SOURCE: “Hartmann's Pessimism,” in The Philosophical Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, July, 1929, pp. 350-371.

[In the following essay, Tasanoff places Hartmann's philosophy between those of G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer, determining that Hartmann escapes major flaws Tasanoff finds evident in the work of the former two philosphers.]

I.

Twenty-five years after the publication of The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer literally had to beg his publisher Brockhaus to try out a second enlarged edition of his masterpiece. Hartmann's publisher Heymons brought out seven editions of The Philosophy of the Unconscious in six years, to be followed by five more in Hartmann's life-time. That this was merely a publisher's triumph Hartmann would have been the last one to admit. But in the preface to his seventh edition the thirty-two year old author speculated: Had Schopenhauer been fortunate enough to find a real publisher, had the thirty years of unrecognition been spared him, who can tell what his creative powers might have given to the world, and how profoundly and how much earlier the entire course of nineteenth-century philosophy might have been affected thereby! We should not be overwhelmed by these regrets. No author doubts that there is a special pouch in hell for slothful publishers, but it would scarcely do to blame the House of Brockhaus for Germany's long neglect of Schopenhauer. When the master-pessimist first composed, Hegel was conducting the Symphony of the Absolute. It took thirty years before the pessimistic strain had a real chance in the concert of German thought, and it was precisely during that opportune season that Hartmann's violoncello stirred the public ear.

The outstanding fact in the philosophy of Hartmann's day was the antithesis of Hegel and Schopenhauer. Hegelianism still dominated the academic lecture-hall; the standard æsthetics, protestant theology, philosophy of history, and history of philosophy, all bore the Hegelian stamp. But Schopenhauer prevailed in the unanointed philosophy of the day. The two were antipodal all along the line. Schopenhauer built on the very elements in the Kantian philosophy (subjective idealism) which Hegel disavowed. Hegel's metaphysical principle is the capitalized Notion: the world is for him a spiritual system; the Real is the Rational; the universe makes sense, makes for sense, makes good sense. This is the optimism of the self-confident Logos: “The world-process is development, the development is logical, what is developed is the logical, and aside from it there is nothing.”¹ Of all this Schopenhauer's system is an explicit and unqualified denial. The world is in reality irrational, blind striving, is essentially and irremediably miserable, a tragic blunder.

The pessimistic tenor of The Philosophy of the Unconscious very naturally led the casual reader to list the author with the disciples of Schopenhauer. Against this interpretation of his philosophy Hartmann protests vigorously and with good reason. Although being on the whole a Schopenhauerian in his estimate of the world process, Hartmann finds Schopenhauer altogether onesided in his ultimate explanation of the world. He objects to Schopenhauer's metaphysical dismissal of reason as mere phenomenon of the blind irrational will; within the realm of the phenomenal, he objects to Schopenhauer's subjective idealism; he perceives a covert materialism in Schopenhauer's account of the intellect, and regards it as inadequate and worthless. He opposes Schopenhauer's metaphysical estimate of mechanism and teleology. He regards the account of the origin and destiny of individuality in The World as Will and Idea as insufficient and self-contradictory. The distinction between empirical and intelligible character has corollaries which Schopenhauer has not thought out, and serves to raise the issue between monism and pluralism or monadism in metaphysics; regarding this issue Schopenhauer is very confused, as is exhibited perhaps most strikingly in his view of salvation through individual self-denial of the will. Even in his pessimism Hartmann, as we shall see, is no mere disciple of Schopenhauer, and his own practical program is a rejection of Schopenhauer's quietism.

Hartmann's radical critique of Schopenhauer, however, does not constitute him a Hegelian. In method, in philosophical equipment and outlook, Hegel is free from most of Schopenhauer's vices, but he also lacks Schopenhauer's virtues. Shall we say that Hegel's world is like Athena, issued fully armed and complete from Zeus' head? Surely it shows how far the single strength of thought can go: how far short of the goal. In the world Hegel sees only spirit; he has no heart for nature; nature has no history, and ultimately reality is for him history, spiritual process. But even though reason be the hero of the play, yet it is after all not the whole play, nor yet its author. The play, the world process, is history, but, Hartmann holds, it is natural history, which includes but is not exhausted by intelligence. The same observation would apply in axiology: the triumph of reason in our experience may justify a very relative, but surely not an absolute optimism.²

Methodologically, Hartmann rejects the Hegelian dialectic in favor of induction, but he is Hegelian enough to observe that, between two contradictories, the greater truth is in the middle. Precisely on Hegelian grounds the issue cannot be: either Hegel or Schopenhauer. Hegel's own philosophy is not the final synthesis of thought; it also becomes thesis in its turn, involves an antithesis, demands a more ultimate synthesis. The Hegelian pantheism of the Idea, panlogism, is the thesis; the Schopenhauerian pantheism of the Will, panthelism, is the antithesis. The problem of problems imposed by the situation in philosophy as Hartmann conceived it was to find the synthesis of this dialectical triad. This he undertook to do, and he found his guide in Schelling; not only in the Schelling of the Jena days, known to us as the second step from Kant to Hegel, but also and more particularly in the Schelling of the forties.

