Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  SECOND STAGE OF THE ILLUSION.

  Happiness is conceived attainable by the individual in a transcendent life after death.

  On this extreme weariness of life of the ancient world falls the kindling ray of the Christian IDEA. The founder of Christianity completely adopts the contempt and weariness of earthly life, and draws from them their last and most repulsive consequences (comp. F. A. Müller, “Briefe über die Christliche Religion,” Stuttgart, Kötzle, 1870).

  Only to those who feel the misery of existence, sinners, outcasts (Samaritans and publicans), oppressed (slaves and women), poor, sick, and suffering, but not to those who feel themselves well off and comfortable in the earthly life, does he bring his gospel (Matt. xi. 5; Luke vi. 20–23; Matt. xix. 23–24; Matt. xi. 28). He rejects everything natural, not even laws of nature does he acknowledge (Matt. xvii. 20); he speaks slightingly of the ties of family (Matt. x. 35–37; Matt. xix. 29; Matt. xi. 47–50); he requires sexual continence (Matt. xix. 11–12); he condemns the world and its goods (Luke xii. 15; Matt. vi. 25–34; 1 John i. 15–16; Luke xvi. 15); declares it to be impossible simultaneously to attain earthly and heavenly bliss (Matt. vi. 19–21, and 24; John xii. 25; Matt. xix. 23–24), and demands, therefore, voluntary poverty (Matt. xix. 21–22; Luke xii. 33; Matt. vi. 25, and 31–34). Nowhere and in no respect does Christ prescribe asceticism, although voluntary restraint and the fewest possible wants, whence it is clear that he assumes pain to increase with the number of wants and desires. He regards his age as so corrupt (Matt, xxiii. 27; Matt. xvi. 2–3) that the day of judgment must be near at hand (Matt. xxiv. 33–34), and the quintessence of his teaching is, patiently to bear this life of affliction in the terrestrial vale of tears as one’s cross (Matt. x. 38), and to follow him in worthy preparation and cheerful hope of the blessedness of a future eternal life (Matt. x. 38–39). “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John xvi. 33).

  This is the fundamental difference between the older Judaism and Christianity; the promises of the former have reference to the life here (“that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth”), those of the latter to the life beyond; and this earthly vale of tears has only a meaning as preparation and trial for the life hereafter (1 Peter i. 5–7); in itself, however, of no value whatever; on the contrary, the earthly life is composed of tribulation (John xvi. 33) and daily torment and evil (Matt. vi. 34: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”). Love makes this limbo more bearable, and is also the test of worthiness (Rom. xiii. 8–10; Matt. xxii. 37–39); faith and hope of the hereafter enable us to “overcome the world” or “to be delivered from the world,” i.e., from evil and sin.

  The redemption of the world through Christ comes to pass, therefore, through this, that all men follow him in despising the world, and in living in faith and hope of a hereafter; but not through his death with the subsequent Judaical conception of the same as a purifying sin-offering, of which Christ himself assuredly would not have heard for a moment.

  This is the historical and only important content of the doctrine preached by Jesus, to which, at the most, the rejection of an outward ritual and all priestly mediation in worship is to be added. Christian virtue also follows on its negative side from contempt of the flesh, whence all sin arises, on its positive side from the supreme commandment of love.

  All that relates to earthly relations themselves is so unimportant and indifferent to him, that he either fits himself to the existing order with smiling contempt (Matt. xxii. 21; Matt. xvii. 24–27), or only gently hints at what is desirable, e.g., self-government and independent jurisdiction (Matt, xviii. 15–17) of the communistic society. All other ideas, which we are accustomed to regard as Christian, were already current in the ancient world, but outside India the combination of contempt of the world and intense belief in an eternal transcendent blessedness was new. It was the peculiar world-redeeming Idea which saved the dying antiquity from its despair and world-weariness, in that it condemned the flesh and enthroned the spirit, conceived the natural world as the kingdom of the devil (John xiv. 30, and xvii. 9), and only this transcendent world of the spirit as the kingdom of God (1 John iv. 4, and v. 19), which latter certainly, according to Christ himself, could even here have its commencement in the hearts of believers; as Paul (Rom. viii. 24) very truly says, “For we are saved by hope”

