Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870-1920 0192899767, 9780192899767

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
I. The Conception of Philosophy
II. An Individualist Ethics
III. The Battle against Pessimism
IV. Lebensphilosophie and Historicism
V. Historicism and Relativism
VI. Religious Legacy
VII. Lebensphilosophie and Irrationalism
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

Philosophy of Life

Philosophy of Life German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920 FREDERICK C. BEISER

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Frederick C. Beiser 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949469 ISBN 978–0–19–289976–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents vii

Preface

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4.

Dates and Dramatis Personae Historical Context The Idea of Life The Value of Life

I. The Conception of Philosophy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Philosophy as a Worldview Origins Nietzsche’s Conceptions of Philosophy Dilthey’s Idea of a Worldview Simmel’s Qualification

II. An Individualist Ethics 1. 2. 3. 4.

An Ethics of Protest Nietzsche’s Early Ethics Dilthey’s Ethics Simmel’s Individual Law

III. The Battle against Pessimism 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Challenge of Pessimism Nietzsche’s First Response to Pessimism Dilthey and Pessimism Simmel on Pessimism Nietzsche’s Later Response to Pessimism

IV. Lebensphilosophie and Historicism 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Historicist Tradition Lebensphilosophie and Hermeneutics Dilthey and the Foundation of Hermeneutics Simmel and the Philosophy of History Nietzsche’s Historicism

1 1 4 5 11

15 15 17 19 23 26

29 29 31 38 47

54 54 57 61 69 79

82 82 84 86 97 105

vi 

V. Historicism and Relativism 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Problem of Relativism Nietzsche’s Relativism Dilthey and the Problem of Relativism Simmel and the Conflict of Values

VI. Religious Legacy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Religious Context Faith and Apostasy in the Young Nietzsche A Modern Epicurus Dilthey’s Religious Beliefs Simmel’s Jewish Background Simmel’s Religious Philosophy

VII. Lebensphilosophie and Irrationalism 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Charge of Irrationalism The Meaning of “Irrationalism” A Critique of Reason Hermeneutics and the New Rationalism

Conclusion Index

112 112 115 120 127

134 134 137 142 148 152 155

162 162 163 165 168

171 173

Preface The intellectual movement called Lebensphilosophie, which dominated German culture from 1870 until 1920, is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Some leading figures of this movement are well-known, viz., Nietzsche, Dilthey and Simmel, but that they were part of a wider movement is much less appreciated. The purpose of this book is to introduce this movement to the English-speaking world and to place its better-known figures into the wider cultural and intellectual contexts to which they belong. For more than a century now, Lebensphilosophie has been an established subject in the history of philosophy in Germany. The first monograph treatment of it was by Max Scheler in his 1913 Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens.¹ A more rigorous and detailed study by Heinrich Rickert appeared in 1920.² After World War II, no less than four studies were published devoted to Lebensphilosophie.³ Herbert Schnädelbach’s Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933, which appeared in English translation in 1984,⁴ has an illuminating chapter on Lebensphilosophie, which has been for many English readers their chief source on this movement. Despite all these works, there still has not been any English book on the movement. This book aspires to be the first of its kind.

¹ Max Scheler, “Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens”, in Vom Umsturz der Werte, Fünfte Auflage (Bern an Munich: Francke Verlag, 1972) pp. 311–39; first published in Die weiβen Blätter Nr. 3 (1913), pp. 203–33. One should also mention Julius Goldstein’s Wandlungen in der Philosophie der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Verlag von Werner Klinkhart, 1911), which describes Lebensphilosophie without using that term. What Goldstein describes would later be called Lebensphilosophie. ² Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens (Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1920). ³ O.F. Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie (Berlin: Springer, 1958); Karl Albert, Lebensphilosophie (Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag, 2017); Ferdinand Fellmann, Lebensphilosophie (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993); and Hans-Joachim Lieber, Kulturkritik und Lebensphilosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974). ⁴ Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

viii



This is a study of the common themes of three thinkers: Nietzsche, Simmel and Dilthey. There are many different accounts of the membership of Lebensphilosophie, but all would agree that these three are the most important thinkers of the movement. They were the most original, formative and philosophically sophisticated. They comprise the central core of the movement. There have been innumerable studies of Nietzsche, and many of Dilthey and Simmel. But they almost always study each of them individually, apart from the others and their general context. Here my task is to study them as members of a broader movement, showing the major themes they share in common. These themes were many: a completely immanent philosophy, void of all transcendent entities; individualism and relativism in ethics; opposition to pessimism and an affirmative attitude toward life; historicism and hermeneutics in the study of culture and society; and an individualist and relativist conception of philosopphy. Lebenphilosophie was the first strictly non-religious philosophy—its first principle was atheist or agnostic—and the first explicitly relativist ethics in the history of Western philosophy.

Introduction 1. Dates and Dramatis Personae In 1918 Georg Simmel, an eminent philosopher at the University of Strassburg, gave one of his signature lectures in which he tried to describe the culture of his age.¹ Already for decades now, he said, the concept of life has become dominant in philosophy. It is indeed the central concept of the modern age. It is like Being in ancient Greece, God in the Middle Ages, or Nature in the Renaissance. Simmel then went on to describe how life had become the leitmotif of many recent cultural phenomena.² It was apparent in expressionism, in the rebellion against classicism, in new forms of mysticism, and even in the demand for sexual freedom. The philosophy to which Simmel refers was called, appropriately enough, life philosophy, or, as it is better known in German, Lebensphilosophie. It prospered for at least five decades, from 1870 until 1920.³ Lebensphilosophie is said to have died out after the First World War, when its “naïve faith in life” was shattered by all the death and disillusionment wrought by the war.⁴ After the 1920s, what was still vital and interesting in Lebensphilosophie was incorporated into existentialism, which is said to have surpassed it in depth and sophistication.⁵

¹ Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur. Ein Vortrag (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). In Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), XVI, 186–8. Henceforth this edition will be abbreviated as GSG. ² Ibid., XVI, 191–203. For a similar contemporary account of the prevalence of Lebensphilosophie in modern culture, see Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1920), pp. 3–16. ³ The datings differ from scholar to scholar. O.F. Bollnow states 1880 to 1920; Herbart Schnädelbach gives 1880 to 1930. Neither scholar offers a rationale for his dates. See O.F. Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie (Berlin: Springer, 1958), p. 1 and Herbart Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 140. ⁴ Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie, p. 1. ⁵ Ibid., p. 1. Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0001

2

  

By one reckoning, 1920 is a much too early date for the demise of Lebensphilosophie. Some of its themes were appropriated by the Nazis, who tried to make them the philosophy of their movement.⁶ As such, Lebensphilosophie led a shadow existence into the 1930s and 1940s. This association with national socialism discredited Lebensphilosophie and sealed its fate. If Lebensphilosophie is remembered at all today, it is largely because of its unfortunate association with Nazism.⁷ Yet there is really very little in common between national socialism and Lebensphilosophie. The aggressive hypernationalism, racism, and imperialism characteristic of Nazism have no precedent in Lebensphilosophie.⁸ The chief representatives of Lebensphilosophie would have strongly repudiated all these doctrines. Of all the Lebensphilosophen Nietzsche would be the most celebrated by the Nazis; yet their exploitation of him has been discredited long ago.⁹ Because the association of Lebensphilosophie with national socialism is illusory, it is best to stick to the earlier dates (1870–1920) as the official ones for the movement. Now that we have settled the dates of Lebensphilosophie, we need to determine its dramatis personae. Who were the Lebensphilosophen? The grandfather of this movement, by common consent, was Arthur Schopenhauer, who not only sketched many of its leading ideas but who also posed its fundamental problems. Still, Schopenhauer is often excluded from the heart of the movement, and for a very good reason: his pessimism. This was the greatest challenge to the Lebensphilosophen, whose aim was to affirm life and to reconcile people to the modern world. If pessimism were true, there could be no such affirmation, no such reconciliation. So the grandfather of Lebensphilosophie was also its antipode and tormenter. ⁶ See, for example, Ernst Krieck, Leben als Prinzip der Weltanschauung und Problem der Wissenschaft (Leipzig: Armanen Verlag, 1938). ⁷ This has been rightly stressed by Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, p. 140. ⁸ Georg Lukács called Lebensphilosophie “the ruling ideology of the whole imperialist period in Germany.” See his Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1953), p. 318. Yet Lukács has to admit that the movement was already formed before the rise of imperialism in 1891—the date for the grounding of the Allgemeine deutsche Verband—and that none of the major Lebensphilosophen endorsed imperialism. ⁹ See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, third edition (Princeton: Vintage Books, 1968). Kaufmann’s book was first published in 1950.



3

The main protagonists of Lebensphilosophie were Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Georg Simmel (1858–1918), and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911). There were many other representatives of the movement—Theodor Lessing (1872–1933), Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), and August Messer (1867–1937) to name a few—but Nietzsche, Simmel, and Dilthey were, beyond any doubt, the most intellectually creative and philosophically sophisticated. Although Henri Bergson and José Ortega y Gasset are sometimes placed in the center of the movement,¹⁰ I exclude them here simply for the sake of cultural unity and continuity. The historical and cultural context of Lebensphilosophie was essentially, and almost entirely, German. Nietzsche, Simmel, and Dilthey are familiar figures of intellectual history. There are many books written about each of them. But here they are treated differently: not as single isolated figures but as members of an intellectual movement. Our aim is to show what these thinkers had in common, and how they together formed a single tradition. It is important to stress, however, that Nietzsche, Simmel, and Dilthey never formed a self-conscious movement or tradition—only Simmel would call himself a Lebensphilosoph—and they sometimes even quarreled among themselves. Their grouping under the category of Lebensphilosophie is strictly the act of the historian. We can regard them as Lebensphilosophen simply because they lived and worked around the same time, and because they shared many fundamental ideas centering around the theme of life. Given the importance of Lebensphilosophie for its age, and given the widespread ignorance of it in the Anglophone world, the time is ripe for a reexamination of this movement. We need to know its central ideas, its main problems, and how it differs from other major intellectual movements of its age, especially idealism and existentialism. These will be the tasks of the following sections, which will serve as a broad introduction to the content and context of Lebensphilosophie.

¹⁰ On the place of Bergson in the movement, see Max Scheler, Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens, in Vom Umsturz der Werte, Fünfte Auflage (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1972), pp. 311–40; and on the place of Ortega and Bergson, see Karl Albert, Lebensphilosophie, Von den Anfängen bei Nietzsche bis zu ihrer Kritik bei Lukács (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2017), pp. 70–93, 128–36.

4

  

2. Historical Context The historical context of Lebensphilosophie is complicated, and we cannot begin to explain its many facets here. But, to know at least where we are in history, one fact is of overwhelming importance. This fact colors all aspects of Lebensphilosophie. On January 18, 1871, at the close of the Franco-Prussian War, the Second German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, France. King William I of Prussia was declared German Kaiser. With that, German reunification, the dream and hope of generations, finally became a reality. Germany was now a single nation, at long last. Despite its great promise, the Second Empire did not last long: less than fifty years. It collapsed at the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, on the eleventh month of 1918. On that fateful date, Germany surrendered in the First World War; two days before, on November 9, Kaiser Wilhelm I abdicated. These dates, 1871–1918, which mark the rise and fall of the Second Empire, also circumscribe the careers of the Lebensphilosophen. All their important writings were composed or published within these dates. In 1871 Dilthey was in mid-career, a professor at Breslau; Nietzsche had just began his post at Basel; and Simmel was still in Gymnasium. But, by 1918, they were all gone. On September 16, 1918 Simmel died, the last of the great Lebensphilosophen. Although it is rarely recognized, the Second Empire was one of the most radical and revolutionary eras of modern philosophy. All the old faiths crumbled, all the old certainties disappeared. The age had lost its traditional religious and moral moorings: there was no God; there were no absolute moral values; there were no natural laws or purposes in nature; and there was no law of progress. There was only man alone in the universe, bereft of any God to comfort him or any absolute values to guide him. This would seem to be the occasion for great anxiety, even panic. Yet, apart from the war years (1914–1918), the era of Lebensphilosophie was fundamentally optimistic. The great hope and promise that came with reunification seemed to be mirrored in Lebensphilosophie itself.



5

There were no limits, anything seemed possible. Just as the German people now had a new nation to build, so man was free to create his own world. Yet there was a paradox at the heart of Lebensphilosophie. Although philosophy had abolished all of the old absolutes, it had also created a new one, one especially appropriate for the new age, so filled with life and hope. This was the concept of life itself. Life was the absolute to end all absolutes. For life is forever creative, inexhaustible, and eternal. Because it is constantly surpassing its limits, life transcends itself; whatever it has been, and for however long, it will transcend it and create anew. Although the present era will fade away like all those before it, there will still be a new era, and infinitely many after that.¹¹ This new metaphysics of life came with a new ethics. It had one cardinal imperative: Live! Live every moment of life, to its fullest and deepest. Carpe diem! This is because there is no life after this. This is the only life for everyone, the one and only opportunity. This realization went hand in hand with a new ethic of individuality, which recommended that the self realize itself fully, that it reject all customs, laws, and rules that would attempt to restrain it. To conform, to comply, to heed customs, regulations, and laws, was to suppress the vital force within oneself. It followed that many of the old institutions—church, state, school—had lost their authority over the individual because they had inhibited and repressed the individual’s vital energies.

3. The Idea of Life The basic concept of Lebensphilosophie, as the name indicates, is life (das Leben). But what did the Lebensphilosophen mean by it? And why did they give it such importance? Life was for the Lebensphilosophen the most fundamental reality for a human being. Whatever someone experiences—whether it is perceived, ¹¹ This new sense of optimism was expressed admirably by Simmel shortly before his death in his last major writing, “Die Transcendenz des Lebens,” chapter 1 of Lebensanschauung. Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918), GSG XVI, 212–35. On this writing, see Chapter III, Section 4 in this volume.

6

  

desired, or felt—is something that is lived. Perception, desire, and feeling are simply aspects of life. This is not a metaphysical thesis that states that life is the only reality; it is an epistemological thesis that states that whatever we know is a form of life. Whether there is a reality beyond human life—something like the Kantian thing-in-itself—is a question that does not concern the Lebensphilosophen. Since this reality is unknowable—since we cannot perceive, desire, or feel it—they think it should not matter to us. Life is for the Lebensphilosophen a fundamentally contingent matter.¹² It is possible for life to exist, but it is also possible for it not to exist; in other words, there is no contradiction in assuming that it does not exist. This means that life does not—like Spinoza’s substance or Schelling’s absolute—come into existence by the necessity of its own nature alone. It is necessary to distinguish, therefore, between the essence and existence of life. We cannot prove the existence of life simply through knowledge of its essence; we can know of the existence of life only through experience. The contingency of life means that it is all the more valuable; because it is possible for it not to be, we cannot take it for granted. The three major Lebensphilosophen—Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel—do not have a general metaphysical theory about life. They do not explain how it differs from matter or mind, and they do not discuss its origins or the stages of its appearance in nature. They also have little interest in biology. There is a simple reason for this lack of interest: their concern is not with life in general but with one particular form of it, namely, human life. Life as the subject of Lebensphilosophie is, as Dilthey put it, “the life lived by human beings.”¹³ Although the main interest of the Lebensphilosophen is human life, this does not mean that they were unaffected by developments in biology. On the contrary. Like all German intellectuals after 1860 they were

¹² See Nietzsche, Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studien Ausgabe, eds. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967–77), I, 845–6 (henceforth this edition will be abbreviated as KSA); and Simmel, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1910). GSG, XIV, 57. ¹³ Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. B. Groethuysen (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914–77), VIII, 121; cf. VI, 314. Henceforth this edition will be abbreviated as GS.



7

profoundly influenced by Darwinism.¹⁴ They accepted the main lesson of Darwin’s theory of evolution: that the origins of life lie in nature alone and require no explanation through supernatural or teleological causes. Any explanation of the origins of life, they were convinced, would have to be in naturalistic terms. It was largely because of the success of Darwinism that, in their ethics, the Lebensphilosophen directed their attention to life in this world and had no interest in immortality. The concept of life of the Lebensphilosophen expressed the new modern feeling that there is no end or meaning to life beyond life itself. Life is not therefore a means to a goal beyond itself, namely preparation for eternity or heaven; rather, the purpose of life is simply life itself. The Lebensphilosophen therefore rejected any attempt to base ethics on ideas about the transcendent, the supernatural, or otherworldly. This life, the one we lead here and now on earth, is our only life, and we therefore must make the most of this unique opportunity. The concept of life circumscribed for the Lebensphilosophen the whole realm of human concern. Nothing beyond the sphere of life—the realm of the transcendent, the supernatural—could be of interest to them. Fundamental to Lebensphilosophie is what has often been called “the principle of immanence.” This means that there is no reality beyond life, or at least none that should concern us. The Lebensphilosophen therefore aspired toward an immanent philosophy, one that strictly observes the limits of experience and refers to no transcendent or supernatural entities. In insisting upon the constraints of immanence, the Lebensphilosophen were following in the footsteps of their father, Schopenhauer, who had characterized his own philosophy as “immanent.”¹⁵

¹⁴ On the influence of Darwinism in Germany, see Alfred Kelly, The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, eds. Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas Glick (London: Continuum, 2008); E.J. Weindling, “Darwinism in Germany,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 685–96; and William Montgomery, “Germany,” in Comparative Reception of Darwinism, ed. Thomas F. Glick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), pp. 81–115. ¹⁵ See Schopenhauer, “Über das metaphysische Bedürfnis,” Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (WWV), in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang Freiherr von Löhneysen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), II, 234, 237. Cf. I, 377 (henceforth this edition will be abbreviated as SW).

8

  

The Lebensphilosophen took the principle of immanence an important step further than Schopenhauer, however. Human beings are limited by not only the concerns of earthly life, they maintained, but also by their specific social and historical world. We are fundamentally social and historical beings, they taught, creatures of our particular culture and epoch. Our education into our culture determines who and what we are; and we cannot jump beyond its horizon into another social and historical world. The Lebensphilosophen stressed this principle of historical immanence not least because they were children of the age of historicism, which stressed the role of history in forming life, society, and culture.¹⁶ Their emphasis on the historicity of life is one of the many respects in which they anticipate Heidegger’s later existential ontology. It is important to see that the principle of immanence of Lebensphilosophie excluded pantheism. Since the pantheistic God is identical with nature, it is an immanent God, and therefore one might think that the Lebensphilosophen should embrace it. But none of them did. The pantheistic God still did not meet their standards of immanence, which required that something be identifiable in experience. For them, just because the pantheistic God is everywhere, it is really nowhere; because we cannot identify it, we cannot prove its existence. This rejection of pantheism is the fundamental respect in which Lebensphilosophie moves beyond the radicalism of the 1830s, the Neues Deutschland movement of the Vormärz. Heinrich Heine, the major spokesman for that movement, justified its republicanism by appealing to pantheism: if God is everywhere and in everyone, then we are all equal and there is no validity to a social hierarchy that privileges the few.¹⁷ But the Lebensphilosophen rejected any such religious sanction, which for them was still much too transcendent. Pantheism was the last possible stance of theology before atheism. They would have happily accepted

¹⁶ Famously, Nietzsche protested against historicism in the second of his Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” which was published in 1874. But this anti-historicism was only a short phase of his career. In his 1878 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches he embraced what he called “historical philosophy,” which had all the characteristics of historicism he once despised. On Nietzsche’s later historicism, see Chapter IV, Section 2. ¹⁷ Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, in Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich: Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1976), V, 570–1.



9

Feuerbach’s famous dictum: “Pantheism is the negation of theology from the standpoint of theology.”¹⁸ The rejection of theology by the Lebensphilosophen did not derive from any materialism, implicit or explicit. When they began writing in the 1870s the great age of materialism in Germany had already passed. Feuerbach, Vogt, Czolbe, Moleshott, and Büchner were the firebrands of the 1850s; but by the 1870s their doctrine began to seem as crusty and musty as the idealism it had displaced. In 1866 Friedrich Lange published his Geschichte des Materialismus,¹⁹ which criticized materialism from a Kantian standpoint. The materialist’s belief in the independent reality of matter seemed to beg every critical question about how we know of the existence of matter, and it seemed to ignore entirely the role of the subject in constituting the object of awareness. Nietzsche and Dilthey were admirers of Lange’s book, whose lessons they took much to heart.²⁰ The realized that any fully satisfactory epistemology would have to take into account the contribution of the knowing subject to the constitution of knowledge, and that pure matter was no better than the bad old Kantian thing-in-itself. The concepts of mass, force, and atom were for them only fictions for ordering experience, and there was no way to prove that any of them referred to a reality independent of thought. It was a central thesis of Lebensphilosophie that the purpose or meaning of life has to be created by human beings themselves. There is no purpose or meaning within the cosmos itself to which human beings have to conform, and which they do not create themselves. This is to say that there is no such thing as a natural law, a norm inherent in nature which determines what is right or wrong for human beings. The Lebensphilosophen broke explicitly and decisively, therefore, with the natural law tradition. They denied that there is any kind of teleology in ¹⁸ Ludwig Feuerbach, “Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie,” in Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Erich Thiess (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), III, 224. ¹⁹ Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn: J. Baedeker, 1866). A second edition appeared in two volumes, the first in 1873 and the second in 1875. ²⁰ On Nietzsche’s reaction to Lange’s book, see his end of August 1866 and February 1868 letters to Carl von Gersdorf, in Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975–84), II, 159–60, 257; see too his November 1866 letter to Herman Mushacke, II, 184. On Dilthey’s reaction to Lange’s book, see his reviews of the second edition in GS, XVII, 101, 440.

10    nature, whether that is an external teleology, where a purpose is imposed on nature by a transcendent cause, or an internal teleology, where a purpose is inherent in nature itself. This rejection of teleology was one of the hallmarks of Lebensphilosophie. Nietzsche gave the classic formulation for it with his concept of “the innocence of becoming” (die Unschuld des Werdens).²¹ Life is innocent for him because it does not strive for any purpose, for any moral end, whether beyond or within itself. Dilthey too refused to interpret life teleologically.²² When we talk about development, he argued, it seems that we presuppose some purpose; but this, he insisted, is only because we read a purpose into nature from our own human perspective. This anti-teleological standpoint is another of the central ways in which Lebensphilosophie anticipated existentialism. The thesis that there is no inherent purpose in nature to which human beings conform, that there is no natural law to which their actions should comply, meant that human beings are free to set their own agenda in life. The meaning of their lives cannot come from any cosmic order outside themselves but has to come from inside themselves. Sartre would later characterize this freedom as “dreadful,” though the Lebensphilosophen found it exhilarating. This anti-teleological standpoint is the fundamental respect in which Lebensphilosophie broke with the idealist tradition. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel anticipated Lebensphilosophie in a sense because they too disputed the old Christian idea of an external teleology, a providential plan created by the divine creator. Nevertheless, they still differed from the Lebensphilosophen in holding onto an internal teleology, the idea that life has some inherent purpose within itself. The idealists made their first principle reason, logos, or the idea, and to it life had to conform. If they believed that thought is the prius of life, the Lebensphilosophen thought just the opposite; as Dilthey put it: “Life is the prius of thought.”²³ For the Lebensphilosophen, any idea or purpose behind the creation is post facto, a goal that we read into. ²¹ Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, KSA, VI, 96. ²³ Dilthey, GS, VIII, 264.

²² Dilthey, GS, VII, 232.



11

Using the later language of existentialism, we can formulate the difference between Lebensphilosophie and idealism by saying that idealism makes essence precede existence while Lebensphilosophie makes existence precede essence. For the idealists, the realm of essence is that of formal and final causes, to which the activity of life has to conform; for the Lebensphilosophen, the realm of existence is the creative activity of life itself which is not bound by any essence; rather, the realm of essence is the product of life.

4. The Value of Life The fundamental problem of Lebensphilosophie, which was first raised by the ancient Greeks, is very simple and familiar. It is the ultimate existential question: Is life worth living? Or is it better not to be born? Nietzsche puts the problem of the value of life in a vivid perspective when he retells, in Die Geburt der Tragödie,²⁴ the myth of Silenus. According to that myth, King Midas goes in search of Silenus, a satyr, and upon capturing him in a net, asks him what is the best life for man. Laughing hysterically at such a silly question, Silenus sneers back that the best life is never to be born, and the next best life is to die young. Although this existential question was first posed by the ancient Greeks, it had been forgotten for centuries; it had to be posed anew in the nineteenth century. This is because, for many centuries, it had become confused with a different theological question: namely, what is the purpose or meaning of life? The theological question had presupposed a teleological order in the universe; it assumed that God created nature, and that he created everything for a reason; the purpose or meaning of life consisted in finding one’s place in that teleological order, in fulfilling the purpose that God had given my life upon my birth. But when that teleological order had been cast in doubt in the middle of the nineteenth century, the whole question about the value of life also became transformed. The value of life would have to be created by myself and it could not be given to me by nature or God. ²⁴ Nietzsche, Der Geburt der Tragödie, §3, KSA, I, 35.

12    The ancient Greek problem was revived in the modern world by Schopenhauer, and more specifically in chapter 17 of the second volume of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.²⁵ He called this problem “the puzzle of existence” (das Rätsel des Daseins). As Schopenhauer first explains this problem, it seems to be nothing more than the classical metaphysical conundrum of why there is something rather than nothing. But it soon becomes clear that this is not what he had in mind at all; the conundrum is not why something exists but why we human beings exist, or better yet why we should want to live at all. In other words, what is the value of life? Is life worth living or not? So, ultimately, Schopenhauer’s question was more ethical than metaphysical. His puzzle of existence is what we might call “the Hamlet question”: “To be or not to be?” This question arises naturally and necessarily, Schopenhauer thinks, whenever we reflect on two fundamental facts of human life: the existence of evil and the omnipresence of suffering. There is so much evil in this world, and there is so much suffering, that we often think that it would be better that we human beings simply did not exist. Sometimes, nothingness just seems better than existence. Which raises the question: Why exist at all? Schopenhauer’s problem differs crucially from the traditional Christian problem of evil, which was often formulated in terms of the question: What is the vocation of man? This question occupied philosophers well into the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most striking example of this concern was the famous book by J.J. Spalding, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, which was first published in 1748 and which then went through no less than thirteen editions.²⁶ Spalding’s book had sparked much discussion, and there had been in the 1760s a famous controversy surrounding it in which Thomas Abbt, Moses Mendelssohn, and Johann Gottfried Herder were all participants.²⁷ Spalding’s question “What is the ²⁵ Schopenhauer, “Über das metaphysische Bedürfnis.” SW, II, 206–43. ²⁶ See the new edition by Wolfgang Müller, Johann Joachim Spalding, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (Waltrop: Hertmut Spenner, 1997), which contains the first edition of 1748 and the last of 1794. ²⁷ On this controversy, see my article “Mendelssohn versus Herder on the Vocation of Man,” and George di Giovanni, “The Year 1786 and Die Bestimmung des Menschen, or Popularphilosophie in Crisis,” in Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics, ed. Reinier Munk (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), pp. 217–45.



13

vocation of man?” assumed that there is a God who created nature and humanity according to a plan or design, and in that divine scheme each individual is assigned his or her proper role and place. The vocation of man, or the meaning of life, is to fulfill one’s place in this plan, to play one’s allotted part, and so to satisfy the purpose of God in creating us. The meaning of life is such a mystery for us, however, because God’s plan is very obscure, and we can discover it only by carefully reading the clues in nature and Scripture. Seen from this eighteenth-century perspective, Schopenhauer’s question is radically new. This is because Schopenhauer lays aside the teleological and theological presuppositions of the traditional Christian one. Schopenhauer not only denies theism but also disputes the idea of providence behind eighteenth-century metaphysics. If there is no God, and if there is no design or providence, then there just is no vocation of man, no meaning of life, that we receive from the natural order of the universe. So when Schopenhauer poses the question of the value of life, he does so—for better or worse—from the new secular framework characteristic of the nineteenth century. If there is no God to redeem suffering, and if there is no God to ensure that good triumphs over evil, the problem of existence poses itself anew. Why is life worth living if it contains more suffering than joy, more evil than good, and if it promises no reward or redemption, either now or in some life to come? We can no longer assume that, despite all the suffering, and despite all the evil, there will be some form of divine grace or redemption. It was Schopenhauer’s great merit to have returned philosophy to the ancient problem of the value of life, but to have done so in a more secular age. He clearly saw that the problem would not go away even if we reject the theology and teleology of its medieval formulations. It is striking how he revives the problem of evil even though he rejects the old theist assumptions behind it. For Schopenhauer, no less than the theologians of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the problem of evil is central to philosophy, and he even goes so far as to say that the origin of philosophy arises from contemplation of the existence of evil.²⁸ For him, too, the existence of evil is the great conundrum; but it is so not because it impugns the ²⁸ Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, SW, II, 222.

14    existence of God but because it impugns the value of existence itself. Evil and suffering are for Schopenhauer the great stains on existence itself— even though that existence is not created by God. It was Schopenhauer who posed the great challenge to the Lebensphilosophen. They would somehow have to show that life is worth living, that there is meaning to existence, even though there is no God, even though there is no teleological order to nature. This would force them to confront his notorious pessimism. In Chapter III we shall examine that confrontation.

I The Conception of Philosophy 1. Philosophy as a Worldview One of the most important innovations of Lebensphilosophie was its conception of philosophy itself.¹ Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel conceived of philosophy as a worldview, a Weltanschauung, a personal outlook on the world. Philosophy was not a science, a Wissenschaft, a totally impersonal conception of the world which claimed to be true for every intelligent being, regardless of their personality, culture, and values. Rather, it was an expression of their personality, a product of their culture and values. This distinction between a worldview and science, between Weltanschauung and Wissenschaft, marked an important turning point in the history of philosophy: the abandonment of the age-old ambition of philosophy to be a science. There were three salient characteristics of a worldview. It was personal, practical, and metaphysical. It was personal because its ultimate rationale depended on what kind of person one was; whether one accepted it did not depend on reason but upon choice. It was practical because it had an answer to the question of the value or purpose of life; it explained how and why one should live. Finally, it was metaphysical in the sense that it provided an attitude toward life as a whole or existence in general. This conception of philosophy was a reaction against the German idealist tradition. It was the grand ambition of the great German idealists—Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—to make philosophy a science, a discipline that could achieve certainty, and whose results were universal and necessary. Whether one accepted their systems, they believed, did not depend on personal choice but upon reason and ¹ This conception of philosophy was later systematically explored and explained by Karl Jaspers, Psychologie als Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1919). Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0002

16    experience alone; their systems claimed to be valid for everyone alike, regardless of their character.² The German idealists and the Lebensphilosophen both had a metaphysical conception of philosophy. The idealists saw their metaphysics as knowledge of the absolute, of the universe as a whole. The Lebensphilosophen regarded their metaphysics as a perspective or attitude toward life as such or existence in general. They had, therefore, a very different conception of metaphysics than the idealists. Their metaphysics was meant to be totally immanent, one within the boundaries of human experience and existence. It was about how we human beings experience life and existence, and it was not about being as such. The Lebensphilosophen therefore rejected a transcendent metaphysics, one about existence in itself or being in general. The difference between the idealists and the Lebensphilosophen regarding the conception of philosophy was often expressed as the difference between Wissenschaft and Weltanschauung. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the big question within philosophy was often formulated in these terms: Wissenschaft oder Weltanschauung? The advocates of Wissenschaft made knowledge an end in itself; the champions of Weltanschauung made knowledge a means to an end, the goal of guiding life. The former insisted that all philosophical questions were theoretically decidable; the latter held that they were theoretically undecidable and that one therefore had to resort to choice and practice to resolve them. The phenomenologists and neo-Kantians struggled to defend the conception of philosophy as Wissenschaft against the increasingly popular view that it should be Weltanschauung.³ They believed that the champions of Weltanschauung had forfeited one of the most important values of all philosophy: the claim to objectivity. With the claim to objectivity came the thesis that a philosophy should represent universal

² Fichte seems to be an exception to this generalization, as we discuss in Section 2. ³ On the phenomenologist’s reaction, see Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos I (1910–11), 289–341. On the neo-Kantian reaction, see Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920), pp. 13, 77, 147 and Wilhelm Windelband, “Immanuel Kant. Zur Säkularfeier seine Philosophie. Ein Vortrag, 1881,” in Präludien, Neunte Ausabe (Tübingen: Mohr, 1924) I, 112–46, esp. 140.

   

17

and necessary values. If a Weltanschauung were entirely personal—if it could claim no validity beyond the choice or character of the individual—then why should it be accepted by anyone else? There could not be correct but incompatible worldviews.

2. Origins The origins of the idea of a Weltanschauung are very obscure, and we need to limit our search within the area of modern German philosophy. Within that tradition,⁴ one of its founding fathers is J.G. Fichte. As one of the chief idealists, Fichte appears an unlikely spokesman for the idea of a Weltanschauung. Yet even the history of philosophy has its ironies. In the polemics surrounding his Wissenschaftslehre,⁵ Fichte made an important concession about his philosophy. He admitted that it was indemonstrable, that it was impossible to prove its superiority over Spinoza’s system. The difference between his system of idealism and Spinoza’s system of naturalism, he explained, concerned their first principles; but since first principles are indemonstrable, the choice between these systems depended simply on what kind of person one was. It was a famous statement. It became the punctum saliens for the development of a new more personal conception of philosophy. Another central thinker in the development of the idea of a worldview was Fichte’s successor in Berlin, Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72). His attempt to classify all the different worldviews was an important influence on his student, Wilhelm Dilthey. Like Fichte, Trendelenburg believed that there was one fundamental difference between all the conflicting worldviews, and that there was no straightforward theoretical means of resolving it.⁶ This fundamental difference revolved around the ⁴ For a broader survey, see H. Thome, “Weltanschauung,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliches Buchgesellschaft, 2004), Band 12: W–Z, 453–9. ⁵ Fichte, Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, in Werke, ed. I.H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1845/46), I, 434. ⁶ Adolf Trendelenburg, “Über den letzten Unterschied der philosophischen Systeme,” in Philologische und historische Abhandlungen der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Dümmler, 1847), 241–62. Reprinted in Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie (Berlin: G. Bethge, 1855), II, 1–30.

18    issue of idealism versus materialism: idealism stood for the importance of final causes or teleology, while materialism meant the exclusive prerogative of mechanism to explain nature. The dispute between them was theoretically irresolvable, Trendelenburg contended, because materialism could never reduce the psychic and purposive to material forces, whereas idealism could never explain how final causes could direct and control matter. Trendelenburg thought that the only solution to this conflict was ethical; idealism was preferable to materialism because it provided a foundation for ethics. Besides the personal influence of Fichte and Trendelenburg, there were broader forces at work in developing the idea of a Weltanschauung. One of these was the growing recognition of the limits of reason in the nineteenth century. There was first of all Fichte’s insight that the difference between philosophies concerned first principles, which are indemonstrable because all demonstration must begin with them. But there was also the awareness that there are practical motives behind the construction of a philosophy, and that these motives are not decidable by reason. Here Schopenhauer’s voluntarism played an influential role. Schopenhauer taught that the will played a dominating role over the intellect: while the will determined the ends of action, reason determined only the means.⁷ If a philosophical system had to serve the needs of life, it was clear that reason could not play the dominant role in its formation; instead, it would have to be the will, whose empirical manifestation is character or personality. Another force at work was the reaction against positivism in the beginning of the 1880s. Since the 1850s positivism had become a major power in Germany in discrediting metaphysical speculation and in advocating specialization in the natural sciences. But its success was also its undoing. The sciences had grown and specialized to such an extent that it no longer seemed possible to have an idea of the whole. It had always been one of the traditional functions of metaphysics to provide just such an idea; but now that metaphysics was taboo, there was no discipline to answer that need. The idea of a Weltanschauung stepped in to serve it. A worldview was not only personal, of significance to the life of a person, but it was also—paradoxically—universal by giving ⁷ Schopenhauer, WWV, II, 259–316, Kap. 19.

   

19

an account of the universe as a whole. Among the works that developed a worldview in this sense was Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos, Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten, and Ernst Haeckel’s Die Welträtsel.⁸ The problem with overspecialization in the sciences was voiced especially clearly by one of the foremost opponents of Lebensphilosophie, Wilhelm Windelband. In a public lecture he delivered in 1878,⁹ Windelband declared that the modern world had become too specialized, too fragmented, to be grasped by any single individual. Modern society, he worried, was in danger of falling to pieces; it had become “the picture of inner turmoil.” The usual surrogate nowadays for this lack of holism was a kind of “dilletantism,” he warned. If this dilletantism was comic in the salons, it was tragic in the alleyways, because it was the demagogue who claimed to know the whole and to speak for everyone. The only antidote to this predicament, Windelband implied, was the philosopher, who was someone who understood, from a professional point of view, the whole of things and how all its parts fit together. It was this idea that made Windelband retract his earlier criticisms of the idea of a worldview and made him now conceive a worldview as one of the main attractions of Kant’s critical philosophy.¹⁰

3. Nietzsche’s Conceptions of Philosophy The locus classicus of the Lebensphilosophen conception of philosophy is Nietzsche’s famous statement in Jenseits von Gut und Böse that “every great philosophy” is “the self-confession of its author, a kind of involuntary and unconscious mémoire.”¹¹ Nietzsche went on to explain that “the ⁸ Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (Tübingen: Cotta, 1845–62), four volumes; Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten: Versuch einer Weltanschauung (Berlin: Carl Duncker’s Verlag, 1869); and Ernst Haeckel, Die Welträtsel (Bonn: Emil Strauss, 1899). All of these books were extremely popular and went through several editions. ⁹ Wilhelm Windelband, “Über Friedrich Hölderlin und sein Geschick. Nach einem Vortrage in der akademischen Gesellschaft zu Freiburg am 29 November 1878.” In Präludien, I, 230–59. ¹⁰ See Windelband’s “Nach hundert Jahren. Zu Kantshundertjährigen Todestage, 1904,” in Präludien, I, 147–67, esp. 150. ¹¹ Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §6 in KSA, V, 19–20.

20    moral (or immoral) intention” behind each philosophy is “the proper germ from which the whole plant has grown.” What are the sources of Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy? What were the premises behind it and the influences upon it? One obvious source is Nietzsche’s own psychology, his main preoccupation in the 1880s. In section 13 of Jenseits von Gut und Böse Nietzsche declares bluntly and boldly the fundamental principle of his psychology: “life is will to power” (27). Nietzsche’s statement about philosophy would seem to be a simple instance and application of this principle. If life is the will to power, then every writing of an author should be an act or exercise of his or her will to power. The origins of Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy would then seem to come down to the sources of his principle of the will to power. This seems to be a promising lead; but it is also a deceptive one. Nietzsche wrote Jenseits von Gut und Böse in 1886, but the first evidence about his personal view of philosophy goes back at least a decade earlier, well before he formulated his principle of the will to power. In his unpublished manuscript Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, which he finished in 1876, Nietzsche taught that the philosophical systems of the pre-Platonic philosophers were true only for their founders, and that their irrefutable aspect lay in their personal dimension.¹² He stressed how the ancient Greek philosophers believed philosophy should serve life, and that its goal was not just to acquire knowledge for its own sake. Their doctrines were not primitive science, still less myth, Nietzsche argued, but a special kind of metaphysics, one whose main aim was to teach people about the value of life and the place of man in the universe. Time and again, Nietzsche points out how the Greeks anticipate Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It is clear: his Greeks were the Lebensphilosophen of the fourth and fifth centuries . Another plausible account of the origins of Nietzsche’s concept of philosophy lies with the philosopher who influenced him most: Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer saw the will as the dominant power of the soul, directing and guiding all others, so that anything someone did or said would have the will as its ultimate cause. But this hypothesis does ¹² KSA, I, 801.

