Socrates was right, Plato, Tolstoi, the prophets were right: there is only one truth, one God; truth has the right to destroy lie, light to destroy darkness. God, omniscient, most gracious and omnipotent, will like Alexander of Macedon conquer nearly all the known world, and will drive out from his possessions, amid the triumphant and delighted shouts of his millions of loyal subjects, the devil and all those who are disobedient to his divine word. But he will renounce his claim to power over the souls of his few opponents, according to the agreement, and a handful of apostates will gather together on a remote isle, invisible to the millions, and will there continue their free, peculiar life. And here—to return to the beginning—among these few disobedient will be found Ibsen as he was in the last years of his life, as he is seen in his last drama. For in When We Dead Awake Ibsen approves and glorifies that which Gogol actually did fifty years ago. He renounces his art, and with hatred and mockery recalls to mind what was once the business of his life. On April 15, 1866, Ibsen wrote to King Karl: 'I am not fighting for a careless existence; I am fighting for the work of my life, in which I unflinchingly believe, and which I know God has given me to do.' By the way, you will hardly find one of the great workers who has not repeated this assertion of Ibsen's, whether in the same or in another form. Evidently, without such an illusion, temporary or permanent, one cannot compass the intense struggle and the sacrifices which are the price of great work. Evidently, illusions of various kinds are necessary even for success in small things. In order that a little man should fulfil his microscopical work, he too must strain his little forces to the extreme. And who knows whether it did not seem to Akaky Akakievitch that God had assigned to him the task of copying the papers in the office and having a new uniform made? Of course he would never dare to say so, and he would never be able to, first because of his timidity, and then because he has not the gift of expression. The Muses do not bring their tribute to the poor and weak: they sing only Croesus and Caesar. But there is no doubt that the first in the village consider themselves as plainly designated by fate as the first in Rome. Caesar felt this, and not mere ambition alone spoke in him when he uttered the famous phrase. Men do not believe in themselves and always yearn to occupy a position wherein the certainty, whether justified or mistaken, may spring up within them that they stand in the sight of God. But with years all illusions vanish, and among them the illusion that God chooses certain men for his particular purposes and puts on them particular charges. Gogol, who had thus long understood his task as an author, burnt his best work before his death. Ibsen did almost the same. In the person of Professor Rubek he renounces his literary activity and jeers at it, though it had brought him everything that he could have expected from it, fame, respect, riches.... And think why! Because he had to sacrifice the man in him for the sake of the artist, to give up Irene whom he loved, to marry a woman to whom he was indifferent. Did Ibsen at the end of his life clearly discover that God had appointed him the task of being a male? But all men are males, while only individuals are artists. Had this been said, not by Ibsen, but by a common mortal, we would call it the greatest vulgarity. On the lips of Ibsen, an old man of seventy years, the author of Brand, from which the divines of Europe draw the matter for their sermons, on the lips of Ibsen who wrote Emperor and Galilean such a confession acquires an unexpected and mysterious meaning. Here you cannot escape with a shake of the head and a contemptuous smile. Not anybody, but Ibsen himself speaks—the first, not in the village, not in Rome even, but in the world. Here surely is the human law at work: 'Forswear not the prison nor the beggar's wallet!'
