Were I now to name the man whom I regard as the flower of philosophical mysticism, I should pronounce the name of Spinoza: his starting-point, the mystical Substance, his ultimatum1 the mystical love of God, in which God loves himself, and all else sun-clear, according to mathematical methods.
Certainly Spinoza did not think himself a mystic, but rather supposed he had proved everything so surely that all must see it; and yet his system, imposing as it is, has nothing convincing about it, and convinces so few, because one must first be convinced of Substance in Spinoza’s sense, which only a mystic can, or a philosopher who at the close of his system has reached the same by another path, and then no longer needs Spinozism. Similarly is it, however, with all other systems, excepting the few which, like those of Leibnitz and the English, begin from below, but then also do not get far, and, properly speaking, are not to be called systems. The complete rational proof of the mystical results can only appear at the close of the history of philosophy, for the latter consists, as has been said, altogether in the search for this proof.
Finally, we must not omit to call attention to the risk of error which lies in mysticism, and which is so much worse in this than in rational thought, because the latter has in itself, and in the co-operation of others, the control and hope of improvement, but the error which has crept in in mystical form is ineradicable. One must not thereby, however, conceive the matter as if the Unconscious imparted false inspirations, but it then imparts none at all, and consciousness simply takes the images of its uninspired fancy for inspirations of the Unconscious, because it longs for them.
It is just as difficult, to distinguish a genuine inspiration of the Unconscious in the waking state in a mystical mood from mere freaks of fancy, as a clairvoyant dream from an ordinary one; as in the latter case only the result, so in the former only the purity and inner worth of the result, can decide this question. But as true inspirations are always rare conditions, it is easy to see that among all, who ardently long for such mystical suggestions, very many self-deceptions must occur for one true inspiration; it is therefore not astonishing how much nonsense mysticism has brought to light, and that it must in consequence be extremely repugnant to every rational mind.
1 By his third kind of knowledge (the intellectual intuition, comp. above, p. 22 Obs.), by which alone those fundamental ideas of his system can be grasped in an adequate manner, and with full conviction of certainty (comp. “Ethics,” part v., Prop. 25, Prop. 36 Obs., Prop. 42 Prop.), Spinoza himself admits the mystical nature of these conceptions.
END OF VOL. I.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.
X.
THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY.
NATURE and History, or the origin of organisms and the development of the human race, are two parallel problems. In both cases the question runs: particular contingency or universal necessity, dead causality or living conformity to an end, mere sport of atoms and individuals or a single plan and general superintendence? He who has decided the question with respect to Nature in favour of design will have no difficulty in doing the same in regard to history. The only thing likely to mislead in the latter case is the semblance of personal freedom. But I think I may confidently appeal to the general consensus of modern philosophers in respect to this matter of the freedom of the will, to the effect namely that an empirical freedom in any single act of volition in the sense of unconditionality is altogether out of the question, since, like every other natural phenomenon, it falls under the law of causality, and necessarily follows from the state of the man’s mind at any given moment, and the motives which are acting upon him. Further, that if a claim be set up for a freedom of the will outside natural causality, this must at best be sought (I do not say, found) in the supersensible sphere (mundus noumenon), in Kant’s intelligible character, but can in no case apply to the specific volitional act, since any such act is always in time, consequently belongs to the sphere of the phenomenal world, and is accordingly subject to the law of causality, i.e., necessity. This, and the reasons why we are liable to the illusion of a belief in the will’s freedom, may be studied in Schopenhauer’s essay ‘On the Freedom of the Will.”
But suppose we even admitted the empirical freedom of the will, if we recognise a purposive evolution in history at all, this could only be the result of the freedom of individuals if the consciousness of the step next to be taken, in its full significance and in all its consequences, were possessed by every one freely co-operating in the historic movement, before he actively intervened.
