Pomponazzi with his "De immortalitate" was vehemently denounced by his ecclesiastical contemporaries as the man undermining Christian doctrine--and rejecting finality. The true initiator of the spirit of modern science, René Descartes, was not in any similar way denounced as a man undermining Christian doctrine--and rejecting finality. In fact, his contemporaries may, to a large extent, have considered him a fairly good Christian. But we think the characteristic Charles Werner gives to Descartes of a true revolutionary spirit just in the field of the Christian conception of human finality, should be carefully noticed:
When he wants to banish "substantial forms" from philosophy, what he is actually banishing is the principle of quality, activity, and perfection: the soul that organizes matter and makes it alive. (Op. cit. p. 275)
Apart from man, who appears as an exception in the universe, the beings possess no soul whatsoever. Animal life is nothing but a machine. In this respect at least, Descartes rejects every consideration of finality! The Cartesian universe is still a universe created by God, it is true. And that God is said to be a God of perfection sovereign perfection. However, the "perfection" with which that same God has evidently endowed that same universe, is indeed, a sadly reduced perfection. It is "the perfection of mechanics". Its movements are without any higher goal, without any real sense. No higher aspirations pervade it. Everything happens as if things were devoid of, and foreign to, any spirit of true totality, and strangely impassive towards the admitted perfection which has, allegedly, given birth to them.
We cannot quite agree, however, that antiquity is the only epoch abounding in a purpose-laden philosophy. As we have seen, some thinkers of the Middle Ages--and particularly just those most profoundly influenced by the heritage of Christianity--display a richness in finality and in human personalism rarely found in Greek philosophy. To the genius of medieval thought it was still comparatively easy to understand how the divine can interfere with the human, and how the world here below can have its share in the glories of the high heavens above. But these intuitive understandings of the child were soon to disappear in the cunning machinations of the irretrievably adult. The "rupture between the world and the principle of qualities" is soon made abysmal and bridgeless forever. Or, as Werner puts it:
Things were left defenseless to geometry. (Ibid.)
After Descartes, Spinoza found, in his turn, that the mathematical method was the only suitable one in philosophy. Little wonder that he adds to the title of his Ethica: "more geometrico demonstrata". In fact, this memorable work on a highly spiritual subject is arranged after the pattern of some thesis of geometry, that is, in a sternly theoretical way.
But has not Spinoza actually just abolished the duality of the created world versus the creating God, you may perhaps inquire, referring to his pantheistic views.
As far as just pantheism is concerned, however, we shall soon see to what extent it means, in all its forms, an annihilation of personalism rather than an enhancement of it. Whenever Creator and creation are treated as flowing together, it is not creation that becomes more personal, but the Creator who becomes more impersonal. It is not the created things that gain by appearing more divine, but the creating deity that loses by appearing more profane and commonplace. Above all, pantheism unfailingly constitutes a signal victory of the general over the specific, of the impassively collectivistic over the ardently individualistic.
Spinoza goes to the length of stating that things are derived from the essence of God with the same automatic necessity as the properties of the triangle are derived from its essence. Do any serious consequences devolve from such a view on the relations between visible everyday things of temporal nature and the invisible God of eternity? Yes, to that transcendence of perfection which is so indispensable to purpose and meaning in human destiny, and accordingly fundamental to any true religiousness, it means the inevitable pulverization.
It becomes particularly significant to see what Spinoza regarded as the great advantage of the mathematical method: it delivers us from the "prejudice" of final causes. To the philosopher, human imagination is the source of that "sad prejudice". For it constantly fools us into believing that things exist for the sake of man--in order to serve his needs and provide for his commodities. When once we succeed in rising (by means of reason, that goes without saying) towards the real knowledge of the facts, then we shall luckily drop those vulgar notions of good and evil that bewilder us now. In front of us nothing will remain except nature alone in her grand eternal necessity!
The newer philosophy has, as a general rule, given up the ancient and medieval aspiration of considering things in their dependence on moral values, a dependence which--as we willingly admit--is far more religious than philosophical in its nature. According as philosophy gradually strips off its religious element, no other development could reasonably be expected.
Here it might of course be objected that even Aristotle, our sturdy old hero of the ancient world, did not go too far in an alterocentric direction, when it comes to ethics. We have seen, indeed, how obstinately he insists upon finding the most valuable life in contemplation, not in moral action. Thus he makes the realm of good into a realm accessible only to an exclusive club of intellectual highbrows, so to speak.
In fact, the Stoic was far more human and broad-minded in this respect. The Stoics placed good within the reach of even the most lowly minds among men. And then Christianity comes and completes this tendency of "popularizing" the range of ethical unfolding for the human race. Now caritas becomes the wonderful summit, commanding even the highest peaks of scientific and philosophical exploits:
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matt. V:48)
The perfection referred to here is not that of general ideas, but that of personal deeds.
How different is the programme of modern thought from this! Descartes announces solemnly and distinctly a purely scientific set of morals. And why does Spinoza think that the mathematical method is the only suitable one, even in ethics? Because that method makes us understand the necessity of things!
