1. THE FIRST FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION
THE tradition of modern thought presents philosophy as asking at the outset of its task three vital questions: What can we know? What ought we to do? What may we hope? The second of these is recognized as the fundamental problem of ethics. It is that aspect of the human problem in its entirety which gives to ethics the character of practical philosophy. It is the kind of question which aims at more than the merely intellectual grasp of reality and yet at less than what hope yearns for. Independent of any guarantee of attainment, independent equally of knowledge of the conditioned and accessible and of belief in the absolute, it stands midway between the hard realities of life and the hovering ideals of the visionary. It does not even turn its face towards anything real as such; and yet standing very near reality—indeed nearer than any theory or aspiration—it plants itself in the real, and sets before its eyes the reality of that which is unreal in the existing conditions.
It grows out of what is next to us, out of the current of everyday life not less than out of life’s great decisive moments, with which the individual is occasionally confronted. Such moments are those which through the weight of reasons for and against, presented once but never again, lift the individual above half-conscious drifting into a fresh decision in his life, into a perspective of unavoidable and unforeseeable responsibility. But the same is in fact true also of the little things in experience. The situation before which we are placed shows the same aspect in petty details as in affairs of great moment. It forces us to a decision and to an act, and it gives us no dispensation from the necessity of deciding; yet it does not tell us how we ought to decide, what we ought to do or what consequences we ought to accept and to prefer.
Every moment we stand face to face with the question: What ought we to do? Every new situation brings it up afresh. Step by step in life we must answer it anew, and no power can deliver us, or lift us above the necessity of answering it. To the ever-new question our action, our actual conduct, is the ever-new reply. For our action already contains the decision. And even where we were not conscious of it, we can afterwards recognize it in our act, and perhaps repent of it. Whether in every choice we decide aright does not enter into the problem, nor into the situation. For that, there is no guarantee; and the hand of another does not guide us. Here everyone is thrown back upon himself, and makes the decision alone, and from himself. Afterwards, if he has erred, he alone bears the responsibility of the guilt.
Who foresees the sweep of his action? Who knows the chain of its consequences, or measures the greatness of his responsibility?
A deed, once done, belongs to reality and can never be undone. What was defective in it is in the strictest sense irreparable. The situation arises once for all, never returns, and, like everything real, is individual. But it is also there irrevocably, woven into the web of the cosmic process as a part of it. The same things hold good of an act, when it has occurred. Its effects extend to ever-wider circles, it propagates itself after its own kind. When it is once woven into existence, it lives on, it never dies out—even if the beat of the waves which proceeds from it grows weaker and is cancelled in the greater stream of the world’s course—it is immortal as all reality is.
However unreal and unmotived its origin may be, when once it is incorporated into existence it follows another law, the law of reality and of efficacious activity. This law gives to it a life of its own, a power to build up and destroy life and being, in the presence of which repentance and despair are powerless. A deed passes beyond the doer, sets its mark upon him and judges him without mercy.
Not of every act do we see the chain of consequences. But every act has consequences, and the possibility is always present that they weigh heavily where we least suspect it. And what holds good on a small scale concerning the conduct of the individual is true, on a large scale, of the conduct of a community, a generation, an age. On what we determine to-day depends perhaps the future of generations. The coming time always reaps what the present sows, as the present has reaped the harvest of the past. In a pre-eminent sense this holds good where the old has outlived itself and the new, the untried, seeks to establish itself, when fresh energies burst forth and dark unknown powers begin to stir. It is here that under the weight of an unforeseen responsibility the modest participation of the individual in the initiative of the whole can last for centuries.
Here the seriousness of the question “What ought we to do?” becomes self-evident. One forgets the real significance of this fundamental question only too easily amid the clamouring problems of the day—as if it were not exactly these latter which have their root in the former and by it alone can be solved. Not, indeed, that philosophic ethics should always speak out directly. Its task is not the positive programme, not the bias of partisanship. The reverse is true: a holding aloof, on principle, from the given, the present, the disputed, makes ethics free and renders it competent to teach.
Ethics does not teach directly what ought here and now to happen in any given case, but in general how that is constituted which ought to happen universally. This may vary and may be manifold. But not all that ought to take place can occur in every situation. The passing moment, with its claims, here has scope within that which ethical reflection requires. Ethics furnishes the bird’s-eye view from which the actual can be seen objectively. From it the tasks of individuals and the tasks of ages appear equally specific. It keeps the same distance from both; for both it means an elevation above the special case, escape from extraneous influences, from sugges tion, falsification, fanaticism. Herein ethics proceeds not other wise than does philosophy; it does not teach finished judgments, but how to judge.
