Paul Carus - Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism

PAUL CARUS

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ANTI-SCIENTIFIC TENDENCIES

PHILOSOPHIES are world-conceptions presenting three main features: (1) A systematic comprehension of the knowledge of their age; (2) An emotional attitude toward the cosmos; and (3) A principle that will serve as a basis for rules of conduct. The first feature determines the worth of the several philosophical systems in the history of mankind, being the gist of that which will last, and giving them strength and backbone. The second one, however, appeals powerfully to the sentiments of those who are imbued with the same spirit and thus constitutes its immediate acceptability; while the ethics of a philosophy becomes the test by which its use and practicability can be measured.

The author's ideal has been to harmonize these three features by making the first the regulator of the second and a safe basis of the third. What we need is truth; our fundamental emotion must be truthfulness, and our ethics must be a living of the truth. Truth is not something that we can fashion according to our pleasure; it is not subjective; its very nature is objectivity. But we must render it subjective by a love of truth; we must make it our own, and by doing so our conduct in life will unfailingly adjust itself.

Former philosophies made the subjective element predominant, and thus every philosopher worked out a philosophy of his own, endeavoring to be individual and original. The aim of our own philosophy has been to reduce the subjective to its proper sphere, and to establish, in agreement with the scientific spirit of the age, a philosophy of objective validity.

It is a well known experience that the march of progress does not advance in a straight line but proceeds in epicycles. Man seems to tire of the rigor of truth. From time to time he wants fiction. A strict adherence to exact methods becomes monotonous to clever minds lacking the power of concentration, and they gladly hail vagaries. Truth, they claim, is relative, knowledge mere opinion, and poetry had better replace science. Then they say: Error, be thou our guide; Error, thou art a liberator from the tyranny of truth. Glory be to Error!

Similar retrograde movements take place from time to time in art. Classical taste changes with romantic tendencies. Goethe, Schiller and Lessing are followed by Schlegel and Tieck, Mozart and Beethoven by Wagner.

The last half-century has been an age of unprecedented progress in science and we would expect that with all the wonderful successes and triumphs of scientific invention this age of science ought to find its consummation in the adoption of a philosophy of science. But no! The mass of mankind is weary of science, and anti-scientific tendencies grow up like mushrooms, finding spokesmen in philosophers like William James and Henri Bergson who have the ear of large masses, proclaiming the superiority of subjectivism over objectivism, and the advantages of animal instinct over human reason.

These subjective philosophies if considered as expressions of sentiment, as sentimental attitudes toward the world, as poetical effusions of a semi-philosophical nature, are perfectly legitimate and can be indulged in as well as the several religions which in allegories attune the minds of their followers toward the All of which they are parts. There is no need to condemn arts or emotions for they have a right to exist just as they are.

We protest against subjectivism in philosophy only when it denies the possibility of an objective philosophy. We do not deny that the masses of the world are not, cannot be and never will be scientific thinkers. Science is the prerogative of the few, and the large masses of mankind will always be of a pragmatist type. If the pragmatist considered himself as a psychologist pure and simple showing how the majority of mankind argues, how people are influenced by their own interest and how their thoughts are warped by what they wish the facts to be, pragmatism would be a commendable branch of the science of the soul. Pragmatism explains the errors of philosophy and we can learn much from a consideration of its principles. It becomes objectionable only in so far as it claims to be philosophy in the strict sense of the word.

The name philosophy is used in two senses, first as we defined it above, as a world-conception based upon critically sifted knowledge; and secondly it is used in a vague general sense as wisdom in the practical affairs of life. And if pragmatism claims to be a philosophy in this second sense it ought not to deny that philosophy as a science is possible.

Philosophy as a science is philosophy par excellence. It is the only philosophy of objective validity. All other philosophies are effusions of subjective points of view, of attitudes, of sentiment. But we must insist that these two contrasts may exist side by side just as art does not render mathematics supererogatory, and as a physicist who in his profession devotes himself to a study of nature according to methods of an objective exactness may in his leisure hours paint a Stimmungsbild to give an artistic expression to a subjective mood.

This world is not merely the object of science. There are innumerable tendencies which exist and have a right to exist, but they ought not to banish science, scientific enquiry and scientific ideals from the place they hold; for science is the mariners' compass which guides us over the ocean of life, and though the majority of the passengers do not and need not worry about it, science is after all the only means which makes for progress and lifts mankind to higher and higher levels.

If we criticize men like James and Bergson and other philosophers of subjectivism we do it as a defence of the indispensable character of the objectivity of science as well as of philosophy as a science.

James and Bergson were by no means the originators of their method of philosophizing. There have been many sages before them who deemed the spectacles through which they viewed the world to be the most important or even the only significant issue of life's problems. The Ionian physicists were outdone by the sophists, and in modern times Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the most sovereign contempt for science.

Among all the philosophies of modern times there is perhaps none which in its inmost principle is more thoroughly opposed to our own than Nietzsche's, and yet there are some points of mutual contact which are well worth pointing out. The problem which is at the basis of Nietzsche's thought is the same as in our philosophy, but our solution is radically different from his.

Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher who astonishes his readers by the boldness with which he rebels against every tradition, tearing down the holiest and dearest things, preaching destruction of all rule, and looking with disdain upon the heap of ruins in which his revolutionary thoughts would leave the world.

For more than a century Germany has been the storm-center of philosophical thought. The commotions that started in the Fatherland reached other countries, France, England, and the United States, after they had lost their force at home. Kant's transcendentalism and Hegel's phenomenalism began to flourish among the English-speaking races after having become almost extinct in the home of their founders. Prof. R. M. Wenley of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., expresses this truth with his native Scotch wit in the statement which I do not hesitate to endorse, that "German professors when they die go to Oxford," and we may add that from Oxford they travel west to settle for a while in Concord, Boston, Washington, or other American cities.