CHAPTER I

HOW PHILOSOPHY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION

Our self-deception as to the real conditions of our civilization. The collapse of the theory of the universe on which our ideals were based. The superficial character of modern philosophizing.

We are living to-day under the sign of the collapse of civilization. The situation has not been produced by the war; the latter is only a manifestation of it. The spiritual atmosphere has solidified into actual facts, which again react on it with disastrous results in every respect. This interaction of material and spiritual has assumed a most unhealthy character. Just below a mighty cataract we are driving along in a current full of formidable eddies, and it will need the most gigantic efforts to rescue the vessel of our fate from the dangerous side channel into which we have [pg 002] allowed it to drift, and bring it back into the main stream, if, indeed, we can hope to do so at all.

We have drifted out of the stream of civilization because there was amongst us no real reflection upon what civilization is. It is true that at the end of the last century and the beginning of this there appeared a number of works on civilization with the most varied titles; but, as though in obedience to some secret order, they made no attempt to settle and make clear the conditions of our intellectual life, but devoted themselves exclusively to its origin and history. They gave us a relief map of civilization marked with roads which men had observed or invented, and which led us over hill and dale through the fields of history from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. It was a triumph for the historical sense of the authors. The crowds whom these works instructed were filled with satisfied contentment when they understood that their civilization was the organic product of so many centuries of the working of spiritual and social forces, but no one worked out and described the content of our spiritual life. No one tested its value from the point of view of the nobility of its ideas, and its ability to produce real progress.

Thus we crossed the threshold of the twentieth century with an unshakable conceit of ourselves, [pg 003] and whatever was written at that time about our civilization only confirmed us in our ingenuous belief in its high value. Anyone who expressed doubt was regarded with astonishment. Many, indeed, who were on the road to error, stopped and returned to the main road again because they were afraid of the path which led off to the side. Others continued along the main road, but in silence; the understanding and insight which were at work in them only condemned them to isolation.

It is clear now to everyone that the suicide of civilization is in progress. What yet remains of it is no longer safe. It is still standing, indeed, because it was not exposed to the destructive pressure which overwhelmed the rest, but, like the rest, is built upon rubble, and the next landslide will very likely carry it away.

But what was it that preceded and led up to this loss of power in the innate forces of civilization?

The age of the Illuminati and of rationalism had put forward ethical ideals, based on reason, concerning the development of the individual to true manhood, his position in society, the material and spiritual problems which arose out of society, the relations of the different nations to each other, and their issue in a humanity which should be united in [pg 004] the pursuit of the highest moral and spiritual objects. These ideals had begun, both in philosophy and in general thought, to get into contact with reality and to alter the general environment. In the course of three or four generations there had been such progress made, both in the ideas underlying civilization and in their material embodiment, that the age of true civilization seemed to have dawned upon the world and to be assured of an uninterrupted development.

But about the middle of the nineteenth century this mutual understanding and co-operation between ethical ideals and reality began to break down, and in the course of the next few decades it disappeared more and more completely. Without resistance, without complaint, civilization abdicated. Its ideas lagged behind, as though they were too exhausted to keep pace with it. How did this come about?

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The decisive element in the production of this result was philosophy’s renunciation of her duty.

In the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth it was philosophy which led and guided thought in general. She had busied herself with the questions which presented themselves to mankind at each successive period, and had kept the [pg 005] thought of civilized man actively reflecting upon them. Philosophy at that time included within herself an elementary philosophizing about man, society, race, humanity and civilization, which produced in a perfectly natural way a living popular philosophy that controlled the general thought, and maintained the enthusiasm for civilization.

But that ethical, and at the same time optimistic, view of things in which the Illuminati and rationalism had laid the foundations of this healthy popular philosophy, was unable in the long run to meet the criticism levelled at it by pure thought. Its naïve dogmatism raised more and more prejudice against it. Kant tried to provide the tottering building with new foundations, undertaking to alter the rationalistic view of things in accordance with the demands of a deeper theory of knowledge, without, however, making any change in its essential spiritual elements. Goethe, Schiller and other intellectual giants of the age, showed, by means of criticism both kindly and malicious, that rationalism was rather popular philosophy than real philosophy, but they were not in a position to put into the place of what they destroyed anything new which could give the same effective support to the ideas about civilization which were current in the general thought of the time.

