How often do we fancy that we have weighed with the utmost care the strength of all operative desires, and disregarded none; and yet, when it comes to action, see, to our extreme surprise, that our subtle calculation does not fit the case, for, lo and behold, another and altogether different resultant appears as sovereign will. (The remarks on an unconscious will contained in the last chapter, pp. 252, 253, will recur to the reader. Compare also Chap. iii. C.) It appears, then, that there is, in fact, only one sure token of the proper, true, and final will, that is, the deed (no matter whether it succeeds, or is at the first attempt checked by external circumstances), but that every other supposition of consciousness with regard to what one properly wills remains uncertain, frequently deceptive, conjecture, which by no means depends on an immediate conscious cognition of the will, but on analogies of experience and their artificial combination. Often the firmest resolve, the strictest intention is dispersed by action like spray before the wind, when the true will emerges from the night of the Unconscious, whilst the intentional will was only one-sided or partial desire, or was only imagined by consciousness, and did not exist at all. If, however, the man never acts, as, e.g., in the case where he is impressed with the impossibility of execution, he never knows with absolute certainty what it is he really wills at the bottom of his heart. The so-called conscious choice of the will and its hesitancy is by no means a conscious hesitancy of the will, but a vacillation of the intellect in estimating the motives and realising present and future circumstances as affected by volition. But if there is no doubt about the knowledge, there is none about the will; e.g., the vacillation of my choice, whether I should marry the clever and ugly or the stupid and pretty sister, is no vacillation of my will, which, meantime, does not emerge at all, but of my understanding with respect to the greatness of the advantages and disadvantages to be expected in either case. After the intellect has chosen, the motive is prepared for the will, namely, the idea of the sum total of satisfaction to be expected in either case.
We may then regard it as settled that the laboratory of volition is hidden in the Unconscious; that we can only get to see the finished result, and then only at the moment when it in fact comes to practical application; and that the glances which we succeed in throwing into the laboratory are only able to afford some uncertain information by the help of mirrors and optical apparatus, which, however, never reveal those unconscious depths of the soul where occur the reaction of the will on motives and its passage into definite volition.
If we must now confess that the excitations of the will remain for us eternally covered with the veil of the Unconscious, it is not to be wondered at that we are also not so easily able to review the causes which condition the stimulating power of different desires, or the dissimilar reaction of the will of different individuals on the same motives; we must be provisionally satisfied with seeing in them the inmost nature of the individual, and therefore call their effect very appropriately character, i.e., mark or token of the individual. This much, however, we have seen, that this inmost core of the individual soul whose efflux is the character, that most strictly practical ego of the human being, to which one reckons desert and guilt, and ascribes responsibility, that this peculiar essence which we ourselves are is still more remote from our consciousness and the sublimated ego of pure self-consciousness than anything else in us; that we can most easily get to know this deepest core of ourselves in the same way as we come to know that of other men, namely, by inferences from action. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” This saying holds good also for self-knowledge; and how much do we deceive ourselves therein in fancying we have performed actions from quite other motives, especially better motives, than is actually the case, as we sometimes by chance learn to our shame! (For the continuation of the examination of Character, see the second half of Chap. xi., sect. C.)