Undoubtedly since the close of the last century we have been making approaches to that ideal state where the human race consciously accomplishes its destiny, but, save for a few superior minds, this is still a remote condition of things, and nobody will maintain that by far the larger part of the way already traversed has been conquered in this wise. For the aims of the individual are always selfish, each one seeks only to further his own well-being, and if this conduces to the welfare of the whole, the merit is certainly not his; the exceptions to this rule are so few that they are of no account in respect of the whole. But the wonderful part of the matter is, that even the mind, which wills the bad, works the good, that the results become, by combination of many different selfish purposes, quite other than what each individual had imagined, and that in the last resort they always conduce to the welfare of the whole, although often the advantage is somewhat remote, and centuries of retrogression seem to contradict it; this contradiction, however, is only apparent, for they serve the purpose of breaking the strength of an old system, that room may be made for a new and better one, or of allowing a vegetation to grow corrupt, in order that it may manure the ground for something fresh and fairer. Even thousands of years of stagnation on one spot of earth should not mislead us, if only this phase of culture has fulfilled its appointed office, and if only at the same time the process of evolution goes forward at another place.
Just as little should we expect, as is often and unreasonably the case, that at one and the same place all the various branches or tendencies should enjoy an unchecked progress, and complain of stagnation and retrogression, ii any particular branch, for which perhaps one has a personal preference, falls into decay. The evolution proceeds on the large scale, although only one or a few factors are in active progress and other fields lie fallow; for at the proper time these others will again be taken in hand, and in such a way that the elevation already attained is embraced in the new phase of the evolution (think of Raphael and Phidias, Göthe and Euripides). What is apt to blind the observer to the general development of humanity is really a too narrow limitation of the view, which keeps the eye fixed on certain painful and apparently incurable political or social diseases, or on the momentary ruin of one’s favourite intellectual hopes, instead of opening it wide to embrace vast historical scenes, which would make plain not only the great civilising events of the present time, but also reveal the multiplicity of the ways of history, and the possibility and probability of an improvement of these painful conditions by a path not dreamt of, and perhaps even contemned. But in yet another sense a too narrow restriction of the historic horizon may blind to the great truth of evolution, namely, if of the long period of humanity’s unfolding all too small a portion, say the last thousand years (called in the narrower sense, “historic”) be selected, and the brilliant age of Pericles or of Augustus be compared with the present era. The naiveté accuracy and delicacy of feeling of the æsthetic culture of those times may deceive us for a moment with respect to the superiority of our own, but the delusion disappears as soon as we reflect that the age of Pericles possessed these excellences only instinctively and unconsciously, as is shown by the fact that even so deep and circumspect a thinker as Plato, with such models before him, could construct so poor a theory of æsthetics and an ideal constitution so remote from actual needs. Not the shallow common sense of the Romans, but the Germans of the last century, converted into the conscious and now inalienable possession of human
ity what the Greeks only wrought out by instinct; and which we can no longer execute, because in all departments of art we have advanced in feeling from the plastic to the pictorial. The naive delicacy of taste, for which antiquity was distinguished in all directions, is naturally also far more easily destroyed by rude external influences or inner decay than the more substantial mental culture of the present day, with its rich material knowledge and self-conscious capacity, which is protected from sinking into oblivion by a thousand expedients. Other differences consist in this, that in antiquity the cultivated portion of the world was very small compared with that of the present day, when culture has spread more or less among all vigorous races and peoples, and new parts of the world have been taken possession of by the civilised peoples of Europe. At the same time, however, within the civilised races also education is ever extending to larger circles and strata of the population, so that for a twofold reason the cultured and mentally advanced society of the present day forms a very much larger quota of the total population of the earth than heretofore, and is growing with the greatest rapidity precisely at the present moment. But now as we have to do not with the development of mm but of humanity, this increase in breadth is not less important than the growth in depth—apart from the circumstance that the imperishability of what has once been won is guaranteed by a probability advancing in geometrical progression.