In this sense it takes the question: “What ought we to do?” It does not determine, describe or define the proper “What” of the Ought; but it gives rather the criteria, by which the What is to be recognized. That is the inner reason why it stands high above all the strife of particular tendencies, interests and parties. Its perspectives stand to those of private and public everyday life as those of astronomy to acquaintance with terrestrial things. Nevertheless the points of view even of these particular tendencies have their justification in it alone. The distance is not a separation, not a losing hold of the particular case, but only a perspective, a conspectus, a comprehensive vision and—in idea—a tendency towards unity, totality, completeness.
Here the character of practical philosophy loses all its aggressiveness. It does not mix itself up with the conflicts of life, gives no precepts coined ad hoc; it is no code, as law is, of commandments and prohibitions. It turns its attention directly to the creative in man, challenges it afresh in every new case to observe, to divine, as it were, what ought here and now to happen. Philosophical ethics is not casuistry and never should be: it would thereby kill in man the very thing which it ought to waken and educate—man’s creative, spontaneous, living, inner sense of what ought to be, of what in itself is valuable. This is not a renunciation of the high task of being “practical.” Only in this way can it be practical: by drawing forth, lifting up and maturing the practical in man—that is, the active in him, the spiritual ability to generate. Its aim is not man’s disfranchisement and imprisonment within a formula, but his advance towards full self-direction and responsibility. The freeing of man from tutelage is the true making of man. But only ethical reflection can set him free.
In this sense ethics is practical philosophy. It is not a shaping of human life regardless of man’s intelligence, but is precisely his own advance towards his own free fashioning of life. It is his knowledge of good and evil which puts him on a level with divinity; it is his ability and authority to help in determining the course of events, to co-operate in the workshop of reality. It is his training in his world-vocation, the demand upon him to be a colleague of the demiurge in the creation of the world.
For the creation of the world is not completed so long as he has not fulfilled his creative function in it. But he procrastinates. For he is not ready, he is not standing on the summit of his humanity. Humanity must first be fulfilled in him. The creative work which is incumbent upon him in the world terminates in his self-creation, in the fulfilment of his ethos.
The ethos of man includes both the chaotic and the creative. In the former lie his possibilities but also his danger; in the latter he finds his vocation. To fulfil it is to be human.
Ethics applies itself to the creative power in man. Here human intelligence is seeking and finding the pathway to the meaning of life. But in this it is practical. Man thus moulds life. Ethics is not primal and foundation-laying philosophy; its knowledge is neither the first nor the most certain knowledge. But in another sense it is the primal concern of philosophy : its original and innermost obligation, its most responsible task, its μεγστοv μάθηα. Its limitation is something not willed, something conditioned from within. Its domain is a natural sanctuary of wisdom, for ever esoteric—if judged by the rules of the understanding and its fixed concepts—a sanc tuary, in which even the wisest treads with reverence and awe. It is, nevertheless, that which is nearest and most com prehensible; it is given to all and is common to all. It is the first and most positive philosophical interest of man; historically it is this interest which first divided philosophy from mythology. It is the source and innermost motive of philosophical thinking, perhaps indeed of human intelligence in general. It is, furthermore, the final goal and the widest outlook of this very thinking. And the reason why it is preoccupied with the future and always directs its gaze upon the remote and the unactualized and that it sees even the present under the guise of futurity, is because it is itself super-temporal.
3. THE MEANING OF “PRACTICAL” IN PHILOSOPHY
What ought we to do? is harder to answer than: What can we know? As for knowledge, its object confronts it, is fixed, immovable, existent in itself. Thought can fall back upon experience. What does not tally with the data of experience is false. But what we ought to do is not yet done, is unreal, without previous existence in itself. It can first attain existence through the doing. Yet the inquiry is concerning the “what” of this doing, in order thereby to direct the doing.