  Contempt for the world combined with a transcendent life of the spirit had, indeed, in India already found a place in the esoteric doctrine of Buddhism; had, however, in the first place, not become known to the Western mind; in the second place, in India itself was only within the reach of a narrow circle of celibate adepts; and, thirdly, had soon been submerged in exoteric frenzy, so that the thought only attained realisation in the eccentric phenomena of hermits and penitents; fourthly, it did not originally spring up in a soil so fertile by reason of previous corruption; fifthly, it did not possess in the same degree the cosmopolitan side, the idea of the universal human brotherhood and the divine fatherhood (Matt, xxiii. 8–9); sixthly and lastly, what is most important, it knows indeed an eternal transcendent blessedness for those finally released from terrestrial existence, but no individual immortality. Christianity, however, which promises a resurrection (of the flesh), and, accordingly, an individual everlasting life in the transcendent kingdom of God, thereby appeals more directly to human egoism, and consequently inspires the believer with a far more felicific hope. In this satisfying hope the Christian world has hitherto lived, and still for the most part continues to live.

  We have already seen above, under the head of Religious Edification, that the pleasure arising from religious hope and devotion is also not without pain, partly resulting from the rebellion of the instinctive impulses against their unnatural suppression, partly consisting in the doubts concerning one’s own worthiness and the procuring of the divine favour, and in the fear of the last judgment. Add to that the required repentance and contrition for one’s own sins and sinfulness, even when one is, properly speaking, not conscious of wrong-doing. Whether the religious pain or pleasure predominates will essentially depend on the character; frequently, however, with the genuine believer hope will predominate. Pity only that this hope, too, like all others, rests on an illusion. I abstain here from a searching examination of the doctrine of the individual perpetual existence of the soul, and simply refer to Chaps, ii. and vii., Sect. C., according to which the individuality both of the organised body and of consciousness is only a phenornenon, that disappears with death, and only the substance, the One Unconscious, remains, which evoked this phenomenon partly by its own individuation as atoms, partly by its direct action on the atomic groups combined to form a body.

  I may remark that the cosmic theory of Jesus was far too naïve and childish to consider possible the separation of body and soul, and the isolated continuance of the latter. Hence also the adoption of “the resurrection of the flesh” into the third article of the Confession of Faith is quite in the sense of Christ. Passages certainly are to be found in John and Paul which throw light on the nature of the eternal life little in harmony with the promises of Christ, but their consequences were never drawn. Rev. x. 5, 6: “And the angel … sware by him that liveth for ever and ever … that there should be time no longer” 1 Cor. xiii. 8: “Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.”

  The latter passage announces the cessation of all consciousness, the former the ceasing of all change in that condition; both abolish individuality, or at least its significance. That in all the important systems of modern philosophy (apart from Kant’s inconsequence and Schelling’s later declension) there is no room for an individual immortality no one save the self-deluded can for a moment doubt. I shall, however, although very rapidly, summarise the opinions of certain ancient and modern
thinkers.

  In Plato’s “Timæus” (ed. Steph., iii. p. 69) we read: “And of the divine (existences) he himself becomes the fashioner. The generation of mortals, however he intrusted to his own children; and they imitating, having received the immortal foundation of the soul, surrounded it with a mortal body, and gave it as vehicle the whole body, and built in it another kind of soul—the mortal, receptive of fearful and inevitable feelings, first pleasure, the greatest bait of evil; then pains, warding off the good, and again boldness and fear, senseless counsellors; then anger, slow to cease, and seductive hope; and having mingled these with irrational perception and love ready to attempt all things, compounded by necessity the race of mortals.”

