No More Learning

It can, so to speak, be richer (as when I think of a triangle)
? LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO
or it can be poorer (the conception of a lion contains more than my generaUsation of Hons). The logical conception is the plumb-line which the attention tries to follow ; it is the goal and pole-star of the psychological generalisation. \Pure logical thought cannot occur in the case of men
;
it would be an attribute of deity. A human being must always think partly psychologically because he possesses not only reason but also senses, and his thought cannot free itself from temporal experiences but must remain bound by them. Logic, however, is the supreme standard by which the individual can test his own psychological ideas and those of others. When two men are discussing anything it is the conception and not the varying individual pre- sentations of it that they aim at. ) The conception, then, is the standard of value for the individual presentations. The
mode in which the psychological generalisation comes into existence is quite independent of the conception and has no significance in respect to it. The logical character which invests the conception with dignity and power is not derived from experience, for experience can give only vague and wavering generalisations. Absolute constancy and absolute coherence which cannot come from ex-
perience are the essence of the conception of that power concealed in the depths of the human mind whose handi- work we try hard but in vain to see in nature. Concep- tions are the only true realities, and the conception is not in nature ; it is the rule of the essence not of the actual existence.
\When I enunciate the proposition A = A, the meaning of the proposition is not that a special individual A of experience or of thought is like itself. The judgment of identity does not depend on the existence of an A. It means only that if an A exists, or even if it does not exist, thenA=A. Somethingisposited,theexistenceofA=A whether or no A itself exists. It cannot be the result of experience, as Mill supposed, for it is independent of the
existence of A. But an existence has been posited ; it is not the existence of the object ; it must be the existence of
157
? SEX AND CHARACTER
the subject. "sThe reality of the existence is not in the first A or the second A, but in the simultaneous identity of the two. And so the proposition A = A is no other than the proposition " I am. "^
/From the psychological point of view, the real meaning oT^the proposition of identity is not so difficult to interpret. It is clear that to be able to say A = A, to establish the per- manence of the conception through the changes of ex- perience, there must be something unchangeable, and this can be only the subject. Were I part of the stream of change I could not verify that the A had remained unchanged, had remained itself. Were I part of the change, I could not recognise the change. Fichte was right when he stated that the existence of the ego was to be found concealed in pure logic, inasmuch as the ego is
the condition of intelligible existence.
/ The logical axioms are the principle of all truth. These I posit an existence towards which all cognition serves. ) Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realises / himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself
j
in cognition. ^
\ All error must be felt to be crime. And so man must
not err. He must find the truth, and so he can find it. The duty of cognition involves the possibility of cognition, the freedom of thought, and the hope of ascertaining truth. In the fact that logic is the condition of the mind lies the proof that thought is free and can reach its goal.
O can treat ethics briefly and in another fashion, inas- much as what I have to say is founded on Kant's moral philosophy. Thedeepest,theintelligible,partofthenature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad. ^ This is manifest in consciousness of sin and in repentance. No one has attempted to explain these facts otherwise ; and no one allows himself to be persuaded that he must commit this or that act. In the shall there lies the possibility of the can. The causal determining factors, the lower motives that act upon him, he is fully
158
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159 aware of, but he remains conscious of an intelligible ego
free to act in a different way from other egos.
Truth, purity, faithfulness, uprightness, with reference to oneself ; these give the only conceivable ethics. Duty is only duty to oneself, duty of the empirical ego to the intelligible ego. These appear in the form of two impera- tives that will always put to shame every kind of psycho- logismus--the logical law and the moral law. The internal direction, the categorical imperatives of logic and morality which dominate all the codes of social util'tarianism are factors that no empiricism can explain. All empiricism and scepticism, positivism and relativism, instinctively feel that their principal difficulties lie in logic and ethics. And so perpetually renewed and fruitless efforts are made to explain this inward discipline empirically and psychologi-
cally.
Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are
no more than duty to oneself. They celebrate their union by the highest service of truth, which is overshadowed in the one case by error, in the other by untruth. <A11 ethics are possible only by the laws of logic, and logic is no more than the ethical side of law. Not only virtue, but also insight, not only sanctity but also wisdom, are the duties and tasks of mankind. Through the union of these alone comes perfection. \
Ethics, however, the laws of which are postulates, cannot bemadethebasisofalogicalproofofexistence. Ethicsare not logical in the same sense that logic is ethical. Logic proves the absolute actual existence of the ego ; ethics con- troltheformwhichtheactualityassumes. Ethicsdominate logic and make logic part of their contents.
In thinking of the famous passage in the "Critique of Practical Reason," where Kant introduces man as a part of the intelligible cosmos, it may be asked how Kant assured himself that the moral law was inherent in personality. The answer Kant gave was simply that no other and no nobler origin could be found for it. He goes no further than to say that the categorical imperative is the law of
? i6o SEX AND CHARACTER
the noumenon, belonging to it and inherent in it from the beginning. That, however, is the nature of ethics. / Ethics make it possible for the intelligible ego to act free from the shackles of empiricism, and so through ethics, the existence of whose possibilities logic assures us, is able to become actual in all its purit3^|
There remains a most important point in which the Kantian system is often misunderstood. It reveals itself plainly in every case of wrong-doing.