   

21

not really work either. Schopenhauer’s will is universal and impersonal, lacking all individuality or personality, which belongs in the realm of appearance; but it is precisely individuality and personality that Nietzsche sees behind authorship. The origins of the concept lie in an area neglected by many Anglophone Nietzsche scholars: German Romanticism.¹³ Nietzsche’s intellectual background was suffused in Romanticism; he was very fond of certain Romantic writers, especially Hölderlin;¹⁴ and several Romantic themes appear in his early writings, namely the central role of art in culture, the primacy of genius in art, and an organic concept of nature. One of these themes, which also played a foundational role in his ethics, was the concept of individuality.¹⁵ According to this concept, the core of a person’s identity, and the source of his or her creativity, was their individuality, i.e., what is unique to and characteristic of a person, what makes him or her just this person and no one else. Whatever a person thought or did came from their individuality; it was the self-expression or self-manifestation of their individuality. Nietzsche simply applied this concept to philosophy, just as the Romantics did to poetry. Just as every individual has a novel within himself, as Friedrich Schlegel once said,¹⁶ so they have a philosophy within themselves. Every philosophical system was therefore the expression of the personality of its author. It is important to see, however, that Nietzsche’s concept of philosophy was a moving target. What he regarded as the vocation of philosophy in one phase of his life, he did not consider its vocation in another phase. The Romantic conception of philosophy that prevailed until 1876, ¹³ Walter Kaufmann: Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, third edition (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 124. Partly under Kaufmann’s influence, the Romantic element in Nietzsche has been neglected in recent Anglophone literature. But in the early 1900s it played a central role in German secondary literature. See, for example, Arthur Drews, Nietzsches Philosophie (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1904), pp. 96–203 and Karl Joel, Nietzsche und die Romantik (Jena: Diederichs, 1905). ¹⁴ On Nietzsche’s relation with Hölderlin, see Daniel Blue, The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 146–7. ¹⁵ On the importance of individuality in Romanticism, see Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ideen, 60: “Individuality is the original and eternal in man; personality is less important. To push the education and development of this individuality as the highest vocation is divine egoism.” See Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich Schegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler (Padernborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1979–2009), II, 262. ¹⁶ See Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente, 178, Kritische Ausgabe, II, 156.

22    especially in the Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen, virtually disappears in 1878, the year of the publication of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. It was in this later work that Nietzsche broke with the Romanticism of Wagner and developed what has been called (with some justice) “a positivistic” conception of philosophy. In the first main section,¹⁷ Nietzsche tells us that it is a sign of a higher culture to value the little unspectacular truths, which are found by a strict method, over the big and dazzling truths, which are characteristic of the metaphysical and artistic ages of mankind (§3, 25). Nietzsche implies that science grows, in a very slow and gradual process, by the accumulation of these little truths, and that it is illusory to think it needs to be founded on some grand intuition or insight. “The spirit of a science,” Nietzsche further tells us, “is powerful in the part and not in the whole” (§6, 27). It is these parts that are treated purely objectively, whereas the science as a whole raises the less objective and more personal question of its value and use. The philosophy that Nietzsche now considers ideal, because it aims to be a system of impersonal, objective insights, leaves little room for the personal confession of its author. It is only metaphysics, a lower stage of cultural evolution, which permits the personal confession of its author behind its systems. Despite moving in a positivist direction in the late 1870s, Nietzsche still remained true to his personal conception of philosophy, which he restated in 1886 in Jenseits von Gut und Böse. There is no inconsistency with the positivist conception of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, however, if one stresses the implicit distinction, which is characteristic of positivism, between science and philosophy or metaphysics.¹⁸ While science is formed gradually by adding up its little impersonal truths, philosophy or metaphysics begins with a grand vision or insight characteristic of the personality of its author. Still, there can be no question that in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches Nietzsche values science more highly than philosophy: the quest for objective truth trumps the need for a personal vision. This preference for science over philosophy disappears,

¹⁷ “Erstes Hauptstück. Von den ersten und letzten Dingen.” KSA, II, 23–55. ¹⁸ See, for example, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §6, II, 27, §7, II, 28.

   

23

however, in the later 1880s when Nietzsche reaffirms his more personal conception of philosophy. Sometime in the 1880s, then, Nietzsche had at least two different conceptions of philosophy swirling around in his head, which are imperfectly distinguished by him. There was a positivist conception, which he formed in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, and there was a personal conception, which he had first formulated in his early writings on the Greeks and reaffirmed in Jenseits von Gut und Böse. The positivist one was comprised by his program of “historical philosophy,” which would investigate the psychological origins or causes of metaphysical beliefs; and the personal one was his general metaphysics, which would try to give a general view of life or existence as a whole but which ultimately reflected the values of the author himself.¹⁹

4. Dilthey’s Idea of a Worldview The Lebensphilosoph most commonly associated with the idea of a worldview is Wilhelm Dilthey. He did not invent the idea; but he did make it famous. His chief exposition of the idea is his 1907 treatise Das Wesen der Philosophie,²⁰ though there are also many unpublished late fragments.²¹ No less than Nietzsche and Simmel, Dilthey was struck by the historical relativity of philosophical viewpoints. Each philosophy claimed to have a universal validity, to be true for all peoples at all times, and, unlike art and religion, it attempted to demonstrate its point of view, so that any intelligent person, who understood it, would have to accept it. However, “the historical standpoint” proves its superiority over every particular system of philosophy, Dilthey claims, because it shows us that each philosophy is the product of its specific time and place (V, 364). The historical standpoint sees all philosophies, despite their claims to universal validity, as relative and temporary. This conflict ¹⁹ On the reasons for Nietzsche’s reaffirmation of a personal vision after his positivist period, see Matthew Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works, a Dialectical Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ²⁰ Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Wesen der Philosophie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1907). GS, V, 339–416. ²¹ GS, VIII. The entire volume is relevant.

24    between the historical standpoint and philosophy itself, Dilthey remarks, is “the deepest silently endured suffering of contemporary philosophy” (364). We will consider later Dilthey’s attempts to resolve this conflict, but for now our focus is solely on his idea of a worldview. For Dilthey, philosophy is above all an attempt to answer the question of the value and meaning of life. It tries to determine the ultimate values by which a person lives and the purpose of existence itself. Using a phrase from Schopenhauer, Dilthey says that philosophy is an attempt to answer “the puzzle of life” (Das Räthsel des Lebens) (V, 370). The puzzle of life involves the problem of evil, the question why we choose to exist if life involves so much evil and suffering. For each person who chooses to exist, there must be some experience of redemption, some decisive moment whereby he or she discovers that life is worth living after all. The task of the philosopher is to analyze this experience, the reasons someone would or should give for staying alive and persisting in the struggle of life. In trying to answer this puzzle, the philosopher consults what Dilthey calls his “life experience” (Lebenserfahrung) (374). Life experience is that by which we discover the value of life and test the various hypotheses about it. Through it, we determine how we want to live and why we think life is worth living. This experience is not purely theoretical, arising from acts of perception and intellection, Dilthey stresses, because it is deeply practical, coming from our feelings and desires, from our reactions to things and people in our world (374). Life experience results in the formation of what Dilthey calls a “psychic structure,” which is a teleological system involving certain purposes and values that direct our lives, that determine attention, selection of impressions, choice among goals, finding means toward ends (373). We apprehend the world according to this structure; and its ultimate product is a worldview. Although Dilthey recognizes that lived experience is by its very nature individual, differing from one person to the next, he resists the conclusion that its meaning is entirely personal; indeed, he stresses how its claim to universal validity transcends its individual significance (376). Dilthey does not provide a formal definition of a worldview in Das Wesen der Philosophie, and the closest he comes to it is in calling it “an interpretation of reality” (Interpretation der Wirklichkeit) (379).

   

25

He likens it to the interpretation of a book. “Just as a proposition has a sense or meaning and brings it to expression, so these interpretations state the sense or meaning [of life]” (379). He now stresses how individual these interpretations are; there are as many interpretations of the world as there are interpretations of a book. “How changing these interpretations are in each individual! They change gradually or suddenly with the influence of experience.” In the structure of each worldview, Dilthey tells us, there is an inner relation between life experience and the image of the world (Weltbild) (380). Philosophy, religion, and poetry all contain worldviews; what distinguishes philosophy from poetry and religion is its claim to universal validity (380–1). Although Dilthey stresses the ethical importance and practical orientation of a worldview, he is also explicit that it does not have specific actions as its goal; it never includes “definite practical conduct” (380). In one of his late fragments,²² Dilthey made some important additions to his explanation of a worldview. These additions, which would have a great influence on the young Heidegger,²³ give “an existential dimension” to the worldview. We now learn much more about that “puzzle of life” which it is the purpose of a worldview to resolve (81). This puzzle arises from the great mysteries of life: creation, birth, development, and death. Of all these factors, the most daunting and mysterious is death. We all know death but we cannot comprehend it (81). Because of it, we see life as something alien to us, as something transcending our understanding. The life experience, which is at the root of every worldview, consists in the awareness of certain basic facts of life: the powerful role of fortune in our lives, the corruptibility of all we regard as dear, and the constant danger of death (79). We also become aware that there are great tensions and conflicts in life; just consider the following examples: the perishability of all things and therefore our desire for permanence; the power of nature over us yet the independence of our will over it; and the limitations that time and space impose on everything we do yet our power to transcend them (81). There is a basic structure to every ²² “Leben und Weltanschauung,” GS, VIII, 78–118. ²³ Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1972), §§76–7. On Heidegger’s relation to Dilthey, see John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 298–9, 217, 334, 336, 391.

26    worldview: the lowest level consists in our mood (Lebensstimmung); the middle level comprises our reactions to and attitudes about what affects us; and the highest level consists in our ideals, our view about the highest good (83). There are three basic components of every worldview: knowledge of reality; evaluation of life; and the actions of the will (85, 86, 95, 96, 98). Dilthey then adds a typology of the various kinds of worldview, though it is very schematic.²⁴ There are three basic worldviews: naturalism, the idealism of freedom, and objective idealism. Naturalism maintains that nature is the all encompassing reality, that everything is only a part of nature. Its epistemology is sensualism, its metaphysics is materialism, and its ethics is hedonism and resignation to the powers of nature. The idealism of freedom is a reaction to naturalism and is essentially a dualistic metaphysics which maintains the will’s independence of nature. Objective idealism is an organic metaphysics, where everything is a part of the universe as a whole. Dilthey thinks that these three worldviews have been constant since antiquity. Why he chooses just these three is unclear; he considers the plausibility of other variables—idealism versus realism, materialism versus spiritualism—but he never uses them (97). In any case, he stresses that his taxonomy is entirely provisional (99).

5. Simmel’s Qualification No less than Nietzsche and Dilthey, Simmel also saw philosophy as a worldview, as a personal account of the universe as a whole. His idea of philosophy was very much influenced by Nietzsche and Dilthey, though he attempted to qualify their views in an important respect. We will attempt to explain this qualification below. Simmel’s most important statement of his view of philosophy appears in the first chapter of his Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, “Vom Wesen der Philosophie.”²⁵ He begins by noting a well-known fact about

²⁴ GS, VIII, 100–18. ²⁵ Simmel, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1910). GSG, XIV, 11–157. All references in the text are to the Gesamtausgabe.

   

27

philosophy: that it is the most self-reflexive of all disciplines. It is characteristic of philosophy, he writes, that it is always thinking about itself. Philosophy is a discipline in search of itself, one which is constantly trying to define itself. Other disciplines reflect on their objects, which are distinct from the reflection upon them, but philosophy exists only in and through its reflection upon itself (13). Because each philosopher has to define philosophy, there is no single universally accepted definition of philosophy (15). Hence there are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers. Although there is no authoritative definition of philosophy, Simmel still thinks that there are some essential characteristics of all philosophy. One of these characteristics is having “a sense for the totality of things and of life” (16). A philosopher should have some intuition or feeling for the universe as a whole, of life in general, even if he does not articulate it precisely. However, there is no pure and complete perception of the universe as a whole, because our perception is conditioned by the culture and epoch in which we live (20). Our historically and culturally conditioned way of looking at the world means that we grasp its content in different, incompatible, and incommensurate ways (20–1). This is true not only for art and religion, Simmel thinks, but also for science and philosophy. The science and philosophy we have depends on the kind of humanity we are (22). But, more than dependence on time and place, Simmel goes an important step further and states boldly that a worldview also depends on the personality who forms it (26). The more we have to comprehend, he claims, the more personal our vision of the world becomes (26). Simmel concedes, however, that the extent to which a worldview expresses a personality is limited. What is expressed through a worldview is not the unique individual – if that were the case, then there could be as many worldviews as individuals – but there is a limited number of worldviews which differ from one another in a finite number of ways. Furthermore, the scope and genesis of a philosophy cannot be entirely individual, Simmel argues, because then the philosophy would lose its claim to intersubjectivity and communicability. However, the scope and genesis also cannot be purely logical and methodological because then the philosophy would lose all its individuality; if all philosophies were

28    purely logical creations, then there would be just one philosophy. Since neither of these alternatives is possible, Simmel reasons, the root of a philosophy must lie in some third thing, which is neither purely individual nor purely universal. What is this third thing? It is the type of person (28). A worldview is not an attempt to have a purely objective account of things, which is the task of science; nor is it a purely subjective account of an individual, which is the task of autobiography; rather, it is an attempt to portray the world from the standpoint of a specific kind of person. Here was Simmel’s qualification of Nietzsche and Dilthey: it was not the unique individual but the type of individual that comprised the personal element of the worldview. Simmel’s treatment of philosophy in Hauptprobleme is very schematic and dense. It does not provide us with any account of the types of personality behind different worldviews, leaving its central contention purely speculative and abstract. It also does not provide direct evidence for its central claim that a philosophy depends on the personality of its founder or that it expresses a type of humanity. Yet, in the course of his argument, Simmel does make two points that make his argument more intuitive and plausible. First, he points out the similarity between philosophy, art, and religion. All are about how the universe reflects itself in humanity rather than nature itself. Second, philosophical theories are not objective in the same way as scientific theories; they are not descriptions or analyses of facts. Simmel notes how philosophical theories are not falsifiable, and that it would be absurd to expect them to correspond with facts (31, 39–42). No one thinks that monism is false because of the vast differences between things in experience; no one claims that idealism is implausible because the starry heavens above cannot depend on our representations. These kinds of claims are not inductions from experience but expressions for how personality types relate to life and the world (42). As Simmel attempts to summarize his theory: “One could summarize this conception of philosophy in the formula: philosophical thought objectifies the personal and personalizes the objective” (30).

II An Individualist Ethics 1. An Ethics of Protest Lebensphilosophie was less a metaphysics about life than an ethics about how life should be led. That was only in keeping with the original sense of the word. The term Lebensphilosophie first arose in the late eighteenth century to designate a philosophy oriented around practical life.¹ A Lebensphilosophie was a philosophy for a person’s life, a guide to action and the good life. Its goal was to achieve wisdom, Weltweisheit. Lebensphilosophie was a reaction against the perceived scholasticism of the Wolffian tradition, which valued philosophy for its own sake, independent of its practical use, and which viewed it as contemplation or speculation. By the close of the nineteenth century, the original meaning of Lebensphilosophie had largely disappeared. But there was still something of it that remained: the idea that philosophy should be directed toward life, that its goal should be not contemplation but action, learning how to live. At the end of the nineteenth century the term Lebensphilosophie acquired some new connotations. It had become a rallying cry, a slogan, a Kampfbegriff,² a declaration of rebellion against all the suffocating aesthetic, social, and moral norms of the day. Life meant the living forces inside the individual, those striving to express themselves, those struggling against obstacles, those fighting against oppression. The ultimate goal of Lebensphilosophie was therefore to liberate the life inside each individual, to free it from the inhibitions and oppressions imposed on it by habit, tradition, and law. In championing the rights of personal ¹ On the etymology of the term, see the article “Lebensphilosophie” by G. Pflug in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), V, 135–40. ² This term was originally used by Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie, p. 4. Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0003

30    creativity and individual self-expression, and in protesting against restrictive aesthetic, legal, and social norms, Lebensphilosophie was a return to an earlier intellectual movement, one that thrived in the 1760s and 1770s: namely, the Sturm und Drang.³ The Lebensphilosophen were the Sturmer und Dränger of the late nineteenth century. What motivated the protest movement of Lebensphilosophie was its ethic of self-realization or individualism. The central thesis of this ethic is that the end of life should be the development of individuality, the realization of the unique inner core of each person. This is the source of all its protests against oppressive norms and rules, because they threaten to suppress the individual for the sake of social unity and conformity. The founders of such an ethic were the Sturmer und Dränger—Schiller, Hamann, Herder, and Möser—in the late eighteenth century, and the young Romantics—Schlegel, Novalis, and Schleiermacher— in the early nineteenth century. This individualistic ethic was neither utilitarian nor deontological. It was not utilitarian because it did not think that the end of life is the acquisition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Pleasure could be the consequence of the development of our individuality, but it should not be the reason for it; even if a life were filled with suffering, it could still be worth living as long as the person realized his or her individuality. And it was not deontological because it did not believe that the formal qualities of a moral principle (viz., consistency, universality) alone could be the justification of duty; a moral principle had to be one part of a rewarding life, it had to be involved in the development of the whole personality. The individualistic ethic, in the case of Schiller and the Romantics, was a reaction against the Kantian-Fichtean ethics of duty. This ethics had stressed the importance of universalizability as a criterion of morality; and it had made rationality the chief requirement of morality, because only a rational being could act for the sake of universal laws. But, for Schiller and the Romantics, such an ethics was lacking two vital characteristics: it ignored the whole individual, who is the whole or unity of rationality ³ On the German Sturm und Drang, see especially Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953); Lewis White Beck, Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 361–92; and H.A. Korff, Geist der Goethezeit: I. Teil Sturm und Drang (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1966).

  

31

and sensibility, and it neglected the unique single individual, who was much more than just an instance of universal law. A complete ethical theory had to take account of all forms of value: it had to give a place to the sensible or emotional side of a human being, and it had to acknowledge the individuality of a person, which was irreplaceable and unique. This clash between individualist and Kant-Fichtean ethics first appears in Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. In letter 4,⁴ without mentioning Fichte by name, Schiller considers Fichte’s theory, recently expounded in his series of lectures Über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten,⁵ that sensibility and individuality should be “eliminated” (vernichtet). Fichte saw them as obstacles to the development of a perfect moral agent, someone who would completely realize the demands of reason, which are the same for everyone alike. Fichte fantasized that the elimination of sensibility and individuality would make all individuals alike and eventually result in a single rational being, which is God. This vision of a complete moral universe, where all individuals are the same and where there is only one rational being, did not inspire Schiller; it horrified him. Despite its illustrious and rich past, the individuality ethic was not without its problems. The most pressing of these concerned the limits of individual liberty. If the right of individual self-realization is asserted absolutely, and if one acts on that right, then in certain cases it allows immoral consequences. For the sake of consistency, one could just accept these consequences, even if they are very immoral by customary standards. If, however, one decides to limit this right, then one has to admit that there are certain values that are more fundamental than individuality. So, one faces the dilemma of immoralism or inconsistency.

2. Nietzsche’s Early Ethics The best exposition of Nietzsche’s early ethics is the third of his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, “Schopenhauer als Erzieher.”⁶ Here ⁴ See Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962), XX, 316–17. ⁵ See Fichte, Werke, ed. I.H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit & Comp., 1845–6), VI, 309–10. ⁶ All references in parentheses are to KSA, I, 335–427.

32    Nietzsche states directly, clearly, and simply the heart of his early ethics, which is also the basis for his mature views. The later ethics will add much to, but only remove a little from, the earlier version. Walter Kaufman has written rightly about this text: “The third of the Untimely Meditations . . . represents nothing less than the consummation of Nietzsche’s early philosophy.”⁷ Nietzsche’s ethics, as he first expounds it in this text, is a perfect case in point of the ethics of individuality or self-realization. There are three components of this ethics, all of them interconnected. The three components are (1) individuality, (2) holism, and (3) autonomy. Each deserves a little explanation. The very first section of “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” is a classic exposition of the individualist component of his ethics. Every human being is unique, Nietzsche tells us, i.e., no one is entirely like anyone else, and no one will ever recur in history (337). Hence each individual is, as Nietzsche puts it, “a singular miracle” (ein einmaliges Wunder) (337–8). It is the task of each individual to realize his or her uniqueness or singularity, to develop those powers or capacities that are uniquely his or her own. The fundamental maxim of individualism is therefore “Be yourself!” (338). One could object that this maxim is tautologous: whatever a person does is an expression of him or herself, so that it is impossible not to follow it. Seeing this very problem, Nietzsche raises the appropriate question: How do I know myself? (340). This is a very obscure matter, he warns, because if a rabbit has seven skins, a human being has seven times seventy. How do we distinguish, then, our real self from the many layers of affectation and disguise? Nietzsche thinks that the best answer to this question is to ask ourselves another simple question: What have we really loved? What has attracted our soul the most? What has made us most happy? If we were to set in a row all the objects we have loved, he suggests, “perhaps” that will give us “the basic law of our proper self ” (340). This was as good a suggestion as any to solve an intrinsically unsolvable problem. ⁷ Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, third edition (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 157.

  

33

Nietzsche warns that there is a major obstacle to the expression of individuality: conformity (338–9). Few people act on their individual needs and desires because of social pressure, or because they fear the reactions of others. Being yourself, doing what you really want, requires courage and conviction, because often you have to face the disapproval of others. Because of social pressure, few people succeed in knowing and realizing themselves; they alienate their individuality for the sake of getting along with others. Through conformity, they will perhaps lead a comfortable life; but they will not have a fulfilling one. The source of the individual component of Nietzsche’s ethics was Schiller and the Romantics. In the late 1790s and early 1800s Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Schleiermacher developed an ethics which stressed the importance for life of the development of individuality. We have already seen in the previous chapter the importance of the Romantic concept of individuality for Nietzsche’s idea of philosophy; we can now see its importance for his ethics. It should be clear: the thesis that Nietzsche, before 1878, was “an anti-Romantic” does not stand serious scrutiny.⁸ The second component of Nietzsche’s ethics—its holism—comes to the fore when he writes that the ideal educator should “draw forth all powers [of his pupil] and bring them into a harmonious whole” (342). We have many different kinds of powers and activities characteristic of our humanity, Nietzsche notes, and we should develop as many as we can, so that we are a well-rounded and many-sided individual; only then will we realize the full extent and breadth of our humanity. Nietzsche considers a possible conflict between the individual and holistic components of his ethics. He asks: If someone’s personal strength and passion is to be a goldsmith, should we force them, for the sake of a fuller and more rounded life, to learn something else, for example music? It seems that learning many different things is a waste of time for someone who has a passion and talent for just one thing. Nietzsche suggests that these two components are not in conflict after all. “Perhaps one says only that the individual should have a center, the other that he should also have a periphery?” (342–3). A good educator ⁸ Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 124.

34    therefore would discover the central power but also prevent it from overwhelming the others. “The task of his education should be, as I see it, to make the whole person a solar and planetary system and to know the law of its higher mechanics” (343). With this suggestion, Nietzsche leaves the problem. The source of this second component of Nietzsche’s ethics was classical and modern. It appears in Plato and Aristotle; and it recurs in almost all the thinkers of the Goethezeit in modern Germany: in Winckelmann, Wieland, Schiller, Forster, and Herder, who all went back to the classical tradition. The Romantic idea that one should make one’s life a work of art—a harmonious whole—also goes back to these classical sources. Nietzsche would reaffirm this Romantic theme on several occasions. The final component of Nietzsche’s early ethics is autonomy. Nietzsche expresses it well when he states that “No one can build the bridge upon which you must stride over the stream of life, no one but you alone” (340). Alternatively, he writes: “We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence” (339). This is a very different notion of autonomy from that which most contemporary philosophers are familiar: Kant’s concept of moral autonomy. Here we are not asked what we should do as a rational being but what we should do to be an individual being. We are to answer to our own individuality, not to a universal reason. Still, there is the same basic notion of autonomy in Kant and Nietzsche: autonomy is self-government, responsibility for our own actions; but the source of autonomy is different. It is either the individual or the rational self. These criteria are not conflicting but complementary, serving different ends: Kant is seeking a criterion of morality; Nietzsche is seeking the basis of the good life. If we ask Nietzsche what is the final justification for this ethics—what is the rationale for all its components—we get a surprising answer: it is the law of nature. It is the purpose of nature, he thinks, that we should develop our individuality, our wholeness, and our autonomy. Notably, he does not appeal to reason, still less the happiness of the individual. Rather, Nietzsche refers to the classical concept of the law of nature, which by the middle of the nineteenth century had fallen out of favor because of the historicist advocacy of positive law. It is a very specific

  

35

concept of nature that Nietzsche emphasizes: the Romantic view of nature as an organic whole, where human self-consciousness is made the highest purpose of nature herself. The creativity of the artist, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Novalis taught, is the highest goal of nature, because through it nature comes to self-consciousness. What I produce as an artist is what nature produces through me. Nietzsche explicitly reaffirms this tenet of the Romantic worldview. The highest goal of nature, he writes, is to produce the artist, the philosopher, and the saint, because it is through them that nature reaches its self-consciousness (382). If we do all we can to support the lives of artists, philosophers, and saints, we are helping nature herself to realize her goals (381). That Nietzsche should stress natural law is ultimately not so surprising because it was only in keeping with his general views at that time about the foundation of ethics. In his first untimely meditation, “David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller,” Nietzsche maintained that the chief problem with Strauss’s ethics is that he had constructed it “entirely independently of the question ‘What is our conception of the world?’” (194). We should not separate the question “What should I do?” from the question “What is the nature of the universe?,” he insisted. The connection between ethics and metaphysics was very important in the classical tradition, and Nietzsche wanted to reaffirm it against such modern philosophers as Hume and Kant, who had sharply distinguished between “ought” and “is.” But Nietzsche has in mind a very modern conception of metaphysics. Strauss, he says, should have derived his ethics from “the bellum omnium contra omnes and the privilege of the strong.” Strauss’s ethic should have been “a genuine and seriously worked through Darwinian ethic,” he writes (195). This is a remarkable requirement, however, given that Nietzsche seems unaware how much his own ethics violates it. There is a great tension between Darwinism and the Romantic worldview Nietzsche recommends in his second meditation. The Romantic worldview was still strongly teleological, though it was precisely teleology that Darwin wanted to banish. There was a well-established precedent for Nietzsche’s ethics of selfrealization. Not only did each of its individual components have a long history, but also its combination of them. The combination of

36    individualism, holism, and autonomy also appears in such well-known thinkers of the Goethezeit as Friedrich Schlegel and Schiller. Yet there was one element of Nietzsche’s ethics that was much more original and much more controversial: its elitism. From the very beginning, Nietzsche had divided humanity into masters and slaves where the masters are the few and the slaves are the many.⁹ This is already apparent in his early 1872 essay “Der griechische Staat,”¹⁰ where Nietzsche maintains that the production of culture requires slaves; and it also appears in his 1872 lecture series Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten, where he deplores education for the masses. Adamantly and persistently, Nietzsche maintains his elitism throughout all his later writings. It is his one original and characteristic addition to the German humanist tradition. Such elitism would have been deplored by every major thinker in that tradition, who all believed that their ideal of the good life should be equally accessible to all. Nietzsche was aware of his own departure from traditional individualism in this respect, and he began to affirm his elitism more in his later writings. He repudiates the suggestion that he is advocating “an individualist morality” because he insists “My philosophy is centered around order of rank.”¹¹ This is one important respect in which Nietzsche’s individualism differs from traditional liberal individualism, which was also more egalitarian.¹² Nietzsche’s justification for his elitism lies again with his concept of natural law. The consideration of the animal and plant kingdom shows us, Nietzsche argues in the third untimely meditation, that nature aspires toward “the single higher exemplar, the uncommon, more powerful, complicated and fruitful” (384). “The goal of its development” lies not in “the mass of its exemplars” but “where a species is at its limits and in

⁹ Walter Kaufmann maintains that the master/slave theme “play[s] a comparatively small role in Nietzsche’s writings.” See his Nietzsche, p. 296. But the theme was already fully developed in Der griechische Staat, a writing ignored by Kaufmann, and it appears persistently in almost all his later writings. ¹⁰ Number 3 in Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebenen Büchern, KSA, I, 764–77. ¹¹ Samtliche Werke, Nachgelassense Fragmente, XII, 280. ¹² On the difference between Nietzsche and traditional liberalism, see Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 9–11.

  

37

the transition to a higher species” (384). The higher species appears in the philosopher, artist, and saint, who are “the great saving and redeeming humans.” We normal mortals give our lives meaning—we redeem our existence—by working toward the conditions for the appearance of these higher human beings (385). This strange doctrine appears uncommonly clearly in the following passage: “For the question goes as follows: How does your individual life have the highest worth, the deepest meaning? . . . Only by living for the advantage of the rarest and most valuable exemplars, not for the advantage of most, that is for the, taken individually, most worthless examples” (385). The core of Nietzsche’s early ethics was his belief in the value of culture. What justifies our existence, he tells us, is genius, which is the power to create culture, which consists in great works of art, religion, and philosophy (363). The artist, philosopher, and saint can succeed in their aspiration, though, only if they have a good idea of the problems they face, of the enemies who oppose them. It is one of the peculiarities of Nietzsche’s early ethics that he goes to great pains and lengths to construct a theory about these enemies and the problems they pose. Who are they? Nietzsche calls them “cultural philistines” (Bildungsphilister) (165). The concept of the philistine has a long history in German culture. A biblical term, it designated those who are opposed to the spirit, the true teaching of the gospels; but it was soon applied more broadly in a more secular sense to any enemies of true doctrine (whatever that might be). The Romantics applied the term to anyone who did not love the realm of culture but who was devoted instead to bourgeois comforts and material values. Nietzsche appropriated the concept from the Romantics but then he gave it a special twist. Philistinism was for him the pretense to culture. It is precisely because it pretends to be culture that philistinism proved to be such an obstacle to the advancement of true culture. It therefore became necessary to penetrate and expose its pretensions. The philistines were not, therefore, just the masses, who have no interest in culture, and who might even have a contempt for it; rather, they are those who have an interest in culture but who think that they possess it simply by consuming it. The philistines listen to concerts, read classic literature, and go to plays; but they are not the artists themselves who create the works that philistines enjoy. While the philistine thinks

38    that he possesses culture, the artist, philosopher, and saint constantly seek it. Art, philosophy, and religion are for them an infinite task, an ideal which they can approach but never attain.

3. Dilthey’s Ethics We do not normally think of Dilthey as an ethical thinker. He is more famous for his theory of history and hermeneutics. But there can be no question that ethics was important for him, and that it was so from the very beginning of his career. In 1864 he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Schleiermacher’s ethics, De principiis ethicis Schleiermachi; and in the same year he wrote his habilitation thesis on the analysis of moral consciousness, Versuch einer Analyse des moralischen Bewusstseins.¹³ The first draft of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, which he wrote in 1875, attempted to be “a restoration of moral philosophy from its decline.”¹⁴ Finally, in 1890, Dilthey lectured on ethics, which eventually resulted in his first systematic treatment of the topic, his System der Ethik.¹⁵ All these facts indicate fully enough the importance of ethics for Dilthey.¹⁶ The crucial influence on Dilthey’s ethics was Schleiermacher, who was the founder of his ethics of individuality. That the goal of life consists in the development of one’s individuality, in the cultivation of those powers characteristic of one’s nature alone, is an idea that Dilthey acquired from his study of Schleiermacher, which began in the late 1850s and which he would pursue until at least the 1870s.¹⁷ Dilthey swore that he was no Schleiermachian,¹⁸ and indeed he was not because he was not among ¹³ Versuch einer Analyse des Moralischen Bewusstseins, GS, VI, 1–55. This work was unpublished in Dilthey’s lifetime and appeared first in GS in 1958. ¹⁴ “Über das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat,” GS, V, 33–4. ¹⁵ System der Ethik, GS, X, 13–112. ¹⁶ It is all the more surprising, as Benjamin Crowe has recently argued, that Dilthey’s ethics has received so little scholarly attention. See his “Dilthey’s Ethical Theory” in Interpreting Dilthey, ed. Eric S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 159–77. ¹⁷ Dilthey edited Schleiermacher’s letters, Aus Schleiermacher’s Leben: In Briefen (Berlin: G. Riemer, 1858–63) and wrote a biography of him, Leben Schleiermacher’s (Berlin: G. Riemer, 1870). ¹⁸ See his March 1862 letter to his father, in Der junge Dilthey: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern 1852–1870, ed. Clara Misch (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1960), p. 171.

  

39

those students of Schleiermacher who were intent on preserving and transmitting his theological legacy. Yet if he was not a Schleiermachean in theology, he was so in ethics, and chiefly because he adopted the essentials of his doctrine of individuality. That Dilthey embraced that doctrine is clear from a fragment in his diary, written in March 1860: Life means: an intuition and activity to let all powers of the world work upon you, to work out all [your] characteristics to a unifying form— thus arises the work of art of your existence. I have to avoid especially all comparison, which all too easily persecute and torment me. In oneself, everyone is unique, individually feeling joy and pain, individually comprehending the world, a source of infinite joys and pains, of infinite formation [Bildung] and activity. Everything exclusively depends on understanding oneself, willing to be oneself, i.e., the ideal that is one with our position in the world order . . . Not to dream and compare [with others] but actively and peacefully to shape one’s own being in the deep joy of creation! How fortunate I have been to do this!¹⁹

This entry reveals the surprising affinity between Dilthey’s and Nietzsche’s early ethics. Both have a common heritage in Romanticism. True to that source, both stress the great importance of individuality, of making the personality a unique work of art. Unlike the Romantics, though, both stripped this ethics of its Christian roots. Gone is the connection with love, and gone is any reference to the divine. The same ethics appears in another unpublished source, Dilthey’s correspondence with his close friend Graf Paul Yorck von Wartenburg. On October 3, 1885, Wartenburg celebrated his silver wedding anniversary with his wife, and Dilthey wrote him on the occasion: We enter into life with an bounded longing for complete happiness; to live life to the fullest is the secret of our unsettled hearts; and gradually we make sense of the deep arrangement of the world, according to which we live fully only in the life of others, in our activity for others. ¹⁹ Der junge Dilthey, p. 117.

40    The celebration of the first height of existence lies twenty-five years behind you; the celebration of this other, quieter, purer and higher pleasure is the silver anniversary.²⁰

This sentiment—that the secret of our hearts, in the first half of our lives, is living life to the fullest (sich auszuleben), and that, in the second half, it is living for others so that they too will live life to their fullest— expresses perfectly the ideal of Lebensphilosophie. Dilthey’s model of a life well lived was Goethe. In his chapter on Goethe in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung,²¹ he painted a vivid portrait of his life and the values behind it. Goethe’s ideal of life was self-fulfillment, the complete development of all powers so that they formed an organic whole. To attain this ideal, Goethe felt he had to experience life to its fullest and deepest; he had to treat every encounter, every relationship, every situation as an opportunity for personal growth. So life was for Goethe, from beginning to end, a grand adventure, a story of selfdiscovery, a never-ending learning experience. Dilthey wrote of Goethe’s goal in life: “Experience (Erleben) in its complete fullness and freedom—that is what he demanded” (206). Each experience was a means toward the end of Bildung, the self-realization of his personality. The meaning of Goethe’s life, Dilthey explained, did not come from some source beyond life itself, in some transcendent cause or purpose, namely, the plan of providence. Rather, it came from his life itself and, more specifically, from his attempt to make sense of it in the many stories he wrote about it (211–12). In saying this, Dilthey was claiming that we alone give meaning to our lives, that there is no meaning other than the one we make. We give our lives meaning through what we make of ourselves and what we write about it, whether that be fiction or history. Dilthey’s first and only systematic treatment of ethics is his System der Ethik, which he gave as a series of lectures at the University of Berlin in the summer semester of 1890. It is unclear whether Dilthey intended to ²⁰ Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, ed. Sigrud von den Schulenburg (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1923), p. 52. ²¹ Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, Zweite erweitere Auflage (Leipzig; B.G. Teubner, 1907), pp. 198–248, esp. 205–16.

  

41

publish a book based on these lectures. The Nachlass consists partly in student lecture notes and partly in a manuscript written by Dilthey himself.²² Dilthey’s intentions in parts of the text are often obscure, and his argument is often very schematic, leaving it to the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps in his reasoning. The vague structure of the work is due to the stressful time in which Dilthey wrote it.²³ Still, for all its faults, the System der Ethik is significant for the insight it provides into Dilthey’s general view of ethics. There are three sections to the System der Ethik, each approximately thirty pages. The first section is a critique of contemporary ethics; the second is an analysis of moral psychology; and the third is a discussion of moral evolution. The book has neither preface nor introduction. Dilthey defines ethics as “the science which derives from its theoretical knowledge principles for the conduct of the individual and the direction of society” (13). Hence he thinks that there should be a close connection between theory and practice in ethics. Ethics should be not simply theory—second-order reflection on moral principles and concepts—but also practice because it determines how one acts and one’s attitude on political matters (13). More specifically, he insists that ethics develop principles for dealing with the “social question,” which was the contemporary phrase to refer to the problem of poverty and economic inequality. Dilthey practiced what he preached. He was deeply involved in the politics of his day, which usually took the form of journalistic activity. He wrote hundreds of articles and reviews on contemporary issues and publications.²⁴ The target of Dilthey’s critique in section 1 is utilitarianism, which had become the dominant ethics in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dilthey takes Bentham and Mill as the chief expositors of utilitarianism. But he also mentions several recent German utilitarians—Paulsen, Döring, and Gizycki²⁵—who had stimulated his

²² See Hermann Nohl’s comments in the “Vorwort des Herausgebers,” GS, X, 12. ²³ Dilthey explains these work pressures in his August 1890 letter to Graf Yorck, Briefwechsel, p. 107. ²⁴ The articles and reviews comprise two volumes, XVI and XVII, of GS. ²⁵ Dilthey cites no specific works by these authors. In all probability they are the following: Friedrich Paulson, System der Ethik mit einem Umriss der Staats- und Gesellschaftslehre (Berlin:

42    thinking. So widespread had utilitarianism become by mid century that two of the chief philosophers of the day—Hermann Lotze and Theodor Fechner²⁶—had also formulated a utilitarian ethic. So when Dilthey wrote his lectures in 1890 he was convinced that he was swimming against the current. Dilthey’s first reaction to utilitarianism appears in his revealing December 1888 letter to Graf Yorck: Dear friend, the naturalistic movement in science has become unstoppable. Nowadays we experience, despite all that really happens, that the liberalizing social doctrine of Bastiat, Bentham and the Mills has taken over ethics. The presupposition of this doctrine is that whoever cares for himself also cares for the welfare of others, or whoever cares for others also cares for himself. The admirable purposiveness of the social machine is conditioned by the harmony of interests. You are right to call this a complacent rentier’s philosophy. One should distribute extracts of it to the workers to see if they can satisfy and warm themselves through the satiety of the upper classes.²⁷

As one would expect, it is this alleged harmony between the individual and the social that bears the brunt of Dilthey’s critique (39–40). Because human beings are more selfish than social, Mill realizes that this harmony is not natural; it therefore has to be created through institutional means, and more specifically through legislation and a system of education. But these means will achieve their result—ensuring social and legal conduct—only by interfering with the natural liberty of the individual. Hence the utilitarian has to abandon “the system of individual freedom by directing the individual’s innermost convictions” (40). Although Mill would loathe to admit it, his philosophy ends out in a kind of socialism

Hertz, 1889); August Döring, Philosophische Güterlehre: Untersuchungen über die Möglichket der Glückseligkeit und die wahre Triebfeder des sittlichen Handelns (Berlin: R Gaertner, 1888); and Paul von Gizycki, Ueber das Leben und Moralphiosophie des Epikur (Halle: Plötz, 1879). ²⁶ Gustav Theodor Fechner, Ueber das Höchste Gut (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1846) and Hermann Lotze, Grundzüge der praktischen Philosophie (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1882). ²⁷ Briefwechsel, pp. 75–6.

