CHAPTER XXI
THE ETHIC OF REVERENCE FOR LIFE
The basic principle of the moral
COMPLICATED and laborious are the roads along which ethical thought, which has mistaken its way and lost itself, must be brought back. Its course, however, maps itself out quite simply if, instead of taking apparently convenient short cuts, it keeps to its right direction from the very beginning. For this three things are necessary.
It must have nothing to do with an ethical interpretation of the world.
It must become cosmic and mystical, that is, it must seek to conceive all the devotion which rules in ethics as a manifestation of an inward, spiritual relation to the world.
It must not go astray into abstract thinking, but must remain elemental, understanding self-devotion to the world to be self-devotion of human life to every form of living being with which it can come into relation.
The origin of ethics is that I think out the full meaning of the world-affirmation which is given by nature together with the life-affirmation in my will-to-live, and try to make it a reality.
To become ethical means to begin to think sincerely.
Thinking is the agreement between willing and knowing which is come to within me. Its course is a naïve one, if the will demands of the knowledge to be shown a world which corresponds to the impulses which it carries within itself, and if the knowledge attempts to satisfy this requirement. The place of this dialogue, a dialogue which is doomed beforehand to produce no result, must be taken by a correct one, in which the will demands from the knowledge only what it really knows.
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If the knowledge answers solely with what it knows, it is always teaching the will one and the same fact, viz., that in and behind all phenomena there is will-to-live. Knowledge, though ever becoming deeper and more inclusive, can do nothing except take us deeper into the enigmatic fact that all that is, is will-to-live. Progress in science consists only in increasingly accurate description of the phenomena in which life in its innumerable forms appears and passes, letting us discover life where we did not previously expect it, and putting us in a position to turn to our own use in this or that way what we have learnt of the course of the will-to-live in nature. But what life is, no science can tell us.
For our world- and life-view, then, the gain derived from knowledge is only that it makes it harder for us to be thoughtless, because it forces upon our attention ever more strongly the mystery of the will-to-live which we see stirring everywhere. Hence the difference between learned and unlearned is an entirely relative one. The unlearned man who, at the sight of a tree in flower, is overpowered by the mystery of the will-to-live which is stirring all round him, knows more truly than the learned one who studies under the microscope or in physical and chemical activity a thousand forms of the will-to-live, but who, with all his knowledge of the life-course of these manifestations of the will-to-live, is unmoved by the mystery that everything which exists is will-to-live, while he is puffed up with vanity at being able to describe exactly a fragment of the course of life.
All true knowledge passes on into experience. The nature of the manifestations I do not know, but I form a conception of it in analogy to the will-to-live which is within myself, and thus my knowledge of the world becomes experience of the world. The knowledge which is becoming experience does not allow me to remain in face of the world a subject who merely knows; it forces upon me an inward relation to the world, and fills me with reverence for the mysterious will-to-live which is in everything. By making [pg 246] me think and wonder, it leads me ever upwards to the heights of reverence for life. There it lets my hand go. It cannot accompany me further. My will-to-live must now find its way about the world by itself.
It is not by informing me what this or that manifestation of life means in the sum-total of the world that knowledge brings me into connexion with the world. It goes about with me not in outer circles, but in the inner ones. From within outwards it puts me in relation to the world by forcing my will-to-live to feel everything around it as also will-to-live.
With Descartes, philosophy starts from the dogma: “I think, therefore I exist.” With this poverty-stricken, arbitrarily chosen beginning, it is landed irretrievably on the road to the abstract. It never finds the entrance to ethics, and remains entangled in a dead world- and life-view. True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness, which says: “I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live.” This is not a cleverly composed dogmatic formula. Day after day, hour after hour, I live and move in it. At every moment of reflexion it stands fresh before me. There bursts forth again and again from it as from roots that can never dry up, a living world- and life-view which can deal with all the facts of Being. A mysticism of ethical union with Being grows out of it.
As in my own will-to-live there is a longing for wider life and for the mysterious exaltation of the will-to-live which we call pleasure, with dread of annihilation and of the mysterious encroachment on the will-to-live which we call pain; so is it also in the will-to-live all around me, whether it can express itself before me, or remains dumb.
Ethics consist, therefore, in my experiencing the compulsion to show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I do to my own. There we have given us that basic principle of the moral which is a necessity of thought: It is good to maintain and to promote life; it is bad to destroy life or to obstruct it.
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As a matter of fact everything which in the ordinary ethical valuation of the relations of men to each other ranks as good, can be brought under the description of material and spiritual maintenance or promotion of human life, and of effort to bring it to its highest value. Conversely, everything which ranks as bad in human relations is in the last analysis material or spiritual destruction or obstruction of human life, and negligence in the effort to bring it to its highest value. Separate individual categories of good and evil which lie far apart and have apparently no connexion at all with one another fit together like things which belong to each other, as soon as they are comprehended and deepened in this the most universal definition of good and evil.