Here the fixed object, the immediate presence, is lacking. Thought must anticipate it. Thought here lacks the corrective of experience. It rests on itself alone. Whatever can here be perceived must necessarily be discerned a priori. The autonomy of this apriorism may indeed be an object of pride for the moral consciousness; but in it lies the difficulty of the problem. What credibility has ethical perception, if it lacks every criterion? Is the nobility of the human ethos so sure a testimony that it cannot even be disputed when it says dictatorially “You ought”? Is it not condemned to remain floating for ever in the hypothetical? Indeed, does not multiplicity rule here, relativity, subjectivity, variation from case to case? What I ought to do to-day under determined circumstances ought I not perhaps to leave undone to-morrow under different cir cumstances, and perhaps never do again in my life?
Now it is clear that at this point the false perspective of casuistry has again been introduced—a partisan approach to the particular and the given. Nevertheless, the problem is not to be settled by aloofness from the actual. Who would wish to say where the boundary is of the legitimate question as to the “What” of the Ought? Practical interest always attaches precisely to the actual and this always threatens to foreshorten the wider perspectives. Thus it comes about that, in spite of its acknowledged universality and dignity, the subject-matter of ethics is nevertheless exposed at the same time to the most serious doubt.
In this sense ethics is once more the most disputed depart ment of philosophy. Is there a unity in morals? Does not the ethos itself vary from people to people and from age to age? And ought one then to believe that the nature of the good itself changes according to the actuality of the moment? Would not that again mean a denial of the autonomy of the ethos, a casting of suspicion upon the essential meaning of the Ought and the good?
Thus at the first step ethics brings us face to face with its insurmountable difficulty: how are ethical principles to be arrived at and how can one be certain of them? No experience can teach them; in contrast to that which can be experienced they must be intuitively discerned. But where, in contrast to the actual, we find them intuitively discerned and set up as claims, there we also find them variable, displaceable, exchangeable, transformed, dislocated. To what then can ethics as a science cling?
To this question the peculiar meaning of the “practical” in ethics corresponds. Other domains of practical knowledge are always aware through other sources what in the last resort the goal is. In all technique, hygiene, jurisprudence, pedagogy, the ends are fixed, are presupposed; there is only a question as to the ways and means. Ethics is practical in a different sense, one might almost say in the reverse sense. It ought to point out the ends themselves for the sake of which all means are there, the highest, the absolute ends, which cannot be regarded as in turn means to anything else. Although within certain bounds an ethics of means can be legitimately maintained, the emphasis is still upon the ends.
The meaning of the practical is therefore in fact the reverse of what it is in other fields. How are pure, absolute, irreducible ends discovered? As they can be found in nothing real or are verifiable only afterwards, what cognitive pathway leads to them? That is the insurmountable difficulty with the question: “What ought we to do?” It is a unique kind of difficulty, it is peculiar to ethics and constitutes a part of its nature. And yet it allows of no disavowal, it is propounded irremissibly to man. Each person must somehow solve it for himself, in action if not in thought. He cannot take a step in life without actually settling it in one way or another. It is the highest claim which confronts him. Its import is the necessary correlate of that dignity of autonomy, of that highest privilege, which distinguishes the ethos of man. Man carries it with him as long as he breathes.
Not for idle play is this superb capacity given to him. What is at stake is always himself—including his high power. For even this he can lose through folly, can gamble away.
4. The Valuational Wealth of the Real and Participation Therein
All this, however, is only one half of the fundamental problem of ethics. The other half is less positive, less obtrusive and exacting, but correspondingly more general, concerned more with the whole of man and of human life. The first question, as regards himself, referred only to man’s action and, as regards the world, only to that part of it where the power of his action can make itself felt. Notwithstanding the urgency of its hold upon him, this portion of existence which makes a claim upon him and, loading him with responsibility, depends upon his decisions, resolutions and will is an imperceptibly small part of the world.
But the inner attitude of man, his ethos as deciding for or against, as acceptance or rejection, reverence or disdain, love or hate, covers an incomparably wider area. This decidingfor-or-against manifests its highest intensity, no doubt, only concerning things near to oneself; as the radius increases, it grows pale: at a certain distance it bears the character only of an accompanying emotional tone that for the most part remains unnoticed. But this tension nowhere entirely disappears. It accompanies the accepting consciousness, it transports it to the limits of the powers of comprehension, in the form of admiration, interest and finally of theoretical alertness of the will to understand. A purely theoretical consciousness of objects is a mere abstraction. Actually, the practical interest is always there, like an undercurrent, and occasionally it breaks powerfully through and disturbs the serenity of contemplation.