Duty is only towards oneself ; Kant must have realised this in his earlier days when first he felt an impulse to lie. Except for a few indications in Nietzsche, and in Stirner, and a few others, Ibsen alone seems to have grasped the principle of the Kantian ethics (notably in " Brand " and " Peer Gvnt "). The following two quotations also give the Kantian view in a general way :
First Nebbel's epigram, " Lies and Truth. "
" Which do you pay dearer for, lies or the truth ? The former costs you yourself, the latter at most your happiness. " )
Next, the well-known words of Sleika from the "Wes- to? stlichen Diwan " :
(All sorts go to make a world,
The crowd and the rogue and the hero; But the highest fortune of earth's children Is always in their own personality.
It matters little how a man lives
If only he is true to himself;
It matters nothing what a man may lose If he remains what he really is. )
It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the mental side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human being. Itisonlyinthiswaythattheycanbringtheirlives under the social law.
--
? LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO i6i
Kant was permeated with his conviction, as is con- spicuous in the minutest details of his chosen Hfe-work, that man was responsible only to himself, to such an extent that he regarded this side of his theory as self- evidentandleastlikelytobedisputed. ThissilenceofKant has brought about a misunderstanding of his ethics--the only ethics tenable from the psychologically introspective standpoint, the only system according to which the insistent strong inner voice of the one is to be heard through the noise of the many.
I gather from a passage in his " Anthropology " that even in the case of Kant some incident in his actual earthly life precededthe"formationofhischaracter. " Thebirthof the Kantian ethics, the noblest event in the history of the world, was the moment when for the first time the dazzling awful conception came to him, " I am responsible only to myself ; I must follow none other ; I must not forget myselfevenin mywork; I amalone; I amfree; I amlord of myself. " ;
" Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and awe the more often and the deeper I dwell on them thestarryvaultabovemeandthemorallawwithinme. I must not look on them both as veiled in mystery or think that their majesty places them beyond me. I see them before me, and they are part of the consciousness of my existence. The first arises from my position in the outer world of the senses, and links me with the immeasurable space in which worlds and worlds and systems and systems, although in immeasurable time, have their ebbs and flows, their beginnings and ends. The second arises from my invisible self, my personality, and places me in a world that has true infinity, but which is evident only to the reason and with which I recognise myself as being bound, not accidentally as in the other case but in a universal and necessary union. On the one hand, the consciousness of an endless series of worlds destroys my sense of importance, making me only one of the animal creatures which must
return its substance again to the planet (that, too, being nc L
\rhus he becomes one and all ; he has the law in him, and so he himself is the law, and no mere changing caprice. The desire is in him to be only the law, to be the law that is ihimself, without afterthought or forethought. This is the awful conclusion, he has no longer the sense that there can be duty for him. Nothing is superior to him, to the isolated absolute unity. But there are no alternatives for him ; he must respond to his own categorical imperatives, absolutely, impartially. " Freedom," he cries (for instance, Wagner, or Schopenhauer), " rest, peace from the enemy peace,notthisendlessstriving ;
" and he is terrified. Even in this wish for freedom there is cowardice ; in the igno- minious lament there is desertion as if he were too small for the fight. What is the use of it all, he cries to the
universe ; and is at once ashamed, for he is demanding happiness, and that his own burden should rest on other shoulders. Kant's lonely man does not dance or laugh he neither brawls nor makes merry ; he feels no need to make a noise, because the universe is so silent around him. To acquiesce in his loneliness is the splendid supremacy of the Kantian. )
;;
? i62 SEX AND CHARACTER
more than a point in space) from whence it came, after having been in some unknown way endowed with life for a brief space. The second point of view enhances my im- portance, makes me an intelHgence, infinite and uncon- ditioned through my personaHty, the moral law in which separates me from the animals and from the world of sense, removes me from the limits of time and space, and links me with infinity. "
The secret of the critique of practical reason is that man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation.
He has no object outside himself ; lives for nothing else ;
he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities ; he stands far above social ethics ; he is alone.
? CHAPTER VIII
THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS
? ' In the beginning the world was nothing but the Atman, in the form of a man. It looked around and saw nothing different to itself. Then it cried out once,
Itis L' Thatis howtheword' I' cameto be. That is why even at the present day, if any one is called, he answers, 'It is I,' and then recalls his other name, the one he bears. "--(Brihadaranyata-Upanishad. )
Many disputations about principles in psychology arise from individual characterological differences in the dis- putants. Thus, in the mode that I have already suggested, charactero)ogy might play an important part. When one person thinks to have discovered this, the other that, by introspection, characterology would have to show why the results in the one case should differ from those in the other, or, at least, to point out in what other respects the persons in question were unlike. I see no other possible way of clear- ingupthedisputedpointsofpsychology. Psychologyisa scienceofexperiences,and,therefore,it mustproceedfrom
the individual to the general, and not, as in the supra-indi- vidualistic laws of logic and ethics, proceed from the uni- versal to the individual case. There is no such thing as an empirical general psychology ; and it would be a mistake to approach such without having fully reckoned with differential psychology.
