CHAPTER XX

THE ETHIC OF DEVOTION AND THE ETHIC OF SELF-PERFECTING

The widening of the ethic of self-devotion into a cosmic ethic

BEING sufficiently informed about the questions which have called for solution and the results attained in the search for an ethic down to the present time, the ethic of self-devotion and that of self-perfecting can now try to combine their ideas, with a view to establishing together the true basic principle of the moral.

Why do they not succeed in combining their ideas?

On the side of the ethic of self-devotion the fault must somehow lie in the fact that it is too narrow. As a matter of principle social utilitarianism is concerned only with the relations of man to man and to human society. The ethic of self-perfecting on the other hand is something universal. It has to do with the relation of man to the world. If the ethic of self-devotion, therefore, wishes to agree with that of self-perfecting, it must become, like the latter, universal, and let its devotion be directed not only towards man and society but somehow or other towards all life whatever in the world.

But ethics hitherto have been unwilling to take even the first step in this universalizing of devotion.

Just as the housewife who has scrubbed out the parlour, takes care that the door is left shut so that the dog may not get in and spoil the work she has done by the marks of his paws, so do European thinkers watch carefully that no animals run about in the fields of their ethics. The stupidities they are guilty of in trying to maintain the traditional narrow-mindedness and to raise it to a principle [pg 233] border on the incredible. Either they leave out altogether all sympathy for animals, or they take care that it shrinks to a mere afterthought which means nothing. If they admit anything more than that, they think themselves obliged to produce elaborate justifications, or even excuses, for so doing.

It seems as if Descartes with his dictum that animals are mere machines had bewitched the whole of European philosophy.

So important a thinker as Wilhelm Wundt mars his ethic with the following sentences: “The only object for sympathy is man. . . . The animals are for us fellow-creatures, an expression by which language already hints at the fact that we acknowledge here a kind of co-ordination with ourselves only with reference to the ultimate ground of everything that happens, viz., creation. Towards animals also, then, there can arise within us stirrings which are to a certain extent related to sympathy, but as to true sympathy with them there is always wanting the fundamental condition of the inner unity of our will with theirs.” To crown this wisdom he ends with the assertion that of rejoicing with animals there can at any rate be no question, as if he had never seen a thirsty ox drink.

Kant emphasises especially that ethics have to do only with duties of man towards men. The “human” treatment of animals he thinks himself obliged to justify by putting it forward as a practising of sensibility which helps to improve our sympathetic relations with other human beings.

Bentham, too, defends kindness to animals chiefly as a means of preventing the growth of heartless relations with other men, even though he here and there recognises it as something obviously right.

Darwin in his _Descent of Man_ notices that the feeling of sympathy which is dominant in the social impulse, becomes at last so strong that it comes to include all men, and indeed even animals. But he does not pursue the problem and the [pg 234] significance of this fact any further, and contents himself with establishing the ethics of the human herd.

Thus it ranks with European thought as a dogma that ethics have to do properly only with a man’s relation to his fellows and to society. The motives which emanate from Schopenhauer, Stern, and others, for throwing down the antiquated line of circumvallation, are not understood.

This backward attitude is the more unintelligible seeing that both Indian thought and Chinese, even when they have only scarcely begun to develop, make ethics consist in a kindly relation to all creatures. Moreover, they have come to this view quite independently of each other. The subtle and far-reaching commands concerning regard for animals in the popular Chinese ethics of the book _Kan Yin Pien_ (_Concerning Rewards and Punishments_) cannot be referred back, as is commonly supposed, to Buddhist influences._(_105_)_ They have no connexion with metaphysical discussions about the mutual relationship of all beings, such as became effective as the ethical horizon widened in Indian thought, but originate in a living, ethical feeling which dares to draw the consequences which seem to it to be natural.

When European thought refuses to make self-devotion universal, the reason is that its efforts are directed to reaching a rational ethic which deals with universally valid judgments, and it sees a prospect of that only when it can keep its feet upon the solid ground of discussion of the interests of human society. But an ethic which busies [pg 235] itself with the relations of man to the whole creation forsakes it. Such an ethic is driven into discussions about existence as such. Whether it will or not, it has to plunge into the adventure of coming to terms with nature-philosophy, and the result of such an adventure cannot be foreseen.

This is a correct conclusion. But it has already been shown that the ethic of society, which guides men from the outside, supposing it can be drawn up in this way at all, is never a true ethic, but merely an appendix to ethics. It has been established further that true ethics are always subjective, that they have an irrational enthusiasm as their very breath of life, and have to come to terms with nature-philosophy. The ethic of self-devotion has, therefore, no reason for shrinking from this in any case unavoidable adventure. Its house has been burnt down. Let it go out into the world to seek its fortune.