Here there is no question of outward efficiency, of decisions weighty with consequence. There is here no Ought. Yet in the mere inward attitude taken there is something highly positive and involving great responsibility. For the nature of man himself is not indifferent to the range of his interest and its strength. His nature widens and grows proportionately, or again shrivels.
He who stolidly passes by men and their fates, he whom the staggering does not stagger nor the inspiring inspire, for him life is in vain, he has no part in it. The world must be meaningless and life senseless to one who has no capacity to perceive life’s relationships, the inexhaustible significance of persons and situations, of correlations and events. The outward emptiness and monotony of his life are the reflex of his inner emptiness and his moral blindness. The real world in which he exists, the stream of human life which bears him up and carries him along, is not without manifold wealth of content. His poverty amidst abundance is due to his own failure to appreciate life. Hence for the moral nature of man there is, besides the narrow actuality of action, a second requirement: to participate in the fulness of life, to be receptive of the significant, to lie open to whatever has meaning and value.
This claim upon him is more inward and calm and keeps its secret better than the claim of the Ought-to-Do and of the will. And yet to this it is fundamentally related, it is the same ever-new and living need of an inner decision for or against. It demands the same taking up of a moral attitude on the basis of the same inward autonomy, of the same ethical principles.
Philosophical ethics has misinterpreted this often enough, has allowed itself to be deluded by the more positive and elemental pressure of the other claim, and through this bias has reacted perniciously upon the development of the human ethos. Every ethics of duty and of the Ought alone, all purely imperative morals, commits this blunder—the blunder of overlooking the fulness of life. Whoever has fallen under the spell of such a rigorism may at this stage foolishly ask: Is not that which is valuable always given up first of all? Is not moral value always in its very essence an eternal Not-Being, an Ought-to-Be? Are there, then, actualized values in the world? Whoever asks this question has not noticed what a failure to appreciate life, what a thanklessness and arrogance hold him in their grip. As though the actual must necessarily be bad and of poor quality! As though human life were in itself a senseless game, the world a vale of tears, and as though all existence had only waited for him in order to attain through his will and his action light, meaning and value!
An ethics exclusively of the Ought is a moral delusion, is a blindness to the value of the actual. No wonder that, historically, pessimism follows in its track. In a world stripped of values and profaned, no one could tolerate life.
5. THE SECOND FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION
When once we have grasped the fact that the very same values which alone can guide our purpose and action are a thousandfold realized in life by persons and situations, that they confront us in relations and events, surround us all the time, carry us forward and fill our existence with light and splendour—far beyond our limited power of comprehension—we stand face to face with the second ethical question: What are we to keep our eyes open for, so as to participate in the world’s values? What is valuable in life and in the world generally? What are we to make our own, to understand, to appreciate, so as to be man in the full meaning of the word? What is it for which we still lack the sense, the organ, so that we must first form our capacity, sharpen and educate it?
This question is not less important and serious than the one concerning what ought to be done. In fact, it is infinitely broader in content, richer, more comprehensive. In a certain sense it includes the other question. For how shall I recognize what I have to do, so long as I do not know about the values and disvalues within situations, the approach to which alone requires me to decide, will and act! Shall I not fumble about in the dark, be exposed to every kind of error, shall I not necessarily with clumsy hand ruin the valuable thing which, possibly, like all else that is real, cannot be replaced?
Thus the second question surpasses the first in importance. It proves to be definitely precedent, conditioning the other.
And it is superior, as well in its wider metaphysical signi ficance as in its practical positive bearings. For the meanin of human existence is not exhausted in man’s proud vocation as a builder and fashioner of the world. What is the good of working, if it dies with the work? Wherein is the meaning of creation itself, if the thing made does not contain the meaning, if it is not significant to someone capable of judging? Is it not man’s metaphysical meaning in the very same world in which he also works and fashions, that the world may have meaning for him? In him alone the world has its consciousness, its existence for itself. What he is to the world, no other of its creatures can be to it. His cosmic littleness, transitoriness and helplessness do not impair his metaphysical greatness and his superiority to the lower forms of being.
