About the Work
Egotism in German Philosophy is a work of philosophical criticism by George Santayana, identified on its title page as late Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, and published in London and Toronto by J. M. Dent & Sons and in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons. It belongs to the years of the First World War and, as Santayana says in his preface, is one of the many books that war brought forth—though he is careful to add that it was not hastily conceived. It was the fruit of more than twenty years of teaching philosophy at Harvard College, during which he read and discussed German metaphysics continually. From the beginning, he writes, that philosophy wore a questionable shape to him: beneath its obscure and fluctuating tenets he felt something sinister, hollow, and aggressive—a forced method of speculation that produced more confusion than it found, and that seemed calculated chiefly to let practical materialists call themselves idealists and rationalists remain theologians. The fear that its secret eluded him, perhaps because he was handicapped by blood and tradition, spurred him to prolonged efforts to understand it; he wished to be clearer and juster about it than it ever was about itself.
“It is a terrible thing to have a false religion, all the more terrible the deeper its sources are in the human soul.”
The book is therefore not a treatise in the ordinary academic sense but a critical description and judgment, written frankly from the outside. German philosophy, Santayana insists, was never his chief interest; he makes no professorial pretensions, and appeals to common reason before any claims to logical authority or spiritual supremacy. A reader already indoctrinated in the German schools is free not to read further. His object is neither to repeat familiar arguments nor to refute them, but to describe them intelligibly and to judge them from the layman’s point of view. The original authors are at hand for study; what he offers is only the aroma of German philosophy that reached his nostrils. History and criticism, he holds, should not passively reproduce their subject-matter; reflection and description are superadded, more winged and selective—echoes of reality in the sphere of art, intellectual symbols at once indicative and original.
The book’s governing idea is stated at the outset: egotism—subjectivity in thought and wilfulness in morals—is the soul of German philosophy. This egotism is by no means gratuitous. It is a genuine expression of the pathetic situation of any animal on earth and any intelligence in the universe, an inevitable and initial circumstance in life. Like every material accident it is to be abstracted from and discounted. The Germans’ perversity, childishness, and sophistry lie in glorifying an inevitable impediment and marking time on an earthly station from which the spirit of man is called to fly. This glorified, dogged egotism, Santayana suggests, might now be evident to the whole world. The German philosophers are not responsible for the war, nor for the recrudescence of corporate fanaticism that prepared it from afar; they merely shared and prophetically justified the spirit of uncompromising self-assertion and metaphysical conceit which the German nation was then reducing to action. A false religion is terrible, the more so the deeper its sources in the human soul. Like many a false religion before it, this one has made a double assault upon mankind—one with the secular arm, another by solemn asseverations and sophistries. Though incidental methods may be dubious, the assault has been bold and honest in principle, like those of all conquerors and founders of militant religions against liberty or reason. The issue will doubtless be the same: liberty may be maimed but not killed; reason bent but not broken. The dark aggression is to be repelled, if possible, by force of arms; failing that, it will be nullified in time by the indomitable moral resistance which maturer races, richer in wisdom, can exert against the rude will of the conqueror.
Context
The book stands at a particular historical moment and speaks out of a particular intellectual formation. It was written during the First World War, and Santayana acknowledges that the war is its occasion, even while denying that the war is its subject. His charge against German philosophy is not that it caused the war but that it shared and prophetically justified the spirit of self-assertion the German nation was then reducing to action. The book thus belongs to a genre of wartime reflection, but it is distinguished from most of its fellows by the length of its gestation and by the fact that its author had been reading and teaching German metaphysics for two decades before the war made the subject urgent for a general audience.
Santayana’s own position is important to the book’s character. He writes as an outsider—he says so plainly—and he suspects that his blood and tradition may have handicapped him in understanding the German mind. He does not claim to be a Germanist or a specialist in the school he describes. What he offers is the judgment of a layman armed with common reason, and he appeals to that common reason against the claims of logical authority and spiritual supremacy which the German philosophers advance. This stance gives the book its peculiar tone: it is not a work of scholarly exposition, nor a polemic in the ordinary sense, but a critical description undertaken from a deliberately external point of view. The original authors are available to anyone who wants them; Santayana’s contribution is the aroma, the impression, the judgment.
The intellectual context is the long history of German philosophy from Leibniz through Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, together with its roots in the Protestant Reformation. Santayana treats this history not as a series of technical problems but as the unfolding of a single spiritual temper—a temper he identifies with Protestantism’s inwardness and with the romantic movement’s exaltation of the self. The book is therefore also a study in the genealogy of a culture: it asks how a nation came to hold a philosophy that is deliberately subjective, that limits itself to the articulation of self-consciousness, and that treats the whole world as an idea framed in consciousness according to principles fetched from the most personal and subjective parts of the mind—duty, will, or the grammar of thought. The answer involves the Reformation, the romantic revival, and the peculiar political history of Germany.
The book also belongs to the history of Santayana’s own thought. He tells us that German philosophy was never his chief interest, and that he writes without professorial pretensions. But the twenty years of reading and discussion at Harvard left him with a settled conviction: that beneath the obscure and fluctuating tenets of the German school there was something sinister, hollow, and aggressive. The book is the fruit of that conviction, and of the prolonged effort to be clearer and juster about its object than that object ever was about itself. It is, in its way, a work of self-clarification as much as of criticism.
Structure of the Book
The book proceeds by a series of chapters that move from a general characterization of German philosophy, through its historical roots in Protestantism, to its great systematic expressions in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and finally to its dissolution and transformation in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, ending with reflections on German genius and on egotism in practice. The movement is broadly chronological, but it is also thematic: each chapter takes up a distinct aspect of the egotism Santayana is tracing, and the argument accumulates rather than proceeding by strict demonstration.
The opening chapter, “The General Character of German Philosophy,” distinguishes German philosophy from philosophy in Germany. The religion of the Germans is foreign to them; the philosophy associated with religion before the Reformation and in Catholic circles since is a system native to the late Roman Empire. Their irreligion is foreign too; sceptical and scientific schools conspicuous elsewhere took root in Germany as well. Counting Catholics, old-fashioned Protestants, and materialists (who call themselves monists), the majority of intelligent Germans likely held views which German philosophy proper must despise, and this philosophy seemed as strange to them as to others. For an original and profound philosophy has arisen in Germany, as distinct in genius and method from Greek and Catholic philosophy as this is from the Indian systems. Its great characteristic is that it is deliberately subjective and limits itself to the articulation of self-consciousness. The whole world appears there but at a certain remove, viewed and accepted merely as an idea framed in consciousness, according to principles fetched from the most personal and subjective parts of the mind—duty, will, or the grammar of thought. Its profundity is in the direction of inwardness; it probes the self, as unaided introspection may, with extraordinary intentness and sincerity. In inventing the transcendental method, the study of subjective projections and perspectives, it added a new dimension to human speculation.