The basic principle of the moral means, however, not only an ordering and deepening of the current views of good and evil, but also a widening of them. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves one’s interest as being valuable, nor, beyond that, whether and how far it can appreciate such interest. Life as such is sacred to him. He tears no leaf from a tree, plucks no flower, and takes care to crush no insect. If in summer he is working by lamplight, he prefers to keep the window shut and breathe a stuffy atmosphere rather than see one insect after another fall with singed wings upon his table.
If he goes into the street after a shower and sees an earthworm which has strayed on to it, he bethinks himself that it must get dried up in the sun, if it does not get back soon enough to ground into which it can burrow, and so he lifts it from the deadly stone surface, and puts it on the grass. If he comes across an insect which has fallen into a puddle, he stops a moment in order to hold out a leaf or a stalk on which it can save itself.
He is not afraid of being laughed at as sentimental. It is the fate of every truth to be a subject for laughter until [pg 248] it is generally recognized. Once it was considered folly to assume that men of colour were really men and ought to be treated as such, but the folly has become an accepted truth. To-day it is thought to be going too far to declare that constant regard for everything that lives, down to the lowest manifestations of life, is a demand made by rational ethics. The time is coming, however, when people will be astonished that mankind needed so long a time to learn to regard thoughtless injury to life as incompatible with ethics.
Ethics are responsibility without limit towards all that lives.
The definition of ethics as a relation to things within a disposition to reverence for life, strikes one in its absolutely universal extent as cold. But it is the only complete one. Sympathy is too narrow to rank as the essence of the ethical. It denotes, of course, only interest in the suffering will-to-live. But ethics include also feeling as one’s own all the circumstances and all the aspirations of the will-to-live, its pleasure, too, and its longing to live itself out to the full, as well as its urge to self-perfecting.
Love means more, since it includes fellowship in suffering, in joy, and in effort, but it shows the ethical only in a simile, although in a natural and deep one. It makes the solidarity produced by ethics analogous to that which nature calls forth on the physical side, for more or less temporary purposes between two beings which complete each other sexually, or between them and their offspring.
Thought must strive to bring to expression the nature of the ethical in itself. To effect this it comes inevitably to defining ethics as devotion to life which is inspired by reverence for life. Even if the word reverence for life sounds so general as to seem somewhat lifeless, what is signified by it is nevertheless something which the man into whose thought it has made its way can never get rid of. Sympathy, and love, and every kind of valuable emotion are given within it. With a restless living force [pg 249] reverence for life works upon the disposition into which it has entered, and throws it into the unrest of a feeling of responsibility which at no place and at no time ceases to affect it. Just as the screw which burrows through the water drives the ship along, so does reverence for life the man.
Arising, as it does, from an inner compulsion, the ethic of reverence for life is not dependent on the extent to which it is able to think itself out to a satisfying life-view. It need give no answer to the question of what significance the ethical man’s work for the maintenance, promotion, and exalting of life can have in the total happenings of the course of nature. It does not let itself be misled by the calculation that the maintaining and completing of life which it practises is hardly worth consideration beside the tremendous, unceasing destruction of life which goes on through natural forces. Having the will to action, it can leave on one side all the problems of the success of its work. Full of significance for the world is the fact in itself that in the ethically developed man there has made its appearance in the world a will-to-live which is filled with reverence for life and devotion to life.
In my will-to-live the universal will-to-live experiences itself otherwise than in its other manifestations. In them it shows itself in a process of individualising which, so far as I can see from the outside, is bent merely on living itself out to the full, and in no way on union with any other will-to-live. The world is a ghastly drama of will-to-live divided against itself. One existence makes its way at the cost of another; one destroys the other. One will-to-live merely exerts its will against the other, and has no knowledge of it. But in me the will-to-live has come to know about other wills-to-live. There is in it a longing to arrive at unity with itself, to become universal.
Why does the will-to-live experience itself in this way in me alone? Is it because I have acquired the capacity of reflecting on the totality of Being? What is the goal of this evolution which has begun in me?
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To these questions there is no answer. It remains a painful enigma for me that I must live with reverence for life in a world which is dominated by creative will which is also destructive will, and destructive will which is also creative.