Perhaps it is opportune to recall the swan songs of Turgeniev. Turgeniev, too, had high ideals which he probably thought he had received direct from God. We may with assurance put into the mouth of Brand himself the phrase with which his remarkable essay, Hamlet and Don Quixote, concludes: 'Everything passes, good deeds remain.' In these words is the whole Turgeniev, or better, the whole conscious Turgeniev of that period of his life to which the essay belongs. And not only in that period, but up to the last minutes of his life, the conscious Turgeniev would not recant those words. But in the Prose Poems an utterly different motive is heard. All that he there relates, and all that Ibsen tells in his last drama, is permeated with one infinite, inextinguishable anguish for a life wasted in vain, for a life which had been spent in preaching 'good.' Yet neither youth, nor health, nor the powers that fail are regretted. Perhaps even death has no terrors.... What the old Turgeniev cannot away with are his memories of 'the Russian girl.' He described and sang her as no one in Russian literature before him, but she was to him only an ideal; he, like Rubek, had not touched her. Ibsen had not touched Irene; he went off to Madame Viardo. And this is an awful sin, in no wise to be atoned, a mortal sin, the sin of which the Bible speaks. All things will be forgiven, all things pass, all things will be forgotten: this crime will remain for ever. That is the meaning of Turgeniev's senilia; that is the meaning of Ibsen's senilia. I have deliberately chosen the word senilia, though I might have said swan songs, though it would even have been more correct to speak of swan songs. 'Swans,' says Plato, 'when they feel the approach of death, sing that day better than ever, rejoicing that they will find God, whom they serve.' Ibsen and Turgeniev served the same God as the swans, according to the Greek belief, the bright God of songs, Apollo. And their last songs, their senilia, were better than all that had gone before. In them is a bottomless depth awful to the eye, but how wonderful! There all things are different from what they are with us on the surface. Should one hearken to the temptation and go to the call of the great old men, or should he tie himself to the mast of conviction, verified by the experience of mankind, and cover his ears as once the crafty Ulysses did to save himself from the Syrens? There is a way of escape: there is a word which will destroy the enchantment. I have already uttered it: senilia. Turgeniev wished to call his Prose Poems by this name—manifestations of sickness, of infirmity, of old age. These are terrible; one must run away from these! Schopenhauer, the philosopher and metaphysician, feared to revise the works of his youth in his old age. He felt that he would spoil them by his mere touch. And all men mistrust old age, all share Schopenhauer's apprehensions. But what if all are mistaken? What if senilia bring us nearer to the truth? Perhaps the soothsaying birds of Apollo grieve in unearthly anguish for another existence; perhaps their fear is not of death but of life; perhaps in Turgeniev's poems, as well as in Ibsen's last drama, are already heard, if not the last, then at least the penultimate words of mankind.
VII
What is Philosophy?
In text-books of philosophy you will find most diverse answers to this question. During the twenty-five hundred years of its existence it has been able to make an immense quantity of attempts to define the substance of its task. But up till now no agreement has been reached between the acknowledged representatives of the lovers and favourites of wisdom. Every one judges in his own way, and considers his opinion as the only true one; of a consensus sapientium it is impossible even to dream. But strangely enough, exactly in this disputable matter wherein the agreement of savants and sages is so impossible, the consensus profanorum is fully attained. All those who were never engaged in philosophy, who have never read learned books, or even any books at all, answer the question with rare unanimity. True, it is apparently impossible to judge of their opinions directly, because people of this kind cannot speak at all in the language evolved by science; they never put the question in such a form, still less can they answer it in the accepted words. But we have an important piece of indirect evidence which gives us the right to form a conclusion. There is no doubt that all those who have gone to philosophy for answers to the questions which tormented them, have left her disenchanted, unless they had a sufficiently eminent gift to enable them to join the guild of professional philosophers. From this we may unhesitatingly conclude, although the conclusion is for the time being only negative, that philosophy is engaged in a business which may be interesting and important to the few, but is tedious and useless to the many.
This conclusion is highly consoling as well for the sage as for the profane. For every sage, even the most exalted, is at the same time one of the profane—if we discard the academical use of words—a human being, pure and simple. To him also it may happen that those tormenting questions will arise, which ordinary people used to bring to him, as for instance in the case of Tolstoi's Ivan Ilyich or Tchekhov's professor in The Tedious Story. And then he will of course be obliged to confess that the necessary answers are missing from the great tomes which he has studied so well. For what can be more terrible to a man than to be compelled in the hard moments of his life to acknowledge any doctrine of philosophy as binding upon him? For instance, to be compelled to hold with Plato, Spinoza, or Schopenhauer that the chief problem of life is moral perfection, or in other words, self-renunciation. It was easy for Plato to preach justice. It did not in the least prevent him from being the son of his time, or from breaking to a permissible extent the commandments which he himself had given. By all the evidence Spinoza was much more resolute and consequent than Plato; he indeed kept the passions in subservience, but that was his personal and individual inclination. Consistence was not merely a property of his mind, but of his whole being. Displaying it, he displayed himself. As for Schopenhauer, it is known that he praised the virtues only in his books; but in life, like many another clever, independent man, he was guided by the most diverse considerations.