The second chapter, “The Protestant Heritage,” argues that German philosophy is the heir of Protestantism. When Fichte and Hegel mention a providential plan of the world, they reveal that they view history not as infinite and endlessly various but as a closed plot like a drama, in which one nation—the very one to which these philosophers belong—holds the central place and chief rôle. This shows their philosophy to be a revealed philosophy, the heir of Judaism, incapable of being formed by free observation of life and nature like the philosophy of Greece or of the Renaissance. It is Protestant theology rationalised, with religious faith in the Protestant sense essential to it. It may be sceptical about tradition and the senses, may reduce nature and God to figments of the mind, yet remains persuaded that the questioning and striving spirit within is indefeasible and divine. It never reduces all things, including the mind, to loose and intractable appearances as a free idealism might; instead it uses scepticism to turn all things into ideas, chaining them to the thinker’s moral interests, which it exalts as groundless and immutable. Protestantism and German philosophy share the essence that religion gradually drops supernatural personages and private hopes, absorbed in living manfully the conventional life of this world—not the whole life, since gay religions and gay things are excluded or admitted only as childish toys. Positive religion disappears, as does frivolous worldliness; only a consecrated, deliberate worldliness remains. As pantheism naturalises God into a cosmic force, German philosophy secularises Biblical piety into social and patriotic zeal.
The third chapter, “Transcendentalism,” traces the development of the transcendental method from Leibniz through its perfection in the German idealists. Leibniz named the darker manifestation of the unconscious “appetition,” and under the name “Will” it later played a great part in German systems. Santayana insists that calling it Will is improper and mythological, since actual willing requires an idea of what is willed. When we say a man doesn’t know what he wants, we mean he can will nothing for lack of a clear idea of his interests, though he doubtless lacks many specific things making him unhappy and restless. These instinctive appetitions for objects the mind is ignorant of may figuratively be called unconscious Will—a contradiction in terms unless “Will” is used metaphorically. From this metaphor, once its boldness is dulled by use, one passes insensibly to calling Will that whole transcendental potency of the soul which, like a watch’s mainspring, lay coiled within it from the beginning of time. A man’s transcendental Will can then be called the source of everything that happens to him—birth, character, life, death—even what he most detests and does not will, like nightmares, being an expression of the original pregnancy of his spirit.
The fourth chapter, “Hints of Egotism in Goethe,” turns from the philosophers to the poet. Goethe exhibited the principle of self-expansion more plainly in practice than in theory. His family, friends, and feelings served as stepping-stones in his moral career; he expanded as he left them behind. His love-affairs were means to the fuller realisation of himself—not sensual, nor his infidelities callous. They stirred him deeply and unsealed the springs of poetry in his heart; that was their precise function. Each tender passion opened a “primrose path” into which his inexorable genius led him to wander. If he trod down a flower in passing, that was a great sorrow; perhaps that sorrow and his inevitable remorse were the most needful and precious elements of the experience. Each pathetic sweetheart was a sort of Belgium to him: he violated her neutrality with a sigh, his heart bled for her innocent sufferings, and he never afterwards said in self-defence, like the German Chancellor, that she was no better than she should be. But he had to press on: his beckoning destiny and the claims of his spiritual growth compelled him to sacrifice her and his own lacerated feelings on the altar of duty to his infinite self. So supreme was this vocation that universal nature, he thought, was bound to do itself violence on his behalf and grant him immortal life, so that the noble process of self-expansion might go on forever.
The fifth chapter, “Seeds of Egotism in Kant,” examines the philosopher in whom Santayana finds the critical turning point. Kant is remarkable among sincere philosophers for the pathetic separation between his personal beliefs and his official discoveries. His personal beliefs were mild, half orthodox, hardly differing from Leibniz’s; but officially he was entangled in the subjective criticism of knowledge, finding the process of knowing so complicated and exquisitely contrived to make knowledge impossible that, while the facts of the universe were there and we might have a shrewd, exact notion of them, officially we had no right to call them facts or claim to know them. Much in Kant’s personal belief could not be sanctioned by his critical method, and there were latent implications he never absorbed, being old when he adopted it. One latent implication was egotism. The fact that each spirit was confined to its own perceptions condemned it to an initial subjectivity and agnosticism; what things might exist besides his ideas he could never know. That such things existed was not doubted; Kant never accepted the principle of dogmatic egotism that nothing can exist unless I can know it. On the contrary, he assumed human perceptions, with the moral postulates he added, were symbols of a real world.
The sixth chapter, “Transcendentalism Perfected,” presents Fichte. Fichte purified Kant’s system of its inconsistent and humane elements, presenting the subjective system of knowledge and action in its most radical form. The ego, to live fully and freely, posited or feigned a world of circumstances—an imagined theatre made to suit the play—which might seem to oppress the Will with hindrances but was really only a mirage raised by that Will to enjoy exerting itself manfully. It would seem obvious that the Will could never be defeated and was identical with destiny or the laws of nature. Transcendentalists leaning toward naturalism, like Schelling or Emerson, understand the absolute Will this way. But not so Fichte, nor the keener and more heroic romantic school, whose last prophet was Nietzsche. The Germans, amid their fantastic metaphysics, sometimes return to immediate experience; their philosophy was begotten in wrestling with the Lord. As a matter of fact, the will is often defeated—especially if we are stubborn in defining our will—and this tragic fact by no means refutes the Fichtean philosophy, which deals with it heroically. It conceives that what is inviolable is only what ought to be, the unconscious plan or idea of perfect living hidden in the depths of all life. A will not animated by this idea cannot exist or be noticed by this philosophy. But when, where, how often and how far this divine idea shall be carried out is left unexplained. Actual will may be feeble or wicked in any degree; consequently the world that ought to be evoked in its maximum richness may dwindle and fade to nothing.
The seventh chapter, “Fichte on the Mission of Germany,” applies the theory of absolute Will to national life. This ego, identical with mind in general, Fichte identified also with the German people. If the Germans suffered their national will to be domesticated in the Napoleonic empire, the creative spirit of the universe would be extinguished, and God himself, who existed only when incarnate in mankind, would disappear. It was evidently one’s duty to prevent this; and Fichte poured out all the vehemence of his nature into the struggle for freedom. The mere struggle, the mere protest in the soul, according to his system, would secure the end desired: self-assertion, not material success, was the goal. A happy equilibrium once established in human life would have been only a temptation, a sort of Napoleonic or Mephistophelian quietus falling on the will to strive. Santayana is not sure how far Fichte, in his romantic and puritan tension of soul, would have relished the present organisation of Germany. He was a man of the people, a radical and an agitator as much as a prophet of nationalism, and the shining armour in which German freedom is now encased might have seemed to him too ponderous. He might have discerned in victory the beginning of corruption.
The eighth chapter, “The Egotism of Ideas,” turns to Hegel. His tone, especially in later writings, was full of contempt for everything subjective: the individual’s viewpoint, opinions, and wishes were treated as of no account unless brought into line with the providential march of events and ideas. This realism, pronounced and acrid, was still idealistic in that the world’s substance was conceived not as material but conceptual—a law or logic animating phenomena and being the secret of their movement. The world was like a riddle or confused oracle; the solution lay in the romantic instability or self-contradiction inherent in every finite form of being, compelling it to pass into something different. We might understand this movement’s direction sympathetically through a vital dialectic or dramatic necessity in our own reflection. Hegel was a solemn sophist: he made discourse the key to reality. This technical realism in Hegel was reinforced by his historical imagination, producing an impression of detachment, objectivity, and impersonal intelligence; he often seems lost in his story’s events, plucking the very heart out of the world. He adored the state, to which the individual should be entirely subjugated—not for other individuals’ benefit (a barren vicarious selfishness), but in rapt service of common impersonal ends. The family was a first natural group in which the individual should happily lose himself; the trade.