I can do nothing but hold to the fact that the will-to-live in me manifests itself as will-to-live which desires to become one with other will-to-live. That is for me the light that shines in the darkness. The ignorance in which the world is wrapped has no existence for me; I have been saved from the world. I am thrown, indeed, by reverence for life into an unrest such as the world does not know, but I obtain from it a blessedness which the world cannot give. If in the tenderheartedness produced by being different from the world another person and I help each other in understanding and pardoning, when otherwise will would torment will, the division of the will-to-live is got rid of. If I save an insect from the puddle, life has devoted itself to life, and the division of life against itself is got rid of. Whenever my life devotes itself in any way to life, my finite will-to-live experiences its union with the infinite will in which all life is one, and I enjoy a feeling of refreshment which prevents me from pining away in the desert of life.
I therefore recognize it as the destiny of my existence to be obedient to this higher revelation of the will-to-live in me. I choose for my work the removal of this division of the will-to-live against itself, so far as the influence of my existence reaches. Knowing now the one thing needful, I leave on one side the enigma of the world and of my existence in it.
The surmisings and the longings of all deep religiousness are contained in the ethic of reverence for life. This religiousness, however, does not build up for itself a completed world-view, but resigns itself to the necessity of leaving its cathedral unfinished. It finishes the choir only, but in this choir piety maintains a living and never-ceasing divine service.
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The ethic of resignation. An ethic of veracity towards oneself, and an activist ethic
The ethic of reverence for life shows its truth also in that it includes in itself the different elements of ethics in their natural connexion. Hitherto no ethic has been able to present in their parallelism and their interaction the effort after self-perfecting, in which man acts upon himself from outside without deeds, and the activist ethic. The ethic of reverence for life can do this, and indeed in such a way that it not only answers academic questions, but also produces a deepening of ethical insight.
Ethics are reverence for the will-to-live within me and without me. From the former comes first the profound life-affirmation of resignation. I apprehend my will-to-live as not only something which can live itself out in happy occurrences, but also something which has experience of itself. If I refuse to let this self-experience disappear in thoughtlessness, and persist in feeling it to be valuable, I begin to learn the secret of spiritual self-assertion. I win an unsuspected freedom from the various destinies of life. At moments in which I had expected to find myself overwhelmed, I find myself exalted in an inexpressible and surprising happiness of freedom from the world, and I experience therein a clearing of my life-view. Resignation is the vestibule through which we enter ethics. Only he who in deepened devotion to his own will-to-live experiences inward freedom from outward occurrences, is capable of devoting himself in profound and steady fashion to the life of others.
Just as in the reverence for my own will-to-live I struggle for freedom from the destinies of life, so I struggle too for freedom from myself. Not only in face of what happens to me, but also with attention to the way in which I deal with the world, I practise the higher self-maintenance. Out of reverence for my own existence I place myself under the compulsion of veracity towards myself. Everything [pg 252] I acquired would be purchased too dearly by action in defiance of my convictions. I fear that if I were untrue to myself I should be wounding my will-to-live with a poisoned spear.
The fact that Kant makes, as he does, veracity towards oneself the centre point of his ethic, testifies to the depth of his ethical feeling. But because in his search for the essential nature of the ethical he fails to find his way through to reverence for life, he cannot comprehend the connexion between veracity towards oneself and an activist ethic.
As a matter of fact the ethic of veracity towards oneself passes imperceptibly into that of devotion to others. Such veracity compels me to actions which manifest themselves as devotion in such a way that ordinary ethics derive them from devotion.
Why do I forgive anyone? Ordinary ethics say, because I feel sympathy with him. They allow men to seem to themselves, when they pardon others, frightfully good, and allow them to practise a style of pardoning which is not free from humiliation of the other. They thus make forgiveness a sweetened triumph of self-devotion.
The ethic of reverence for life does away with this unpurified view. All acts of forbearance and of pardon are for it acts forced from one by veracity towards oneself. I must practise unlimited forgiveness because, if I did not, I should be wanting in veracity to myself, for it would be acting as if I myself were not guilty in the same way as the other has been guilty towards me. Because my life is so liberally spotted with falsehood, I must forgive falsehood which has been practised upon me; because I myself have been in so many cases wanting in love, and guilty of hatred, slander, deceit, or arrogance, I must pardon any want of love, and all hatred, slander, deceit, or arrogance which have been directed against myself. I must forgive quietly and without drawing attention to it; in fact I do not really pardon at all, for I do not let things develop to any such act of judgement. Nor is this any eccentric proceeding; [pg 253] it is only a necessary widening and refinement of ordinary ethics.
The struggle against the evil that is in mankind we have to carry on not by judging others, but by judging ourselves. Struggle with oneself and veracity towards oneself are the means by which we work upon others. We quietly draw them into our efforts after the deep spiritual self-assertion which springs out of reverence for one’s own life. Power makes no noise. It is there, and works. True ethics begin where the use of language ceases.