It is a great pity that psychology has been placed between philosophyandtheanalysisofperceptions. Fromwhich- ever side psychologists approached the subject, they have always been assured of the general validity of their results.
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164
Perhaps even so fundamental a question as to whether or no perception itself implies an actual and spontaneous act of consciousness cannot be solved without a consideration of characterological differences.
The purpose of this work is to apply characterology to the solution of a few of these doubtful matters, with special referencetothedistinctionsbetweenthesexes. Thedifferent conceptions of the I-problem, however, depend not so much ondifferencesofsexasondifferencesingiftedness. The dispute between Hume and Kant receives its characterolo- gical explanation much in the same way as if 1 were to dis- tinguish two men in so far as the one held in the highest esteem the works of Makart and Gounod, the other those ofRembrandtandBeethoven. Iwouldsimplydistinguish the two by their giftedness. So also the judgments about the " I " must be very different in the cases of differently giftedmen. Therehavebeennotrulygreatmenwhowere not persuaded of the existence of the " I " ; a man who denies it cannot be a great man.
In the course of the following pages this proposition will be taken as absolutely binding, and will be used really as a means of valuing genius.
There has been no famous man who, at least some time in the course of his life, and generally earlier in proportion to his greatness, has not had a moment in which he was absolutely convinced of the possession of an ego in the highest sense.
Let us compare the following utterances of three very great geniuses.
Jean Paul relates in his autobiographical sketch, " Truths from my own Life " :
** I can never forget a circumstance which, so far, has been related by no one--the birth of my own self-conscious- ness, the time and place of which I can tell. One morning I was standing, as a very young child, at the front door, and looking towards the wood-shed I suddenly saw, all at once, my inner likeness. ' I ' am ' I' flashed like lightning from the skies across me, and since then has remained. I saw
:
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 165
myself then for the first time and for ever. This cannot be explained as a confusion of memory, for no alien narrative could have blended itself with this sacred event, preserved permanently in my memory by its vividness and novelty. "
Novalis, in his " Miscellaneous Fragments," refers to an identical experience :
"This factor every one must experience for himself. It is a factor of the higher order, and reveals itself only to higher men ; but men should strive to induce it in them- selves. Philosophy is the exercise of this factor, it is a true self-revelation, the stimulation of the real ego by the ideal ego. It is the foundation of all other revelations
;
the resolution to philosophise is a challenge to the actual ego, to become conscious of itself, to grow and to become a soul. "
^Schelling discusses the same phenomenon in his "Philoso- phical Letters upon Dogmatism and Criticism," a little known early work, in which occurs the following beautiful words
" In all of us there dwells a secret marvellous power of freeing ourselves from the changes of time, of withdrawing to our secret selves away from external things, and of so discover- ing to ourselves the eternal in us in the form of unchange- ability. Thispresentationofourselvestoourselvesisthemost truly personal experience upon which depends everything that we know of the supra-sensual world. This presenta- tion shows us for the first time what real existence is, whilst all else only appears to be. It differs from every presenta- tion of the sense in its perfect freedom, whilst all other presentations are bound, being overweighted by the burden of the object. Still there exists for those who have not this perfect freedom of the inner sense some approach to it, experiences approaching it from which they may gain some faint idea of it. . . . )This intellectual presentation occurs when we cease to be our own object, when, with- drawing into ourselves, the perceiving self merges in the self-perceived. At that moment we annihilate time and duration of time; we are no longer in time, but time, or
? i66 SEX AND CHARACTER
rather eternity itself, is in us. The external world is no longer an object for us, but is lost in us. "
The positivist will perhaps only laugh at the self-deceived deceiver, the philosopher who asserts that he has had such experiences. Well, it is not easy to prevent it. It is also unnecessary. ButI ambynomeansoftheopinionthat this " factor of a higher order " plays the same part in all men of genius of a mystical identity of subject and object as Schelling describes it.
Whether there are undivided experiences in which the dualism of actual life is overcome, as is indicated by Plotin and the Indian Mahatmas, or whether this is only the highest intensification of experience, but in principle similar to all others--does not signify here, the coincidence of sub- ject and object, of time and eternity, the representing of God through living men, will neither be demonstrated as possible nor denied as impossible. The experiencing of one's own " I " is not to be begun by theoretical knowledge, and no one has ever, so far, tried to put it in the position of a systematic philosophy. I shall, therefore, not call this factor of a higher order, which manifests itself in some men in one way and in other men in another way, an essential manifestation of the true ego, but only a phase of it.
'(^Every great man knows this phase of the ego. He may become conscious of it first through the love of a woman, for the great man loves more intensely than the ordinary man ; or it may be from the contrast given by a sense of guilt or the knowledge of having failed ; these, too, the great man feels more intensely than smaller-minded people. It may lead him to a sense of unity with the all, to the seeing of all things in God, or, and this is more likely, it may reveal to him the frightful dualism of nature and spirit in the universe, and produce in him the need, the craving, for a solution of it, for the secret inner wonder) But always it leads the great man to the beginning of a presentation of the world for himself and by himself, without the help of the thought of others.