He is the subject among objects, the recognizer, the knower, the experiencer, the participator: he is the mirror of Being and of the world, and, understood in this way, he is the world’s meaning. This view is not an arbitrary or speculative fancy, it is a straightforward expression of a phenomenon which can be explained but not explained away: the phenomenon of man’s cosmic status. We do not know whether there is another mirror of the world than that which consists of our human consciousness. In this matter free play may be permitted to fancy; but that changes nothing as to man’s place in the world. This place is for us certain, about this we know; and this is enough, in order to recognize in it the metaphysical meaning of human existence. Although man may be a dim mirror of the real, nevertheless he is still a mirror and in him Being is reflected. For him Being has a meaning. Whether it would have without him, or whether without consciousness the world would be meaningless, eludes our judgment.
This meaning of human existence is not exhausted in the mere taking up of the idea. Acceptance without interest, the purely theoretical enlistment of consciousness, is, as was said, an abstraction. Man is primarily practical, only derivatively is he theoretical. His apprehension is from the first a preferring of one thing to another. His portion in the coming and going of events is participation with feeling, interest, the sense of valuing. Impartial calmness of thought is a later distillation. And here everything depends upon the energy, reach and right orientation of the evaluating sense. The common phenomenon is the narrowness of the sense of value, petty-mindedness, a lack of appreciation of the comprehensible extent of the real. For most persons the limit of life’s narrowest interests, of the most positive egoistic relations, dictated by the stress of the moment, is at the same time the limit of their moral universe. Their life is a cramped, diminished life, a shrivelled, distorted caricature of humanity.
One does not need the great metaphysical perspectives in order to gauge the low moral level of such narrow-mindedness. The apathy of feeling for values bears on its brow the stamp of inner misery. It avenges itself immediately on man. To it correspond his moral poverty and the emptiness of his life. The stress of existence becomes a burden, for which life does not compensate him. Not from its excessive fulness but from its impoverishment comes satiety.
And in what harsh contradiction does such impoverishment stand to the riches of real life, to life which is always at hand and surrounds us with its munificence. The tragedy of man is that of one who, sitting at a well-laden table, is hungry but who will not reach out his hand, because he does not see what is before him. For the real world is inexhaustible in abundance, actual life is saturated and overflows with values, and when we lay hold of it we find it replete with wonder and grandeur.
These statements of course do not admit of “proof,” just as we can prove to no one that a thing is there which he is not in a position to see. And whether one can operate upon another for moral cataract—whether ethics as a science can—that must certainly remain doubtful. In general, however, it is possible to teach another to see, to wake up his emotional activity, to educate and train the capacity to discriminate values. There is such a thing as moral guidance, a leading into the abundant riches of life, an opening of eyes by means of one’s own vision, an admitting to participation through one’s own participation. There is a training of others in humanity as well as a training of oneself therein.
6. THE VALUATIONAL CONSTITUENTS OF PERSONS AND SITUATIONS
The claim which we are considering must begin with the simple question: What, then, is it that we fail to heed in life ? What is it that escapes us ?
Here in fact lies the whole difficulty. It is not to be solved simply by pointing it out. For every constituent value a corresponding sense must be awakened. The constituent parts of value are everywhere. We see them close before us at all times and yet again we do not see them. Every person, every human peculiarity is filled with them, is significant and unique down to the most impalpable shades of colouring. Each is a world in miniature, and not only as a specific structural entity but also as a specific structural value. Not less so is every actual juxtaposition of persons, every situation when some wider or narrower connection in life calls it forth: it may be a complex of interacting obligations, tensions and relaxations, a dovetailing into one another of purposes, passions, quiet emotional dispositions, or even noisy, rough acts of partisanship—everything bound variously to every other and reciprocally conditioned, intensified and complicated by their very reactions, over-woven with released sympathies and antipathies and carried to a higher plane of the ethos; finally, in a brighter or darker consciousness of the situation, lived through again as a whole by the participants, and presented as a total impression subjectively distorted in the imaginative concept of the persons themselves. The moral situation is never wholly merged in persons, it is always something else lying above and beyond them, even if not something existing independently of them. It is, besides, a cosmos in itself with its own manner of Being and its own legitimacy, not less a determinant factor for the person than the person is for it. And the unique value corre sponds to the unique entity. Situations are something individual, only existing once and not returning. Whoever has stood in a situation and not comprehended it, for him it is lost, is wasted and has irrevocably passed away.
