The Approach to Philosophy Part 19

[314:6] _Ibid._, p. 49.

[318:7] _Ibid._, pp. 77, 81.

[329:8] Plato: _Symposium_, 211. Translation by Jowett.

[330:9] Plato: _Republic_, 533. Translation by Jowett.

[337:10] See Burnet: _Op. cit._, pp. 322-333.

[338:11] Leibniz: _Discourse on Metaphysics_. Translation by Montgomery, p. 15.

In so far as the monads are spiritual this doctrine tends to be subjectivistic. Cf. Chap. IX.

[340:12] Leibniz: _New Essays on the Human Understanding_. Translation by Latta, p. 363.

[344:13] Spinoza: _Op. cit._, Part IV. Translation by Elwes, p. 243.

[345:14] Plato: _Op. cit._, 401.

[347:15] Plato: _Symposium_, 210-211. Translation by Jowett.

[348:16] Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: _Thoughts_. Translation by Long, p.

141.

CHAPTER XI

ABSOLUTE IDEALISM[349:1]

[Sidenote: General Constructive Character of Absolute Idealism.]

- 171. Absolute idealism is the most elaborately constructive of all the historical types of philosophy. Though it may have overlooked elementary truths, and have sought to combine irreconcilable principles, it cannot be charged with lack of sophistication or subtlety. Its great virtue is its recognition of problems--its exceeding circ.u.mspection; while its great promise is due to its comprehensiveness--its generous provision for all interests and points of view. But its very breadth and complexity render this philosophy peculiarly liable to the equivocal use of conceptions. This may be readily understood from the nature of the central doctrine of absolute idealism. According to this doctrine it is proposed to define the universe as an _absolute spirit_; or a being infinite, ultimate, eternal, and self-sufficient, like the being of Plato and Spinoza, but possessing at the same time the distinguishing properties of spirit. Such conceptions as self-consciousness, will, knowledge, and moral goodness are carried over from the realm of human endeavor and social relations to the unitary and all-inclusive reality.

Now it has been objected that this procedure is either meaningless, in that it so applies the term spirit as to contradict its meaning; or prejudicial to spiritual interests, in that it neutralizes the properties of spirit through so extending their use. Thus one may contend that to affirm that the universe as a whole is spirit is meaningless, since moral goodness requires special conditions and relations that cannot be attributed to the universe as a whole; or one may contend that such doctrine is prejudicial to moral interests because by attributing spiritual perfection to the totality of being it discredits all moral loyalties and antagonisms. The difficulties that lie in the way of absolute idealism are due, then, to the complexity of its synthesis, to its complementary recognition of differences and resolution of them into unity. But this synthesis is due to the urgency of certain great problems which the first or realistic expression of the absolutist motive left undiscovered and unsolved.

[Sidenote: The Great Outstanding Problems of Absolutism.]

- 172. It is natural to approach so deliberate and calculating a philosophy from the stand-point of the problems which it proposes to solve. One of these is the epistemological problem of the relation between the state of knowledge and its object. Naturalism and absolute realism side with common-sense in its a.s.sumption that although the real object is essential to the valid state of knowledge, its being known is not essential to the real object. Subjectivism, on the other hand, maintains that being is essentially the content of a knowing state, or an activity of the knower himself. Absolute idealism proposes to accept the general epistemological principle of subjectivism; but to satisfy the realistic demand for a standard, compelling object, by setting up an _absolute knower_, with whom all valid knowledge must be in agreement.

This epistemological statement of absolute idealism is its most mature phase; and the culminating phase, in which it shows unmistakable signs of pa.s.sing over into another doctrine. We must look for its pristine inspiration in its solution of another fundamental problem: that of the relation between the absolute and the empirical. Like absolute realism, this philosophy regards the universe as a unitary and internally necessary being, and undertakes to hold that being accountable for every item of experience. But we have found that absolute realism is beset with the difficulty of thus accounting for the fragmentariness and isolation of the individual. The contention that the universe must really be a rational or perfect unity is disputed by the evident multiplicity, irrelevance, and imperfection in the foreground of experience. The inference to perfection and the confession of imperfection seem equally unavoidable. Rational necessities and empirical facts are out of joint.

[Sidenote: The Greek Philosophers and the Problem of Evil. The Task of the New Absolutism.]

