CHAPTER IX THE MERGING OF CHURCHLY WITH PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS-A SUMMARY Note of Introduction.-I. Kant and Post-Kantian Thought; Fichte; Schelling; Hegel; Schleiermacher-II. Kant and Empiricism; Fechner; Lotze; Wundt-III. Rationalism in France; Voltaire Rousseau; The Encyclopædists; Cousin; Comte-IV. The English Reaction upon Hume; Price; Reid and Uncritical Intuitionalism; Coleridge; Green-V. English Utilitarianism; Bentham; Mills; Darwin; Spencer. INTRODUCTORY NOTE This chapter can only be a hasty summary of the history of ethics from Hume and Kant to the present time, for the history of ethics within Protestant organized Christianity so merges with philosophic ethics that there is no distinguishing line. It is impossible to write a history of Protestant ethics and omit Bentham and Herbert Spencer, but it is equally impossible to regard them as constituent elements of organized Christianity. Protestantism, in its denial of the ever-present authority of an ecclesiasticism to determine thought and conduct, failed happily to really establish any past authority as final in ethics. It would have been fatal to moral progress if it had succeeded in doing so. The faith of Christianity in all ages has been that a Holy Spirit is guiding us into all truth. Moreover, in Protestantism the distinction between the religious and the secular has broken down. It is a false antithesis. Ethical advance is always religious in the highest sense, and it is not in ecclesiastical Christianity alone that ethical advance has had its rise. In a really Protestant ethics dogmatism has no proper place. The science of Christian ethics is, like all other sciences, a science of experience with its advancing organization of thought. The destruction of dogmatic ethics on the basis of authority was complete with the work of Immanuel Kant,1 whose services on the ethical field are largely the examination and rejection of the last traces of dogmatic rationalism. The critical rationalism which he sought to substitute in ethics must, however, be seriously challenged. The weakest point of Kant's philosophy is his formal attempt at ethical reconstruction. 1. Kantianism is the reaction upon the dogmatism of such as Wolff and an attempt to again assert faith in its proper sphere. Kant himself was roused, as he explains, by the necessity laid upon him of meeting the doubts and the negations of Hume; he entered upon his critique of pure reason in order to get a basis for faith. His style is overladen by the terminology of dogmatic rationalism; his schemes of classification are artificial and by their elaboration defeat his own end. He never frees himself completely from the superstition that mathematical conceptualism has something superhuman in it and can be divorced from sense-perception. The influence at this point of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, not to speak of Plato, is apparent. Moreover, some of his most fruitful conceptions are either not worked out at all, or they are implicitly contradicted by the formal outcome. At the same time he is the founder of the new Protestantism which looks out upon a world of science with a faith large enough to trust scientific analysis as by divine 'Immanuel Kant, born April 22, 1724, died February 12, 1804. His whole life was spent in Königsberg. The best life is still that by Schubert, F. W., in Schubert and Rosenkranz's edition of his works, although corrections in details are being constantly made, as in Arnoldt's (E.) "Excursen zur Kantforschung," 1894. The completest English life is that of Stuckenberg, J. H. W.: "The Life of Immanuel Kant," London, 1882. The edition of his works undertaken by the Berlin Academy of Science is not yet finished. The ethical works are translated (unequally) by Abbott, Thomas Kingsmill, the 5th ed. in 1898. Max Müller has translated the "Critique of Pure Reason." An excellent popular introduction to Kant is Paulsen, Friederich: "Immanuel Kant, His Life and Doctrine," admirably translated by Creighton and Lefevre (1902), who have added the English works of chief importance to the bibliography. Schopenhauer's criticisms upon Kant are among the best in the literature, but the system of Schopenhauer forbids any serious development of his own ethical thought as a proper substitute. right in its own sphere, and at the same time to demand the recognition of a world of supersensuous values which scientific analysis can neither give nor take away. The main interest for the student of ethics in the "Critique of Pure Reason" is its demonstration of the possibility of a concept of freedom not found in the phenomenal world. This freedom is the moral spontaneity needed for the world of moral activity. This freedom which analysis of our world of knowledge shows is possible, the ethical man asserts as a first necessity of his rationality. The moral man asserts as a postulate of his moral will, God, freedom, and immortality.' He lives in a world that belongs essentially to supersensuous reality, as well as in a world of phenomenal appearances held together in the category of causality. The basis, therefore, of his moral world is intuition, but it is a critical intuitionalism made necessary by a metaphysical examination of the world of experience. Only that conduct is really moral which is dictated by respect for the categorical imperative of the law within each rational creature. All conduct that has pleasure or happiness as its motive may be legal and appropriate, but it is not moral. The end of moral conduct is perfection, and faith