Let it, then, venture to accept the thought that self-devotion has to be practised not only towards men but towards all living creatures, yes, towards all life whatever that exists in the world and is within the reach of man. Let it rise to the conception that the relation of men to each other is only an expression of that in which they all stand to Being and to the world in general. Having thus become cosmic, the ethic of devotion can hope to meet the ethic of self-perfecting, which is fundamentally cosmic, and to unite itself with it.

The ethic of self-perfecting and mysticism

But in order that the ethic of self-perfecting may combine with that of self-devotion, it must first become cosmic in the right way.

It is indeed fundamentally cosmic, because self-perfecting can consist of nothing but this, that man comes into his true relation to the Being that is in him and outside him. His natural, outward connexion with Being he means to [pg 236] change into a spiritual, inward devotion to it, letting his passive and active relation to things be determined by this devotion.

In this effort, however, he has never yet got further than a passive devotion to Being. He is always driven past active devotion to it. This one-sidedness is what makes it impossible for the two ethics of self-perfecting and of self-devotion to penetrate each other, and to produce together the complete ethic of passive and active self-perfecting.

But what is the reason that the ethic of self-perfecting, in spite of all its efforts, cannot get out of the circle of the passive? It is that it allows the spiritual inward devotion to Being to be directed to an abstract notion of Being instead of to real Being. Thus it approaches nature-philosophy in a wrong way.

Whence this error? It is a result of the difficulties which the ethic of self-perfecting meets when it attempts to comprehend itself in nature-philosophy.

In a fashion which is deep, though it strikes us as unfamiliar, Chinese thought undertakes to arrive at this agreement. It thinks that it is somehow or other in the “impersonal” element of the world’s activity that the secret of the truly ethical lies. It accordingly makes spiritual devotion to Being consist in this, that we look away from the subjective stirrings within ourselves, and relate ourselves to the laws of objectivity which we discover in the course of nature.

It is with this deep “becoming like the world” that the thought of Lao-tse and that of Chwang-tse are concerned. The motifs of such an ethic make themselves heard in a wonderful fashion in Lao-tse’s _Taoteking_; but they cannot be made to produce a complete symphony. The meaning of what happens in the world is a thing we cannot investigate. What we do understand of it is that all life tries to live itself out. The true ethic of life, therefore, “in the spirit of what happens” would seem to be that of Yang-tse and Friedrich Nietzsche. On the other hand the assumption [pg 237] of an objectivity, dominant in the course of nature, which can be a pattern for our activity is nothing else than an attempt, undertaken with the palest of colours, to paint the world as ethical. Correspondingly, this existence in the spirit of the world means with Lao-tse and Chwang-tse an inward liberation from the rule of passion and from outward occurrences, which is accompanied by marked depreciations of all tendencies to activity. Whenever life in the spirit of the world leads to a really activist ethic as with Confucius, Mo-Di, and others, there has been a corresponding interpretation of the meaning of the world. Whenever, in general, human thinking raises being-like-the-world to an ethic, the ethical willing of mankind has read somehow or other into the world-spirit an ethical character in order to be able to find itself in it later.

Since no motives to ethical activity are to be discovered in the course of nature, the ethic of self-perfecting must allow both the active and the passive ethic to originate side by side in the bare fact of spiritual inward self-dedication to Being. It must derive them both from the act as such, without any presupposition of any sort of ethical quality in Being. Then first will thought have reached a complete ethic without having been guilty of any sort of naïve or tricky proceedings.

That is the problem at which the ethical searching of all peoples and all ages vainly toils, so far as it ventures to think in the spirit of true nature philosophy. With the Chinese and the Indians, in Stoicism, with Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Fichte, and Hegel, and in all mysticism of union with the Absolute, it reaches only an ethic of resignation, consisting of inward liberation from the world, never at the same time an ethic of working in the world and upon the world.

It is true that it only seldom ventures honestly to admit to itself the unsatisfactory result. As a rule it seeks to widen it, and to maintain in some measure an activist ethic in spite of it, letting this ethic be combined in some form or other with the ethic of resignation. The more [pg 238] consistent the thinkers, the more modest is the space occupied by the piece thus hooked on.

With Lao-tse and Chwang-tse, with the Brahmans and the Buddha, with the Stoics of antiquity, with Spinoza, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, and with the great monist mystics the activist ethic is reduced to little more than nothing. With Confucius and Meng-tse, with the Hindoo thinkers, with the representatives of the Later Stoicism, and with J. G. Fichte it makes strenuous efforts to assert itself, but it can do so only so far as it takes either naïve or sophisticated thought to help it.