It may not be superfluous to throw a side-glance at the essence of the ethical from this point of view. There has been much dispute on the point whether virtue can be taught, and theoretically one may still dispute about it as much as in Plato’s time, but the practical psychologist has at no time doubted that, apart from habit, that second nature of the soul, which is a breaking-in, in the strict sense, because fear is the all-tamer, that without habit, I say, no teaching is able to produce morality, but only to awaken an existing moral consciousness through the presentation of suitable motives, which otherwise, perhaps, would not reach the pupil in this mode and strength. For it is evident that morality is not a predicate of thought, but of will. The emergence of the will into actuality as reaction on motive we have, however, recognised as a thoroughly unconscious act, which is partly, it is true, dependent on the nature of the motive but in another part on the mode of reaction and strength of the will. The motive is always merely idea, and can thus not have the predicate moral; consequently there remains for morality only that unconscious factor which must be looked upon as part of the character, and belongs to the inmost core of individuality. This foundation of the character may, as has been said, probably be modified by practice and habit (through intentional or accidential partiality of the motives appearing before consciousness), but never by teaching; for the finest knowledge of ethics is dead knowledge if it does not act as motive on the will, and whether it shall do so depends solely on the nature of the individual will itself, i.e., on the character. Thus we see also historically that the people who most of all have morality on their lips often have least morality in their character; that people of eminent mental and scientific capacity and culture are not seldom morally worthless people; and that conversely the purest, most unsullied morality is to be found in people of slight mental cultivation, who have never occupied themselves with ethical problems, who often have never enjoyed a good education, and on whom the bad examples surrounding them never acted as incentives, but only as deterrents. Accordingly we further see that all religions, whatever their ethical creed may be, exert equally much or equally little influence on their confessors; nay, even that different stages of culture may possibly affect the coarseness or fineness of the form of the crimes and misdemeanours, but have no real influence on the morality of the character and the goodness and purity of the heart. On the other hand, the morality of one people as compared with that of another is, together with its national character, exclusively determined by its manners and the habits resulting from education; but the national manners again are, apart from the accidents of external position, environment, and inner development, dependent on the national character.
The conclusion is: The ethical element in man, i.e., that which conditions the character of opinions and actions, lies in the deepest night of the Unconscious. Consciousness may perhaps influence actions by emphatically presenting those motives which are adapted to react on the unconscious ethical, but whether and how this reaction follows, consciousness must calmly await, and first learn when the will proceeds to action, whether such will agrees with the conceptions which it entertains of moral and immoral.
It is hereby proved that the process of origination of that to which we assign the predicates moral and immoral lies in the Unconscious. We must now, in the second place, show that these predicates denote qualities which do not inhere in their subject in and of themselves, but which express only relations of the same to a quite definite standpoint of a higher consciousness, i.e., that these predicates are only creations of consciousness, and never can belong to the Unconscious in itself. It immediately follows from this that it would be wrong to talk of a moral instinct, since it is true the actions of mankind as such flow from the unconscious or instinctive part of character, e.g., through the instincts of compassion, gratitude, revenge, selfishness, sensuality, &c.; but this unconscious production can never have anything to do with the notions moral and immoral, because they are only engendered by consciousness, and a conscious instinct would be a contradictio in adjecto. The latter remark should protect me from being credited with maintaining an instinctive conscience; on the contr
ary, I hold conscience to be no simple fact, but a very complex one, the development of which from the very numerous factors of consciousness can never be definitely proved.
We also call lifeless natural phenomena, wind, air, portents, good and bad; further, we assign these predicates to animals and savages or young children, but they only pass into moral and immoral when we make beings responsible for their operation. But we then, again, hold beings responsible for their actions when their consciousness is developed to such a degree that they can themselves understand the notions of moral and immoral, and make them responsible only for those actions which their consciousness was not prevented from measuring by its own standard. Thus it comes to pass that we call one and the same action moral or immoral in one being but not in another. For example, the strict sense of property which we find in many animals within their own species and narrow community (e.g., among wild horses within the herd in respect to pastures and provender) we do not designate a moral, but only a good quality. Thus we cannot call it immoral when wild peoples offer even their wives to their guests; on the contrary, as a part of hospitality, this might be called moral, because their consciousness is at any rate developed up to this stage, but not to the comprehension of modesty in sexual intercourse. In a little child, we can, at the most, only term bad those malignant outbreaks which at a riper age would cause the same character to be condemned as immoral. Revenge for bloodshed would among ourselves be called immoral; among peoples of less culture it is a moral institution; among quite rude savages a mere act of passion which can be styled neither moral nor immoral. These examples may suffice to prove that moral and immoral are not qualities of the persons, or of their actions in themselves, but only judgments on them from a point of view taken by consciousness—relations between those beings and their actions on the one hand, and this standpoint of a higher stage of consciousness on the other; that thus Nature, so far as it is unconscious, does not know the distinction of moral and immoral. Yes, Nature is in itself not good or bad, but is ever nothing else but natural, i.e., self-adequate. For the universal natural Will has nothing outside itself, because it includes everything and is itself everything; thus there can for it be nothing good or bad, but only for an individual will; for a relation between a will and an external object is already necessarily presupposed in the notions good and bad.
