Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  But with the renunciation of the predicate of personality disappears again, as remarked above, the practical religious interest in maintaining the personal divine self-consciousness, and with this the last interest in the assertion of an exclusive transcendent consciousness of the All-One. The practical religious interest being set aside which could not bring itself to abandon all these conceptions in spite of their long-proved untenability, the notional difficulties and philosophic proofs fully assert themselves, and compel that Theism, which endeavours to purify itself from the crude naturalness of an anthropopathic representation of God and to attain tenable metaphysical conceptions, to take the last necessary step in this process of purification and profounder thinking, from which it has hitherto recoiled from a mistaken religious motive. The result, however, which emerges in this last and now inevitable step of the self-purification of Theism, is the same as that which the Philosophy of the Unconscious on its own part from quite another side brings to Theism, and the old supports of the latter have gradually become one after the other so rotten and crumbling that it should rejoice when another new one is offered it.

  That all the attributes of the divine intelligence (all-knowledge, all-wisdom, all-presentness) are also applicable to the clairvoyant unconscious intuition of our All-One, will be more precisely shown at the beginning of Chap. xii. C., and we have already admitted the omnipotence of the Unconscious Absolute Will. When we add, that we have in the last chapter recognised the Unconscious as the Individual in a pre-eminent sense (p. 223 ff., and 240–243), and that the former claims of Theism to personality, self-consciousness, and consciousness of God in their previous sense have become untenable, but that all that is tenable in the same is actually satisfied by our Unconscious, it is clear that on this side a difference in principle between a Theism that rightly understands itself and the Philosophy of the Unconscious cannot be found.—

  This might appear still more plain in another direction, namely, in reference to the relation of the individual to the All-One; but here too we shall see that a well-understood Theism must necessarily move away some steps from the vulgar conception, and then likewise coincides with our point of view. Theism namely is originally dualism, in that it ascribes just as much substantiality to the world as to God. It is true this dualism is one only existing since the creation of the world (conceived as in time), thus no regressively eternal one, but it is intended to be a forwards eternal one, in that the substance of the higher creature is also conceived as eternal. The dualism is therefore indeed only the result of the act of creation, but it is now in operation, and moreover determined not to disappear again. Such a dualism is, however, philosophically untenable, and irresistibly tends to relapse into Monism. We have in the last chapter (pp. 230–234) seen that a seriously held dualism abolishes and reduces to Occasionalism or Pre-established Harmony—two equally untenable refuges from difficulty—the empirically given and a priori demanded causality of individuals among one another, and that causality as influxus physicus necessarily demands the taking up of individuals as phenomena into the one absolute substance. We can here reach the same result by a consideration of the notion of creation, which forms a distinguishing fundamental conception of Theism.—A consistent dualism must assume that the world fashioned as substance by the creative act would continue to subsist, even if the creator were suddenly annihilated; only on this condition would the world be a permanent residuum of a completed act of creation, only on this condition true and genuine substance. This consequence is, however, too strong even for Theism itself, and it therefore foregoes the regarding the world as a mere completed result of a single creative act; it lets its God permanently act the part of world-restorer or world-governor, as the world-architect of Greek dualism in presence of the chaos of the eternal uncreated matter. For this matter, however, and strictly taken also for the individual immortal spirits called into actuality, Theism tries to retain the notion of a created substance, a caput mortuum of a former long past creative act, which residuum, it is true, God has the power again to annihilate, if it seems good to him, but which without such a divine interposition would of itself be imperishable. However, Theism must soon perceive that it is here in presence of the same difficulty, of the same belittling of God, in that this residuum would then also continue to exist if God were annihilated, and that therewith an independence limiting God’s absoluteness would have to be accorded it. This scruple could only be laid to rest if, on God’s annihilation, continued subsistence were denied to the creature; the creature must collapse into nothingness, if the creator withdraws his hand from it even only for a moment; but this is only possible if continued existence is conditioned by a continuously active function of God, by an act of will renewed every moment.

  Such a conserving activity of God, which prevents the constantly threatened falling back of the creature into nothingness, is now, however, in no way different from the first creative act, which summoned the creature out of nothing; for both substitute for the non-existence of the creature its existence; i.e., however, the conservation of the creation by God is to be more precisely defined as continuous creation. Herewith is the untenable notion of the caput mortuum of a past act of creation stripped off, no matter whether this past is reckoned at thousands of years or seconds, and the existence of the creation is in every moment understood as creative act of the same moment. Creation out of nothing, which was emphasised by the Jewish-Christian Theism in contrast to Greek dualism, in order to render prominent the absence of an eternal matter existing before God, is then to be understood in this way, that that wherefrom God creates is his own creative energy, that the whole real existence of the creature consists purely in the divine creative power directed to the same, and its whole essence at every moment purely consists in the content which the divine creative act of this moment pours into it.