Our human life, seen at close range, consists of nothing else than a running chain of coming and going situations—from the most fluid, most accidental, relations of the moment to the most inward and weighty and enduring fetters which link man to man. Communal as well as individual life is rooted in them and wears itself out in them. They are the ground upon which conflicts grow and press on to settlement. They are the contents of hope and disappointment, joy and suffering, of valiant strength and of weakness.
When a poet moulds a human situation and sets it before our eyes, we easily see its constituent parts in their ethical fulness; we somehow suddenly feel their values throughout, although obscurely and with no consciousness of the special complexity of their valuational structure. Thus we feel the great as great and the sublime as sublime.
In actual life only one thing is different from what it is in dramatic art. There is lacking the guiding hand of a master, who unobtrusively brings the significant into the foreground, so that it also becomes evident to the eye of the common man. But life throughout is a drama. And if we could only see plastically the situation in which we are placed, as the poet sees it, it would appear to us just as rich and as filled with values as in his creation. The proof of this is the fact that in looking back upon our past life the highest points of value are for us those moments which hover before us in entire concreteness and fulness of detail—independently of whether at the time our sense of value realized the ethical content or not—yes, often in contrast to our former crude perception, and with perhaps a secret pain at the thought that it has for ever vanished, that it was ours and yet not ours.
7. PASSING bY ON THE OTHER SIDE
Failure to appreciate is a special chapter in the life of man. If we were to leave out all that we pass by without noticing, without looking, not to mention without appreciating, there would remain in the end little of the substance of life which really was ours spiritually.
The paths of life cross one another at many points. One meets innumerable beings. But there are few whom one “sees” in the ethical sense, few to whom one gives the sympathetic glance—one might almost say the loving glance, for the glance that appreciates value is loving. And, conversely, how few are they by whom one in turn is “seen” ! Worlds meet, surface lightly grazes surface, in their depth they remain untouched and solitary; and they part again. Or for a lifetime or more they run parallel, externally united, perhaps chained to one another, and yet each one remains locked out from the other. Certainly no man can or ought to sink and lose himself in everyone he takes a fancy to. Deeper participation remains individual and exclusive. But is it not true that, in this general passing-by, everyone at the same time wanders about with a silent yearning in his heart, a yearning to be “seen” by someone, to be sympathetically understood, responded to, to be trusted beforehand? And does not everyone find himself a hundred times misunderstood, neglected or overlooked? Is not the great and common disappointment of all in life just this: to go empty away, unseen, unsensed, to be dismissed unvalued ?
This is human fate. But is it not the acme of unreasonableness, when we consider that each one deep down is aware of the yearning of others for a recognizing glance, and, notwithstanding, passes by without having looked—each one alone in the secret suffering of his solitude?
Is it merely haste and discontent with one’s own life which inhibits each, or is it not perhaps the narrowness of one’s own perception of values, the fetter of the isolation of each, the inability to extend one’s hand to another?
There is no doubt that, together with natural egoism, fear of others and false pride, there exists above all an incapacity to “see” morally. We do not know what riches we daily overlook, we do not dream how much we lose, what escapes us; hence we go by unheeding. Hence the abundance of life’s highest values is wasted on us. What we are longing for is there in unnumbered hearts. But we let it perish and we go away empty. Superabundant as the human ethos is, it sickens and dies, because of the poverty and crudity of our ethical perception, the perception of just the same men for the same human ethos.
And in great affairs does not the same picture appear, magnified and coarsened? Is there not a moral participation and understanding also on a large scale, and an ignoring of great issues? Is not party prejudice the same thing in the life of the State; is not chauvinism the same thing in the history of the world? One people is struck with blindness as regards the distinctive character and world-mission of another. But the party spirit is blind to the just claim and political value of the opposite party. Each is acquainted only with its own aims, lives only for them, harnesses to them the life of the whole as well as of the single individual. So the individual is oblivious of the true life of the whole which is not sacred to him; he lives only for the life of his own group, just as he finds it, forced into the narrow formulas of his time and of his understanding. No one has penetration into the great correlations which constitute the peculiar life of the whole; no one traces sensitively the pulse-beat of history. Nevertheless everyone is in the midst of history, has a hand in the game and is called upon to be a seer and fashioner of the whole. He lives without regard to his era, its values and tasks, its distinctive life which is revealed only to him, its contemporary. Is it any wonder that an age which has an excess of partisans and party leaders suffers from a critical dearth of loyal citizens and statesmen?