The ninth chapter, “Egotism and Selfishness,” considers Max Stirner. In a review of egotism in German philosophy, it would hardly be excusable to ignore the one notable writer who openly adopted egotism in name and fact. The work of Max Stirner on the single separate person and what he may call his own hardly belongs to German philosophy as Santayana has been using the words: it lacks the transcendental point of departure, breadth of view, metaphysical subtlety, or generous aff.
The tenth chapter, “The Breach with Christianity,” and the eleventh, “Nietzsche and Schopenhauer,” trace the dissolution of the transcendental synthesis. The change in the conception of the Will, which became infinite in what Hegel called the evil sense—”that is, in the true one”—made a plan of creation and a dramatic history beginning in Eden and ending in Berlin impossible to speak of. Life was instead seen to radiate from an elementary form into disparate, incomparable growths capable of endless diversity; no limit, forced co-operation, or stereotyped method was imputed to it. Hegel’s “pocket universe” opened out to the stars, which that philosopher hated. Man lost his importance and simultaneously the burden of his false pretensions. In Schopenhauer, frankness and with it clearness returned, yet he could not quite reconcile man to his actual place in nature; a deep prejudice still intervened.
The twelfth chapter, “The Ethics of Nietzsche,” and the thirteenth, “The Superman,” present Nietzsche’s moral philosophy. Nietzsche’s attack on morality was not directed at all morality, but specifically at Christian virtues and a Protestant-Kantian moralism that treated duty as absolute rather than as a means to secure goods attainable through action. Santayana identifies this latter view as the common and sound opinion, maintained by Aristotle. Nietzsche, lacking humility in study, believed he was propounding a revolutionary doctrine by placing goods and evils beyond and above right and wrong, which Santayana says is all that “Jenseits von Gut und Böse” amounts to. Nietzsche loved whatever seemed admirable, beautiful, and eligible—good in the sense opposed to “schlecht” rather than “böse.” Hence his ire against Christianity for renouncing too much, and his hatred of moralism for sacrificing half the goods of life by raising duty to an absolute throne. Santayana argues that Nietzsche, far from transcending ethics, re-established it on true foundations, though his planned edifice was sketchy and possibly unable to stand.
The fourteenth chapter, “Heathenism,” asks how Nietzsche’s fantastic ideal could impose on a keen satirist and sincere lover of excellence. The answer given is that true human excellence seemed to him hostile to life, and he felt that life must be accepted as it is or may become, and that false beliefs, hollow demands, and hypocritical, forced virtues must be abandoned. This new wisdom was also felt and practised by Goethe, whom Nietzsche could best understand. But a master of life uses life for ends which transcend it; even Goethe transcended life in depicting, judging, and blessing it. Saints and true philosophers have emphasised this renunciation of egotism more, seeing all things in the light of eternity and feeling a reasonable contempt for mere living and dying, which is where moral greatness lies. Here Nietzsche could not follow; rationality chilled him and he craved vehemence.
The fifteenth chapter, “German Genius,” and the sixteenth, “Egotism in Practice,” bring the book to its conclusion. Happiness unites vitality with art; spiritual vitality (not mere restlessness) is increased by art, which removes friction, waste, and despair. Without art, vitality is painful and “big with monsters,” prone to folly and crime, ignoring external forces. German philosophy does.
Inside the Book
The Book’s Occasion and the Author’s Standpoint
Santayana’s Egotism in German Philosophy, published in 1916 while the First World War was still raging, belongs to the flood of books that conflict produced, yet he insists it was not a hasty product of the moment. It grew out of more than twenty years of teaching philosophy at Harvard, years in which he read and discussed German metaphysics continually. From the outset that philosophy struck him as questionable in shape: beneath its obscure and shifting doctrines he sensed something sinister, hollow, and aggressive—a forced manner of speculation that manufactured more confusion than it resolved, and whose chief service was to let practical materialists call themselves idealists and let rationalists remain theologians. The fear that its secret eluded him, perhaps because of his own blood and tradition, drove him to prolonged efforts to understand it, and he wished to be clearer and juster about it than it ever was about itself.
He writes frankly as an outsider. German philosophy was never his chief interest, and he makes no professorial pretensions; he appeals to common reason rather than to claims of logical authority or spiritual supremacy. A reader already indoctrinated in the German schools is free to read no further. His aim is neither to repeat familiar arguments nor to refute them, but to describe them intelligibly and judge them from a layman’s point of view, offering only the aroma of German philosophy that reached his nostrils. History and criticism, he holds, should not passively reproduce their subject-matter; reflection and description are superadded, more winged and selective, echoes of reality in the sphere of art, intellectual symbols at once indicative and original.
Egotism—subjectivity in thought and wilfulness in morals—is, for Santayana, the soul of German philosophy, and it is by no means gratuitous. It is a genuine expression of the pathetic situation of any animal on earth and any intelligence in the universe, an inevitable and initial circumstance in life. Like every material accident it is to be abstracted from and discounted; the Germans’ perversity, childishness, and sophistry lie in glorifying an inevitable impediment and marking time on an earthly station from which the spirit of man is called to fly. This glorified, dogged egotism might now be evident to the whole world. The German philosophers are not responsible for the war or for the recrudescence of corporate fanaticism that prepared it from afar; they merely shared and prophetically justified the spirit of uncompromising self-assertion and metaphysical conceit that the German nation is now reducing to action. A false religion is terrible, the more so the deeper its sources in the human soul. Like many a false religion before it, this one has made a double assault upon mankind—one with the secular arm, another by solemn asseverations and sophistries. Though incidental methods may be dubious, the assault has been bold and honest in principle, like those of all conquerors and founders of militant religions against liberty or reason. The issue will doubtless be the same: liberty may be maimed but not killed; reason bent but not broken. The dark aggression is to be repelled, if possible, by force of arms; failing that, it will be nullified in time by the indomitable moral resistance maturer races, richer in wisdom, can exert against the rude will of the conqueror.
The Chapters and the Character of German Philosophy
The book proceeds through a sequence of studies: the general character of German philosophy; the Protestant heritage; transcendentalism; hints of egotism in Goethe; seeds of egotism in Kant; transcendentalism perfected; Fichte on the mission of Germany; the egotism of ideas; egotism and selfishness; the breach with Christianity; Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; the ethics of Nietzsche; the superman; heathenism; German genius; egotism in practice; and an index.
What Santayana calls German philosophy, he begins, is not identical with philosophy in Germany. The religion of the Germans is foreign to them; the philosophy associated with religion before the Reformation and in Catholic circles since is a system native to the late Roman Empire. Their irreligion is foreign too; sceptical and scientific schools conspicuous elsewhere took root in Germany as well. Counting Catholics, old-fashioned Protestants, and materialists who call themselves monists, the majority of intelligent Germans likely held views that German philosophy proper must despise, and this philosophy seemed as strange to them as to anyone else. For an original and profound philosophy has arisen in Germany, as distinct in genius and method from Greek and Catholic philosophy as these are from the Indian systems. Its great characteristic is that it is deliberately subjective and limits itself to the articulation of self-consciousness. The whole world appears there, but at a certain remove, viewed and accepted merely as an idea framed in consciousness, according to principles fetched from the most personal and subjective parts of the mind—duty, will, or the grammar of thought. Its profundity lies in the direction of inwardness; it probes the self, as unaided introspection may, with extraordinary intentness and sincerity. In inventing the transcendental method, the study of subjective projections and perspectives, it added a new dimension to human speculation. The foreign religion and irreligion of Germany are both incompatible with this philosophy.