Hegel and Schopenhauer are both right in recognizing one ultimate aspect of the real, wrong in ignoring or depreciating the reality of the other ultimate aspect. Schopenhauer treats intelligence as a by-product or tool of the Will-to-live. Hegel regards will as a subordinate moment in the ultimately logical process, but Schopenhauer's blind Will-to-live cannot account for the intelligence which it is supposed to generate, nor can the logical significance of Hegel's world by itself explain its own actuality, its coming to be. Will and Idea, creativeness and intelligence, drive and significance, are both attributes, incommensurable and complementary; they are both involved in the world-process throughout: the one making activity possible, the other determining the nature of the activity. The ultimate of ultimates Hartmann calls the Unconscious, Absolute Substance, Absolute Subject or Spirit. It is progressively recognized in German philosophy: “Schelling in his Philosophy of Identity showed the right road by recognizing the Absolute as the eternally unconscious; Hegel advanced along the side of the unconscious Idea, and Schopenhauer along the line of the unconscious Will; both of which were reunited in Schelling's last system in the principle of Absolute Spirit.”³ What Schelling had perceived in principle, Hartmann now undertakes to understand and, more important to our purpose, to estimate in detail. It is the main theme of The Philosophy of the Unconscious.⁴

Hartmann surveys bodily and mental life and finds in them both manifestations of the Unconscious. The slightest bodily movement presupposes the unconscious idea of the position of the corresponding nerve-endings in the brain and the unconscious will to stimulate them. The Unconscious is manifested as the dominant factor in reflex action and in the reparative power of nature. The action of mind on body is in the end inexplicable save by means of an unconscious will. If bodily activity points beyond chance and mechanism to teleology, mental life points beneath consciousness to the underlying Unconscious. Instinct is purposive action without consciousness of the purpose. Character and morality, æsthetic judgment and production, language, thought, sense-perception, all hark back, beyond consciousness, to an unconscious direction. In history the struggle between lower and higher races does not proceed by conscious plan; a power beyond our conscious projects moves resistlessly, eradicating the inferior. To retard or try to check this process in the interests of alleged mercy is to cut off a dog's tail kindly, that is, gradually, inch by inch.⁵

Conscious and material existence both require for their ultimate explanation the recognition of the Unconscious. In this world-process, what is the precise status of consciousness; what is its origin and its final cosmic rôle?

According to Hartmann, the initial possibility of existence is due to the unaccountable will-activities of the metalogical Unconscious. These will activities are alogical; opposing each other, they clash and recoil, and are thus confronted with the amazing fact of externality. Thus arises consciousness: it is “the stupefaction of the will at the existence of the idea not willed and yet sensibly felt by it. … The world consists only of a sum of activities or will-acts of the Unconscious, and the ego consists of another sum of activities or will-acts of the Unconscious. Only so far as the former activities intersect the latter does the world become sensible to me; only so far as the latter intersect the former do I become sensible to myself.”⁶ The mind, which for Hartmann is prior to consciousness, has, according to its own nature, the ideas which it wills and which form the contents of its will. This self-contained peace of the Unconscious is disturbed by organized matter; sensation takes place, not self-evoked but received from without. The unconscious mind is now conscious. As Hartmann expresses it, in an outburst of eloquence, “the great revolution has come to pass, the first step to the world's redemption taken; the idea has been rent from the will, to confront it in future as an independent power, in order to bring under subjection to itself its former lord. This amazement of the will at the rebellion against its previously acknowledged sway, this sensation which the interloping idea produces in the Unconscious, this is Consciousness.”⁷

Observe now in this drama of world-redemption that it is to be a tragedy, a redemption through woe. In the very origin of consciousness pain is involved: “the breaking of the will on the resistance of a foreign will crossing it, or the centripetal rebound, is sensation, and moreover, as non-satisfaction of the will, pain-sensation.”⁸ And the increase of knowledge is increase of sorrow: to the experience of pain is added and superadded the clear perception of evil and of apparently stupid guilt. Consciousness has involved unconscious mind in pain and dissatisfaction, has raised the problem which only the intelligent mind can meet and solve. We have now approached Hartmann's account of experience as on the whole miserable and his program of salvation through negation of the cosmic will.

II.

“It is related of an ancient Brahmin that he was so affected with astonishment at the sight of an insect-capturing plant, that, forgetful of meat and drink, he remained seated before it till the end of his life.”⁹ The inerrant fitness of the activity of the Unconscious has a similarly hypnotic effect on us: we find in nature infallible, unhesitating adaptation of means to ends, not only in the general scheme, but in the least detail. The absolute clairvoyance of the Unconscious, its ever-suitable direction of all data, its ceaseless and most appropriate intervention at every step of the process, dazzle us and hold us spellbound. We proclaim this world the best possible of worlds, God's own world, and therefore a good and a happy world. This is the conclusion which the theist is apt to draw from his recognition of teleology in nature.

Here Hartmann advises us to proceed with caution and watch our step. The infallibility of the infinite omniscient Unconscious does involve the conclusion that this is the best possible world—under the circumstances of there being a world at all! But to call this world the best possible in the sense of perfect, altogether good and faultless, a bower of bliss in which all evil is somehow good, merely the shadow in the lovely picture,—to proceed to such optimistic conclusions is to be guilty of bad logic and poor observation of the facts of life. This world may be the best possible world and may yet be a world of woeful experience, the tragedy of which is intensified by the ideal values which intelligence strives to realize in it. Indeed it may be the best possible world in that it points to its own extinction.¹⁰ The sharp distinction between the evaluation of the world in hedonistic-eudæmonolgical and in teleological-evolutionistic terms is regarded by Hartmann as his own contribution to axiology. He regards this distinction as essential to all true morality and all intelligent religion. It is well to keep this point in mind, and not to confuse Hartmann's philosophy with absolute pessimism or Weltschmerz: a confusion against which he tirelessly protests.