The innermost element then, in activist ethics, even if it appears as self-devotion, comes from the compulsion to veracity towards oneself, and obtains therein its true value. The whole ethic of being other than the world flows pure only when it comes from this source. It is not from kindness to others that I am tender-hearted, peaceable, forbearing, and friendly, but because by such behaviour I prove my own deepest self-assertion to be true. Reverence for life which I apply to my own existence, and reverence for life which keeps me in a temper of devotion to other existence than mine, interpenetrate each other.
Ethics and thoughtlessness. Ethics and self-assertion
Ordinary ethics, because they are without any basic principle of the ethical, are obliged to engage at once in the discussion of conflicting duties. The ethic of reverence for life has no such need for hurry. It takes its own time to think out in all directions its own principle of the moral. Knowing itself to be firmly established, it then settles its position with regard to these conflicts.
It has to come to terms with three adversaries: these are thoughtlessness, egoistic self-assertion, and society.
To the first of these it pays usually insufficient attention, because no open conflicts arise between them. This adversary does, nevertheless, obstruct it imperceptibly.
There is, however, a wide field which our ethic can take [pg 254] possession of without any collision with the troops of egoism. Man can accomplish much that is good, without having to require of himself any sacrifice. And if there really goes with it a bit of his life, it is something so insignificant that he feels it no more than if he were losing a hair or a piece of dead skin.
Over wide stretches of conduct the inward liberation from the world, the being true to oneself, the being different from the world, yes, and even devotion to other life, is only a matter of giving attention to this particular relation. We fall short so much, because we do not keep ourselves up to it. We do not stand sufficiently under the pressure of any inward compulsion to be ethical. The steam hisses at all points out of the leaky boiler. The resulting losses of energy are as high as they are in ordinary ethics, because these ethics have at their disposal no single basic principle of the moral which works upon thought. They cannot repair the boiler; they do not, indeed, ever even examine it. Reverence for life, however, being something which is ever present to thought, penetrates unceasingly and in all directions men’s observation, reflexion, and resolutions. A man can keep himself clear of it as little as the water can prevent itself from being coloured by the dye-stuff which is dropped into it. The struggle with thoughtlessness is started, and is always advancing.
But what is the relation between ethics and reverence for life in the conflicts which arise between inward compulsion to devotion, and necessary self-assertion?
I too am subject to division of my will-to-life against itself. In a thousand ways my existence stands in conflict with that of others. The necessity to destroy and to injure life is imposed upon me. If I walk along an unfrequented path, my foot brings destruction and pain upon the tiny creatures which populate it. In order to preserve my own existence, I must defend myself against the existence which injures it. I become a hunter of the mouse which inhabits my house, a murderer of the insect which wants to have its nest there, a mass-murderer of the bacteria which [pg 255] may endanger my life. I get my food by destroying plants and animals. My happiness is built upon injury done to my fellow-men.
How does our ethic assert itself in the tragic necessity to which I am subjected through the division of my will-to-live against itself?
Ordinary ethics seek compromises. They try to lay down how much of my existence and of my happiness I must sacrifice, and how much of them I may preserve at the cost of the existence and happiness of other lives. With this distinction they produce an experimental, relative ethic. They offer as ethical what is in reality not ethical but a mixture of non-ethical necessity and ethics. They thereby establish a huge confusion, and allow the starting of an ever-increasing obscuration of the conception of the ethical.
The ethic of reverence for life knows nothing of a relative ethic. It allows to rank as good only the maintenance and promotion of life. All destruction of and injury to life, under whatever circumstances they take place, it condemns as evil. It does not keep in store adjustments between ethics and necessity all ready for making up. It is always again and again and in ways that are always original coming to terms in men with reality. It does not abolish for man all ethical conflicts, but compels him to decide for himself in each case how far he can remain ethical and how far he must submit himself to the necessity for destruction of and injury to life, and therewith incur guilt. It is not by receiving instruction about agreement between ethical and necessary, that a man makes progress in ethics, but only by coming to hear more and more plainly the voice of the ethical, by becoming ruled more and more by the longing to preserve and promote life, and by becoming more and more obstinate in resistance to the necessity for destroying or injuring life.
In ethical conflicts man can arrive only at subjective decisions. No one can lay down for him at what point, on each occasion, lies the extreme limit of possibility for [pg 256] his persistence in the preservation and promotion of life. He alone has to decide, by letting himself be guided by a feeling of the highest possible responsibility towards other life.
We must never let ourselves become blunted and dull. We are living in truth, when our experience in these conflicts is ever deepening. The good conscience is an invention of the devil’s.
Man and other living creatures
What does reverence for life say about the relations between men and the animal world?