A Revealed Philosophy and the Protestant Inheritance
When Fichte and Hegel mention a providential plan of the world, they reveal that they view history not as infinite and endlessly various but as a closed plot, like a drama, in which one nation—the very one to which these philosophers belong—holds the central place and chief rôle. Their philosophy is thus a revealed philosophy, the heir of Judaism, incapable of being formed by free observation of life and nature as the philosophy of Greece or of the Renaissance was. It is Protestant theology rationalised, with religious faith in the Protestant sense essential to it. It may be sceptical about tradition and the senses, may reduce nature and God to figments of the mind, yet it remains persuaded that the questioning and striving spirit within is indefeasible and divine. It never reduces all things, including the mind, to loose and intractable appearances as a free idealism might; instead it uses scepticism to turn all things into ideas, chaining them to the thinker’s moral interests, which it exalts as groundless and immutable.
From the same tenet, the principal figures in this revealed philosophy’s world plan are not individuals—Creator, Redeemer, one’s own soul—but nations and institutions. Protestantism and German philosophy share the essence that religion gradually drops supernatural personages and private hopes, absorbed in living manfully the conventional life of this world—not the whole life, since gay religions and gay things are excluded or admitted only as childish toys. Positive religion disappears, as does frivolous worldliness; only a consecrated, deliberate worldliness remains. As pantheism naturalises God into a cosmic force, German philosophy secularises Biblical piety into social and patriotic zeal.
German philosophy inherited from Protestantism its earnestness and pious intention, plus a tendency to retain the names of former beliefs. God, freedom, and immortality may be transformed into their opposites while keeping their names, since the oracle of faith is internal. If God came nearest in vital energy, freedom meant personality, immortality meant endless human progress, and these satisfy us as the old ideas satisfied our fathers, why not use the consecrated names, indicating religion’s continuity amid the flux of science? This expedient is not always hypocritical—it was candid in Spinoza and Emerson, whose attachment to positive religion gave way to a half-mystical, half-intellectual satisfaction with the natural world. Whether candid or disingenuous, the habit oils the wheels of progress with sacred unction, blurring consciousness of change and attaching incompatible sentiments to new opinions. Many tender-minded people are attached to German philosophy for this reason, though German philosophy is not tender.
Protestantism’s beauty and torment is that it opens the door wide to what lies beyond it; this progressive quality passed to all the German systems. Each thinks itself true and final yet suggests some next thing. Conservative elements in each system provoke protests in the next generation. Kant was a puritan revering the rule of right as immutable and holy, perhaps never obeyed. Fichte was freer in his Calvinism; the rule of right was the moving power in all life and nature, though betrayed by a doomed generation. Hegel was a free and superior Lutheran; the divine will was necessarily realised in this world, though unrecognised in petty moral judgments. Schopenhauer revolted against that cruel optimism as an indignant atheist; in Nietzsche this atheism became exultant—he thought it man’s part to abet the movement of things, however calamitous, to appropriate its wild force and be the crest of its wave.
Protestantism was essentially a reformation, not an accident: every individual must reinterpret the Bible and church practices in his own spirit; accepting them without renewing them in personal religious experience would not be living religion. German philosophy inherited this: it is not cumulative science transmittable ready-made but essentially a reform, a revision each neophyte must make, under pain of lip-service and remaining unregenerate. His chief business is to be converted, refuting for himself the natural views with which all men begin. These views—like Satan’s temptations—reform afresh each generation, even in the philosopher, so he must recapitulate his saving arguments from the beginning. Each new idealist must refute again the same homely opponents—materialism, naturalism, dualism—dead each day yet fought again on the morrow. Hence continual preoccupation lest he fall away or the world forget him; he must daily conquer freedom and idealism anew. This philosophy is secondary, critical, sophistical, in perennial quarrel with inevitable opinions.
Protestantism, despite its personal status, wished to revert to primitive Christianity, guided by conventional faith in the Scriptures and sympathy with experimental religion. German religion and philosophy are homesick, wishing to be primitive once more, remaining primitive in spirit, spontaneous and tentative amid cumbrous erudition—like a composition of Dürer’s where flesh, fish, and fowl crowd every corner, still primitive, puzzled, oppressed. Such a naïve but overloaded mind is lost in admiration of its own depth and richness, yet is helpless and immature, not learned to select what suffices or be satisfied with what is best.
Faith for the Germans must be primitive and groundless assurance, not knowledge credibly transmitted by others with greater experience. Even philosophy is not reasonable adjustment to the world’s constitution; it is first a criticism dissolving reputed knowledge, then, when primitive innocence is restored, a wager or demand beyond and in contempt of all evidence, obeying an innate impulse. It is usual to assume experience will satisfy these demands and we shall win bets and wars; but the point of principle borrowed from Protestantism is that faith’s authority is intrinsic and absolute, while external corroboration is problematical and not essential. This is a fundamental characteristic of the school.
Appetition, Will, and the One Spirit
Carried to its logical conclusion, this principle, though unconscious, sometimes reveals its workings to consciousness. Besides breeding a multitude of ideas, it manifests as subterranean strains and rumblings—a sense of movement and longing. Leibniz named this darker manifestation “appetition,” and under the name “Will” it later played a great part in German systems. Santayana insists that calling it Will is improper and mythological, since actual willing requires an idea of what is willed. When we say a man doesn’t know what he wants, we mean he can will nothing for lack of a clear idea of his interests, though he doubtless lacks many specific things that make him unhappy and restless. These instinctive appetitions for objects the mind is ignorant of may figuratively be called unconscious Will—a contradiction in terms unless “Will,” capitalised, is used metaphorically. From this metaphor, once its boldness is dulled by use, one passes insensibly to calling Will that whole transcendental potency of the soul which, like a watch’s mainspring, lay coiled within it from the beginning of time. A man’s transcendental Will can then be called the source of everything that happens to him—birth, character, life, death—even what he most detests and does not will, like nightmares, being an expression of the original pregnancy of his spirit.
Santayana adds a point often left obscure: in Leibniz the number of spirits was infinite; in later systems they are reduced to one. This difference seems greater than it is, since when Spirit or Will stands metaphorically for unconscious laws of continuity or development, and the Will present in me now may have presided over my soul’s destinies ages before my birth, there seems no reason the same Spirit should not preside over all inhabitants of the universe—gods or humming-birds. Such a Spirit resembles Providence, the law of evolution, or Leibniz’s pre-established harmony far more than a mind. Those philosophers intent on proving the Spirit can be only one might therefore have urged that a Spirit is at best a formal, abstract law covering disparate facts, so all flesh and fowl, demons and angels, might be animated by a single Spirit.
