The Essential Colin Wilson (18 page)

So Fichte came to be rejected as a muddled and self-contradictory thinker by later generations. So he was; but his single insight was more important than whole systems of later philosophers.

There was another reason that Fichte lost influence; another, and more exciting star, was rising in the first decade of the nineteenth century: Hegel. Hegel seemed to promise all that previous philosophers had been unable to achieve. He began, like Fichte, by brooding on the problem of religion and revelation. On this subject, Hegel was a true existentialist, for he decided that 'historical truth' can never be as important as subjective truth, the eternal truths of the reason. Whether a man called Christ really existed is beside the point.

But while in this early sceptical stage, Hegel had his own sudden flash of insight; it may well have been a mystical vision of some kind. He saw the 'idea' as the ultimate reality, the absolute, from which all things derive: logic, Nature and Spirit (or mind). All the world as we know it is made up of subdivisions of these categories.

To grasp the essence of Hegel's achievement—and to ignore its illogicalities, self-contradictions and moments of downright absurdity—we have to recall for a moment the basic attitude of Greek philosophy: the rejection of the real world in favour of the world of reason and ideas. (Plotinus, for example, refused to allow any pictures of himself to be made, or to give any biographical facts, for he claimed that the 'real' side of himself was not only supremely unimportant, but a contradiction of his true self, the spirit striving after the absolute idea.) World rejection has entered deep into philosophy; it can be seen even in Descartes' tendency to stay in bed all day. Eastern and Western philosophy show the same basic pattern; the man of thought and the man of action are fundamentally opposed—except for the occasional enlightened king.

Hegel's temperament rejected this dualism. Something healthy and optimistic in him wanted to be allowed to accept the real world—but in a profounder sense than its usual kind of acceptance by practical men. (It is typical that Hegel was delighted when Napoleon won the battle of Jena—even though it meant that Hegel was out of a job; there was something cheerful in him that could not help approving of vitality.) Therefore it was necessary, as it were, to be a super-practical man, far above both the shallow world-accepters and the pessimistic world-rejectors. And this 'synthesis' on a higher level is the fundamental movement of all Hegel's thought. Hegel did not spend his life arguing in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis; this is one of the myths promulgated by people who have never actually read Hegel; it was a purely instinctive movement of his thought.[1]

If he was to justify this world-acceptance, it would require arguments and reasonings that would make all previous philosophizing seem dilettantism. To some extent, he succeeded. But it must also be admitted that this desire of his—a certain element of the actor in him—also led directly to his worst feature: his incomprehensible style. It is impossible to doubt that his obscurity was a part of his technique for being impressive.[1] Whether this is regarded as a particularly serious charge against Hegel depends on the view one takes of the writer's responsibility to be as clear as possible. What seems to be generally acknowledged—Karl Popper is one of the few violently dissenting voices[1]—is that in spite of his atrocious style, Hegel has a great deal more to say than most other philosophers of the nineteenth century.

In view of this refusal to be a 'world-rejector', it is not surprising that he eventually became the official philosopher of the Prussian state. For Hegel's philosophy is essentially an immense attempt to 'justify the ways of God to man'. It has one important distinction: it is the first clear attempt in the history of philosophy since Plato, to refute the idea that the world is evil or meaningless, and that the philosopher is better off dead. Hegel's philosophy of history has been the most frequent target for the jeers of anti-Hegelians—for he attempted to show that all history is moving steadily towards the ultimate self-expression of spirit—but for all its absurdities and over-simplifications it is a philosophy that believes in evolution, and refuses to accept that history is a 'nightmare'.

One might criticize Hegel by saying that his philosophy is not true philosophy at all: that although he begins by talking about perception, consciousness, logic, he has actually broken with the Cartesian tradition of closely connected reason, and is really writing a kind of monstrous novel or epic poem about 'Spirit'. There is some truth in this, but it could be argued about endlessly. Could a completely 'logical' philosophy—without vision or intuition—ever arrive at 'truth'? At all events, Hegel stands next to Goethe as one of the greatest creative minds of the nineteenth century.

Hegel's greatest achievement was his recognition—purely intuitive—that the old dualism must be somehow transcended. If he had been a far greater man, his influence might have been more decisive; he might have written in clearer language, and have shown far more definitely that there was a fallacy in Descartes' dualism. As it was, he became the father-figure of a British school of idealism, and over the next fifty years gradually ceased to exercise any active influence on philosophy.

But, strangely enough, it was the philosophies of violent reaction provoked by Hegel's thinking that came to exercise most influence on post-Hegelian thought, and that still dominate philosophy in the twentieth century. The first of these was the positivism of Auguste Comte; the second, Kierkegaard's existentialism.

