The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

But after a century of reaction against the absolutism of Kant’s ethics, we find ourselves again in a welter of urban sensualism and immorality, of ruthless individualism untempered with democratic conscience or aristocratic honor; and perhaps the day will soon come when a disintegrating civilization will welcome again the Kantian call to duty.

The great pessimist believes that Kant was really a sceptic who, having abandoned belief himself, hesitated to destroy the faith of the people, for fear of the consequences to public morals.

“Then Immanuel Kant has compassion, and shows that he is not only a great philosopher, but also a good man; and half kindly, half ironically, he speaks: ‘Old Lampe must have a God or else he cannot be happy, says the practical reason; for my part, the practical reason may, then, guarantee the existence of God.’”

But these adventurous reconstructions of the inner Kant need not be taken too seriously. The fervor of the essay on “Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason” indicates a sincerity too intense to be questioned, and the attempt to change the base of religion from theology to morals, from creeds to conduct, could have come only from a profoundly religious mind.

As to his influence, the entire philosophic thought of the nineteenth century revolved about his speculations. After Kant, all Germany began to talk metaphysics: Schiller and Goethe studied him; Beethoven quoted with admiration his famous words about the two wonders of life—“the starry heavens above, the moral law within”; and Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer produced in rapid succession great systems of thought reared upon the idealism of the old Königsberg sage. It was in these balmy days of German metaphysics that Jean Paul Richter wrote: “God has given to the French the land, to the English the sea, to the Germans the empire of the air.”

Kant’s criticism of reason, and his exaltation of feeling, prepared for the voluntarism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the intuitionism of Bergson, and the pragmatism of William James; his identification of the laws of thought with the laws of reality gave to Hegel a whole system of philosophy; and his unknowable “thing-in-itself” influenced Spencer more than Spencer knew.

After a century of struggle between the idealism of Kant, variously reformed, and the materialism of the Enlightenment, variously redressed, the victory seems to lie with Kant.

By reading Kant, said Schopenhauer, “the public was compelled to see that what is obscure is not always without significance.” Fichte and Schelling took advantage of this, and excogitated magnificent spider-webs of metaphysics. “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most bare-faced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”226 Is this fair?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born at Stuttgart in 1770.

He was graduated from Tübingen in 1793 with a certificate stating that he was a man of good parts and character, well up in theology and philology, but with no ability in philosophy.

At Jena Schiller was teaching history; Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels were preaching romanticism; and Fichte and Schelling were propounding their philosophies. There Hegel arrived in 1801, and in 1803 became a teacher at the University.

For a while he edited a paper at Bamberg; then, in 1812, he became head of the gymnasium at Nürnburg. It was there, perhaps, that the stoic necessities of administrative work cooled the fires of romanticism in him, and made him, like Napoleon and Goethe, a classic vestige in a romantic age. And it was there that he wrote his Logic (1812–16), which captivated Germany by its unintelligibility, and won him the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg.

he complained that “only one man understands me, and even he does not.”

Most of his writings, like Aristotle’s, consist of his lecture-notes; or, worse, of the notes taken by students who heard his lectures. Only the Logic and Phenomenology are from his hand, and these are masterpieces of obscurity, darkened by abstractness and condensation of style, by a weirdly original terminology, and by an overcareful modification of every statement with a Gothic wealth of limiting clauses.

The Logic is an analysis not of methods of reasoning, but of the concepts used in reasoning.

The most pervasive of them all is Relation; every idea is a group of relations; we can think of something only by relating it to something else, and perceiving its similarities and its differences. An idea without relations of any kind is empty;

Of all relations, the most universal is that of contrast or opposition.

This “dialectical movement” runs through everything that Hegel wrote.

It is an old thought, of course, foreshadowed by Empedocles, and embodied in the “golden mean” of Aristotle, who wrote that “the knowledge of opposites is one.”

Schelling was right—there is an underlying “identity of opposites”; and Fichte was right—thesis, antithesis and synthesis constitute the formula and secret of all development and all reality.

The movement of thought, then, is the same as the movement of things; in each there is a dialectical progression from unity through diversity to diversity-in-unity. Thought and being follow the same law; and logic and metaphysics are one.

the task of philosophy, is to discover the unity that lies potential in diversity; the task of ethics is to unify character and conduct; and the task of politics is to unify individuals into a state.

In man the Absolute rises to self-consciousness, and becomes the Absolute Idea—that is, thought realizing itself as part of the Absolute, transcending individual limitations and purposes, and catching, underneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of all things. “Reason is the substance of the universe;... the design of the world is absolutely rational.”229

Passion also has a place in the reason of things: “nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion”; and even the egoistic ambitions of a Napoleon contribute unwittingly to the development of nations. Life is not made for happiness, but for achievement.

“Such individuals had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding;... but they had an insight into the requirements of the time—what was ripe for development. This was the very Truth for their age, for their world; the species next in order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of time.”

And as unity is the goal of development, order is the first requisite of liberty.