It is true that the free possession of the fruits of civilisation is still hampered and embittered by the struggle with the threatening shades of the Middle Ages reaching into our own time; but we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the struggle against these no longer justifiable existences to the historical value of the same in the past, and their abiding significance for the evolution of humanity. The utterly barbarous tribes of the Germanic migrations required during their infancy a strict schooling, in which the physiological processes of transmutation and fusion simultaneously went on, as whose result we have the nationalities of Europe of the present day. If antiquity especially developed the beautiful in sense and fancy, if the culture of the understanding to-day gives us the right to declare the forms of mediæval life to be relatively barbarous, it was the task of Germanism to complete the deepening of the heart, though naturally in a one-sided fashion, and this it could accomplish effectively by the aid of no other civilising impulse than the transcendent ideals of Christianity. It would be unjust to refuse to recognise that the working-out and development of the profoundest forces of the German mind, which will ever remain a possession to humanity after separation from that native soil, is essentially, if not exclusively, due to the imaginative inner life of the Middle Ages. Whoever has got the better of the elements hostile to civilisation inherent in the popular Christianity is for ever secured from relapsing into the elements of past periods of the development of humanity, which are hostile to civilisation, whereas the most highly cultured Greek or Roman had still before him the Christian phase of evolution.
Such an injustice to the Middle Ages Buckle and his school are guilty of when they set up the conscious understanding, which undoubtedly is higher than sense, fancy, and heart, and ought to govern these, as sole measure of advance in culture, which it by no means is, since the harmonious elaboration of all the mental forces appertains thereto; and since the understanding alone, without the foundation of powerfully developed sensibility, fancy, and heart, would only produce wasted shadows, but not men capable of any earnest task. The source of this error is this,—that the English, even down to the present day, are essentially at that rationalistic standpoint which we occupied in the last century; and that these historians of civilisation, instead of trying to discover the unconsciously impelling ideas of history, fancy they can explain them as a product of conscious reflection. Unconscious reason, namely, unfolds itself, as we have just seen, just as much in sensibility, fancy, and heart, as in the reflection of the conscious understanding; and it again is evidence of an all too-narrow glance, when the regulative element of modern life is looked upon as that which is most important for all time, and as a standard of culture valid for all time. In opposition to such a straitening of the history of civilisation into a “History of Rationalism” Hegel’s attempts at a Philosophy of History retain their full value, since in them the discussion always and alone turns upon the (unconscious) ideas underlying the epoch.
The opposite view of Schopenhauer with respect to History rests on his conception of time as purely subjective phenomenal form, according to which all that happens is an exclusively subjective appearance, wherefore history is a subjective tissue of representations devoid of truth. He blinds himself to the manifest contradiction of this view, to the mighty organism of the historic evolution of humanity, on the one hand, by reflecting only on the indifferent and accidental framework of facts (succession of kings, battles, &c.), instead of on the content of historical culture, which is entirely neglected by him; and, on the other hand, by confounding the demand for a heightening of individual comfort with the demand for a civilised progression of humanity as a whole. Happiness certainly does not keep pace with human progress, but this does not militate against the truth, that this progress, both in the inner mental world and in the forms of social life, really exists, and leads to ever higher development.