Charles Werner thinks there is something very contradictory here. All beings in the universe are exactly what they should be. There is no distinction between the real and the ideal. But then, how can Spinoza demand of us any real effort towards what is good?
In fact, even if, quite logically, he could demand such an effort, how should it at all result in any practical realizations? From our point of view, the bare facts of the case are that we ordinary mortals are simply excluded from the possibility of deriving any inspiration from an outlook on life so hopelessly devoid of any interior connectedness, devoid of any superior sense, devoid of any higher goal, the sine qua non of all alterocentric orientation.
And what about Kant? Does he restore the equilibrium? His Kritik der reinen Vernunft presents nature as entirely subject to mechanics. Thus a world of liberty is separated from the world of nature. We, however, poor creatures that we are, constitute a part of nature. According to Werner, Kant has not at all succeeded in reconciling our liberty with that hard determinism governing all our actions, as far as we belong to that poor nature subject to the stern laws of mechanics.
If morality is defined as a mere form without any concrete contents, and duty becomes nothing but an abstract conception, the danger is imminent for human beings left in a concrete everyday world.
Certainly, after Kant, paradoxes have not been lacking in morality: for example, a morality without obligation has been proposed. But how timid all these paradoxes seem, compared to the Kantian paradox of a morality without purpose.[1]
The egocentric character of modern philosophy, however, certainly manifests itself much more clearly in the case of Schopenhauer. Here pessimism is not only a conclusion we ourselves may draw from the implicit logic of the system. No, here that pessimism is openly proclaimed as an integrating part of the system. Schopenhauer's inclination towards a Hindu-like mysticism may also be taken as an immediate indication of a rather fundamental introversion.
Mysticism, we know, is a mental attitude which does not necessarily favour individuality. A very common tendency of the mystic is precisely to have his sense of the personal and the specific wiped out, as it were. His individuality is gradually dissolved into the abstract vagueness of the more general. That very common feature of mysticism makes us doubt very seriously that its radical forms, at least, have any particularly close relationship to that genuine religiousness which we have described as typically alterocentric, and favourable to totality.
On the contrary, we have seen the personal and the individual form essential elements of the alterocentric and the total.
But what about Schopenhauer's pessimism, then; has that also an obvious connection with his attitude towards the individual? Yes, that is precisely the conspicuous fact about this pessimism, now entering European thought in a demonstrative manner hardly known in the history of Europe up to that moment. Schopenhauer's pessimism reveals itself in one thing more than in anything else: its total failure to believe in an individual preservation.
His peculiar attitude towards the problem of mortality versus immortality, one of our main topics in this book, is well expressed by the Dutch student of Schopenhauer, Leonie Muller, in her dissertation De onsterfelijkheidsgedachte bij Schopenhauer onder invloed van Kant en Plato:
Death, the destruction of individuality, is the adequate correction of our natural egoism. At the moment of death we stop being something we should never have become. Pessimism and an urge to be rescued go together in Schopenhauer's opinion that death takes from us a personality we are unable to correct ourselves.[2]
Dr. Muller here shows how Schopenhauer, from the very beginning of his reasoning, thinks the individual too unimportant to survive. Therefore nature is set upon a preservation of the species. That is a viewpoint we want to emphasize particularly, and compare it to Thomas Aquinas's attitude, which we have recently discussed.
Please notice another thing also: the concept "species" in Schopenhauer's terminology corresponds here to the Platonic idea, one may say. The Greek philosopher's dualism of idea versus world is conceived by Schopenhauer as a dualism of will versus representation (Wille und Vorstellung).
That "Vorstellung" has the serious "handicap" of being concrete and individual. Hence it simply cannot have any better fate than that of being destroyed. The "Wille", contrariwise, being abstract and general--those blessed qualities Plato found to be the noble attributes of the idea--has sufficient value in it to be preserved. Even in the household of nature, anything that is sufficiently collective and general to call itself a whole species, seems to enjoy a similar prerogative and a similar durability. In fact, who would venture to doubt that the species is more durable? The empirical reality of every day gives proof of that. And vice versa: the obvious destructibility of the individual proves it to be the "illusive value". Nature deems it absolutely unworthy of being preserved. So nature and Schopenhauer seem to agree fairly well in this: they are unanimously pessimistic regarding the real value of all that is individual, all that is most profoundly human. We say that they seem to agree. Nature is apparently pessimistic. We know that it is quite possible to have a very different view of nature, a very different view of human values.
We may just call to mind once more Thomas Aquinas's words:
Etiam ipsa individua sunt de principali intentione naturae. (Even individuals themselves are part of the main intention of nature.)[3]
Anyway, one thing must be clear as crystal: meaningfulness, in the childlike sense, can never do without the salvation of the individual. Nobody is more dependent on the concrete and the specific than the genuine child. And this certainly also applies to the Christian Child, our supreme pattern for the totality in human life. Nobody is more dependent than he on the reality of the particular and the personal. But at the same time nobody is more dependent on the sublime, the transcendental and the spiritual. The grace of Christian totality consists just in the marvelous way in which it manages to join the temporal to the spiritual, the prosaic to the sublime, and time to eternity.
Notes: