CHAPTER III

THE ETHICAL PROBLEM

The difficulties of ethical perception

HOW came mankind to think about morality and to make progress in that sphere of thought?

It is a picture of confusion that unrolls itself before the eyes of anyone who undertakes a journey through the history of man’s search for the ethical. The progress made in that sphere of thought is inexplicably slow and uncertain. That the scientific view of the world could be delayed in its rise and development is to a certain extent intelligible, for its advance depended more or less on the chance of there existing gifted observers, whose discoveries in the realm of the exact sciences and the knowledge of nature was needed first, to provide new horizons and to point out new paths for thought.

But in ethics thought is thrown back entirely on itself: it has to do only with man himself and his self-development, which goes on by a process of causation from within. Why, then, does it not make better progress? Just because man himself is the material which has to be investigated and moulded.

Ethics and æsthetics are the step-children of philosophy. They both deal with a subject which is coy about submitting itself to reflexion, for they both treat of spheres in which man exercises his purely creative activities. In science man observes and describes the course of nature, and tries to penetrate its mysteries. In practical matters he uses and moulds it by applying what he has grasped of it outside his own person. But in his moral and artistic activities he uses knowledge and obeys impulses, [pg 020] perceptions, and laws which originate in himself. To establish these firmly and to create ideals from them is an undertaking which can be successful to a certain extent only. Thought lags behind the material on which it exercises itself.

This is evident from the fact that the examples with which ethics and æsthetics try to work upon reality are usually not quite consistent and are often foolish. And how far from simple is whatever is laid down in either this or that! How the assertions made contradict each other! The guidance that an artist can get for his activities from the best works on æsthetics is but small. Similarly, a business man who seeks in a work on ethics advice as to how, in any given case, he is to bring the demands of his business into harmony with those of ethics, can seldom find any satisfactory information.

The inadequacy in this respect of æsthetics is not of great importance for the spiritual life of mankind. Artistic activity is always the peculiar affair of individuals whose natural gifts develop more by the actual production of works of art than by consideration of the conclusions arrived at by æsthetic theorizing.

With ethics, however, it is a matter of the creative activity of the mass of men, an activity which is largely determined by the principles which are current in the general thought of the time. The absence of that progress which is still possible in ethics is something tragic.

Ethics and æsthetics are not sciences. Science, as the description of objective facts, the establishment of their connexion with one another, and the drawing of inferences from them, is only possible when there is a succession of similar facts to be dealt with, or a single fact in a succession of phenomena, when, that is, there is a subject matter which can be reduced to order under a recognized law. But there is no science of human willing and doing, and there never can be. Here there are only subjective and infinitely various facts to be studied, and their mutual connexion lies within the mysterious human ego.

It is only the history of ethics that is scientific, and that [pg 021] only so far as a history of man’s spiritual life is scientifically possible.

The importance of thought about ethics

There is, therefore, no such thing as a scientific system of ethics; there can only be a thinking one. Philosophy must give up the illusion which it has cherished even down to the present day. As to what is good and what is bad, and about the considerations in which we find strength to do the one and avoid the other, no one can speak to his neighbour as an expert. All that one can do is to impart to him so much as one finds in oneself of that which ought to influence everybody, though better thought out perhaps, and stronger and clearer, so that noise has become a musical note.

Is there, however, any sense in ploughing for the thousand and second time a field which has already been ploughed a thousand and one times? Has not everything which can be said about ethics already been said by Lao-tse, Confucius, the Buddha, and Zarathustra; by Amos and Isaiah; by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; by Epicurus and the Stoics; by Jesus and Paul; by the thinkers of the Renaissance, of the “Aufklärung,” and of Rationalism; by Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hume; by Spinoza and Kant; by Fichte and Hegel; by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others? Is there a possibility of getting beyond all these so materially contradictory convictions of the past to something new which will have a stronger and more lasting influence? Can the ethical kernel of the thoughts of all these men be collected into an idea of the ethical, which will unite all the energies to which they appeal? We must hope so, if we are not to despair of the fate of the human race.