  About thus far has Theism progressed in the philosophical purification of its conceptions; it is, however, easy to see that herewith the notion of substance has ceased to be applicable to the creature, since it no longer has subsistence at all, save through the absolute divine substance. Thus only the latter manifesting itself in a continuous creative act of will is the subsistent or self-existent, but the creature itself and its existence is only the manifestation or the revelation of the functions of the Absolute directed to its constant creation or preservation, or, in brief, an appearance1 of the All-One Being. The real existence and the essence of the creature is hereby not at all impugned, since we have indeed already seen that what we call its reality only consists of the sum of the acts of will which are functional in it (comp. above, pp. 242, 243). The notion of creation is, however, through the setting aside of the conception of the created substance, resolved into that of the continuous manifestation of the absolute will and the absolute idea, i.e., into that of the Appearance of the absolute Being. The individual who has penetrated to this conception thereby attains for his religious feeling the desired conviction that he at every moment owes to God, and to him alone, his whole being and all he is; that he is nothing at all but in him and through him, and that the being in him is God’s being itself. Thus also dualism has disappeared from Theism, and by dealing in earnestness with pure Monism has, at the same time, gained for the ardently devotional religious feeling the consciousness of an intimacy of relation between God and man, which is not even remotely to be reached as long as man by the perverse self-contradictory notion of a created substance is opposed as a foreign, independent, self-contained personal substance to God, who may now solve the puzzle how to enter into the man separated substantially from him. The purely monistic view of the world is also alone capable of laying the metaphysical foundation of an ethic exempt from the interference of all sovereign individual caprice (comp. Schopenhauer), which could only attain general validity on the ground of a pluralistic individualistic ethics, if the conception of the divine revelation of a universally obligatory moral canon were tenable. That profounder intimacy of the relation of th
e individual to the Absolute and this better foundation of ethics, which Monism affords as compared with dualistic Theism, and for the sake of which the mystical theosophists and theologians of the West have always shown a strong and decided inclination to Pantheism, the purely Aryan religions of India possessed long before the origin of Christianity; whilst, on the contrary, Christianity from its Semitic origin retained the dualism between creator and creation, at any rate in the orthodox doctrines of the chief confessions. Whilst, however, the pantheistic religions of India, entangled in the error of the eternity of the phenomenon and not acknowledging the real existence of time, were unable to elevate themselves to an historical world-theory, and therefore allowed their believers to be lost in dreams and perish in unhistorical Quietism, the Jewish-Christian Theism, on the contrary, has in compensation for its other defects developed an historical world-view, in which the all-wise providence on the basis of natural process guides the historical process according to a teleologically predetermined plan to a rational goal; from this belief in a rational historical evolution which has found ever clearer expression have the European nations derived the strength of their devotion to the historical process.

  At the present time, when the more special forms of the Christian religion are manifestly outlived, and the faith in the providentially guided historical evolution has besides passed into the flesh and blood of modern civilisation, the essential question is how to liberate from the deciduous shell and to unite with the real substance of the pantheistic Indian religions this remaining kernel of Theism, in order through these ideas, which have grown purely out of the spirit of our Aryan stock, to gain a religious profundity and enhancement of the intensity of religious and ethical feeling, which would be a vivifying renewal of our irreligious age clinging convulsively to the mere externals of religion. That the old creed is no longer tenable, and is still only artificially and violently preserved as a mummy, is generally felt and admitted. But that by mere critical negation nothing is directly gained, unless at the same time fresh elements of religious feeling are introduced, would be just as generally recognised if one did not frequently despair of discovering these new positive elements. If these are anywhere to be found, they lie in that genuine and imperishable core of pure Aryan Pantheism, which must be fused with the circuitously attained historical world-view of Judaism and Christianity, in order by this concrescence to reach a position that unites the advantages of both sides without their defects, and therefore stands higher than either of them singly. In this sense we may say: we stand directly before the time when the Jewish-Christian cosmic theory has only the choice of dying entirely out or of becoming pantheistic, The metaphysical foundation of this transformation, however, which was prepared by the pantheistic and mystical philosophies of the Middle Ages and the Reformation (Scotus Erigena, Martin Eckhart, Giordano Bruno, Jacob Böhme, Spinoza), has been philosophically laid and built on by the most recent German philosophers, whose partially authorised and valuable endeavours and tendencies have coalesced into a provisional unity in the principle of the Unconscious. Precisely in our own time, when the opposition between the unmediated extremes of a rigid theistic dogmatism and an irreligious atheistic naturalism is threatening to become more irreconcilable, the golden mean of a spiritualistic Monism or Pantheism, which supplies both parties with a bridge for mutual understanding and union on neutral soil, appears to be of the highest importance for the peaceful spiritual development of modern society.—