  

43

because the only way he can connect the individual with society is through a strict system of legislation and education (40). Dilthey has another argument for why utilitarianism ultimately leads to socialism (40). This argument appeals to the general happiness principle, according to which the general happiness depends on every individual receiving an equal share of benefit. This principle works ab initio, from the very beginning of society, where all people are equal in terms of their share in wealth. But it does not work in case society and state are already established, where there are inequalities in wealth and in the share of resources. Then it becomes imperative to redistribute wealth, because the wealthy, who already have so much, get little satisfaction in receiving the same portion of the good as the poor; since the poor will get much greater satisfaction, the general happiness dictates that they receive a greater share of the public benefit than the rich. Hence the principle of utility will demand, as all good socialists do, a redistribution of the wealth of society. The fundamental flaw of Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism, Dilthey maintains, is its “social atomism,” i.e., its belief in the self-sufficient individual who fulfills his basic needs independent of others (32). Such an individual is a sheer abstraction, because every individual is formed by the society of which he or she is a part; separated from this society, he or she is a beast or god, as Aristotle would have it. This atomism surfaces when Mill and Bentham consider the consequences of any proposed law or policy; they always consider first and foremost its possible effects on the feelings of individuals, whether they will feel pleasure or pain (31). But this is not how legislation really works, Dilthey argues, because the legislator considers not the consequences for the feelings of individuals but the consequences for “the household of social life.” If it is trying to determine the military budget, for example, a legislative body will consider the consequences for national security or a local economy; the last thing it will consider is whether it makes individuals happy or sad. The second part of Dilthey’s System der Ethik consists in his attempt to find a psychological-anthropological foundation for ethics. Dilthey wanted his ethics to have “a scientific foundation,” by which he meant that it had to be based on facts about human nature and not upon metaphysics, i.e., conceptual or rational constructions. Kant’s ethics

44    was based on such metaphysics because it tried to deduce all moral obligations from its concept of reason. But this project failed, Dilthey argues, because reason as such has no content. Mill was right: the only way Kant got content into his ethics was by illicitly presupposing consideration of consequences (34).²⁸ But the utilitarians too were guilty of basing their ethics on abstractions because they presupposed that all obligations could be derived from utilitarian calculations about quantities of pleasure and pain. That this abstractness was another chief failing of utilitarianism Dilthey makes plain in his July 1890 letter to Graf Yorck: With my ethic you will be pleased. I trump utilitarianism! I show that it is a construction from top to bottom. I start from the simplest facts, that the ways of our will are connected with an extension and raising of our state of feeling . . . But I defend the concrete realities of our moral impulses against abstract principles; it is a manly ethics that feels within itself these realities in contrast to the sentimental, altruistic and utilitarian.²⁹

How did Dilthey surpass utilitarianism? He would take as his starting point “the process of will in a human being” (48). Like Nietzsche, Dilthey held that the will is the dominant power of the soul, the power that organized all its nerves, feelings, and impulses. The human being, he wrote, is a “bundle of nerves,” which is held together only by the will (50). It is a mistake to see the human being as intellectual, Dilthey maintains, because its representations of good and evil are ultimately determined by its desires and feelings, which are governed by the will (50). Although Dilthey insisted on the centrality of the will, he still warned against hypostasis: one should not see drives, feelings, and impulses as manifestations of the will; the will is only an abstract term for all these particular drives, feelings, and impulses (67). Granted that the will is fundamental to the psyche, how do we get from this fact to morality? To do this, Dilthey explains, we must

²⁸ Mill, On Utilitarianism, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. F.E.L. Priestley (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), X, 207. ²⁹ Briefwechsel, p. 106.

  

45

introduce into our ethics another person and the feelings for it (Fremdgefühl) (68). All feeling for the other is based upon a recreation or reconstruction (Nachbildung) of his or her feelings. This reconstruction is not an intellectual process but it is achieved through a movement of the same feelings which take place in the other. Hence it is based on “commonality” (Gemeinsamkeit), solidarity of human nature (68). Dilthey stresses that this “recreation” or “reconstruction” is an “elementary relation,” which cannot be further explained or derived from something more basic. It is interesting for his hermeneutics that he indicates that it is the same structure which is apparent in understanding someone else; in parentheses he places the phrase “theory of understanding” (Theorie des Verstandes), which was a reference to his hermeneutics. The utilitarians have completely misunderstood the solidarity that occurs through the recreation or reconstruction of feelings, Dilthey charges (68). They think that it is based on utility alone, as if a person reconstructs or recreates the feelings of another simply because of the advantages it brings. But this is incorrect because we recreate or reconstruct feelings for all kinds of reasons, even if they bring no advantage at all. We do get pleasure through recreating or reconstructing the feelings of others, to be sure, but that feeling of pleasure is only the consequence and not the reason we do it. We feel a primal need to understand others, even if it brings us no pleasure at all. We now have a theory of understanding, but this still does not give us a moral theory of any kind. The mere fact that I understand someone does not mean that I approve or disapprove of him or her, that I treat him or her well or badly. Dilthey is fully aware of this (69), but he still thinks that the feeling of solidarity behind understanding is full of longterm consequences for our moral life. The feeling of solidarity develops from simple acts of understanding to much more complicated forms of interaction, so that it appears in love, friendship, and community (70). The general form for these positive ways of relating to people Dilthey calls benevolence (Wohlwollen). Benevolence in its full and complete sense treats others as persons, giving each an unconditional worth, which is analogous to the experience of my own worth (70). With this feeling of benevolence, Dilthey says, I feel a pleasant widening of my self (72).

46    The feeling of hate destroys the inner harmony of my self and diminishes my state of feeling. It seems that Dilthey has arrived at a position like the sentimentalist school in eighteenth-century Britain (viz., Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume), which based moral obligation upon sentiment, the feelings of approval or disapproval one had on seeing people do morally good or evil actions. Dilthey is aware of this affinity, but he still wants to distinguish his position from the British moralists (59–60). They were right to stress that moral judgment is based on sympathy, he says, but they were wrong in considering sympathy a primitive fact. Even sympathy is the result of a much more complicated psychological process, one that begins with feelings of understanding and solidarity and which is gradually built up from them. Although the third section of System der Ethik purportedly treats moral evolution, most of it is a far more interesting discussion about another topic: the prospects for moral theory. If Dilthey expects much of ethics in its practical capacity, where it determines what we should do in everyday life, he demands very little of it in its theoretical capacity. We expect a system of ethics to provide a foundation for moral obligation, to set down the criteria from which we can derive our specific obligations. This is roughly what Kant does in his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten and what Mill does in his On Utilitarianism. But Dilthey thinks that such a project cannot succeed. He disputes that there can be a single principle (or set of principles) to justify all our moral obligations. “Such a simple, universally valid obligation, from which a system of obligations originates, does not exist” (108). There cannot be a single principle to derive all moral obligations, partly because these obligations are so heterogeneous, and partly because we cannot find in history a single universally valid obligation which holds for all times and places. “What is moral cannot be answered a priori. We also cannot determine it from a pair of moral examples. We must enquire into moral evolution; but this will give us different answers for different epochs” (88). Although, in his second section, Dilthey stressed the importance of benevolence and sympathy for the foundation of morals, he still does not think that it provides a comprehensive basis to explain all of moral life. There are some obligations, he claims, which cannot be derived from it,

  

47

viz., strict justice and honesty (102). It then turns out that Dilthey thinks that benevolence or sympathy is only one of the possible sources of morality. Dilthey maintained that there are three basic sources and principles of morality: sympathy, justice or duty, and ideals of perfection (109–10). These sources are logically distinct from one another and they complement each other; but none of them alone can explain all of our moral obligations. Thus his skepticism about a single fundamental principle remains to the end. The manuscript closes with the lines: “A principle, which in the same way derives the rules of justice, the laws of benevolence and the demands of the ideal—such an ethic is a monstrous, singular fiction. There is in truth only an ethic that works from below, not one that constructs from above” (112).

4. Simmel’s Individual Law Simmel is best known today as a founder of modern sociology, and he is often placed alongside such thinkers as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim in the pantheon of their discipline. But it is important to see that sociology was only one side of the man, and that it claimed his attention for only a brief period of his career, from the late 1890s until 1908. Simmel was first and foremost a philosopher, and he conceived himself in such terms.³⁰ He was trained in philosophy, and he was a professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Berlin. The interest in sociology did not compete with his philosophical interests because sociology was really only one part of them; his interest in sociology came from his philosophical interest in the foundation of the social sciences. Simmel’s philosophical interests ranged widely, covering such fields as aesthetics, epistemology, history, and political theory. Chief among these philosophical interests was ethics, which played a dominant role in his thinking from the beginning to the end of his career. Simmel’s first major publication was in ethics, a two-volume work covering all the major

³⁰ See Simmel’s December 13, 1899, letter to Céleste Bouglé, GSG, XXII, 342.

48    issues in the field, his Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft,³¹ which first appeared in 1892–3. Toward the end of his career, Simmel returned to ethics, which is the central topic of his last published work, Lebensanschauung,³² which first appeared in 1918, the year of his death. Lebensanschaung consists in four major essays, but only the last of them, “Das individuelle Gesetz,”³³ is of special concern to us here. This essay is a major contribution to Lebensphilosophie because it attempts to give a foundation for its individualistic ethic. Simmel wanted to give a rationale for this ethic, which had been simply asserted by Nietzsche and Dilthey. It is difficult to determine when, how, and why Simmel developed an interest in the concept of individuality. The Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft does not discuss this topic; but in the early twentieth century we find Simmel writing about the concept of individuality in Kant and Goethe, and then about the individualism of modern life. It seems to have been part of his general interest in the mentality of the modern era. In the beginning of his article “Kant und der Individualismus” he wrote that “The principal life-problems of the modern age essentially revolve around the concept of individuality.”³⁴ In another article, “Der Individualismus der modernen Zeit,”³⁵ which was published only in 1917, Simmel distinguished between three concepts of individuality in the modern age. According to the first concept, which arose with the Renaissance, individuality consisted in the will to power, to distinction and fame (249). The individual did not want so much to be different from others but he wanted to be seen to be different. ³¹ Georg Simmel, Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der ethischen Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1892–3). GSG, III and IV. ³² Georg Simmel, Lebensanschauung. Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). GSG, XVI, 209–425. All references in parentheses are to the Gesamtausgabe. ³³ GSG, XVI, 346–425. This essay first appeared in Logos, IV (1913), 117–60. There are significant differences between these versions. Here I cite from the later version reproduced in GSG, XVI. The earlier version in Logos contains the revealing subtitle, removed in the later version, “Ein Versuch über das Prinzip der Ethik.” ³⁴ Georg Simmel, “Kant und der Individualismus,” Vossische Zeitung, 7 (January 6, 1904), Feuilleton Teil. GSG, VII, 273–82. ³⁵ Georg Simmel, “Der Individualismus der modernen Zeit,” GSG, XX, 249–58. This essay was not published in Simmel’s lifetime. An earlier Danish version of it, “Individualismus Former,” was published in Ugeskrift for politik og kultur, 2 (1917), 285–96. A German version of it, “Das Individuum und die Freiheit,” would not appear until 1957, in Georg Simmel, Brücke und Tür, ed. Margarete Susman (Stuttgart: K.F. Kochler, 1957), pp. 260–9.

  

49

The second concept, which emerged in the eighteenth century, was the will to be free of arbitrary power and oppressive institutions and laws. There was in this era the closest connection between freedom and equality: the old laws and institutions had created all kinds of inequality among people, so that one only had to remove them to see the natural equality among all people. All individuals were fundamentally alike if they only liberated themselves from the shackles of the past. The third concept, which begins in the nineteenth century, regards individuality as what is unique or distinctive about a person. The connection between freedom and equality in the eighteenth century now falls apart and goes in two directions: a tendency toward equality without individuality, and a tendency toward individuality without equality. The first tendency appears in socialism and the second in Goethe, the Romantics, and Nietzsche (254). All free individuals, in this second tendency, would not be alike but would be different from one another. They would be free to explore and develop their individuality or differences. It was especially the third sense of individuality that Simmel would investigate in his later work. He saw Goethe as the chief exponent of this concept of individuality.³⁶ Although he mentions Schleiermacher and Nietzsche among its advocates, he does not give them the same importance. Notable for his absence is the greatest modern spokesman of the concept, Leibniz. The fundamental question Simmel intends to answer in “Das individuelle Gesetz” concerns the source of moral obligation: Whether moral necessity receives its content and legitimation from a metaphysical reality beyond the individual, or whether it comes from the life-whole of the individual (350). This “metaphysical reality” could be the will of God or the structure of the universe; but it also could be Kant’s pure reason, which is a source of moral authority independent of the individual. The “life-whole” of the individual refers to the totality of actions constitutive of the individual, the unity of its life, what make it just this individual and no other. The default position of contemporary ethics is to place the source of moral obligation in something beyond the ³⁶ See his “Goethes Individualismus,” Logos 3 (1912), 251–74; GSG, XII, 388–416; and “Kant und Goethe,” Allgemeine Zeitung, Beilagen (1899), 125, 1–5; 126, 3–6; 127, 4–7. GSG, V, 445–79.

50    individual; but Simmel attempts to argue that this position is false and that moral obligation can arise only from the life of the individual. Simmel immediately presents us with a paradox for the Kantian view of moral obligation, which is the most popular view opposed to his own. Kant, he argues, never really removed the source of moral heteronomy; he only placed within ourselves what had once been placed outside ourselves (355). Moral heteronomy was supposed to take place when some external source of obligation (viz. the will of God, the law of nature) was imposed on our will; but Kant removed that external source and placed a new one within ourselves in the relationship between reason and sensibility. Reason is the source of universal imperatives, which control and dominate our sensibility, i.e., our desires and emotions as sensible beings. Human beings had thus become divided within themselves, into a rational self, who originates universal laws, and a phenomenal or empirical self, who feels subjugated by these laws. The “ought” of moral obligation had a meaning, Kant argued, only if there were a desire to act contrary to its imperatives. The very concept of moral obligation therefore had heteronomy built into it. Another problem with the Kantian view, Simmel maintains, is that it still leaves unanswered the question why I should be moral. Granted that we can derive a universal imperative from reason, the individual can still ask the question why he should obey it. He can still ask what that law has to do with him as an individual (407). Simmel thinks that neither of these problems arise if we make the source of obligation the whole individual. There would then be no division between the rational and sensible selves, because the obligation would arise only from the undivided individual, the self who is not only a rational but also a sensible being. There would also be no problem in motivating moral action because it arises not from a universal law of no concern to me in particular but from a law that comes from my own individual nature. Simmel’s attempt to derive moral obligation from the idea of the individual seems to warrant a complete anarchism, where the obligation simply depends on the choice of each individual. We seem to confront the danger posed by Max Stirner, who made his personal will the ultimate sanction of any law. But Simmel thinks that this objection is

  

51

based on a complete misconception. We must not identify the individual with the subjective, i.e., personal desires and decisions, and we must not identify the law with the objective, i.e., a source of authority that stands apart from and prior to the individual (408). There has been a persistent dilemma in all previous moral philosophy, Simmel argues, where one has to accept either the arbitrary subjective will of the individual or the objective universal law, which has nothing to do with the individual. This fails to see that there is a third option: namely, “the objectivity of the individual” or “the law of the individual” (408). We must not identify the individual with the arbitrary will, with choice or desire, because it is the nature of the individual, the idea of the whole, that is the source of obligation; what the individual chooses, or what it happens to think is his or her obligation, might not be correct; only what conforms to its life as a whole is correct and truly obligatory. We also must not identify the law with what is objective, with a source of authority that stands above and apart from the individual, because the proper source of authority should derive from the nature of the individual itself. To show how his individualism avoids the danger of anarchism, Simmel asks us to consider an example from contemporary life. Imagine, he asks, a pacifist who refuses to support the military (Simmel was writing in 1918, during the First World War). Since his conscience is opposed to the war, it seems that he cannot have an obligation to serve the military. But Simmel still assures us that, by his criterion of individuality, the pacifist should still serve his country (409). This is because his inner nature not only derives from his conscientious convictions but also involves his situation in the world, and more specifically from the fact that he is the citizen of a state. Once he takes that side of himself into account, he will be able to see that he still has a responsibility to defend his country. The most difficult question concerning Simmel’s theory concerns the nature of the individual who is the source of the law. Who, what, and where is this individual? We cannot identify it with its desires or likes, or still less with its choices. Simmel has already told us that these could be wrong and that they do not identify the law of the individual. He also insists that we cannot identify the individual with specific differences, with precisely how the individual differs from everyone else (414). What,

52    then, is it? It is not singularity (Einzelheit), Simmel says, but ownness (Eigenheit), or “growth from one’s own roots” (das Wachsen aus eigner Wurzel) (415). The individual is nothing less than “the whole human being” (der ganze Mensch) (415). This whole human being is not created but discovered by us, lying in an objective realm independent of our choices and desires (378). It is not an authority beyond the individual because it is the very nature of the individual itself. The crucial question, Simmel insists, is whether the norm governing our actions comes from life or beyond it (416). “The universal of the individual does not stand as an abstraction above its actions, but as the root deep within them” (386). It does not seem easy to determine, however, what that universal is deep within us. The one hint that Simmel offers for how to solve this problem comes from a contrast between his position and Nietzsche’s: “Instead of the desolate Nietzschean thought ‘Can you will that your deed returns infinite times?’, I posit ‘Can you will that your action determines your whole life?’” (421). We need to ask this question, Simmel explains, because the individual is an organic unity, where the idea of the whole determines all its parts, and where no part is separable from the whole. To do an evil action therefore discredits the entire character of a person (398–9). The best way to understand Simmel’s concept of an individual law is through that thinker that he failed to identify in his list of predecessors: Leibniz. Leibniz held that there is a unique concept answering to each individual being—what he called “la notion d’une substance”—such that from that concept or notion we can infer everything that is true of the thing.³⁷ The concept of an individual forms an organic whole, all of whose parts are inseparable from it and from one another. Leibniz’s notion of an individual has just the characteristics Simmel requires in an individual law: it derives from the individual itself rather than some source outside it; and it is not arbitrary because it expresses a law of its nature. That seems to solve the problem of conceptualizing the concept of an individual law, though there is still the problem of its application:

³⁷ See Leibniz, Discours de Métaphysique, §§8, 13, in Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C.J. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1880), IV, 432–3, 436–9.

  

53

how do we identify and know this law? Especially when it is unknown even to the individual himself. We can identify the individual law, it seems, only post facto, when an individual has already acted on it and expressed it through all his actions. It therefore provides no guide to action or moral judgment.

III The Battle against Pessimism 1. The Challenge of Pessimism Hidden within the heart of Lebensphilosophie there lay a profound optimism. It was one of its most basic assumptions that life without God is still worth living. Even if there were no God in heaven to redeem our suffering, even if there were no supernatural mechanism to reward the virtuous and to punish the wicked, and even if there were no savior to grant us grace, we human beings could still be happy in this world. Whether human life is happy or miserable, whether justice or injustice prevails, ultimately depends upon the choices we human beings make. We are the masters of our own fate, not the victims of a fate God or the cosmos imposes upon us. It was a new world that Lebensphilosophie promised us: a world freed from all the fears of the transcendent, a world human beings would have the power to make by themselves. Such optimism, however, faced a severe challenge: the problem of tragedy. Tragedy means that life often involves sorrow and suffering, and that it is beyond our power to avoid or alleviate it. Sorrow and suffering can be indeed so powerful and pervasive that life seems not worth living after all. Even if we remain within the earthly realm alone, it does not follow that we are masters of our own fate; the earth still burdens us with so many factors beyond our control—disease, deprivation, death—that it even seems better not to have been born. Because tragedy seemed to dim all hopes for the new world of Lebensphilosophie, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel had much to say about it. They were determined to develop an answer to, therapy or coping strategy for, tragedy. The Lebensphilosophen faced the problem of tragedy mainly in their confrontation with Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Like the Lebensphilosophen, Schopenhauer expounded a completely immanent worldview: the Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0004

   

55

purpose of life is in life itself and not in some transcendent realm beyond it. Yet for him this was no reason to celebrate life; rather, because it is so filled with sorrow and suffering, it is reason to renounce life. In his great work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer maintained— explicitly and emphatically—that life is not worth living. He is perfectly clear that non-existence is better than existence. It is as if he were telling us we were better off dead. His bleak assessment of the value of life almost sounds like a recommendation of suicide, even if Schopenhauer himself, arguably inconsistently, advises us against such a drastic remedy.¹ Schopenhauer’s pessimism is his answer to Hamlet’s famous question, “To be or not to be?” Schopenhauer explicitly refers to Hamlet’s monologue; and his answer to it could not be more simple and blunt: “The essential meaning of the world famous monologue in Hamlet,” he writes, “is this: That our life is so miserable that complete non-existence would be preferable to it.”² No one at the end of his life, if he were honest and reflective, Schopenhauer wagers, would want to live it over again or would prefer it to nothingness. Existence is a mistake, Schopenhauer tells us, and our sole aim should be to grasp that it is a mistake, which means knowing that “it would be better not to exist.”³ Nietzsche puts the problem of the value of life in a vivid perspective when he retells, in his Die Geburt der Tragödie,⁴ the myth of Silenus. According to that myth, King Midas goes in search of Silenus, a satyr, and upon capturing him in a net he asks him what is the best life for man. Laughing hysterically at such a silly question, Silenus sneers back that the best life is never to be born, and the next best life is to die young. Doubtless, in retelling the myth, Nietzsche was thinking of Schopenhauer, who had himself cited similar lines from Sophocles.⁵ Schopenhauer is indeed our modern Silenus. It is impossible to surpass his bile and bleakness, which he states with an almost sadistic pleasure. What is the darkest view of life? That which likens it to hell. On several occasions, Schopenhauer did not hesitate to make just that

¹ Schopenhauer, WWV, §69, I, 541. ³ Schopenhauer, WWV, II, 775. ⁵ WWV, II, 752.

² Schopenhauer, WWV, §59, I, 445. ⁴ Nietzsche, Der Geburt der Tragödie, §3, KSA, I, 35.

56    comparison: “The world is hell, and we humans are in one respect its tormented souls and in another its devils.”⁶ We do not have to seek hell below the earth, he writes in the second volume of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, because we are already living in it here and now.⁷ He adds that because human beings are devils to one another, their world is even worse than Dante’s hell.⁸ Schopenhauer’s bleak view about life is famous, but it is also not taken seriously, even among Schopenhauer scholars. It has been taken on a personal level, as if it were nothing more than an expression of his notorious grumpiness.⁹ It also been understood on a pathological basis, as if it were nothing more than a symptom of a sick and sad personality.¹⁰ Some Schopenhauer scholars are even embarrassed by his pessimism, which they regard as the least defensible and most inflated side of his philosophy, and which they therefore excise from the body of his thought on the grounds that it is “logically irrelevant to his philosophy.”¹¹ All of these views could be perfectly correct; however, they still do not justify dismissing Schopenhauer’s pessimism and refusing to take it seriously. The problem is that Schopenhauer regarded his pessimism as a philosophical standpoint, one which he tried to defend through argument. The serious question is whether these arguments are any good. They could be good even if Schopenhauer were personally objectionable, and even if he suffered from the worst pathological disorders. No matter what one thinks of Schopenhauer’s pessimism today, the fact of the matter is that it was taken very seriously by many philosophers in the second half of the nineteenth century and before the First World War. From the late 1850s until 1918, pessimism was one of the most controversial and intensely debated questions in German philosophy.¹² ⁶ WWV, V, 354. ⁷ WWV, II, 744. ⁸ WWV, II, 740. ⁹ See, for example, Eduard von Hartmann, “Mein Verhältnis zu Schopenhauer,” in Philosophische Fragen der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1885), pp. 34–5. ¹⁰ See, for example, Kuno Fischer, Der Philosoph des Pessimismus: Ein Charakterproblem (Heidelberg: Winter, 1897). ¹¹ Brian Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 13–14. ¹² The claim of Walter Kaufmann, that Schopenhauer’s pessimism had “exceedingly little influence in Germany in the nineteenth century,” is incredible coming from such a serious scholar. See his edition of The Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974), 187, n. 23. For a bibliography of the pessimism controversy up to 1880, see Olga Plümacher, “Chronologische

   

57

Philosophers of many stripes and persuasions took part in this dispute: neo-Kantians, positivists, and materialists.¹³ Not the least of those who participated in this debate were the Lebensphilosophen. Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel would write about it for years, from the late 1860s to the early 1900s. After all, they could vindicate the program of Lebensphilosophie—leading life to its fullest—only if they could show that life were worth living. Somehow, then, they had to demonstrate that Schopenhauer’s arguments for pessimism were fallacious. We must now turn to examine their response to pessimism.

2. Nietzsche’s First Response to Pessimism Among the Lebensphilosophen it was Nietzsche who first met the challenge of pessimism. This was a very difficult task for him because, at least for a brief time, he was something of a pessimist himself. The refutation of pessimism would therefore have to be for him an inner struggle, a fight against older cherished convictions. Schopenhauer was his educator, a model to imitate in life and philosophy, as Nietzsche wrote in the third of his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen.¹⁴ He admired Schopenhauer because he was one of those rare individuals who saw the truth, and then stated it coolly and dispassionately, not fearing the consequences. The harsh and horrible truth that Schopenhauer knew was his pessimism: that life is really not worth living; that nothingness is preferable to existence. The main purpose of Nietzsche’s first book—Die Geburt der Tragödie, which was published in 1872¹⁵—was to give an answer to Schopenhauer’s pessimism.¹⁶ Nietzsche is not so explicit about his purpose; but it is plain enough from the central thesis of the book, which is Verzeichniss der Hartmann Literatur von 1868-1880,” in Der Kampf um’s Unbewusste (Berlin: Duncker 1881), pp. 115–50; and Ferdinand Labau, Die Schopenhauer Literatur (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1880). ¹³ On the pessimism dispute in German philosophy, see my Weltschmerz, Pessimism in German Philosophy: 1860–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 162–200. ¹⁴ Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen, KSA, I, 335–427. ¹⁵ Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (Leipzig: Fitzsch Verlag, 1872), KSA, I, 9–156. ¹⁶ In some later notes in the Nachlass Nietzsche makes it explicit that he was opposing Schopenhauer in the Geburt der Tragödie. See Nachgelassene Fragmente, KSA, XII, 115, 233. Also see Nietzsche’s comments in Ecce Homo, KSA, VI, 309.

58    announced twice in a striking statement: “Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.”¹⁷ To justify existence is to show that it is worth living, that there is some reason for existence. What makes life worth living, Nietzsche is implying, is what makes it an aesthetic phenomenon, i.e., art. It was Nietzsche’s Romantic heritage that he gave such importance to art. All the spokesmen for the Romantic movement—Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, and Hölderlin—shared this credo. Nietzsche was no exception to it.¹⁸ He even called his book “ein RomantikerBekenntniβ.”¹⁹ But now Nietzsche would have to test that faith against a new problem: the value of life. The Romantics, the very opposite of pessimists, all believed life was worth living, but their faith was naïve; they never had to confront the challenge of pessimism. After Schopenhauer, however, Nietzsche, could not take that faith for granted. He had to justify the value of life, and his means of doing so was by showing the value of art. In Die Geburt der Tragödie Nietzsche has a twofold argument for his central thesis. The two arguments correspond to his distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian art. One argument is founded on Apollonian art, the other is based on Dionysian. Apollonian art, which arose from the plastic arts, represents the principles of order, restraint, and beauty. Dionysian art, which originates from music, stands for unleashed energy, uncontrolled passion, freedom from all constraints. Each kind of art gives a different response to pessimism. However, their responses are incompatible: Apollonian art presupposes the truth of pessimism; Dionysian art attempts to show the falsehood of pessimism. This contradiction reflects a deep-seated ambivalence in Nietzsche’s attitude toward pessimism.

¹⁷ KSA, I, 47, 152. ¹⁸ In his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, third edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 124, 140–1, Walter Kaufmann argues that Nietzsche was “antiromantic in his first three books,” and he insists that he never ascribed to the Romantics’ aesthetic program. Kaufmann’s arguments for his thesis are very weak. He first argues that Nietzsche did not approve of Friedrich Schlegel’s reasons for admiring Lessing (137), though it is unclear what Schlegel’s reasons have to do with him as a Romantic. He then maintains that the Romantic aspirations at the end of Die Geburt der Tragödie were not Nietzsche’s original intention or program. But Kaufmann can maintain this only by reading the later anti-Wagnerian Nietzsche into the earlier text. ¹⁹ Nachgelassene Fragmente, KSA, XII, 115.

   

59

The argument from Apollonian art is that the experience of beauty provides a pleasure in appearances which conceals from us the horrors of existence. Such experience is disinterested and therefore allows for the tranquility of detached contemplation. In proposing Apollonian art as a solution for pessimism, Nietzsche was following Schopenhauer, at least in part. In Book III of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung Schopenhauer explains how only the disinterested contemplation of art provides escape and relief from the striving of the will (§38, 282). The moment we engage in aesthetic contemplation, Schopenhauer writes, we free ourselves from the “tyranny of the will” and we enter into another more tranquil order of things (§38, 280). However, in an important respect, Nietzsche’s solution differs from Schopenhauer’s: Nietzsche thinks that art provides the comfort of illusion; but Schopenhauer, who held that aesthetic experience gives us insight into the eternal forms of things, had no conception of “redemption through illusion.” There was for Schopenhauer no illusion involved in aesthetic experience. It is important to see in just what sense Apollonian art is an answer to pessimism. As Nietzsche describes it, such art provides a therapy, a coping mechanism, a medicine, to deal with the sorrows and sufferings of life. But this is not really a refutation of pessimism; it is rather an admission of its truth.²⁰ All throughout Die Geburt der Trägödie Nietzsche refers to “the horror,” “the absurdity,” and “the terror” of existence; we are indeed reminded of the wisdom of Silenus: that the best life is to die young or not to be born (§3, 35). If it were not for the illusion of art, Nietzsche implies, then life would be indeed meaningless. But Apollonian art works only because it conceals from us the horrible truth: that life is not worth living. The account we have given so far of Nietzsche’s response to pessimism holds only for Apollonian art. Nietzsche’s conception of Dionysian art provides a very different answer to pessimism. Now Nietzsche does not presuppose pessimism but takes issue with it. Unlike Apollonian art, ²⁰ Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 131, warns us against the “popular error” of thinking that Nietzsche was “an unswerving follower of Schopenhauer” and he claims that Nietzsche had already rejected “Schopenhauer’s negativistic pessimism.” This does not reflect the ambivalence of Nietzsche’s argument, however, which presupposed as much as it rejected Schopenhauer’s pessimism.

60    Dionysian art does not conceal the horrors and absurdity of existence; rather, it reveals something very different: the creative, powerful, and eternal cosmic will. Redemption is found not through pleasure in illusion but in the expression of living energy, in the reassuring recognition that life is indestructible and forever creative. Thus, in his account of Dionysian art, Nietzsche makes much of Schopenhauer’s theory that music is the direct revelation of the will; it does not attempt to conceal the chaos and suffering of appearances but to reveal the creativity, power, and eternity of the will (§16, 108–9). In his rites and festivities the Dionysian reveler is expressing and indulging in these properties of the will. Nietzsche begins to take issue, if only implicitly, with Schopenhauer in his account of the chorus of Greek tragedy (§7, 52–7). The chorus gives the spectator “metaphysical comfort” (metaphysische Trost), Nietzsche writes, because it tells him that life, throughout all its changes, is still “indestructible, powerful and pleasant” (unzerstörbar, mächtig und lustvoll). The spectator thinks about the “terrible destructive drives of world history” and “the cruelty of nature,” so that he is in danger of “a Buddhistic denial of the will”; but “art rescues him,” and then, Nietzsche pointedly adds, “through art he is saved by—life” (56). What separates Nietzsche from Schopenhauer here is that Nietzsche attributes positive qualities to life itself. It is life that rescues the spectator from “a Buddhistic denial of the will” because he now sees that life is “indestructible, powerful and pleasant.” Nietzsche is implicitly criticizing Schopenhauer, who held that such insight into the source of life should lead directly to a denial of the will. Nietzsche, by contrast, is saying that such insight should result in the affirmation of the will. The break with Schopenhauer is more evident, if still implicit, in Nietzsche’s account of the will. Nietzsche sees the cosmic will as the source of infinite creativity and power, and he thinks that this allows it to overcome the destructivity of war and the cruelty of nature. The origin of all evil and suffering comes from not the will, Nietzsche assumes, but the realm of appearances, from the principium individuationis and the splintering of the will into many individuals, who are all in conflict with one another (§10, 72). For Schopenhauer, however, it is just the reverse. In Die Welt as Wille und Vorstellung he regards the cosmic will

   

61

as the single source of all evil and suffering (§63, 481, 484). It is the relentless and irresistible force of the cosmic will which pushes all individuals to their self-destructive strivings and which forces them into competition with one another. Because it is within each and every individual will, and because its striving is endless and irresistible, the cosmic will itself is the cause of all individual suffering (§61, 453–4). Nietzsche’s response to pessimism was therefore self-contradictory. If Apollonian art presupposes the truth of pessimism, Dionysian art directly contradicts it. Apollonian art assumes that life is absurd, that suffering is omnipresent, and that we need to shield ourselves from such horrible truths; Dionysian art assumes that life is not absurd, that suffering is not omnipresent, because the cosmic will is the source of creativity, pleasure, and power. We can see this curious double argument as Nietzsche hedging his bets: if life really is horrible, the source of absurdity and suffering, at least we can conceal ourselves from it. This solution gives us consistency; but it is not a coherent and powerful response to pessimism.

3. Dilthey and Pessimism In Easter 1852 the nineteen-year-old Wilhelm Dilthey wrote in his diary: “The appearances of so-called Weltschmerz, if one considers them scientifically, are of the highest importance when considered in their reason and essence as well as in their extent, which one seldom determines correctly.”²¹ This was an extremely prescient comment, anticipating the later pessimism controversy, which will not be fully active until the 1860s. Uncannily, it also predicts Dilthey’s own participation in the controversy. In another ten years he will find himself totally immersed in it. That said, Dilthey’s concern with pessimism was never as dramatic and obsessive as that of Nietzsche. He never wrote a book on the topic, and he never had a juvenile flirtation with it, as Nietzsche had, so there ²¹ Der junge Dilthey. Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern, 1852–1870, ed. Clara Misch (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1960), p. 2.

62    was no inner demon for him to expel. Still, as the above quotation testifies, Dilthey took pessimism very seriously. Since it portrayed life in such grim and forbidding terms, it was a major challenge to his humanism, to his immanent and secular worldview. The extent of its importance for Dilthey can be measured by his Weltanschauungslehre, his famous theory of worldviews. The whole theory was oriented around Schopenhauer’s question of the value of life; and Dilthey held that there were two major positions about the value of life: optimism and pessimism.²² Though Dilthey wrote no book explicitly devoted to pessimism, he did write several articles about its foremost apostle, Arthur Schopenhauer. It is in the context of a discussion of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that his views about pessimism emerge. Three of these articles appeared in the early 1860s, just as the pessimism controversy became widespread in Germany. In this respect, Dilthey was no mere bystander of that controversy; he was indeed a participant. Dilthey’s first article is a review of a book about Schopenhauer, Wilhelm Gwinner’s Arthur Schopenhauer aus persönlichem Umgange dargesellt.²³ The review appeared in April 1862 in the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung.²⁴ Gwinner’s book, which was an apology for Schopenhauer’s life and character, played a major role in the revival of Schopenhauer’s reputation in the 1860s. Since Dilthey’s review was anonymous, he felt little scruple in stating exactly what he thought and felt about the Frankfurt pessimist. It was a bracing blast of cold air. No review could have been more damning. Like many commentators, Dilthey was struck by the disparity between Schopenhauer’s life and philosophy. Schopenhauer did not live the philosophy he preached. He taught asceticism; but he lived like a bon vivant. He claimed that the highest virtue was sympathy with all living things; but, in a burst of bad temper, he made a cripple out of a harmless

²² See “Die Typen der Weltanschauung,” GS, VIII, 81. Dilthey’s exact words: “Unter die groβen Lebensstimmungen sind die umfassendsten der Optimismus und der Pessimismus.” ²³ Wilhelm Gwinner, Arthur Schopenhauer aus persönlichem Umgange dargestellt. Ein Blick auf sein Leben, seinen Character und seine Lehre (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1862). ²⁴ “Schopenhauer’s Lehre und Leben,” Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung, 163, 6.4.1862, p. 1. Reprinted in GS, XVI, 394–7.

   

63

Putzfrau. Schopenhauer claimed that it is one thing to know virtue and another to practice it; but Dilthey was not willing to accept such an excuse. For him, the discrepancy between Schopenhauer’s life and philosophy was proof that his philosophy is untenable and that his life is despicable (397). Gwinner tries to convince his reader that Schopenhauer’s notorious personality flaws do not detract from his nobility of character or the merits of his philosophy; but Dilthey thinks that a careful reader will come to the opposite conclusion: that Schopenhauer really is the monster he appears to be, and that his philosophy does not merit the inflated claims that he makes for it (397). Dilthey’s insistence on a disparity between Schopenhauer’s life and philosophy stands in remarkable contrast to Nietzsche’s later portrait of Schopenhauer in the third of his Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen.²⁵ Nietzsche takes Schopenhauer as a model for the unity of philosophy and personality, for how a person should live by his philosophy. He sees in Schopenhauer what he saw in the ancient Greek philosophers: wisdom, i.e., leading one’s life according to one’s philosophy. In giving such a flattering portrait of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, it seems, was a follower of Gwinner and other Schopenhauer disciples. Unfortunately, he does not consider Dilthey’s objections. Of all aspects of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Dilthey took most exception to his pessimism. Whoever has a severe toothache, or whoever has a bad hangover after a night carousing, will find confirmation of his feelings in Schopenhauer’s doctrine, but anyone else will find it exaggerated (395). Rather than enjoying life, Schopenhauer recommends that we practice asceticism; and rather than doing what we can to improve our lives, he thinks that we do better to sit on the floor, cross our legs, contemplate our noses, and then recite endlessly “Om” (396–7). This will do nothing, Dilthey implies, to improve our situation, to ameliorate the suffering on earth. Schopenhauer denies that any progress is ever made in history, and claims that it is nothing but the same old story of folly told over and over again. Dilthey regards such a theory as selfdestructive; he who denies that there is any progress in history will make ²⁵ Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen, Drittes Stück: Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Leipzig: E.W. Fritzsch, 1874). GSA, I, 335–427.