  From this, together with Plato’s theory of Knowledge, it follows that he placed the immortal soul exclusively in truthful cognition, i.e., the vision of the Platonic IDEAS, which in its very nature admits no individual distinctions, although this consequence may never have been clear to Plato himself.

  Aristotle occupies the same point of view. De An., i. 4, 408, a, 24 ff., he denies to the as he calls the immortal part of the soul, not only love and hate, but also memory and discursive thinking ; from other passages we gather that the (or active understanding) is the eternal, universal, unchangeable, and inaccessible to all external impressions in man; it is accordingly altogether incomprehensible how it could be individual.

  Spinoza, who certainly proceeds from other presuppositions, comes to the same result. “The human mind cannot be absolutely annihilated with the body, but there remains something of it which is eternal” (Eth., part v. prop. 23). As is clear from the proof of this proposition, by “eternal” the “enduring” is by no means to be understood, but only the being logically contained in the IDEA of the Absolute Substance (part v. prop. 22). “Our mind can only be called enduring and its existence be defined by a certain time, so far as it includes the actual existence of the body” (ibid.) If we now ask which part of the mind is to be affirmed eternal, i.e., contained as necessary moment in the eternal IDEA of God, we are able so far to determine it that it can only be the purely active, not the passive mind affected by the body. To the latter part belong, however, all the passions and emotions, senseperception, ideation, and memory; they are all accordingly dependent on the existence of the body, and cannot endure after its death (part v. prop. 34, 21). Even love belongs to the transitory perturbations of the soul, and must perish with the body; only the intellectual love springing from intellectual intuition (part v. prop. 33) with which God loves himself calmly and dispassion ately (prop. 17, corollary), only this purely contemplative absorption in the logical necessity of the Absolute is eternal (prop. 34, corollary). Strictly speaking, then, there is nothing eternal in mind but the third species of intellectual perception (prop. 33, proof; comp. above, vol. i. p. 22, obs.) This, however, and the consciousness of himself, of God, and of the eternal necessity of things springing from it along with the sequent mental repose, only the wise man will really possess, whilst the mind of the uncultivated is absorbed in passive sensation. As soon, therefore, as “the uncultivated ceases to feel, he also ceases to be” (prop. 42, obs.); so that, properly speaking, we can only speak of an eternal part of the mind in the cultured and wise.1 If we ask, finally, how we are to conceive the eternal being of the active part of the spirit, the required answer is given in part ii. prop. 8, to wit, since the mind is the idea of the body, the mind, before and after the actual existence of the body, is the idea of a non-existent thing. Of such ideas, however, the proposition mentioned affirms that they must be contained in the infinite idea of God, as the formal essences of individual things or modes in God’s attributes, which is elucidated in the observation by the manner in which the infinitely numerous ideas of describable rectangles are contained in the idea of a given circle, although they are not actually drawn therein. We should, however, say that only the formal possibility of these rectangles is given, and accordingly that in the eternal absolute idea the idea of a particular individual mind is only potentially contained, which implicit potentiality, however, is only explicated realiter at the moment when the individual mind attains to actual existence in an organism. With this interpretation there is just as little to be said against Spinoza’s eternity of individual minds as (say) against the eternity of any particular mathematical truth.

  In Leibniz this at least is deserving of notice, that he is unable to assign as the individual limitation of the monads anything but the body, and therefore ventures to assert the immortality of the soul only with a simultaneous immortality of a body peculiar to it and inalienable. At the present stage of physical science the statement of the latter hypothesis is its own criticism.

  Schelling expresses himself in like manner as Spinoza (i. 6, 60–61): “The eternal element of the soul is not eternal on account of the absence of a beginning or end to its duration, but it has altogether no relation to time. It can therefore also not be called immortal in the sense in which this concept includes that of an individual perpetuity…. It is therefore a mistaking of the genuine spirit of philosophy, to place the immortality above the eternity of the soul and its being in the IDEA, and, as appears to us, a distinct misunderstanding to conceive the soul at death denuded of sensibility, and yet to possess an endless individual existence.”—Fichte and Hegel entirely adopt this view, and Schopenhauer goes still farther, in that with him only the will, never knowledge, is eternal.