If Hegel inclined, in his later years, to the conservative rather than to the radical implications of his philosophy, it was partly because the Spirit of the Age (to use his own historic phrase) was weary of too much change.

It was not quite in order that the philosopher of strife as the dialectic of growth should become the advocate of content; but at sixty a man has a right to ask for peace.

Nevertheless, the contradictions in Hegel’s thought were too deep for peace; and in the next generation his followers split with dialectical fatality into the “Hegelian

Right” and the “Hegelian Left.” Weisse and the younger Fichte found, in the theory of the real as rational, a philosophical expression of the doctrine of Providence, and justification for a politics of absolute obedience. Feuerbach, Moleschott, Bauer and Marx returned to the scepticism and “higher criticism” of Hegel’s youth, and developed the philosophy of hi...

Hegel, the imperial professor, had hatched the socialistic eggs.

The old philosopher denounced the radicals as dreamers, and carefully hid away his early essays. He allied himself with the Prussian Government, blessed it as the latest expression of the Absolute, and basked in the sun of its academic favors.

But Hegel aged rapidly in those happy years. He became as absent-minded as a story-book genius; once he entered the lecture-room with only one shoe, having left the other, unnoticed, in the mud.

Why did the first half of the nineteenth century lift up, as voices of the age, a group of pessimistic poets—Byron in England, De Musset in France, Heine in Germany, Leopardi in Italy, Pushkin and Lermontof in Russia; a group of pessimistic composers—Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and even the later Beethoven (a pessimist trying to convince himself that he is an optimist); and above all, a profoundly pessimistic philosopher—Arthur Schopenhauer?

Schopenhauer, traveling through France and Austria in 1804, was struck by the chaos and uncleanliness of the villages, the wretched poverty of the farmers, the unrest and misery of the towns.

The passage of the Napoleonic and counter-Napoleonic armies had left scars of ravage on the face of every country. Moscow was in ashes. In England, proud victor in the strife, the farmers were ruined by the fall in the price of wheat; and the industrial workers were tasting all the horrors of the nascent and uncontrolled factory-system. Demobilization added to unemployment.

Yes, the Revolution was dead; and with it the life seemed to have gone out of the soul of Europe. That new heaven, called Utopia, whose glamour had relieved the twilight of the gods, had receded into a dim future where only young eyes could see it; the older ones had followed that lure long enough, and turned away from it now as a mockery of men’s hopes.

Only the young can live in the future, and only the old can live in the past; men were most of them forced to live in the present, and the present was a ruin. How many thousands of heroes and believers had fought for the Revolution! How the hearts of youth everywhere in Europe had turned towards the young republic, and had lived on the light and hope of it,—until Beethoven tore into shreds the dedication of his Heroic Symphony to the man who had ceased to be the Son of the Revolution and had become the son-in-law of reaction.

But some others made harsher answer: that the chaos of Europe but reflected the chaos of the universe; that there was no divine order after all, nor any heavenly hope; that God, if God there was, was blind, and Evil brooded over the face of the earth. So Byron, and Heine, and Lermontof, and Leopardi, and our philosopher.

it made him the antipodes of that closet or academic type of philosopher whom he so despised.

“The character or will,” says Schopenhauer, “is inherited from the father; the intellect from the mother.”

Arthur Schopenhauer reacted to this as Hamlet to his mother’s re-marriage; and his quarrels with his mother taught him a large part of those half-truths about women with which he was to reason his philosophy.

Goethe, who liked Mme. Schopenhauer because she let him bring his Christiane with him, made matters worse by telling the mother that her son would become a very famous man; the mother had never heard of two geniuses in the same family. Finally, in some culminating quarrel, the mother pushed her son and rival down the stairs; whereupon our philosopher bitterly informed her that she would be known to posterity only through him. Schopenhauer quitted Weimar soon afterward; and though the mother

lived twenty-four years more, he never saw her again. Byron, also a child of 1788, seems to have had similar luck with his mother. These men were almost by this circumstance doomed to pessimism; a man who has not known a mother’s love—and worse, has known a mother’s hatred—has no cause to be infatuated with the world.

He became gloomy, cynical, and suspicious; he was obsessed with fears and evil fancies; he kept his pipes under lock and key, and never trusted his neck to a barber’s razor; and he slept with loaded pistols at his bedside—presumably for the convenience of the burglar.

“that the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it... Noise is a torture to all intellectual people... The superabundant display of vitality which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long.”

He had no mother, no wife, no child, no family, no country. “He was absolutely alone, with not a single friend; and between one and none there lies an infinity.”

Schopenhauer gave all his time, and devoted all his power, to the work which was to be his masterpiece—The World as Will and Idea.

Many years later Schopenhauer was so sure of having solved the chief problems of philosophy that he thought of having his signet ring carved with an image of the Sphinx throwing herself down the abyss, as she had promised to do on having her riddles answered.

So completely did Schopenhauer put himself into this book that his later works are but commentaries on it; he became Talmudist to his own Torah, exegete to his own Jeremiads.