  Having endeavoured to prove the evanescence of the main differences between the Unconscious and the God of Theism with the philosophical purification of Theism, a cardinal point must in conclusion not be left unmentioned. Theism, namely, asserts that the existence of the world is an intended consequence of God’s goodness and omniscience, and sees itself therefore driven in presence of evil to the necessity of attempting a theodicy, the impossibility of which had already been convincingly proved by Kant in a special treatise. We do not deal here with the optimism of those who, like Jewish Theism, find the whole world and the life in it wonderfully glorious, and hold evil to be evanescent as compared with the happiness which exists beside it; we also do not insist on the necessity of a theodicy in regard to moral evil, which for the rest indeed were indifferent, if it did not contribute to the increase of suffering; we only ask an account of that Theism which, like the Christian, grants the preponderating woe and misery in this world (comp. C. Chap. xiii.), and yet regards the resolution to create the world as an efflux of the divine all-knowledge and all-wisdom. The consolation of immortality is no help here, for also in the other world the number of the blessed will be very small compared with that of the torment of the suffering damned (Matt. vii. 13–14; xxii. 14). The only partially accepted doctrine of the future restoration of every creature at the end of all things is in itself too problematical to deserve consideration, and leaves open the question why the world must be miserable until then. As now it would never do to make God the author of evil, Theism sees itself compelled to seek the origin of evil outside God, i.e., since save God only his creature exists, in the creature. A moral guilt of the first (?) human pair is said to have had the deterioration of nature for its natural consequence, so that God must now look on while milliards suffer for the trespass of a couple of individuals dead thousands of years ago, i.e., guiltlessly; since, however, notwithstanding the connection between human fall and deterioration of Nature, between moral guilt and natural world misery, appeared all too bold, a superhuman creature must be introduced, a devil, who ruined and brought into disorder the fair creation of God. For a more childish time this theodicy, by means of the two scapegoats, Lucifer and Adam, might be well enough; we only smile now at such fancies. We repudiate, however, at the same time, in principle, every attempt to disburden God of the responsibility for the world-misery by shifting the same on to any of his creatures whatsoever, since, in the first place, such an independence of the creature crossing the intentions of God is, according to our foregoing discussion, not conceivable; and since, secondly, an all-knowing and all-wise God must, at the moment of creation, foresee and take account of the voluntary decisions of his creatures under all circumstances, and all the indirect consequences of their action as terms of the question, whether it would be wise to create a world with such a history.

  It is to be noticed that it is quite immaterial, and does not at all affect the serious nature of the responsibility, whether the intelligence of God, which is active in this resolve to create a world, is assumed to be conscious or unconscious. Were the divine intelligence at all concerned in the decision whether a world should be created or not, the actual result of this decision in the case of affirmation would be an inexcusable cruelty towards the created substances on the assumption of dualistic Theism, but, on the assumption of Monism, the frenzy of a divine asceticism, a divine self-laceration. If an absolute intelligence (no matter whether conscious or unconscious) really be one of the attributes of God, as indeed we too assume, it is, in view of the misery of the world, impossible that it can have taken part in the decision in question, thus impossible that it was active and efficient during the exaltation of the will which decided on the “That” of the world. Only if the existence of the world was decided by the act of a blind will illuminated by no ray of rational intelligence, only then is this existence comprehensible; only then is God as such not to be made responsible for the same. Such a non-participation of intelligence in the world’s origin, however, cannot be explained by Theism in any of its forms; it must maintain it to be simply impossible on the assumption of an eternal interior spiritual life of a self-conscious God. With our principles, however, it is perfectly comprehensible, nay, even not otherwise to be expected a priori, because, namely (according to C. Chap. i.), the Idea of itself has no interest in being, and can only be posited by the raising of the will out of non-being into being, thus neither before nor during the elevation of the will is existent, but only becomes so through the same. Suppose then the elevation
of the blind will into actual volition (i.e., the moment of the initiative preceding every actual intelligence in the All-One) sufficed, as we shall hereafter see, to posit the “That” of the world, it would thereby be explained how, despite the omniscience of God (during the world-process), the unfortunate commencement could have come to pass.