Evaluation may be in logical or in alogical terms. In the logical scale we consider knowledge-values, æsthetic, moral, redemption values; likewise developmental and teleological values; in the alogical scale we have will-values and pleasure-pain values.¹¹

The epistemological pessimist (sceptic, agnostic) doubts the possibility of real knowledge and regards the alleged knowledge-values as illusory. Against him we cannot maintain that our knowledge is either complete or adequate. While we may be optimistic regarding the ultimate perfection of attainable knowledge, its present state demands a much more modest estimate. But even this more modest “epistemological bonism” does not justify us in regarding knowledge-values as of intrinsic or absolute worth. What is good knowledge is not on that account good; what is known well it may yet be a pity to know. The fact is that science is indifferent to worth.

In the realm of æsthetic values a similar conclusion holds. Beauty is not the ultimate standard or the last word in axiology, as some æsthetes would have it. The world might be a misbegotten hell, but to the artist it would still have its appropriate beauty. A thing of beauty need not be a joy forever. The universe as a whole is neither beautiful nor ugly.

The universe as a whole is also neither good nor evil. Moral values are as relative as æsthetic values; they are real only in the experiences and judgments of moral agents. We find in this world virtue and vice; our judgment of the balance between them may lead us to ethical optimism or to pessimism, but a sound philosophy cannot lead to despair or to jubilation; its task, as Spinoza told us, is to understand. Ethical optimism, if at all possible, is always only in prospect. The present is even less likely to yield us moral than scientific or æsthetic satisfaction. The values in the logical scale are realized in development and aspiration. This is particularly true of the redemption values of the religious life: salvation is possible only in a tragic world, in a world recognized as essentially tragic, a world in the tragedy of which one is moved to play or to share a hero's part.

Confidence in evolution-values is a postulate of epistemological, moral, and religious optimism. A developing world is a moving not a stagnant world; seemingly a circle, it is really a spiral. Faith in evolution-values is faith in the reality of growth, of cultural progress, of advance towards some goal. It is an insurance against the blight of dead monotony. Evolutionistic optimism thus finds its completion in teleological optimism, of which, in fact, the other varieties are to be regarded as special aspects. Teleological optimism is conviction that the world makes sense, has an end, is intelligible. An anti-teleological optimist is an unthinkable contradiction: unthinkable, but not extinct.

In the alogical scale, as far as will values are concerned, any kind of world is better than no world, and, while we have here no basis for distinguishing better or best, any world whatever is indifferently good. The pleasure-pain values are logically inexplicable facts of feeling which reason may not ignore and which philosophy must reckon with, for they are of prime importance in all axiology. Is the attainment of happiness the prime purpose of creation? Then it were impious to doubt that life yields a positive balance of pleasure. But should life yield a balance of pain, then, if there be any purpose and goal, it will have to be sought elsewhere than in pleasure.

Turning thus to eudæmonological axiology or weighing of the balance of pleasure in life, Hartmann surveys the various possible standpoints. In a spirit of negative dogmatism, we may declare the problem absurd: pleasure and pain being incommensurable, there being no real compensation and accordingly no ‘balance’. Or else, while admitting that an absolute intelligence might cope with the problem, we may declare it to be past our mortal ken. Or we may be sceptics, doubting whether we can solve the problem. Or again, in a positively dogmatic manner, we may assert that the balance of pleasure over pain—or of pain over pleasure—, is a maximum, holding to superlative eudæmonological optimism and pessimism respectively. Or still once more we may declare that pleasure and pain match and compensate each other in a balance of indifference. Or finally, in a critical spirit, we may reckon the pleasure-pain balance as relative, as inclining to pleasure (meliorism), or to pain (pejorism), or else perhaps, while admitting the actuality of the balance, regard it as indefinite and infinitesimal, past reliable reckoning. Of these three varieties of a critical view, Hartmann's theory is the second. His conclusion is pejoristic: life is on the whole more painful than pleasant; but he is much better informed about the painfulness.

The empirical-inductive survey of everyday life is a melancholy recital. If we take a cross-section of life, we find unmixed evil, but scarcely unmixed good. All along the line pain, fear, countless ills, ruinous labor, disappointment, sway the balance. Trace the average man's career from birth to death: how dim is the light, how dark the shadows in the picture! In this art of dolorous recital Schopenhauer has made it very difficult for anyone to approach him. What Hartmann lacks in brilliant insight, he makes up in comprehensiveness and detail of observation. One example will illustrate his procedure: here is Hartmann's account of the home life in which the average man seeks assured happiness in this sorry world. The reader will remember that Hartmann himself was happily married.