Every world-and-life-view which is to satisfy thought is mysticism. It must seek to give to the existence of man such a meaning as will prevent him from being satisfied with being a part of the infinite existence in merely natural fashion, but will make him determine to belong to it inwardly and spiritually also, through an act of his consciousness.

The ethic of self-perfecting is in inmost connexion with mysticism. Its own destiny is decided in that of mysticism. Thinking out the ethic of self-perfecting means nothing else than seeking to found ethics on mysticism. Mysticism, on its side, is a valuable world-and-life-view only in proportion as it is ethical.

And yet it finds it cannot succeed in being ethical. Experience of becoming one with the Absolute, of existence within the world-spirit, of ascent into God, or whatever one may choose to call the process, is not in itself ethical; it is only spiritual. Of this deep distinction Indian thought has become conscious. With the most varied phrasing it proclaims the statement: “Spirituality is not ethics.” We Europeans have remained naïve in matters of mysticism. What appears among us as mysticism is usually mysticism with a more or less Christian, that is to say ethical, colouring. Hence we are inclined to deceive ourselves about the ethical content of mysticism.

If one analyses the mysticism of all peoples and all ages to find out its ethical content, we find that this is [pg 239] extraordinarily small. Even the ethic of resignation, which seems after all to belong naturally to mysticism, is in it more or less afflicted with impotence. Through the absence of the activist ethic with which it should normally be bound up, it to a certain extent loses its hold, and pushes itself more and more into the region of no longer ethical resignation. There then arises a mysticism that no longer helps the effort for self-perfecting, which is the deeper work to which it is called, but allows absorption into the Absolute to become an aim in itself. The purer the mysticism, the further has this evolution developed. Mysticism becomes then a world- and life-view of the merging of the finite existence in the infinite, if indeed it does not get reversed, as with the Brahmans, into the lofty mysticism of the existence of infinite existence within the finite. The ethic of self-perfecting, which should arise out of mysticism, is therefore always in danger of perishing in mysticism.

The tendency of mysticism to become supra-ethical is quite natural. As a matter of fact its connexion with an Absolute which has neither qualities nor needs has nothing more to do with self-perfecting. It becomes a pure act of consciousness, and leads to a spirituality which is just as bare of content as the pre-supposed Absolute. Feeling its weakness, mysticism does all it can to be more ethical than it is, or at any rate to appear so. Even the Indian form of it makes efforts in this direction, although again, on the other hand, it has courage to be veracious enough to rank the spiritual above the ethical.

In order to judge what mysticism is worth ethically one must count only what it contains in itself in the way of ethics, not what it does or says beyond that. Then, however, the ethical content of even Christian mysticism is terrifyingly small. Mysticism is not a friend but a foe of ethics; it devours it. And yet the ethic which is to satisfy thought must be born of mysticism. All deep philosophy, all deep religion, are ultimately a struggle for ethical mysticism and mystical ethics.

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Dominated by efforts to secure an activist ethical world- and life-view, we Westerners do not allow mysticism to come into its own. It leads among us a furtive, intermittent existence. We feel instinctively that it stands in antagonism to activist ethics, and we have therefore no inward relationship to it.

Our great mistake, however, is thinking that we can reach without mysticism an ethical world- and life-view, which shall satisfy thought. Up to now we have done nothing but fabricate world- and life-views. They are good because they keep men up to activist ethics, but they are not true, and therefore they are always collapsing. Moreover they are not deep. Hence European thought makes men ethical indeed, but superficial, and the European, because he is surfeited with world-view which has been fabricated with a view to activist ethics, has no collectedness and no inward personality, nor indeed any feeling of need for these things.

It is indeed time for us to abandon this error. Depth and stability in thinking come to the world- and life-view of activist ethics only when this springs from mysticism. The question of what we are to make of our life is not solved by our being driven out into the world with an impulse to activity, and never being allowed to collect ourselves for thought. It can be really answered only by a world- and life-view which brings man into a spiritual inward relation to Being, out of which there results of natural necessity an ethic both passive and active.

The hitherto accepted mysticism cannot effect this because it is supra-ethical. The struggle of thought has therefore to direct itself upon ethical mysticism. We must rise to a spirituality which is ethical, and to an ethic which includes within itself all spirituality. Then only do we become profoundly qualified for life.