But this cool, verbal way of making all one is not the German way. Their intention and illusion is rather that whenever two things can be called manifestations of one Spirit in the loosest metaphorical sense, they are thereby proved to be data in one spirit in the most intimate psychological sense. What really happens to transcendentalists is not that they unite Leibniz’s units into one looser unit, but that they limit the universe to what in Leibniz was one of an infinite number of parallel careers—indeed limiting even that one career to the experience present at one point, that of the most intense and comprehensive self-consciousness. The unity they desire is an actual, intense unity: all elements viewed at once, bound and merged by simultaneous intuition of all their relations, in a single, unchanging, eternal moment of thought, or rather unutterable feeling. The union is real, psychic, mystical, so close that everything to be united remains, by curious irony, outside.
What leads serious thinkers into such pitfalls? A powerful, not unworthy motive. All transcendentalism takes the point of view of what it calls knowledge; whenever it mentions anything—matter, God, oneself—it means not that thing but the idea of it. By knowledge it understands the image or belief, the fact of cognition. Whatever is thought of exists only for thought; yet this thought is called knowledge, not illusion, because knowledge is what the thought feels that it is. On this principle none of Leibniz’s spirits could know any other, nor any phase of the same spirit know another phase. The unbridgeable chasm of want of experience would cut off knowledge from everything but its “content.” External objects would be brought back into my ideas and identified with them; my ideas drawn in and identified with the fact that I entertain them; this fact condensing into the intimate fact that I feel that I am, or am tending to be, something.
Fichte and the Absolute Will
Fichte purified Kant’s system of its inconsistent and humane elements, presenting the subjective system of knowledge and action in its most radical form. The ego, to live fully and freely, posited or feigned a world of circumstances—an imagined theatre made to suit the play—which might seem to oppress the Will with hindrances but was really only a mirage raised by that Will to enjoy exerting itself manfully. It would seem obvious that the Will could never be defeated and was identical with destiny or the laws of nature. Transcendentalists leaning toward naturalism, like Schelling or Emerson, understand the absolute Will this way. But not so Fichte, nor the keener and more heroic romantic school, whose last prophet was Nietzsche. The Germans, amid their fantastic metaphysics, sometimes return to immediate experience; their philosophy was begotten in wrestling with the Lord. As a matter of fact, the will is often defeated—especially if we are stubborn in defining our will—and this tragic fact by no means refutes the Fichtean philosophy, which deals with it heroically. It conceives that what is inviolable is only what ought to be, the unconscious plan or idea of perfect living hidden in the depths of all life. A will not animated by this idea cannot exist or be noticed by this philosophy. But when, where, how often and how far this divine idea shall be carried out is left unexplained. Actual will may be feeble or wicked in any degree; consequently the world that ought to be evoked in its maximum richness may dwindle and fade to nothing.
The Will may be defeated not by imagined external things but by its own apathy and tergiversation. According to the logic of this system, the dissolving world will appear overwhelmingly formidable and real. In expiring because we have no longer the warmth to keep it alive, it will seem to be killing us; for the passivity of the ego, says Fichte, is posited as activity in the non-ego. That way of speaking is scholastic, but the thought, from the egotistical point of view, is deep and true. So any actual will may perish by defect and die out; but actual will may also perish by sublimation. The true object of absolute Will is not things or pleasures or length of life, but willing itself; the more intense and disinterested this willing, the better it manifests absolute Will. The heroic act of dashing oneself against overwhelming obstacles may be the highest fulfilment of the divine idea. The will dares to perish in order to have dared everything. In its material ruin it remains ideally victorious. Under the form of eternity, this heroic and suicidal will has accomplished what it willed; it has not only lived perilously but perished nobly.
It is hardly necessary to point out how completely this theory justifies any desperate enterprise to which one happens to be wedded—for instance, any wilful handling of history and science. The Will by right lays down the principles on which things must and shall be arranged. If things slip from the traces, so much the grander your “scientific deed” in striving to rein them in. You first summoned them into being only that you might drive them. If they seem to run wild and upset you, like the steeds of Hippolytus, you will at least not have missed the glory, while you lived and drove, of assuming the attitude of a master. Call spirits from the vasty deep: if they do not come, that will only prove the absolute self-sufficiency of your duty to call them.
What tightens this speculative bond between Fichte and the Nietzschean school is that he himself applied his theory of absolute Will to national life. This ego, identical with mind in general, he identified also with the German people. If the Germans suffered their national will to be domesticated in the Napoleonic empire, the creative spirit of the universe would be extinguished, and God himself, who existed only when incarnate in mankind, would disappear. It was evidently one’s duty to prevent this; and Fichte poured out all the vehemence of his nature into the struggle for freedom. The mere struggle, the mere protest in the soul, according to his system, would secure the end desired: self-assertion, not material success, was the goal. A happy equilibrium once established in human life would have been only a temptation, a sort of Napoleonic or Mephistophelian quietus falling on the will to strive.
The author is not sure how far Fichte, in his romantic and puritan tension of soul, would have relished the present organisation of Germany. He was a man of the people, a radical and an agitator as much as a prophet of nationalism, and the shining armour in which German freedom is now encased might have seemed to him too ponderous. He might have discerned in victory the beginning of corruption. Nevertheless, we should remember that a perfected idealism has a tendency to change into its opposite and become a materialism for all practical purposes. Absolute Will is not a natural being, not anybody’s will or thought; it is a disembodied and unrealised genius which first comes into operation when it begins to surround itself with objects and points of resistance, so as to become aware of its own stress and vocation. What these objects or felt resistances may be is not prejudged; or rather it is prejudged that they shall be most opposite to spirit, and that spirit shall experience its own passivity—one mode of its fated and requisite experience—in the form of an influence which it imputes to dead and material things.
The Egotism of Ideas
History’s sole animating principle, the passage asserts, is a tendency toward a universal Christian European monarchy, a tendency deeper than human plans and stronger than intentions. It quotes a state’s claim that solemnly asserting love of peace and aversion to conquest means nothing, since such asseveration may hide real intentions; the principle “Threaten war that thou mayst have peace” can be inverted as “Promise peace that thou mayst begin war with advantage.” A state may be earnest in peaceful assurances so far as its self-knowledge goes, but when a favorable opportunity for aggrandisement appears, the previous good resolution is forgotten. If people are disinclined to obey the Idea, government must constrain them. All citizens’ powers must be absorbed in the state. Personal liberty could serve no good use once individuality and variety of training beneficial to the state are provided by its regulations. Idleness must not be tolerated. An ideal education must remake men so they cannot will anything but what that education wills. The state may then rely on subjects, “for whoever has a well-grounded will, wills what he wills for all eternity.”
In foreign relations, the state must conquer surrounding barbarians and raise them to culture, a process that almost exclusively introduced progress into history. The passage asks what impels the Macedonian hero to seek foreign lands and chains victory to his footsteps; it is not fortune but an Idea. The civilised must rule and the uncivilised obey if Right is to be law. It dismisses the thousands who fell and his own early death: after realizing his Idea, what greater thing was there than to die? This enthusiasm for Alexander, shared by Hegel, is not merely retrospective. It predicts that in one nation the highest, purest morality will arise, secured for all future time and extended over all peoples, transforming the human race from earthly and sensual creatures into pure and noble spirits. It asks whether anything is higher than death and who has a right to stand in the way of an enterprise begun in the face of this peril.
