Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  Since all longing for immortality is egoism, it would seem to be of small importance to all who have been “saved by hope” in the immortality dogma whether, after the destruction of the hope in individual immortality, Christianity, with its transcendent optimism as regards the truth of an eternal blessedness in general, in contrast to the originally purely negative Buddhism, is right or wrong; for he to whom immortality is a postulate of the heart is also always so far egoist as to say, “What is the greatest future blessedness to me, if I do not feel and enjoy it?”

  But how stands it in general with that everlasting blessedness according to our premisses? The only Unconscious is all-knowing and all-wise, cannot therefore become wiser; it has, as Aristotle says, no memory; therefore can learn nothing from the experience which it gets (suppose) in the world. Consequently, when the world has once ceased to be, and the fleeting moment of contrast between the torment of willing and the peace of non-willing is past, it is precisely in the same condition as it was before the creation of the world; as blessed as it formerly was is it now again, neither more nor less: the world-process can never help it to a greater bliss than it possessed before, unless it should find it in the process itself. (This latter case we do not, however, consider here, for it would be only the secular life itself, whereas we are inquiring concerning the bliss of the ultra-mundane condition.) If, then, through terrestrial life we can make no addition to the felicity of that ante-mundane state, but after the close of the world-process merely relapse into that former condition, the question arises of what nature it was. It is clear that if there had been willing, there would also have been act, therefore process, and the Unconscious would not have been acosmic; the acosmic state could only be that of non-willing. But now we have seen (Chap. i. C.) that until the world existed thought could only be urged by volition from non-existence into existence; for in itself thought had no impulse and no motive to emerge from non-being into being, therefore before the occurrence of volition there was also no actual thinking; consequently, before the origin of the world neither willing nor thinking, i.e., nothing actual at all, nothing but the quiescent, inactive, self-enclosed essence without existence. As long as volition lasts, so long will the process and its phenomenon in consciousness, the cosmos, last; if, then, one day the world shall be no more, there will be no willing, consequently also no thinking more (since the unconscious thinking always only becomes so far actual as the interest of the will requires it), i.e., it will again, in the same sense of the term as above, be nothing. This is also the state alluded to in the words of the Apostles, that there shall be no more time nor knowledge. As long, then, as the world exists is there cosmic process, and as much happiness or unhappiness as this includes; before the genesis and after the cessation of the world and the world-process is—actually—Nothing.

  Where now is the promised bliss? In the world it may and can not be, and the nothingness after the world could at the best be relatively happier or unhappier than an earlier condition, but not a positive blessedness or unblessedness (comp. Aristot., Eth. N. i. 11, 1100, a, 13). Certainly if the world is the state of the unblessedness of the creative Being of the world, in comparison with that nothingness will be blessedness; but unfortunately this contrast can only be drawn in the condition of existence, not in that of non-existence, since in the latter there is neither thought nor feeling—for either would be already actuality, which is excluded—the one would presuppose actual imagination, the other even actual reflection on a memory of the former intra-mundane state implying comparison with the present, and the participation of the will in this reflection, all which is simply impossible.

  Thus thinks Buddhism with its “Nirvâṇa;” thus Schopenhauer; but not so Christianity. This is as little satisfied with such a reduction to the zero-point of sensation, to painlessness and absence of happiness, as the common egoistic understanding that claims the fulfilment of its instinctive striving after happiness as its natural right. Christianity does not indeed strictly allow a right to happiness, but it demands its renunciation only to enhance the value of the undeserved gift of grace of a happiness hereafter, and the individual Christian foregoes his pretended right, only because he is assured of the satisfaction of his claims by express covenant. Christianity must have a positive world-goal or renounce the principle that at bottom distinguishes it from Buddhism, i.e., abdicate. As, however, no satisfactory explanation can make this practical postulate intelligible, every justification of the positive transcendent bliss that refuses to rest content with a confessedly unintelligible divine promise must issue in a more or less fantastic presentation of Nirvâṇa, which, of course, in the character of its phantasmagoria follows the direction of and changes with the culture of the time. The Christian theory of the world is simply incapable of rising to the complete resignation of happiness; even Christian asceticism is out-and-out selfish. Hence it is no wonder if we, who are still more or less entangled (I will not say, in the Christian faith, but) in the Christian philosophy, indignantly resent the complete renunciation of happiness. A prolonged historical discipline, and the discipline, moreover, of a non-Christian purely secular period, is needed to prepare mankind for this extreme demand. This period, however, we shall soon become acquainted with as the third stage of Illusion.