Ethics must resolve to originate in mysticism. Mysticism, on its side, must never think that it exists for its own sake. It is not a flower, but only the calyx. Ethics are [pg 241] the flower. Mysticism which exists for itself only is the salt which has lost its savour.

The hitherto accepted mysticism leads into the supra-ethical because it is abstract, and abstraction is the death of ethics, for ethics are a living relation for a living life. We must therefore abandon abstract mysticism, and turn to the mysticism which is alive.

Abstract mysticism and the mysticism of reality. Supra-ethical, and ethical mysticism

The Essence of Being, the Absolute, the World-spirit, and all similar expressions denote nothing actual, but something conceived in abstractions which for that reason it is also absolutely impossible to represent to the mind. The only reality is the Being which manifests itself in phenomena.

How does thought come to such a meaningless proceeding as making man enter into a spiritual relation with an unreal creation of thought? By yielding to temptation in two ways, one general, one particular.

Thrown back upon the necessity of expressing itself in words thought adopts as its own the abstractions and symbols which have been coined by language. But this coinage should have no more currency than allows it to represent things in an abbreviated way, instead of putting them forward with all the detail in which they are given. But in time it comes about that thought works with these abstractions and symbols as if they represented something really existing. That is the general temptation.

The particular temptation lies in this case in this, that man’s devotion to infinite Being, effected with the help of abstractions and symbols, is thereby given expression in an enticingly simple way. It is taken to consist of entrance into relation with the totality of Being, that is to say, with its spiritual essence.

That looks very well in words and in thought. Reality, [pg 242] however, knows nothing about the individual being able to enter into connexion with the totality of Being. As it knows of no Being except that which manifests itself in the existence of individual beings, so also it knows of no relations except these of one individual being to another. If mysticism, then, means to be honest, there is nothing for it to do but to cast from it the usual abstractions, and to admit to itself that it can do nothing rational with this imaginary essence of Being. The Absolute may be as meaningless to it as his fetish is to a converted negro. It must in all seriousness go through the process of conversion to the mysticism of reality. Abandoning all stage decorations and declamation, let it try to get its experience in living nature.

There is no Essence of Being, but only infinite Being in infinite manifestations. It is only through the manifestations of Being, and only through those with which I enter into relations, that my being has any intercourse with infinite Being. The devotion of my being to infinite Being means devotion of my being to all the manifestations of Being which need my devotion, and to which I am able to devote myself.

Only an infinitely small part of infinite Being comes within my reach. The rest of it drives on past me, like distant ships to which I make signals they do not understand. But by devoting myself to that which comes within my reach and needs me, I make spiritual, inward devotion to infinite Being a reality and thereby give my own poor existence meaning and richness. The river has found its sea.

From devotion to the Absolute there comes only a dead spirituality. It is a purely intellectual act. No motives to activity are given in it. Even the ethic of resignation can only eke out a miserable existence on the soil of such an intellectualism. But in the mysticism of reality devotion is no longer a purely intellectual act, but one in which everything that is alive in man has its share. There is therefore dominant in it a spirituality which carries in itself [pg 243] in elemental form the impulse to action. The gruesome truth that spirituality and ethics are two different things no longer holds good. Here the two are one and the same.

Now, too, the ethic of self-perfecting and the ethic of devotion can interpenetrate each other. They now become, we see, cosmic in nature-philosophy, which leaves the world as it is. Hence they cannot but meet each other in a thought (which satisfies in every direction the laws of thinking), of living devotion to Being which lives. In this thought lie passive and active self-perfecting in mutual agreement and perfect union. They comprehend each other as the working out of one and the same inner compulsion. Having become one they no longer need first of all to exert themselves to establish by joint efforts the completed ethic of influencing the world through liberation from the world. The completeness is now automatically attained. Now there ring out in wonderful harmonies all the notes in the gamut of ethics, from the vibrations in which resignation begins to be audible as ethics, up to the higher notes in which ethics pass over into the harsh noises of the commands which are proclaimed by society to be ethical.

Subjective responsibility for all life which comes within his reach, responsibility which widens out extensively and intensively to the limitless, and which the man who has become inwardly free from the world experiences and tries to make a reality, that is ethics. It originates in world- and life-affirmation. It makes itself a reality in life-denial. It is completely bound up with optimistic willing. Never again can the belief-in-progress get separated from ethics, like a badly-fastened wheel from a cart. The two turn inseparably on the same axle.

The basic principle of ethics, that principle which is a necessity of thought, which has a definite content, which is ever bringing itself into steady, living, and practical agreement with reality, proclaims itself to be: Devotion to life out of reverence for life.

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