CHAPTER II

THE PROBLEM OF THE OPTIMISTIC WORLD-VIEW

The Western and the Indian conceptions of civilization

FOR us Westerners civilization consists in this, that we work for the perfecting of ourselves and of the world at the same time.

But do the activities that are directed outwards and inwards necessarily belong together? Cannot the spiritual and moral perfecting of the individual, which is the ultimate aim of civilization, also be secured if he works for himself only and leaves the world and its circumstances to themselves? Who gives us any guarantee that the course of the world can be influenced so as to promote the special aim of civilization, viz., the perfecting of the individual? Who tells us that it has any meaning at all which can be further developed? Is not any action of mine which is directed on the world a diversion of what could be directed on myself, though everything depends finally upon the latter?

Moved by these doubts the pessimism of the Hindus and that of Schopenhauer refuse to allow any importance to the material and social achievements, which form the outward and visible part of civilization. About society, nation, mankind, the individual is not to trouble himself; he is only to strive to experience in himself the sovereignty of spirit over matter.

This, too, is civilization, in that it pursues the final object of the latter, viz., the spiritual and ethical perfecting of the individual. If we Westerners pronounce it incomplete, we must not do so too confidently. Do the outward progress of mankind and the inner completion of the individual really belong together as we imagine them to? Are we not, under an illusion, forcing together things which are [pg 012] different in kind? Has the spirit in one kind of action actually some gain for the other?

What we set up as our ideal we have not realized. We lost ourselves in outward progress, allowing the moralization and inward deepening of the individual to come to a stop. So we have not been able to produce practical proof of the correctness of our view of what civilization is. We cannot, therefore, simply put aside that other narrower conception, but must come to terms with it.

There will come a time—it is already being prepared for—when pessimistic and optimistic thought, which have hitherto talked past each other almost as strangers, will have to meet for practical discussion. World-philosophy is just dawning. It will shape itself in a struggle as to whether its world-view shall be optimistic or pessimistic.

The struggle for the optimistic world-view

The history of Western philosophy is the history of the struggle for an optimistic world-view. If in antiquity and in modern times the peoples of Europe have managed to produce a civilization, it is because in their thought the optimistic world-view was dominant, and held the pessimistic permanently in subjection, although it was not able to suppress it altogether.

The accessions of knowledge which have come in the course of our philosophy have been nothing in themselves: they always stand in the service of one world-view or the other, and attain only in it to their real significance.

But the characteristic thing about the way in which the settlement is made on each occasion, is that it never is made openly. The two world-views are never brought face to face and the case of each heard. That the optimistic alone is in the right is a conviction which is accepted as more or less self-evident. The only thing felt as a problem is how to marshal all possible knowledge in the triumphal procession of proof to defeat the other, and to knock on the head anything that may still wish to rise in its defence.

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Since the pessimistic world-view has never made its presence properly felt, Western thought manifests a lofty unwillingness to understand it, though it has a splendid faculty for detecting it. Where it finds, as in Spinoza, too little interest for activity directed upon the world, it reacts immediately with rejection of it. Yet all objectively thinking investigation of the reality of nature is disliked by it because it may lead to the central position of the human spirit in the world being insufficiently emphasised. It is because materialism seems likely to be the last ally of pessimism that it carries on so embittered a struggle against it.

In the discussion of the problem of the theory of knowledge from Descartes to Kant and beyond him it is really the cause of the optimistic world-view which is being maintained. That is why the theoretical possibility of a depreciation or a denial of the world of sense is attacked with such obstinacy. By proving the ideality of space and time Kant hopes to make finally secure the optimistic world-view of rationalism with all its ideals and demands. Only so can it be explained that the most acute examinations of the theory of knowledge are carried through with the most naïve conclusions about world-view. The great post-Kantian systems of thought, however much they differ from one another in their subject-matter and the process of the speculation with which they deal with it, are all united in this, that they crown the optimistic world-view in their cloud-castles as the ruler of the universe.

To fit in the aims of mankind with those of the universe in a logically convincing fashion, that is the endeavour in which European philosophy serves the optimistic world-view. Anyone who does not help, or who is indifferent about it, is an enemy.

In its prejudice against scientific materialism philosophy was right. Materialism has done much more to shake the position of the optimistic world-view than Schopenhauer has, although it never proceeded against it with outspoken hostility. When, after the collapse of the great systems, [pg 014] it was allowed to seat itself at table with philosophy, which had now become more modest, it even exerted itself to find out in what sort of tone the latter would like the conversation to be carried on. In dealing with Darwin and others, philosophizing natural science made touchingly naïve attempts so to extend and stretch out the history of zoological development which led up to man, that mankind and with it the spiritual should appear again as the goal of the world-process, as in the speculative systems. But in spite of these well-meant efforts of the proletarian guest the conversation could no longer be carried on in the old spirit. Of what use was it for him to try to be better than his reputation? He brought with him more respect for nature and facts than was consistent with the convincing establishment of the optimistic world-view. He therefore shook it, even when he did not intend to.

To such a disregard of nature and science as was shown by the earlier philosophy we can never return. Nor can we expect the return of a system of thought which makes it possible to discover in any convincing way in the universe the aims and objects of mankind, as was allowed by the old methods. The optimistic world-view ceases, therefore, to be self-evident to us, or to be demonstrable by the arts of philosophy. It must give up the idea of finding for itself a solid foundation.