Does thought about ethics bring more ethics into the world? The confused picture offered us by the history of ethics is enough to make one sceptical about it. On the other hand, it is clear that ethical thinkers like Socrates, Kant, or Fichte had a moralizing influence on many of their [pg 022] contemporaries. From every revival of ethical reflexion there went forth ethical movements which made the contemporary generation fitter for its tasks. If any age lacks the minds which force it to reflect about the ethical, the level of its morality sinks and with it its capacity for answering the questions which present themselves to it.

In the history of ethical thought we wander in the innermost circles of world-history. Of all the forces which mould reality morality is the first and foremost. It is the determining knowledge which we must wring from thought. Everything else is more or less secondary.

For this reason everyone who believes that he can contribute something to help forward the ethical self-consciousness of society and of individuals has the right to speak now, although it is political and economic questions that the present day prescribes for study. For what is inopportune is really opportune. We can accomplish something lasting in the problems of political and economic life only if we approach them as men who are trying to think ethically. All those who help forward in any way our thought about ethics are working for the coming of peace and prosperity to the world. They are engaged in the higher politics, and the higher rational economics, and even if all they can do is nothing more than to bring ethical thinking to the fore, they have nevertheless done something valuable. All reflexion about ethics has as one result a raising and rousing of the general disposition to morality.

The search for a basic principle of morality

But however certain it is that every age lives by the energies which have sprung from its thought about ethics, it is equally certain that up to now the ethical thoughts which have become current have after a longer or a shorter period lost their power of convincing. Why has the establishment of an ethical system never met with more than a partial and temporary success, and never been a permanency? Why is the history of the ethical thinking of [pg 023] mankind the history of inexplicable stoppages and fallings-back? Why has there been in this sphere no organic progress which allows one period to build upon the achievements of preceding ones? Why in the sphere of ethics do we live in a town full of ruins, in which one generation builds for itself here, and another there, what is absolutely necessary?

“To preach morality is easy, to establish it is hard,” says Schopenhauer, and that saying shows what the problem is.

In every effort of thought about ethics there is to be seen, distinctly or indistinctly, the search for a basic principle of morality, which needs no support outside itself, and unites in itself the sum total of all moral demands. But no one has ever succeeded in really formulating this principle. Elements only of it were brought to light and given out to be the whole, until the difficulties which emerged destroyed the illusion. The tree, however finely it sprouted, did not live to grow old, because it was unable to send its roots down into the permanently nourishing and moisture-giving earth.

The chaos of ethical views becomes to some extent intelligible as soon as one sees that we are concerned with differing and mutually contradictory views about fragments of the basic principle. The contradiction has its foundation in their incompleteness. There is ethical matter in what Kant objects to in the ethics of rationalism, as also in what he puts in its place; in that part of Kant’s writings where his conception of the moral is opposed by Schopenhauer, as also in what is to take its place in the ethical system of the latter. Schopenhauer is ethical in the points on which Nietzsche attacks him, and Nietzsche is ethical in his opposition to Schopenhauer. What is wanted is to find the fundamental chord in which the dissonances of these varied and contradictory ethical ideas unite in producing harmony.

The ethical problem, then, is the problem of a basic principle of morality, which is founded in thought. What is the common element of good in the manifold goods which we feel to be such? Is there such a universally valid [pg 024] conception of the good? If there is, in what does it consist, and how far is it real and necessary for me? What influence has it over my general disposition and my actions? Into what relations with the world does it bring me?

It is, then, on the basic principle of the moral that the attention of thought has to be fixed. The mere giving of a list of virtues and duties is like striking notes at random on the piano and thinking it is music. And when we come to discuss the works of earlier moralists, it is only the elements in them which can help the establishment of an ethical system that will interest us, not the way in which any system has been advocated.

