II
BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM
I
We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of Morale,[[424]] the intellectual interpretation of Life by itself, to ascend the height from which it is possible to survey the widest and gravest of all the fields of human thought. At the same time, we shall need for this survey an objectivity such as no one has as yet set himself seriously to gain. Whatever we may take Morale to be, it is no part of Morale to provide its own analysis; and we shall get to grips with the problem, not by considering what should be our acts and aims and standards, but only by diagnosing the Western feeling in the very form of the enunciation.
In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say “thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with Jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the Faustian soul that this should be so. He who thinks or teaches “otherwise” is sinful, a backslider, a foe, and he is fought down without mercy. You “shall,” the State “shall,” society “shall”—this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so either in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element.
What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittingly or no, Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate opponent of “herd morale,” was perfectly incapable of limiting his zeal to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of “mankind,” and he attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on the contrary, was heartily indifferent to others’ opinions and acts and never wasted one thought on the “transformation” of mankind. He and his friends were content that they were as they were and not otherwise. The Classical ideal was indifference (ἀπάθεια) to the course of the world—the very thing which it is the whole business of Faustian mankind to master—and an important element both of Stoic and of Epicurean philosophy was the recognition of a category of things neither preferred nor rejected[[425]] (ἀδιάφορα). In Hellas there was a pantheon of morales as there was of deities, as the peaceful coexistence of Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics shows, but the Nietzschean Zarathustra—though professedly standing beyond good and evil—breathes from end to end the pain of seeing men to be other than as he would have them be, and the deep and utterly un-Classical desire to devote a life to their reformation—his own sense of the word, naturally, being the only one. It is just this, the general transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and—using the word in a novel and deep sense—socialism. All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.
The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only Faustian. It is wholly without importance that Schopenhauer denies theoretically the will to live, or that Nietzsche will have it affirmed—these are superficial differences, indicative of personal tastes and temperaments. The important thing, that which makes Schopenhauer the progenitor of ethical modernity, is that he too feels the whole world as Will, as movement, force, direction. This basic feeling is not merely the foundation of our ethics, it is itself our whole ethics, and the rest are bye-blows. That which we call not merely activity but action[[426]] is a historical conception through-and-through, saturated with directional energy. It is the proof of being, the dedication of being, in that sort of man whose ego possesses the tendency to Future, who feels the momentary present not as saturated being but as epoch, as turning-point, in a great complex of becoming—and, moreover, feels it so of both his personal life and of the life of history as a whole. Strength and distinctness of this consciousness are the marks of higher Faustian man, but it is not wholly absent in the most insignificant of the breed, and it distinguishes his smallest acts from those of any and every Classical man. It is the distinction between character and attitude, between conscious becoming and simple accepted statuesque becomeness, between will and suffering in tragedy.
In the world as seen by the Faustian’s eyes, everything is motion with an aim. He himself lives only under that condition, for to him life means struggling, overcoming, winning through. The struggle for existence as ideal form of existence is implicit even in the Gothic age (of the architecture of which it is visibly the foundation) and the 19th Century has not invented it but merely put it into mechanical-utilitarian form. In the Apollinian world there is no such directional motion—the purposeless and aimless see-saw of Heraclitus’s “becoming” (ἡ ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω) is irrelevant here—no “Protestantism,” no “Sturm und Drang,” no ethical, intellectual or artistic “revolution” to fight and destroy the existent. The Ionic and Corinthian styles appear by the side of the Doric without setting up any claim to sole and general validity, but the Renaissance expelled the Gothic and Classicism expelled the Baroque styles, and the history of every European literature is filled with battles over form-problems. Even our monasticism, with its Templars, Franciscans, Dominicans and the rest, takes shape as an order-movement, in sharp contrast to the “askesis” of the Early-Christian hermit.
To go back upon this basic form of his existence, let alone transform it, is entirely beyond the power of Faustian man. It is presupposed even in efforts to resist it. One fights against “advanced” ideas, but all the time he looks on his fight itself as an advance. Another agitates for a “reversal,” but what he intends is in fact a continuance of development. “Immoral” is only a new kind of “moral” and sets up the same claim to primacy. The will-to-power is intolerant—all that is Faustian wills to reign alone. The Apollinian feeling, on the contrary, with its world of coexistent individual things, is tolerant as a matter of course. But, if toleration is in keeping with will-less Ataraxia, it is for the Western world with its oneness of infinite soul-space and the singleness of its fabric of tensions the sign either of self-deception or of fading-out. The Enlightenment of the 18th Century was tolerant towards—that is, careless of—differences between the various Christian creeds, but in respect of its own relation to the Church as a whole, it was anything but tolerant as soon as the power to be otherwise came to it. The Faustian instinct, active, strong-willed, as vertical in tendency as its own Gothic cathedrals, as upstanding as its own “ego habeo factum,” looking into distance and Future, demands toleration—that is, room, space—for its proper activity, but only for that. Consider, for instance, how much of it the city democracy is prepared to accord to the Church in respect of the latter’s management of religious powers, while claiming for itself unlimited freedom to exercise its own and adjusting the “common” law to conform thereto whenever it can. Every “movement” means to win, while every Classical “attitude” only wants to be and troubles itself little about the Ethos of the neighbour. To fight for or against the trend of the times, to promote Reform or Reaction, construction, reconstruction or destruction—all this is as un-Classical as it is un-Indian. It is the old antithesis of Sophoclean and Shakespearian tragedy, the tragedy of the man who only wants to exist and that of the man who wants to win.
It is quite wrong to bind up Christianity with the moral imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity—and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The “it” became “I,” the passion-charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted—nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. And in virtue of it the Gothic springtime proceeded to a profound—and never yet appreciated—inward transformation of the morale of Jesus. A quiet spiritual morale welling from Magian feeling—a morale or conduct recommended as potent for salvation, a morale the knowledge of which was communicated as a special act of grace[[427]]—was recast as a morale of imperative command.[[428]]
Every ethical system, whether it be of religious or of philosophical origin, has associations with the great arts and especially with that of architecture. It is in fact a structure of propositions of causal character. Every truth that is intended for practical application is propounded with a “because” and a “therefore.” There is mathematical logic in them—in Buddha’s “Four Truths” as in Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”[[429]] and in every popular catechism. What is not in these doctrines of acquired truth is the uncritical logic of the blood, which generates and matures those conduct-standards (Sitten) of social classes and of practical men (e.g., the chivalry-obligations in the time of the Crusades) that we only consciously realize when someone infringes them. A systematic morale is, as it were, an Ornament, and it manifests itself not only in precepts but also in the style of drama and even in the choice of art-motives. The Meander, for example, is a Stoic motive. The Doric column is the very embodiment of the Antique life-ideal. And just because it was so, it was the one Classical “order” which the Baroque style necessarily and frankly excluded; indeed, even Renaissance art was warned off it by some very deep spiritual instinct. Similarly with the transformation of the Magian dome into the Russian roof-cupola,[[430]] the Chinese landscape-architecture of devious paths, the Gothic cathedral-tower. Each is an image of the particular and unique morale which arose out of the waking-consciousness of the Culture.