- 173. Even Plato had been conscious of a certain responsibility for matters of fact. Inasmuch as he attached the predicate of reality to the absolute perfection, he made that being the only source to which they could be referred. Perhaps, then, he suggests, they are due to the very bounteousness of G.o.d.

"He was good, and no goodness can ever have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as possible."[352:2]

Plotinus, in whom Platonism is leavened by the spirit of an age which is convinced of sin, and which is therefore more keenly aware of the positive existence of the imperfect, follows out this suggestion.

Creation is "emanation"--the overflow of G.o.d's excess of goodness. But one does not readily understand how goodness, desiring all things to be like itself, should thereupon create evil--even to make it good. The Aristotelian philosophy, with its conception of the gradation of substances, would seem to be better equipped to meet the difficulty. A development requires stages; and every finite thing may thus be perfect in its way and perfect in its place, while in the absolute truth or G.o.d there is realized the meaning of the whole order. But if so, there is evidently something that escapes G.o.d, to wit, the meaningless and unfitness, the error and evil, of the stages in their successive isolation. Nor is it of any avail to insist (as did Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza alike) that these are only privation, and therefore not to be counted in the sum of reality. For privation is itself an experience, with a great variety of implications, moral and psychological; and these cannot be attributed to G.o.d or deduced from him, in consideration of his absolute perfection.

The task of the new absolutism is now in clear view. The perfect must be amended to admit the imperfect. The absolute significance must be so construed as to provide for the evident facts; for the unmeaning things and changes of the natural order; for ignorance, sin, despair, and every human deficiency. The new philosophy is to solve this problem by defining a _spiritual absolute_, and by so construing the life or dynamics of spirit, as to demonstrate the necessity of the very imperfection and opposition which is so baffling to the realist.

[Sidenote: The Beginning of Absolute Idealism in Kant's a.n.a.lysis of Experience.]

- 174. Absolute idealism, which is essentially a modern doctrine, does not begin with rhapsodies, but with a very sober a.n.a.lysis of familiar truths, conducted by the most sober of all philosophers, Immanuel Kant.

This philosopher lived in Konigsberg, Germany, at the close of the eighteenth century. He is related to absolute idealism much as Socrates is related to Platonism: he was not himself speculative, but employed a critical method which was transformed by his followers into a metaphysical construction. It is essential to the understanding both of Kant and of his more speculative successors, to observe that he begins with the recognition of certain non-philosophical truths--those of _natural science_ and _the moral consciousness_. He accepts the order of nature formulated in the Newtonian dynamics, and the moral order acknowledged in the common human conviction of duty. And he is interested in discovering the ground upon which these common affirmations rest, the structure which virtually supports them as types of knowledge. But a general importance attaches to the a.n.a.lysis because these two types of knowledge (together with the aesthetic judgment, which is similarly a.n.a.lyzed) are regarded by Kant as coextensive with experience itself. The _very least experience_ that can be reported upon at all is an experience of nature or duty, and as such will be informed with their characteristic principles. Let us consider the former type.

The simplest instance of nature is the experience of the single perceived object. In the first place, such an object will be perceived as in s.p.a.ce and time. These Kant calls the _forms of intuition_. An object cannot even be presented or given without them. But, furthermore, it will be regarded as substance, that is, as having a substratum that persists through changes of position or quality. It will also be regarded as causally dependent upon other objects like itself.

Causality, substance, and like principles to the number of twelve, Kant calls the _categories of the understanding_. Both intuition and understanding are indispensable to the experience of any object whatsoever. They may be said to condition the object in general. Their principles condition the process of making something out of the manifold of sensation. But similarly, every moral experience recognizes what Kant calls _the categorical imperative_. The categorical imperative is the law of reasonableness or impartiality in conduct, requiring the individual to act on a maxim which he can "will to be law universal." No state of desire or situation calling for action means anything morally except in the light of this obligation. Thus certain principles of thought and action are said to be implicit in all experience. They are universal and necessary in the sense that they are discovered as the conditions not of any particular experience, but of experience in general. This implicit or virtual presence in experience in general, Kant calls their transcendental character, and the process of explicating them is his famous _Transcendental Deduction_.

[Sidenote: Kant's Principles Restricted to the Experiences which they Set in Order.]