Comte was one of the first of the great worshippers of science of the nineteenth century. History, he says, proceeds in three stages: superstition, metaphysics and science. The first stage is one of total ignorance; when men are dominated by fear. In the second stage, men know enough to reject the idea of a universe populated by gods and demons, but are still inclined to connect up their facts with vague theories about the 'absolute', 'essences', and so on. Finally, with the coming of science, history enters its final stage; the sun of knowledge rises, and the millennium is in sight. All knowledge can now be verified by observation and logic.

To men of the twentieth century, this view sounds harmlessly optimistic, but naïve. In its own time, it exercised a considerable influence, particularly on the British school of philosophers led by Mill and Herbert Spencer.

The other major philosopher to oppose Hegel must be considered at greater length. Although Kierkegaard remained unknown outside Denmark during his lifetime, and was forgotten for more than half a century after his death, his influence on twentieth century thought has been enormous, and has extended to thinkers with as little in common as Jaspers, Heidegger, Marcel and Sartre.

With Kierkegaard, as with Hegel, one must understand his temperament if one is to go to the heart of his thought. Hegel was fundamentally a kind of Shavian optimist; he experienced despair in his youth, but went beyond it. Kierkegaard never went beyond despair; he never trusted life. He was the son of old parents, and was always physically weak; he was also crippled in one leg. His father was an imaginative neurotic who encouraged the child's intelligence and stunted his development as a normal boy. Kierkegaard inherited his father's emotional immaturity and instability, and when he became engaged to an attractive girl, found it necessary to destroy the relationship as a spoilt child smashes a toy. He went to Berlin, and heard Schelling—a friend and admirer of Hegel—lecture; as a consequence of which he developed an intense dislike of Hegelianism based upon incomplete understanding.

There was, of course, a fundamental difference of temperament between Hegel and Kierkegaard. Hegel reminds us in many ways of Wordsworth. (Their portraits even make them look rather alike.) He had Wordsworth's fundamental vision of universal harmony; but apart from this, his character was pedestrian, and his life orderly, stable and dull. His marriage to a girl many years his junior was uniformly happy. Like Wordsworth he became a pontifical reactionary, somewhat conceited; but none of this detracts from the value of his vision. And he had little patience with the excesses of the
Sturm and Drang
movement. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, was volatile, witty, thin-skinned and unstable. The neurotic oversensitivity bequeathed him by his father gave him endless trouble.

Add to this that Kierkegaard's acquaintance with Hegel's work was all at second-hand, and that he was totally unaware that the young Hegel had been something of a religious visionary, and it can be seen that Kierkegaard's 'Hegel' was a stuffed dummy that he set up for target practice.

Kierkegaard's neurosis did not prevent him from producing work of genius; and if he had been a poet it would hardly have been worth mentioning, except for its biographical interest. But philosophy aims at objectivity, and it must be recognized that, in spite of his genius, Kierkegaard was not ideally equipped for being objective.

His complaint—understandable enough—was that, as far as he was concerned, Hegel's system was
not
a key to the universe. The reaction was primarily emotional, or even physical—like a man with a hangover shuddering at the thought of breakfast. In another respect it was not at all unlike the reaction that W. B. Yeats felt towards Bernard Shaw. Kierkegaard mistook Hegel for something he was not, a heartless rationalist, a kind of gigantic calculating machine offering a 'solution' to the universe. His response was the standard response of the anarchist to authority—to shake his fist and shout defiance.

This is not to say that his rejection of Hegel was entirely a matter of temperament and immaturity. There was a certain valid perception that philosophy since Descartes had become too detached and abstract—precisely Hamann's objection to Kant. Kierkegaard was a man of religious temperament, and he felt that the purpose of seeking truth is to 'exist in it', not to think about it. 'To exist under the guidance of pure thought is like travelling in Denmark with the help of a small map of Europe on which Denmark shows no larger than a pen-point.'
(Unscientific Postscript.)
This is only to say that he was intensely aware of the hidden component in man, the concealed self that is not the detached 'I think', but a struggling and purposive force. But instead of trying to correct the fallacy that had crept into philosophy with Descartes, he chose to reject all philosophy in the name of religion—a paradoxical and pessimistic religion of his own. According to Kierkegaard, to be a Christian means to recognize that the closer you keep to God, the worse it will be for you. 'For in a strict sense, being a Christian means to die to the world, and then to be sacrificed.'