The passage finds it curious that an uncompromising puritan like Fichte—a prophet sprung from the people, a theoretical republican who quarrelled with students for forming clubs and fighting duels, a fierce idealist contemptuous of worldlings—should have supplied the Junkers and bankers with their philosophy. But this is not new: Plato supplied the dull Spartans with theirs. Men of idealistic faith are confident that things’ foundations must be divine; investigating these foundations, they come upon sinister principles—blind impulse, chance, murderous competition—and fanatically erect these into sacred maxims. Convinced all strength must come from God, they conclude that if deception, wilfulness, tyranny, and big battalions are means to power, they must be God’s chosen instruments. Similarly the Catholic Church, for fear of impiety, blesses many forms of deceit and oppression. Thus ardent speculation may sanction brutal practice. Such sanctioned primitive passions, seeming safe and potent, are too narrowly organised to sustain themselves long, and meanwhile trample down mankind’s best things. They are a force, vehement and contagious, capable of many victories but no stable success. Such passions and the philosophies glorifying them are sincere, absorbing, and if frankly expressed, irrefutable.
The transcendental theory of a world merely imagined by the ego, and the will deeming itself absolute, are desperate delusions—but not more than many another system millions accept. The thing bears all the marks of a new religion. Established German religions remain forms of Christianity, obscuring the new faith’s explicit heathen character; it passes for faded speculation or the creed of a few extremists when in reality it dominates the nation’s judgment and conduct. No religious tyranny could be more complete: it has its prophets in the great philosophers and historians of the last century; its high priests and pharisees in the government and professors; its faithful flock in the disciplined mass of the nation; its heretics in the socialists; its dupes in the Catholics and liberals, to whom the national creed would be an abomination if understood; it has its martyrs now by the million, and its victims among unbelievers are even more numerous, for its victims are all men in some degree.
Hegel and the Worship of the State
Chapter VIII, “The Egotism of Ideas,” opens by asking whether we need speak of Hegel when discussing egotism. His tone, especially in later writings, was full of contempt for everything subjective: the individual’s viewpoint, opinions, and wishes were treated as of no account unless brought into line with the providential march of events and ideas. This realism, pronounced and acrid, was still idealistic in that the world’s substance was conceived not as material but conceptual—a law or logic animating phenomena and being the secret of their movement. The world was like a riddle or confused oracle; the solution lay in the romantic instability or self-contradiction inherent in every finite form of being, compelling it to pass into something different. We might understand this movement’s direction sympathetically through a vital dialectic or dramatic necessity in our own reflection. Hegel was a solemn sophist: he made discourse the key to reality. This technical realism in Hegel was reinforced by his historical imagination, producing an impression of detachment, objectivity, and impersonal intelligence; he often seems lost in his story’s events, plucking the very heart out of the world. He adored the state, to which the individual should be entirely subjugated—not for other individuals’ benefit, but in rapt service of common impersonal ends. The family was a first natural group in which the individual should happily lose himself.
Every person is subject to illusions of perspective and the “pathos of distance,” which can be favorable or unfavorable to what they study. Hegel, believing he possessed the key to the divine design, fancied himself deeply sympathetic because he saw in everything a fragment of himself. But no part of the world was that; each part had its own inalienable superiority, which to transcend meant losing forever. To the omniscient egotist every heart is closed. The past never gives away its secret except to a self-forgetful, humble lover with a kindred destiny. The egotist who tries to grasp the past for his philosophic banquet or museum of antiquities grasps only himself—his egotism turns out true, to his confusion. The egotism in this lordly treatment of the past is egotism of the imagination, the same expressed in the romantic love of nature—really a subtle, studious, obstinate love of self, seeking reference and deference to oneself in everything. There is also an egotism of passion, appearing in Hegel’s worship of the state. “The passions” is the old, fit name for what Germans call ideals. Passions are not selfish as German moralists denounce selfishness; they are not contrived for ulterior profit. They are ideal, dangerous, often fatal. Even carnal passions are not selfish if by self we understand the whole man—they are an obsession to which he sacrifices himself. But transcendental philosophy, with its migratory ego, can turn any passion or complex of passions into a reputed centre of will, a moral personage. As passion usurps more of the man’s nature, it becomes a fierce egotist in his place—fanaticism or madness. When nobody thought the ego migratory, substituting a passion for a man seemed a disease—folly to sacrifice natural life to a partial, transitory, visionary passion. But the German idealist recognizes no natural life, no natural individual. His ego can migrate into any political body or synthetic idea. Therefore his passions seem divine inspirations, calls to sacrifice, fidelities to the ideal. Santayana does not claim a German idealist is commonly just to all passions; his passions are generally few and mental. Accidents of training or limitations of temperament keep him respectable, but he is never safe. Dazzle him with a sophism like “the more evil the more good,” or hypnotise him with a superstition like “organisation is an end in itself,” and nothing more is needed to turn him into a romantic criminal.
Even the absolute requires an enemy to whet its edge upon. The state, morally absolute according to Hegel, requires rival states so its separate individuality may not vanish, along with the occasion for blessed and wholesome wars. Hegel rejects the notion that nations have duties to one another because there is no moral authority or tribunal higher than the state to which its government could be subject. Santayana calls this assertion evidently false: first, there is God, or the highest good of mankind, hedging in narrowly the path states should follow between opposite vices; second, there is the individual, whose natural allegiance to family, friends, religion, truth, and art is deeper and holier than allegiance to the state, which is an historical and geographical accident. At the present stage of civilisation, more is gained than lost by co-operating loyally with governments, not because any state is divine, but because no less cumbrous machinery is available for carrying on life with decency and security. For Hegel, however, the life of the state was the moral substance and souls of men but accidents. As to the judgment of God, he asserted it was none other than the course of history—a characteristic saying that seems to proclaim moral government of the world when in truth he is sanctifying a brutal law of success and succession. The best government succumbs in time like the worst, and sooner; the dark ages followed the Roman Empire and lasted twice as long. Hegel’s God was simply the world, or a formula supposed to describe it.
Nietzsche’s Attack on Morality and the Ethics of Power
Santayana begins by correcting a common misreading of Nietzsche. His assault on morality was never aimed at morality as such, but at Christian virtues and at the Protestant-Kantian moralism that treats duty as an absolute end in itself rather than as a means to secure goods attainable through action. That latter view, Santayana notes, is simply the sound and common opinion, the one Aristotle maintained. Nietzsche, lacking the humility that study demands, believed he was propounding something revolutionary by placing goods and evils beyond and above right and wrong—yet this, Santayana says, is all that Jenseits von Gut und Böse really amounts to. Nietzsche loved whatever seemed admirable, beautiful, and eligible: good in the sense opposed to schlecht rather than böse. Hence his fury against Christianity for renouncing too much, and his hatred of moralism for sacrificing half the goods of life by raising duty to an absolute throne. Far from transcending ethics, he re-established it on true foundations—though the edifice he planned remained sketchy and perhaps unable to stand.