But these are all masters, who devise systems and imperatives. Whereas the pupil, seeking in philosophy an answer to his questions, cannot permit himself any liberties and digressions from the universal rules, for the essence and the fundamental problem of any doctrine reduces to the subordination not merely of men's conduct, but of the life of the whole universe to one regulating principle. Individual philosophers have discovered such principles, but to this day they have reached no final agreement among themselves, and this to some extent lightens the burden of those unhappy ones who, having lost the hope of finding help and guidance elsewhere, have turned to philosophy. If there is not in philosophy one universal principle binding upon and acknowledged by all, it means that it is permitted to each man, at least for the meantime, to feel and even to act in his own way. A man may listen to Spinoza, or he may stop his ears. He may kneel before Plato's eternal ideas, or he may give his allegiance to the ever-changing, ever-flowing reality. Finally, he may accept Schopenhauer's pessimism, but nothing on earth can compel him to celibacy on the ground that Schopenhauer successfully laughed at love. Nor is there any necessity at all, in order to win such freedom for one's self, to be armed with the light dialectic of the old Greek philosopher, or with the heavy logic of the poor Dutch Jew, or with the subtle wit of the profound German. Neither is it necessary to dispute them. It is even possible to agree with them all. The room of the world is infinite, and will not only contain all those who lived once and those who are yet to be born, but will give to each one of them all that he can desire: to Plato, the world of ideas, to Spinoza, the one eternal and unchangeable substance, to Schopenhauer, the Nirvana of Buddhism. Each of these, and all the other philosophers, will find what they want in the universe even to the belief, even to the conviction, that theirs are the only true and universal doctrines. But, at the same time, the profane will find suitable worlds for themselves. From the fact that people are cooped up on the earth, and that they must put forth efforts beyond belief to gain each cubit of earth, and even their illusory liberties, it by no means follows that poverty, obscurantism, and despotism must be considered eternal and original principles, and that economical uniformity is the last refuge of man. A plurality of worlds, a plurality of men and gods amid the vast spaces of the vast universe—this is, if I may be forgiven the word, an ideal. It is true it is not built according to the idealists. Yet what a conclusion does it foreshadow! We leave the disputes and arguments of philosophers aside, so soon as we begin to speak of gods. According to the existing beliefs and hypotheses the gods also have always been quarrelling and fighting among themselves. Even in monotheistic religions people always made their God enter a fight, and devised an eminent opponent for him—the devil. Men can by no means rid themselves of the thought that everything in heaven goes on in exactly the same way as it does on the earth, and they attribute all their own bad qualities as well as their good ones to the denizens of heaven. Whereas it is by far the most probable that a great many of the things which are, according to our notions, perfectly inseparable from life do not exist in heaven. Among other things, there is no struggle. And this is well. For every struggle, sooner or later, develops inevitably into a fight. When the supply of logical and ethical arguments is exhausted, one thing is left for the irreconcilable opponents—to come to blows, which do in fact usually decide the issue. The value of logical and ethical arguments is arbitrarily assigned, but material force is measured by foot-pounds and can be calculated in advance. So that where on the common supposition there will be no foot-pounds, the issue of the fight will very often remain undecided. When Lermontov's demon goes to Tamara's cell, an angel meets him on the way. The demon says that Tamara belongs to him; the angel demands her for himself. The demon will not be dissuaded by words and arguments: he is not built that way. As for the angel, he always considers himself doubly right. How can the issue be decided? At last Lermontov, who could not or dared not devise a new solution, admitted the interference of material force: Tamara is dragged away from the demon exactly as the stronger robber pulls his prey from the weaker on earth. Evidently the poet admitted that conclusion, that he might pay his tribute to the piety of tradition. But in my opinion the solution is not pious, but merely blasphemous. In it the traces of barbarity and idolatry are still clearly visible. The tastes and attributes of which earthly despots dream are attributed to God. By all means he must be, he desires to be, the strongest, the very first, just like Julius Caesar in his youth. He fears rivalry above all things, and never forgives his unconquered enemies. This is evidently a barbarous mistake. God does not want to be the strongest, the very first, at all. Certainly—for that would be intelligible and in accordance with common sense—he would not like to be weaker than others, in order that he might not be exposed to violence; but there is no foundation at all for attributing to him ambition or vainglory. Therefore there is equally no reason to think that he does not suffer equals, desires to be supreme, and seeks at all costs to destroy the devil. Most probably he lives in peace and concord even with those who least adapt themselves to his tastes and habits. Perhaps he is even delighted that not all are as he, and he readily shares his possessions with the devil, the more readily because by such a division neither loses, since the infinite—I admit that God's possessions are infinite—divided by two and even by the greatest possible finite number still leaves infinity.