64    no contribution toward it (396). Schopenhauer pronounces a death sentence on his own philosophy, Dilthey claims, because whoever turns his back on history will find that history will take no interest in him. In August 1862, Dilthey wrote another article on Schopenhauer for the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung.²⁶ This article was also a review of another book on Schopenhauer, Ernst Otto Lindner and Julius Frauenstädt’s Arthur Schopenhauer, Von ihm. Über ihn.²⁷ Like Gwinner, Lindner and Frauenstädt were apologists for Schopenhauer, for both his life and philosophy. This time, Dilthey is more sympathetic to Schopenhauer. There was “an admirable unity in the basic intuition of his thought,” and his “greatness” as a thinker consisted in beginning his philosophy from intuition rather than from the concepts of others (364). Schopenhauer had the great talent of interesting the public in his philosophy, of making it seem relevant to their lives rather than just to a few scholars (356). But these nice compliments came at a considerable price for Schopenhauer, overshadowed as they were by Dilthey’s hefty criticisms. Schopenhauer was deceiving himself in seeing himself as the true heir to Kant and in concealing his great debts to Fichte, Schelling, and the Romantics. His theory of the will was indebted to Fichte and Schelling, and his whole method and manner of thinking were Romantic (359). Try though he would to disavow the Romantics, Schopenhauer was “through and through a romantic” (363). Like them, he wanted to ally philosophy more with art than with science (360). It was also pure vanity on Schopenhauer’s part to pretend that his thinking was any more rigorous than his contemporaries. His system was held together more by its mood than by any connection of its concepts (362). Because of the laxity of his system and the vagueness of his fundamental concepts, Schopenhauer could not expect to have any influence on the scientific thought of his age. There were reasons for all the isolation of which he complained; neither his thinking nor his character deserved the recognition that he craved. ²⁶ “Zur Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers,” Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung, 355, 2.8.1862, 1–3, and 359, 5.8.1862, 1–3. GS, XVI, 356–70. ²⁷ Otto Lindner and Julius Frauenstädt, Arthur Schopenhauer, Von ihm. Über ihn. Ein Wort der Verteidigung von Ernst Lindner und Memorabilien von Julius Frauenstädt (Berlin: A.W. Hayn, 1863).

   

65

Dilthey was even more merciless in exposing the flaws in Schopenhauer’s thinking. A major weakness of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, he argued, was its methodology (361). Schopenhauer had a talent for transforming his subjective experience into metaphysical ideas. Rather than proceeding gradually from experience to generalizations by careful induction, Schopenhauer would begin from his metaphysical ideas and then look for experience conforming to them. There was therefore a wide gap between metaphysical principles and experience, a playground where his imagination could roam and run riot. His philosophy lacked what Bacon called the axiomata media, the more specific laws which stood between metaphysical principles and the data of sense. Another source of problems in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Dilthey claimed, came with his theory of the will. This theory constantly vacillated between the ordinary and metaphysical meaning of the will (365). The ordinary meaning was the will of the individual; the metaphysical meaning was the single cosmic will whose appearance was the entire universe. The confusion between these meanings was especially apparent in Schopenhauer’s teaching about the renunciation of the will: somehow the individual will had to renounce the cosmic will. But how was this possible? The individual will could control itself but not the cosmic will, of which it was only a part and appearance. Dilthey could also see no reason to accept Schopenhauer’s account of worldly suffering—the whole chain of desire, exertion, and disappointment—given that he also assumed that the educated and restrained will could break out of this chain and enjoy inner freedom (365). Hegel and Schleiermacher had developed this doctrine of inner freedom; Schopenhauer could have learned from them. After these two articles, there appeared two more in Westermanns Monatshefte. One article, the longest of the four, is a biography of Schopenhauer.²⁸ The fourth and final article is a review of Julius Frauenstädt’s Schopenhauer-Lexikon.²⁹ Since these articles have little

²⁸ “Arthur Schopenhauer,” Westermans Monatshefte, 16 (1864), 634–51. Published under the pseudonym Wilhelm Hoffner. GS, XV, 53–74. ²⁹ Julius Frauenstädt, Schopenhauer Lexikon. Ein philosophische Wörterbuch. Nach Arthur Schopenhauers Sämtlichen Schriften und handschriftlichem Nachlaβ bearbeitet von Julius Frauenstädt (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus,1871). Dilthey’s review is in Westermans Monatshefte, 33 (1873), 450f. It is reprinted in GS, XVII, 295–6.

66    philosophical content, they are of no concern to us here. Yet Dilthey’s interest in pessimism was not limited to his Schopenhauer articles, for reasons we will now see. In 1864 Dilthey completed his habilitation dissertation, Versuch einer Analyse des moralischen Bewusstseins,³⁰ whose starting point was the pessimism controversy. The very first sentence of the dissertation reads: “The complaints about the suffering of the world do not end.”³¹ This sentence could only be a reference to the pessimism controversy, which was raging in 1864. Dilthey firmly believed that philosophy should have a direct practical relevance, that it should be a guide to life and action, so that it could help to diminish the sources of suffering in the world. To combat pessimism, he believed, it was important to understand the sources of moral motivation, which could not be simply measured by the calculus of pleasure versus pain. Many of the pessimists had presupposed such a calculus: because the pleasures of life are very few and the pains very many, they reasoned, life is not worth living. Hence Dilthey undertook an examination of the sources of moral motivation, which led him to an examination of Schopenhauer’s moral theory.³² The basis of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is his theory that the dominant motive of human action is “egoism,” i.e., the drive or urge to existence and well-being (727; §14).³³ It is because this drive is incessant and unsatisfiable, and because it is the source of endless strife, that life becomes so miserable. Pleasure is simply the absence of pain, according to Schopenhauer; but there is so much pain in life, and it so far outweighs the amount of pleasure, that life just does not seem worth living. Yet Dilthey could still see a glimmer of light in this very dark worldview. Schopenhauer did not believe that all actions are self-interested; there were still a few rare cases when a human being lost his egoism and acted not for his own good but for that of others (734–5; §15). Yet how is it possible, Schopenhauer asks, that the welfare of someone else can motivate me just as much as my own welfare? It is possible, he answers, only if ³⁰ Versuch einer Analyse des moralischen Bewusstseins, GS, VI, 1–55. The dissertation was unpublished in Dilthey’s lifetime. ³¹ Versuch einer Analyse, GS, VI, 1. ³² See Versuch einer Analyse, VI, 35–9. ³³ All references to Schopenhauer in this paragraph are to his Über die Grundlage der Moral, in SW, III.

   

67

I can identify with someone else, only if I can perceive their welfare or misery as if it were my own (740; §16). That this sometimes happens is clear from the everyday phenomenon of sympathy (Mitleid), which is the basis of all moral action. This sympathy happens, Schopenhauer explains, when I see myself as one and the same as the other person, when I have insight into the identity of all of us in the single cosmic will (808; §21). He admits that this insight is “astonishing, indeed mysterious.” “It is in truth the greatest mystery of ethics, its basic phenomenon (Urphänomen) and milestone, beyond which only metaphysical speculation can dare to take a step” (741; §16). The main target of Dilthey’s criticism is just this metaphysical postulate of a single cosmic will. He questions the basis for this postulate and whether it is really necessary to explain the phenomenon of sympathy. The greatest weakness of Schopenhauer’s theory is how he applies metaphysical principles of the most abstract kind to the concrete phenomena of experience (35). There is a gap between the principles and the phenomena, even if the phenomena are supposed to prove the principles. In the case in question, the feelings of sympathy between human beings do not prove that there is a single self-identical will in all of them. There is at best an analogy between the wills who have a feeling of sympathy for one another (36). The only element of truth in this analogy is that the feeling of sympathy presupposes a homogeneity between people feeling sympathy for one another; one feels that they are human beings who share a common fate. But this does not warrant the belief in the existence of a single cosmic will that breaks down all barriers between individual egos. Dilthey does not offer any solution to the problem of pessimism in his dissertation. He leaves us with the critical conclusion that Schopenhauer has no tenable account of the basis of sympathy because he leaves us with a miracle and a mystery. But if one does not believe in miracles, all that remains as the sole source of human action is egoism. In his System der Ethik, as we have seen,³⁴ Dilthey engaged in a critique of utilitarian ethics.³⁵ Among the many problems he found with utilitarianism was its psychology, its theory that pleasure and pain ³⁴ Chapter II, Section 3.

³⁵ System der Ethik, GS, X, 32–9, 72–8.

68    were the chief motivations of human action. Dilthey found this theory hopelessly narrow and reductivist, incapable of doing justice to the subtleties and complexities of human conduct. This rejection of utilitarianism was decisive for Dilthey’s attitude toward pessimism, because he thought that the pessimist’s bleak assessment of the value of life was rooted in his utilitarian ethics.³⁶ Indeed, in sections 57–8 of the fourth part of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer finds life not worth living because it involves so much suffering, the preponderance of pain over pleasure. All human existence, Schopenhauer argues, falls between willing and its satisfaction. The willing is suffering because we feel all too keenly a deficiency, the lack of something that we need; and the satisfaction, though it happens, is very fleeting, because new needs arise quickly and constantly. If we satisfy our needs too quickly, then we become bored, the mere absence of activity makes our existence a burden; but if we cannot satisfy them quickly, then we feel prolonged discomfort and distress. Schopenhauer further diminishes the prospects of happiness in life by insisting that pleasure is only negative in value: it is only the absence of pain. With arguments like these in mind, Schopenhauer concludes in section 59 that life is essentially suffering. Each person at the end of his life, he maintains, will not want to live it again. Like many critics of pessimism, Dilthey could not accept these arguments because of the utilitarianism behind them. They all presupposed that the main goal of life is happiness, which is defined in terms of pleasure. But Dilthey believed that a person’s life could still be worth living even if he or she were unhappy, even if their life involved more pain than pleasure. Dilthey was an adherent of that humanist tradition of ethics which sees the goal of life not as happiness but as the development of character, the self-realization of personality. It was indifferent whether this process ended in more pleasure than pain; it would indeed often involve suffering, which was crucial to personal growth. The main champions of this tradition were Schiller, Schleiermacher, Herder, Wieland, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, last but not least, Goethe.

³⁶ Schopenhauer cannot be considered a utilitarian in any strict sense. He was not a student of Bentham and Mill. The utilitarian criteria he assumes in his argument came more from Epicurus rather than any modern source.

   

69

Dilthey’s portrait of Goethe in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung gives a very different rationale for life from that envisioned by the pessimists.³⁷ Life is not a tale of woe and suffering but a story of self-creation. There is indeed some suffering involved in that story, but it has its meaning and purpose in being part of a broader narrative of self-fulfillment. Of course, that narrative might be cut short by accident or fate; but what matters is that we have found meaning in the narrative as long as it has lasted.

4. Simmel on Pessimism Georg Simmel came late to the pessimism controversy. He gave his first lecture on the topic in the winter semester of 1885–6³⁸ and his first article on the subject did not appear until 1887; by this time the controversy was already decades old. Yet Simmel was as concerned with the issues it raised as Nietzsche and Dilthey. He too was a spokesman for a modern worldview, for an immanent philosophy, and he was well aware that Schopenhauer’s pessimism was a great challenge to it. The best evidence for Simmel’s concern with pessimism is his book devoted to its greatest exponent and opponent, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche,³⁹ which he published in 1906. This is still one of the best comparative treatments of the two philosophers. Most of the book is an exposition and critique of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and therefore much of it has a direct bearing on the question of his pessimism. It is noteworthy that Simmel treats Schopenhauer with much greater sympathy than Dilthey. It is inevitable, he thinks, that the modern individual will be more receptive to Nietzsche than Schopenhauer (188). Such a reader will not readily accept Schopenhauer’s gloomy gospel of the worthlessness of life, and it is more easy for him to approve Nietzsche’s cheering idea that there is meaning in life. Nevertheless, even if Nietzsche is more acceptable, Simmel thinks that Schopenhauer is the greater ³⁷ On Dilthey’s portrait of Goethe, see Chapter I, Section 3. ³⁸ See the list of Simmel’s “Lehrveranstaltungen,” in GSG, XXIV, 607. Simmel lectured on pessimism four times between 1885 and 1895. See XXIV, 607–10. ³⁹ Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche. Ein Vortragszyklus (Munich: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1906). All references above are to GSG, X, 167–408.

70    philosopher. Although he defended the lesser cause, he still did so with greater powers. Simmel prizes Schopenhauer over Nietzsche for another less comprehensible reason: he maintains that Schopenhauer had more of a sense for the “absolute of things,” more of a feeling for the cosmos as a whole (188). He even found Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the cosmic will—the very doctrine Dilthey attacked—“a sublime idea” (317). Why this metaphysical sense should be so important for a philosopher Simmel does not explain. Simmel’s admiration for Schopenhauer was the basis for his thorough and sympathetic reconstruction of much of his reasoning. However, this was far from any abstention from criticism. Simmel thinks that Schopenhauer’s reasoning is deeply flawed. One of Schopenhauer’s doctrines that he examines very critically is his diagnosis of human suffering in sections 57–8 of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The weak point in Schopenhauer’s reasoning Simmel finds in his claim that the will, before it attains its goal, suffers from a feeling of deprivation (243). That is not necessarily the case, he argues, because we often take pleasure in anticipating and pursuing our goals. We feel deprivation only if the will’s striving is frustrated in some way. Schopenhauer’s mistake was to divide the whole process of desire into first chasing after and then achieving one’s goal, where chasing it is suffering and where only achieving it is pleasurable; but often the whole process of desire—the moments of anticipation and progress toward the goal—is very pleasant (248). Simmel notes how Schopenhauer builds his case for pessimism on his hedonic calculus. It has often been objected that the value of life can be assessed by other metrics than pleasure or pain. But Simmel notes that Schopenhauer had a deeper reason for using pleasure (241–2). He was only following his thesis that the appearance of the will takes place first and foremost in the sphere of feeling; hence the metric of value had to be, for metaphysical reasons, pleasure or pain. Nevertheless, Simmel still thinks that there is something problematic in the pessimist’s use of the hedonic calculus (252–3). Schopenhauer claims that the pleasures of life are far outweighed by the pains, that we have to pay too high a price for the few pleasures of life because to attain them we have to suffer too much. But how do we determine, Simmel asks, paying too much or too little? We would need some criterion based on how much people

   

71

normally or on average pay for their pleasures. There is, however, no such criterion (252–3). Schopenhauer still has another thesis to back up his estimate of the preponderance of suffering over pleasure in life: that all pleasure has only a negative value (243). This would put a null value on the pleasure side of the scale. However, Simmel does not think that Schopenhauer’s theory of the purely negative value of pleasure is very plausible; he claims that we have a positive feeling in the satisfaction of desire. Nor is Simmel impressed by Schopenhauer’s thesis that the mere existence of suffering shows that the universe should not exist. The thesis seems utterly arbitrary. Why not just say the opposite: the mere existence of pleasure, despite all the suffering to attain it, shows that the universe should exist (255)? Simmel’s Schopenhauer und Nietzsche was not his only contribution to the pessimism controversy. Long before it appeared in 1906, he wrote several articles on the topic, the first of which, “Über die Grundfragen des Pessimismus,”⁴⁰ appeared in 1887. All these articles are short but very dense, revealing Simmel’s intense concentration on and concern with the topic. The central concern of “Über die Grundfragen” is made clear in an opening abstract: “The present investigation considers the question in what way, and according to what criterion, pleasure and pain can be weighed against one another, and what justification results for all those claims that the quantity of pain outweighs that of pleasure (or conversely)” (9). It is a fair and accurate summary of the contents. Simmel begins with a statement that he thinks is obvious: the awareness that a quantity of pain exceeds a quantity of pleasure cannot lie immediately in sensation itself. This seems obvious because one is comparing two heterogeneous sensations, pleasure and pain. The act of comparison goes beyond the sensations themselves. The statement is obvious, he says, because the comparison presupposes “an intellectual judgment” (9). A comparison between two homogeneous sensations is

⁴⁰ Georg Simmel, “Über die Grundfragen des Pessimismus in methodologische Hinsicht,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 90 (1887), 237–47. GSG, II, 9–19. All references above are to the Gesamtausgabe.

72    perfectly possible when “the sensations consist only in their connected elements” (9). Simmel seems to mean that if the sensations were not pure, if they also consisted in elements foreign to them, then the judgment comparing them could be incorrect, basing its comparison on alien elements instead of just the quality of the sensations themselves. There is no difficulty involved in the comparison of A with B, where A and B are the same kind of sensation, where neither has any impurity, and where B is only one part of A; then A can be the measure of B; the mere fact that there is more of A than B means that A will have to be the greater pleasure or pain. Things become more difficult, however, when we compare a quantity of pleasure against one of pain (10). In this case it is not about an exact gradation of two sensations of the same kind; it is a matter of comparing two very different kinds of sensation. We cannot then say that the one sensation is contained in the other. Imagine a being who has no experience about the distribution of pleasure and pain in life; he will then be completely unsure whether he should sacrifice a pleasure of a certain degree to escape a pain of a certain degree, whether he should accept the pain to win a pleasure, or whether he should inflict a certain pain to get a certain pleasure. In other words, he cannot know a priori by the mere comparison of pleasant and painful sensations how a definite quantity of pain is to be measured against one of pleasure. There is a great degree of uncertainty in life, Simmel says, about where lies the zero point in a scale measuring pleasure against pain (11). That uncertainty shows that it is not a matter of comparing the quality of the sensations themselves but that it is also a matter of experience. It is one of the main results of contemporary epistemology and psychology, Simmel notes, that apparently simple sensations are the complicated results of operations of the understanding. Imagine an omniscient being, like La Place’s universal spirit, who could oversee the total amount of all pleasure and pain in the universe, and who could determine through mathematical calculation how much on average each individual receives of both pleasure and pain (11–12). Since there still cannot be an ideal criterion for how much pleasure compensates for how much pain, it is not possible to say there is more suffering than pleasure on earth (12).

   

73

We can use the average amount of pleasure and pain all people experience in life to determine whether an individual has too little or too much pain in his or her life; we just compare his or her quantity of pleasure and pain with the average. But we cannot make absolute judgments about whether the average is too much or too little pleasure or pain, because we have no criterion to measure the average itself. We can measure individual cases against the average; but the average itself is beyond measure. We cannot have a criterion to determine the value of the criterion itself. The pessimist’s claim that one must buy the joys of life with too much pain is like the complaint that a good for sale is too dear (13–14). It is possible to make this judgment only when the same good can be bought for less; there is no a priori connection between the good and a price. What determines whether a price is correct is whether it agrees with what has been paid on average for a thing. Nothing is too dear or too cheap in itself but only relatively dear and cheap in comparison with what others have paid for it. These problems still do not refute the pessimist. He could still claim that the amount of pleasure in life is still insufficient when measured by a definite ideal (15). Meeting this ideal alone would make life worthwhile, the pessimist could claim. This is just like finding the amount of morality in life insufficient when it is measured by the standard of morality. If the pessimist takes this line, he cannot maintain any longer, however, that there is too much pain in comparison with pleasure, because if there is any pain at all it is too much (17). A correct proportion between pleasure and pain is like a contradictio in adjecto because it would be like a correct proportion between morality and immortality, right and wrong. Simmel draws no general conclusions from all these difficulties but they are more than sufficient to show his skepticism about providing a scientific basis for pessimism. A few years after Simmel published his “Über die Grundfragen” he published another article on pessimism, his “Zu einer Theorie des Pessimismus,” which appeared in the popular weekly magazine Die Zeit in 1900.⁴¹ Fitting its popular venue, this article discusses the broader ⁴¹ Georg Simmel, “Zu einer Theorie des Pessimismus,” Die Zeit 22 (1900), 38–40. GSG, V, 543–51. All references in parentheses are to the Gesamtausgabe.

74    cultural context of pessimism. Just for that reason, it is sometimes more revealing about Simmel’s general attitude toward pessimism. There is a natural teleology, Simmel says, which ensures that humankind is on the whole more disposed to optimism than pessimism. The evidence for this teleology is that most people feel and act as if the joys of existence outweigh its pains (543). If they acted on the opposite assumption, then that would undermine the energies they need for the preservation and promotion of their lives. Of course, there are a few individuals who believe that there is more suffering than pleasure in life; but either they have found some other rationale for living than the preponderance of pleasure over pain or their feelings and actions are not consistent with their beliefs. The popularity of optimism over pessimism is that optimism is a useful weapon in the struggle for existence; it helps to keep us going even when the prospects are not good. Adding a pointed political comment, Simmel notes that it is perhaps because of their optimism that the Jews have been able to achieve so much under the difficult circumstances of German life. This natural optimism has been reflected in traditional cosmology, which placed man in the center of things (544). It seemed as if human happiness were the chief purpose of creation, as if everything were designed for human well-being. But, however flattering, Simmel notes that this cosmology has been in decline ever since Copernicus. The man of modern science has lost his privileged place in the universe, and he now turns out to be one part of nature like all other parts. His body has roughly the same physical and chemical constitution as other natural bodies, and he obeys the same natural laws as all other creatures. In this dehumanized universe, the human desire for happiness plays no determining role; the nature of things is simply indifferent to human suffering. Although the anthropocentric cosmology has been in decline for centuries, Simmel notes that we have been very slow to adapt and to recognize the consequences (545). Because the older anthropocentric view supports our natural optimism, we still find it difficult to part with; we still feel and act as if it were true. We still do not know what it means to live in a world with no final causes, no soul, and no God. Pessimism is one consequence, Simmel maintains, of this decline in the

   

75

old cosmology and our failure to live with the new. It has arisen out of a feeling of disappointment and disillusionment: if there is no God, no providence, and no soul, then life must be miserable and cannot be worth living. Pessimism and optimism are therefore curious bedfellows: both assume that the anthropocentric view of the world is necessary to our happiness, but optimism affirms that view while pessimism denies it. Pessimism, Simmel maintains, is a transitional philosophy (546–7). It is the philosophy after optimism and before a new more modern philosophy. This more modern philosophy holds a neutral position regarding the question of the value of life. It disagrees with both optimism and pessimism in that it holds that life is neither good nor evil; it is rather simply indifferent, holding that the good or evil of the world is a matter of what we human beings make it. So far Simmel has located pessimism in its broad historical context, such that it seems the natural result of the decline in the old anthropocentric worldview. That seems to appreciate pessimism for what it is worth, at least on historical grounds. But in the remarkable second half of his article Simmel turns on pessimism, accusing it of nothing less than “sadism” (Grausamkeitslust) (547). The pessimist’s cruelty shows itself in trying to destroy the feelings that give worth to life, or in making people self-conscious of their suffering. In doing these things, the pessimist takes a strange pleasure in destruction. The pessimist’s denial of all values is just a theoretical form of practical destruction and pillage (548). It was very characteristic of Simmel’s philosophizing that he would consider an issue from many different angles, and that he would constantly approach it anew. He never took what he said at one time as binding for another; if this resulted in inconsistency, it also allowed for a greater understanding and insight into a problem or topic. This aspect of Simmel’s philosophizing is fully in display in his next article on pessimism, his “Socialismus und Pessimismus,”⁴² which was also published in Die Zeit in 1900. In this article Simmel is much more sympathetic to pessimism than in his previous articles and in his book; it is as if he has now finally discovered the value and point of pessimism. ⁴² “Socialismus und Pessimismus,” Die Zeit, 22 (1900), 70–1. GSG, V, 552–9. All references in parentheses are to the Gesamtausgabe.

76    Simmel begins by questioning yet again the applicability of the pessimist’s calculus of pleasure and pain. The idea that there is a correct proportion between pleasure and pain, a balance in which these quantities could be equal, rests on a fallacy, Simmel says (552). No one can say a priori about a certain quantity of pleasure what should be its equivalent in pain. Since pleasure and pain are not homogeneous, they are not really comparable; and because they are not qualitatively comparable, they are not quantitatively so. Hence the pessimist’s thesis that, on average, the few pleasures of existence are bought too dearly by its many pains is nonsense (552). We cannot say, therefore, that humans experience too much pain; as the average itself cannot be measured, it cannot be regarded as too much or too little without requiring another measure to measure it (553). Yet Simmel thinks that the question about the happiness or suffering of humanity has now lost much of its interest (553). The far more urgent and interesting question, he maintains, concerns the distribution of happiness. Regardless of the total amount of happiness available for humanity in general, the fundamental problem is how this happiness is distributed among different people. This is where the socialist enters the picture. The socialist maintains that we can significantly increase the sum total of happiness in society through establishing greater economic equality; the masses, who have suffered deprivation for so long, will be made much happier when they see their wealth increase through social legislation. Simmel sees a connection here between pessimism and socialism: the pessimist holds that the value of life increases with the sum of happiness, and the socialist maintains that the value of a person’s life increases with a greater share in the distribution of goods (555). This makes socialism seem an antidote to pessimism, because the value of life will increase in direct proportion with the number of people who are happy, and that number will be made much greater through socialism. Nevertheless, this apparent solution to the problem of pessimism suffers from a serious glitch, Simmel points out (555–6). Although people will be happy at first with attaining a greater level of wealth, they will not be happy for long. For people, Simmel notes, are constantly trying to go beyond the average, to exceed the norm, which the community sets them; they are never satisfied with limits but always want to go

   

77

beyond them. Although Simmel is not so explicit, he is referring to the classical problem of pleonexia,⁴³ of how all people strive to outdo others and are never satisfied with simple justice, with what is due to them. The competitive striving to get more is therefore a serious problem for socialism. There is only one way for the socialist to avoid this problem, Simmel argues (556). That is for him to abandon the utilitarian ethic that tells everyone to maximize their happiness in life. Such an ethic is only an encouragement to pleonexia, to the competitive striving by which everyone strives to outdo everyone else. Instead, the socialist must adopt the pessimist doctrine which advocates a minimum of pain rather than a maximum of pleasure. According to this doctrine, the best one can achieve in life is freedom from pain: “this is an approximation to Nirvana, whose serenity consists not in positive feelings of pleasure but in a mere nothingness, removed from all feelings of pain” (556). Now that he sees the value of the pessimist ethics, Simmel turns around and defends some of the pessimist’s central arguments. If you grant the main premise of the pessimist—that life demands extraordinary suffering for its few pleasures—then it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there is more suffering than happiness in life (557). There is indeed much to support the premise, Simmel finds. The lack of a satisfying and attainable end in life, the triviality of its few pleasures, and the empty striving after illusions hardly make life worth living (557–8). There is nothing that compensates us for all our toils and troubles. The more the ego demands of life, the less the resources are able to match them. There is also a terrible disproportion between the ego’s claims on life and the scarce resources available to satisfy them (558). Once we accept the pessimist’s portrait of the normal ego—the “Hypertrophie des Ichs,” as Simmel calls it—the more we have to accept his account of the suffering of life. To escape this fate, Simmel says that it is necessary for the ego to accept some limit to its striving. He needs an external limit, a law which defines his rights and obligations. This restraint can come from “the religious circle of ideas,” which will give him an element of humility and ⁴³ See Plato, Republic, 344a–c.

78    acceptance of his limits. Simmel does not specify this circle of ideas, but it is clear he was thinking of the Buddhist ethic he earlier suggested. All in all, it was an extraordinary alliance that Simmel was suggesting: a pessimistic socialism or a socialistic pessimism. He said it was really more the latter than the former because pessimism was really alien to the socialist way of thinking, which was at bottom very optimistic in its beliefs about the goodness of humanism and progress (557). Whatever form one prefers, it is clear that Simmel was willing to grant the pessimist much more credibility than his earlier articles suggest. Simmel’s final word on pessimism is his theory about the nature of life in the first chapter of his last great work, Lebensanschauung,⁴⁴ which was published in 1918. Life is for Simmel a ceaseless activity of self-creation and self-transcendence. This activity involves the unification of two opposing drives within itself: limitation and the overcoming of limitation. Each drive is necessary for self-creation. The self must limit itself because it must express, embody, or objectify its creative energies; to do that, it must give them some specific form; it must make them something determinate. But that form or determination eventually acts as a limit on its activity, controlling and restraining it. Hence the self must overcome its self-limitation, it must transcend itself, if it is to continue to be creative. This process never comes to an end because the self constantly strives for new ways of expressing itself; but whatever the ways it finds, it will rebel against them and create anew, posing itself with new challenges. Simmel sometimes describes this process in a paradoxical form: on the one hand, the goal of the self is “more life” because it is never satisfied with its current restrictions and limitations, which it will always strive to remove and go beyond; but, on the other hand, its goal is “more than life” because it rebels against all restrictions, against limitations in general, which are essential to life. This paradoxical dual aspiration was Simmel’s ultimate reply to pessimism. The fact that the self always wanted more life, and indeed more than life, meant that it was invincible, irrepressible, indefatigable. Schopenhauer regarded the endless striving of life as pointless because ⁴⁴ Georg Simmel, “Die Transcendenz des Lebens,” Kap. I of Lebensanschauung. Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). GSG, XVI, 209–35.

   

79

the self never moved beyond itself; it simply repeated the same process of struggle without learning and growing. Simmel, though, saw the infinite striving of the self as a progression, where it learned and acquired new life. Self-transcendence was his version of Bildung, of self-education and inner growth. Unfortunately, Simmel’s concept of self-transcendence was never influential—it appeared too late, as Lebensphilosophie was disappearing from the historical stage. Nevertheless, it perfectly epitomized themes that had been implicit in the movement from the very beginning. The historical ancestors of Simmel’s concept were Schlegel’s irony and Hegel’s spirit; and its contemporary counterparts in Lebensphilosophie were Nietzsche’s concept of self-overcoming and Dilthey’s concept of Erlebnis. For all the Lebensphilosophen, life was a process of selftranscendence. This was for them what made life worth living.

5. Nietzsche’s Later Response to Pessimism Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of pessimism in Die Geburt der Tragödie proved to be very temporary. In 1878, four years after Die Geburt der Tragödie, Nietzsche published his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, which involved a complete rethinking of many of his former views, not least his view about pessimism. The reasons for this rethinking are very complicated, and we cannot disentangle its many threads here. Our only concern now is to see how his rethinking led to a fundamental change in his attitude toward pessimism. The new standpoint of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches is what Nietzsche calls “historical philosophy.” Following the tradition of the critical philosophy, the aim of historical philosophy is to expose metaphysical illusions which arise from the hypostasis of abstractions. This hypostasis arises when metaphysical concepts appear to refer to an autonomous realm of being independent of the sensible and natural world; historical philosophy attempts to destroy this illusion by dehypostasizing these concepts, by showing that they have a history, that they are the result of abstraction from the sensible and natural world. In revealing their origin and genesis in experience, historical philosophy

80    will show how apparent opposites (viz., mind and body, intellect and senses) are really continuous with one another. The higher mental or intellectual realm will be shown to differ not in kind but only in degree from the lower physical and physiological realm; the higher world will then be really only a sublimation of the lower world, a more organized and developed form of it (§1). This new historical project forced Nietzsche to abandon some of the fundamental premises of his earlier philosophy. The most important of these premises was his dualism between Apollo and Dionysus, which was formulated around Schopenhauer’s dualism between thing-in-itself and appearance. Now, however, Nietzsche is claiming that this dualism is untenable, that the realm of the will is continuous with that of nature, so that there are not two realms but really only one: that of nature. In paragraph after paragraph of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches Nietzsche deconstructs Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s concept of the thing-in-itself (§§9, 10, 15, 16, 19). There is no longer any deeper and darker reality lying behind or beyond the veil of appearance; or at least, since we could know nothing about it, there is no point in worrying about it. What point is there, then, in Apollo’s veil of illusion? The project of historical philosophy now made it imperative for Nietzsche to rethink the whole question of pessimism. Nietzsche was now convinced that the whole dispute between pessimism and optimism—whether the universe is more good or evil—made no sense. Historical philosophy has shown that good and evil are not attributes of nature but that they arise from human needs and passions. The good or evil of existence, therefore, depends on the attitudes of a culture, and there is nothing in the nature of things that makes them one or the other. There is no need for either optimism or pessimism anymore, Nietzsche explained, because the world is neither good nor evil (§28, 49). The project of historical philosophy, which Nietzsche inaugurated in Menschliches Allzumenschliches, played a pivotal role in his philosophy until his breakdown in 1889. It was crucial to the critique of morality in his later works, especially Jenseits von Gut und Böse and Zur Genealogie der Moral. The project proved to be a lasting antidote to pessimism, which ceased to be a central concern to Nietzsche after 1878.

   

81

However, if pessimism ceased to be an issue for Nietzsche, nihilism became an obsession for him by the late 1880s. The notebooks of the late 1880s are filled with references to nihilism (Nihilismus). Nietzsche now elevates the danger of nihilism as he diminished that of pessimism. Hence he claims that pessimism is “a preliminary form of nihilism” (KSA, XII, 491), and that it is “only a symptom of nihilism” (KSA, XIII, 529). Just how pessimism differs from nihilism Nietzsche does not explain. Judging from the contexts in which both words appear, it would seem that nihilism is the thesis that the world has no meaning and that it conforms to no moral ends, whereas pessimism is the thesis that existence is evil, and that there is more evil than good in the universe. Hence pessimism presupposes that we can apply moral standards to existence, which fails the test, while nihilism denies that we can apply any moral standards at all to existence, so that it neither passes nor fails any test. Whatever their precise meaning, it is clear that pessimism would be an issue for Nietzsche only in its more sophisticated nihilistic form. This is because historical critique targets the assumption of pessimism—the world is either good or evil—but not that of nihilism—the world is neither good nor evil. Nietzsche sees that there is still a problem of alienation even if the world is neither good nor evil. One figure from Nietzsche’s battle against pessimism remains a constant motif of his philosophy until the very end: Dionysus. The figure of Apollo is no longer needed because the horrors of existence have disappeared and hence nothing needs to be concealed by her charming illusions; nevertheless, Dionysus still prevails as a counter to the chief cultural force that denies the value of life: Christianity. In a note from early 1888, Nietzsche holds up Dionysus as a religious symbol for “a form of thanksgiving and affirmation of life” (KSA, XIII, 266). Dionysus represents “an apology for and deification of life.” Dionysus does not shrink before the facts of suffering but affirms them as one part of life. Life is affirmed as a whole by Dionysus, which means that it is not denied in any part. There could not be a more explicit and emphatic affirmation of the value of life. This, more than anything else, makes Nietzsche the chief apostle of Lebensphilosophie.

IV Lebensphilosophie and Historicism 1. The Historicist Tradition One of the most important intellectual movements in the second half of the nineteenth century—a development of no less importance than pessimism—was historicism.¹ We can define historicism, very simply and broadly, as the thesis that the essence of everything in the natural and human world is the product of history. What makes a thing what it is, the historicist tells us, is the process by which it came into being. Of course, stated so simply and broadly, this proposition states nothing new; it was commonplace in the classical and medieval world. But, beginning in the eighteenth century, philosophers and natural scientists began to appreciate history more than ever before; they started to see it as the magical key to unlock the natural and human worlds. This emphasis on history had important consequences: there were no fixed natures or eternal essences underneath phenomena; and there was no single human nature that was the same in all cultures or epochs. Everything is in flux; you can never step twice into the river of history. The historicists were thus the Heracliteans of the modern world. This metaphysical thesis does not completely define historicism, however. There was another critical dimension to it, one that is much more modern and characteristic of the nineteenth century. This is the attempt to make history into a science, to give it the same scientific status as the natural sciences. For millennia, history was not regarded as a science because it lacked the certainty of mathematics; science required certainty, as Aristotle taught, but no statement about the past could ever attain it. ¹ For a fuller account of historicism, see my The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 1–26. For a revised version, see “Historicization and Historicism: Some Nineteenth Century Perspectives,” in Historisierung, eds. Moritz Baumstark and Robert Forkel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016), pp. 36–54. Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0005

  

83

In the eighteenth century, philosophers like Vico, Chladenius, and Herder began to question this paradigm of science. What made something a science for them was not so much its results as its methods. These methods consisted in basic rules of procedure, instructions which could be exactly and clearly specified. If these methods were rigorously applied, so that one attained all the certainty the subject matter permitted, even if it were not mathematical certainty, then one could claim to be following a scientific procedure. There had always been a place for history in the curricula of German universities. It was not studied for its own sake, however, but only as an aid to other disciplines, such as theology and philology. The project of making history into a science, and the new higher standards in historical studies, helped to legitimate history as an academic subject. By the eighteenth century, history had become a faculty in its own right, a discipline pursued for its own sake and not only for its value to other disciplines. The struggle for autonomy and recognition finally came to fruition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Now there were not only chairs in history but also independent faculties which were organized according to specific categories (ancient, medieval, and modern). The golden years of German historicism were from 1850 until the late 1880s. The spectacular rise in the prestige of history, from a humble servant to other disciplines into a major discipline in its own right, is the chief reason that the nineteenth century is so often referred to as “the age of history.” Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel all came of age as history rose in her fortunes. Dilthey and Simmel were students at the University of Berlin, the center for historical studies, and they received their training from some of the masters of the new science. Dilthey had been a student in the famous history seminar of Leopold Ranke, and he was supervised by August Boeckh, Franz Bopp, and Jakob Grimm, philologists who were applying the new methods of history to the literature of the past. Simmel had been the student of Johann Droysen, Theodor Mommsen, Herman Grimm, and Heinrich von Treitschke, four of the most eminent historians of the historical age. Nietzsche was never at Berlin, but he was the student of Albrecht Ritschl, who was a member of the Tübinger Schule, which was in the forefront of applying the new historical methods to

84    theology. All the Lebensphilosophen were deeply familiar with and were trained in, therefore, the new historical methods. Historicism had become a fundamental part of their intellectual heritage. It is fair to say that the three Lebensphilosophen were not only educated in the historicist tradition but that they were historicists themselves. Dilthey was one of the major historicists of the nineteenth century; he was indeed the historicist par excellence. Many of his writings are classics in the historicist tradition. Simmel too was a major spokesman of the historicist tradition, and two of his early works were major contributions to it: his Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, which was first published in 1892, and his Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, which was published in two volumes in 1892–3. Prima facie it seems that we must place Nietzsche outside the historicist tradition. One of his most famous early works, his 1874 Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, is a caustic critique of historicism. Yet, by 1878, in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Nietzsche had reversed course and announced a new program of “historical philosophy,” which thereafter played a central role in his philosophy. His famous 1887 Zur Geneologie der Moral was the culmination of that program. Having begun his career as a critic of historicism, Nietzsche later became one of its foremost advocates.

2. Lebensphilosophie and Hermeneutics The attraction of the Lebensphilosophen to history derived from their fundamental metaphysical convictions. They all held that the fundamental reality for a human being is life, that everything in its experience is a mode of life, that what it saw, felt, or desired was a manifestation of life. But that raised the question: how do we know life? Granted that the source of life is unknowable in itself, because any reflection upon it presupposes it, that still leaves the question, how does life appear or manifest itself to us? The answer to this question was not difficult to surmise. Life appears to us through the thoughts and actions of a living human being; but the sphere in which these thoughts and actions appear is history. These thoughts and actions appear in time; and the thinking

  

85

and acting of a human being in time constitutes its history. It was on grounds like these that Heidegger would later argue in Sein und Zeit that Dasein exists through history; but his reasoning was already implicit long before him in Lebensphilosophie. This answer to the problem of how we know life only threw the problem back another step: How do we know history? What is the proper method for understanding human thoughts and actions in history? The Lebensphilosophen had an innovative and interesting answer to this question, one we can boil down to a single word: hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation, primarily of texts or written documents; but then, by extension, it can be applied to all human thoughts and actions. We understand human thought and action, Dilthey, Simmel, and Nietzsche all maintained, in the same way that we understand a text: through interpretation. They treated human life in history as if it were a text, and just as we understand a text through interpretation, so we should understand history through it. This basic metaphor governed the thinking of the Lebensphilosophen about history. The Lebensphilosophen understood interpretation as a distinct form of explanation from that prevalent in the natural sciences. Interpretation was explanation from within, according to the standpoint of the author or agent; it was not explanation from without, according to the standpoint of an external observer who understood human intentions and actions according to general laws of cause and effect. We can leave aside here the controversial question whether these forms of explanation are really logically distinct;² the crucial point to see for the understanding of Lebensphilosophie is that hermeneutics was for the Lebensphilosophen the form of explanation or understanding of human life. If this is so—and it is impossible to doubt it—then it is hard to characterize Lebensphilosophie as a form of irrationalism. This would be to beg the question in favor of those who advocate strictly mechanical explanations of human life, as if these were paradigmatic and the only possible ones.