This intuitive vision of the world is not a great synthesis
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 167
elaborated at his writing-table in his library from all the booksthathavebeenwritten; itissomethingthathasbeen experienced, and as a whole it is clear and intelligible, although details may still be obscure and contradictory. The excitation of the ego is the only source of this intuitive vision of the world as a whole in the case of the artist as in thatofthephilosopher. And,howeverdifferenttheymay be, if they are really intuitive visions of the cosmos, they have this in common, something that comes only from the excitation of the ego, the faith that every great man pos-> sesses, the conviction of his possession of an " I " or soul, which is solitary in the universe, which faces the universe and comprehends it. -
From the time of this first excitation of his ego, the great man, in spite of lapses due to the most terrible feeling, the feeling of mortality, will live in and by his soul.
,(And it is for this reason, as well as from the sense of his creative powers, that the great man has so intense a self- consciousness. Nothingcanbemoreunintelligentthanto talk of the modesty of great men, of their inability to recog- nisewhatiswithinthem. Thereisnogreatmanwhodoes not well know how far he differs from others (except during these periodical fits of depression to which I have already alluded). Every great man feels himself to be great as soon as he has created something ; his vanity and ambition are, in fact, always so great that he over-estimates himself. Schopenhauer believed himself to be greater than Kant. Nietzsche declared that " Thus spake Zarathustra " was the
greatest book in the world.
There is, however, a side of truth in the assertion that
great men are m^,dest. They are never arrogant. Arro- gance and self-realisation are contradictories, and should neverbeconfui^edalthoughthisisoftendone. Amanhas just as much arrogance as he lacks of self-realisation, and uses it to increase his own self-consciousness by artificially lowering his estimation of others. Of course the fore- going holds true only of what may be called physiological, unconscious arrogance ; the great man must occasionally
? 1 68 SEX AND CHARACTER
comport himself with what seems rudeness to contemptible persons.
^All great men, then, have a conviction, really independent of external proof, that they have a soul. The absurd fear must be laid aside that the soul is a hyperempirical reality and that belief in it leads us to the position of the the- ologists. Belief in a soul is anything rather than a supersti- tionandisnomerehandmaidofreligioussystems. Artists speak of their souls although they have not studied philosophy or theology ; atheists like Shelley use the ex- pression and know very well what they mean by it)-
Others have suggested that the " soul " is only a beautiful empty word, which people ascribe to others without having felt its need for themselves. This is like saying that great artists use symbols to express the highest form of reality without being assured as to the existence of that reality. The mere empiricist and the pure physiologist no doubt will consider that ail this is nonsense, and that Lucretius is theonlygreatpoet. Nodoubttherehasbeenmuchmisuse of the word, but if great artists speak of their soul they knowwhattheyareabout. Artists,likephilosophers,know well when they approach the greatest possible reality, but
Hume had no sense of this.
^The scientific man ranks, as 1 have already said, and as I
shall presently prove, below the artist and the philosopher. The two latter may earn the title of genius which must always be denied to the scientific man^ Without any good reason having been assigned for it, it has usually been the case that the voice of genius on any particular problem is listened to before the voice of science. Is there justice in this preference ? Can the genius explain things as to which the man of science, as such, can say nothing ? Can he peer into depths where the man of science is blind ?
The conception genius concludes universality. If theie were an absolute genius (a convenient fiction) there would be nothing to which he could not have a vivid, intimate, and complete relation. Genius, as I have already shown, would have universal comprehension, and through its
;
? THE " I " PROBLEM AND GENIUS 169
perfect memory would be independent of time. To com- prehend anything one must have within one something similar. <^A man notices, understands, and comprehends onlythosethingswithwhichhehassomekinship. The genius is the man with the most intense, most vivid, most conscious,mostcontinuous,andmostindividualego. The ego is the central point, the unit of comprehension, the synthesis of all manifoldness. )
(^he ego of the genius accordingly is simply itself universal comprehension, the centre of infinite space ; the great man contains the whole universe within himself genius is the
;
living microcosm/ He is not an intricate mosaic, a chemical combination of an infinite number of elements ; the argu- ment m chap. iv. as to his relation to other men and things must not be taken in that sense ; he is everything.
In him and through him all psychical manifestations cohere and are real experiences, not an elaborate piece-work, a whole put together from parts in the fashion of science. Forthegeniustheegoistheall,livesastheall; thegenius sees nature and all existences as whole ; the relations of things flash on him intuitively ; he has not to build bridges ofstonesbetweenthem. Andsothegeniuscannotbean empirical psychologist slowly collecting details and linking them by associations ; he cannot be a physicist, envisaging the world as a compound of atoms and molecules.
