philosophers joyfully and thankfully received the precious gift, as a means to help them out of the straits to which Kant had reduced them. That cool, calm, deliberate Reason, which Kant had criticized so mercilessly, was henceforth degraded to _Understanding_ and known by this name; while Reason was supposed to denote an entirely imaginary, fictitious faculty, admitting us, as it were, to a little window overlooking the superlunar, nay, the supernatural world, through which all those truths are handed to us ready cut and dried, concerning which old-fashioned, honest, reflective Reason had for ages vainly argued and contended. And it is on such a mere product of the imagination, such a completely fictitious Reason as this, that German sham philosophy has been based for the last fifty years; first, as the free construction and projection of the absolute _Ego_ and the emanation from it of the _non-Ego_; then, as the intellectual intuition of absolute identity or indifference, and its evolutions to Nature; or again, as the arising of God out of his dark depths or bottomless pit[140] _à la_ Jakob Böhme; lastly, as the pure, self-thinking, absolute Idea, the scene of the ballet-dance of the self-moving conceptions--still, at the same time, always as immediate apprehension (_Vernehmen_) of the Divine, the supersensuous, the Deity, verity, beauty and as many other "-ties" as may be desired, or even as a mere vague presentiment[141] of all these wonders.--So this is Reason, is it? Oh no, it is simply a farce, of which our professors of philosophy, who are sorely perplexed by Kant's serious critiques, avail themselves in order to pass off the subjects of the established religion of their country somehow or other, _per fas aut nefas_, for the results of philosophy.
Nay, the impossibility of any such proof, and with it the impossibility of all speculative theology, is shown at length _à priori_ and not in the empty verbiage or Hegelian jargon now in fashion, which may be made to mean anything one likes, but quite seriously and honestly, in the good old-fashioned way; wherefore, however little it may have been to the taste of many people, nothing cogent could be brought forward in reply to it for the last sixty years, and the proofs of the existence of God have in consequence lost all credit, and are no longer in use. Our professors of philosophy have even begun to look down upon them and treat them with decided contempt, as ridiculous and superfluous attempts to demonstrate what was self-evident. Ho! ho! what a pity this was not found out sooner! How much trouble might have been spared in searching whole centuries for these proofs, and how needless it would have been for Kant to bring the whole weight of his Critique of Reason to bear upon and crush them! Some folks, will no doubt be reminded by this contempt of the fox with the sour grapes. But those who wish to see a slight specimen of it will find a particularly characteristic one in Schelling's "Philosophische Schriften," vol. i., 1809, p. 152. Now, whilst others were consoling themselves with Kant's assertion, that it is just as impossible to prove the non-existence, as the existence, of God--as if, forsooth, the old wag did not know that _affirmanti incumbit probatio_--Jacobi's admirable invention came to the rescue of our perplexed professors, and granted German _savants_ of this century a peculiar sort of Reason that had never been known or heard of before.
Yet all these artifices were quite unnecessary. For the impossibility of proving the existence of God by no means interferes with that existence, since it rests in unshakeable security on a much firmer basis. It is indeed a matter of revelation, and this is besides all the more certain, because that revelation was exclusively vouchsafed to a single people, called, on this account, the chosen people of God. This is made evident by the fact, that the notion of God, as personal Ruler and Creator of the world, ordaining everything for the best, is to be found in no other religion but the Jewish, and the two faiths derived from it, which might consequently in a wider sense be called Jewish sects. We find no trace of such a notion in any other religion, ancient or modern. For surely no one would dream of confounding this Creator God Almighty with the Hindoo Brahm, which is living in me, in you, in my horse, in your dog--or even with Brahma, who is born and dies to make way for other Brahmas, and to whom moreover the production of the world is imputed as sin and guilt[142]--least of all with beguiled Saturn's voluptuous son, to whom Prometheus, defiant, prophesies his downfall.