The first principle of Nietzsche’s ethics was that the good is power. But the word “power” ranged widely in his mind: sometimes animal strength and size, the big blonde beast; sometimes vitality, fortitude, and contempt for the wills of others; sometimes dominion over natural forces and over people—wealth and military power. Santayana characterizes this school as confusing the laws that preside over the movement of things with the good results those movements may involve. Nietzsche confuses his biological insight that all life asserts some sort of power with his admiration for masterful egotism. Even if life is identified with the exertion of strength, the kinds of strength are heterogeneous and not always compatible. The strength of Lucifer does not insure victory in war; it points to failure in a world of millions of timid, pious, and democratic persons. Hence Nietzsche’s plaintive question, “Why are the feeble victorious?” The fact rankled that martial aristocracies had succumbed before Christianity in the ancient world and before democracy in the modern. By strength, Nietzsche could not mean the power to survive by flexibility, nor the strength of majorities or vermin, nor moral strength, of which he had no idea.
The arts give power, but only in channels prescribed by their own principles, not by the will of untrained men. To be trained is to be tamed and harnessed—an accession of power detestable to Nietzsche. His Zarathustra had the power of dancing and of charming serpents and eagles, but missed the power bestowed by goodness of charming and guiding men. A man intent on algebra or painting is not striving to rule anybody; his dominion is chiefly concentration and self-forgetfulness. Dominion over the passions changes them from attempts to appropriate into sentiments of the mind, colouring a world no longer coveted. Such autumnal wisdom is itself a power of feeling and a kind of strength, but not helpful in conquering the earth.
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. He did not crave wealth or empire; what he loved was solitude, nature, music, books. But his imagination, like his judgment, was captious; it could not dwell on reality but reacted furiously against it. When he speaks of the will to be powerful, power is merely an eloquent word on his lips, symbolising escape from mediocrity. What power would be when attained remains beyond his horizon. What meets us everywhere is the sense of impotence and a passionate rebellion against it.
His phrases were brilliant but seldom just. Santayana suggests we may see the principle of his ethics better by forgetting the will to be powerful and considering that he knew no sort of good except the beautiful, and no sort of beauty except romantic stress. He was a belated prophet of romanticism, writing its epitaph and praising it more extravagantly than anybody had while it was alive.
Truth, Pragmatism, and the Romantic Egotist
Since men were governed solely by the will to be powerful, truth for its own sake must be moonshine to them; they would cultivate ideas, true or false, useful to their ambition. Nietzsche—more candid than some other pragmatists—confessed that truth itself did not interest him; it was ugly, and the bracing atmosphere of falsehood, passion, and subjective perspectives was better. Sometimes a more wistful mood overtook him, and he wondered whether the human mind could endure the light of truth—the great question of the future. Santayana agrees that a mind without poetry, fiction, and subjective colouring would not be human, nor a mind at all; and that neither truth nor the knowledge of truth would have intrinsic value if nobody cared about it for its own sake. But some men do care; and in ignoring this fact Nietzsche expresses the false and pitiful notion that we can be interested in nothing except ourselves and our own future. The romantic egotist says: I am solitary and sufficient unto myself; the world is my idea, new every day; what can I have to do with truth?
This impulse to turn one’s back on truth has a long history. Lessing had said he preferred the pursuit of truth to truth itself; but if taken seriously, the pursuit of truth at once changes its character—it can no longer be the pursuit of truth, truth not being wanted, but only the pursuit of some fresh idea. Whether one idea comes nearer truth would be unimportant and undiscoverable. Any idea will do so long as it is pregnant with another that may presently take its place; and as error will precipitate new ideas more readily than truth, we might almost find implied in Lessing’s maxim a preference for error.
Heathenism and the Greek Ideal
How could Nietzsche’s fantastic ideal impose on a keen satirist and sincere lover of excellence? True human excellence seemed to him hostile to life, and he felt that life must be accepted as it is or may become, and that false beliefs, hollow demands, and hypocritical, forced virtues must be abandoned. This new wisdom was also felt and practised by Goethe, whom Nietzsche could best understand. But a master of life uses life for ends which transcend it; even Goethe transcended life in depicting, judging, and blessing it. Saints and true philosophers have emphasised this renunciation of egotism more, seeing all things in the light of eternity and feeling a reasonable contempt for mere living and dying, which is where moral greatness lies. Here Nietzsche could not follow; rationality chilled him and he craved vehemence.
How life can be fulfilled and made beautiful by reason was never better shown than by the Greeks. Nietzsche in his youth was a professor of Greek literature, so one would have expected his superman to be a sort of Greek hero. Something of Dorian harshness in beauty and the Pindaric high-born and silent victor may have fused into his ideal, and Bacchic freedom and ardour were to enter in. But on the whole it is remarkable how little he learned from the Greeks: no modesty or reverence, no joy in order and loveliness, no sense for friendship, none for the sanctity of places and institutions. He repeated the paradoxes of some of their sophists without remembering how their wise men had refuted them. He gave a new name and prominence to the distinction between the Dionysiac and Apollonian elements in Greek genius. He saw how false was the whitewashed notion of the Greek mind derived from sketching a plaster cast of the Apollo Belvidere. He saw that a demonic force underlay everything; what he did not see was that this demonic force was under control, which is the secret of the whole matter. Plato had elucidated this in the contrast between inspiration and art, but Plato was rather ironical about inspiration and had a high opinion of art, and Nietzsche rushes away without understanding the mind of the master or the truth of the situation. He thinks he alone has discovered the divinity of Dionysus and of the Muses, which Plato took as a matter of course but would not venerate superstitiously. Inspiration, like will, is a force without which reason can do nothing; it must be presupposed, but in itself it can do nothing good unless it is in harmony with reason. This two-edged wisdom—that makes impulse the stuff of life and reason its criterion—is lost on Nietzsche, and with it the whole marvel of Greek genius. There is nothing exceptional in being alive and impulsive; any savage can run wild and be frenzied and enact histrionic passions. The virtue of the Greeks lay in the exquisite firmness with which they banked their fires without extinguishing them, so that their life remained human and yet became beautiful. They were severe and fond of maxims, on a basis of universal tolerance; they governed themselves rationally, with a careful freedom, while well aware that nature and their own bosoms were full of gods, all of whom must be reverenced.
This defect in appreciation is inseparable from the transcendental pose. The ancients never seem to the egotist a reality co-ordinate with himself, from which he might still have something to learn. They are only so much “content” for his self-consciousness, so much matter for his thought to transcend. They can contain nothing for him but the part of his outgrown self which he deigns to identify with them. His mind must always envelop them and be the larger thing. No wonder that in this school learning is wasted for the purposes of moral education. Whoever has seen the learned egotist flies at his approach. History in his hands is a demonstration of his philosophy. Science is a quarry of proofs for his hobbies. If we do not agree with him we are not merely mistaken, but false to ourselves and ignorant of our ideal significance. His ego gives us our place in the world. He informs us of what we mean, whatever we may say; and he raises our opinions, as he might his food, to a higher unity in his own person. He is priest in every temple. He approaches a picture-gallery or a foreign religion in a dictatorial spirit, with his a priori categories ready on his lips; pedantry and vanity speak in his every gesture, and the lesson of nothing can reach his heart.