Otherwise there is no success for any attempt to bring order into chaos. How utterly at sea Friedrich Jodl_(_2_)_ is in his history of ethics, the most important existing work in this department, when he tries to estimate the relative values of the various ethical standpoints! Failing to judge them directly by their distance from an initial basic principle of morality, he is unable to establish a standard of comparison. He gives us, therefore, only a survey of ethical views, and no history of the ethical problem.

Religious and philosophical ethics

When we come to look for the fundamental principle of morality, are we concerned only with the direct attempts of philosophy to find it? No, we are concerned with every kind, those of religion as well as others. We must trace out the whole experience of mankind in its search for the ethical.

The raising of a dividing wall between philosophical ethics and religious ethics is based on the mistaken idea that the former are scientific and the latter non-scientific. But neither of them is either: they are both alike merely thought; only one has freed itself from acceptance of the traditional religious world-view, while the other still maintains its connexion with it.

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The difference, however, is merely relative. Religious ethics appeal, indeed, to a supernatural authority, but that is rather the form which they assume. As a matter of fact, however high they rise, they still seek to find an independent basic principle of morality. In every religious genius there lives an ethical thinker, and every really deep philosophical moralist is in some way or other religious.

How indeterminate is the border-line is shown by Indian ethics. Are they religious, or are they philosophical? Originating in the thought of the priests, they claim to be a deeper exposition of the demands of religion, but in essential nature they are philosophical. With the Buddha and others, they venture to make the step from pantheism to atheism, but without giving up their claim to be religious. Spinoza and Kant, however, who are counted among philosophical moralists, do, if we judge by the general direction of their thought, belong at the same time to the religious ones.

It all depends on a relative difference in methods of thought. The one group works towards the basic principle of ethics by a more intuitive process, the other by a process which is more analytical. It is the depth, not the method of the thought, which decides the matter. The more intuitive thinker produces his ethical thought like an artist who with the production of an important work of art opens up new horizons. In deep-reaching moral sayings like the beatitudes of Jesus the basic principle of morality shines out. There comes progress in the recognition of what is moral, even if the provision of a foundation for it fails to advance in the same way.

On the other hand, the searching for the basic principle of the moral by the process of critical analysis may lead to an impoverished system of ethics, because there runs through it the effort to take into account only what is connected with the idea that seems to be what is being sought for. That is why philosophical ethics are as a rule so far behind practical ethics, and have so little direct influence. While religious moralists in one mighty word can get down to the [pg 026] waters flowing far below the surface, philosophical ethics often dig out nothing but a slight hollow in which a puddle forms.

Nevertheless, it is rational thinking alone which is able to pursue the search for the basic principle with perseverance and hope of success. It must find it at last, if it only goes deep enough, and is simple enough.

The weakness of all ethics hitherto, whether philosophical or religious, has lain in this, that they have not shown individuals how to deal directly and naturally with reality. To a large extent they merely talk “about it and about.” They do not touch a man’s daily experience, and therefore they exert no permanent pressure upon him. The result is lack of ethical thought, and mere platitudes about ethics.

The true basic principle of the ethical must be not only something universally valid, but something absolutely elementary and inward, which, once it has dawned upon a man, never lets him loose, which as a matter of course runs like a thread through all his meditation, which never lets itself be thrust aside, and which continually challenges him to come to an understanding with reality.

For centuries men who navigated the seas guided themselves by the stars. In time they rose above this imperfect method through the discovery of the magnetic needle, which by its natural principle of activity pointed them to the north. Now they can tell where they are in the darkest night on the most distant sea. That is the kind of progress that we have to seek in ethics. So long as we have nothing but an ethical system of ethical sayings, we direct our course by stars, which, however brilliant their shining, give us only more or less reliable guidance, and can be hidden from us by rising mist. During a stormy night they leave mankind, as we know by recent experiences, in the lurch. If, however, we have in our possession a system of ethics as a principle which is a necessity of thought and comes to clearness within ourselves, there begins a far-reaching ethical deepening of individuals, and steady ethical progress in mankind.

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