  But now, if, on the one hand, the Christian hope of blessedness rests on an illusion, that necessarily disappears in the further course of the development of consciousness; if, on the other hand, the mission of the gospel through Jesus, and its eager reception by the nations, in spite of Greek philosophy, that had long risen above this childish standpoint, can certainly only be understood as a direct intervention of the Unconscious in the genius of the founders and the popular instinct of the rage for conversion, the question arises, what then was the object of this illusion? The answer is simply this, that this second stage is the necessary link between the first and the third, because through despair of the first stage of the illusion, Egoism is not yet so far broken as not to cling with both arms to the only egoistic hope still remaining to it. Not till this anchor too breaks, and the complete despair of attaining happiness for one’s dear self has taken possession of the soul, not till then does it become receptive for the self-denying thought, to work only for the weal of future generations, to lose itself in the universal movement for the future good of the whole.

  Rome had indeed possessed and practised this self-renunciation, but only for the sake of increasing the power of a single branch of the human family; it had, therefore, as it were, expanded individual egoism into a race egoism, and in this spirit chased the phantoms of boundless ambition and lust of power; but now the question becomes the expansion of the egoistic into a cosmic consciousness and endeavour, of seli-seeking personal feeling into self-denying impersonal feeling, into the consciousness that the individual and the nation are nothing but a wheel or a spring in the vast world-machine, and have no other task than to do their duty as such, to further the movement of the whole, which alone is of consequence.

  For such a thought, for such a self-renunciation, the ancient world was of course not ripe, and there was an external secondary reason, as it were, for the interim existence of Christianity in the circumstance that so much technical progress had to be made before the possible opening of a world-communication, and that the future elements of telluric social life, the nationalities, had first to be created. Apart from all this, there is exhibited, however, a decided advance from the first to the second stage of the illusion, namely, in the acquired conviction that happiness is not to be found in the present phase of the evolution, just as in the transition from the second to the third stage the advance consists in the attained perception, that the way to redemption from the misery of the present, in the first place, is not to be sought outside the world-process, but lies in the world-process itself; that thus the future redemption of the world is not to be found in abstention from life, but in devotion to life; that, however, again this devotion to life, which for its own sak
e would be an absurdity, has only a meaning for the sake of the future of the process of the whole.

  This passage from the second to the third stage is certainly with human weakness hardly otherwise to be conceived than through a partial mistaking of the latter truth, i.e., than through a partial relapse into the first stage of the illusion; for how is man to attain to a sufficiently strong faith in a future happiness on earth if he regards the present state as miserable in every respect, and all attainable happiness in the life of the present as vain?

  Accordingly we see with the principle of free investigation and criticism set up by the Reformation, although negatively, it is true, the commencement of the decomposition of the Christian dogma and the destruction of its promises; but at the same time we see appear, in place of the Christian “salvation in the hope of the hereafter,” the regeneration of ancient art and science, the sudden growth of municipal wealth and commerce, and the progress of the practical arts, the universal expansion of the mental horizon; in a word, the reawakening love of the world.