² On this issue, see my “Hermeneutics and Positivism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics, eds. Michael Forster and Kristin Gjesdal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 133–57.

86    Lebensphilosophie does not mark the beginning of hermeneutics. There were already pioneering thinkers in the field in the eighteenth century. Chladenius, Herder, and Humboldt made great strides in applying the study of textual interpretation to history; and in the nineteenth century major advances along similar lines were made by Schleiermacher, Boeckh, and Droysen. So the Lebensphilosophen were not blazing through virgin territory; the ground had already been ploughed before them.³ But there was still much to do, and much unexplored ground before them. Their contribution to the historicist tradition is one of the major achievements of Lebensphilosophie.

3. Dilthey and the Foundation of Hermeneutics The fundamental question of Dilthey’s philosophical career concerned the foundation of the human sciences. How do we explain human thought and action? Is it the same in kind as explanation in the natural sciences? And, if not, what other forms of explanation are there? As early as the 1860s, Dilthey had crude answers to these questions. He was convinced that explanation in the human sciences would have to be distinct in kind from that of the natural sciences, and he was well aware that his new form of explanation would have to come from hermeneutics. But in the 1860s these were little more than hunches, conjectures which stood in need of confirmation and explanation. Hence Dilthey’s agenda was set before him: show how hermeneutics is necessary for the explanation of human thought and action. Dilthey’s reflections on the foundation of the human sciences span nearly half a century, from the 1860s to the 1910s. They appear in many forms: private notebooks, lecture notes, articles, and books, published and non-published. Over the years, Dilthey adopted different approaches to the topic, and he never ceased thinking about it. It would be a mistake ³ On the history of the hermeneutic tradition, see Joachim Wach, Das Verstehen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926–33), three vols; Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968); Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1959); and Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922).

  

87

to think that all his reflections led to one final mature position. All his positions, even those at the end of his life, were tentative, awaiting further formulation and clarification. Dilthey’s first drafts on these issues go back to 1865–6. Some of his leading ideas appear in a short fragment from those years, the first of a series of such fragments entitled “Frühe Pläne und Entwürfe.”⁴ The crucial question on Dilthey’s mind in this first fragment is whether the methods of the natural sciences are applicable to the human sciences. Dilthey is already skeptical of Mill’s program of explaining “the moral sciences” on the basis of the natural sciences. Mill, he complains, is much too dogmatic. He has not sufficiently examined the content of the moral sciences to know whether his program will work (2). Dilthey also doubts whether psychology in its present form, in which it follows the mechanistic paradigm, will be successful. Psychology attempts to ascertain “the forms and laws of psychic life”; but it has left out of account the most important part of psychic life: namely the content of our mental acts, what they are about and what they mean to us (5). Dilthey envisages a new kind of psychology—he does not yet have a word for it—that will make the description and analysis of this content its chief business (5). He does not specify the method this new psychology will use, but there is one point on which he is very clear: “The novelty in my method lies in the connection of the study of human beings with history” (3). This emphasis on history will indeed prove crucial for Dilthey’s thought; it is characteristic of his approach to the human sciences in all phases of his thought. Ten years later Dilthey was still struggling with these issues. In a draft for a later essay, which was written in 1875,⁵ his thinking is still very much in flux. Questions arise but are not answered; tensions surface but are never resolved. Dilthey states that it is the goal of philosophy to provide a single general system of all the sciences, and that the two chief sciences that will help it to achieve this goal are logic and psychology (XVIII, 61). Psychology is for him the link between the human and ⁴ “Frühe Pläne und Entwürfe,” GS, XVIII, 1–16. ⁵ “Über das Studium der Geschichte, der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat,” GS, V, 31–73. See also “Fortsetzung der Abhandlung von 1875,” in GS, XVIII, 58–78.

88    natural sciences. Yet how psychology can perform this task remains very obscure, because Dilthey says that the human sciences have a very different logic and structure than the natural sciences (63). The picture becomes even more complicated because Dilthey tells us that there are two kinds of psychology – explanatory and descriptive, where the explanatory follows the natural scientific paradigm and where the descriptive attempts to describe mental content (70). Unfortunately, he does not further explain the differences between these kinds of psychology. There are other passages, however, where Dilthey offers hints about the methods of the human sciences. In one passage he states that the method should be what he calls “re-experience” (Nacherleben). We understand the life of someone else, he explains, when we enter into their situation and try to recreate it in our imagination. Dilthey calls this method “selftransformation into an alien genius” (Sich-Verwandeln in den fremden Genius). Beyond this metaphor, though, Dilthey does not go. In another passage he stresses the importance of an intuitive method in the human sciences. It is the task of every science, he writes, to find uniformities between sets of facts (67). But these uniformities are only between parts of wholes; they explain only the relations between these parts, but the whole itself can be grasped only in intuition (Anschauung) (68–9). In both these passages Dilthey seems to endorse intuition and imagination as the characteristic methods of the human sciences, but he would not be satisfied with these methods for long. Dilthey’s most successful early attempt to provide a foundation for the human sciences was his 1883 Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften.⁶ Unlike his earlier attempts, this one was comparatively more complete; one volume of it was actually published.⁷ In his preface Dilthey maintains that the human sciences can have a firm foundation only if they build upon, and remain within the limits of, human experience (xviii). We cannot get behind or beyond the facts of experience, which makes it necessary to forfeit all speculation about the transcendent, all theories which we cannot verify in experience. This rule seems perfectly in accord ⁶ Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883). GS, I, 3–408. All references in parentheses are to GS. ⁷ The first draft for the planned second volume, which was never published, is the Breslauer Ausarbeitungen, which was written in the early 1880s. See GS, XIX, 58–227.

  

89

with the spirit of Kant’s critical philosophy, which had made experience the limits of knowledge. Although Dilthey notes his agreement with Kant, he immediately makes clear his differences from him. The Kantian subject, he warns us, is a pure abstraction, a disembodied “I,” who observes the world from the purely fictional standpoint of neutral or indifferent contemplation. This subject has no emotions or desires; it only thinks. It might be useful for strictly theoretical purposes to postulate such a subject, but if the aim is to provide a foundation for the human sciences, one based on experience alone, then it becomes useless, even misleading. Our foundation must be based on facts of experience; but experience shows us only particular subjects, individual human beings with desires and feelings, who are embodied in specific social, historical, and cultural contexts. The pure Kantian subject simply does not exist. It is here that we see especially clearly the close connection between Dilthey’s concern with the foundation of the human sciences and his emphasis upon history. The facts of experience, upon which all the human sciences must rest, are, implicitly or explicitly, historical. This is for the simple reason that all human experience is conditioned by, and the result of, its historical context. Both the content and the occurrence of experience, in all its forms, is the product of history. Hence Dilthey called his project “an historical critique of reason.” Given that the human sciences must be based upon facts of experience, what kind of facts are these? Dilthey’s first explanation is that they are based upon facts of inner experience, which he distinguishes from outer experience. While the natural sciences deal with outer experience, which consists in the sense perception of objects in space, the human sciences treat inner experience, which comes from the self-awareness of our own conscious activities. Since these forms of experience are so different from one another, Dilthey thought that they suffice to distinguish the human and natural sciences. He stressed that this distinction is not metaphysical or ontological, i.e., it is not between distinct kinds of substance, mental and physical; and he insisted that it is only phenomenological, referring only to what is given in experience. Following his belief that the human sciences should be based on inner experience, Dilthey assumed that their foundation rests upon

90    psychology. Psychology is the science of inner experience, and it is therefore the master science, the Grundwissenschaft for all the human sciences. Psychology could do for the human sciences, Dilthey hoped, what mathematics did for the natural sciences. Dilthey’s faith in psychology was typical of his age, which understood even epistemology in psychological terms. If epistemology was philosophia prima, so for the same reasons was psychology. Such was the reasoning of many thinkers in the neo-Kantian tradition (Fries, Beneke, Helmholtz, Lange, Bona Meyer). Yet the crucial question was: What kind of psychology? Mill, Herbart, and Comte understood psychology in mechanistic terms and they strived to make it a natural science on par with physics and chemistry. But if the human sciences were made to conform to the mold of the natural sciences, then there would be nothing unique or distinctive about them. For Dilthey, this was a highly undesirable conclusion, for it would push the human sciences down the road toward materialism. It was urgently necessary, therefore, to distinguish between kinds of psychology. This was the task of Dilthey’s 1894 treatise Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie.⁸ Here he contrasts two completely different kinds of psychology, one of which he deplores, the other of which he recommends. The psychology he condemns he calls “explanatory psychology” (erklärende Psychologie). This kind of psychology attempts to follow the methods of natural science and to explain the mind in the same way that physics or chemistry would explain events in the natural world (139). It strives to determine the regular laws of psychic life and to explain events according to the principle of causality, which holds that the cause equals the effect (causa aequat effectum) (158). Following the analytic-synthetic method of physics, it attempts to find the basic units of mental life (viz., representations, drives), then to determine the causal relations between them, from which it then reconstructs all the phenomena of mental life. Again like the natural sciences, explanatory psychology attempts to quantify psychic phenomena—e.g., the intensity of sensation, the duration of nerve stimulation—and to find ⁸ Wilhelm Dilthey, Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie (Berlin: Verlag der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1894). GS, V, 139–240.

  

91

the precise ratios between such quantities (165). Descriptive or analytic psychology, on the other hand, follows the reverse procedure of explanatory psychology. Rather than beginning from basic units and reconstructing the whole of psychic life from them, it begins from the whole of psychic life and then proceeds to analyze it into its elements. It understands these elements when it places each of them in the whole, showing how each plays a necessary role in it (172). Explanation in descriptive psychology is not mechanical, therefore, but holistic. What is wrong with explanatory psychology? Throughout the Ideen Dilthey makes many objections to it, but three of them are weighty. First, though it models itself on the natural sciences, explanatory psychology cannot test its hypotheses as they do. We accept or reject hypotheses in the natural sciences on how well they fit the facts; but in explanatory psychology we cannot determine the facts precisely enough to determine whether a theory corresponds to them. The facts are in constant motion and we cannot repeat them at will. So what facts would determine what the basic units of mental life are? Is it representations, drives, or nerve impulses? Second, explanatory psychology is too reductivist, because its concept of a whole is an aggregate, where the parts precede the whole and make it possible; but in mental life the whole precedes the parts and makes them possible. Third, explanatory psychology does not account for the content of mental life, i.e., it does not consider what our ideas are about, or what they mean, but simply how they follow one another as events in the mind. Hence Dilthey insists that psychology needs to do justice to “the complete contentality of mental life” (die ganze Inhaltlichkeit des Seelenlebens). Granted that the human sciences have to be based on inner experience, in what does this inner experience consist? And how can we know it? “Inner experience” sounds like it consists in psychological activities of certain kinds, and that we know them through introspection. Dilthey seems to consent to this interpretation when he says that we acquire inner experience through self-consciousness, through reflection on ourselves or by directing our attention inward. Yet Dilthey was well aware that introspection alone would not suffice as a basis for inner experience. Introspection is unreliable, partly because it reads the introspector’s own

92    beliefs into his experience, and partly because it is extremely selective, giving only one aspect of a much more complicated experience. To explain the subject matter of descriptive psychology, Dilthey introduces the concept of “lived experience” (Erlebnis) (172). Lived experience does not consist in just a mental act; it is more a series of mental acts stretching throughout time, and forming a meaningful whole for the person who has it. The series forms a whole because it is done for a purpose, and every moment in it serves as a means toward that end. Dilthey analyzes lived experience into two dimensions. The first dimension is synchronic: the unity of every aspect of a person, i.e., his thinking, willing, and feeling, at any given time (201, 216); and the second dimension is diachronic: the unity of the person having different experiences throughout time (216–217). Lived experience involves whatever is thought, willed, and felt in the course of acting for a purpose. It involves the experiences of struggle, effort, elation, or disappointment. Lived experience involves values, which are not only the goals the person sets for himself but also his or her beliefs about the purpose of life itself. The task of the descriptive psychologist is to describe all these aspects of lived experience, so that the spectator understands why the person undertook the action and what he or she went through in realizing it. The introduction of the concept of lived experience was a major step forward in Dilthey’s account of the subject matter of the human sciences. But it still did not say much about the method of these sciences, about how we are to reconstruct lived experience. Yet, from his first years of reflecting on the subject, Dilthey had a theory about this method, though it lay unexplored and unexplained. Alongside his attempt to develop a descriptive psychology, Dilthey also had an alternate theory for explanation in the human sciences. He had a word for this theory: hermeneutics. The idea grew more and more on Dilthey that explanation in the human sciences is fundamentally a matter of interpretation. Just as we interpret texts to find their meaning, so we must interpret human speech and action to discover their meaning. The activity of interpretation is the same in each case; only the objects are different. Hermeneutics was indeed very promising. It seemed to provide the solution to the problem of explaining the difference between the human and natural sciences: interpretation, which is distinctive of the human

  

93

sciences, has a logic that is clearly distinct from the causal explanation of the natural sciences. Since the very beginning of his career, Dilthey was familiar with hermeneutics. He wrote a prize-winning essay on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in 1860,⁹ in which he argued that the development of modern hermeneutics involved a shift in interpretation of classical and sacred texts to the understanding of human expression in general. Here he already sketches the idea of a general hermeneutics that would apply not only to texts but to human words and actions. In his 1865–6 fragment “Frühe Pläne und Entwürfe” Dilthey virtually made interpretation the method of the human sciences when he stated that their problem was to understand the content of mental acts. To understand mental content is to interpret it. As Dilthey developed his theory of the human sciences in the 1870s and 1880s he gave hermeneutics an increasingly greater role. He now focuses on the concept of “understanding” (Verstehen), which is the result of interpretation; one person understands the speech, action, or writing of another when he has a correct interpretation of it. While the concept of understanding does not appear in the first volume of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, it plays a central role in the draft of the second volume, the Breslauer Ausarbeitungen, where it becomes a crucial part of the methodology of the human sciences. Dilthey now defined understanding as “the interpretation of the state of the soul from the context of its entire life under the condition of the milieu.”¹⁰ In the “Zusätze” to the 1900 essay “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik,” Dilthey then made understanding “the fundamental procedure for all further operations of the human sciences.”¹¹ The increasing importance of hermeneutics in Dilthey’s thinking raises an uncomfortable question: Whatever happened to his psychology? Psychology used to be the queen of his sciences; but now it seems dethroned by hermeneutics. The shift away from psychology and toward hermeneutics runs parallel with the movement of focusing on the content rather than act of representation; while the act is indeed the object of

⁹ See “Das hermeneutische System Schleiermachers in der Auseinandersetzung mit der älteren protestantische Hermeneutik,” GS, XIV/2, 597–787. ¹⁰ GS, XIX, 277. ¹¹ GS, V, 333.

94    psychology, content or meaning is more the object of semantics or logic. It was probably this kind of consideration that led Dilthey to write in a notebook entry from 1903: “The whole of psychology is problematic for the entire future.”¹² This shift in interest away from psychology has led to a great controversy about whether Dilthey abandoned or retained his psychology in the early 1900s. We cannot pursue this issue here, however, where our only purpose is to make apparent the shift in Dilthey’s interests.¹³ Dilthey’s mature reflections on hermeneutics appear in several sets of unpublished manuscripts which he wrote in the 1900s.¹⁴ The most important of these manuscripts, “Das Verstehen anderer Personen und ihrer Lebensäusserungen,”¹⁵ spells out the conditions for understanding. The phenomena by which we understand someone Dilthey calls “externalizations of life” (Lebensäuβerungen). These externalizations are visible or audible signs which reveal, embody, or express something mental, i.e., meanings or intentions. These signs can be words, actions, or gestures; the sign is assigned to the mental state by virtue of convention, so that one knows what it means or signifies. The relation of a sign to the mental state is not contingent, as if the sign and mental state were separable from one another. Rather, the mental state becomes what it is through the sign, which embodies or expresses it. When the sign reveals, expresses, or embodies the mental state, it makes what is implicit, indeterminate, and potential in the mental state into something more explicit, determinate, and actual. Hence the expression or embodiment is only a more explicit and determinate form of what was at first inchoate and amorphous in the mental state. Dilthey attributes a specific form of analogical or inductive reasoning to the forms of understanding. He is explicit that they are a form of inference or reasoning, and he attempts to find for them “a logical construction” (210, 212). The reasoning he attributes to the elementary ¹² As cited in Michael Ermath, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, `1978), p. 209. ¹³ These issues are discussed in greater detail in my The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 337–46. ¹⁴ The manuscripts appear under the title Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften in volume VII of GS. ¹⁵ GS, VII, 205–27.

  

95

forms of understanding goes like this: (1) There is a uniform connection between a specific kind of expression E and the mental state M that it expresses. (2) There is in this specific case C an expression of kind E. (3) Therefore, in case C, E is an expression of the mental state M. In the most elementary forms of understanding we take some particular externalization—a sentence, action, or gesture—and apply some general law to it, so that we see it as an instance of that law. More complicated forms of understanding arise when we consider not only one particular externalization but many different kinds of them, and when we have to consider the changing circumstances and the precise initial conditions under which the law applies (211). Now that we have a rough idea of the kind of reasoning behind the elementary forms of understanding, we are in a position to correct the most common misunderstanding about Dilthey’s hermeneutics. According to this interpretation, understanding is an essentially imaginative and intuitive awareness of the states of minds of other persons. Rather than involving concepts, judgments, and inferences, understanding, so it is said, involves the use of intuition, feeling, and imagination. I understand what a speaker or writer means if I can recreate within myself the same experience to which the speaker or writer refers; such a recreation requires above all the use of imagination and sympathy, and it is not the simple conclusion of reasoning. This interpretation has been especially prevalent among positivists,¹⁶ but it also has been popular in the Anglophone world, having been propagated by Collingwood.¹⁷ This interpretation is not entirely wrong. Dilthey would sometimes write about how understanding requires imagination and empathy, and ¹⁶ For the positivist critique of the concept of understanding, see Carl Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” in The Philosophy of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 352–3; Theodore Abel, “The Operation called Verstehen,” American Journal of Sociology, 54 (1948), 211–18; Otto Neurath, “Sociology and Physicalism,” in Logical Postivism, ed. A.J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 295, 298; Edgar Zilsel, “Physics and the Problem of Historico-Sociological Laws,” Readings in the Philosophy of Science, eds. H. Feigl and M. Brodbeck (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), p. 721. Although Popper distanced himself from the positivists, he shares with them a similar account of Verstehen. See The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1957), p. 138. Similar objections to the method appear in the work of Ernest Nagel, who was a sympathizer with positivism. See his The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), pp. 480–5. ¹⁷ R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 172.

96    he stressed that it cannot be reduced down to simple rules.¹⁸ But these points are stretched far beyond their limited validity, so that it seems as if Dilthey thought that understanding were entirely a matter of imagination and empathy. That this cannot be so, we have already seen from the reasoning involved in the elementary forms of the understanding; this reasoning is often implicit, to be sure, but it has to be present in some form if the act of understanding is to be, in principle, justifiable. Dilthey recognized that understanding often had to be the result of careful investigation, and he condemned the attempt to base it on intuition alone as “aesthetical mysticism” and “enthusiastic obscurity.”¹⁹ Although he held that imagination and sympathy were important aids to understanding, he never believed that they were by themselves sufficient to justify an interpretation. While he acknowledged that the interpreter often begins with some intuition, he insisted that he should not end with it. At the beginning of enquiry, the interpreter’s intuition has a strictly provisional status; it takes the form of a hypothesis or conjecture, which must be later tested, corrected, or modified in the light of further evidence. Rather than relying on flashes of inspiration, the interpreter must follow a combined inductive and deductive procedure, whereby he formulates his ideas about the whole after studying each of the parts, and whereby he reinterprets the parts in the light of his knowledge of the whole. This was Schleiermacher’s famous “hermeneutical circle,” which Dilthey would invoke time and again. We can see, then, that for Dilthey the understanding of life did not involve any commitment to or acceptance of irrationalism. It was vital to his whole philosophy that the understanding of life be a form of rationality, even though it was not the same form of rationality as that in use in the natural sciences. That the mechanistic and mathematical explanation of the natural sciences is not the only form of rationality was Dilthey’s central contention, though it was also denied by all his positivist critics. Because they could imagine no other form of explanation than that in natural science, they were forced to interpret Dilthey’s theory of understanding in irrationalist terms. But that interpretation only begged the central question at issue. ¹⁸ GS, V, 277; GS, VII, 218.

¹⁹ GS, XIV/2, 650–8.

  

97

4. Simmel and the Philosophy of History Simmel’s major contribution to the historicist tradition is his Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, which was first published in 1892.²⁰ This work is a classic statement of the idealist theory of history. Applying Kantian epistemology to problems of the philosophy of history, Simmel argues that history, no less than nature, is the work of the subject who knows it.²¹ What Kant had demonstrated about physical nature in the first Kritik—that the understanding knows it only because it helps to create it—Simmel now tries to show for history. His work is therefore a criticism of what he calls “historical realism,” i.e., the theory that history is only a mirror image of a given reality. Simmel’s Probleme presents serious challenges to its readers. Apart from its often dense and elliptical style, the main difficulty is the discrepancies between its different editions.²² There are three editions: 1892, 1905, and 1907. The 1907 edition differs only slightly from that of 1905; it adds a new preface, a few notes, and some stylistic corrections. But the 1892 edition differs drastically from the last two, and to such an extent that it is virtually another book. The later editions drop many passages from the first, and they also add many; as a result, the later editions are much longer than the first. When Simmel first sat down to rewrite the work in November 1904, he found that the first edition was often too vague, and that it failed to address fundamental issues;²³ and so, as he revised, he found himself writing an almost new book. After the 1907 edition, Simmel continued to rethink issues and he eventually realized that a completely new work was necessary. But nothing ever came of these plans.

²⁰ Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1892). GSG, II, 297–421. ²¹ Simmel states this thesis most clearly in the “Vorwort” to the 1907 edition. See Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1907). GSG, IX, 229–31. ²² The account here compares the 1892 edition with the 1907 edition. The 1892 edition is in GSG, II; and the 1907 edition is in GSG, IX. The edition cited is marked by the Roman numerals for their volume numbers, i.e., II for the 1892 edition and IX for the 1907 edition. ²³ See Simmel’s November 4, 1904, letter to Rickert, GSG, IX, 424–5.

98    To understand why Simmel made such drastic revisions between editions, we only have to consider the remarkable intellectual developments since his first edition. When Simmel wrote the first edition of Probleme in 1892, the philosophy of social science was still inchoate. Simmel was writing before Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (1901), before Dilthey’s Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie (1894), and before Rickert’s Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (1896). One of the most important results of these works was the critique of psychologism and of Dilthey’s theory of the Geisteswissenschaften. In revising his work, Simmel began to take account of these developments. He wrote Rickert in November 1904 that one of the most important changes in the new edition would be “its overcoming of psychologism.”²⁴ This phrase was somewhat misleading, he admitted, because he was not abandoning psychology but developing a new conception of it. Just what this conception was, we will soon consider. Simmel’s Probleme has often been read as the work of a Dilthey disciple, as if it did little more than develop the line of thought Dilthey began in his 1883 Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften.²⁵ There are indeed some close similarities in their positions: both stress the importance of psychology for the human sciences; both are opposed to positivism; and both have a theory of explanation as internal understanding. Apart from these doctrinal affinities, it is also necessary to keep in mind that there were personal connections between the two: Simmel was Dilthey’s student, and he was dependent upon him for advancement in his academic career. Since 1882, Dilthey was Ordinarius in the Philosophy Faculty at Berlin, and in that capacity he had served on the committee for Simmel’s promotion in 1881 and for his habilitation in 1885.²⁶ It would be a mistake, however, to conflate Simmel’s academic

²⁴ See GSG, IX, 425. ²⁵ Thus Horst Jürgen Helle, Soziologie und Erkenntnistheorie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), pp. 41, 44 and Ralph Leck, Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000), pp. 64–9. ²⁶ On Dilthey’s role in these capacities, see Klaus Christian Köhnke, Der junge Simmel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 51–77. After his habilitation, Simmel began to see Dilthey as the chief obstacle to his ambitions for a professorship in Berlin. On this development, see again Köhnke, Der junge Simmel, pp. 355–79.

  

99

dependence with any intellectual dependence. Even a quick comparison between Simmel’s Probleme and Dilthey’s Einleitung reveals basic divergences. Rather than defending or developing Dilthey’s position, Simmel takes issue with it, and in at least two important respects: first, he questions the doctrine of the autonomy of history, which was vital to Dilthey; and second, he defends the philosophy of history, which Dilthey had emphatically opposed. There are two respects in which Simmel and Dilthey seem very close—their emphases on psychology and internal understanding—but these are more the result of coincidence than influence. For it was Lazarus, not Dilthey, who had convinced Simmel of the importance of psychology.²⁷ Furthermore, Dilthey had barely stated his theory of internal understanding in the Einleitung; he would develop that theory only later in the 1890s, after the publication of the first edition of Probleme. If Dilthey influenced Simmel’s Probleme in any way, it is more likely with regard to the later 1907 edition. All these differences aside, in both the 1892 and 1907 editions of Probleme Simmel begins with a Diltheyian definition of history. He too finds the subject matter of history in inner experience. History is fundamentally about the mental life of human agents. “If history is not to be a puppet play,” Simmel writes, “then it is the history of psychic events (psychischer Vorgänge)” (II, 303). All external events—be they political or social, economic or religious, legal or technical—would not interest us, or be comprehensible to us, Simmel argues, if they did not proceed from, or call forth, “movements of the soul” (Seelenbewegungen). Both the starting and end points of any account of historical events is “the character of their innerness” (Charakter der Innerlichkeit) (II, 304). The materialist theory of history does not invalidate this definition, Simmel contends, because even if mental processes are ultimately material, they remain the chief interest in history. The nature of the climate and soil on earth would interest us as much as the climate and soil on the planet Sirius if it did not have an effect on our inner life (303–4). Hunger would never set world history in motion if we did not feel it. Since Simmel thinks that history is about mental life, he stresses, like Dilthey before him, the importance of psychology for history. History ²⁷ See Simmel to Lazarus, August 4, 1880, GSG, XXII, 9.

100    turns out to be simply a form of psychology. Thus Simmel writes in the 1892 edition: “If psychology were a science of laws, the science of history would be . . . applied psychology, just as astronomy is [applied] mathematics” (II, 304). This statement appears in the 1907 edition, too; but it now undergoes an important qualification (IX, 236–7). It turns out that the historian investigates different aspects of mental life than the psychologist. The historian is more interested in the content of mental acts than the psychologist, who is especially concerned with their occurrence, i.e., “the dynamic of their coming and going.” Not that the historian is interested solely in the content of mental acts; he too, like the psychologist, studies their occurrence. More precisely, the historian straddles the purely logical and purely psychological approaches to mental life. While the logical approach considers only the content of mental acts, and while the psychological approach treats only their occurrence, the historian treats both, i.e., the content in its motion and development (IX, 236). History, Simmel explained later, has two different aspects. We can treat a historical event from the standpoint of individual agents or from the standpoint of its content (IX, 285). The history of art, for example, can be treated from the standpoint of the artists who make it or from the standpoint of style or the artworks themselves. Even good history contains both aspects, which are inextricably intertwined though logically distinct. Granted that history is about mental life, how do we understand it? Simmel’s answer is firmly in the hermeneutical tradition of Dilthey. The first condition of such understanding, Simmel writes, is that we reproduce or recreate (nachbilden) the person’s mental acts within ourselves, so that we, so to speak, “place ourselves in the soul of the person” (II, 317). We understand a sentence, for example, when the mental events of the speaker, which are expressed in certain words, arouse the same mental events in the listener. Simmel admits that this condition is rarely fully satisfied. A direct and full reproduction of the other person’s mental state happens only for statements having a theoretical or intellectual content. In these cases the individual character or experience of the speaker or writer is indifferent to the content of what is said, so that it is easier for the listener to reproduce it. It is more difficult to understand inner life or experience, however, when personality comes into play,

  

101

when its content also depends on the speaker’s intentions, desires, or feelings. We fully understand someone’s desires or feelings only when we have had similar desires or feelings ourselves (II, 318). Hence it is said that whoever has not loved cannot understand love. The loose and general language Simmel used to expound his theory in the first edition created problems for him, making the changes and clarifications necessary in later editions. In talking about the listener reproducing the mental acts of the speaker, Simmel seemed to be employing the language of the historical realist, who assumes that cognition simply mirrors its given object. To address this possible misunderstanding, Simmel stressed more in the later editions the active role of the listener in creating its object. The listener needs to apply, he explained, imagination, inference, and judgment to understand what the speaker said. More problematically, in the first edition Simmel does not make a clear distinction between mental acts and content. He writes as if understanding were a matter of reproducing a similar mental act, so that the listener simply has a psychological state similar to the speaker. This is questionable, however, because understanding someone’s speech is more a matter of reproducing the content, or what they say, rather than the mental act of saying it. Seeing his mistake, Simmel stressed in the second edition the distinction between act and content. For all his debts to the hermeneutical tradition, Simmel questions one of its most cherished assumptions: that thinking beings know themselves better than external nature. It was often held in this tradition—by Vico, Humboldt, and Dilthey—that thinking beings know one another in themselves or in their inner nature while they know nature only as an appearance. Realism seemed more plausible in the case of historical knowledge, because the object and subject of knowledge are the same in kind; the object is only another subject like myself, so that I can easily understand it. Simmel, however, disputes this assumption, because it attempts to justify a lingering element of realism in the hermeneutical tradition. Whether we know other conscious beings or external nature, the object of knowledge is not simply given to us but in need of reconstruction. In other words, the innerness of events is not read from them, as if it were an empirical datum, but it is read into them (II, 308). In the historical as in the natural world, the correspondence between

102    subject and object is made by a priori conditions of cognition (II, 324). While the mere affinity between thinking beings—the simple fact that they are generally alike—is a necessary condition of the possibility of understanding, it is not a sufficient condition, because on its own this affinity cannot explain a single determinate thought or action (II, 321). An immediate understanding between two people on the basis of their general affinity as thinking beings, Simmel says, would be something like telepathy; it would presuppose a pre-established harmony no less miraculous than that of Leibniz (II, 319). “Upon such a thin pillar [i.e., a mere generic affinity] no bridge between the I and the not-I can be built” (319). What we must recognize, Simmel insists, is that understanding another person, like all understanding, involves the intellectual activity of the understander, so that the act by which I understand recreates the content of what I understand (319). Simmel’s critique of historical realism in the 1892 edition underwent, however, an important qualification in the 1907 edition. He later had to admit that there is a greater difference between historical and natural knowledge than he originally realized. Historical knowledge differs from natural knowledge, he now realizes, because the historical object is, to some extent, already preconceptualized by the known for the knower; the consciousness the knower attempts to understand has already used concepts to make sense of its own experience (IX, 260). So Simmel now sees that historical realism is more defensible than he first thought. Although history is still not the reproduction of a simple given object, the historian’s conceptualization is only the more clear, explicit, and selfconscious form of the conceptualization contained in its object. However, having made this important concession, Simmel still insists that it does not warrant a full-blown realism. Though the material is partly preconceptualized, it is still given in a fragmentary, inchoate, and half-digested form; the historian still has to reconstruct and systematize it for himself. While the object might understand itself in its terms, the subject who understands it still has to understand it in his own terms. Simmel’s small concession to historical realism in the 1907 edition did not stop him from engaging in a sustained polemic against it. Indeed, the 1907 edition refines and elaborates the sharp critique of realism in the 1892 edition. Simmel takes Leopold von Ranke as his paradigm of

  

103

historical realism. Accordingly, some of Ranke’s most famous dicta become the target of criticism. When Ranke expressed the wish to extinguish his own ego to let the facts speak for themselves,²⁸ the very fulfillment of such a wish would have defeated his ends, Simmel argues, for if the ego were to extinguish itself there would be nothing left to comprehend the facts (II, 321). Simmel is careful to explain here that by the “ego” he does not simply mean the transcendental ego, i.e., the subject in general, as if all he were saying is that the object of knowledge must have a subject. Ranke, he rightly notes, would never have disputed this. His point against Ranke is that the historian must keep intact his own individual ego, and that is precisely through his individual characteristics that he can understand another individual. The strength and depth of the individual personality is the precondition for the strength and depth of a historical portrait, Simmel insists, because the historian can take out of his material only what he brings into it. Simmel’s emphasis on the creative role of the historian led him— ironically, just like Ranke—to stress the close affinity between history and art (II, 322–3; IX, 297–300). The historian acts like an artist not only in the style of his exposition, he writes, but also in his manner of comprehending his material. The historian has to exercise the same powers of imagination as the artist to comprehend his material; the only difference between him and the artist is that he has to restrict himself to given facts. But once the historian has taken account of these facts, he has to form them into a meaningful whole, and in doing so all his creativity has to come into play. While the artist is free in the beginning, in the first act of creation, he is a slave thereafter, because he has to follow the idea behind his inspiration. For the historian, however, it is just the opposite: he is a slave in the first act (i.e., taking account of the facts) but free thereafter. Having drawn this close analogy between art and history, Simmel introduces the category of genius, which he finds as appropriate in history as in art (II, 328–90; IX, 302). It is genius which gives the historian the power to imagine the lives of others who are very different from our own.

²⁸ Leopold Ranke, Englische Geschichte, in SW, XV, 103.

104    In the 1907 edition Simmel provides an account of the historian’s method that accentuates its artistic status. The historian’s method turns out to be more like that of the artist than the logician or psychologist. When the historian attempts to understand a particular personality or culture, he attempts to form all its disparate elements into a unity or coherent whole. The crucial question is then: What connects these elements together? The connection is not entirely logical, as if it concerned their content alone; but nor is it entirely psychological, as if it were a matter of the causal connections between them. The historian has to take into account both the logical and psychological elements; but they are still not sufficient to construct the peculiar kind of unity necessary to understand a unique historical object. What guides the historian, Simmel finds, is something like an aesthetic intuition, “a feeling of necessity” in tracing the transition from one element to another. Simmel likens this feeling of necessity to what we feel upon reading a good lyric poem. We feel that all the elements somehow belong together into a whole, even though the connection between them is neither logical nor psychological (XI, 267). It is the same feeling of necessity, Simmel suggests, that the historian follows in trying to understand a unique historical personality or epoch. Applying Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment from the Kritik der Urteilskraft, Simmel says that the unity we construct in history is communicable but not purely logical or universal; it is a synthetic unity, where the whole precedes the parts, rather than an analytic unity, where the parts precede the whole. Given that the historian, like the artist, has to recreate his object, what ensures him that it is accurate? What justifies him in attributing to another historical individual his own reconstructions, which are the creation of his own individuality? The question is inescapable for the historian, who, unlike the artist, has to claim that his portraits are literally historically true. Simmel was greatly bothered by this problem, and wrestled with it in both editions. The puzzle of historical knowledge, he wrote, is that we attribute to others something that we create within ourselves (II, 320; IX, 266). The simple solution is that what I think, feel, and desire I attribute by analogy to others on the basis of their similar words and actions. Simmel realizes, however, that this explanation works only so far (IX, 239–40, 300–1). When we understand historical

  

105

personalities, who have often lived under very different circumstances from ourselves, we cannot claim to have had similar experiences to them. Indeed, historical explanation demands an effort of imagination, so that we attempt to understand the experiences of people which we never really could have had ourselves. Such a power of imagination is the attribute of genius. But invoking the concept of genius here only throws the question back another step: For what gives the genius such a power? And with what right does he attribute his creations to others? To explain this, Simmel resorts to a remarkable biological hypothesis. We can understand experiences we have not had ourselves, he conjectures, because we have inherited them from past generations. We inherit the experience of past generations and, upon the appropriate stimulus, we remember them, so that understanding turns out to be a form of recollection, just as Plato once said (IX, 303). Simmel lays no great weight upon this theory, however, which he admits is best regarded as a fiction (IX, 304). With that concession, his account of the basis of historical understanding came to a close.

5. Nietzsche’s Historicism The date of the publication of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches,²⁹ 1878, is an important turning point in Nietzsche’s intellectual development. In many important respects this work breaks utterly with the philosophy Nietzsche expounded in his earlier works, especially that found in Der Geburt der Tragödie and Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen. Nietzsche now rejects pessimism; the dualism between thing-in-itself and appearance; the Romantic faith in art; the value of cultural unity; and the existence of a single cosmic will. The earlier works were devoted to late Romantic ideals: nationalism, aestheticism, and individualism; Menschliches Allzumenschliches, by contrast, asks for a second Enlightenment, for the revival of the opposing values: cosmopolitanism, rationalism, and universality. A more radical volte-face is hardly conceivable. ²⁹ Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Ein Buch für freie Geister (Chemnitz: E. Schmeitzner, 1878). KSA, II. All references in parentheses are to KSA.

106    But we are still not done. There is one more important item to add to the list of rejections: anti-historicism. Contrary to the passionate antihistoricism of the Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen, Nietzsche now advocates in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches a full-blown historicism. Nietzsche is famous for his critique of historicism in the second of the Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen, Nutzen und Nachtheil die Historie für das Leben. But little more than three years later he disavows that critique; though there are points of continuity, it is the points of rupture that are more dramatic and drastic. In the very first paragraph of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches Nietzsche announces his program of “historical philosophy.” The aim of historical philosophy is to trace the origins and genesis of characteristic human activities—art, morality, and religion—and to show how they have arisen from man’s primitive needs. Historical philosophy will involve a form of naturalistic explanation, one which will show how these activities are continuous with and a product of nature (§1, 22). One goal of historical philosophy will be to break down the fast and fixed opposition between concepts, as if opposites stood for self-sufficient and independent phenomena. It will show how apparent opposites (viz., mind and body, intellect and senses) are really continuous with one another. The higher mental or intellectual realm will be shown to differ not in kind but only in degree from the lower physical and physiological realm; the higher world will then be really only a sublimation of the lower world, a more organized and developed form of it (§1). It is important to be clear about the explanans of historical philosophy, about precisely what kind of history is at stake. Nietzsche refers more to natural history, the development of organisms, rather than cultural history. His explanans will be more biological than sociological, more natural than cultural. It will trace the origins of characteristic human activities not from the education of a specific culture but from the natural evolution of an organism. It will investigate the origins of ideas and activities from the “physiology and ontogeny” of organisms (§10, 30). We will show how our concepts and activities came about “gradually in the overall development of organic beings” (§16, 37). The ultimate goal here is what Nietzsche calls “an ontogeny of thought” (§§17 and 18, 38–9).