  In the monistic systems, be they Naturalism, Pantheism, or Personal Pantheism, there can be no talk of individual immortality without the grossest inconsistency, and just as little in the pluralistic Materialism; it remains a matter of discussion, therefore, only in the system of a psychical Individualism or in Theism proper. As for the former, I know of no elaborated system of psychical Individualism that does not lead to the more or less open confession of impotency to stand by Pluralism as a metaphysical ultimate. Leibniz concludes with the all-comprehending central monad, which, in truth, absorbs the whole Monadology; Herbart with the double entry of the God-Creator of faith by the side of the known absolute positions of the many simple Reals. We have, then, strictly only to do with Theism, if also with a shame-faced Theism. Even in Theism, however, as we saw before (vol. ii. pp. 266–269), the individual is guaranteed continued existence only as long (we will not say) as God does not issue his annihilating fiat, but God as constantly renews his conserving action. Now one might allege the abstract possibility that God should let the individual endure to the world’s end, and even appeal to the analogy of the atoms, which, although also mere manifestations of divine will, doubtless severally possess an unbroken existence from the beginning to the end of the world. In opposition to this, however, we may refer to Chaps, vi. and xi. C., in which the concept of individuality is analysed, and the great difference between the simple will-act in the atom and the very compound individual we call man is pointed out. The atomic will can be constant because it is simple; the stream of will-acts of the Unconscious, which is directed upon a particular individual organism, cannot possibly have a longer duration than the object on which it is directed. If the organism has entered into dissolution and the organic individual has lost its existence; if, in consequence, the consciousness has ceased that was bound to this organism and had stored up its ideal treasures, and possessed the determining ground of its individual character, in the molecular arrangement of the cerebral molecules of the same, then is the fasciculus of actions of the Unconscious, which afforded this individual mind its metaphysical foundation, without an object, and thereby becomes impossible as continued action. The power to will is not thereby altered, but this is no longer individual, but resides in the universal and unique unconscious essence. Were there even a similar organism created on which the Unconscious should direct similar actions, it would still be another individual, not the same as the deceased, since continuity of existence would be wanting. Unwarranted as would be the assertion that before the organic development of the ovum and the spermatozoon,
whence a future man arises, the same man possessed an individual psychical antenatal life, no less unjustified would be the assumption that after the destruction of the organism the man might possess an individual psychical after-life. What is enduring is the substance that is manifested in this particular man, but this substance is not individual.

  Thus, then, also, the hope of an individual duration of the soul turns out to be an illusion, and therewith the main nerve of the Christian promises is cut, the Christian Idea outgrown. The draft on the life hereafter, which is to compensate for the miseries of the life here, has only one fault: place and date of discharge are forged. Egoism finds this result cheerless; to it indeed immortality was a postulate of the heart; and with the observation that postulates of the heart can establish no metaphysical verities (as Jacobi and Schleiermacher fancy), its comfortable condition ceases. But the sterling soul that puts its trust in self-renunciation and love does not find this result cheerless. To the unselfish the guarantee of an endless self-affirmation appears not merely worthless, but disquieting and abhorrent, and all the attempts to demonstrate immortality as an emotional postulate on any other basis than that of the grossest self-love utterly fail (comp. my essay, “1st der pessimistische Monismus trostlos?” in the “Ges. philosoph. Abhandlungen,” No. iv.) Even the humblest form of the desire for immortality, the wish to live on in one’s works, deeds, and achievements, is egoistic; for one may indeed rightly desire the continued production of good deeds and the continued influence of useful and admirable works, but the insertion of the dear self into this wish, the demand that it shall be just my deeds and works that shall bear fruit for the future of the world, is, if, humanly speaking, excusable, yet always an ethically unjustified selfishness, which becomes even vanity when it requires the grateful preservation of the name and its memory among the men who derive a benefit from the deeds and works.