- 175. The restriction which Kant puts upon his method is quite essential to its meaning. I deduce the categories, for example, just in so far as I find them to be necessary to perception. Without them my perception is blind, I make nothing of it; with them my experience becomes systematic and rational. But categories which I so deduce must be forever limited to the role for which they are defined. Categories without perceptions are "empty"; they have validity solely with reference to the experience which they set in order. Indeed, I cannot even complete that order. The orderly arrangement of parts of experience suggests, and suggests irresistibly, a perfect system. I can even define the ideas and ideals through which such a perfect system might be realized. But I cannot in the Kantian sense attach reality to it because it is not indispensable to experience. It must remain an ideal which regulates my thinking of such parts of it as fall within the range of my perception; or it may through my moral nature become the realm of my living and an object of faith. In short, Kant's is essentially a "critical philosophy," a logical and a.n.a.lytical study of the special terms and relations of human knowledge. He denies the validity of these terms and relations beyond this realm. His critiques are an inventory of the conditions, principles, and prospects of that cognition which, although not alone ideally conceivable, is alone possible.

[Sidenote: The Post-Kantian Metaphysics is a Generalization of the Cognitive and Moral Consciousness as a.n.a.lyzed by Kant. The Absolute Spirit.]

- 176. With the successors of Kant, as with the successors of Socrates, a criticism becomes a system of metaphysics. This transformation is effected in the post-Kantians by _a generalization of the human cognitive consciousness_. According to Kant's a.n.a.lysis it contains a manifold of sense which must be organized by categories in obedience to the ideal of a rational universe. The whole enterprise, with its problems given in perception, its instruments available in the activities of the understanding, and its ideals revealed in the reason, is an organic spiritual unity, manifesting itself in the self-consciousness of the thinker. Now in absolute idealism this very enterprise of knowledge, made universal and called the _absolute spirit_ or _mind_, is taken to be the ultimate reality. And here at length would seem to be afforded the conception of a being to which the problematic and the rational, the data and the principles, the natural and the ideal, are alike indispensable. We are now to seek the real not in the ideal itself, but in that spiritual unity in which appearance is the incentive to truth, and natural imperfection the spring to goodness.

This may be translated into the language which Plato uses in the "Symposium," when Diotima is revealing to Socrates the meaning of love.

The new reality will be not the loved one, but love itself.

"What then is Love? Is he mortal?"

"No."

"What then?"

"As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean between them."

"What is he then, Diotima?"

"He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal."[359:3]

Reality is no longer the G.o.d who mingles not with men, but that power which, as Diotima further says, "interprets and conveys to the G.o.ds the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of the G.o.ds."

In speaking for such an idealism, Emerson says:

"Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The mid-world is best."[359:4]

The new reality is this highway of the spirit, the very course and raceway of self-consciousness. It is traversed in the movement and self-correction of thought, in the interest in ideals, or in the submission of the will to the control of the moral law.

[Sidenote: Fichteanism, or the Absolute Spirit as Moral Activity.]

- 177. It is the last of these phases of self-consciousness that Fichte, who was Kant's immediate successor, regards as of paramount importance.

As Platonism began with the ideal of the good or the object of life, so the new idealism begins with the conviction of duty, or _the story of life_. Being is the living moral nature compelled to build itself a natural order wherein it may obey the moral law, and to divide itself into a community of moral selves through which the moral virtues may be realized. Nature and society flow from the conception of an absolute moral activity, or ego. Such an ego could not be pure and isolated and yet be moral. The evidence of this is the common moral consciousness. My duty compels me to act upon the not-self or environment, and to respect and cooperate with other selves. Fichte's absolute is this moral consciousness universalized and made eternal. Moral value being its fundamental principle the universe must on that very account embrace both nature, or moral indifference, and humanity, or moral limitation.

[Sidenote: Romanticism, or the Absolute Spirit as Sentiment.]

- 178. But the Romanticists, who followed close upon Fichte, were dissatisfied with so hard and exclusive a conception of spiritual being.

Life, they said, is not all duty. Indeed, the true spiritual life is quite other, not harsh and constrained, but free and spontaneous--a wealth of feeling playing about a constantly shifting centre. Spirit is not consecutive and law-abiding, but capricious and wanton, seeking the beautiful in no orderly progression, but in a refined and versatile sensibility. If this be the nature of spirit, and if spirit be the nature of reality, then he is most wise who is most rich in sentiment.