Now we can return to the original question, and it seems that we can even give an answer to it—two answers even, one for the sage, another for the profane. To the first, philosophy is art for art's sake. Every philosopher tries to construct a harmonious and various system, curiously and nicely fashioned, using for his material his own intrinsic experience as well as his own personal observations of the life beyond him, and the observations of others. A philosopher is an artist of his kind, to whom his works are dearer than everything in life, sometimes dearer than life itself. We very often see philosophers sacrifice everything for the sake of their work—even truth. Not so the profane. To them philosophy—more exactly, that which they would call philosophy if they possessed a scientific terminology—is the last refuge when material forces have been wasted, when there are no weapons left to fight for their stolen rights. Then they run for help and support to a place which they have always taken care to avoid before. Think of Napoleon at St. Helena. He who had been collecting soldiers and guns all his life, began to philosophise when he was bound hand and foot. Certainly he behaved in this new sphere like a beginner, a very inexperienced and, strange to say, a pusillanimous novice.
He who feared neither pestilence nor bullet, was afraid, we know, of a dark room. Men used to philosophy, like Schopenhauer, walk boldly and with confidence in a dark room, though they run away from gun shots, and even less dangerous things. The great captain, the once Emperor of nearly all Europe, Napoleon, philosophised on St. Helena, and even went so far as to begin to ingratiate himself with morality, evidently supposing that upon morality his ultimate fate depended. He assured her that for her sake, and her sake alone, he had contrived his murderous business—he who, all the while a crown was on his head and a victorious army in his hands, hardly knew even of the existence of morality. But this is so intelligible. If one were to come upon a perfectly new and unknown world at the age of forty-five, then surely everything would seem terrible, and one would take the incorporeal morality for the arbiter of destiny. And one would plan to seduce her, if possible, with sweet words and false promises, as a lady of the world. But these were the first steps of a tyro. It was as hard for Napoleon to master philosophy as it was for Charlemagne at the end of his days to learn to write. But he knew why he had come to the new place, and neither Plato nor Spinoza nor Kant could dissuade him of this. Perhaps at the beginning, while he was as yet unused to the darkness, he would pretend to agree with the acknowledged authorities, thinking that here too, just as there where he lived before, exalted personages do not tolerate opposition; perhaps he would lie to them as he lied to morality, but his business he would not forget. He came to philosophy with demands, and would not rest till he had received satisfaction. He had already seen how a Corsican lieutenant had become a French Emperor. Why should not the beaten Emperor fight his last fight?... And how shall he be reconciled with self-renunciation? Philosophy will surrender: it is only necessary not to surrender in one's self. So does a Napoleon come to philosophy, and so does he understand her. And until the contrary is proven, nothing can prevent us from thinking that the Napoleons are right, and therefore that academical philosophy is not the last nor even the penultimate word. For, perhaps, the last word is hidden in the hearts of the tongue-tied, but bold, persistent, implacable men.