  The gigantic progress in all directions after so long a stagnation kindled hope into still greater expectations, and there thus arose, as ever in the epochs of much-promising progress, a period of optimism, whose chief theoretical representative is Leibniz. (At the present moment, when the formation of nationalities is nearing its end, there prevails a similar optimism in political affairs.) Only slowly and gradually can the power of an idea so great as the Christian be broken. This is especially interesting to observe in the most recent philosophy. Kant, growing dizzy at the unfathomable consequences of his principle, turns back and prescribes his soul as quickly as possible to the Christian God, solemnly reinstated by the practical categorical imperative; Hegel tries, by the juggle of a symbolic dialectic, to save, at any rate, some of the leading ideas of Christianity; Schelling, with a start, pauses at the very edge of the abyss, and meekly returns at the end of his system to the positive dogma of revelation, with a perfectly serious deduction of the three Persons of the Christian Trinity from the potentialities of being.

  There is only one who completely and in all respects breaks with Christianity, and denies it all significance for the future—Schopenhauer—to be sure only to relapse into Buddhist asceticism, and without being able to rise to the thought of the possibility of a positive principle for the historical future, without the trace of an understanding and a love for the great endeavours of our time, which are abundantly represented in all other recent philosophers. Day by day secular aims palpably gain in power, extent, and interest; Antichrist is evidently advancing more and more, and soon Christianity will only be a shadow of its medieval greatness—will again be, what it exclusively was at its origin, the last consolation of the poor and wretched.

  THIRD STAGE OF THE ILLUSION.

  Happiness relegated to the future of the world.

  Characteristic of this stage is the idea of immanent development, its application to the world as a whole, and the belief in a cosmic evolution. In ancient philosophy, with the exception of Aristotle, we can find no trace of this, but even in Aristotle the application of the conception is substantially limited to the natural evolution of the individual, and on the mental side, at any rate, exerted no epoch-making influence on contemporaries or posterity.

  Rome recognised a development only as development of the power of Rome. To the inherently stationary and stagnant Judaism the idea of development is so strange and repugnant, that even a Mendelssohn could maintain and defend against a Lessing the impossibility of progress.

  Catholic Christianity is likewise self-complete and perfect; it strives only after an extension of the kingdom of God, not after the enriching of its substance; the evolution of dogma in the first centuries takes place against its will, as it were, simply from the endeavour to attain a fixed form. The Reformers also had by no means the intention of carrying the development of Christianity farther, but only of purifying it from abuses that had crept in, and of restoring it to its original form.

  Even Spinoza’s rigid necessity, whose soulless and aimless character causes the ever-varying forms of existence to appear only as an indifferent, I might almost say, capricious and fortuitous sport, has no place for the notion of evolution; it is Leibniz who first discovers it, as it were, afresh, but also immediately works it out in all its significance and varied application, and in this sense may, to a certain extent, be regarded as the positive apostle of the modern world.

  Lessing makes a magnificent use of the same in his “Education of the Human Race;” the works of Schiller are penetrated by it; Herder gives it expression in his “Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind,” and Kant in several essays on the Philosophy of History, animated by the genuine philosophic spirit (Werke, Bd. vii., Nos. xii, xv., xix.) Most full and profound is this thought in Hegel, for whom indeed the whole world is nothing but a self-realising of the IDEA (cp. Ges. philos. Abhandl., No. ii.: “Ueber die nothwendige Umbildung der Hegel’schen Philosophie aus ihrem Grundprincip heraus”).