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Fichte, Hegel, and other philosophers, who, for all their criticism of rationalism, paid homage to its ethical ideals, attempted to establish a similar ethical and optimistic view of things by speculative methods, that is by logical and metaphysical discussion of pure being and its development into a universe. For three or four decades they succeeded in deceiving themselves and others with this supposedly creative and inspiring illusion, and in doing violence to reality in the interests of their theory of the universe. But at last the natural sciences, which all this time had been growing stronger and stronger, rose up against them, and, with a plebeian enthusiasm for the truth of reality, reduced to ruins the magnificent creations of their imagination.

Since that time the ethical ideas on which civilization rests have been wandering about the world, poverty-stricken and homeless. No theory of the universe has been advanced which can give them a solid foundation; in fact, not one has made its appearance which can claim for itself solidity and inner consistency. The age of philosophic dogmatism had come definitely to an end, and after that nothing was recognized as truth except the science which described reality. General theories of the universe no longer appeared as fixed stars; they [pg 007] were regarded as resting on hypothesis, and ranked no higher than comets.

The same weapon which struck down the dogmatism of knowledge about the universe struck down also the dogmatic enunciation of spiritual ideas. The early simple rationalism, the critical rationalism of Kant, and the speculative rationalism of the great philosophers of the nineteenth century had all alike done violence to reality in two ways. They had given a position above that of the facts of science to the views which they had arrived at by pure thought, and they had also preached a series of ethical ideals which were meant to replace by new ones the various existing relations in the ideas and the material environment of mankind. When the first of these two forms of violence was proved to be a mistaken one, it became questionable whether the second could still be allowed the justification which it had hitherto enjoyed. The doctrinaire methods of thought which made the existing world nothing but material for the production of a purely theoretical sketch of a better future were replaced by sympathetic attempts to understand the historical origin of existing things for which Hegel’s philosophy had prepared the way.

With a general mentality of this description, a real combination of ethical ideals with reality was no [pg 008] longer possible; there was not the freedom from prejudice which that required, and so there came a weakening of the convictions which were the driving power of civilization. So, too, an end was put to that justifiable violence to human convictions and circumstances without which the reforming work of civilization can make no advance, because it was bound up with that other unjustifiable violence to reality. That is the tragic element in the psychological development of our spiritual life during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Rationalism, then, had been dismissed; but with it went also the optimistic convictions as to the moral meaning of the universe and of humanity, of society and of man, to which it had given birth, though the conviction still exerted so much influence that no attention was paid to the catastrophe which had really begun.

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Philosophy did not realize that the power of the ideas about civilization which had been entrusted to it was becoming a doubtful quantity. At the end of one of the most brilliant works on the history of philosophy which appeared at the close of the nineteenth century philosophy is defined as the process “by which there comes to completion, step by step, [pg 009] and with ever clearer and surer consciousness, that conviction about the value of civilization the universal validity of which it is the object of philosophy itself to affirm.” But the author has forgotten the essential point, viz., that there was a time when philosophy did not merely convince itself of the value of civilization, but also let its convictions go forth as fruitful ideas destined to influence the general thought, while from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards these convictions had become more and more of the nature of hoarded and unproductive capital.

Once philosophy had been an active worker producing universal convictions about civilization. Now, after the collapse in the middle of the nineteenth century, this same philosophy had become a mere drawer of dividends, concentrating her activities far from the world on what she had managed to save. She had become a mere science, which sifted the results of the historical and natural sciences, and collected from them material for a future theory of the universe, carrying on with this object in view a learned activity in all branches of knowledge. At the same time she became more and more absorbed in the study of her own past. Philosophy came to mean practically the history of philosophy, but the creative spirit had left her. She became more and [pg 010] more a philosophy which contained no real thought. She reflected, indeed, on the results achieved by the individual sciences, but she lost the power of thought about fundamental problems.