(
Journals
, 1851.) This recalls Kafka's remark: 'In the struggle between the world and yourself, always take the world's side.' Kierkegaard's chief desire, it seems, was to be the anti-Hegel. Instead of being reasonable, and taking what was good in Hegel—and previous philosophers—and then modifying it to suit himself, Kierkegaard rejected it wholesale in a thoroughly emotional way, cutting off his nose to spite his face. Hegel was a professor; so Kierkegaard denounced professors and exalted suffering poets; Hegel thought that history was part of the divine plan; Kierkegaard rejected history as an irrelevancy; Hegel believed that thought could be constructive; Kierkegaard set out to show that, in the paradoxical light of eternity, destruction is constructive. So Kierkegaard's philosophy—or theology—is a curious mixture of valid insight and special pleading. In an attempt to escape the implication that he was an unstable and neurotic personality (which was continually levelled against him by Copenhagen society) he dragged up the business of his jilting Regina Olsen, and compared it to Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, implying that it had been some 'higher' motive than mere fickleness that led to his action; he even wrote a whole book showing that the sacrifice of Isaac was the paradoxical symbol of his own anti-philosophizing.

In fact, with Kierkegaard the pendulum had swung back to the ancient Greek dualism; Kierkegaard's religious 'paradox' is only a slightly disguised form of Socrates' assertion that the body is the enemy of pure thought, and therefore the philosopher's highest aim is death. Philosophy had merely come a full circle: there had been no evolutionary movement of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; instead, Kierkegaard merely repeated Plato's thesis in a new key.

AFTER HEGEL

Kierkegaard was the major influence on twentieth-century existentialism; and since I have already dealt with Comte, who might be regarded as the founder of the other major school of modern philosophy, logical positivism (or logical empiricism), this chapter might well be brought to an end at this point. But for the sake of completeness, it may be as well to speak of some minor developments.

Perhaps it is hardly accurate to speak of the philosophy of Nietzsche as a minor development—particularly since he is often regarded, together with Kierkegaard, as the founder of existentialism. But Nietzsche's work was essentially incomplete; he went insane before he could bring it to fruition. If Nietzsche had stayed sane, he might well have affected the great Hegelian synthesis in philosophy, rising above the simple pessimism of the Greeks and the simple optimism of Hegel. For he was Hegel's successor in one important respect: he did not put the world of thought and the world of history into two separate compartments. Although he began as a pessimistic romantic and disciple of Schopenhauer (who believed that the basic choice was: Happy animal or suffering god?), his natural mental vigour soon rejected Schopenhauer's crypto-Buddhism. He was less of a weakling than most romantics, and his nature was resilient: 'I have made my philosophy out of my will to live . . . Self-preservation forbade me to practise a philosophy of wretchedness and discouragement.' Like most romantics, he was inclined to go too far in his opposition to the things he disliked, and his glorification of the military man or the 'blond beast' sometimes sounds a note of sheer absurdity. (In practice, Nietzsche lost no opportunity to sneer at the Prussian tendency to militarism.) But on the whole, his philosophy is remarkably balanced, remarkably free of imprecision and overstatement. Darwin's theory of evolution provided him with the basic concept he needed for his new romanticism: the superman. 'Not mankind, but Superman, is the goal.' As an analyst of the weaknesses and pockets of decay in contemporary thought, he was unrivalled. He speaks of the 'smell of defeat' in contemporary thought, and declared with sheer inspiration that 'the nineteenth century goes in search of theories by which it may justify
its fatalistic submission to the empire of facts'
. He captured the objection to Descartes in a single phrase when he jeered at 'the idea of will-less contemplation as the road to truth' (
Will to Power
, 95). Like Hegel, Nietzsche had experienced a vision in his teens, on the top of a hill called Leutch,[1] as a consequence of which he wrote: 'Pure will, without the confusions of intellect—how happy, how free!' This vision, of total life-affirmation, transcending the mere animal will to live and the doubts of the intellectuals, was always the mainspring of his thought, and is far more important than the casual aspects of it that are sometimes selected for criticism: his glorification of the Ego, his occasional anti-rationalism, his contempt for 'the herd'. Under slightly different circumstances, Nietzsche might easily have become the officially approved philosopher of Germany at the turn of the century. But there were obstacles. Like Kierkegaard, he had inherited feeble health from his father, and this was made worse when he contracted syphilis in a brothel. His feeble health was an obstacle to sustained intellectual effort, so that his books are written in brief disconnected fragments; unlike Hegel, he was incapable of out-Kanting Kant. (And perhaps the fact that Hegel had already done it, discouraged him.) Finally, his fluctuating health emphasized the inner-inconsistency of his philosophy, so that the exaltation of free will is immediately countered by
amor fati
, and the idea of the superman is contradicted by the notion of Eternal Recurrence. Nietzsche had chosen a task—or rather, his temperament had chosen it for him—that was too great for a sick, poverty-stricken man who had no stable domestic background. And yet even so, his life gives us a feeling of a near miss. His sanity collapsed at just about the point when he was becoming a European celebrity. His death in a mental home must have struck many would-be artists as a warning that 'you can't win', that life and spirit are irreconcilably opposed.