CHAPTER XII

SCHILLER; GOETHE; SCHLEIERMACHER

Schiller’s ethical world-view; Goethe’s world-view based on nature-philosophy

VERY important is the fact that the deepened optimistic-ethical world-view of Kant and Fichte finds a champion in Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), who brings it to the mass of the people with the force, added by poetical language. He is himself philosophically gifted, and undertakes in addition to develop it further. He wishes to broaden the foundation of the ethical by showing its relation to the æsthetic.

In his _Letters Concerning the Æsthetic Education of Mankind_ (1795), he works out the idea that art and ethics belong together as far as this, that man maintains with the sensible world a relation which is free and creative. “The transition from the passive condition of feeling to the active one of thinking and willing comes about in no other way than through an intermediate condition of æsthetic freedom. . . . There is no way of making the sentient man rational other than first making him æsthetic.” In what way the capacity for freedom which is built up in man by æsthetic practice really disposes him to morality, Schiller does not work out in further detail. His treatise, in spite of all the notice it attracted and deserves, is more rhetorical than substantial. He has not gone to the bottom of the problem of the relations between the æsthetic and the ethical.

In contrast to Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), stands in almost as cold an attitude to the world-view of the deepened rationalism as he does to that of ordinary rationalism. To him it is impossible to share [pg 137] the confidence with which others, looking around, regard optimistic and ethical convictions as well founded. What separates him from Kant, and Fichte, and Schiller, is reverence for the reality of nature. Nature is to him something in herself, not merely something existing with a view to mankind. He does not require from her that she shall fit herself completely into our optimistic-ethical designs. He does no violence to her either through epistemological and ethical idealism or through presumptuous speculation, but lives in her as a human being who looks at existence with wonder and does not know how to bring her relation to the world-spirit within any formula.

Descartes led modern philosophy astray by cutting the world up into objects which have extension and objects which think, and by going on, moreover, to refuse to each of them the possibility of influencing the other. Following in his steps, thinkers rack their brains over the problem of these two parallel kinds of existence, and try to embrace the world in formulas. That the world is life, and that in life lies the riddle of riddles, never enters their minds. Hence they overlook in their philosophizing what is most important. Because Descartes preceded them, the two great spirits who adhere to nature-philosophy, Spinoza and Leibniz, cannot get further than a nature-philosophy which is more or less dead. Being in the line of descent from Descartes, Kant and Fichte renounce all philosophizing over the real world.

Descartes and the ethical belief-in-progress, therefore, agree in a common neglect of nature. Both alike overlook the fact that she is living, and that she exists for her own sake, and it is because he cannot join them in this that Goethe dares to confess that he understands nothing about philosophy. His greatness is this: that in a time of abstract and speculative thought he had the courage to remain elemental.

Overwhelmed by the mysterious individual life in nature, he persists in maintaining a magnificently imperfect [pg 138] world-view. With the spirit of an investigator he looks within into everything; in that of an inquirer he looks around upon everything. He wants to think optimistically. Shaftesbury’s thoughts exercise their charm upon him also. But in the chorus of optimism which makes itself heard so loudly around him, he cannot join. World- and life-affirmation is for him not such a simple thing as it is for Fichte and Schiller. He strives to reach an ethical world-view, but admits to himself that he cannot carry it through, and he therefore does not venture to attribute a meaning to nature. To life, however, he will attribute one. He seeks it in serviceable activity. To make the world-view of activity at home in nature-philosophy is to him an inner necessity. The conviction that activity provides the only real satisfaction that is to be found in life and that therein lies the mysterious meaning of existence is shown by him in _Faust_ as something which he has laboriously gained during his pilgrimage through existence and to which he will hold fast, without being able to explain it completely.

Goethe struggles to arrive at a conception of ethical activity, but cannot reach one because nature-philosophy is unable to provide him with any criterion of what is ethical. What that philosophy had to refuse to the Chinese monists and to Spinoza, she cannot give to him either.

The range of this world-view of Goethe’s which deals thus with reality remains hidden from his contemporaries. Its incompleteness alienates their sympathies and irritates them. For knowledge of the world and of life which cannot be reduced to a system, but sticks fast in facts, they have no understanding. They hold to their optimism and their ethic.

Schleiermacher’s attempt at a nature-philosophy

Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), stands apart both from the ordinary and from the deepened rationalism because he cannot free himself from the influence of [pg 139] Spinoza._(_46_)_ His life-work is directed to preaching the Spinozan nature-philosophy as being, as far as he can make it so, both an ethic and the Christian religion. Hence he always dresses it up as one or the other of these.

The accepted ethical code, in Schleiermacher’s opinion, makes man merely run about the earth as an ethical individual bent on improving the world. Living in this way, in a constant state of enthusiasm, he becomes in danger of losing himself and becoming unpersonal. He forgets that his primary duty is, first of all to be alone with himself, to look within himself, and, instead of being a mere human creature, to make himself into a personality.

This renunciation of rationalism’s enthusiasm for activity is to be found in the _Monologues_, those splendid introspective meditations meant for the first New Year’s Day of the nineteenth century. One seems to hear in them Lao-tse and Chwang-tse criticising the moralism and the fanaticism for progress of Confucius.

Man’s first task is, according to Schleiermacher, to realize his oneness with the Infinite and in the Infinite to see the world. Only that which results from this as action is really significant, and has importance for morality.

Spinoza’s ethic consisted in keeping oneself at the highest level and living one’s life more after the fashion of a life of thought than after that of a life of corporeal existence. Schleiermacher’s ethic has the same objective except that he seeks to combine with it a more comprehensive interest in the world than is to be found in Spinoza. He is helped in this direction by his belief that progress is something immanent.

We have, he says, no other perfecting to bring about in things than that which is inherent in them. Ethics, therefore, are not a setting up of laws, but the recognition and the description of the tendencies working for perfection which appear in the world itself, together with behaviour [pg 140] in accord with their spirits. The moral law is not distinct from the law of nature and pursues no other aims than the latter does. It is only the law of nature arriving in man at the consciousness of itself.

Schleiermacher, therefore, feels that his task is not, as Fichte conceived his to be, the bringing of the universe under the sovereignty of reason; it consists solely in supporting the oneness of nature and reason in the sphere of human action, which is ever striving to realize itself within that universe. “All ethical knowledge is the expression of the ever-beginning but never completed efforts of reason to become nature.” Ethics are a contemplative “science.” They revolve around the two poles of natural science and human history.

The ethic which results from this fundamental conception is, like those of Lao-tse and Chwang-tse, so toned down that there is no longer any real power in it. However completely Schleiermacher may try to conceal this fact by his wonderful powers of description, it plays only a subordinate _rôle_. What gives a meaning to human existence is something which is independent of deeds; it is the oneness with the Infinite which is experienced in feeling.

With its clever dialectic, but not in reality, Schleiermacher’s ethic shows itself finally to be superior to that of Spinoza. His world-view is that of Spinoza, only enriched by his belief in the immanence of the power of progress. Hence his ethic is iridescent with somewhat more brilliant colours.

Thus do a living nature-philosophy in Goethe and a Spinozan one in Schleiermacher undermine the ground on which stand the men of the now beginning nineteenth century, whose thinking is so enthusiastically optimistic-ethical. The crowd pays no attention to their dangerous proceedings. It gazes at the fireworks which Kant and Fichte let off, while Schiller recites his poetry. And now there begin to rise bursts of rockets which throw a peculiarly brilliant light. The past-master in the art of firework display, Hegel, has come into action!

[pg 141]