“Family happiness is even in normal circumstances uncertain. Either husband or wife is not of much account, or they are not quite suited to each other, or the marriage is childless, or else yields such a rich crop of children that daily care visits the home, or efforts to prevent too many births poison conjugal happiness, or the illnesses of parents or children cast a shadow over the home, or the parents must needs bewail the loss of the very children who seem dearest, or else the worry over some blind, deaf-mute, imbecile, epileptic, or otherwise sickly or invalid child embitters their joy in the others. If the children grow up, then the school-worries over lazy or ungifted children weigh over the parents more than over the children, and perhaps there is a light-minded good-for-nothing among them. Should the children all fare well, then suddenly the mother dies, and leaves her husband to worry how with strange help he can bring up the children, or else the father himself passes from the home circle and leaves the family in sudden need. … ”¹² A paragraph immediately following this retails with equal impartiality of detail the trials and tribulations of the unmarried folk.

The joys and blessings of the ‘higher life’ are likewise mixed and uncertain. The thinker's joy is known to few, but arduous futile labor is the lot of the many who set out on the path of knowledge. This is even truer in the life of art: how exceptional the success, the joy of creation, genuine understanding, and recognition,—how common the bitter futility of untalented endeavor, the still more bitter and futile struggle with stupid apathy! Here, in science and art, pure joy is indeed to be found; alas that it is so rare! The moral life does yield attainment of worth; of this Hartmann has no doubt, but he doubts that happiness marks the attainment of virtue. Peace of heart, a neutral state, is all that the moral hero can expect. And religion, far from being a source of happiness, is rather designed to cure man of his predilection for it.

This general conclusion from experience is supported by detailed psychological observations, by reasoning, and by demonstrations as to how and why pain preponderates over pleasure. An instance or two must suffice. “Pain is (apart from the complete blunting of the nerves by great pain) the more painful, pleasure the more indifferent and cloying, the longer it lasts.”¹³ Concomitant pleasures weaken each other, but concomitant pains enhance each other; one chance unpleasantness can ruin the happiest day, but the day of misery is scarcely relieved by an incidental pleasure.

Hartmann does not subscribe to Schopenhauer's doctrine that pain is primary and positive, and pleasure only negative, the temporary alleviation of pain. It is true that, owing to the fact that there is far more pain than pleasure in life, most pleasure does follow the remission of pain, but this does not affect the truth in principle that pure positive pleasure is to be had. Examples may be found, not only in intellectual and æsthetic experience, but also in the sensual life. Hartmann, however, shares Schopenhauer's general conclusion that man's hope of a lasting balance of happiness in this life is doomed to disappointment.

The pathetic expectation of a balance of happiness in this life is called by Hartmann the first stage of man's illusion. “Happiness is considered as having been actually attained at the present stage of the world's development, accordingly attainable by the individual of today in his earthly life.”¹⁴ The progress of intelligence lays bare this illusion: even in the realm of most intense desires and passions—hunger, love, ambition, to mention only three—the pains of the unsatisfied far exceed in frequency and in intensity the pleasures of satisfaction. The supreme attainable felicity is painless contentment: a dreamless sleep. Hartmann's elevenfold dolorous inventory of life exhibits it as a losing venture.

Disappointed in his expectations here and now, man turns his hopes to the hereafter, and now conceives happiness as attainable by the individual in a transcendent life after death. In the life of the individual the transition from the first to this second stage of the great illusion corresponds to the passage from the blithe trust of innocent childhood to the wistful yearning of adolescence. Representing it in the history of the race is the succession of Greek-Roman-Jewish antiquity by Christianity. On the extreme weariness of life in the ancient world falls the ray of the Christian hope of personal immortality, a hope the brighter because of the dark despair and disdain of the present life. Hartmann misses no opportunity to brand this hope as not only illusory but also pernicious: illusory because reflecting belief in the eternal reality of the empirical self, and pernicious because springing from self-centeredness and egoism. How could there be any individual happiness in the hereafter? Even if we overlooked for the moment the overwhelming empirical evidence of the dependence of our self-consciousness on the bodily organism and the consequent illusoriness of the belief in personal existence after death, even if we ventured to speculate on mere suppositions, what happiness could we predicate of life beyond death, however conceived? The view of reincarnation could only regard the soul as involved repeatedly in the same sorry round of bodily existence, whether on this earth or elsewhere. The hope that our soul may be reborn in a happier world rests on the supposition that our earth is the stepchild of the Absolute. But what justifies us in regarding our unhappy globe as the ashputtle or the wretched experimental station of an otherwise blissful universe? All analogy is against such fancies.¹⁵ The conception of disembodied existence precludes consciousness, feeling, memory, precludes also any discussion of pleasure-pain. The desire for immortality arises from egoism, and the relinquishing of this desire and hope is a prime condition of genuine morality and true religion. This second illusion man must dispel; in dispelling it, he renounces utterly the quest of happiness along the lines of individual satisfaction.

This is genuine advance, but it is not enough. For a third stage of the illusion of happiness must now be transcended: this is the belief in social progress, so characteristic of our modern age. Happiness is relegated to and sought in the future of the world. But what justifies this sublime faith in progress? How is progress to bring us real felicity?¹⁶ Civilization brings forth new diseases to match the advance of medicine, and even if medicine does win the race with disease, “cheerful youth will always form only a fraction of mankind, and the other part be composed of morose old age”.¹⁷ Death will always be with us, and, in life, domination of one man by another, and discontent, and, with the increase of knowledge, increased doubt and dismay. “With the advance of culture, demands increase always more rapidly than the means for their general satisfaction.”¹⁸ He who rests his hopes of happiness on civilization and progress should consider the world as he has it: are the most civilized people the most or the least contented? The progress of human culture is of value, but why? Because it releases for mental exertion human energies which at lower levels of existence have been employed in the satisfaction of elemental needs. Man has thus more opportunity to understand the futility of life's quest of happiness, to tear the veils of illusion, to see the truth and find the way out of the misery of life. That is to say, in savage life Eduard von Hartmann would have had to hunt and fish and grub to keep alive, and his sixteen thousand pages of gray wisdom would have been left unwritten.