Neither the philosophy inherited by Nietzsche nor his wayward imagination was fit to suggest to him a nobler race of men. On the contrary, they shut him off from comprehension of the best men that have existed. Like the utopias or ideals of many other satirists and minor philosophers, the superman is not a possibility, it is only a protest. Our society is outworn, but hard to renew; the emancipated individual needs to master himself. In what spirit or to what end he will do so, we do not know, and Nietzsche cannot tell us. He is the jester, to whom all incoherences are forgiven, because all indiscretions are allowed. His mind is undisciplined, and his tongue outrageous, but he is at bottom the friend of our conscience, and full of shrewd wit and tender wisps of intuition. Behind his “gay wisdom” and trivial rhymes lies a great anguish.
Happiness, Art, and the German Genius
Happiness unites vitality with art; spiritual vitality—not mere restlessness—is increased by art, which removes friction, waste, and despair. Without art, vitality is painful and “big with monsters,” prone to folly and crime, ignoring external forces. German philosophy does this theoretically by dethroning the natural world, calling it an idea created by the ego for its own purposes, and practically by obeying the categorical imperative—not the imperatives of Sinai or Königsberg, but the inward vital imperative of the bull following a red rag.
Religions and philosophies are customarily judged by truth, though truth is seldom their strong point; this criterion is not unjust since they claim truth and forbid opposing views. Once dead or remote, they retain interest as expressions of human genius—true to the eye and spirit that fashioned them, not to their subject-matter. Their errors no longer threaten, and they acquire beauty through the refraction truth suffered in that vital medium. German philosophy is a work of genius: to be heathen is easy, but to be learned, industrious, moral, and Christian yet pierce through phenomena to absolute will and freedom, setting them forth as true reality, is a wonderful achievement—recovering atavistically the primitive soul’s depths. The ancestral ego returns to haunt us, persuading us that not the ego but the world is the ghost.
The egotism justified by theory in German philosophy is a form of experience, turning everything into part of its own life—personal, spontaneous, sincere, original, young, self-sufficient. Since continual change of view is incompatible with art and learning, Germany shows a division of labour between genius and tradition, with extreme types of young rebel and tireless pedant. An absolute genius must be unstable, a “shooting star” with no guarantees; the complete egotist has no terrors of a tragic end or enemies. An absolute genius is formless; its supposed freedom is subjection to unknown, perhaps ironical forces. Absolute Will cannot say what it craves, craving everything indiscriminately; specific aims are suggested by circumstances. Its proclaimed eternal logic is the fashionable rhetoric of the hour. Like Faust, it is helpless before vulgar temptations—magic, seduction, archæological pose, piratical or engineering enterprise. The German ego, after swallowing Christianity whole, sticks at Indulgences in Luther; Faust turns on Mephistopheles. The ego is not really absolute but specifically human, directed upon a few natural ends—which saves it.
The pathetic history of the German people: it conquered the Roman empire and became Roman; it had its own mythology and morality yet accepted Christianity with a child’s docility; feeling this alien, it sought relief in fresh draughts from foreign sources—Hebraic and Greek. Studying these models, it found that revelation and classical perfection were of human national growth, stratified like rocks, not divine. Theory’s triumphs soon seemed unsatisfying; wine, science, and song once made Germany happy, but military discipline under a prince might be better. Wistfulness and Titanic loneliness filled the cup of living, expressed in the lines “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt.” Presently true intensity appeared to lie in being a victorious general, ironmaster, commercial traveller, reveller in the Friedrich-strasse, or spy. These ambitions are artificial; Germans are by nature simple, honest, kindly, easily pleased, without latent irony. Their goodness makes them helpless—dragooned to be what they are. Their philosophy exemplifies succumbing to epidemic; they have the defects of the newly prosperous, too proud of possessions. Their real strength lies in their Gemüth and their music. Emotion is inarticulate yet mighty in movement; music gives form to inner feelings without attaching them to events—the chosen art of a mind to whom the world is foreign.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the book is that German philosophy is at bottom a glorification of egotism—subjectivity in thought and wilfulness in morals—and that this glorification, though rooted in an inevitable and initial circumstance of life, is a perversity. Every animal on earth and every intelligence in the universe is in some sense egotistical; the egotism is a material accident to be abstracted from and discounted. The Germans’ error lies in glorifying an inevitable impediment and marking time on an earthly station from which the spirit of man is called to fly. This is the thesis the book develops through its historical survey.
A second argument concerns the nature of German philosophy as a revealed philosophy. When Fichte and Hegel mention a providential plan of the world, they reveal that they view history not as infinite and endlessly various but as a closed plot like a drama, in which one nation—their own—holds the central place and chief rôle. This shows their philosophy to be the heir of Judaism, incapable of being formed by free observation of life and nature like the philosophy of Greece or of the Renaissance. It is Protestant theology rationalised, with religious faith in the Protestant sense essential to it. It may be sceptical about tradition and the senses, may reduce nature and God to figments of the mind, yet remains persuaded that the questioning and striving spirit within is indefeasible and divine. It never reduces all things, including the mind, to loose and intractable appearances as a free idealism might; instead it uses scepticism to turn all things into ideas, chaining them to the thinker’s moral interests, which it exalts as groundless and immutable.
A third argument concerns the transcendental method itself. In inventing this method—the study of subjective projections and perspectives—German philosophy added a new dimension to human speculation. Its profundity is in the direction of inwardness; it probes the self, as unaided introspection may, with extraordinary intentness and sincerity. But the method has a fatal tendency. It begins by noting that whatever is thought of exists only for thought; yet this thought is called knowledge, not illusion, because knowledge is what the thought feels that it is. On this principle none of Leibniz’s spirits could know any other, nor any phase of the same spirit know another phase. The unbridgeable chasm of want of experience would cut off knowledge from everything but its “content.” External objects would be brought back into my ideas and identified with them; my ideas drawn in and identified with the fact that I entertain them; this fact condensing into the intimate fact that I feel that I am, or am tending to be, something. My Will or Spirit absorbs my ideas, my ideas absorb their objects, and these objects absorb the world, past, present, and future. Earth and heaven, God and my fellowmen are mere expressions of my Will. My Will is absolute. With that conclusion transcendentalism is complete.
A fourth argument concerns the practical consequences of this philosophy. Fichte’s theory of absolute Will justifies any desperate enterprise to which one happens to be wedded—for instance, any wilful handling of history and science. The Will by right lays down the principles on which things must and shall be arranged. If things slip from the traces, so much the grander your “scientific deed” in striving to rein them in. You first summoned them into being only that you might drive them. If they seem to run wild and upset you, like the steeds of Hippolytus, you will at least not have missed the glory, while you lived and drove, of assuming the attitude of a master. Call spirits from the vasty deep: if they do not come, that will only prove the absolute self-sufficiency of your duty to call them. This logic, Santayana argues, leads directly to the Nietzschean school and to the sanctification of brutal practice.
A fifth argument concerns the relation between egotism and selfishness. The egotism in the lordly treatment of the past is egotism of the imagination, the same expressed in the romantic love of nature—really a subtle, studious, obstinate love of self, seeking reference and deference to oneself in everything. There is also an egotism of passion, appearing in Hegel’s worship of the state. “The passions” is the old, fit name for what Germans call ideals. Passions are not selfish as German moralists denounce selfishness; they are not contrived for ulterior profit. They are ideal, dangerous, often fatal. Even carnal passions are not selfish if by self we understand the whole man—they are an obsession to which he sacrifices himself. But transcendental philosophy, with its migratory ego, can turn any passion or complex of passions into a reputed centre of will, a moral personage.