Whenever I injure life of any sort, I must be quite clear whether it is necessary. Beyond the unavoidable, I must never go, not even with what seems insignificant. The farmer who has mown down a thousand flowers in his meadow to feed his cows, must be careful on his way home not to strike off in thoughtless pastime the head of a single flower by the roadside, for he thereby commits a wrong against life without being under the pressure of necessity.
Those who experiment with operations or the use of drugs upon animals, or inoculate them with diseases, so as to be able to bring help to mankind with the results gained, must never quiet any misgivings they feel with the general reflexion that their gruesome proceedings aim at a valuable result. They must first have considered in each individual case whether there is a real necessity to force upon any animal this sacrifice for the sake of mankind, and they must take the most careful pains to ensure that the pain inflicted is made as small as possible. How much wrong is committed in scientific institutions through neglect of anæsthetics, which to save time or trouble are not administered! How much, too, through animals being subjected to torture merely to give to students a demonstration of perfectly understood phenomena. By the very fact that animals have been subjected to experiments, and have by their pain won such valuable results for suffering [pg 257] men, a new and special relation of solidarity has been established between them and us. From that springs for each one of us a compulsion to do to every animal all the good we possibly can. By helping an insect when it is in difficulties I am thereby attempting to cancel part of man’s ever new debt to the animal world. Whenever an animal is in any way forced into the service of man, every one of us must be concerned with the suffering which it has thereby to undergo. None of us must allow to take place any suffering for which he himself is not responsible, if he can hinder it in any way, at the same time quieting his conscience with the reflexion that he would be mixing himself up in something which does not concern him. No one must shut his eyes and regard as non-existent the sufferings of which he spares himself the sight. Let no one regard as light the burden of his responsibility. While so much ill-treatment of animals goes on, while the moans of thirsty animals in railway trucks sound unheard, while so much brutality prevails in our slaughter-houses, while animals have to suffer in our kitchens painful death from unskilled hands, while animals have to endure intolerable treatment from heartless men, or are left to the cruel play of children, we all share the guilt.
We are afraid of making ourselves conspicuous, if we let it be noticed how we feel for the sufferings which man brings upon the animals. We think at the same time that others have become more “rational” than we are, and that they take as being usual and as a matter of course, what we are excited about. Yet suddenly they will let slip a word which shows us that they too have not yet learnt to acquiesce. And now, though they are strangers, they are quite near us. The mask in which we misled each other falls off. We know now, from one another, that we are alike in being unable to escape from the gruesome proceedings that are taking place unceasingly around us. What a happy making of a new acquaintance!
The ethic of respect for life guards us from letting each other believe through our silence that we no longer experience [pg 258] what, as thinking men, we must experience. It prompts us to keep each other sensitive to what distresses us, and to talk and to act together without any feeling of shyness, just as the responsibility we feel moves us to. It makes us keep on the look-out together for opportunities of bringing some sort of help to animals, to make up for the great misery which men inflict on them, and thus to step for a moment out of the incomprehensible horror of existence.
The ethic of the relation of man to man
In the matter also of our relation to other men, the ethic of reverence for life throws upon us a responsibility so unlimited as to be terrifying.
Here again it offers us no rules about the extent of the self-maintenance which is allowable; again, it bids us in each case come to terms with the absolute ethic of self-devotion. I have to decide in accordance with the responsibility of which I am conscious, how much of my life, my possessions, my rights, my happiness, my time, and my rest I must devote to others, and how much of them I may keep for myself.
In the question of possession, the ethic of reverence for life is outspokenly individualist in the sense that wealth acquired or inherited must be placed at the service of the community, not through any measures taken by society, but through the absolutely free decision of the individual. It expects everything from a general increase in the feeling of responsibility. Wealth it regards as the property of society left in the sovereign control of the individual. One man serves society by carrying on a business in which a number of employees earn their living; another by giving away his wealth in order to help his fellows. Between these two extreme kinds of service let each decide according to the responsibility which he finds determined for him by the circumstances of his life. Let no one judge his neighbour. The one thing that matters is that each shall value what he possesses as means to action. Whether this is [pg 259] accomplished by his keeping and increasing his wealth, or by surrender of it, matters little. Wealth must reach the community in the most varied ways, if the latter is to profit by it in the best way.
Those who possess little wealth to call their own are most in danger of holding what they have in a purely selfish spirit. There is profound truth in the parable of Jesus which makes the servant who had received least the least loyal to his duty.