So the progress of intelligence gradually brings humanity to the realization that self-centeredness is as stupid as it is futile and pernicious and that the quest of happiness is doomed to defeat. “After the three stages of illusion of the hope of a positive happiness it has finally seen the folly of its endeavor; it finally foregoes all positive happiness, and longs only for absolute painlessness, for nothingness, Nirvana.”¹⁹

Hartmann's Nirvana should not be confused with the Buddhist or the Schopenhauerian quietist goal of individual self-renunciation. Schopenhauer's doctrine is open to a serious objection which Hartmann presses vigorously: “How should it be possible for the individual to negate his individual will as a whole, not merely theoretically but also practically, as his individual volition is only a ray of the Only Will?”²⁰ But even supposing that the impossible were to happen, supposing that through asceticism, eremite vigils, and voluntary starvation, one certain egoistic will had been denied, one self-engrossed individual extinguished, what would that signify? Simply that one man had died: “to the Only Will the consequences would have been the same if a tile had killed that man; it continues after, as before, with unenfeebled energy, with undiminished avidity.”²¹ And even if all men were to turn ascetics, and mankind were to die out gradually by sexual continence, the remedy would be no more radical than before. Nature, the Unconscious, would evolve some new type to replace man, and the sorry tragicomedy of existence would go on.

In The Philosophy of the Unconscious Hartmann regards the ascetic endeavor after individual negation as “an aberration only in procedure, not in aim.”²² In his later work, Das sittliche Bewusstsein, he offers a less favorable diagnosis: “The goal of the denial of the will is clearly here also decidedly egoistic.”²³ Morality and religion demand the utter uprooting of selfishness; redemption is not redemption of self but redemption from self. The denial of the will is not to be individual in any sense, and nowise partial. It should be universal and final, and should register the extinction of the entire world-process.

We have come now to the climax of Hartmann's philosophy: a fantastic eschatology which has aroused amazement and ridicule, and which Hartmann himself, never explicitly abandoning, has yet in his later writings subjected to revision and higher criticism. Instead of ascetic withdrawal from life, he advocates provisionally the affirmation of the will-to-live, not in the sense of egoism, but in the sense of complete devotion to life and its pains, active participation in the business of living, in the advancement of culture and progress. All this is to be provisional, a preparation for the grand finale of cosmic will-negation. The progress of culture and intelligence will disclose to men in increasing numbers and in increasing measure the essential infelicity of life. The largest part of the Unconscious Spirit manifests itself in humanity and exceeds the will objectified in organic and inorganic nature. When, as a result of progressive pessimistic enlightenment, humanity's will-denying power comes to outweigh the world-affirming power objectified in unenlightened nature, and when furthermore the consciousness of mankind has been completely awakened to the folly of volition and the misery of existence, and has conceived a resistless yearning for the peace and painlessness of nonexistence, and when, as a third condition, perfected communication between the peoples of the earth has made a simultaneous common resolve possible, humanity will be able, by one universal act of will-denial at the proper moment, to vote the world out of being.

III.

The boldness of this young recruit's strategy roused general amazement; the more so as it was intended to crown a philosophy of “speculative results according to the inductive method of physical science”. The assumption involved in Hartmann's first condition that the world-negating will-power of disillusioned humanity should exceed the world-affirming will-power of the rest of the cosmos was regarded as one “belonging to the region of airiest fancy”.²⁴ Even Mainländer, boldly credulous in his own speculations, found in Hartmann's Cosmic Extinction Vote good occasion for satire: “From all parts of the world arrive telegrams. … You burst out in a cry of joy and rush forthwith to the Französische Strasse and there, let us say, you wire ten thousand dispatches to this effect: ‘World-redemption tomorrow noon twelve o'clock sharp. All to commit suicide simultaneously, weapons optional.’ … Immediately thereafter the Twilight of the Gods begins.”²⁵ Hartmann stated at the outset that by cosmic will-denial he did not mean a mere suicide of humanity en masse. Already in 1874, when only thirty-two, he was characterizing his first magnum opus as “a work of youth, with its characteristic merits and defects”.²⁶ In a note written some twenty years after the first publication of The Philosophy of the Unconscious, he ‘explained’ his meaning: universal will-denial and the end of the world-process, he said, should be regarded, not naturalistically, but as a supernatural act “by which the Cosmic Being withdraws itself from its former will-manifestations and gives up, along with the phenomenal world, also its laws and its apparent substance (matter)”.²⁷ On this hyperphysical interpretation of cosmic extinction, the third condition, mentioned above, of “a sufficient communication between the peoples of the earth” by “the perfection and more dexterous application of technical discoveries … to allow of a simultaneous common resolve”²⁸ would have to be ruled out. It is in fact not only neglected but explicitly rejected by Hartmann in his later writings.²⁹