She looked back with condescending pity on the rationalism which she had outstripped. She prided herself on being able to trace her descent through Kant, on having been shown by Hegel the inner meaning of history, and on being at work to-day in close sympathy with the natural sciences. But for all that she was poorer than the poorest rationalism, because she now carried on in imagination only, and not in reality, the recognized work of philosophy, which the latter had practised so zealously. Rationalism, for all its simplicity, had been a working philosophy, but philosophy herself had now become, for all her insight, merely a pedantic philosophy of degenerates. She still played, indeed, some sort of _rôle_ in schools and universities, but she had no longer any message for the great world.

In spite of all her learning, she had become a stranger to the world, and the problems of life which occupied men and the whole thought of the age had no part in her activities. Her way lay apart from the general spiritual life, and just as she derived no stimulus from the latter, so she gave none back. Refusing to concern herself with fundamental [pg 011] problems, she contained no fundamental philosophy which could become a philosophy of the people.

From this impotence came the aversion to all generally intelligible philosophizing which is so characteristic of her. Popular philosophy was for her merely a review, prepared for the use of the crowd, simplified, and therefore rendered inferior, of the results given by the individual sciences which she had herself sifted and put together in view of a future theory of the universe. She was wholly unconscious of several things, viz., that there is a popular philosophy which arises out of such a review; that it is just the province of philosophy to deal with the primary, deeper questions about which individuals and the crowd are thinking, or ought to be thinking, to apply to them more comprehensive and more thorough methods of thought, and then restore them to general currency; and, finally, that the value of any philosophy is in the last resort to be measured by its capacity, or incapacity, to transform itself into a living philosophy of the people.

Whatever is deep is also simple, and can be reproduced as such, if only its relation to the whole of reality is preserved. It is then something abstract, which secures for itself a many-sided life as soon as it comes into contact with facts.

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Whatever of inquiring thought there was among the general public was therefore compelled to languish, because our philosophy refused either to acknowledge or to help it. It found in front of it a deep chasm which it could not cross.

Of gold coinage, minted in the past, philosophy had abundance; hypotheses about a soon to be developed theological theory of the universe filled her vaults like unminted bullion; but food with which to appease the spiritual hunger of the present she did not possess. Deceived by her own riches, she had neglected to plant any ground with nourishing crops, and therefore, ignoring the hunger of the age, she left the latter to its fate.

That pure thought never managed to construct a theory of the universe of an optimistic, ethical character, and to build up on that for a foundation the ideals which go to produce civilization, was not the fault of philosophy; it was a fact which became evident as thought developed. But philosophy was guilty of a wrong to our age in that it did not admit the fact, but remained wrapped up in its illusion, as though this were really a help to the progress of civilization.

The ultimate vocation of philosophy is to be the guide and guardian of the general reason, and it was her duty, in the circumstances of the time, to confess [pg 013] to our world that ethical ideals were no longer supported by any general theory of the universe, but were, till further notice, left to themselves, and must make their way in the world by their own innate power. She ought to have shown us that we have to fight on behalf of the ideals on which our civilization rests. She ought to have tried to give these ideals an independent existence by virtue of their own inner value and inner truth, and so to keep them alive and active without any extraneous help from a corresponding theory of the universe. No effort should have been spared to direct the attention of the cultured and the uncultured alike to the problem of the ideals of civilization.

But philosophy philosophized about everything except civilization. She went on working undeviatingly at the establishment of a theoretical view of the universe, as though by means of it everything could be restored, and did not reflect that this theory, even if it were completed, would be constructed only out of history and science, and would accordingly be unoptimistic and unethical, and would remain for ever an “impotent theory of the universe,” which could never call forth the energies needed for the establishment and maintenance of the ideals of civilization.

So little did philosophy philosophize about [pg 014] civilization that she did not even notice that she herself and the age along with her were losing more and more of it. In the hour of peril the watchman who ought to have kept us awake was himself asleep, and the result was that we put up no fight at all on behalf of our civilization.

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