L It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the \ genius always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. And so the man of genius is the profound man, and profound only in proportion to his \ genius. Thatiswhyhisviewsaremorevaluablethanthose of all others. He constructs from everything his ego that holds the universe, whilst others never reach a full con- sciousness of this inner self, and so, for him, all things have significance, all thmgs are symbolical. ) For him breathing is something more than the coming and going of gases through the walls of the capillaries ; the blue of the sky is
? SEX AND CHARACTER
more than the partial polarisation of diffused and reflected light ; snakes are not merely reptiles that have lost limbs. If it were possible for one single man to have achieved all the scientific discoveries that have ever been made, if every- thing that has been done by the following : Archimedes and Lagrange, Johannes Mu? ller and Karl Ernst von Baer, Newton and Laplace, Konrad Sprengel and Cuvier, Thucy- dides and Niebuhr, Friedrich August Wolf and Franz Bopp, and by many more famous men of science, could have been achieved by one man in the short span of human life, he would still not be entitled to the denomination of genius, for none of these have pierced the depths. The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are ; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea and moun- tain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he recognises in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation.
jJ^And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special aspect of hisinnerlife; theuniverseandtheegohavebecomeonein him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. ^ The greatest poly- historian, on the contrary, does nothmg but add branch to branch and yet creates no completed structure. That is another reason why the great scientist is lower than the great artist, the great philosopher. The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast ; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in him- self. Although these remarks apply more to genius than to the nature of the productions of genius, although the occur- ence of artistic ecstasy, philosophic conceptions, religious fervour remain as puzzling as ever, if merely the conditions, not the actual process of a really great achievement has
lyo
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS 171
been made clearer, yet this is nevertheless to be the final definition of genius :
A man may be called a genius when he lives in conscious connection with the whole universe. It is only then that the genius becomes the really divine spark in mankind.
The great idea oi the soul of man as the microcosm, the most important discovery of the philosophy of the Renaissance--although traces of the idea are to be found in Plato and Aristotle--appears to be quite disregarded by modernthinkerssincethedeathofLeibnitz. Ithashitherto been held as only holding good for genius, as the prerogative of those masters of men.
Buttheincongruityisonlyapparent. Allmankindhave some of the quality of genius, and no man has it entirely. Genius is a condition to which one man draws close whilst another is further away, which is attained by some in early days, but with others only at the end of life.
The man to whom we have accorded the possession of genius, is only he who has begun to see, and to open the eyes of others. That they then can see with their own eyes proves that they were only standing before the door.
Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect relationship to everything : his idea of the " whole " is only a glimpse, he does not succeed in identifying himself with it. But he is not without the possibility of following this identification in another, and so attaining a composite image. Through some vision of the world he can bind himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can make each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite strange to him, and in all a band of sympathy exists between him and the things of the world. It is not so with plants oranimals. Theyarelimited,theydonotknowthewhole, but only one element ; they do not populate the whole earth, and where they are widely dispersed it is in the service of man, who has allotted to them everywhere the same task. They may have a relation to the sun or to the moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the "starry vault" and "the moral law. " For the latter
SEX AND CHARACTER
originates in the soul of man, in which is hidden all totality, which can see everything because it is universal itself : the starry heavens and the moral law are fundamen- tallyoneandthesame. Theuniversalismofthecategorical imperative is the universalism of the universe.
The infinity of the universe is only the "thought-picture" of the infinity of the moral volition.
This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles, that mighty magician.
Fa/p /Jiv yap yatav OTrwTrajntv, vSari S'uow/o, AlBepi S'aWepa Slov, drap irvpX irvp a? ihrtXov, ^Topyy ^? (TTopyriv, vaixog Se rt i/ti^d Aoy/otj>>.
And Plotinus ;
V Xo. p av TTiiiiroTt nosv otpSaXfibg rjXiov riXiotiSng firj Ytyij/rjjuevo^,
which Goethe imitated in the famous verse
" War' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne ko? nnt' es nie erblicken
Lag' nicht in uns des Gottes eig'ne Kraft,
" Wie ko? nnt uns Go? ttliches entzu? cken ?
Man is the only creature, he is the creature in Nature, that has in himself a relation to every thing.
He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things, the man who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is called a genius.
He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom an interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely a man.
The theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, that the lower monads are a mirror of the world without being conscious of this capacity of theirs, expresses the same idea. Themanofgeniuslivesinastateofcompleteunder- standing, an understanding of the whole ; the whole world
172
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? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS
is also in ordinary men, but not in a condition that can become creative. The one Hves in conscious active relation with the whole, the other in an unconscious relation ; the man of genius is the actual, the common man the potential, microcosm. ^J'he genius is the complete man ; the manhood that is latent in all men is in him fully developed.
Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other parts ; he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws, but he himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as the world whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is unconditionedN The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he does not forget himself, and because forgetting, being a functional subjection to time, is neither free nor ethical. He is not brought forward on the wave of a historical movement as its child, to be swallowed up by the next wave, because all, all the past and all the future is contained in his inward vision. He it is whose conscious- ness of immortality is most strong because the fear of death has no terror for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to symbols and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that it is within him and ail that is outside him. We is the freest and the wisest and the most moral of men, and for these reasons he suffers most of all from what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within him. S
How does the morality of great men reveal itself in their relations to other men ? This, according to the popular view, is the only form which morality can assume, apart from contraventions of the penal code. And certainly in this respect, great men have displayed the most dubious qualities. Have they not laid themselves open to accusa- tions of base ingratitude, extreme harshness, and much worse faults ?