  That the whole cosmic mechanism is one great process of development emerges ever more distinctly as result of modern positive science. Astronomy no longer limits itself merely to the genesis of the planetary system; by the help of spectrum analysis it reaches farther into the cosmos, in order, by a comparison of the present states of remote suns and nebulæ, to comprehend the same as different stages of an evolution in which one part has advanced more quickly, another more slowly, but whose sum can only be conceived as a collective cosmic evolution. Photometry and spectrum analysis combined seek to ascertain the continuation of the same in the formation of the several planets; and chemistry and mineralogy unite to determine more precisely the phase of evolution of our planet before that period of refrigeration, whose gradual progress to the present time is told in the stony memorials of geology, in hieroglyphics that are being continually deciphered. Biology interprets to us from the petrified remains of past ages the history of the vegetable and animal kingdoms (cp. C. Chap. x.); and archæology, supported by comparative philology and anthropology, unveils to us the pre-historical period of development of the human race, whose magnificent tableau of advancing civilisation is displayed in history, revealing at the same time glimpses of the future (cp. Chap. x. 13). What the several sciences offer piecemeal Philosophy has to comprehend with all-embracing glance, and to recognise as the development of the world-whole providentially guided by the all-wisdom of the Unconscious according to pre-determined plan to a beneficent goal.

  In the case of the individual it is not difficult to convince one’s self of the fact of an evolution One sees it indeed on all hands every day. The more difficult, however, is it so to assimilate the thought of the development of a whole consisting of many individuals as to gain for it an ultra-egoistic interest; for from nothing is it more difficult to free ourselves than from the instinct of egoism.

  Extremely instructive in this reference is “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum,” by Max Stirner, a book that nobody interested in practical philosophy should leave unread. This book subjects all ideals having an influence on practice to a destructive criticism, and shows them to be idols that only possess power over the Ego so far as the latter concedes such to them in its self-mistaking weakness. It cleverly and piquantly demolishes with forcible reasons the ideal aims of political, social, and humanitarian Liberalism; and shows how the Ego alone can be the smiling heir of all these ideals thus reduced to impotent nothings. If these considerations only had the purpose of confirming the theoretical position that I can as little step out of the frame of my self-hood as out of my skin, nothing need be added; but as Stirner professes to have found in the Idea of the Ego the absolute standpoint for action, he either falls into the same error that he had combated in the case of the other ideals, such as Honour, Freedom, Right, &c., and places himself at the mercy of another enthralling idea, whose absolute sovereignty he recognises, not however for this or that reason, but blindly and instinctively, or he conceive
s the Ego not as idea but as reality, and with no other result than the perfectly empty and meaningless tautology that I can will only my own will, think only my own thoughts, and that only my own thoughts can become motives of my willing—a fact as undeniable by his opponents as by himself. If, however, and only in that case has his conclusions any sense, he means that we ought to acknowledge the IDEA of the Ego as the only governing one, and to admit all other ideals only so far as they have a value for the former, he should first have examined the idea of the Ego. He would then before all have found that, as all the other ideals are the cues of instincts in pursuit of special ends, so the Ego is the cue of a universal instinct, egoism, that is related to the special instincts somewhat as a season to a day ticket, of which many special instincts are only derivatives in particular cases, and with which, therefore, we can get along tolerably well after all other instincts have been banished, which even, on the contrary is never entirely to be dispensed with as long as we live.

  Thus it is certainly more pardonable to accord an unconditional sovereignty to this instinct than to any other; but although in the abstract the error is the same in the two cases, the consequences are far worse in the exclusive homage paid to egoism. Other instincts, namely, if they are only sufficiently strong, can frequently be pacified, although commonly only with sacrifice of happiness on the whole, which makes them unprofitable; but egoism is, according to our former inquiries, never to be satisfied, because it always procures an excess of pain.

  This perception, that from the point of view of the ego or the individual the denial of the will or forsaking of the world and renunciation of life is the only rational course, Stirner entirely misses. It is, however, an infallible specific for an over-balanced egoism. Whoever has once realised the preponderating pain that every individual must endure, with or without knowledge, in his life, will soon contemn and scorn the standpoint of the self-preserving and would-be enjoying—in a word, self-affirming ego. He who has come to hold lightly his egoism and his ego will hardly insist upon the same as the absolute pivot on which everything must turn, will rate personal sacrifice less highly than usual, will less reluctantly accept the result of an investigation which exhibits the Ego as a mere phenomenon of a Being that for all individuals is one and the same.