in its attainment makes the postulate of immortality a necessity. God is needed to unite worthiness and happiness, which cannot be identified in the world of our experience as the Epicureans and Stoics would from different stand-points do. The characteristic of this moral law must be its universality. Hence Kant gives as a rule for conduct the possibility of willing that that conduct should be a universal law. It is at this point that Kant's greatest service to ethics 1 "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (v. Kirchmann's edition, vol. II, pp. 38 f. and 146-158), II: 2; V, I, § 8; IV and II: 2; III. 2 Carried on in "Kritik der reinen Vernunft," and in "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten," v. Kirchmann's edition, vols. I and III. "Kritik der reinen praktischen Vernunft," I: 3, v. Kirchmann's edition, vol. II, pp. 86-107. "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten,” v. Kirchmann's edition, vol. III, pp. 67-73. "Der Analytik der praktischen Vernunft II," v. Kirchmann's edition, vol. II, pp. 83-84. ends. His destructive criticism of dogmatic rationalism by revealing the complex character of "ratio," and his forceful attacks upon all types of eudæmonism and hedonism that claim to exhaust the content of our moral reactions, stand to this day. At the same time Kant is not true in his ethics to the analogy he sets up between the categories of the pure reason and those of the practical reason. He is still haunted by the ghost of the slain absolute, and vainly seeks to escape the relative character his critiques make inevitable for all knowledge whether in the fields of metaphysics or ethics. The will to do the moral thing is according to Kant the final essence of morality. He rightly rejects all final authority outside of ourselves as capable of giving content to the moral life; he fails to draw the inevitable conclusion that the content must ever be a relatively correct interpretation of human experience. The concept of "oughtness" is empty until experience gives it content; but experience without the concept "oughtness" could never produce the moral life but would move in the realm of mechanical causation. Even the Golden Rule, of which Kant's formula is but a modification, is an empty concept until intelligent interpretation of our own experience gives it content. We simply do not yet intelligently know what we want others to do to us. It is taking us centuries of ethical experience to find out. Thus Kant does no proper justice to eudæmonism as a test of empiric morality. And this was because he failed to catch the genetic point of view already on the horizon. He for the same reason utterly failed to grasp either the meaning and dignity of the morality of the Old Testament or the gentle graciousness of the ethics of Jesus and Paul. His own actual ethical thinking was hard and cold, though lofty and imposing. His own mental world was a reaction, not only upon the dogmatic rationalism of the schools, but upon the Pietism of his early training. And yet he saved Protestant ethical thinking from being lost once more in a rationalistic scholasticism on the one hand, and from seeking its salvation from that fate in ascetic and mystic emotionalism on the other. The ethics of Fichte1 reveal a strong emotional reaction from the world of Kant's interest on the basis of that side of his thinking in which the "thing-in-itself" was the important element. Kant disowned Fichte, just as Fichte disowned Kant; but it is none the less true that Kant left an unresolved discord between the noumenal and phenomenal. Fichte instinctively turned with his keen ethical interest to the noumenal, where Kant had placed ethics. And on the basis of the autonomous "I" ⚫ in its relation to the "not-I," evolved a fantastic but most interesting rationalism. The meeting-place of the objective and the subjective is the "I' the intelligence, the Reason." " The freedom of the "I" is the essential postulate not only for moral action, but for any action at all, and the outcome of the extensive dialectic of the whole first two parts is the simple Kantian formula, "Act always according to your best persuasion of your duty." The universality of the command links us with the unchanging intelligible world, whereas the wavering obedience to nature's impulses links us with the changes in time,' in the world of time. The correctness of our persuasion must come from within, and the guarantee is not given in theoretical knowledge but as a "practical" (moral) judgment. The rationalistic character of the ethics is seen in the three moral laws which Fichte formulates: "1. Negative: never subordinate your theoretical reason as such, but investigate (forsche) with absolute freedom without reference to anything but your knowledge (Erkenntniss). (Set no goal [Ziel] for yourself beforehand, for where should it come from?) 2. Positive: Cultivate (bilde) your capacity for knowledge as far as you can: 1 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1762-1814. Collected works in eight volumes, by J. H. Fichte, Berlin, 1845-1846. Those of special interest to the student of ethics are "Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre,” vol. III, pp. 1-385; "Die Staatslehre, oder über das Verhältniss des Urstaates zum Vernunftreiche," vol. IV, pp. 396-600, and, particularly, "System der Sittenlehre nach den Principien der Wissenschaft," vol. IV, pp. 1-365, and "Reden an die deutsche Nation," vol. VII, pp. 259-516. 2 "Die Ichheit, die Intelligenz, die Vernunft," "Works," vol. IV, p. 1. 4 "Works," vol. IV, p. 169. |