Now the collective inner spiritual evolution of humanity forms the proper content of the history of humanity; whereas State, Church, and Society, notwithstanding their organic character and their organic development, still, in respect of the inner spiritual evolution, have only the value of a scaffolding which, produced by the unconscious mental activity of individuals, now on its side again supports and furthers the elaboration of the conscious mind, by not only protecting and securing it, but also as an accessory mechanism saving one great part of the spiritual labour, and lightening another.
Like every bodily part the cerebrum also is strengthened by use and exercise, and made more capable of new allied performances; but as in every bodily part, so in the cerebrum the vigour and material perfection acquired by the parents is transmissible to the child. This transmission is not directly demonstrable in each single case; but, on the average, taking one generation with another, it is a fact, and it is likewise a fact that there is a latent transmission, which only reveals its fruits in the second or third generation (e.g., when somebody inherits from his maternal grandfather a luxuriant red beard and fine bass voice). As each generation further elaborates its conscious intellect, thus also further perfects its material organ, in the course of generations these additions, imperceptibly small in a single generation, amount to clearly visible quantities. It is no mere figure of speech, that children are now born more clever, and that, less childish than formerly, they even in childhood show a tendency to become prematurely knowing. As the offspring of trained animals are more adapted for similar training than offspring captured when wild, so also the children of a human generation are the more clever in making acquisitions in the various departments of practice and theory, the greater the advance already made. I doubt, e.g., whether a Greek boy could ever have become an excellent productive musician in the modern sense, because his brain was without those inherited predispositions for the wide field of musical harmony, which modern humanity of western Europe has only gained through an historic development of more than fifteen generations. An Archimedes or Euclid, in spite of their relative mathematical genius, would have evinced no little awkwardness as pupils of an instruction in the higher mathematics.
Thus all spiritual progress causes an enhancement of the executive capacity of the material organ of the intellect, and this becomes through inheritance (on the average) the enduring possession of humanity—a position scaled facilitating further advance. That is, the progress in the spiritual possession of humanity goes hand in hand with the anthropological development of the race, and stands in reciprocal relation with it; all progress on the one side stands the other side in good stead. There must, accordingly, be also an anthropological ennoblement of the race, which springs from other causes than that mental progress, which furthers the intellectual evolution. Of the latter kind is, e.g., the improvement of the race by sexual selection (B. Chap. ii.)—which ceaselessly exerts its unnoticed but powerful effects—or the competition of races and nations in the struggle for exi tence, which is waged among mankind under natural laws just as pitilessly as among animals and plants. No power on earth is able to arrest the eradication of the inferior races of mankind, which, as relics of earlier stages of development once also passed through by ourselves, have gone on vegetating down to the present day. As little as a favour is done the dog whose tail is to be cut off, when one cuts it off gradually, inch by inch, so little is there humanity in artificially prolonging the death-struggle of savages who are on the verge of extinction. The true philanthropist, if he has comprehended the natural law of anthropological evolution, cannot avoid desiring an acceleration of the last convulsions, and labouring for that end. One of the best means is the support of missions, which (according to a truly divine irony of the Unconscious) has done more to further this purpose of Nature than all the direct attempts of the white race at the annihilation of savages. The quicker this eradication of the peoples living in a state of nature incapable of competition with the white race is proceeded with, and the quicker the whole earth is exclusively occupied by races hitherto the highest, the more quickly will the struggle of different stocks within the highest race burst forth into immense proportions, the sooner will the spectacle of the absorption of the lower race by the higher be repeated among stocks and peoples. But the difference is, that these peoples are far more equal, thus far more capable of competition, than the lower races (except the Mongolian) have hitherto shown themselves in presence of the Caucasian race. Hence it follows that the struggle for existence between nations, because waged with more equal force, must be much more fearful, bitter, persistent, and attended with greater sacrifices, than between races, as we shall see later on (C. chap. x.), that the struggle for existence is in general the more bitter and the more merciless, but at the same time also the more advantageous for the progressive evolution of the race, the nearer are the species or varieties that compete with one another.
It is relatively indifferent whether this struggle for existence between peoples and races assumes the form of physical struggle with weapons, or whether it takes place in other apparently more peaceful forms of competition. It would be a great error to suppose that war is the cruelest or even only the most effective form of annihilating a competitor; it is only the most obvious, because rudest—but on that very account also the ultima ratio for a people which sees itself overreached by its competitor in the so-called peaceful clashing of interests. The sacrifices of even the greatest war are insignificant compared with the annihilation of millions and millions of human beings who perish when, e.g., a people is drained by another of higher industrial development by means of commerce, and deprived of a part of its previous source of earning a livelihood (comp. Carey’s “Principles of Political Economy,” on the effects of the English blood-sucking system in India, Portugal and elsewhere). While by means of this struggle for existence the earth becomes more and more the exclusive possession of the most highly-developed peoples, not only does the entire population of the earth become more civilised, but also by means of the differentiations conditioned by forms of soil and climate within the people that has attained the hegemony new germs of development are always being scattered, which indeed, again, can only be unfolded by means of the cruel struggle for existence.
Awful as is the prospect of this perpetual struggle from the endæmonist point of view, equally magnificent does it appear from the teleological in respect to the goal of an extreme intellectual development. One must only accustom oneself to the thought that the Unconscious can be led astray neither more nor less by the lamentation of milliards of human individuals than by that of as many animal individuals, if only these torments further development, and thereby its own main design.
I said above, that the fact of an evolution of humanity may certainly be doubted if one contemplate too limited sections of history; we may now say, that one can only in that case doubt evolution, but not if the total duration of humanity, from its first appearance on earth till the future perspective just hinted at, be surveyed with a single glance. The time has gone by when a Creuzer and a Schelling supposed a primitive people endowed with all wisdom, from whose decay the race of mankind had developed. To-day, comparative philology and comparative mythology, ethnology, anthropology, and archaeology, unite in their teaching that the state of culture of our forefathers was the ruder and more primitive the more remote the era to which we descend. When three to four thousand years ago the Aryans began in small detachments that national migration, whose present result is the rule of the Indo-Germanic stocks from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, they already possessed a considerable civilisation, which can only have been the result of the antecedent ten thousands of years. Already provided with a language furnished with inflexions, with fruitful and profound philosophical nature-myths, with technical instruments for agriculture, the shaping of dwellings and clothes, they make their first appearance in history. Much as we have gained in culture since then, yet it holds good here more than anywhere
that all commencement is difficult, and doubtless it was a far greater and therefore also more protracted task to work up to such an elevation from the primitive condition of speechless human animals, than, once in possession of such means of culture, especially such an incomparable language, to subjugate Nature ever more and more, and to outstrip the backward races in ever-increasing progression.
If language, mythology, and technology form the spiritual content of that pre-historic period of civilisation, the family expanded to the tribe is the form in which this content is embraced. Whilst the sexual instinct brought together man and woman to found a family, it was on the one hand the instinctive social instinct (Grotius) which hindered the atomistic sundering of blood-relations of the first and second degree; and, on the other hand, the struggle for existence, the war of all against all (Hobbes); the hostility of foreign neighbours to one another, which necessarily brought about an increase of the power of attack and defence by the closest solidarity of the family and the clan. Thus the head of the family grew into the elder of the clan or patriarch, and—with increasing expansion of the clan into the tribe—into the chief of the tribe, or patriarchial king. In this condition do we find the Aryans, when they conquered Hindostan; the Greeks, at the time of the Trojan war; the Germans, in their tribal migrations. It is true that animals also found families, also wage war with one another; but they immediately relapse into the inorganic mass of the herd, as soon as more than the family in the narrow sense remain together, whereas the clan is organically parted into families and therefore really exhibits the higher unity of the latter. Wherefore the union of the three instincts (sexual impulse, social impulse, and instinct of enmity of all to all) is, in fact, in man something new and higher than in the animal, and makes him the ζɷov πoλɩτɩκòv of Aristotle.
The higher unconscious content of those instincts in the case of man is shown in this, that its proximate products, the family, the clan, and the tribe, must be regarded as the germinal vesicle and embryo of all later political, ecclesiastical, and social forms. The head of the family is first king (leader in battle, exclusive representative of the family to the outer world, and judge, with power of life and death); secondly, priest (in the then exclusive family worship); and thirdly, teacher and taskmaster of his own people. These three departments are here still united in inseparable unity; or, more correctly, they have not yet at all worked themselves out of their state of indifference. This emergence does not take place suddenly but gradually; each of the three spheres has the tendency to develop into a formal organism, which dominates according to possibilities the other life-spheres. That one of the three spheres now, on whose elaboration in an historical period most popular energy is expended, in fact rules during this period. But since the departments can only be worked at one after another, it lies in the nature of the case that the sides which first emerge must implicitly contain in themselves those which are not yet unfolded, so far as the latter do not still remain in the primitive bosom of the family.
The development of the State is everywhere the first and most urgent requirement; but the ecclesiastical and social functions, so far as they have emerged from the family circle, must be supplied at the same time (thus, e.g., in the Græco-Roman constitution, where the kingly high-priests, and also in the republican phase the ecclesiastical institutions were integral parts of the State). In Hindostan, a few centuries after the conquest by the Aryans, there took place that powerful revolution, whereby the military nobility was almost exterminated, and the rule of the priesthood was permanently established down to the present day. In the West this revolution (which in India stifled all germs of progress) happily took place after a complete cycle of the political development of antiquity; a circumstance which, after the expiration of the mediæval-ecclesiastical phase of development, made possible the re-birth of German life, even in political and mental respects, by means of the renascence of antiquity.
As the Church only appeared as the second element, it could not absorb the already existing State in the same way as in antiquity the State the yet-undeveloped Church; but it could push it back into the second rank, and itself occupy the first place. Whilst in the last century secular life again gained the upper hand over the spiritual, it was only in appearance the State as such that gained the victory over the Church. In truth it is the social interests which have repressed the ecclesiastical, and only because society as such is still occupied in fashioning an organ of its own has it been provisionally the State that has outstripped the Church in the perception and advocacy of certain social and especially economic interests, and so in general has obtained precedence of her; whilst, on the other hand, the hitherto-existing Church likewise derives its best power of persistence from certain social functions which she still vicariously champions. This phase is, therefore, particularly interesting, because it offers something really new under the sun.
The commencement of the evolution of society as such into an independent organism beside Church and State is something so new, that there are only a few who notice it at all. Most people think, because the organism of the State must at present vicariously perform social functions (e.g., instruction of youth, care of the poor, guaranteeing of interest for industrial undertakings), that these things are really State-functions, and then perhaps commit the error, like Lassalle, of expecting from it the establishment of associations for purposes of production, instead of rather co-operating in the organisation of society, and transferring to the latter social functions hitherto performed by the State. But where exceptionally the ideal separation of State and Society, and the necessity of gradually procuring a real separation is recognised, there perhaps we hear talk of a necessary and irreconcilable strife between them, instead of the harmony of political and social interests (Gneist). Negatively expressed, Society embraces the wide sphere of life-relations and forms of intercourse, that are not given in the conceptions State and Church; positively expressed, it is the organisation of labour in the widest sense. The organisation of labour especially signifies the ordering and regulating of the division of labour between the sexes and individuals; but, in addition also, the preparation of youth for their life-work, and the care of those who have become incapable of work. The notion of the division of labour of course includes the highest as the lowest, unqualified manual labour as well as the mental labour of the investigator and artist, and not less the labour of education and of social self-government. It is evident that “Society,” in this sense, in fact embraces all forms of civilised life except State and Church; a meaning in which it has hitherto been understood only by Lorenz Stein. The tendency of this working-out of a social organism (Socialism) is to limit the freedom of competition, which has been the means of emancipating labour from its former shackles, in favour of a systematic division of labour, and to prevent the gain of one (as in free competition) being only too often purchased at the disproportionate loss of another. But, as said, this phase is still so much in its very commencement, that the How of such organisations as will infallibly arise in the future is thus far quite indeterminable.
We will now bestow one more hasty glance on the development of the forms of the State, the Church, and (if only as yet implicit) Society.
I shall first try to describe with a few strokes the outline of the development of the Idea of the State, as it appears to me. History exhibits three main contrasts in the life of the State, large state and small state, republic and monarchy, indirect and direct government. The problem is, to unite large state and republic as the preferable forms, the means to that end indirect government. The patriarchal chieftainships and royalties show us the union of small state and monarchy, the Asiatic despotisms that of the large state and monarchy. Here only one man has civil liberty, all others are bond-slaves or thralls of the ruler. The Greek town and district republics are the first specimens of the Republic. Favoured by the natural divisions of their small country, the Greeks could, even in their petty states, exhibit the republican form of governme
nt as an aristocracy of free citizens, ruling over twice as many slaves. The Roman Empire combines the Greek town-republic with the Asiatic despotism of the Great State; in place of the despot appears the Roman citizenship, and all subjugated lands contain only slaves. When therefore the republican power of the Roman citizens waned, it likewise relapsed into the Monarchy of the Great State.—Germany brings a new principle into the idea of the State by its system of feudalism; that of indirect government or the pyramidal graduated system of rule, whereas antiquity only knew direct government. The ancients had only free-men and slaves, but now appears a gradation of freedom from the king down to the thrall, in that each man is lord of his own vassals. I might therefore call the State of the Middle Ages the monarchical pyramid.—Lastly, the modern world utters the decisive word with its postulate of universal human freedom; it aims at large states having their natural limits in nationalities, it revives the Greek town-republic in the self-government of the towns and communes, and finds in the principle of representation by chosen deputies a means of rearing a republican pyramid, of which up to this time the best, but by no means perfect, example exists in North America, but which must and will at some time or other, with the universal spread of civilisation, embrace all the countries of the earth, since the sovereignty of the national states is just as much a moment to be sublated as that of the territorial states.—The constitutional hybrid of monarchy and republic is nothing but a prodigious palpable lie, and has an historical authorisation only as a transitional form and the political school of nations. In the Federal Republic, which certainly will come to pass when the individual states have become republics, the state of nature in which communities at first exist will pass into the state of right, and self-protection by war into legal protection by the federal republic, as the natural condition and self-protection of the individual passes into the legal condition and legal protection on the formation of the State. (Here is opened the possibility of a termination of the struggle for existence alluded to on page 25, namely when tolerably uniform climates, are occupied by the same people organised in the universal State, and competition between the peoples inhabiting different climates is excluded by the limits of their capacity of climatic accommodation, which assigns them different geographical areas of diffusion.)
Philosophy of the Unconscious Page 42