It is certainly true that the greater an artist or philospher may be, the more ruthless he will be in keeping faith with himself, in this very way often disappointing the expectations of those with whom he comes in contact in cvery-day life ;
173
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174
these cannot follow his higher flights and so try to bind the
eagle to earth (Goethe and Lavater) and in this way many great men have been branded as immoral.
Goethe, fortunately for himself, preserved a silence about himself so complete that modern people who think that they understand him completely as the light-Hving Olympian, only know a few specks of him taken from his marvellous delineation of Faust ; we may be certain, none the less, that he judged himself severely, and suffered in full measure for the guilt he found in himself. And when an envious No? rgler, who never grasped Schopenhauer's doctrine of detachment and the meaning of his Nirwana, throws the reproach at the latter that he got the last value out of his property, such a mean yelping requires no answer.
/The statement that a great man is most moral towards himself stands on sure ground ; he will not allow alien views to be imposed on him, so obscuring the judgment of his own ego ; he will not passively accept the interpretation of another, of an alien ego, quite different from his own, and if ever he has allowed himself to be influenced, the thoughtwillalwaysbepainfultohim. Aconsciousliethathe has told will harass him throughout his life, and he will be unable to shake off the memory in Dionysian fashiory ^ut men of genius will suffer most when they become aware afterwards that they have unconsciously helped to spread a lie in their talk or conduct with others. Other men, who do not possess this organic thirst for truth, are always deeply involved in lies and errors, and so do not understand the bitter revolt of great men against the " lies of life. ")
The great man, he who stands high, he in whom the ego, unconditioned by time, is dominant, seeks to maintain his own value in the presence of his intelligible ego by his intellectual and moral conscience. His pride is towards himself ; there is the desire in him to impress his own self by his thoughts, actions, and creations. This pride is the pride peculiar to genius, possessing its own standard of value, and it is independent of the judgment of others, since it possesses in itself a higher tribunal. Soft and
? THE **! " PROBLEM AND GENIUS
ascetic natures (Pascal is an example) sometimes suffer from this self-pride, and yet try in vain to shake it off. This self-pride will always be associated with pride before others, but the two forms are really in perpetual conflict.
Can it be said that this strong adaptation to duty towards oneself prejudices the sense of duty towards one's neigh- bours ? Do not the two stand as alternatives, so that he who always keeps faith with himself must break it with others ? By no means. As there is only one truth, so there can be only one desire for truth--what Carlyle called smcerity--that a man has or has not with regard both to himself and to the world (it is never one of two, a view of
;
the world differing from a view of oneself, a self-study with- out a world-study ; there is only one duty and only one morality. Man acts either morally or immorally, and if he is moral towards himself he is moral towards other^
There are few regions of thought, however, so full of false ideas, as the conception of moral duty towards one's neighbours and how it is to be fulfilled. Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, the theoretical systems of morality which are based on the maintenance of human society, and which attach less importance to the concrete feelings and motives at the moment of action than to the effect on the general system of morality, we come at once to the popular idea which defines the morality of a man by his "goodness," the degree to which his com- passionatedispositionisdeveloped. Fromthephilosophi- cal point of view, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith saw in sympathy the nature and source of all ethical conduct, and this view received a very strong support from Schopen- hauer's sympathetic morality. Schopenhauer's *' Essay on the Foundations of Morality" shows in its motto "It is easy to preach morality, difficult to find a basis for it," the fundamental error of the sympathetic ethics which always fails to recognise that the science of ethics is not merely an explanation and description of conduct, but a search for a guide to it. Whoever will be at the pains diligently
to listen to the inner voice of man, in order to establish
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what he ought to do, will certainly reject every system of ethics, the aim of which is to be a doctrine of the require- ments which man has invented for himself and others instead of being a relation of what he actually does in furthering these requirements or in stifling them. The object of all moral science is not what is happening but what ought to happen.
All attempts to explain ethics by psychology overlook the fact that every psychic event in man is appraised by man himself, and the appraiser of the psychic event cannot be a psychic event. This standard can only be an idea, or a value which is never fully realised, and which cannot be altered by any experience because it remains constant, even if all experience is in opposition to it. Moral conduct can be only conduct controlled by an idea. And so we can choose only from systems of morality which set up some idea or maxim for the regulation of conduct, and there are only two to choose from, the ethical socialism or social ethics, founded by Bentham and Mill, but imported to the Continent and diligently propagated in Germany and Norway, and ethical individualism such as is taught by Christianity and German idealism.
The second failure of all the systems of ethics founded on sympathy is that they attempt to find a foundation for morality, to explain morality, whilst the very conception of morality is that it should be the ultimate standard of human conduct, and so must be inexplicable and non- derivative, must be its own purpose, and cannot be brought into relation of cause and effect with anything outside itself. This attempted derivation of morality is simply another aspect of the purely descriptive, and therefore necessarily, relative, ethics, and is untenable from the fact that however diligently the search be made, it is impossible to find in the sphere of causes and effects a high aim that would be applicable to every moral action. The inspiring motive of an action cannot come from any nexus of cause and effect ; it is much more in the nature of things for cause and effect to be linked with an inspiring
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moral aim. Outside the domain of first causes there lies a domain of moral aims, and this latter domain is the inheri- tance of mankind. The complete science of existence is a linking together of first causes until the first cause of all is reached, and a complete science of " oughts " leads to a union of all in one great aim, the culminating moral imperative.