  

107

Nietzsche thinks that historical philosophy is a necessity to combat a perennial illusion: eternalizing concepts and activities, as if they were innate, natural, or eternal, when they are in fact learned, artificial, and temporal, the result of a process of education. “The congenital defect” of all philosophers, we are told, “is lack of historical sense,” thinking that a concept or activity is eternal and necessary when it is really the product of history. We tend to universalize or eternalize beyond our own contemporary historical horizon, as if our concepts and practices held for all times and places when they are really the result of a specific time and place (§2, 24). Throughout the first section of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches there is an animus against metaphysics that amounts to almost positivist zealotry. A central aim of Nietzsche’s new historical method is to dispose of the illusions of metaphysics, especially the metaphysics which once formed the basis of his Schopenhauerian worldview. For centuries, Nietzsche explains, philosophical problems had taken on the form how something can arise from its opposite, viz., the rational from the irrational, sensation from matter, logic from non-logic, contemplation from desire, altruism from egoism (§1; II, 22). Metaphysical philosophy got around this problem by denying that there is any transformation at all, and so it gave a mysterious origin to the more highly valued things. Historical philosophy, however, denies that there are such apparent opposites, and it shows how the higher opposite gradually grew out of the lower one. It shows the higher opposite to be a “sublimate” of the lower one. In his earlier works Nietzsche, true to his Schopenhauerian heritage, had been a champion of metaphysics, because it gave us a concept of the whole of things and showed us the place of man in creation; he valued metaphysics over the method of the natural sciences, which could give us knowledge only of the parts of nature. Now, however, Nietzsche is suspicious of the methods of metaphysics, which rely on vague and unproven intuitions, and he advocates the methods of the natural sciences, which give us more reliable results because they are the product of careful investigation and exact reasoning. It is a mark of higher culture, Nietzsche now writes, to value small inconspicuous facts, which have been found by a strict method, over the vague generalities of the “metaphysical and aesthetic ages” (§3, 25).

108    Relying on the first section of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, we get a very different version of historicism than that of Dilthey and Simmel. They were aiming at a form of historical explanation different in kind from that of the natural sciences, but Nietzsche seems eager to establish that his form of historical explanation is similar in kind to that of the natural sciences. Thus he tells us that historical philosophy uses a method “not distinct from that used in the natural sciences” (§1; II, 22). It will show how characteristic human activities arise from “the physiology and the developmental history of organisms” (§10; II, 30). Such physiology and history, it is implied, will be the subjects of natural science. Although Nietzsche never abandoned his program of historical philosophy—it will be the basis of his genealogy of morals even in his late philosophy—he did begin to have doubts about the ideology of natural science. The critical methods that Nietzsche once turned against metaphysics and religion he eventually turned against the ideology of science itself. This is apparent from Nietzsche’s critique of two of the fundamental articles of faith of positivism: the belief in facts and the belief in laws. Rather than facts and laws, we learn from the Nachlaβ that there are only interpretations. Hence Nietzsche writes: “Against positivism, which wants to stick to the phenomena and [declares] ‘There are only facts,’ I would say: no, facts is exactly what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot determine any fact ‘in itself ’; perhaps it is nonsense even to want one.”³⁰ A fact, Nietzsche now suggests, is simply a hypostasized interpretation, a concept which we regard as a thing. In a similar fashion, Nietzsche questions the concept of causality; just as there is no such thing as a fact in itself, so there is no single cause of an event. The concept of a cause is a reification of our own habits of expectation; because we have always seen one event follow another, we assume that it must follow the other, even though we cannot find any empirical evidence for such a connection. And so Nietzsche writes: “Necessity is not a fact but an interpretation.”³¹

³⁰ Nachgelassene Fragmente, KSA, XII, 315. ³¹ Nachgelassene Fragmente, KSA, XII, 383.

  

109

Nietzsche’s move away from explanation to interpretation is puzzling because there is very little in the published works to prepare us for this.³² Where does this idea of interpretation in Nietzsche come from? In the case of Dilthey we can trace its origins to Schleiermacher; but Nietzsche was no student of Schleiermacher; furthermore, as we have seen, he was an outsider to the circles in Berlin which discussed hermeneutics (Boeckh and Droysen). Where, then, did Nietzsche get this idea? Of course, he would have been familiar with the concept of interpretation from his background in classical philology; but the understanding of knowledge in terms of interpretation, the favoring of interpretation over explanation, goes beyond anything he could have acquired from classical studies. The origin of the idea in Nietzsche, I would suggest, comes from an all too familiar source: Schopenhauer. To understand how this can be, we need to return, if only for a moment, to Schopenhauer himself. In several passages of the Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung Schopenhauer considers the important question of how we know the thing-in-itself. Kant considered knowledge of it to be impossible; but Schopenhauer, whose entire philosophy is a long disquisition on the thing-in-itself, regards it as eminently possible. The source of Schopenhauer’s confidence lies in his reinterpretation of the idea of the thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer explains, is not an ens extra mundanum, a transcendent entity lying behind or beyond appearances. Rather, it is “that which appears in appearances” (das in ihr [die Erscheinung] Erscheinende).³³ It is the what that appears as opposed to the how, when, and where.³⁴ In other words, it is not the form but the content of appearance; while the form consists in the relations between things, the content consists in the inner essence or intrinsic nature of appearances themselves. All Kant’s objections against knowledge of things-in-themselves assumed that it is limited to the forms of appearances; but that left open the question how we know the content. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that we cannot transcend the sphere ³² There are two references to the concept of interpretation (Interpretation, Auslegung) in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, §§353 and 374, KSA, III, 589, 626–7, though they offer little in the way of a general understanding. ³³ WWV, I, 379, §53; and WWV, II, 231, chapter 17. ³⁴ WWV, I, 185, 187, §24.

110    of experience to acquire knowledge of something which lies behind or beyond it; but he insisted that the thing-in-itself does not lie beyond or behind appearances; it lies within appearances, as their content rather than their form. The question still remains: How do we have knowledge of the essence or content of appearances? Schopenhauer is very vague about this, dropping only hints and suggestions here and there, but the little he does say is very revealing. The method lies in what he calls the interpretation (Deutung) or explication (Auslegung) of appearances. The metaphysics Schopenhauer recommends does not engage in conceptual analysis, still less in causal explanation, which is limited to knowledge of the form of appearances. Rather, its task is “to decipher” appearances, as if they were texts or someone speaking to us.³⁵ The aim of the metaphysician is to know “the meaning” (die Bedeutung) of appearances, not the laws that govern them. What Schopenhauer needed to explain the method of metaphysics is an account of the logic of interpretation, a theory of how to understand meaning or, in more modern terms, a hermeneutics. However, except in these sketchy ways, he never really provided this. It fell to the task of this progeny to develop such a theory. Nietzsche was among these progeny. He did not need a hermeneutics to know the thing-in-itself; he had already rejected that concept in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. But the idea that hermeneutics is the method to understand appearances could well have remained with him. At least the few passages where Nietzsche explains his method of interpretation do so along Schopenhauerian lines. Schopenhauer distinguished between explaining something according to the principle of sufficient reason and interpreting or deciphering its meaning. Nietzsche follows a similar distinction in Jenseits von Gut und Böse where he contrasts “explanation of the world” (Welt-Erklärung) with “interpretation of the world” (Welt-Auslegung).³⁶

³⁵ WWV, I, 257, §34 and I, 270, §36. ³⁶ Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §14; KSA, V, 28. See the analogous distinction between nachweisen and erklären in Morgenröte, 428; KSA, III, 264. Nachweisen is to show, identify, or ascertain a thing, to know what it is; erklären means to explain it, to show the general law under which it falls. The distinction between interpretation and explanation is especially evident in the notebooks for “Herbst 1885–Herbst 1886,” KSA, XII, 100, 101, 104.

  

111

Whatever the origin of Nietzsche’s hermeneutics, it is clear that around the mid 1880s he had wholeheartedly embraced the method.³⁷ Hermeneutics was at the very heart of his perspectivalism, which would play a central role in his later epistemology. All of which goes to show how vital hermeneutics was to the movement called Lebensphilosophie.

³⁷ On the importance of hermeneutics for Nietzsche’s methodology, see Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 6–8.

V Historicism and Relativism 1. The Problem of Relativism One of the great challenges of Lebensphilosophie, at least in the eyes of its contemporaries, was its moral and cultural relativism. This relativism had two sources. One was the doctrine of immanence. If there were no God, or at least no knowable one, then there could not be a transcendent or religious sanction for moral principles or cultural values. All such principles and values could have at best only an earthly or human sanction. The other source of relativism was historicism. If morality depends on historical and cultural context, and if these contexts differ, and are indeed incommensurable, then there is no universal morality. While the principle of immanence undermines transcendent or religious sanctions, historicism sabotages even an earthly or human one. In either case, it cannot have a universal morality, whether based on God or humanity. It is one of the most remarkable features of Lebensphilosophie that its chief protagonists admitted this relativism. This admission did not come easily or immediately, but it did come eventually and unambiguously. Although Nietzsche was an atheist already in the 1860s, he still clung to a doctrine of natural law in the 1870s, according to which the purpose of nature was the creation of the highest human exemplars; but, by the 1880s, he had abandoned all traces of natural law, and he fully and finally accepted, and even celebrated, cultural and moral diversity. For his part, Dilthey was an agnostic, refusing to accept any transcendent origin of morals; and he also flatly rejected any attempt to base ethics upon natural law. Although he brusquely denied that his historicism led to relativism, he had great difficulty in showing how it could provide a universal morality; and he ended out confessing that he had no answer to the problem of relativism, which he left for future generations to solve. Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0006

  

113

Finally, Simmel taught that the tragedy of modern society was its irresolvable conflict of values, which was the inevitable result of its pluralistic structure and heterogeneous population. There was no single principle of ethics, no single system of morals, that sanctions all the values of the many groups in modern civil society. The modern individual had to live with this conflict and resign himself to its irresolvability. Relativism in the late nineteenth century had its source, in part, in the problems of moral philosophy. Thinkers in the two main traditions, Kant’s deontological ethics and Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism, had abandoned their attempts to find a universal criterion of morality, a single principle by which they could derive all our specific moral obligations. Ethics had fallen into an aporia, where no major tradition could see past the objections against it. Kant’s deontological ethics, for all its rigor and sophistication, was dismissed as vacuous because the categorical imperative appeared empty, capable of sanctioning all manner of maxims. Its criterion of universalizability was regarded as too lenient because almost any maxim, even immoral ones, could be universalized. Bentham’s and Mill’s principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number seemed to enthrone the “tyranny of the majority” and to violate the rights of minorities; its basic concept of happiness was also too abstract and schematic to yield anything like a concrete morality. All the standard objections against these moral philosophies were well known by the mid-nineteenth century; no one believed that a mere reformulation of them would pass muster against their many critics. Another important historical development leading toward the relativism of the nineteenth century was the decline of the natural law tradition. All throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth century this tradition had prospered—there were chairs of natural law in virtually every major university in Europe—and it had become an accepted part of moral philosophy. The main opponent of this tradition was moral skepticism—and its corollary, relativism—which were scorned as antisocial doctrines. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the natural law tradition was collapsing. When chairs for natural law fell empty, they either were not filled or were replaced by professors of positive law. The first troubling signs came early in the eighteenth century. When Johann Jakob Moser founded the law faculty at the University of Göttingen in

114    the 1740s, he left out natural law because he found it impractical and contentious. This trend continued in the early nineteenth century. When Friedrich Savigny designed the law curriculum in Berlin in 1810, he too omitted natural law, which he regarded as useless for legal training. Banished from the University of Berlin, the most prestigious university in Germany, natural law suffered a mortal blow to its prestige. What had happened? Why did natural law, after more than a century of dominance, decline so dramatically? It was not from the onslaught of its enemies, nor from any victory of moral skepticism. No one put forward the skeptical case with more vigor than Montaigne; but that was in 1580 in his Apologie for Raymond Sebond, long before the rise of the natural law tradition. Rather, the causes for its decline were internecine, the failure of natural law theorists to find any universally agreed formulation of natural law. The principles of natural law were supposed to be clear and self-evident; but, if so, why had no one agreed on a simple and straightforward definition of them? Montaigne asked that in 1580; and there was still, in the mid nineteenth century, no answer. There was only controversy and contention. How, on that basis, could one fund chairs of natural law? The aporias in moral philosophy, and the decline of the natural law tradition, left a vast vacuum in nineteenth-century ethics, one so large that it could be filled only by relativism. These factors help to explain why Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel were so ready to accept relativism by the 1880s, and why they offered virtually no resistance against it; they simply had no alternative to it, nothing to play against it. It is important to see, however, that there was another reason for their willing surrender to relativism, one rarely made explicit but undeniably present all the same. Ultimately, they did not oppose relativism but welcomed it, because it was implicit in their ethics of individuality. If each individual alone should be autonomous, if he or she should be the chief lawgiver and authority in life, then one should expect a profusion of moral codes, indeed as many as there are individuals. One could reply, of course, that an individualist ethics is still universal because it demands the consent of everyone alike. But this is a very different kind of universality from that demanded by traditional ethics: it does not yield a uniform moral code, universal principles which everyone alike will follow for the same

  

115

reasons. The truth of the matter is that relativism was the inevitable consequence of the extreme individualism of Lebensphilosophie. Relativism was not a scandal but a corollary.

2. Nietzsche’s Relativism The classic text of Nietzsche that is taken as an expression of his cultural and moral relativism is his parable “Von tausend und Einem Ziele” from Also sprach Zarathustra.¹ Zarathustra tells us that he has seen many lands and many peoples in his life, and that they have shown him that there are many goods and many evils (74). This seems to be nothing more than a simple observation about cultural diversity; but Zarathustra gives us an explanation why there are so many views of good and evil. “No people could live if it did not first value something; but if it wants to preserve itself, it cannot value things in the same way as its neighbors” (74). Nietzsche implies here that different peoples have different values because they live in different circumstances; their values are a response to the circumstances in which they live; and because these circumstances differ, so do their values. The need to respond to circumstances, Nietzsche further implies, comes from the need for survival. A people which does not adapt to circumstances will not survive. It is sometimes said that Nietzsche cannot be a relativist because he finds one universal value among all people: the will to power. “Life itself is will to power,” as Nietzsche simply puts it in Jenseits von Gut und Böse.² But if life itself is will to power, then the drive is universal, common to all living creatures. We then have a universal or absolute criterion of value: a policy, law, or rule, in any culture and at any time, is good or bad according to the degree it permits or prohibits the expression of the will to power. It is remarkable, however, that Nietzsche introduces his concept of the will to power in the very same passage of Zarathustra where he states the

¹ “Von tausend und Einem Ziele,” Also sprach Zarathustra, KSA, IV, 74–6. Cf. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, KSA, III, 474–5, §116. ² Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §13, KSA, V, 27.

116    1,001 goals. Each people has a tablet of values hanging above it, Zarathustra says, which is also “the voice of its will to power” (74). Apparently, Nietzsche sees no contradiction between having an absolute standard of value—the will to power—and a plurality of different values. The apparent contradiction disappears once we recognize that all these different values are simply different expressions or manifestations of one and the same basic drive, the will to power. Because the will to power has to adapt to very different circumstances, there are different expressions or manifestations of it. It is clear from this passage alone that Nietzsche is neither relativist nor absolutist, or, better yet, he is both at the same time. That Nietzsche intended to adopt a position somewhere between relativism and absolutism emerges from a paragraph in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft where he criticizes previous histories of morality.³ These histories are usually obedient to one specific morality, and assume that it alone is correct, Nietzsche says. This is especially the case with Christian histories which assume that the essence of morality—for all peoples at all times and places—consists in self-sacrifice, sympathy, and pity. But there also relativist histories which note all the different moralities in different times and places, and conclude from this that no morality is binding. So there is a dilemma between holding one form of morality or no form at all. Nietzsche thinks that both these extreme views are childish (Kindereien). Exactly what his middle position is Nietzsche does not specify, but it would seem to be what he has suggested in Also sprach Zarathustra: namely, that there is one absolute value (power) which is realized in different ways in different places and times. Nietzsche’s position on morality should be carefully distinguished from that of someone even more radical than himself: his anarchist predecessor Max Stirner. In 1844 Stirner published an anarchist manifesto, Das Ich und sein Eigenthum, which became notorious for its celebration of the omnipotence of the individual will.⁴ Like Nietzsche, Stirner wanted to expose the prejudices of morality and to liberate the ³ Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, §345; KSA, III, 578–9. ⁴ Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (Leipzig: Wigand, 1844). Reprinted Stuttgart, Reclam, 1972. Arthur Drews, one of the few scholars to treat Nietzsche’s relationship to Stirner, argues that there is no evidence from his writings that Nietzsche knew Stirner. See his Nietzsches Philosophie (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1904), p. 405n.

  

117

individual from all constraints. He began from Kantian premises: that the source of all moral value came from the will, that autonomy of the will is the precondition of all moral principles. But Stirner does not think that the will has any constraints beyond the will of the individual alone because reason is a purely formal power having no content; in other words, barring self-contradiction, we can will anything as a universal law. This ultimately leads to a complete anarchism because whatever I will is valid simply because I will it. Unlike Stirner, Nietzsche abhors anarchism. He sees better than Stirner the need for authority: one will must rule over another; that will is the one with most power, the one which forces all other wills to obey it. Stirner wants to expose and debunk all authority but he does not acknowledge or live up to the consequences of this: a perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes. The whole issue of the relativity of value first arose for Nietzsche in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Here the decisive factor in forming values is historical change. Cultural diversity is not the result of different values at the same time but of different values at different times. Nietzsche’s program of “historical philosophy” made him say that all values are the product of history, that they are the result of a process of becoming of a specific people at a specific time. The belief that certain values are eternal or universal came from ignoring history, from generalizing beyond one’s own age, as if what has been valuable for us now has been valuable for all peoples at all times. All philosophers make the same basic mistake, Nietzsche warns us. They assume that man is an aeterna veritas, forever the same in time, although everything one says about him is true only for a limited time. “Lack of historical sense is the sin of all philosophers” (§2; II, 24). When Nietzsche wrote the first volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches in 1874 he had not yet formulated his doctrine of the will-to-power, so that the more absolute and universal side of his morals had not yet come into play. All that Nietzsche could see behind the flux of history was a change of morals with no enduring or permanent element. This made him uneasy, which becomes clear in §§22–5 of Part I. An essential disadvantage of the deconstruction of the pretense to eternity, he writes, is that one no longer tries to build enduring institutions which last for generations (§22, 43). One fixes his eyes only on his

118    own age, all too aware that nothing will last beyond it; one wants to enjoy the fruit of the trees one has planted, having no intention to plant trees for future generations. Nowadays, in our historical age, we can see all the different cultures, so that we no longer feel especially bound to our own. We can see that all of them, including our own, has no special claim to our loyalty, that none of them can demand our allegiance (§23, 44). We become confused and suffer from “eternal unrest, the interflowing of people, the polyphony of strivings.” We are now living in what Nietzsche calls “the age of comparison” where, thanks to history, our horizon has been so widened that we can compare our culture to others. In the face of all this change and relativity, Nietzsche refuses to surrender to pessimism. He urges us not to give up hope and to rise to the challenge of the new age. The new culture that will come after us, he writes, will benefit from the wider vision of the age of comparison. Even if there is no providence, mankind should compensate for this by setting itself ecumenical goals (§25, 46). What we especially need for this new coming of age is knowledge of “the conditions of culture,” so that we can have a scientific criterion for ecumenical goals. Nietzsche faced the issue of relativism in the epistemological no less than the moral sphere. Already in his 1873 essay “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne”⁵ he had raised the question of the meaning of truth and came to skeptical conclusions. We cannot understand truth as the correspondence of a representation with an object where the object exists independently of the representation, he argues, for the simple reason that we cannot identify such an object as it exists apart from any representation; we can identify and define it only through some representations. All our understanding of the world is anthropomorphic, Nietzsche further contends, because we understand it only relative to ourselves, to our needs and desires, but not as it is in itself (879, 883). We think that our conceptual schemes correspond to things themselves only because we reify their concepts, thinking that they are the things themselves. But the words by which we speak and think about things never exactly correspond with the things themselves: they are abstractions standing for innumerable particulars of the same kind ⁵ KSA, I, 873–90.

  

119

rather than any particular. Words treat unique and singular things as if they were perfectly alike when all of them are really different from one another (879–80). These points alone do not imply relativism because it could still be the case that all humans use the same concepts to understand the world; but Nietzsche expounds other theses in this essay that bring him closer to relativism. He understands the intellect not as an instrument for knowing the truth but as “a means for the preservation of the individual” (876); he thus implies that the criterion of truth is pragmatic, that truth is what ensures my ends rather than any correspondence of representations with things. Since these ends differ between cultures and epochs, with time and place, there will be no single universally acceptable criterion of truth. Nietzsche also interprets truth in social terms, as “a uniformly valid and obligatory designation of things,” so that “the legislation of language” provides “the first laws of truth” (877). Since these conventions differ from one culture to the next, there would also be no single universally valid criterion of truth. Finally, Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that “the correct perception [of an object]”—i.e., “the adequate expression of an object in the subject”—is “a contradictory nonentity,” because “between two such heterogeneous spheres as the subject and object there is no causality, no correctness, no expression but at best an aesthetic relation,” which consists in “a suggestive translation, a hesitant rendering in a completely alien language” (884). Nietzsche’s relativism was much more pronounced and explicit in the mid 1880s after the development of his hermeneutics. The thesis that knowledge is interpretation opened the door for a more radical relativism, which appears first in the notebooks of the 1880s. Now we learn about “the interpretive character of all events,” which means that there is no such thing as the “event in itself”; what happens should be understood as a “group of appearances selected and summarized by an interpretative being.”⁶ Just as the same text permits innumerable interpretations, so there is no such thing as a correct interpretation.⁷ “That things have a constitution in themselves, independent of their interpretation and subjectivity,” Nietzsche writes, “is a completely idle hypothesis.”⁸ It is not ⁶ KSA, XII, 98.

⁷ KSA, XII, 39.

⁸ KSA, XII, 353.

120    that Nietzsche thinks that the real world permits a variety of interpretations; it is that this real world does not exist at all. “It is of cardinal importance that the true world is abolished. It is the doubter and degrader of the world that we are. It was the most dangerous assassination of life.”⁹ Just as in the case of morality, Nietzsche sees the will to power behind interpretation. We have the interpretations we do because they promote our will to power, because through them we can dominate and control our world. Nietzsche states that this theme has run through all his writings: That the worth of the world lies in our interpretations . . . that the previous interpretations are perspectival evaluations, by means of which we receive a growth of power, that every elevation of man brings the overcoming of more narrow interpretations, that every strengthening and increase of power opens new perspective and new horizons— this appears throughout my writings.¹⁰

The introduction of the will to power seems to suggest that there is some absolute standard of truth after all. Just as the good is what increases my will to power, so the truth will be what increases it. Yet even if we adopt this standard, it still does not guarantee universality, that all people will find the same ideas true, because it might be that what increases the power of one decreases the power of another. Everyone might use the same standard, but they can still differ in what they find to satisfy it.

3. Dilthey and the Problem of Relativism For more than a century now, there has been a dispute about Wilhelm Dilthey’s relativism. For some scholars, Dilthey is the outstanding spokesman of modern relativism; he not only recognized but celebrated

⁹ KSA, XIII, 281.

¹⁰ KSA, XII, 114.

  

121

the relativism of the modern world.¹¹ For other scholars, however, Dilthey is the paramount opponent of relativism.¹² His intention was not to support but to refute it. It is possible to find evidence for both viewpoints, leaving it up to the hapless bystander to sort out the evidence pro et con. To find one’s way through this dispute, it is important to distinguish two questions. There is the historical question whether Dilthey, as a matter of fact, affirmed or denied relativism. There is also the logical question whether Dilthey’s doctrines are relativist by implication, no matter what he actually wrote about relativism. Regarding the historical question, there can be no doubt that Dilthey was not a relativist. For he never explicitly expounded or defended relativism; indeed, he bristled at the very suggestion that he was guilty of relativism. When Husserl insinuated that Dilthey’s historicism led to skepticism and relativism,¹³ Dilthey was insulted, refusing to understand how anyone could even think him guilty of either.¹⁴ Regarding the logical question, matters are more complicated. Here a strong case can be made that, despite his protests to the contrary, Dilthey’s doctrines are relativist by implication. The more closely one examines these doctrines, the more difficult it becomes to find any basis for the universal validity of moral principles or philosophical worldviews. Although Dilthey himself sought to avoid relativism, the more he struggled with it the more he ensnared himself in it. The problem of relativism originally arose from Dilthey’s attempt to provide a foundation for the Geisteswissenschaften or human sciences.

¹¹ See, for example, Georg Lukács, Zerstörung der Vernunft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962), p. 380; Wallace Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 217; William Kluback, Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), p. 106; Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 167; H.A. Hodges, Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction (New York: Fertig, 1969), p. 33; and H.P. Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), p. 48. ¹² See Michael Ermath, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 334–8; Theodor Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Dilthey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 122–48; Otto Bollnow, Dilthey: Eine Einführung in seine Philosophie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1936), pp. 195–7; and Georg Misch, “Vorbericht des Herausgebers,” in GS, V, cx–cxvii. ¹³ See Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos I (1911), 323. ¹⁴ See Dilthey to Husserl, June 29, 1911, in “Der Briefwechsel Dilthey-Husserl,” Man and World I (1968), p. 434.

122    Dilthey believed that this foundation would have to lie in experience, just as it does for the natural sciences. But he also believed that there is an important difference between the experience of the natural sciences and that of the human sciences. The natural sciences deal with experience in the sense of what we externally perceive or observe; their subject is inanimate nature, and so they focus entirely on what is perceivable outside us. The human sciences, however, deal with experience in a much broader sense: they are concerned with not only what we see or hear but also with what we feel, desire, or will. Since their concern is human experience, they have to include everything relevant to the life of a human being, which include its emotions, desires, actions, aspirations, frustrations, etc. This experience is formed not only by thinking about the world but also by acting upon it. Dilthey called this broader sense of experience “lived experience” or Erlebnis, which he regarded as the proper subject of the human sciences. There were two salient features of Dilthey’s conception of lived experience. First, it was holistic. In other words, it was formed not only by the thinking but also by the acting and willing sides of a human being. The subject did not stand apart from its world and contemplate it but he or she engaged with it and tried to change it. Second, lived experience was also historical. It took place in a definite cultural context and in a specific place and time in history. Since its content was determined by its historical and cultural circumstances, each lived experience was unique and individual. Dilthey argues for the historicity of lived experience first and foremost because it had to provide evidence for the human sciences. Psychological events and contents, insofar as they are a subject of a science, have to be verifiable, appearing in public space. If they are to be verifiable, then they have to be objectifiable, giving signs of themselves in visible and audible terms. In other words, they need some expression in word or deed. Hence Dilthey made expression central to the concepts of the human sciences.¹⁵ The relation between a mental act or content and its expression was not separable or contingent—as if one could occur without the other— because we identify the act or content through its expression in word ¹⁵ See Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in die Geisteswissenschaften, GS, VIII, 191–220.

  

123

and deed. Since these words and deeds have to be concrete and individual, since they too occur at a specific time and place, and in a specific cultural context, they too are historical. Although he was unaware of it, and although he would refuse to admit it, Dilthey’s conception of lived experience was already pushing his thinking in a relativistic direction. There could not be a general theory of lived experience which held in all cultures, because lived experience was determined by the specific culture in which it took place; there were only incommensurable lived experiences, each of them unique and incomparable. For similar reasons, there could not be a general history of art, religion, or law; but there could be only a national or local history of art, religion, or law. Any generalization beyond a specific culture and epoch would be simply an illicit abstraction. It was for this reason that Dilthey was extremely skeptical of the philosophy of history.¹⁶ This species of philosophy adopted a world or global perspective which could talk only in terms of generalities which had little basis in experience. On the same grounds, Dilthey was critical of the natural law tradition.¹⁷ This tradition attempted to find universal moral principles which held for all peoples and places; it would attempt to base these principles upon its conception of a permanent human nature, which was allegedly the same everywhere. But Dilthey questioned that there was any such human nature. What determined the needs and desires of a human being was the specific culture of which it was a part. In his later years Dilthey began to worry about the problem of relativism and proposed various solutions to it. His own attempts to solve the problem worked on the assumption that he could find a solution only within history itself. If history inflicts the wound, he often wrote, then it must also heal it.¹⁸ This statement reflects Dilthey’s belief that the transcendental approach of the neo-Kantians could not solve the problem of relativism. Neo-Kantians like Windelband and Rickert thought that they could find an a priori standard to judge all

¹⁶ See Über das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat, GS, V, 47–8; and Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, GS, I, 93–104. ¹⁷ See Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, GS, I, 31, 79. ¹⁸ GS, VIII, 10, 12, 222.

124    the different worldviews and cultures of the past; because it was not founded on historical evidence, the standard would be immune from all the changes of history. Dilthey, however, questioned the belief that there could be such an a priori standard: the a priori was purely formal and empty; any content it had would ultimately have to be derived from history; hence the apparently universal standard would be nothing more than an illicit generalization from its own time. But if the a priori standpoint were bogus, one would have to take an a posteriori one, which meant taking a closer look at history itself. Dilthey first enacts this strategy in some undated manuscripts entitled “Das geschichtliche Bewusstsein und die Weltanschauungen.”¹⁹ Here he formulates the problem of relativism in very clear terms. There is “an antinomy,” he writes, between “historical consciousness” and “the claim to universal validity” (6). On the one hand, historical consciousness shows that the variability of human existence gives rise to variability in ways of thinking; it reveals that changes in culture bring corresponding changes in its philosophy, religion, and morality. On the other hand, however, each philosophy, religion, and morality makes a claim to universal validity; it holds that it is true not only for its own time and place but for any time and place; it thus attempts to transcend its own cultural horizon. The problem is then how to reconcile the claim to universal validity of a philosophy, religion, and morality with the limited historical conditions of its genesis. As Dilthey puts it: “What is conditioned in its historical relations should also be relative in its value or validity (Wert)” (6). Dilthey wants to escape the depressing conclusion: “World history as world judgment shows how each metaphysical system turns out to be relative, transitory, perishable” (12). How is it possible to escape the antinomy? Dilthey first proposes a kind of comparative approach. We show how each worldview embodied in a culture expresses life under its specific circumstances (8). Each worldview is true because it is the appropriate response of life to its circumstances. The contradiction between worldviews arises only because of hypostasis (Verselbständigung), i.e., when one worldview attempts to transcend its specific conditions by a claim to universal ¹⁹ GS, VIII, 3–71. The first three sections are especially relevant.

  

125

validity. It disappears as soon as we realize that the different worldviews are just different responses of life to different conditions. It is difficult to see how this proposal solves the problem. It resolves the contradiction between worldviews only by forfeiting the claim to universal validity. Dilthey simply relativizes the validity of each worldview to its specific circumstances, showing it to be a valid response to life under these conditions. When he rejects the hypostasis of a worldview he intends to criticize the metaphysical tradition, whose main fallacy, Kant taught, was hypostasis; but the critique goes too far because it applies to any claim to universal validity. The core of absolute truth throughout all these changes is meant to be the concept of life; but that concept is too general and abstract when it is separated from all its specific circumstances. In any case, Dilthey’s thesis that all different worldviews are functions of a single enduring life would be small consolation for the philosopher who still clings to the claim of universal validity for his specific worldview. Dilthey discusses the problem of relativism from a different angle in his 1910 Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften.²⁰ He first sketches a vague metaphoric solution: though each culture has its center in itself, all cultures are structurally related to the whole of history where each part plays a necessary role (138). They are all, as it were, circles within a wider circle. We avoid the problem of relativism, then, if we show how each culture plays a different but necessary role in the realization of the ends of world history. This solution allows cultures to have incompatible and incommensurable values; but they are still valid as necessary stepping stones in the development of the whole. In subsequent sections of the Aufbau Dilthey proceeds to argue for the possibility of a philosophy of history. The task of the historian, he now writes, is to place values and goals in their broader historical contexts: to see them as epochs in world history (155). A future philosophy of world history will show how, amid all the differences between cultures, there is still system and order. Dilthey now invokes the idea of “the meaning of history,” which consists in the common patterns and structures behind world history (172, 185). Behind each epoch and culture there lies a ²⁰ GS, VII, 79–188.

126    characteristic idea, its specific law of development (164, 185). The meaning of history, Dilthey implies, will be that idea behind world history as a whole. Yet Dilthey’s forays into the philosophy of history in the Aufbau were a sign of his desperation. For he was now attempting to revive a strategy that he once decidedly rejected. In his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften he had argued vigorously against the possibility of the philosophy of history.²¹ The attempt to find meaning in world history, he claimed, is as extravagant as the dreams of the alchemists. The problems with the philosophy of history are legion: there is no point in looking for general patterns in history because all we know about history is confined to a few of its parts; there is no justification for its teleological perspective which attributes goals to whole epochs; the philosophy of history has its source in religion, a motivation no longer suitable to the modern age, and so on. There is nothing in the proposal for world history in the Aufbau that meets any of these objections. Given all these difficulties, it is necessary to agree with those who hold that Dilthey had not avoided relativism.²² If he was not guilty of relativism by intention, he was so by implication. Though he struggled mightily to escape relativism, he failed to do so, and his failures only seemed to demonstrate its powers and dangers. If he rightly saw through the weakness of the Kantian a priori strategy, his own historical strategy was no viable alternative. The shortcomings of his own position did not escape him. In his famous 1903 seventieth birthday address, he virtually admitted that he had not solved the problem, which he now bequeathed upon a future generation. He wrote in a melancholy assessment of his whole career: I undertook an investigation into the nature and conditions of historical consciousness—a critique of historical reason. In pursuing this task ²¹ GS, I, 86–104. ²² See, for example, Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), pp. 133–44; Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 169–85; Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York: Knopf, 1958), p. 199; and Franco Bianco, “Dilthey und das Problem des Relativismus,” in Dilthey und die Philosophie der Gegenwart, ed. Ernst Orth (Freiburg: Alber, 1985), pp. 211–29.

  

127

I ran into the most general of problems: an irresolvable contradiction arose when one follows historical consciousness to its final consequences. The final word of the historical worldview is the finitude of every historical phenomenon—whether it is a religion, an ideal or a philosophical system—and hence the relativity of every kind of human view of the whole of things. On the other hand, there arises the need for universally valid cognition in thinking and in the striving of philosophy. But where are the means of overcoming this anarchy of convictions that threatens to break in upon us? I have worked all my life on the resolution of the problems which connect, in a long chain, with this one. I see the goal. If I fall by the wayside, I hope that all my younger colleagues, my students, will follow it to the end.²³

4. Simmel and the Conflict of Values One of the milestones of the German historicist tradition is Georg Simmel’s Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, which was first published in two volumes from February 1892 to October 1893.²⁴ Simmel’s work is a systematic historicist ethics, an attempt to apply historicist methods to the whole domain of ethical concepts. Simmel calls his method the “psychological-historical” or “socio-historical” because it would trace the historical and psychological origins of ethical concepts and explain them by their social function. Of course, Simmel’s work was not the first to apply the historical method to ethics. There were some notable precedents. One was Moritz Lazarus’s “Über den Ursprung der Sitten,”²⁵ whose influence on Simmel is apparent everywhere. Others were Nietzsche’s 1878 Menschliches Allzumenschliches and 1887 Zur Geneologie der Moral, two works

²³ GS, V, 9. ²⁴ Georg Simmel, Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft (Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz, 1892–3). GSG, III–IV. All references in parentheses are to the GSG. ²⁵ Moritz Lazarus, “Ueber den Ursprung der Sitten,” Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft I (1860), 437–77.

128    which Simmel had apparently absorbed.²⁶ But none of these precedents are as broad and systematic as Simmel’s work, which covered the whole range of ethical topics, and which was much more philosophical in its treatment of them. One of the most interesting aspects of Simmel’s Einleitung is that it contains an explicit defense of a complete ethical relativism. Though Simmel would call his doctrine “relativism” only much later,²⁷ it is fully formed in all but name in his early work. We know how important relativism was for Simmel and his book from his December 18, 1891 letter to Wilhelm Hertz, his publisher, for there we are told about the purpose of the work: This work is directed against the validity of universal concepts and principles, with which ethical systematics usually works. Since it shows, by means of psychological and sociological experience, the equivocation and empty formalism of these concepts and principles, it forms the critical foundation for the conformity of moral science with the demands of modern science.²⁸

Sure enough, in the remarkable final chapter of the Einleitung,²⁹ Simmel argues that the modern world is characterized by a tragic and irresolvable conflict of values. These opposing values arise from the great complexity of modern society, which consists in a pluralistic structure of many different groups. The different interests, histories, and ethnic compositions of these groups inevitably give rise to different values. There is no single principle of ethics—such as the principle of utility of Bentham and Mill or the categorical imperative of Kant—that can resolve the opposition of values according to a rational or universal formula. It is the tragedy of the modern individual, Simmel thinks, that he internalizes

²⁶ Simmel makes no explicit mention of Nietzsche’s works. In chapter 2, however, he adopts Nietzsche’s thesis in Zur Geneologie der Moral that the early words for moral excellence designated the rich, beautiful, and fortunate. See GSG, III, 99. Simmel will later write extensively on Nietzsche in his 1910 Schopenhauer und Nietzsche. ²⁷ See Philosophie des Geldes (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900). GSG, VI, 117–18. ²⁸ See GSG, XXII, 56. ²⁹ See Einleitung, “Siebentes Kapitel: Einheit und Widerstreit der Zwecke,” GSG, IV, 284–389.

  

129

this conflict, suffers from it and struggles to resolve it, though all his efforts are in vain. Simmel comes to his relativism not through anthropological observation of the many cultures on earth, still less through a historical study of cultural change. Sociological analysis of modern social structure does play a role, but even this is not decisive or conclusive. Rather, Simmel takes the slow and high road: the philosophical investigation of the foundation of ethics. What he finds through this investigation is that ethical principles cannot be justified by reason or natural law, and that their ultimate source lies in the will, which knows no intrinsic limits. Following this philosophical approach, the Einleitung begins with an analysis of the most basic ethical concept: “ought,” or Sollen. Simmel maintains that the ought is indefinable, that it indicates nothing more than an indemonstrable feeling, the feeling of constraint that we should like, approve, or do something (III, 22). The ought is not therefore to be found in the content of any representations; rather, it is something that we add to them. From ought we cannot derive any content; and from no content can we derive an ought (23–4). Hence Simmel lays down a firm distinction between “ought” and “is,” the normative and the factual, where the ought is compatible with any possible state of affairs. For Simmel, like Hume, there is nothing logically absurd in preferring the destruction of the entire world to a scratch on one’s finger. On the basis of his “ought”–“is” distinction Simmel insists, again like Hume, that reason cannot determine the ends but only the means for action. Reason is for Simmel an essentially theoretical power which determines what is or is not the case. It has no capacity, therefore, to determine what ought to be the case. What ought to be the case, the ends of human action, are determinable by the will or feeling alone (III, 307). We can say that the means toward ends are rational or irrational, according to whether they are effective in achieving ends; but we cannot say that the ends themselves are rational or irrational, because it is possible for us to will or desire anything without contradiction (III, 106, 157). So far Simmel has still not said enough to rule out natural law as a foundation of ethics. Such a foundation would attempt to make human nature the basis of ethics; it would appeal to certain basic human needs

130    which appear universal, and which must be satisfied if a person is to have a flourishing life. But Simmel objects to such a proposal on the grounds that it would have to jump over the chasm between “ought” and “is.” Even worse, it assumes that there is a constant human nature, that there are universal human needs; but Simmel denies that there is such a nature and that there are such needs. What nature a person has, and what needs he or she has, are determined by the culture and epoch of which they are a part. Simmel thinks that it is one of the great achievements of historicism that it has discredited the old atomistic conception of human nature, according to which a person has a fixed identity apart from the society and culture of which he or she is a part. Simmel has still left open, however, the possibility for an ethics based on pure reason, an ethics like Kant’s which makes its foundation nothing more than universalizability, the consistency of a principle when it is made into a universal law. The advantage of such an ethic is that it accepts the “ought”–“is” dualism because it does not found moral principle on fact; it also is not troubled by the problem of ethnic diversity and historical change, since all that matters in establishing the morality of a principle is its sheer universalizability, which is a simple matter of logic. A Kant scholar in his own right,³⁰ Simmel was very aware of this option and went to great pains to show why it cannot work. He argues, like many of Kant’s critics before him, that the concept of the categorical imperative, understood in its universal law formulation, is an insufficient basis to determine our duties since the universalizability test can be satisfied by opposing maxims (III, 33). The only way Kant derives a specific maxim from his criterion, Simmel maintains, is by covertly smuggling in considerations of consequences, i.e., by imagining what harm would result if everyone acted in the same manner (III, 39–40, 71). What Kant means by “what I could will as a universal law” is not what I could will psychologically but what I could will consistently or logically. But if the test is thus only a matter of consistency, then it is too easy to satisfy it. There is a contradiction only if I will both X and –X; but there is ³⁰ See his Kant, Sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universität (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1904). GSG, IX, 7–226. Simmel’s doctoral dissertation was on Kant, Das Wesen der Materie nach Kant’s Physischer Monadologie (Berlin: Norddeutschen Buchdruckerei, 1881). GSG, I, 9–39.