But if we finally direct our attention towards the religion which numbers most followers, and in this respect may therefore be said to rank foremost: that is, Buddhism, we can no longer shut our eyes to the fact that it is as decidedly and explicitly atheistic, as it is idealistic and ascetic; and this moreover to such a degree, that its priests express the greatest abhorrence of the doctrine of pure Theism whenever it is brought to their notice. Therefore, in a treatise handed to a Catholic bishop by the High Priest of the Buddhists at Ava,[143] the doctrine "that there is a Being who has created the world and all things, and who alone is worthy of worship," is counted among the six damnable heresies.[144] This is entirely corroborated by I. J. Schmidt, a most excellent and learned authority, whom I consider as having undoubtedly the deepest knowledge of Buddhism of any European _savant_, and who, in his work "Upon the connection between Gnostic doctrines and Buddhism," p. 9, says:-- [142] "If Brimha be unceasingly employed in the creation of worlds ... how can tranquillity be obtained by inferior orders of being?" Prabodh Chandro Daya, translated by J. Taylor, p. 23.--Brahma is also part of the Trimurti, which is the personification of nature, as procreation, preservation, and death: that is, he represents the first of these.
Then again:[145] "The expression _Creation_ is foreign to Buddhism, which only knows _Cosmogony_;" and, "We must comprehend that no idea of a creation of divine origin is compatible with their system." I could bring forward a hundred corroborative passages like these; but will limit myself to one more, which I quote on account of its popular and official character. The third volume of a very instructive Buddhist work, "Mahavansi, Raja-ratnacari, and Raja-Vali,"[146] contains a translation of the interrogatories to which the High Priests of the five chief Pagodas were separately and successively subjected by the Dutch Governor of Ceylon about the year 1766. It is exceedingly amusing to see the contrast between the interlocutors, who have the greatest difficulty in understanding one another's meaning. In conformity with the doctrines of their faith, these priests, who are penetrated with love and compassion for all living beings, not excepting even Dutch Governors, spare no pains to satisfy him by their answers. But the artless, naïve Atheism of these priests, whose piety extends even to practising continence, soon comes into conflict with the deep convictions founded on Judaism, imbibed by the Governor in his infancy.
This faith has become a second nature for him; he cannot in the least understand that these priests are not Theists, therefore he constantly returns to his inquiries after a Supreme Being, asking them who created the world, and so forth. Whereupon they answer that there can be no higher being than Buddha Shakia-Muni, the Victorious and the Perfect, who, though a king's son by birth, voluntarily lived the life of a beggar, and preached to the end his sublime doctrine, for the Redemption of mankind, and for our salvation from the misery of constant renascence. They hold that the world has not been made by anyone,[147] that it is self-created, that Nature spreads it out, and draws it in again; but that it is that, which existing, does not exist: that it is the necessary accompaniment of renascence, and that renascence is the result of our sinful conduct, &c. &c. &c. I mention such facts as these chiefly on account of the really scandalous way in which German _savants_ still universally persist, even to the present day, in looking upon Religion and Theism as identical and synonymous; whereas Religion is, in fact, to Theism as the genus to the single species, and Judaism and Theism are alone identical.
For this reason we stigmatize as heathen all nations who are neither Jews, Christians, nor Mahometans. Christians are even taxed by Mahometans and Jews with the impurity of their Theism, because of the dogma of the Trinity. For, whatever may be said to the contrary, Christianity has Indian blood in its veins, therefore it constantly tends to free itself from Judaism. The Critique of Pure Reason is the most serious attack that has ever been made upon Theism--and this is why our professors of philosophy have been in such a hurry to set Kant aside; but had that work appeared in any country where Buddhism prevailed, it would simply have been regarded as an edifying treatise intended to refute heresy more thoroughly by a salutary confirmation of the orthodox doctrine of Idealism--that is, the doctrine of the merely apparent existence of the world, as it presents itself to our senses. Even the two other religions which coexist with Buddhism in China--those of Taotsee and of Confucius--are just as Atheistic as Buddhism itself; wherefore the missionaries have never been able to translate the first verse of the Pentateuch into Chinese, because there is no word in the language for God and Creation.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.