He who rates sympathy as a positive moral factor has treated as moral something that is a feeling, not an act. Sympathy may be an ethical phenomenon, the expres- sion of something ethical, but it is no more an ethical act than are the senses of shame and pride ; we must clearly distinguish between an ethical act and an ethical phenomenon. Nothing must be considered an ethical act that is not a confirmation of the ethical idea by action ; ethical phenomena are unpremeditated, involun- tary signs of a permanent tendency of the disposition towards the moral idea. It is in the struggle between motives that the idea presses in and seeks to make the decision ; the empirical mixture of ethical and unethical feelings, sympathy and malice, self-confidence and presump- tion, gives no help towards a conclusion. Sympathy is, perhaps, the surest sign of a disposition, but it is not the moral purpose inspiring an action. Morality must imply conscious knowledge of the moral purpose and of value as opposedtoworthlessness. Socrateswasrightinthis,and Kant is the only modern philosopher who has followed him. Sympathy is a non-logical sensation, and has no claim to respect.
The question now before us is to consider how far a man can act morally with regard to his fellow men.
It is certainly not by unsolicited help which obtrudes itself on the solitude of another and pierces the limits that he has set for himself ; not by compassion but rather by respect. This respect we owe only to man, as Kant showed ; for man is the only creature in the universe who is a purpose to himself.
But how can I show a man my contempt, and how
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prove to him my respect ? The first by ignoring him, the second by being friendly with him.
HowcanI usehimasameansto anend,andhowcan I honour him by regarding him himself as an end ? In the first case, by looking upon him as a link in the chain of circumstances with which I have to deal ; in the second, by endeavouring to understand him. It is only by interesting oneself in a man, without exactly telling him so, by thinking of him, by grasping his work, by sympathising with his fate, and by seeking to understand him, that one can respect one's neighbour. Only he who, through his own afflictions, has become unselfish, who forgets small wranglings with his fellow man, who can repress his im- patience, and who endeavours to understand him, is really disinterested with regard to his neighbour ; and he behaves morally because he triumphs over the strongest enemy to his understanding of his neighbour--selfishness.
How does the famous man stand in this respect ? He who understands the most men, because he is mostuni- versal in disposition, and who lives in the closest relation to the universe at large, who most earnestly desires to understand its purpose, will be most likely to act well towards his neighbour.
As a matter of fact, no one thinks so much or so intently as he about other people (even although he has only seen them for a moment), and no one tries so hard to understand them if he does not feel that he already has them within him in all their significance. Inasmuch as he has a con- tinuous past, a complete ego of his own, he can create the past which he did not know for others. He follows the strongest bent of his inner being if he thinks about them, for he seeks only to come to the truth about them by understanding them. He sees that human beings are all members of an intelligible world, in which there is no narrow egoism or altruism. This is the only explanation of how it is that great men stand in vital, understanding relationship, not only with those round about them, but with all the personalities of history who have preceded them ;
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this is the only reason why great artists have grasped his- torical personalities so much better and more intensively than scientific historians. There has been no great man who has not stood in a personal relationship to Napoleon, Plato, or Mahomet. It is in this way that he shows his respect and true reverence for those who have lived before him. When many of those who have been intimate with artists feel aggrieved when later on they recognise them- selves in their works ; when writers are reproached for treating everything as copy, it is easy enough to understand the feeling. But the artist or author who does not heed the littlenesses of mankind has committed no crime, he has simply employed his creative act of understanding with regard to them, by a single-minded representation and reproduction of the world around him, and there can be no higher relation between men than this. The following
words of Pascal, which have already been mentioned, are specially applicable here : "A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre les hommes. " It follows from the foregoing that the greater a man is the greater efforts he will make to understand things that are most strange to him, whilst the ordinary man readily thinks that he understands a thing, although it may be something he does not at all understand, so that he fails to perceive the unfamiliar spirit which is appealing to him from some object of art or from a philosophy, and at most attains a super- ficial relation to the subject, but does not rise to the inspira- tion of its creator. The great man who attains to the highest rungs of consciousness does not easily identify himself and his opinion with anything he reads, whilst those with a lesser clarity of mind adopt, and imagine that they absorb, things that in reality are very different. The man of genius ishewhoseegohasacquiredconsciousness. Heisenabled by it to distinguish the fact that others are different, to perceive the " ego " of other men, even when it is not pro- nounced enough for them to be conscious of it themselves. But it is only he who feels that every other man is also an
? i8o ' SEX AND CHARACTER
ego, a monad, an individual centre of the universe, with specific manner of feeling and thinking and a distinct past, he alone is in a position to avoid making use of his neigh- bours as means to an end, he, according to the ethics of Kant, will trace, anticipate, and therefore respect the per- sonality in his companion (as part of the intelligible universe), and will not merely be scandalised by him. The psychological condition of all practical altruism, therefore, is theoretical individualism.
Here lies the bridge between moral conduct towards oneself and moral conduct towards one's neighbour, the apparent want of which in the Kantian philosophy Schopen- hauer unjustly regarded as a fault, and asserted to arise necessarily out of Kant's first principles.