If anything is calculated to prove the great progress in spiritual matters from the Greeks to the present day, it is the progress of philosophy and especially that of the German and English philosophy of the last two hundred years. Philosophy as the final summariser of the ideas which support a period of civilisation, and as the flower of the historic self-consciousness of the Unconscious Idea, may be taken as the most faithful representative of the spiritual horizon of a section of time in the narrowest and most compact frame; the progress of the development of ideas, which we perceive in the history of philosophy, shows us as through a diminishing glass the quintessence of the spiritual possessions of the corresponding ages in their various phases of development. That in the different philosophies there is really a development was first shown by Hegel, who constructed from the earlier detached intellectual torsos an organically connected and harmonious monumental group. Undoubtedly the individual collaborateurs had either no idea at all of this concatenation, or possessed indeed only a highly defective knowledge of a limited number of their predecessors, and just as their profoundest principles instinctively welled up from the depths of the Unconscious, so instinctively did they themselves divine the truth in regard to the place, which they had to occupy in the evolution, so that the modern historiography of Philosophy must be characterised as the bringing to consciousness of the unconscious relations obtaining between different philosophics, in consequence of which they unconsciously form a great development series. But now, when we consider that at the same time each of these philosophies is only the most conscious expression of the period of civilisation which has just attained its acme, thus only the last budding branch, which has sprung from the common hidden root, whence all the achievements of this portion of time in the most diverse directions have harmoniously sprung,—then it is evident, that the epochs of civilisation taken as a whole must be as much related as phases of an ascending development series, as those common roots of the characteristic performances of each one of them (i.e. their unconsciously impelling ideas), or as their most conscious forms of expression (the standard philosophies). What should be regarded as the unconscious impelling Idea in any particular period, can only be determined by the Unconscious itself in reference to the phase of development which is ideally indispensable at that precise time. For the human individuals themselves, who perform the tasks answering to this phase, before they even in a small measure attain to the consciousness of the unconscious Idea, by which they are impelled, cannot possibly be the cause of this phase of the Idea, since humanity only attains a consciousness of the introduction of the same into the collective organism, and of the necessity of just these phases of development in this period of time long after the close of the period in q
uestion.
Now the means whereby a particular phase of the IDEA is actualised in a certain period are of two kinds, namely, on the one side the implanting an instinctive impulse in the masses, and on the other hand, the production of men of genius as finger-posts and pioneers. This mysterious impulse which works in the masses from time to time in the form of tribal migrations, emigrations of multitudes, crusades, religious, political and social national revolutions, and guides the same with truly demonic power to a goal of which they are unconscious, is still ever “right conscious of its way,” if it also for the most part believes, that this way leads to quite another goal than is actually the fact. For in the cases, where the masses do not altogether rush headlong forward, blind with rage, and without conscious aim, but have an end in view, this conscious aim is commonly a worthless or perverse one, whereas the true purpose of history in these revolutions is only subsequently unveiled.—In like manner, even without exactly inflaming the masses, history attains, by the initiative of eminent individuals, results which were quite beside the conscious purposes of such men. (Think in particular of the fertile marriage of different national civilisations, how with the national exclusiveness of earlier times they could have been produced only by means of vast expeditions for the sake of conquest, as, e.g., those of Alexander, of Cæsar, the Roman expeditions of the German Emperors, nay, even the European revolutions evoked by Napoleon. Only an unhistoric sense can make light of the fields strewed with the corpses of these heroes duped by the Unconscious, whence have sprung harvests so fruitful and rich in blessing.) Other ends are attained by the Unconscious in a more peaceful way, when it calls forth the right genius at the right time, who is enabled just to solve that problem, whose solution his age urgently needs.1 No more calamitous gift for the individual than genius, for the men of genius are, even with apparent outward good fortune, yet always those men who most deeply and irremediably feel the wretchedness of existence. But men of genius are not here for their own sake, but for humanity; and for humanity it is quite indifferent, whether in fulfilling their task they feel miserable, or even perish in distress. The right man has never been wanting at the right time; and the cry sometimes heard, that men are lacking for certain urgent tasks, only proves that the problems have been wrongly proposed by human consciousness, that they do not at all (or at least not now) lie in the plan of history, and that consequently even the most gifted men would vainly expend their mental energies on these problems (at least at this time). (Such an absolutely insoluble problem, e.g., is the regeneration and strengthening of States doomed to decay and dissolution. A temporarily insoluble problem, on the other hand, is the revival of original production in some special field of mental work, which, at the moment in the hands of Epigoni, must lie fallow for a season, before a new phase of development commences under the influence of a new and fertile idea.) This pre-established harmony, so to say, between historic problems and individuals with a special faculty for solving them, reaches so far, that even technical inventions (in a practically available form) are effected always, but then also always, only when the pre-conditions for their fruitful utilisation, as well as the need of such aids to culture, are given.
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