Hartmann's eschatology has been the object of as particular attention on the part of his critics as his doctrine of creation. The Universal World-Extinction Congress, the praise of this best of all possible worlds because it admits of being voted out of existence, and in particular Hartmann's comforting description of this miserable world as “a painful mustard plaster which the cosmic One-and-All applies to itself, in order to draw out an inner pain and thus to eliminate it”,³⁰ have led many to share the judgment of Kurt that “a more muddled chaos of philosophical fancies … is indeed very difficult to conceive”.³¹ But it is not enough to cite page and line, and laugh in scorn at this “mustard-plaster metaphysics”. When a philosopher explains that ‘he could not possibly have meant’ this or that passage written twenty, thirty years earlier, it is much less to the point to confront him with his rejected early words than to understand the full significance of his rejection of them. Hartmann's later explanation of the cosmic will-extinction vote is very significant: it serves to indicate an important shift in his axiology, a shift in emphasis which we may observe generally in all his writings. It is scarcely a shift from pessimism to optimism, but it is a shift from general negation towards partial affirmation. The hedonistic pessimist holds his ground to the end and does not retreat beyond the ramparts of pejorism. But instead of proceeding from hedonistic pessimism to a cosmic threnody, as he did in his youth, the mature Hartmann keeps increasingly in view the reality of the non-hedonic values of life.

The present exposition of Hartmann's account of value has relied mainly on his first and on one of his last works. It is to be trusted that the lack of uniformity which this double source lends to an exposition of Hartmann's philosophy of life has not been unduly accentuated. Should we boldly confront the Grundriss der Axiologie with the latter part of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, evidence would be abundant of the real change in Hartmann's emphasis. Should we further make use of the guidance which Hartmann himself provides in the Grundriss der Axiologie by his copious references to his earlier works, we should see that the shift is not sudden but gradual and characterizes the entire course of Hartmann's philosophical writings.

In what sense is Hartmann's thought, as it progressively utters itself, a philosophy of negation? Hartmann negates the reality of pleasure-capital in life; he would disclose the illusion of eudæmonological hopes; he points to these hopes and cravings as feeders of egoism, and denounces egoism as the hidden spring of all spurious morality. This is the first and the last word of his capital work, Das sittliche Bewusstsein. Be the eudæmonistic pseudo-ethics positive or negative, individual or social, earthly-empirical or transcendent, it is alike unavailing. Morality demands the emancipation from the preoccupation with happiness, and it culminates in the ethics of redemption: “Real existence is the incarnation of the Deity, the world-process records the passion of God incarnate and at the same time the road to the redemption of the one crucified in the flesh; while morality is the coöperation in the shortening of this pain and of the path of redemption.” In these closing words of Das sittliche Bewusstsein, Hartmann's philosophy of religion is forecast. The fundamental postulate of religion as of morality is “pessimism in its broadest scope”:³² not the pessimism of the Gospels, which Hartmann calls Entrüstungspessimismus, that is, pessimism springing largely from the intolerable sense of present miserable conditions, as due to man's frailty and sin,³³ but a metaphysical pessimism more nearly allied to the Buddhist, leading to the emancipation from self-engrossment and its illusions—a pessimism more precisely with regard to the attainability or the importance of happiness.

Egoistic craving is “the root of all evil striving”.³⁴ But the world is not only in need of redemption, it is also capable of being redeemed. To be sure, nothing is except God's will, and in this sense God wills the evil in the world. But he wills it “not … as something that should exist and last, but as something that must be overcome, which exists just in order to be negated”.³⁵ Evil may thus be of value and significance to morality as a spur to resistance. “Evil is the pike in the fishpond of the moral world-order, which keeps the good carp from becoming too lazy and the pond from turning stagnant through their peaceful inactivity.”³⁶ This cacodicy, as Hartmann calls it, or teleological justification of evil, is in no sense an everlasting Yea to actuality; it is the grim recognition that life is a life of toil and combat, and that these are the conditions for the attainment of any moral value. The justification of evil, we should keep in mind, is teleological, not eudæmonological.³⁷

The world-process is thus “a unique great tragedy,” “the world-tragedy of the Divine Spirit.”³⁸ The world-process is “the means of God's self-redemption from that in him which should not be.”³⁹ “God's redemption consists in the universal denial of the will which is to be attained through the redemption of the world, i.e., in the return of the will from a state of actuality to one of potentiality.”⁴⁰ In this work of redemption, man, emancipated from egoistic craving, can participate, and is thus lifted up to over-individuality. “Thus God can redeem the world only in so far as he himself is redeemed thereby; he cannot redeem the world as such without redeeming himself. Just as little can God redeem me as individual personality. … But I can indeed redeem God, i.e., I can coöperate positively in the world-process which is to bring about his redemption.”⁴¹

Certain initial difficulties confront us here. How is Hartmann's “concrete monism” to include the character which he ascribes to God; how can he write that “love is the Absolute's highest form of moral manifestation”?⁴² What love does the Absolute Unconscious have to reveal? Well does Sommer point out: “The Absolute has nothing to reveal, its essence consists only in an inexpressible composition of blind will and logical idea; individuals are utterly devoid of love, for their essence is engrossed in egoism and inbred impulses and instincts of the loveless Unconscious; love is quite groundless in this cheerless and desolate view of the world.”⁴³ As a matter of fact, however, Hartmann's view of life is not cheerless; he does conceive the world-process as one of divine redemption through self-emancipated love and through cultural progress in the world. Certainly if we hold Hartmann to his early text his redemption is not possible, and his critics are right in treating his doctrine of redemption as a grotesque pendant to the fantastic eschatology of The Philosophy of the Unconscious. But Hartmann's later axiology does serve to indicate the necessary revision of his earlier metaphysics. This revision is not executed by Hartmann in explicit terms; instead, he endeavors to fit and adjust, or pours new wine into old bottles.