In all this we by no means desire to disparage the value of the critical point of view adopted by consciousness; we only seek to avoid the error of supposing conceptions to be possible outside this specific point of view which only arise in relation to it. Certainly, if a consciousness be assumed external and prior to Nature (in a personal God), one may also, from the point of view of this consciousness, measure the world by the standard of these conceptions; but if—as we shall be constrained to do for reasons hereafter to be assigned—we reject a consciousness outside the union of mind and matter, the possibility also disappears of applying the standard of those conceptions to the whole unconscious world,—a point on which much unprofitable labour has been expended. But all this by no means lowers the value of those notions, for as, in spite of all partiality and limitation, consciousness for this world of individuation surpasses in importance the Unconscious, so, in the last resort, the moral stands higher than the natural; indeed, consciousness being ultimately also only an unconscious product of Nature, the moral also is not an antithesis of the natural, but only a higher stage of it, to which the natural has risen through its own energy and the instrumentality of consciousness.
I must here content myself with these brief indications, as an ethic worked out in this spirit would require a treatise to itself. I have also deemed it necessary to forego explicitly considering why and how judgments, with the predicates moral and immoral, must arise at a certain stage of consciousness, and what the content of those notions is. I thought I might the more readily do this as the general understanding of those conceptions met with in ordinary life appeared sufficient for the purpose of our present inquiries.
V.
THE UNCONSCIOUS IN THE ÆSTHETIC JUDGMENT AND IN ARTISTIC PRODUCTION.
WITH regard to the perception of the Beautiful there have been current from early times two extreme opinions, which, in the various attempts at compromise, have obtained very different recognition. One party, taking its rise from Plato, rely on this, that in Art the human mind transcends the beauty revealed in Nature, and hold this to be impossible unless there indwell in the soul an idea of the beautiful, a certain aspect of which is termed an Ideal, and which serves as a criterion of what is and is not beautiful in Nature, so that the æsthetic judgment is à priori and synthetic. The other party point out that in those creations of art which approximate most closely to the alleged ideals there are contained no elements which Nature herself does not offer to the view; that the idealising activity of the artist only consists in an elimination of the ugly, and in the collecting and combining of those elements of beauty which Nature exhibits apart; and that æsthetic science has in its progress more and more demonstrated the psycho-genesis of the æsthetic judgment from given psychological and physiological conditions, so that we may confidently expect a complete illumination of this province, and its purification from all à priori and supernatural conceptions.
I hold that each side is partly right, partly wrong. The empiricists are right when they affirm that every æsthetic judgment must be founded on psychological and physiological conditions; and accordingly it is, strictly speaking, they alone who create scientific Æsthetics; whilst the idealists, by their hypothesis, cut away the foundations of such science, and in strictness have only advanced Æsthetics so far as they were at the same time more or less consciously empiricists, i.e., substantially limited the science through empirical reception of the matter afforded by experience. But suppose the empiricists had obtained their end, and had completely analysed the æsthetic judgment, they would only thereby have proved its objective connection with other spheres—its world-citizenship, as it were, in the realm of spirit as a natural existence, but would have left untouched its subjective origin in the individual consciousness, or would have maintained something altogether false by their implicit assertion that the objective connection and the process of origination in the subjective consciousness are identical, which is contradicted by all unprejudiced introspection, and the testimony of the simplest as of the most cultivated taste. The idealists are far nearer the truth when they allege that this process is something lying beyond consciousness, antecedent to the conscious æsthetic judgment, consequently something à priori in respect of the latter. They are again in the wrong, however, when they annihilate all process in this à priori by their ready-made ideal, which is derived God knows whence, of whose existence consciousness knows nothing, whose objective connection with other psychical phenomena must remain for ever incomprehensible, and whose rigidity stamps it as insufficient when we consider the endless variety of its illustrations.