  

131

no reason that I have to will both in the first place (III, 75). For example, if I am entrusted with a deposit, which I promise to restore on demand, and if I value the institutions of deposit and promise keeping, then I should restore the deposit with which I have been entrusted, even if I were to suffer bad consequences in doing so; yet there is no necessity that I value the institutions of promise or deposit keeping in the first place. On the basis of these arguments, Simmel reaches the relativistic conclusions of his final chapter. We can come to accept the reality of incommensurable and conflicting values, he argues, once we realize that values have their origin in the will, and that there cannot be any argument about what someone wills but only whether they have chosen an efficient means for it (IV, 317–20). Whether something can be willed consistently as a universal law serves as no criterion of value given that any act of will can satisfy it. Given that there is no intrinsic limit on duties either in the will or in logic, we have to accept the fact that there will be a conflict of duties. This conflict can be logical or material (352). It is logical when one action is commanded from one moral interest and prohibited by another; and it is material when two duties are logically compatible but when circumstances permit only one to be realized. Simmel then goes on to classify several other kinds of conflict of value (367–9). They can take place in the following ways: “next to one another” (nebeneinander), i.e., when different groups have opposing interests (viz., political parties), “after one another” (nacheinander), i.e., when past values contradict more recent ones (viz., conservatism and modernism), and “over one another” (übereinander), i.e., when one circle of values encloses another and overrules them (viz., the duty to humanity over the state, or duty to the state over the family). The most striking and troubling feature of Simmel’s argument is how he relates these conflicts in value to the tendencies of modern society. Rather than moving toward a resolution of these conflicts, modern society is moving toward their intensification, he argues. Modern society is characterized by differentiation, i.e., the growth of a plurality of groups. Where the individual once belonged to only a few groups (viz., the local community, church, and family), he is now in civil society which comprises all kinds of groups (professional, political, religious).

132    This gives extraordinary freedom to the modern individual, but it also makes him victim to the conflicts between these groups. It is impossible for the individual to resolve these conflicts because they take place on a group level, and because they are resistant to all powers of rational thinking (356). Throughout his life, the individual will suffer from these conflicts and his efforts will end only with his death. The conflict of values makes for the tragedy of modern life, and it is simply blindness on the part of philosophy not to recognize it and to pretend there is still some rational means of resolving them (IV, 373). Simmel’s relativism was not only ethical but also epistemological, i.e., it extended to not only the practical concept of obligation but also the theoretical one of truth. This epistemological relativism is already apparent in the Einleitung, but Simmel is much more explicit in its exposition and defense in a later essay, “Ueber die Beziehung der Selectionslehre zur Erkenntnistheorie.”³¹ Here Simmel states avant la lettre the central theses of the pragmatic theory of truth.³² Simmel is very clear that his view of truth departs from the normal one. We normally assume that truth is independent of our practical interests, so that a proposition can be true and thwart our interests or it can be false and promote them. Simmel admits that we can determine whether any single representation is true or false by seeing whether it meets basic theoretical criteria, such as coherence and empirical verification (63). But the crucial question remains, he insists, of the truth of the whole of our representations, i.e., the entire system of which they are all parts. Since we measure truth or falsity within this whole or system,

³¹ GSG, V, 62–74. This article was first published in the Archiv für systematische Philosophie I (1895), 34–45. ³² James gave currency to the name “pragmatism” in his 1907 book of that name, Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907). Arguably, James was moving toward pragmatism before Simmel. See his “The Function of Cognition,” which was read before the Aristotelian Society in December 1884. However, James himself admitted that this article, which retained a realist theory of truth, was still not his mature theory. According to James himself (Pragmatism, p. 47), he first announced his mature theory in a lecture he gave in 1898 at the University of California, his “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” See Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), pp. 405–37. In this case, Simmel developed his own pragmatic theory three years before James. Simmel’s affinity with pragmatism was first brought out by Wilhelm Jerusalem, “Zur Weiterentwicklung des Pragmatismus,” Deutsche Literaturzeitung 34 (1913), 3205–26.

  

133

we cannot measure the truth or falsity of the whole system itself, at least not by theoretical means (63–4, 68). To determine the truth or falsity of the whole, we have to ask whether acting on it proves useful. We should then call those representations true “that have proven themselves to be a motive for purposive, life-promoting action” (64). The concept of truth now means “the rule-governed, practically effective consequence of thinking.” The common view of the relationship between truth and utility has now been reversed: our basic representations are useful not because they are true but they are true because they are useful. Granted that the truth of representations depends on their utility, the question remains what is the measure of utility? Simmel’s answer comes from his general evolutionary perspective. The utility of a system of representations, of our whole way of cognizing the world, depends on whether it helps the species survive and prosper. We adopt a system of representations because it helps us to adapt to the world. Determining truth and falsehood is therefore part of the general process of natural selection. We accept a system of representations or way of thinking not because it corresponds with things but because acting on it brings the desired consequences: namely, survival (71–2). Simmel’s theory of truth was both an endorsement and critique of the Kantian theory. It was an endorsement insofar as Simmel stressed the creative role of the subject in constituting the criterion of truth. Truth did not consist in the conformity of representations to the object but in the conformity of the object with representations. But it was also a critique because Simmel did not think that these representations had a purely autonomous status, independent of our practical activity. These representations originated in the needs of an organism to adapt to its environment. Kant had assumed that the basic concepts which constitute our experience are autonomous, that they are independent of the will, existing in a self-sufficient theoretical sphere. Simmel felt that assumption created a dualism between theoretical and practical reason which made it difficult to explain how the concepts of the understanding act upon and organize experience (70). That problem disappears, Simmel thought, only if we assume that these concepts are governed by the will, whose task is to adapt the organism to experience.

VI Religious Legacy 1. Religious Context Lebensphilosophie arose not least from a reaction against religion in the traditional sense. The major religions in Germany—Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism—assumed that the meaning of life came from a transcendent source, from something beyond life itself. They believed in the existence of a supernatural God, who had created the universe according to a plan, and they held that the meaning of a person’s life came in conformity with this plan. The Lebensphilosophen rejected all these beliefs. They did not believe in the existence of God; some were atheists (Nietzsche), who denied its existence, while others were agnostics (Simmel and Dilthey), who denied that we could have any knowledge of its existence. In either case, they believed that the meaning of life would have to come from within life itself. We cannot base our lives upon the belief in something transcendent, given that it is either false or unverifiable. The reaction against religion among the Lebensphilosophen was no mere intellectual issue; it was also a personal and spiritual struggle. This is because most of them came from a religious background. Nietzsche was raised a Lutheran, and until he was sixteen he planned to become a pastor; the Dilthey family was prominent in the reformed faith, and until he was twenty-three young Wilhelm was in training for a post in the church. Only Simmel was spared the struggle. He came from a Jewish family, on both his father’s and mother’s side, but his mother had converted and baptized her son when he was three. Only later in his career would Simmel confront the issue of reason versus faith, but by then it was only an intellectual affair for him. In their struggle with their religious legacies in the 1860s, Nietzsche and Dilthey came to the conclusion that life had meaning only within the Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0007

 

135

human and earthly sphere, and that the transcendent could be no basis for life. This position was anything but new or original in the 1860s; it came from the absorption of several recent or contemporary strands of thought in Germany. What were these strands? Crucial for Nietzsche’s and Dilthey’s intellectual development in the 1860s was their reading of David Friedrich Strauβ’s book Das Leben Jesu.¹ This book created a sensation when it first appeared in 1835, and the controversy it aroused lasted for decades.² Through a detailed examination of the apostle stories in the New Testament, Strauβ came to the conclusion that none of them were reliable as historical documents; the stories were inconsistent with one another, they were often based on assumptions contrary to fact, and the texts were corrupt, having often been altered over the generations. But if this were so, then the Bible could not claim to be an infallible and inspired document. Such a conclusion was a lethal blow to the traditional Protestant doctrine that Christianity is founded upon the authority of Scripture alone. By his penetrating critique of this doctrine, Strauβ had effectively undermined the most common source of belief in the transcendent in the nineteenth century. By the 1840s the tradition of speculative idealism—the idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—had come to an anti-climactic and sorry close. This tradition had been an attempt to resolve the perennial conflict between reason and faith by building a new metaphysics, one which could give rational grounds for the belief in God. To fashion such a metaphysics, it had used a priori methods, e.g., deduction from a selfevident first principle, the dialectic, intellectual intuition. In the 1840s, however, such methods had come under severe criticism, and from several quarters: from the “physicalists” (Justus Liebig, Emil du Bois Reymond, Hermann Helmholtz), from the late idealists (Adolf Trendelenberg, Hermann Lotze, Eduard von Hartmann), and from the up-and-coming neo-Kantians (Friedrich Beneke, Fries, Johann Friedrich Herbart). All these critics warned that a priori methods and reasoning cannot provide reliable concrete results. We cannot derive substantive ¹ David Friedrich Strauβ, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: C.F. Osiander, 1835), two vols. ² On the controversy, see my David Friedrich Strauβ: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 1–13, 73–83.

136    conclusions from formal principles, determinate results from indeterminate premises. All content, all knowledge of existence, has to be derived from experience alone. The failures of speculative idealism would have taught the Lebensphilosophen that it is impossible to transcend the limits of this world through any flight of pure reason. Like all philosophers in the nineteenth century, the Lebensphilosophen were educated in the Kantian tradition; from an early age they read carefully Kant’s three Kritiken, which they regarded as classics. As a result of their reading, they would have taken away one crucial lesson: that there cannot be knowledge beyond the limits of possible experience. This doctrine would have been confirmed for them by two later developments in the nineteenth century: first, the extraordinary progress of the natural sciences, which was based on strict empirical methods; and second, the collapse of the systems of speculative idealism, which came from their wrong-headed trust in a priori methods. If the Lebensphilosophen were so certain of the immanent limits of all philosophy, it was because they absorbed from an early age Kant’s critical teaching. The 1860s, the very decade the Lebensphilosophen began to reassess their religious heritage, was also the decade in which Darwinism triumphed in Germany. On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859 in England³ and within a year it was translated into German.⁴ The crucial event in its spread was Ernst Haeckel’s lecture in Stettin in September 1863 at the Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtze.⁵ Largely due to Haeckel’s tireless partisanship, Darwinism had become the dominant doctrine in the life sciences by the 1870s. The predominance of Darwinism was a major victory for the immanent worldview, for it meant that to explain the origin of life it was not necessary to move outside or beyond the natural world. The last great support for the cause

³ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859). ⁴ Charles Darwin, Über die Entstehung der Arten im Thier und Pflanzenreich durch natürlichen Züchtung, trans. Heinrich Georg Bronn (Stuttgart: Schweizerbart, 1860). ⁵ Ernst Haeckel, “Ueber die Entwicklungstheorie Darwins,” in Gemeinverständliche Vorträge und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Entwicklungstheorie, Zweite Auflage (Bonn: Emil Strauβ, 1902), I, 1–34.

 

137

of transcendence—the mystery of the origin of life—seemed to be removed, at least in principle. Last but not least, it is important to mention the influence of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthum, which first appeared in 1841.⁶ The work became very popular. “Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians,” Friedrich Engels wrote about its influence on the young Hegelians.⁷ It was not so much Feuerbach’s materialism but his theory of religion that captured the interest of the public. The idea that God is a hypostasization of human qualities became a central theme of religious discussion for decades. Such was the context for the religious thought of Lebensphilosophie. If Nietzsche, Simmel, and Dilthey had lost the faith of their fathers or ancestors, it was due to one or all of these factors. The problem for them was how to give meaning to life now that faith had disappeared.

2. Faith and Apostasy in the Young Nietzsche “The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy,” Nietzsche once said.⁸ He knew well whereof he spoke. For Nietzsche himself was the son of a Protestant pastor, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–49), who faithfully served his flock in the little village of Röcken in Saxony. It was the expectation of his parents that young Friedrich would follow in his father’s footsteps. At the time, such hopes seemed entirely realistic. For Friedrich was a pious boy, one who dutifully said his prayers, who partook of the sacraments, and who went to church every Sunday. The young Nietzsche felt that his fate was in God’s hands, and that God knew what was best for him. So he solemnly swore to consecrate his life to God’s service.⁹

⁶ Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1841). ⁷ Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, Dritte Auflage (Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1903), p. 11. ⁸ Der Antichrist, §10, KSA, VI, 176. ⁹ See his early autobiography “Aus meinem Leben” written August–September 1858, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Jugendschriften, ed. Hans Joachim Mette (Munich; Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), I, 31.

138    On March 10, 1861, the sixteen-year-old Nietzsche underwent the sacrament of Confirmation. This was no mere pro forma ritual because it required six months of preparation to learn the catechism. Apparently, Nietzsche was completely inspired by the ritual, which uplifted him heart and soul. According to Paul Deussen, a close friend who underwent the ceremony with him: “I still remember very well the holy, ecstatic mood that filled us the week before and after Confirmation. We would have been quite ready to die immediately to be with Christ; and all our thoughts, feelings and doings were radiated with a superterrestrial serenity.”¹⁰ Deussen wrote this in 1901, some forty years after the event, though Nietzsche himself writes nothing about the Confirmation in his letters. Yet Daniel Blue,¹¹ the Nietzsche biographer, assures us that, in at least one respect, there is some plausibility to Deussen’s account: as a composer and poet, Nietzsche was susceptible to the aesthetic or imaginative side of religious experience. Shortly after Confirmation, Deussen writes, Nietzsche’s faith and his own began to weaken and waver.¹² He attributed this diminution of faith to “the excellent historical-critical method” in which students were trained in their school, the Schulpforta near Naumberg. Deussen was alluding to the historicist method of textual exegesis and criticism developed earlier in the nineteenth century by Ranke and Niebuhr, which assessed the authenticity of a text by raising questions about its authorship, sources, date of composition, historical context, and so on. This method, whose roots ultimately go back to Spinoza, demanded treating the Bible as if it were like any other book and not as a revelation by God. Deussen notes how one of the instructors at the Schulpforta, Carl Steinhart, had applied this method to explain the forty-fifth Psalm as a secular wedding song.¹³ However, a close look at the evidence does not confirm that Nietzsche had learned this method at the Schulpforta. Blue notes that Nietzsche never refers to it in his letters and journals.

¹⁰ Paul Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1901), p. 4. ¹¹ Daniel Blue, The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 120. ¹² Deussen, Erinnerungen, p. 4. ¹³ Deussen, Erinnerungen, p. 4.

 

139

Although Strauβ was a brilliant practitioner of this method, Nietzsche would not read Strauβ until 1865, after he left Schulpforta.¹⁴ In the spring of 1861 Nietzsche wrote several essays, none of them directly bearing on religion but all of them having implications for it. According to Blue, these essays show “Nietzsche’s entire universe of explanation became naturalistic during 1861.”¹⁵ This is, however, to go beyond what the evidence warrants. They show Nietzsche pondering naturalistic explanation, but never really embracing it. One of these early essays is “Jäger und Fischer,”¹⁶ which Nietzsche wrote for his German class sometime in early March 1861. Almost all people who have culture and moral refinement, the essay begins, have raised themselves slowly and gradually from a primitive condition. There were two primitive kinds of people: hunters and fishers. Both were so sunken in the state of their wildness that we can hardly recognize them in their later civilized state. Both hunters and fishers had cruel customs. They did not know married love, they treated women as slaves, they regarded children as servants, and they did not take care of their elders, whom they ate after their death. This portrait of a primitive natural state is so dire that it inevitably raises the question: How did such a degenerate people eventually become civilized? But Nietzsche does not attempt to answer this question. He contents himself with saying that the three pillars of culture—the state, trade, and art—would never have arisen if true religion had not given them strength and support. At this stage in his thinking, then, Nietzsche did not envisage any process of natural evolution from the state of nature to the state of culture. The implication of his argument is that because man cannot himself create culture, he needs divine assistance. Another of these early essays, “Die Kindheit der Völker,”¹⁷ which was written at the end of March 1861, shows Nietzsche still struggling with the question “How did man create the realm of culture?” Nietzsche says that there are two options. We can assume that man, who was originally endowed with the germs of culture, had once enjoyed a golden age, but ¹⁴ Blue, Making of Nietzsche, p. 193. According to KSA, XIV, 441, Nietzsche read Strauβ’s book first in Bonn in 1864. ¹⁵ Blue, Making of Nietzsche, p. 123. ¹⁶ “Jäger und Fischer,” Jugendschriften, I, 232–5. ¹⁷ “Die Kindheit der Völker,” Jugendschriften, I, 235–43.

140    that it then decayed to a point where only a few nations kept their original culture. Or, we can suppose that culture was never original with man, and that he somehow gradually perfected himself from his primitive state. In this latter case, we want to know how culture could have grown out of an imperfect state. Nietzsche decides that he is not going to answer this question now, and he gives an account of the growth of civilization based on the former assumption. He does not reject the latter assumption for any reason of principle but only for the purposes of a simpler exposition. Still, there is no commitment here to naturalistic explanation. Several months later, in May 1861, Nietzsche wrote, for a school assignment, several drafts of a short autobiography. There are three drafts of the essay, “Mein Lebenslauf,”¹⁸ but only the first has any bearing on religious questions. If all the complaints about the cruelty of fate are correct, Nietzsche reasons, then fate is either blind or a principle of injustice. But Nietzsche finds it unthinkable that our fate is in the hands of a thoughtless or an evil being. If it is thoughtless, then there is nothing having mind in the universe; and if it is evil, then there is nothing good. To reassure himself, Nietzsche imagines that the universe is organized from the lowest to the highest creatures, and that the highest being of all directs everything for the good. So, despite his doubts, a theistic vision prevails. In short, none of the essays of 1861 show Nietzsche adopting a naturalistic program of explanation. He does contemplate its possibility, but only to reject it or to postpone thinking about it. This is not surprising for a sixteen-year-old student, especially in 1861, because then almost no one in Germany had a clear idea of the mechanism behind natural evolution. Although On the Origin of Species had appeared in 1859, and although it was translated as early as 1860,¹⁹ its ideas were not fully received until 1863 when Ernst Haeckel gave his famous lecture on the subject.²⁰ Nietzsche would have understood clearly ¹⁸ “Mein Lebenslauf,” Jugendschriften, I, 276–80. ¹⁹ Charles Darwin, Über die Entstehung der Arten im Their und Pflanzenreich durch natürliche Züchtung, trans. Heinrich Georg Bronn (Stuttgart: Schweierbart, 1860). ²⁰ Ernst Haeckel, “Über die Entwicklungstheorie Darwins,” in Gemeinverständliche Vorträge und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Entwicklungstheorie (Bonn: Emil Strauβ, 1902), I, 1–34.

 

141

in 1861 what was meant by the method of historical criticism but he could hardly have had a conception, at least a modern one, of a naturalistic theory of evolution. There are other essays from the early 1860s that are revealing about Nietzsche’s religious development. In Easter 1862 Nietzsche wrote an essay on freedom of the will, “Fatum und Geschichte,”²¹ which touches upon the question of religion. Here Nietzsche considers the consequences for religion if it is examined from “a freer standpoint” or from “an impartial and contemporary point of view.” He immediately shows some hesitation in pronouncing judgment upon Christianity. There will be “infinite confusion among the people” if they ever think that Christianity is based on mere assumptions (55). It is also presumptuous to think that one can resolve philosophical problems that have been pondered for millennia by the greatest minds of past generations, Nietzsche says. “To wager forth in the sea of doubt, without a compass or a leader, is foolishness and destruction for undeveloped minds; most will be battered by storms, and very few will discover new lands” (55). Filled with such doubts about any enquiry, and filled with such respect for tradition, Nietzsche makes no pronouncements on religion in this essay. Yet in a subsequent essay, “Willensfreiheit und Fatum,”²² which was also written around Easter 1862, everything suddenly and dramatically changes. Attached to this essay is a remarkable page which puts forward a very bold interpretation of Christianity. “Christianity,” it says, “is a matter of the heart; only when [its message] incorporates itself within us . . . is someone a true Christian. The chief teachings of Christianity are the basic truths of the human heart” (63). So far there is nothing in this which one could not find in a conventional pietist. But then, all of a sudden, we learn something very new and very heretical, something that could as well have come from a Ludwig Feuerbach or a David Friedrich Strauβ: “That God has become man only indicates that man should not seek his salvation in the infinite but that he should ground his heaven upon the earth; the conceit of a supernatural world has put human ²¹ “Fatum und Geschichte,” Jugendschriften, II, 54–9. ²² “Willensfreiheit und Fatum,” Jugendschriften, II, 60–3.

142    beings in a false position toward the earthly world” (63).²³ The denial of a transcendent dimension to Christianity could not be more explicit; and it could not be more heretical. Here is where Nietzsche makes his first break with the Christian tradition. Of course, this passage by itself does not imply that Nietzsche was already an atheist. All that it does show is that he had a this-worldly interpretation of Christian doctrine. Blue maintains that there are no more documents on Nietzsche’s developing views on Christianity during his time at the Schulpforta (1860–5),²⁴ but he points out one note which indicates that Nietzsche had taken his new free thinking to its ultimate conclusion. In the summer of 1879 Nietzsche wrote in a notebook: “As an atheist I never said grace before meals at Pforta.”²⁵ There is a bit of hyperbole in this statement because Nietzsche was probably not an atheist in his first years at Pforta; nevertheless, his own testimony still carries weight and it is probably safe to say that he was an atheist in his later years at Pforta. He would never look back.

3. A Modern Epicurus Nietzsche’s first critique of religion appears in section 3 of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, which is entitled “Das religiöse Leben.”²⁶ The critique follows along the lines of the program of historical philosophy which Nietzsche had announced at the beginning of the book. It is the task of historical philosophy, he explains, to show that what at first appears magical and mysterious is really the product of history, the necessary result of the operation of natural laws. According to Nietzsche’s account of religion,²⁷ early human beings saw the sphere of nature as a realm of magic and mystery which did not obey regular causal laws, and whose happenings were controlled by the presence of spirits or animal forces. The task of religious ritual was to placate and to get control over these ²³ Blue finds in this passage (p. 140) the influence of Feuerbach, because many of the phrases appear in his Das Wesen des Christenthums. ²⁴ Blue, Making Nietzsche, p. 141. ²⁵ KSA, VIII, 608. ²⁶ Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §§108–44, KSA, II, 107–40. ²⁷ See especially §111, II, 112–16.

 

143

spirits and forces, so that nature would become more predictable and would operate more according to human needs. Historical philosophy would undermine religion because it would show that these apparently natural and mysterious events are the result not of spirits or animal forces but of causal laws. The more we know about nature, the more we see that it acts according to natural forces, so that the realm of magic and mystery gradually disappears. The great enemy of religions is therefore science. Nietzsche’s critique of religion, as he outlines it in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, is very much in the Epicurean tradition. According to that tradition, religion arises from fear of the gods, spirits, or forces, which often act in arbitrary and harmful ways. All that man can do to control nature is to placate these gods, spirits, or forces, offering them sacrifices and entreating them through prayer. The great enemy of religion is therefore philosophy, which investigates the natural causes of things, and which sees that all events happen according to laws which have nothing to do with gods, spirits, or forces. Philosophy is therefore the great liberator, freeing human beings from their fears. The Epicurean tradition has had an illustrious history, not only in ancient but also in modern times. It was restated in the seventeenth century by Spinoza and Hobbes, in the eighteenth century by Voltaire and Holbach, and in the nineteenth century by Feuerbach and Strauβ. Nietzsche clearly saw himself in this tradition. His admiration for Epicurus in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches is evident time and again. Epicurus was “one of the greatest men, the founder of a heroic-idyllic kind of philosophizing.”²⁸ There is another important respect in which Nietzsche follows the Epicurean tradition: he was passionately anti-clerical.²⁹ It was a hallmark of the Epicurean tradition that it saw the main advocates of religion as priests. Religion was due to a conspiracy of the clergy, who had the most to profit by its spread among the population (through tithes, offerings, sacrifices). Once the clergy got the leaders of the state to believe and

²⁸ §295, II, 686. Cf. §68, II, 81. See also Morgenröte, KSA, III, 70, 71, 142, §§72, 150. ²⁹ This is already apparent in section 3 of Allzumenschliches—see, for example, §130, II, 123, and §132, II, 125—but it will be much more explicit in Der Antichrist.

144    enforce its dogmas, religion turned into a form of virtual tyranny. Anticlericalism became especially popular among modern free thinkers; we find it in Toland, Tindal, and Collins in Britain, and in Voltaire, Holbach, and Helvetius in France. This was a select club which Nietzsche was anxious to join. His anti-clerical sentiments could not have been fiercer: “The greatest haters in world history had always been priests . . . against the spirit of priestly revenge no other spirit comes close.”³⁰ If the Epicureans were the great enemy of Christianity, the Christians returned the favor: they were the great enemy of the Epicureans. Intellectual warfare between them raged for centuries. The Christians’ main defense against the Epicurean attack is that the Epicureans have a much too simplistic and literal interpretation of religious faith. They see it as a primitive animism, as a belief in spirits as the cause of events. Such an interpretation of faith, the Christians complain, fails to do justice to its symbolic dimension, neglecting how its meaning is often metaphorical. The meaning of Scripture is rarely literal and it has nothing to do with nature; rather, its meaning is allegorical, concerning spiritual or personal truths. As if he foresees this very objection, Nietzsche declares that the idea that religion should be interpreted in sensu allegorico “is mistaken through and through.”³¹ He says that no one would have still taken this idea seriously if Schopenhauer had not taken it under his wing and protected it through his persuasive style. The only reason he espoused the idea is that he belonged to the Romantic generation, which had been much too indulgent toward religion; if he had grown up in our later generation, then he would have been more honest and would have declared: “never has a religion, whether mediately or immediately, whether as dogma or as a metaphor, contained a truth.”³² That is a very strong statement. What makes Nietzsche so confident of its truth? The explanation, I think, is fairly straightforward: Nietzsche assumes that many of the allegorical interpretations are unhistorical, attributing a later more sophisticated development to the original authors of the New Testament, who lived in more primitive times and who thought in more ³⁰ Zur Genealogie der Moral, §7; KSA, V, 267. ³² §100; II, 110. Original emphasis.

³¹ §110; II, 109.

 

145

naïve and simplistic ways. He lists many of the older Christian beliefs— e.g., a mortal mother who gave birth to a God, justice that demands the sacrifice of an innocent, prayers for miracles—and he is confident that no modern educated person would take them seriously.³³ These beliefs might be interpreted allegorically, to be sure, but in their age they were understood all too literally. For Nietzsche, a historical interpretation of the Bible tries to understand it in its historical context, as it was understood by the public of its day, namely, literally. In this respect, Nietzsche is on the same page as another great heir of the Epicurean tradition: Spinoza.³⁴ Although Nietzsche has a great debt to the Epicurean tradition, he also builds upon it and adds a contribution of his own. For him the explanans for the magical and mysterious is not taken from the field of physics but that of psychology. Lightning bolts, storms, and volcanoes had ceased to be magical and mysterious by the nineteenth century; no one would have believed that their source lay in spirits or vital powers. However, there were aspects of religious psychology—the feeling of sin, the need for redemption, selfless acts of charity, asceticism—which seemed to belie all attempts at natural explanation. In section 3 of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches Nietzsche is concerned to extend the range of naturalistic explanation so that it covers not only physical but also psychological phenomena. His concern is to explain two religious phenomena in particular: the need for redemption and asceticism. Nietzsche wants to counter Schleiermacher’s apologetic use of psychology, which claims that these phenomena are “facts” from which one can draw religious conclusions.³⁵ According to Nietzsche, the need for redemption arises when people become self-conscious of “sin”: they feel sexual desires which they cannot control and they are aware of selfish motives for all their actions. Since these desires and motives are ineradicable, they believe their origins arise from the natural self; and since they lead to immoral actions, they also

³³ §113; II, 116–17. ³⁴ See Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, in Opera, eds. Günter Gawlick and Friedrich Niewöhner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), I, 228–77, chapter VII. ³⁵ Nietzsche refers to Schleiermacher at §132, II, 125. He does not refer to a specific source.

146    believe in natural sin; hence they think that they can be saved only by some supernatural source. But this feeling is not based on a psychological fact, Nietzsche argues, because it is really based on two beliefs endemic to the Christian tradition: (1) the belief that there is something wrong with our natural desires and motives; and (2) the belief that there is such a thing as completely selfless human action. Deny either of these beliefs, Nietzsche contends, and the so-called “fact” disappears. Christian moralists claim that it is sacrilege to try to explain ascetism and saintliness, which arise from supernatural sources (§136, 130). But, for Nietzsche, this very claim made an attempt at explanation a great temptation. The key to understanding asceticism, he argues, is to realize that there is something called “spite against oneself” (§137, 130). Some people have such a need to show their power that they turn it against themselves. This is a greater demonstration of power than if one were to turn it against others because turning against oneself shows much more self-control. The same phenomenon appears when someone overcomes a fear of heights by climbing a mountain, or when someone publicly renounces opinions which they have openly expressed. The critique of religion in section 3 of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches was simply a dress rehearsal for the far more focused and aggressive critique of some of Nietzsche’s later writings. The first of these writings was Jenseits von Gut und Böse.³⁶ Now Nietzsche has a far more clear and simple psychology to interpret all psychic phenomena. According to this psychology, there is one fundamental motivation for all human action: the will to power.³⁷ Religion too must be interpreted in these terms, and so in section III, “Das religiöse Wesen,” Nietzsche begins to apply his theory to religion. We learn that even the most powerful people have bowed before the saints (§51, 71). And why is that? Because they felt the saints’ strength of will, which was evident in their powers of abstinence, forbearance, and endurance. The great danger of religion is when it ³⁶ Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Leipzig: C.G. Naumann, 1886). All references in parentheses are to KSA, V, 9–243. ³⁷ Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §13, KSA, VI, 27; §36, KSA, VI, 55. Nietzsche had developed the idea of the will to power at the latest sometime between November 1882 and February, 1883. See KSA, X, 187.

 

147

ceases to be an instrument of rule and begins to rule over us, Nietzsche warns. That is what happened in ancient Rome when the Christians became emperors (§62, 81). Christianity made a virtue out of meekness and humility, and it taught that the weak will inherit the earth; but this very ethic, which was embraced by the poor and slaves of the Roman empire, eventually allowed them to conquer their rulers, who followed it and became meek and humble themselves. It was in his Zur Geneologie der Moral that Nietzsche states what is perhaps his most damning criticism of Christianity.³⁸ This occurs in the context of his reconstruction of early society. The ancient priests were once the highest caste of society, but they soon found themselves at war with the warrior caste, who eventually subjugated them. The priests were resentful of their new rulers, upon whom they took their revenge. How? By inventing a new moral code, by undertaking “a revaluation of all values” (§7, 267). What their rulers declared to be good—war, conquest, domination—the priests proclaimed to be evil. While the old warrior virtues were strength and boldness, the new priestly virtues were meekness and humility. This new moral code, which seems to renounce power, was the product of a will to power itself, because its ultimate and subconscious goal was to conquer the conquerors, to make them submit to the power of the priests. Behind this will to power lay a very dark and un-Christian passion: resentment and revenge. Because the conquered priests lacked power, their resentment toward their new masters drove their hatred to the limits (§7, 267). By this means, Christianity used the very values it despises: its highest value is love, but that love had its origins in hate (§8, 268). In saying this, Nietzsche completed what he regarded as the essential task of critique: showing how higher values (love) grew out of their opposites (hate). Nietzsche’s Antichrist, an unpublished manuscript written in 1888, repeats much of his earlier critique of Christianity, though in a more strident and desperate tone. The most interesting feature of this work is Nietzsche’s realization that there is some merit to a symbolic interpretation of the Bible after all (§§34–5, 206–9). In Menschliches, ³⁸ Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Geneologie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift (Leipzig: C.G. Naumann, 1887). KSA, V, 245–412.

148    Allzumenschliches he had rejected an allegorical interpretation of the Bible as a mistake; but now he prefers it over the critical method of Strauβ, which, he thinks, interprets the old stories much too literally (§28, 199). Now Nietzsche adopts some of the old themes of the rationalist interpretation of the Bible. It is clear to him that the symbols of the faith designate inner realities, spiritual truths (§34, 206). The concept of the son of man does not refer to a concrete person but it is a psychological symbol. The heavenly kingdom is not somewhere above the earth or after death, but simply a state of the heart (§34, 207). Nietzsche is even charitable in his judgment of Christ: his mission was not to redeem mankind from its sins but to show it how to live (§35, 207). What Christ taught and left behind were lessons about practice (die Praktik). Nietzsche also states that it is necessary to rethink the whole history of Christianity: it was not at first a fable about miracles and salvation, as if everything spiritual and symbolic were a later development (§37, 209). The history of Christianity shows just the opposite: that it was a story about the vulgarization of Christianity, about making its originally spiritual truths into something more palpable. These comments show that Nietzsche had become less assured about his original interpretation of Christianity;³⁹ unfortunately, his sanity did not last long enough for him to develop this new view.

4. Dilthey’s Religious Beliefs Like Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey came from a religious family.⁴⁰ His father, Maximilian Dilthey (1804–67), was from a Calvinist background; he was Dekan und Kirchenrat in Mosbach-Biebrich, a community which he served for forty years. Max was a liberal and tolerant father, who was little concerned with dogma and who stressed the personal meaning of

³⁹ See too some of Nietzsche’s Nachgelassene Fragmente, KSA, XIII, 154, 156, 162. ⁴⁰ These facts about Dilthey’s early life come from himself and Clara Misch, his daughter. See Der junge Dilthey, Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern, 1852–1870, ed., Clara Misch, Zweite unveränderte Auflage (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1960), pp. 280–5 and 300–4. All page references in parentheses are to this edition.

 

149

faith. At first, Wilhelm seemed happy to follow in his father’s footsteps. He had studied philosophy and theology in Heidelberg and Berlin and he took his qualifying exams in theology, giving his first sermon in Wiesbaden in 1856. His main interest had been in early Christianity, in the history of the church and dogma. Although he took his exams in theology, Dilthey began to regard theology more as a Brotstudium; instead, his heart was set on a university career. If we look at the young Dilthey’s diary and letters, we can see that he was still very much a faithful Christian in 1859. In a letter to his father, which is dated the beginning of June 1859, he thanks him for the faith he has given him, a faith between “enthusiasm and fantastic disbelief,” one which has led him to “joyful rectitude and inner communion with the creator of things” (74). He owes it to his father’s sermons, he explains, that he senses within himself “the feeling of immortality and the eternal nearness of God.” To have such feelings, he says, is nothing less than “the highest good.” To regard nearness to God as the highest good, as the end of life, was a sentiment as old as the Middle Ages. It was Dilthey’s religious faith that inspired his academic work throughout the 1850s. This work consisted in several projects, all of them revolving around theology: an investigation into Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics; a study of the first centuries of Christianity; a biography of Schleiermacher; an edition of Schleiermacher’s correspondence; and a study of Origenes and the Alexandrine school. Dilthey’s interest in early Christianity was not simply archaic; he wanted to bring back to life the early Christian era. In November 1860 he wrote in his diary: “My life lay before me today like a series of premises, obscure and clear, whose facit is that my vocation is to grasp the innermost portion of religious life in history, and to bring it to a moving exposition in our times, dominated as they are by state and science” (140). Within a year, however, Dilthey’s faith was waning. For reasons he does not specify, he doubts the value of thinking about the transcendent. In his diary entry for February 17, 1861, he writes: “It is healthy not to enquire into and to investigate the possibilities of the beyond (die Möglichkeiten des Jenseits); hence philosophy should not busy itself so much with it” (141). In a similar vein he wrote on April 16:

150    One should not say: that they [the medieval philosophers] were oriented toward the transcendent, that they forgot about the earth they were living in. That is only a way of talking. Every reflection begins from the earth. Man, living on earth, who is always stimulated to think about it, never lives in the transcendent. Wherever it appears to him, the transcendent is everywhere in the world. It can never be otherwise for him. (152)

This is an extraordinary reflection for someone writing about Christianity; it is to confess that one cannot really understand what the medieval philosophers were talking about. One can perhaps understand their thought about the transcendent, of course, but one cannot understand the transcendent itself, i.e., what their thought intends to be about. Remarkably, Dilthey did not hesitate to draw this conclusion about his own work on the history of Christianity. In the same April 16 notebook entry he wrote: The historian of Christianity has to endure the tortures of Tantalus. Whoever is so taken by his subject matter, whoever feels so akin to it, that he can reproduce in his soul all the stirrings, states of mind and strivings that once shaped the past—how lucky he is! . . . But I struggle in vain to wrest inner life from this alien material; I do not know if I can renew within myself the spirit of that time. This mistrust against human nature in its healthy peace, that was always the object of the greatest wonder for me; this striving for the beyond and supernatural knowledge, which is so deeply hated by me; this life of the sects, which is inconceivable for me. (152)⁴¹

In one page Dilthey seemed to surrender not only his religious faith but also his historical studies of Christianity. It was impossible not only to know the transcendent but also to understand even those who talked about it.

⁴¹ The last sentence is incomplete in the original. Dilthey is simply listing all the respects he no longer understands Christianity.

 

151

But why did Dilthey come to this realization now, only one year after expressing his religious faith to his father? There is no explicit explanation. But it is not difficult to reconstruct what led to his loss of faith. From his study of history he could see how much human beings were creatures of their time and place, how much they were products of their specific culture. This was a lesson of the new historicism, and it was one Dilthey took to heart. As a notebook entry from May 1860 tells us: “The chief characteristic of the present German mind is to grasp the human being as an essentially historical being, one whose existence is realized only in a specific community” (124). It followed from this that one could not transcend one’s own time, that one could not leap beyond one’s own age. As a later notebook entry from February 1865 puts it: “It is a false idea that there is some point in history from which this point ceases to be historical” (191). This means for Dilthey that the essence of history is not to be discovered in some goal beyond history—eternal salvation, the kingdom of god—but only within history itself: The essence of history is historical movement itself; and if one calls this essence a purpose, then it is the purpose of history itself . . . What is historical movement? The labor of one generation for the next, the elevation of the individual into the social relations which it serves. (190)

The purport of Dilthey’s remarks is to forbid the possibility of transcendence, and to limit the human being to the strictly immanent dimension of life on earth. One might argue, however, that this is not necessarily anti-religious because there still remains the possibility of a strictly immanent religion, the belief in an immanent God co-extensive with the world itself. Indeed, one would think that Dilthey would want to take this option given his preoccupation with Schleiermacher, who was famous as a pantheist. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s Dilthey worked on Schleiermacher’s correspondence and biography, which made him thoroughly familiar with his theology; a late essay shows how sympathetic he was to Schleiermacher’s general standpoint.⁴² Yet to conclude from this that Dilthey was attracted to pantheism would still be premature. There ⁴² “Schleiermacher’s System als Theologie,” GS, XIV/2, 471–550.