Hartmann's later philosophy of life is an example of what real devotion to values is still open to one who has renounced and discarded the quest of pleasure-values. This world of ours, as he views it, is not a bower of happiness, but in it intelligence may aspire to the attainment of genuine worth, and, as we have seen, its very evils may well be a challenge to our spirit to negate them, be it for that purpose necessary to negate the world-process itself. This negation of the world-process, again, comes to mean, not a solemn world-congress to vote the universe out of existence, nor anything literally or allegorically catastrophic.⁴⁴ It represents the resolute rejection of hedonistic attachment to existence. Hartmann opposes eudæmonological optimism, but he is firm in resisting teleological pessimism. That the world is aimless he denies as vigorously as that this aim is the attainment of pleasure. The hopeless view of life without a goal is to him not only intolerable but also invalid. The truth is between and beyond these two. If teleological pessimism is baseless and futile desperation, hedonistic optimism, the ostrich philosophy of life, makes for weakness and cowardice in the presence of pain, is a check to heroic endeavor and a bar to cultural advance. And in the end a bower of happiness may prove more intolerable than our poor world with all its troubles. So Hartmann quotes Schiller:

Some fear and some hope and some sorrow:
Else how live from to-day till tomorrow—
Else how bear the dull load of a life
Unrelieved by some change or by strife?(45)

But man is too weak a creature to cope with a world which he believes to be one of unmitigated woe. Such a dismal view may also lead to suicide. Between the two extremes Hartmann proposes his comparative pessimism or pejorism with regard to happiness: it discourages softness and hardens man into a heroic mold. Thus Hartmann is led to his “most auspicious constellation”: a cheerful temper with a theoretical pejorism; and thus also we reach his practical vindication of his view of life; not miserabilism, not Weltschmerz or desperation, but, with no disdain and little hope of happiness, firm devotion to the pursuit of the higher aims and values that ennoble life and redeem the world by overcoming evil and defying frustration. The worth of life, “eudæmonologically disintegrated, is teleologically once more restored”.⁴⁶

Particular interest attaches to the fact that Hartmann, pessimist though he is regarding the attainability of positive happiness, and rather lukewarm and grudging in his affirmation of attained moral, æsthetic, or religious values, never hesitates as to the reality of teleological value: the reality of aims, goals in the universe which render our present activity significant. In thus emphasizing real purposiveness in the world, he is inconsistent; for what purpose, what end or aim or teleology, could the Unconscious have? That he insists notwithstanding on his teleological optimism is doubly significant: despite his pessimism and alongside his alogical Absolute is this reality of the reach after value, this purposiveness and self-transcendence essential to value which he recognizes clearly in the world-process, even if he is unable to provide adequately for them in his metaphysics.

A very enlightening process of development is thus to be observed in Hartmann's thought. It manifests the inadequacy of eudæmonistic axiology. But it does more. It shows æsthetics, ethics, and religion, as necessarily resting on the metaphysical affirmation of value, on teleological optimism; it shows that Hartmann, as he recognizes more intimately the reality of the higher values, shifts the pessimistic emphasis in his estimate of the world. Schopenhauer's utter despair of the world is rejected by Hartmann, but while sharing the teleological-evolutionistic optimism of the Hegelians, he would point out to them that this sort of optimism does not preclude hedonistic pessimism. Hegel himself, Hartmann maintains, is virtually, if not in outspoken terms, a eudæmonological pessimist: not outspoken because of his extreme rationalism and his preoccupation with the eulogy of the Absolute Idea.⁴⁷ More alive than Hegel to the actuality of the irrational in the universe, more systematic and logical and less impressionistic a mind than Schopenhauer, Hartmann gives us a philosophy of life which, if it lacks the opposite virtues of the one or the other, escapes in its middle course also some of their main defects.

The change in the architect's plans revealed in the progressive erection of this immense philosophical structure is as instructive as it is sometimes exasperating. Itself the record of an axiology gradually modified to meet the demands of ethics, æsthetics, and philosophy of religion, Hartmann's system reveals, altogether in spite of its author's intentions, but perhaps better than any other system of thought, the limitations of pessimism. In this particular respect it is even more instructive than the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The progressive revision of its negations is a delineation of the character and scope of the different values which our judgment of the world discloses to us. The serious embarrassments in which Hartmann is involved in his ethics and philosophy of religion are due to his insistence on gathering grapes and figs from his thorns and thistles; or rather he finds figs and grapes on his alleged thistles and thorns, and would have the full benefit of his crop without allowing his trees the better names which they have earned for themselves. This metaphysical ungraciousness need not mislead us. The positive statement of theory of values in Hartmann's philosophy is the more informing because it proceeds from an initial attitude of negation, and the delineation of the values is perhaps the more vindicating just because it has been, as it were, exacted and delivered only on demand.

Notes

1. Gesammelte Studien and Aufsätze, 3. edition, p. 604.

2. Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart, 1890, pp. 64 ff.

3. Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze, pp. 723 ff.; cf. Schopenhauer, Werke, Deussen edition, Vol. II, p. 736; Haldane and Kemp's translation of The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, p. 470: “The inner being in itself of things is nothing that knows, no intellect, but an unconscious. … ”

4. Regarding Hartmann's estimate of his predecessors, see also his Geschichte der Metaphysik, in Ausgewählte Werke, Vols. XI-XII, 1899-1900, especially Part II, pp. 89-128, 167-246, 289-305, and also the Philosophie des Unbewussten, 12. edition, Vol. I, pp. 13 ff. (cited hereafter as Phil. Unbew.); The Philosophy of the Unconscious, translated by Coupland, Vol. I, pp. 16 ff.

5. Phil. Unbew., Vol. I, p. 331; Coupland, Vol. II, p. 12.

6. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, pp. 33, 172; Coupland, Vol. II, pp. 83, 242.

7. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 34; Coupland, Vol. II, p. 84.

8. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 38; Coupland, Vol. II, p. 88.

9. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 273; Coupland, Vol. II, p. 356.

10. Thus Drews regards Hartmann as combining in one formula the optimism of Leibniz and the pessimism of Schopenhauer (Eduard von Hartmann's philosophisches System im Grundriss, p. 332).

11. “Erkenntniswert, Schönheitswert, Sittlichkeitswert, Erlõsungswert, Entwickelungswert, Zweckmässigkeitswert, Willenswert, Lustwert.” This part of our exposition of Hartmann follows in the main his Grundriss der Axiologie oder Wertwägungslehre (System der Philosophie im Grundriss, Vol V.) and the Philosophy of the Unconscious.

12. Grundriss der Axiologie, p. 59.

13. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 296; Coupland, Vol. III, p. 13.

14. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 295; Coupland, Vol. III, p. 12.

15. Zur Geschichte und Begründung des Pessimismus, 2. edition, p. 255.

16. Grundr. d. Axiol., pp. 64 ff.

17. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 376; Coupland, Vol. III, p. 103.

18. Zur Gesch. u. Begr. d. Pessimismus, p. 253.

19. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 389; Coupland, Vol. III, pp. 117 ff.

20. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 398; Coupland, Vol. III, p. 128.

21. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 399; Coupland, Vol. III, p. 129.

22. Ibid.

23. Das sittliche Bewusstsein, in Ausaewählte Werke, Vol. II, 2. edition, p. 51.

24. Volkelt, Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus, 1873, p. 266.

25. Die Philosophie der Erlösung, 2. edition, Vol. II, pp. 640 ff.

26. Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze, p. 39.

27. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 561.

28. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 408; Coupland, Vol. III, p. 139.

29. Cf. Kategorienlehre, 1895, p. 495, Note; cf. also Note of 1904 to Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, p. 571.

30. Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 684.

31. Wahrheit und Dichtung in den Hauptlehren Eduard von Hartmann's, 1894, p. 24.

32. Die Religion des Geistes, 3. edition, p. 185.

33. Cf. Das Christenthum des Neuen Testaments, 1905, p. 86.

34. Die Religion des Geistes, p. 192.

35. Ibid., p. 189.

36. Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 591.

37. Cf. Zur Geschichte und Begründung des Pessimismus, pp. 327 ff., 359 ff., 370: “Die Bedeutung des Leides”.

38. Die Religion des Geistes, p. 259; Das religiöse Bewusstsein der Menschheit, 2. edition (Ausgewählte Werke, Vol. V), p. 615.

39. Grundriss der Religionsphilosophie, p. 79.

40. Die Religion des Geistes, p. 267.

41. Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 688.

42. Ibid. p. 246.

43. Der Pessimismus und die Sittenlehre, 2. edition, p. 125.

44. Even if it were possible for united humanity to put a full stop to the present world-process, would the redemption so conceived be final? The Absolute Unconscious cannot be extinguished; it may once again become manifested in a world-process; opposed alogical will-activities may once again collide and recoil, giving rise to consciousness and raising the curtain on another cosmic tragedy. Be the actors in that tragedy as pessimistically enlightened and as brave as ourselves, their cosmic extinction vote may, in turn, prove no more final than ours. Hartmann to be sure reasoned that the chances of such a repetition of the world-cycle are at worst even, and the probability [frac12]. “That an indefinitely large number of such epochs of actual existence (Buddhist kalpas) should proceed from God's eternal being, is extremely improbable (for n number of epochs, the probability would be [frac12]n).” Hartmann insists on the validity of this reasoning and adheres to his initial judgment that the chances of world-repetition diminish progressively and “the probability [frac12]n becomes so small that it is practically sufficient for consolation”. The comfort and the logic of this reasoning seem alike dubious. (Die Religion des Geistes, pp. 247 ff., Note; cf. Phil. Unbew., Vol. II, pp. 438 ff.; Coupland, Vol. III, pp. 172 ff.; Grundriss der Metaphysik, p. 102.)

45. Das sittliche Bewusstsein, p. 474:

    Etwas fürchten und hoffen und sorgen
    Muss der Mensch für den kommenden Morgen,
    Dass er die Schwere des Daseins ertrage
    Und das ermüdende Gleichmaass der Tage.

46. Grundriss der Axiologie, p. 194; cf. pp. 166, 167, 181.

47. Cf. Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart, pp. 64 ff.