As soon as æsthetic Idealism wishes to do more than set up its principle in general, as soon as it enters more intimately into the wealth of the given manifold, it sees itself compelled to confess the untenability of the abstract ideal, which is a vague unity, and to admit that the Beautiful is only possible in the most concrete particularity, because individually intuited (e.g., the human ideal as masculine and feminine; the former again as ideal of the child, boy, youth, man, old man; the ideal of the man again as ideal of a Hercules, Odysseus, Zeus, &c.); that thus the concrete ideal must be no longer a vague unity, but an indefinite plurality of the most definite types. To assert the eternal existence of these infinitely numerous concrete ideals would be to set infinitely numerous miracles in the place of the one miracle of the abstract ideal. If, to escape this difficulty, the vague ideal is posited as a fluid unity concreting into plurality according to circumstances, this process of concretion must still proceed in a mind; but the inability of the absolutely indeterminate one ideal of beauty to concrete itself by its own power would have
to be recognised, since no content could come of itself from that which is perfectly void of content. The creative process in the unconscious mind, as whose result the concrete ideal springs into consciousness, accordingly finds no help at all in the hypothetically abstract ideal; it also, however, no longer needs help, for it carries the formal principle of æsthetic formation in itself, and does not need to seek it first in the impossible absolute ideal of beauty. Only in this sense of a concrete ideal to be unconsciously created in the concrete case, recent æsthetic idealists even (like Schasler) understand the æsthetic ideal; and æsthetic Idealism so understood is ripe for reconciliation and fusion with æsthetic Empiricism, when it recognises that precisely through its correct understanding of the formal process as priori and unconscious it is bound, à posteriori, to borrow empirically from consciousness the æsthetic content of this infinite wealth of concrete ideals to which analysis, reflection, and speculation may then be applied.
To take a very simple example. The abstract idealists would be obliged to judge tone, harmony, and timbre according to an ideal tone, ideal harmony, and ideal timbre, and according to their approximation to the latter to determine their tone-colour; whilst Helmholtz (“On the Sensations of Tone”) proves that in all three cases pleasure is to be conceived as negation of a displeasure, which arises through disturbances in the ear in the form of noise, dissonance, and disagreeable timbre similar to the flickering of light. This displeasure is not æsthetical, but just as much a weak physical pain as colic, toothache, or the pain produced by drawing a slate-pencil across a slate. Thus the æsthetic pleasure in the sensuous part of music has been proved to be objectively connected with physical pain, but the mode of origin of the æsthetic judgment—“this tone, this harmony, this timbre is beautiful”—is by no means this, that I am conscious while listening: “I feel now no pain through disturbances, and yet a gentle excitement of the function of the organ, ergo I feel pleasure.” Nothing of all these or such-like processes is found in consciousness, but in our consciousness the pleasure is eo ipso contemporaneous with the listening; it is then as if brought forth by enchantment, without the most strained attention being able to detect in the subjective event a clue to the mode of origin. This by no means precludes the objectively recognised connection being really completed in the Unconscious as process; this is, even according to my view, that which is alone probable, but the result is the only thing which enters into consciousness, and that, too, in the first place, momentarily, after the complete perception of the sensuous observation; so that here again, also, there is verified the instautaneousness of the process in the Unconscious, its compression into the timeless instant; and, secondly, not as æsthetic judgment, but as feeling of pleasure or displeasure.
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