My rights too the ethic of reverence for life does not allow to belong to me. It forbids me to quiet my conscience with the reflexion that as the stronger, but by quite legitimate means, I am advancing myself at the cost of one who is weaker than I. In what the law and public opinion allow me it sets a problem before me. It bids me think of others, and makes me ponder whether I can allow myself the inward right to pluck all the fruit that my hand can reach. Thus it may happen that in obedience to consideration for the existence of others I do what seems to ordinary opinion to be folly. Yes, it may even show itself to be folly by the fact that my renunciation has not been of the slightest benefit to him for whom it was made. And yet I was right. Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal. What it commands has its own significance, even if it seems foolish or useless. We all look, of course, in one another, for the folly which indicates that we have higher responsibilities making themselves felt in ourselves. Yet it is only in proportion as we all become less rational, in the meaning given it by ordinary calculation, that the ethical disposition develops in us, and allows problems to become soluble which have hitherto been insoluble.
Nor will reverence for life grant me my happiness as my own. At the moments when I should like to enjoy myself without restraint, it wakes in me reflexion about misery that I see or suspect, and it does not allow me to drive away the uneasiness thereby caused to me. Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but [pg 260] always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethic whispers into my ear. You are happy, it says; therefore you are called upon to give much. Whatever more than others you have received in health, natural gifts, working capacity, success, a beautiful childhood, harmonious family circumstances, you must not accept as being a matter of course. You must pay a price for them. You must show more than average devotion of life to life.
To the happy the voice of the true ethic is dangerous, if they venture to listen to it. When it calls to them, it never damps down the irrational which glows within it. It assails them to see whether it can get them out of their rut and turn them into adventurers of self-devotion, people of whom the world has too few. . . .
Reverence for life is an inexorable creditor! If it finds anyone with nothing to pledge but a little time and a little leisure, it lays an attachment on these. But its hardheartedness is good, and sees clearly. The many modern men who as industrial machines are engaged in callings in which they can in no way be active as men among men, are exposed to the danger of merely vegetating in an egoistic life. Many of them feel this danger, and suffer under the fact that their daily work has so little to do with spiritual and ideal aims and does not allow them to put into it anything of their human nature. Others acquiesce; the thought of having no duties outside their daily work suits them very well.
But that men should be so condemned or so favoured as to be released from responsibility for devotion as men to men, the ethic of reverence for life will not allow to be legitimate. It demands that every one of us in some way and with some object shall be a man for men. To those who have no opportunity in their daily work of giving themselves as man to men, and have nothing else that they can give, it suggests their offering something of their time and leisure, even if these have been granted to them in scanty measure. Find for yourselves some secondary [pg 261] work (it says to them), an inconspicuous one, perhaps a secret one. Open your eyes and look for a human being or some work devoted to human welfare which needs from some one a little time or friendliness, a little sympathy, or sociability, or work. There may be a solitary or an embittered fellow-man, an invalid or an inefficient person to whom you can be something. Perhaps it is an old person or a child. Or some good work needs volunteers who can offer a free evening, or run errands. Who can enumerate the many ways in which that costly piece of fixed capital, a human being, can be employed! More of him is wanted everywhere! Hunt, then, for some situation for your humanity, and do not be frightened away if you have to wait, or to be taken on trial. And do not be disturbed by disappointments. Anyhow, do not be without some secondary work in which you give yourself as a man to men. There is one that is marked out for you, if you only truly will to have it. . . .
Thus does the true ethic speak of those who have only a little time and a little human nature to give. Well will it be with them if they listen to it, and are preserved from becoming stunted natures, because they have neglected this devotion of self to others.
But to everyone, in whatever state of life he finds himself, the ethic of respect for life does this: it forces him ever and again to be inwardly concerned with all the human destinies and all the other life-destinies which are going through their life-course around him, and to give himself, as man, to the man who needs a fellow-man. It will not allow the learned man to live only for his learning, even if his learning makes him very useful, nor the artist to live only for his art, even if by means of it he gives something to many. It does not allow the very busy man to think that with his professional activities he has fulfilled every demand upon him. It demands from all and every that they devote a portion of their life to their fellows. In what way and to what extent this is laid down for him the individual must gather from the thoughts which arise in [pg 262] him, and from the destinies in which his life moves. One man’s sacrifice is outwardly unpretentious. He can accomplish it while continuing to live a normal life. Another is called to some conspicuous devotion, and must therefore put aside regard for his own progress. But let neither judge the other. The tasks of men have to be decided in a thousand ways to let the good become actual. What he has to bring as an offering is the secret of each individual. But one with another we have all to recognize that our existence reaches its true value only when we experience in ourselves something of the truth of the saying: “Whoever shall lose his life, the same shall find it” (S. Matt. x. 39).
Personal and supra-personal responsibility. Ethics and humanity
The ethical conflicts between society and the individual arise out of the fact that the latter has to bear not only a personal, but also a supra-personal responsibility. When my own person only is concerned, I can always be patient, alway forgive, use all possible consideration, always be tender-hearted. But each of us comes into a situation when he is responsible not for himself only, but also for some undertaking, and then is forced into decisions which conflict with personal morality.