Optimism and Pessimism

Confusion is caused by the fact that the optimistic and pessimistic world-views seldom come forward in their purity in the history of human thought. Their relations are usually such that the one is predominant, while the other treats with it without being officially recognized. In India a tolerated world- and life-affirmation maintains for pessimism something of interest in the external civilization which it nominally denies. With us pessimism slips in and gnaws at the civilizing energies of the optimistic view, the result being that belief in the spiritual progress of [pg 015] mankind has left us. From it, too, comes the fact that we everywhere conduct the business of life with lowered ideals.

Pessimism is a lowered will-to-live, and is to be found wherever man and society are no longer under the pressure of all those ideals of progress which must be thought out by a will-to-live that is consistent with itself, but have sunk to the level of letting actuality be, over wide stretches of life, nothing but actuality.

It is where pessimism is at work in this anonymous fashion, that it is most dangerous to civilization. It attacks then the most valuable ideas belonging to life-affirmation, leaving the less valuable ones untouched. Like some concealed source of magnetic power it disturbs the world-view’s compass, so that it takes, without suspecting it, a wrong course. Thus the unavowed mixture of optimism and pessimism in our thought has the result that we continue to approve the external blessings given us by civilization, things which to thinking pessimism are a matter of indifference, while we abandon that which alone it holds to be valuable, the pursuit of inner perfection. The desire for progress which is directed to objects of sense, goes on functioning because it is nourished by actuality, while that which reaches after the spiritual becomes exhausted, because it is thrown back upon the inner stimulus which comes from the thinking will-to-live. As the tide ebbs, objects which reach deep down are left stranded, while what is just on the surface remains afloat.

Our degeneration, then, traced back to our world-view and what resulted from it, consists in true optimism having, without our noticing it, disappeared from among us. We are by no means a race weakened and decadent through excessive enjoyment of life, and needing to pull ourselves together to show vigour and idealism amid the thunderstorms of history. Although we have retained our vigour in most departments of the direct activities of life, we are spiritually stunted. Our conception of life with all that depends on it has been lowered both for individuals and for the community. The higher forces of volition and [pg 016] influence are impotent in us, because the optimism from which they ought to draw their strength has become imperceptibly permeated with pessimism.

A characteristic feature of the presence at the same time of optimism and pessimism as lodgers in “Thoughtless House” is that each goes about in the other’s clothes, so that what is really pessimism gives itself out among us as being optimism, and _vice versâ_. What passes for optimism with the mass of people is the natural or acquired faculty of seeing things in the best possible light. This illumination of them is the result of a lowered conception of what ought to be now and in the future. A person ill with consumption is brought by the poison of the disease into the condition which is called Euphoria, so that he experiences an imaginary feeling of health and strength. Similarly there is an external optimism present in individuals and in society just in proportion as they are, without realizing it, infected with pessimism.

True optimism has nothing to do with any sort of lenient judgement. It consists in contemplating and willing the ideal in the light of a deep and self-consistent affirmation of life and the world. Because the spirit which is so directed proceeds with clear vision and impartial judgement in the valuing of all that is given, it wears to ordinary people the appearance of pessimism. That it wishes to pull down the old temples in order to build them again more magnificently is by the vulgar optimism put down to its discredit as sacrilege.

The reason, then, why the only legitimate optimism, that of volition inspired by imagination, has to carry on such a hard struggle with pessimism is that it always has first to track the latter down in vulgar optimism and unmask it. That is a task which optimism has never finished, for so long as it allows the enemy to emerge in any shape there is danger for civilization. When that happens, activity in promoting the special aims of civilization always diminishes, even if satisfaction with its material achievements remains as strong as before.

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Optimism and pessimism, therefore, do not consist in counting with more or less confidence on such or such a future for the existing state of things, but in what the will desires to have as the future. They are qualities not of the judgement, but of the will. The fact that up to now that inadmissible definition of these qualities was current side by side with the correct one, so that there were four items to deal with instead of two, made the game easier for the unthinking by deceiving us about what true optimism is. Pessimism of the will they passed off as optimism of the judgement, and optimism of the will they put aside as pessimism of the judgement. These false cards must be taken from them, so that they may not continue to deceive the world in such a fashion.

Optimism, Pessimism, and Ethics

In what relation do optimism and pessimism stand to ethics?

That close and peculiar relations do exist between them is clear from the fact that in the thought of mankind the two struggles, that for optimistic or pessimistic world-view and that about ethics, are usually involved in each other. It is the general belief that when one is being fought out the other is being fought as well.

This mutual connexion is very convenient for thought. When a foundation for ethics is being laid, optimistic or pessimistic arguments are unawares pressed into the service, and _vice versâ_ ethical arguments when optimism or pessimism have to be established. In this process Western thought lays most stress on justifying a life-affirming ethical system, that is an activist one, and thinks that merely by doing so it has proved the case for optimism in its world-view. With Indian thought the most important thing is finding a logical foundation for pessimism, and the justifying of a life-denying ethical system, _i.e._ a passivist one, is rather a derivative from that.

The confusion which resulted from the two struggles for [pg 018] optimism and pessimism and for ethics not being kept distinct, has contributed almost more than anything else to prevent the thought of mankind from attaining to clarity.

It was an easy mistake to make. The question whether it is to be affirmation or denial of life and the world, crops up in ethics in the same way as in the dispute between optimism and pessimism. Things which by their nature belong together feel themselves drawn together, so that optimism naturally thinks it can support itself on an affirmative ethical system, and pessimism thinks the same about a negative one. Nevertheless, the result has hitherto always been that neither of these two closely-related entities could stand firm, because neither of them chose to depend on itself alone.

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