^
It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons take absolutely no interest in their fellow men ; they live as if they were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour, and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of hisbeingbehavestoasecondmanasif thelatterwerenot amanandhadnopersonalityofhisown. "I"and"thou" arecomplementaryterms. Amansoonestgainsconscious- ness of himself when he is with other men. This is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self- confidence is damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in
practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism ;
if there is no " thou," there is certainly no " I," and that would mean there is nothing.
There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And this is it : he who feels his own per- sonality, feels it also in others. For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The highest indivi-
? THE "I" PROBLEM AND GENIUS i8i
dualismisthehighestuniversaHsm. ErnestMackisingreat error when he denies the subject, and thinks it is only after the renunciation of the individual " I " that an ethical rela- tion, which excludes neglect of the strange " I " and over- estimation of the individual " I," may be expected. It has already been seen where the want of one's own I leads in relation to one's neighbour. The I is the fundamental ground of all social morality. I should never be able to place myself, as an actual psychological being, in an ethical relation to a mere bundle of elements. It is possible to imagine such a relationship ; but it is entirely opposed to practical conduct ; because it eliminates the psychological condition necessary for making the moral idea an actual reality.
We are preparing for a real ethical relation to our fellow men when we make them conscious that each of them possesses a higher self, a soul, and that they must realise the souls in others.
This relation is, however, manifested in the most curious manner in the man of genius. No one suffers so much as he with the people, and, therefore, for the people, with whom he lives. For, in a certain sense, it is certainly only " by suffering " that a man knows. If compassion is not itself clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge, it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the acquisition of knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius under- stands men. And the genius suffers most because he suffers with and in each and all ; but he suffers most through his understanding.
Although I tried to show in an earlier chapter that genius is the factor which primarily elevates man above the animals, and in connection with that fact that it is man alone who has a history (this being explained by the pre- sence in all men of some degree of the quality of genius). I must return to that earlier side of my argument. Genius involves the living actuality of the intelligible subject. History manifests itself only as a social thing, as the " ob- jective spirit," the individuals as such playing no part in it,
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being, in fact, non-historical. Here we see the threads of our argument converging. If it be the case, and I do not think that I am wrong, that the timeless, human personality is the necessary condition of every real ethical relation to our fellow men, and if individuality is the necessary pre- liminary to the collective spirit, then it is clear why the "metaphysical animal" and the "political animal," the possessor of genius and the maker of history, are one and the same, are humanity. And the old controversy is settled ; which comes first, the individual or the community ?
Both must be equal and simultaneous.
I think that I have proved at every point that genius is
simply the higher morality. The great man is not only the truest to himself, the most unforgetful, the one to whom errors and lies are most hateful and intolerable ; he is also the most social, at the same time the most self-contained, and the most open man. The genius is altogether a higher form, not merely intellectually, but also morally. In his own person, the genius reveals the idea of man- kind. He represents what man is ; he is the subject whose object is the whole universe which he makes endure
,for all time.
Let there be no mistake. Consciousness and conscious-
ness alone is in itself moral all unconsciousness is immoral, ;
and all immorality is unconscious. The ** immoral genius," the "great wicked man," is, therefore, a mythical animal, invented by great men in certain moments of their lives as a possibility, in order (very much against the will of the Creator) to serve as a bogey for nervous and timid natures, with which they frighten themselves and other children. No criminal who prided himself in his deed would speak like Hagen in the " Go? tterda? mmerung " over Siegfried's dead body : " Ha, ha, I have slain him ; I, Hagen, gave him his death blow. "
Napoleon and Bacon, who are given as counter-instances, were intellectually much over-rated or wrongly represented. And Nietzsche is the least reliable in these matters, when he begins to discuss the Borgia type. The conception of the
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diabolical, of the anti-Christ, of Ahriman, of the "radical evil in human nature," is exceedingly powerful, yet it con- cerns genius only inasmuch as it is the opposite of it. It is a fiction, created in the hours in which great men have struggled against the evil in themselves.
Universal comprehension, full consciousness, and perfect
timelessness are an ideal condition, ideal even for gifted
men genius is an innate imperative, which never becomes ;
a fully accomplished fact in human beings. Hence it is that a man of genius will be the last man to feel himself in the position to say of himself: " I am a genius. " Genius is, in its essence, nothing but the full completion of the idea of a man, and, therefore, every man ought to have some quality of it, and it should be regarded as a possible principle for every one.
Genius is the highest morality, and, therefore, it is every one's duty. Genius is to be attained by a supreme act of the will, in which the whole universe is affirmed in the individual. Genms is something which "men of genius" take upon themselves ; it is the greatest exertion and the greatest pride, the greatest misery and the greatest ecstasy to a man. <^ man may become a genius if he wishes to)
But at once it will certainly be said : " Very many men would like very much to be * original geniuses,' " and their wish has no effect. But if these men who " would like very much " had a livelier sense of what is signified by their wish, if they were aware that genius is identical with uni- versal responsibility--and until that is grasped it will only be a wish and not a determination--it is highly probable that a very large number of these men would cease to wish to become geniuses.