The industrialist who manages a business, however small, and the musician who undertakes public performances, cannot be men in the way they would like to be. The one has to dismiss a worker who is incapable or given to drink, in spite of any sympathy he has for him and his family; the other cannot let a singer whose voice is the worse for wear perform any longer, although he knows what distress he thus causes.
The more extensive a man’s activities, the oftener he finds himself in the situation of having to sacrifice something of his humanity to his supra-personal responsibility. Out of this conflict consideration brings the average person to the decision that the wider responsibility does, as a matter of principle, annul the personal. It is with this idea [pg 263] that society addresses the individual. For the quieting of consciences for which this decision is too categorical it perhaps lays down a few principles which undertake to determine in a way that is valid for everybody, how far in any case personal morality can have a say in the matter.
To the current ethic no course remains open but to sign this capitulation. It has no means of defending the fortress of personal morality, because it has not at its disposal any absolute notions of good and evil. Not so the ethic of reverence for life. That possesses, as we can see, what the other lacks. It therefore never surrenders the fortress, even if the latter is permanently invested. It feels itself in a position to persevere in holding it, and by continual sorties to keep the besiegers on the _qui vive_.
Only the most universal and absolute purposiveness in the maintenance and promotion of life, which is the objective aimed at by reverence for life, is ethical. All other necessity or expediency is not ethical, but only a more or less necessary necessity, or a more or less expedient expediency. In the conflict between the maintenance of my own existence and the destruction of, or injury to, another, I can never put the ethical and the necessary together to form a relative ethical; I must choose between ethical and necessary, and, if I choose the latter, must take it upon myself to be guilty through an act of injury to life. Similarly I am not at liberty to think that in the conflict between personal and supra-personal responsibility I can balance the ethical and the expedient to make a relative ethical, or even annul the ethical with the purposive; I must choose between the two. If under the pressure of the supra-personal responsibility I yield to the expedient, I become guilty in some way or other through failure in reverence for life.
The temptation to combine with the ethical into a relative ethical the expedient which is commanded me by the supra-personal responsibility is especially strong, because it can [pg 264] be shown, in defence of it, that the person who complies with the demand of this supra-personal responsibility, acts unegoistically. It is not to his individual existence or his individual welfare that he sacrifices another existence or welfare, but he sacrifices an individual existence and welfare to what forces itself upon him as expedient in view of the existence or the welfare of a majority. But ethical is more than unegoistic. Ethical is nothing but the reverence felt by my will-to-live for every other will-to-live. Whenever I in any way sacrifice or injure life, I am not within the ethical, but I become guilty, whether it be egoistically guilty for the sake of maintaining my own existence or welfare, or unegoistically guilty for the sake of maintaining a greater number of other existences or their welfare.
This so easily made mistake of accepting as ethical a violation of reverence for life if it is based upon unegoistic considerations, is the bridge by crossing which ethics enter unintentionally the territory of the non-ethical. The bridge must be broken down.
Ethics go only so far as humanity does, humanity meaning respect for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings. Where humanity ends pseudo-ethics begin. The day on which this boundary is once for all universally recognized and marked out so as to be visible to everyone, will be one of the most important in the history of mankind. Thenceforward it can no longer happen that ethics which are not ethics at all are accepted as real ethics, and deceive and ruin individuals and peoples.
The ethics hitherto current have hindered us from becoming as earnest as we must be by the fact that they have utterly deceived us as to the many ways in which each one of us, whether through self-assertion, or by actions justified by supra-personal responsibility, become guilty again and again. True knowledge consists in being gripped by the secret that everything around us is will-to-live and seeing clearly how again and again we incur guilt against life.
Fooled by pseudo-ethics, man stumbles about in his [pg 265] guilt like a drunken man. If he becomes instructed and earnest he seeks the road which leads him least into guilt.
We are all exposed to the temptation of lessening the guilt of inhumanity which comes from our working under supra-personal responsibility, by withdrawing as far as possible into ourselves. But such freedom from guilt is not honestly obtained. Ethics start with world- and life-affirmation, and therefore will not allow us this flight into negation. They forbid us to be like the housewife who leaves the killing of the eels to her cook, and compels us to undertake all duties involving supra-personal responsibility which fall to us, even if we should be in a position to decline them for reasons more or less satisfactory.