Certainly there is, besides, an historical consciousness, even an historical science, which re-establishes the whole. But this consciousness does not keep pace with the historical life. Science much later reconstructs from traces of a vanished life, and shows, as posterity sees it, a faint general picture of what was, but is no longer, our life. It comes too late. It cannot take the place of the participating sense of values which the contemporary had. It lacks the immediateness of actual experience and the intense feeling of participation. The interest of the descendant is not the correlate, equal in rank, of historical life. His love does not come to the rescue of the past, and the past no longer loves him.
The moral world in little and the moral world on the grand scale resemble each other startlingly. They reflect each other more closely than an unsophisticated man might believe. He who, as a single individual, does not look lovingly about him will also, as a citizen of the State, misunderstand and hate and, as a citizen of the world, will sow slander and discord. To pass a human being by unnoticed, to pass a community by, to brush past an historical crisis of the world—in all this appears the same aspect of the same ethos, the same going empty away, the same self-condemnation and self-annihilation. It is the same blindness to values and the same squandering of them. Only once is given to a generation what returns neither to it nor to any other; as only once to an individual is given the one-time fulness of the moment. And it is the same sin against the meaning of life, against the metaphysical significance of human existence—the same absurdity.
If there is such a thing as an awakening of the consciousness of value, it is our time that has need of it. How far it is possible, no one can estimate. It can hardly emanate from philosophy. For all that, however, this is a field for philosophy to explore. There are prejudices which only it can uproot. And there are emotional obstacles which reflection and the turning of the eye of the soul inward can meet.
The life of man to-day is not favourable to depth of insight. The quiet and contemplation are lacking, life is restless and hurried; there is competition, aimless and without reflection. Whoever stands still for a moment is overtaken by the next. And as the claims of the outer life chase one another, so likewise do the impressions, experiences and sensations. We are always looking out for what is newest, the last thing continually governs us and the thing before the last is forgotten ere it has been fairly seen, much less comprehended. We live from sensation to sensation. And our penetration becomes shallow, our sense of value is blunted, by snatching at the sensational.
Not only is modern man restless and precipitate, dulled and blasé, but nothing inspires, touches, lays hold on his inner-most being. Finally he has only an ironical and weary smile for everything. Yes, in the end he makes a virtue of his moral degradation. He elevates the nil admirari, his incapacity to feel wonder, amazement, enthusiasm and reverence, into a planned habit of life. Callously passing lightly over everything is a comfortable modus vivendi. And thus he is pleased with himself in a pose of superiority which hides his inner vacuity.
This morbid condition is typical. It does not appear to-day for the first time in history. But wherever it has made its appearance, it has been a symptom of weakness and decadence, of inward failure and general pessimism.
What is bent on being destroyed one should allow to go to ruin. Yet from every downfall young healthy life shoots forth. Even in our time this is so. Whether the rising generation, with its still somewhat planless attempts, will open up the way, whether it is reserved only for future generations to press powerfully forward to a new ethos, who to-day would dare to foretell? But the seed is there. It never was dead. It is incumbent upon us to be the awakener out of spiritual misery, to have before our eyes the idea, in our hearts the faith.
Ethical man is in everything the opposite of the precipitate and apathetic man. He is the seer of values, he is sapiens in the original sense of the word: the “taster.” He it is who has a faculty for the fulness of life’s values, that “moral faculty,” of which Franz Hemsterhuis prophesied: to it gleaming riches open.
The philosophical ethics of to-day stands under the banner of this task. It stands at the parting of the ways between the old and the new kind of philosophizing. It is taking the first steps in the conscious investigation of values. How far it will lead us, we men of to-day cannot know. But its goal lies clear before our eyes: to bring man into the conscious possession of his “moral faculty,” to open to him again the world which he has closed against himself.
After what has been said there can be no mistake as to what the new ethics will and must be. Whether it is such and can be so at all, the future will show. But in its whole attitude it is undoubtedly one thing: it is in itself a new ethos. It signifies a new kind of love for the task in hand, a new devotion, a new reverence for what is great. For to it the world which it will open is once more great, as a whole and in its smallest part, and is filled with treasure, unexhausted and inexhaustible.
The new ethics also has once more the courage to face the whole metaphysical difficulty of the problems which arise out of the consciousness of the eternally marvellous and unmastered. Once again the primal passion of philosophy has become its attitude—the Socratic pathos of wonder.