152    are other comments in Dilthey’s notebooks which indicate how far he was from a personal endorsement of Schleiermacher’s religious philosophy. In 1862 he wrote his father about the difficulties of obtaining letters for his edition of Schleiermacher’s correspondence because the Countess Schwerin, who had the letters in her possession, knew “how little of a Schleiermacherian I am” (171). He did not share the Schleiermachian doctrine for the reform and renewal of the Christian faith. In 1870 he told his mother that a theologian—“Der gute Dorner”—had made an implicit criticism of his Schleiermacher biography because it did not do full justice to the faith. Dilthey’s response to this criticism was telling: “That is the really the sore spot. I am not a religious nature” (279). At the very least, this was a confession of agnosticism. It shows how far Dilthey had traveled since 1859.

5. Simmel’s Jewish Background Of all the Lebensphilosophen, the religious heritage of Georg Simmel was the most simple; but it also was the most complex. It was the most simple because Simmel had no religious education; he came from a predominantly secular background. In his case there was no conflict between faith and reason, as in the case of Nietzsche and Dilthey; there was no conflict because there was really no faith to begin with. But Simmel’s heritage was also the most complex because he was, at least in his ethnic origins, Jewish. Both of his parents were Jewish and their ancestors were also Jewish. Although they were born Jewish, both Simmel’s parents had converted. Edward Simmel, his father, converted to Catholicism; and Flora Bodstein, his mother, was baptized in a Protestant church. According to Flora, Georg was also baptized as a Lutheran. The religious affiliation of parents and son seems, however, to have been a mere formality, a career move rather than a matter of faith. During the First World War Simmel left the church, which represents no return to Judaism but a need for intellectual independence.⁴³ ⁴³ All these facts are gathered from Michael Landmann, “Bausteine zur Biographie,” in Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel. Briefe, Erinnerungen, Bibliographie, eds. Kurt Gassen and Michael Land (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958), pp. 8–33, esp. 11. See also “Vorfahren” in GSG, XXIV, 649–56.

 

153

Simmel did not like to discuss his Jewish roots;⁴⁴ they were not important for him, as they had been for Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, and Martin Buber. It would seem, therefore, that we can safely ignore Simmel’s Jewish heritage in any account of his life and thought. Unfortunately, this inference is illusory. If Simmel’s origins were of no interest to him, they were of great interest to his contemporaries; and it was their interest in him that became the source of the greatest tragedy in his life. Despite his fame as a lecturer and author, Simmel was persistently denied academic advancement. From 1885 to 1900 he was a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin; only in 1900 did he become extraordinary professor. He finally became an ordinary professor only in 1914 at the University of Strassburg, which was then regarded as a backwater of German academia. The reason for all these professional failures was the brick wall of traditional anti-Semitism. What Simmel wanted to ignore in himself—his Jewish roots—his contemporaries would never let him forget. That Simmel was blocked by anti-Semitic prejudice is very clear from his application for a professorship in Heidelberg in 1908.⁴⁵ Powerful figures spoke on his behalf: Max Weber, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Gustav Schmoller. But his application was stymied by Dietrich Schäfer, a history professor in Berlin and a protégé of Heinrich Treitschke. In his letter to the Heidelberg faculty, Schäfer wrote that Simmel was “Israelit durch und durch” because of his appearance, mannerisms, and audience. His audience consisted largely in women and Ostjuden, “the kind of people Heidelberg would not want crowding its lecture halls.” The Weltanschauung that Simmel represented was the opposite of that of “our German christian-classical Bildung.” Schäfer acknowledged Simmel’s many publications, but he had very little to say about their content. He disapproved of his sociology because it was a mistake to make society, instead of church and state, the main interest in social research. Such a reference, so filled with bias and so empty of content, should have been granted little weight by the faculty; but it was given extra consideration because Grand-Duchess

⁴⁴ See the testimony of Hans Simmel, Simmel’s son, in Klaus Christian Köhnke, Der Junge Simmel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 138. ⁴⁵ On the Heidelberg affair, see Landmann, “Bausteine,” Buch des Dankes, pp. 24–9.

154    Luise of Baden spoke against Simmel’s religious views, which were for her too “relativistic” and not based enough on the Bible. As a result of her intervention, the decision about Simmel’s case was postponed, then postponed indefinitely. Although he never thematized his Jewish roots, Simmel never tried to hide them. He was self-conscious as a Jew, and he knew people would see him as such. When he read the introduction to Martin Buber’s Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman he told Buber “We are a curious people.”⁴⁶ According to Buber, that was the only time he used the pronoun “We” with him. When his future father-in-law asked him if he were Jewish, he answered “My nose betrays it unmistakably.”⁴⁷ Simmel also loved to tell humorous Jewish stories to his family about a character called “Leib Lampenschein.”⁴⁸ Simmel had no qualms, then, about revealing his Jewish identity; but it is noteworthy that he never attempted to speak for or represent Jews in any public capacity. Toward the end of the nineteenth century Simmel was asked about his attitude toward Zionism. He regarded the movement as utopian and unrealistic.⁴⁹ He doubted that the German, French, or English Jews would want to cut their ties with European culture; and he even questioned that the Ostjuden would want to break with their European roots. Herzl’s idea of founding a new Jewish state was like building a house by starting from the roof; a state was the product of generations, and it grew organically from history. It was absurd to think that just a few individuals could build it anew. For Simmel, the only way to escape anti-Semitism was through further assimilation and integration. As he saw it, this was only to continue in the path that had been followed in past generations. If the Germans were being Judaized, the Jews were being Germanized; and the end result of assimilation would be a new mixture, which was neither purely German nor purely Jewish. This was a common belief in the nineteenth century, and a similar view was espoused by such prominent figures as Strauβ and Mommsen.⁵⁰ ⁴⁶ See Köhnke, Der junge Simmel, pp. 122–3. ⁴⁷ Köhnke, Der junge Simmel, p. 140. ⁴⁸ Köhnke, Der junge Simmel, p. 140. ⁴⁹ Köhnke, Der junge Simmel, pp. 123–5. ⁵⁰ See, for example, Theodor Mommsen, Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum (Berlin: Reimer, 1880), pp. 4–11 and David Friedrich Strauβ, “Judenverfolgung und Judenemancipation,” Jahrbücher der Gegenwart, 30 (April 1848), 117–19.

 

155

6. Simmel’s Religious Philosophy Simmel fully endorsed the fundamental principle of Lebensphilosophie that “life has no sense and purpose beyond itself,” “that the basic fact of life gives everything its sense and measure, its positive or negative worth.”⁵¹ There could well be some transcendent dimension, something that exists beyond life, Simmel concedes, but he also insists that we could not make any sense of it, so there would be no point in talking about it. But if we accept this principle, what place can there be for religion in our worldview? Is not religion essentially about a transcendent dimension, about something beyond life itself? So the fundamental principle of Simmel’s philosophy would seem to give him no reason or incentive to discuss religion at all. It would seem that Simmel should be an entirely secular thinker. Indeed, he turned his back on the religion of his ancestors. He never discussed the meaning of Judaism; and the Old Testament was for him only a source of anthropology.⁵² It was probably for this reason that Franz Rosenzweig, despite their similar ethnic roots and interest in philosophy, wrote off the possibility of any discussion with Simmel.⁵³ Rosenzweig felt that he had nothing in common with Simmel; there were no principles of agreement to serve as a basis of discussion. Yet, however unlikely it might seem, Simmel was greatly interested in religion, and wrote several important articles on it. It was not difficult for Simmel to provide a secure place for religion in his philosophy, for he regarded religion as a form of life,⁵⁴ and indeed as an important form of life, one just as legitimate as all other forms, e.g., art, law, and philosophy. Without having to make any commitment to transcendent entities,

⁵¹ Georg Simmel, Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur. Ein Vortrag (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). GSG, XVI, 188, 189. ⁵² On Simmel’s relationship to Judaism, see Hans Liebeschütz, Von Georg Simmel zu Franz Rosenzweig (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1970), pp. 103–44. ⁵³ See Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, 20 September 1922, in Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe, eds. Edith Rosenzweig and Ernst Simon (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935), p. 443. ⁵⁴ Georg Simmel, Die Religion, in Die Gesellschaft: Sammlung Sozial-psychologischer Monographien, ed. Martin Buber. Zweite, veränderte und vermehrte Auflage (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1912). GSG, X, 39–118, 47.

156    Simmel could describe religion as a form of life, explaining how its activities differ from other forms of life. Perhaps the best introduction to Simmel’s philosophy of religion is his short article “Das Problem der religiösen Lage,” which was first published in 1911.⁵⁵ True to title, this article attempts to define the problem of religious belief in the modern world. The problem is simple but intractable: that the modern individual still feels a need for religion, which has not weakened since the age of Moses; but he also sees no way to satisfy that need, because none of the traditional religions have proven credible (150). In other words: people want to believe something but they cannot find any object of belief worthy of their intellect. In the past, if one could no longer believe in one religion, one could always find another. Religion was like a tree: if the fruit of one year died off, there would always be another season. Nowadays, however, the tree itself has withered. People have lost all belief in the transcendent as such, no matter what specific form it takes (150). Belief in some transcendent reality has been characteristic of all religious faith, Simmel thinks, and he disapproves of any attempt to water down that belief, as if it could be replaced by something abstract, logical, or transcendental. These attempts to rarify the object of belief are really disingenuous, Simmel believes, because they amount to “a flirtatious half-concealed disbelief” (149). All true believers will accept nothing less than a full-bodied sense of reality; they believe, as Simmel puts it, that Jesus can save us only if he really exists (149). Faced with this problem, Simmel still refuses to revive belief in the transcendent; he remains true, therefore, to the immanent limits of Lebensphilosophie. The only way around this predicament, he writes, is to go to the end of the path paved for us by Kant (150).⁵⁶ This means, as he understands it, making religion really about “an inner attitude of the soul.” There are two sides to religious belief: an objective pole, which is ⁵⁵ Georg Simmel, “Das Problem der religiösen Lage,” in Weltanschauung, ed. Max Frischeisen-Köhler (Berlin: Reichl & Co, 1911), pp. 328–40. GSG, XII, 148–61. ⁵⁶ It is impossible to ignore the similarity of Simmel’s approach to Kierkegaard’s in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. But Simmel does not seem to have had a full knowledge of Kierkegaard. According to the Gesamtnamenregister in GSG, there is only one reference in all Simmel’s writings to Kierkegaard, which reveals very little. See the article “Individualismus,” GSG, XIII, 301.

 

157

the transcendent, and a subjective pole, which is the inner life of the believer. We must leave aside the objective pole and take the subjective pole; we must make the soul of the believer the essential side of religion because we cannot know anything about the objective, which transcends the limits of knowledge and meaning. Once we recognize that religion is really about the state of being of the subject, then the whole question of truth or falsehood ceases to matter, “for a state of being cannot be true or false” (152). So far all discussion of religion has been stuck on the horns of a dilemma, Simmel says, because it takes belief to be either faith in a transcendent being or a mere illusion; but we can avoid this dilemma, he argues, if we regard belief itself as a state of being that is independent of the content of belief (153). Simmel still insists that subjective religiosity does not justify the belief in a transcendent realm; but if it is treated as a reality by itself, then it will give us all the depth and richness that had once been conferred on religious objects themselves (154). But it is questionable, on Simmel’s own analysis, that the traditional believer would be satisfied with this, given that he needs existence in the literal and full-bodied sense. One of Simmel’s most important forays into the philosophy of religion was his article “Beiträge zur Erkenntnistheorie der Religion,” which appeared in 1901 in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik.⁵⁷ This article discusses less the origin of religion than its epistemic justification. Now the pragmatism and relativism of his earlier work is applied to the field of religion. Simmel begins with the truism that in our psychic life we often react to the same representational content in different ways and that we give it different meanings (9). We have different categories or forms which we apply to the same content; these categories or forms are like the different forms of aggregation of a chemical element, or the different musical instruments that play one melody (10). This is what happens in the case of religion, too. It applies its characteristic forms or discourse to a given content, which can be described by other forms or another kind of discourse. No single discourse can claim to be privileged, as if it were the only one to describe the ⁵⁷ Georg Simmel, “Beiträge zur Erkenntnistheorie der Religion,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 119/1 (1901), 11–22. GSG, VII, 9–20.

158    object. All discourses are equal and coordinate to one another; none is subordinate to another. What justifies a kind of discourse, Simmel implies, is that it achieves efficiently the function assigned to it. In the case of religious discourse, its purpose is to promote the faith, feeling, and action of a believer (9, 14, 17). Simmel is critical of Kant for not taking his own pragmatic defense of faith far enough. Although Kant recognizes that the justification of faith has to be practical, he still leaves theoretical components in his concept of practical faith, viz., that the realization of the highest good presupposes the existence of God who correlates the spheres of morality and nature (16). A true practical justification of religious belief realizes that all that matters is whether holding the belief promotes “the state of our soul” (der Zustand unserer Seele selbst) (17). Simmel provided a further account of the place of religion in the psyche in his remarkable short article “Die Gegensätze des Lebens und die Religion,” which he published in 1904.⁵⁸ Here Simmel intimates a theme which will later stand at the center of his final work: life as selftranscendence. The most important function of religion, Simmel writes in his article, is that it unifies the oppositions of inner life (295). Any concept of religion is one-sided that bases itself on one feeling alone, viz., humility, hope, despair, or love. The great value of religion is that it gives space to all our feelings, which flow together in it as the waves of a stream (296). Religion stands in our inner life as the one element that orders all others and which makes them stand in relation to one another (302). What is this one element? It is nothing less than love, the love Plato describes in the Symposium, an infinite longing which stands between having and not having (298). This infinite longing is what Simmel later describes as the drive to self-transcendence: the striving that limits the soul but also drives it beyond its limits. Simmel maintains that this is where the concept of God plays a central role in our mental life: it is the ideal of this infinite longing. The article is remarkable because it gives religion the central role in our mental life. This goes far beyond the merely pragmatic justification Simmel envisaged earlier, because it shows ⁵⁸ Georg Simmel, “Die Gegensätze des Lebens und die Religion,” in Das freie Wort, 4 (1904), 305–12. GSG, VII, 295–303.

 

159

that religion is not merely a useful belief but belongs to the very essence of the human soul. This, more than anything else, shows us how important religion was to Simmel’s philosophy and his general conception of the world. All the articles described so far show Simmel’s fundamental sympathy with religion. Although Simmel never accepts the transcendent claims of religion, he still thinks that it is valid as a form of life, as a kind of discourse, or as a way of unifying the powers of the soul. But these articles do not exhaust Simmel’s writings on religion. He has two more articles, “Die Religion” and “Zur Soziologie der Religion,”⁵⁹ which are less sympathetic than the others. One could draw negative inferences from these articles, though Simmel is still eager to forestall that. As we would expect from one of the fathers of modern sociology, Simmel also treats religion from a sociological perspective. In these articles he attempts to describe how religion arose in society and how it functions within it. His starting point is an analogy between how an individual relates to society and how an individual describes its relation to God (X, 59–64). In both cases there is the same relation of dependence on a wider whole. All the different forms of dependence in society—of a child to a family, of a patriot to his fatherland, of a cosmopolitan to mankind, of a worker to his class, of a soldier to his army—are like the forms of dependence a believer feels toward God. Just as the individual depends on the group, so the believer depends on God; and just as society is independent of the individual, remaining the same for generations, so God is independent of the lives of believers. Furthermore, just as the individual hypostasizes society, as if it were an entity independent of him, so the believer hypostasizes the object of his faith, as if it exists in some supernatural realm. All religious relations contain a mixture of desire and surrender, of humility and pride, of sensuous immediacy and insensuous abstraction; the same kind of mixture is apparent in many social relations (IX, 269). None of these social relations are religious per se, Simmel notes, but they do have a common tone which one could call ⁵⁹ See Georg Simmel, Die Religion, in Die Gesellschaft: Sammlung Sozial-psychologischer Monographien, ed. Martin Buber. Zweite, veränderte und vermehrte Auflage (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1912); GSG, X, 39–118; and “Zur Soziologie der Religion,” Neue Deutsche Rundschau IX (1898), 111–23; GSG, V, 266–86.

160    religious (IX, 269; X, 64). Religion arose from the common feeling behind these different social relations; this feeling was made into an abstraction, so that it had its own independent status and function (IX, 271). Simmel is especially concerned to trace the social origin and function of two religious concepts: God and faith. The concept of God he sees as the hypostasis of the idea of social unity (IX, 276). The unity of society— the fact that there is one society that is formed by different individuals, laws, and institutions—has its analog in the idea of the unity of God. The unity of God is simply the hypostasization of social unity (X, 111–12). Simmel finds evidence for this thesis in the fact that there used to be as many gods as there were nations; faith in a God was not supposed to extend beyond the borders of a nation or state. The other aspect of religious life that has its origin and analog in society is the concept of faith. We normally speak of faith in the context of religion to describe the belief in God, but the concept has a clear social origin, Simmel thinks, because faith in people and authority is the fundamental basis of all society (IX, 275). Religious faith in God arose from our social faith in others; it is just a purer form of this social faith, which has been abstracted from particular people and institutions. Although these articles are not as sympathetic to religion as the others, Simmel is still very eager to forestall any impression that by showing the social origins of religion he intends to give a critique of it. Following a common neo-Kantian distinction,⁶⁰ he argues that it is one thing to determine the origin or causes of a belief or practice, but quite another to determine its value or truth (IX, 266–7, 285; X, 51, 116). For example, just because religion arises from the hypostasization of social forms does not mean that the belief in a transcendent entity is spurious. No one is more guilty of this practice than Nietzsche, Simmel thinks.⁶¹ Nietzsche thinks that knowing the “all-too-human sources” of a religious belief is ⁶⁰ The founder of the distinction was Wilhelm Windelband, “Kritische oder Genetische Methode,” Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte, Neunte Ausgage (Tübingen: Mohr, 1924), II, 99–135. ⁶¹ This is apparent from Simmel’s “Beiträge zur Erkennnistheorie der Religion,” where Simmel refers to “den Bemühungen Religion in allerhand Allzumenschlichkeiten aufzulösen” (14). The phrase “Allzumenschlichkeiten” refers to Nietzsche’s book Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, which engages in “an historical critique of religion.” See Section 3 in this chapter.

 

161

sufficient to discredit it. But, Simmel says, this is like trying to undermine the value of love by showing that it has physiological origins (IX, 286). Such were Simmel’s main writings on the philosophy of religion. Even this brief survey suffices to show that Simmel was a remarkably sympathetic critic and expositor of religion, though he never accepted belief in its orthodox sense.

VII Lebensphilosophie and Irrationalism 1. The Charge of Irrationalism One of the defining characteristics of Lebensphilosophie, according to many of its expositors,¹ is its “irrationalism.” According to Georg Lukács, whose account in Die Zerstörung der Vernunft has been very influential,² Lebensphilosophie has been the most powerful force for irrationalism in the modern world. Lukács thinks that it is possible to draw a direct line of influence from Nietzsche down to Hitler; even if the Lebensphilosophen were dead for decades before Hitler rose to power, and even if none of them had ever heard of national-socialism, they developed ideas about the limits of reason that aided and abetted its ideology. Were the Lebensphilosophen guilty of “irrationalism”? It depends, of course, on what one means by that term, which is vague and loaded, having many negative connotations. In modern political discourse, “irrationalism” implies that one is a reactionary, opposed to progressive causes and liberal values. This is roughly the sense in which Lukács uses the term. He does not directly define it, but he thinks that whether one is for or against reason depends on one’s attitude toward history. A progressive philosophy is rationalist and a reactionary philosophy is irrationalist (7). What defines a progressive philosophy is its adherence to two central doctrines: materialism and the dialectical method (245). In other words, the yardstick for rationalism is measured by two central tenets of Marxism.

¹ Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie, p. 5; Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, pp. 140–2; Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens, pp. 16, 176, 180; Albert, Lebensphilosophie, pp. 11, 142; and Julius Goldstein, Wandlungen in der Philosophie der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Verlag von Werner Klinkhardt, 1911), pp. 35–77. ² Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1953), p. 318. Numbers in parentheses above refer to this edition. Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0008

  

163

It is obvious that Lukács’s criteria are tendentious, presupposing controversial philosophical doctrines which few philosophers today would accept. One only needs to question these doctrines for Lukács’s whole case for irrationalism to falter. Surely, to question materialism or the dialectical method is not to lapse into irrationalism. Why not indeed make the central dogmas of some other philosophy the criteria of irrationalism? To be fair to Lukács, he does recognize that the case against irrationalism also has to be made on internal grounds, by showing how a philosophy suffers from internal contradictions (7). But there is far too little of this in his actual practice, which mostly consists in complaining about the lack of Marxist orthodoxy in the Lebensphilosophen. Whether a philosopher is progressive or reactionary cannot be decided a priori, by whether he or she adheres to a political dogma; rather, it has to be determined empirically, by a careful, informed examination of his or her actual doctrines. The Lebensphilosophen held a wide variety of political beliefs, from the leftist Karl Lessing to the rightist Ludwig Klages, and it is extremely hard to generalize about them. Where Lukács’s account has most plausibility is in the case of Nietzsche. He makes a good case for Nietzsche’s reactionary politics, and for the central importance of his hatred of socialism. His portrait of Nietzsche is far more convincing than that of Walter Kaufmann, who not only makes Nietzsche sound like a contemporary liberal but who also completely ignores his early politics.³ Because Lukács thinks that Nietzsche is the founder of Lebensphilosophie, it is not difficult to see why he wanted to generalize from his case. But Lukács runs into difficulty in trying to account for the politics of other Lebensphilosophen, most notably for the politics of Dilthey and Simmel, who were progressive and liberal.

2. The Meaning of “Irrationalism” The whole discussion about whether a philosopher is conservative or progressive, reactionary or radical, is ultimately beside the point in ³ Lukács makes much of his case for Nietzsche’s reactionary politics in the early text Der griechische Staat, a text completely ignored by Kaufmann. See Lukács’s justified comments on Kaufmann’s interpretation, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, pp. 253, 283.

164    determining whether he or she merits the term “irrationalist.” It still leaves the broader question: Is any political position as such, taken on its own and apart from its social and historical context, rational or irrational? What does a political opinion have to do with reason in general? According to one classical account of the term reason, it should have nothing to do with politics at all. Reason is only a formal faculty, a faculty of inference, where the content of the beliefs is left out of account. Politics, however, is a discipline with beliefs having a specific content, so that reason should be neutral about politics. It can discuss the formal relations between these beliefs, i.e., whether one follows the other, whether one is incompatible with the other, and so on. But it has no power to say anything about the content of the beliefs themselves, e.g., whether they are true or false, just or unjust, etc. On this account, both progressives and conservatives, both radicals and reactionaries, are logically neutral in the beliefs they hold; there is nothing about the beliefs themselves that is rational or irrational. There is a common meaning to the word “irrational,” of which “irrationalism” is derivative, according to which “irrational” means thinking or believing contrary to the evidence or the rules of inference. The prefix “ir,” a variant of the Latin prefix “in,” functions as a negation, so that putting it before a noun means the opposite. So irrationalism in this sense would be to hold, allow, or recommend beliefs that are contrary to reason, i.e., contrary to the laws of inference or the evidence. Irrationalism has been a position in theology or the philosophy of religion; it is best illustrated by Tertullian’s infamous maxim credo quia absurdam. But this sense of the term describes no modern philosophical or political position. The issue of irrationalism in modern philosophy goes back to the epistemology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when philosophers examined in painstaking depth and detail the powers and limits of the faculty of reason. Reason was assigned greater or lesser powers, greater or lesser limits, according to its role in the acquisition of knowledge. Rationalists held that reason had the power to attain knowledge independent of the senses and the assistance of revelation; and empiricists insisted that reason could not attain knowledge without the aid of the senses and could only organize the materials given to it. In this

  

165

debate, those who stressed the limits of reason were often accused of irrationalism by those who emphasized the powers of reason; they were called “irrationalists” because they ignored, neglected, or denied what were thought to be the actual powers of reason. It is in this latter sense that the Lebensphilosophen were regarded as irrationalists by their opponents. It is undeniable that they emphasized the limits of reason in comparison with their Kantian, Hegelian, or Marxist antipodes, who more valued the powers of reason. Thus the Lebensphilosophen denied that reason has the power to determine the principles of morals, that it can transcend its historical context, and that it can determine the universal principles of criticism. Nevertheless, these are still not sufficient reasons for the charge of irrationalism against Lebensphilosophie. There is a terrible confusion behind such a charge: it conflates holding that reason has narrow limits with thinking contrary to the evidence or the rules of inference. But there is nothing contrary to the rules of inference or evidence in holding that reason has limited powers; this would be tantamount to saying that philosophers like Hume and Kant are irrationalists, though we know that they were very rigorous and thorough in their epistemologies.

3. A Critique of Reason Even if we should be wary of calling the Lebensphilosophen irrationalists, there can be no doubt that they were often critical of rationalism, that their philosophy contained a full-scale critique of reason. What were their criticisms of rationalism? And were they reactionary, as Lukács has claimed? Whether we regard a whole philosophical movement as irrationalist and reactionary depends not a little on its origins and historical context. This is especially the case with Lebensphilosophie. An examination of its origins shows that it was anything but a reactionary and irrationalist movement. The source of Lebensphilosophie goes back to a revolutionary movement of the 1760s, the Sturm und Drang. The leaders of this movement were Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), and Justus

166    Möser (1720–94). All of them are often regarded as anti-rationalists because they protested against the rationalism of the Aufklärung. The reason they rebelled against rationalism, however, is anything but reactionary. The Sturmer und Dränger protested against rationalism in the name of human freedom. They believed that its emphasis on rules, laws, and centralized authority led to the suppression of creativity, individuality, and personal freedom. In the sphere of aesthetics, the Aufklärer had been too eager to emphasize the structure and constraint of classical rules against the inspiration of the artist; in the sphere of politics, they had been too swift to embrace central authority against local liberties; and in the sphere of ethics, they had been too happy to elevate reason at the expense of sensibility and emotion. If, for these reasons, we regard the Sturm und Drang as a reactionary and irrationalist movement, then we ride roughshod over their reasons for the critique of rationalism: the defense of human freedom and creativity. The Lebensphilosophen inherited much of their critique of reason from the Sturm und Drang. They too wanted to defend individuality, creativity, and liberty. With the Sturm und Drang a trope emerges that would persist down to the days of Lebensphilosophie. The trope goes like this: life = spontaneous energy, liberation, authenticity; reason = routine, restraint, artificiality. The appeal to life among the Lebensphilosophen was in support of all these values; their distrust of reason came from their fear of its role as an agency of oppression. Lebensphilosophie arose not only from a reaction against the Aufklärung but also from a reaction against idealism. The great age of idealism in German philosophy (1781–1831) was another age of reason, a rehabilitation of the grand goals and ideals of the Enlightenment. With the rise of materialism and positivism in the 1850s and 1860s, this second age of rationalism came to an end, at least a decade before the advent of Lebensphilosophie in the 1870s. The Lebensphilosophen broke with the rationalism of idealism more directly and energetically than with the rationalism of the Aufklärung, whose legacy had largely disappeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In their battle against the rationalism of idealism, the Lebensphilosophen could expect no allies among the positivists and materialists, whom they also heartily opposed. But they still had an important precedent, one that came from an

  

167

unexpected source, indeed from an inner act of betrayal: the ageing Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling. Beginning as early as 1815, Schelling began to turn against the idealist tradition in which he was first nursed as a philosopher. In his Weltalter, a fragment of which was first published in 1814 or 1815, he insisted that science should be the exposition of a living being, the primal living being, which nothing precedes, and which is the basis of all thought.⁴ In his later Philosophie der Offenbarung this line of thinking was developed into an explicit and powerful critique of Hegel’s rationalism.⁵ Schelling maintained that the realm of existence is prior to essence, and that it is irreducible to thought. All thinking held sway in the realm of essence, in the sphere of the universal, because only in it could there be relations between concepts; but none of these concepts could demonstrate existence itself, which they simply had to presuppose. The Lebensphilosophen followed Schelling, both in stressing the primacy of the concept of life and in making existence prior to essence. Reason held sway only over the realm of essence, the sphere of universals or ideas; but it had no comprehension of the realm of existence, which is irreducible to essence or the universal. Hence the Lebensphilosophen maintained that life in itself is unfathomable (unergründlich), that it cannot be penetrated or known by reason. The argument for the incomprehensibility of life appears most plainly and explicitly in Dilthey. He would argue that any attempt to know life is circular. Since life is the source of all activity, even thinking and knowing, it cannot in turn be the object of thinking and knowing; any attempt to think or know it would presuppose it. All Kant’s arguments against knowledge of the transcendental subject seemed to apply here: we cannot know the transcendental subject because any attempt to know it presupposes it.⁶ Dilthey rehearsed arguments like this in stressing the incomprehensibility of life: “The fundamental presuppositions of knowledge are given in life, so that thinking cannot get behind them.”⁷

⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷

See F.W.J. Schelling, Die Weltalter Bruchstück in SW, I/VIII, 199. See Philosophie der Offenbarung, Werke II/3, 55–114, Vierte bis Sechste Vorlesung. Kant, KrV, A 346, 366, 402, B 158n. See Dilthey, GS, V, 136; cf. V, 194, 196, and VIII, 184.

168    The limits of reason were apparent to the Lebensphilosophen not only in its incapacity as a theoretical faculty but also in its impotence as a practical one. The foremost expression and manifestation of the living powers of a human being came in its will; it was the will that directed and dominated the activities of human beings so that they could serve the ends of life. Reason was a central tool in the realization of human ends; it could find all the options and their consequences and choose the most effective course of action. But reason was only an instrumental power; it did not determine the ends of human action but only the means. It was the servant and not the master of the will, which determined the ends of human action. Such was the power of the will over reason that it would also determine the course of its theoretical activity. The ends of enquiry, and its conclusions, were determined by the will and not by a neutral and autonomous reason. The Lebensphilosophen were also critical of the Aufklärung’s claims on behalf of criticism. The Aufklärer believed that they were in possession of a tribunal of criticism which could assess impartially the pros and cons of all beliefs, and whose conclusions were universal, acceptable to every rational being, regardless of his culture and epoch. But for the Lebensphilosoph such claims were no better than mythology. The beliefs and values of every person were determined by his education, culture, and epoch, and any pretense to universality in his judgments came from disregarding his origins and context. The horizon of his own culture determines his values and beliefs, and to ignore its effect upon him is to lapse into ethnocentrism, the belief that the values of one’s own culture set the values for all. So the critique of reason of Lebensphilosophen did stress some of the limits of reason: its incapacity to grasp life, its inability to set the ends of action, its powerlessness to transcend the context of its own time. But none of these points are sufficient to make them irrationalists ready to violate or transcend these limits.

4. Hermeneutics and the New Rationalism Although the Lebensphilosophen stressed the limits of reason and the incomprehensibility of life, there is another respect in which they

  

169

stretched the powers of reason to ensure the comprehensibility of human life and action. This more rationalist side of Lebensphilosophie appears in its advocacy of hermeneutics. We have already seen how Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel argued for the interpretation rather than explanation of life, how they insisted that life has to be understood from within according to the intentions and beliefs of actors rather than from without according to general causal laws. From this perspective, the Lebensphilosophen were not striving to limit the powers of reason but to extend them, to widen its powers beyond the explanation of material nature to the interpretation and understanding of human life, history, and action. When we take into account the advocacy of hermeneutics among the Lebensphilosophen, we can see that the charge of irrationalism against them begs the question. This charge assumes a specific concept of reason, and that this concept alone is applicable to all phenomena, in the natural and human world. There are two very different concepts of rationality at stake: explanation according to general laws, where an event is understood when we subsume it under a law; and explanation according to purposes or intentions, where an action is understood if we know the end of an agent in doing it. The first form of explanation is prevalent in the natural sciences; the second is more appropriate for history and the social sciences. The use of the second form became controversial because it seemed to clash with the positivists’ program for the unity of science, according to which the first form of explanation is the only form in all the sciences, both human and natural. The positivists accused the Lebensphilosophen of irrationalism because they denied that human actions are explicable according to what they saw as the sole form of scientific explanation. The positivist critique of hermeneutics was based on the claim that hermeneutics offered no distinct form of explanation of human actions than that already offered by covering laws. The hermeneuticist’s concept of understanding was either reducible to covering laws or it offered nothing but vague appeals to intuition and empathy. We have already seen, however, how the Lebensphilosoph responded to this critique: it presupposed that a narrow mechanical paradigm of explanation is the only form of explanation; and it neglected the specific forms of reasoning

170    involved in hermeneutics.⁸ Intuition and empathy were not means of explanation in hermeneutics but simply preliminary forms of understanding. We can now see how we need to qualify the critique of reason within Lebensphilosophie. This critique was directed against the mechanistic model of explanation that was then the dominant paradigm in the natural sciences; it claimed that this model would not work in the explanation of human life and action, for which a holistic-teleological paradigm was necessary. The Lebensphilosophen critique of reason was therefore analogous to Hegel’s critique of reason a century earlier. Just as Hegel criticized the limits of the understanding (Verstand) in its attempt to know the absolute, which he insisted could be comprehended only by the more holistic power of reason (Vernunft), so the Lebensphilosophen criticized the mechanical paradigm in its attempt to know life and human action, which they stressed could be known only by the more holistic power of internal understanding (Verstehen). The Lebensphilosophen wanted to defend the power and authority of reason no less than Hegel and the German idealists; its just that they understood reason now in terms of hermeneutical understanding. For all these reasons it is misleading to regard Lebensphilosophie as a form of irrationalism. Rather, it was the last great attempt to secure the power and authority of reason in the attempt to explain life and history.

⁸ See Chapter IV, Section 3 of this volume.

Conclusion It was the great achievement of Lebensphilosophie that it taught human beings how to live in the new secular and scientific world order. It showed them that life is still possible without the old absolutes: the existence of God, the guidance of providence, the prospect of immortality, and the control of natural law. The new world order would have to be created by human beings themselves, and it would have to be testament to their autonomy and self-given authority. The creation of this world would be daunting and challenging, to be sure, but it could also be the source of a Promethian pride and joy. The Lebensphilosophen engaged in this task with zeal and energy. The Lebensphilosophen inherited a desolate landscape, the destruction of the old intellectual order, which was the feat of earlier generations. The beliefs in the existence of God, providence, immortality, and natural law had lost their credibility after centuries of free thinking, criticism, and scientific progress. The Lebensphilosophen took no part in this destruction and they deserve no credit or blame for it. Their task was to build anew. They created a new ethics that stressed the value of individuality and creativity, that avoided the old problems plaguing formalism and utilitarianism; they forged a new method for understanding human action and history with their hermeneutics; and they developed a new conception of philosophy which stressed its individuality and relevance to life. The great danger to life in the new secular and scientific world order came not from materialism but from pessimism. Pessimism was a threat because it did not presuppose any questionable metaphysics but based its case upon the nature of life itself. It was to the great credit of Lebensphilosophie that it met directly the challenge of pessimism and stoutly resisted the temptations to a fashionable Weltschmerz. It affirmed the value of life, despite suffering and all its sorrows. Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Frederick C. Beiser, Oxford University Press. © Frederick C. Beiser 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192899767.003.0009

172    All intellectual movements leave behind problems, unresolved questions, and tensions. Lebensphilosophie is no exception to this rule. It had stressed the great freedom of human beings, their autonomy or power to live by laws of their own making; but it also emphasized that human beings are the product of their place in history, and it resisted the old atomism which seemed to make every individual resistant to social and historical forces and the arbiter of his own destiny. The individual was not only the creator of society and the state but also its product. It was the old dilemma of freedom versus determinism. This was a fundamental tension that the Lebensphilosophen never really resolved. All intellectual movements die, eventually. They die either gradually and naturally, out of sheer exhaustion, or they die suddenly and violently, because of some destructive political event. Lebensphilosophen suffered the second fate. It was the victim of what its generation called “The Great War.” Lebensphilosophie was built on the premise that life, despite its tragedies, is still worth living. But the sheer scale and magnitude of the tragedy of the war—millions of lives lost of the best and brightest for no apparent reason—cast doubt on that premise. Any promise of future happiness now seemed hollow and shallow. It was no wonder that pessimism was reborn, that it had became popular again, with Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Westens. Lebensphilosophie did live on, through existentialism, which was its reincarnation. The existentialists inherited fundamental ideas of the Popularphilosophen: that existence is contingent and precedes essence; that there is no natural law of right or wrong, or justice or injustice; that the good life involves individuality and free decision; that who we are as human beings is formed by our history and culture. Some of the basic themes of existentialism—nausea, Angst, and dreadful freedom—are popularizations or variations on ideas inherited from Lebensphilosophie. Where Lebensphilosophie stopped existentialism began. Few fans of existentialism would have realized that the themes that so fascinated them in the 1950s came from German philosophers in the 1890s.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Darwinianism 6–7, 35, 152, 68 Deussen, Paul 138–9 Dilthey, Wilhelm early religious beliefs of 148–9; on historial critique 89; his ethics: 38–47; concept of life-experience 24, 122–3; his hermeneutics 86–96; influence of Goethe upon 40; influence of Schleiermacher upon 38–9; and irrationalism 82–3; on pessimism 61–9; on on psychology 87–90; on relativism 120–7; on understanding 94; on utilitarianism 13–14, 43; on worldview 69–79; on will 67 existentialism 10–11 Haeckel, Ernst 18–19 historicism advocates of 86; chronology of 83; definition of 82–3; and irrationalism 85; and hermeneutics 85; and rationalism 168–70; and relativism 119 Heidegger, Martin 7–9 irrationalism 163–5 Kaufmann, Walter 38–9, 163, 56n.12 Lange, Friedrich 9

Lebensphilosophie as a category 3; context of 4–5; its critique of reason 165–8; dating of 2; its ethics 29–31; its major exponents 2–3; and hermeneutics 84–6; its concept of immanence 7–9; its alleged irrationalism 162–3; its concept of life 1, 5–11; and national-socialism 2; its optimism 54; and religion 134–7; rejection of teleology 9–10 Lukács, Georg 162–3 materialism 3, 8–9 Montaigne, Michel de 129–30 Nietzsche, Friedrich on Dionysian and Apollonian art 58–61; his ethics 31–2; his critique of natural science 108; his elitism 35–7; and epicurean tradition 142–8; on genius 37; early religious faith of 137–42; influence of romanticism upon 21–2, 33, 58; on historical philosophy 106; his historicism 105–11; his irrationalism 162–3, 168–9; concept of philosophy 19–23; influence of Schopenhauer upon 108–10; first response to pessimism 57–61; later response to pessimism 61–9; his relativism 115–20; and will to power 20, 115–16 natural law 113–14, 129–30

174  Pantheism 8–9 positivism 16 relativism 112–15 Schiller, Friedrich 31, 33, 35–6 Schopenhauer, Arthur as challenge to Lebensphilosophie 12, 14; as grandfather of Lebensphilosophie 2–11; his pessimism 54–7; on value of life 12; on puzzle of existence 12–14; and problem of evil 13–14, 54–5 Simmel, Georg on art and history 103; critique of Kant 130–1; on Jews 74; his Jewish background 152–4; on

historical interpretation 100–1; his philosophy of history 97–105; on life 1; historical realism 102; on individual law 47–53; on natural law 129–30; on Schopenhauer 69–71; on truth 132–3; on pessimism 69–79; relativism 127–33; religious philosophy of 155–61; on socialism 76–7; on worldview 26–8 Spalding, J.J. 12–13 Stirner, Max 50–1, 116–17 Strauss, David Friedrich 135 Trendelenburg, Adolph 17–18 Windelbnd, Wilhelm 19