Each one of us, then, has to engage, so far as he is brought to it by the circumstances of his life, in work which involves supra-personal responsibility, but we must do it not in the spirit of the collective body, but in that of the man who wishes to be ethical. In every individual case we struggle therefore to preserve as much humanity as is ever possible in such work, and in doubtful cases we venture to make a mistake on the side of humanity rather than on that of the object in view. When we have become instructed and earnest, we think of what is usually forgotten: that all public activity of whatever sort has to do not with facts only, but also with the creation of that spirit and temper which is desirable in the collective body. The creation of such a spirit and temper is more important than anything directly attained in the facts. Public work, in which the utmost possible effort is not made to preserve humanity, ruins the disposition. He who under the influence of supra-personal responsibility simply sacrifices men and human happiness when it seems commanded, accomplishes something. But he has not reached the highest level. He has only outward, not spiritual influence. We have spiritual influence only when others notice that we do not decide coldly in accordance with principles laid down once and for all, but in each individual case fight for humanity.
[pg 266]
There is too little among us of this kind of struggling. From the smallest who is something in the smallest business, right up to the political ruler who holds in his hands the decision for peace or war, we act too much as men who in any given case can prepare without effort to be no longer men, but merely the executive of general interests. Hence there is no longer among us any trust in a righteousness lighted up with human feeling. Nor have we any longer any real respect for one another. We all feel ourselves in the power of a mentality of cold, impersonal, and usually unintelligent opportunism, which stiffens itself with appeals to principle, and in order to carry out small interests is capable of the greatest inhumanity and the greatest folly. We therefore see among us one temper of impersonal opportunism confronting another, and all problems are executed in a useless conflict of force against force because there is nowhere at hand such a spirit and temper as will make them soluble.
Only through our struggles for humanity can forces which work in the direction of the truly rational and expedient become powerful, while the present spirit and temper prevails. Hence the man who works under supra-personal responsibilities has to feel himself answerable not only for the successful result which is to be realized through him, but for the general spirit and temper which has to be created.
We therefore serve society without losing ourselves in it. We do not allow it to be our guardian in the matter of ethics. That would be as if the solo violinist allowed his bowing to be regulated by that of the double-bass player. Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. It is an unreliable horse, and blind into the bargain. Woe to the driver if he falls asleep!
All this sounds too hard. Society serves ethics by giving legal sanction to its most elementary principles, and handing [pg 267] on the ethical principles of one generation to the next. That is much, and it claims our gratitude. But society is also something which checks the progress of ethics again and again, by arrogating to itself the dignity of the ethical teachers. To this, however, it has no right. The only ethical teacher is the man who thinks ethically, and struggles for an ethic. The conceptions of good and evil which are put in circulation by society are paper-money, the value of which is to be calculated not by the figures printed upon it, but by its relation to its exchange value in gold of the ethic of reverence for life. But so measured, its exchange value reveals itself as that of the paper-money of a half-bankrupt state.
The collapse of civilization has come about through ethics being left to society. A renewal of it is possible only if ethics become once more the concern of thinking human beings, and if individuals seek to assert themselves in society as ethical personalities. In proportion as we secure this, society will become, instead of the purely natural entity, which it naturally is, an ethical one. Previous generations have made the terrible mistake of idealizing society as ethical. We do our duty to it by judging it critically, and trying to make it, so far as is possible, more ethical. Being in possession of an absolute standard of the ethical, we no longer allow ourselves to make acceptable as ethics principles of expediency or even of the vulgarest opportunism. Nor do we remain any longer at the low level of allowing to be current as in any way ethical meaningless ideals, of power, of passion, or of nationalism which are set up by miserable politicians and maintained in some degree of respect by bewildering propaganda. All the principles, dispositions, and ideals which make their appearance among us we measure, in their showy pedantry, with a rule on which the measures are given by the absolute ethic of reverence for life. We allow currency only to what is consistent with the claims of humanity. We bring into honour again regard for life and [pg 268] for the happiness of the individual. Sacred human rights we again hold high; not those which political rulers exalt at banquets and tread underfoot in their actions, but the true ones. We call once more for justice, not that which purblind authorities have elaborated in a legal scholasticism, nor that about which demagogues of all shades of colour shout themselves hoarse, but that which is filled to the full with the value of each single human existence. The foundation of law and right is humanity.
Thus we bring the principles, dispositions, and ideals of the collective body into agreement with humanity. At the same time we shape them in accordance with reason, for only what is ethical is truly rational. Only so far as the current disposition of men is animated by ethical convictions and ideals is it capable of truly purposive activity.
The ethic of reverence for life puts in our hands weapons for fighting false ethics and false ideals, but we have strength to use them only so far as we—each one in his own life—preserve our humanity. Only when those men are numerous who in thought and in action bring humanity to terms with reality, will humanity cease to be current as a mere sentimental idea and become what it ought to be, a leaven in the spirit and temper of individuals and of society.
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