Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 1 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's The
Foundations of the 19th century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
14
FIRST CHAPTER
HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY
Nur durch den
Menschen
tritt der Mensch in das Tageslicht des Lebens ein. — JEAN
PAUL FRIEDRICH
RICHTER.
MAN BECOMING
MAN
Much wit has been spent in defining
the
difference between man and beast, but the distinction between man and
man
seems to me to be even more important, preparing the way, as it does,
for
the recognition of a fact of greater significance. The moment a man
awakens
to a consciousness of freely creative power, he crosses a definite
boundary
and breaks the spell which showed how closely, in spite of all his
talent
and all his achievements, he was related even in mind to other living
creatures.
Through art a new element, a new form of existence, enters into the
cosmos.
In expressing this
as my conviction, I put myself on the same footing as some of Germany‘s
greatest sons. This view of the importance of art corresponds, too, if
I am not mistaken, to a specific tendency of the German mind; at any
rate
so clear and precise a formulation of this thought, as we find in
Lessing
and Winckelmann, Schiller and Goethe, Hölderlin, Jean Paul and
Novalis,
in Beethoven and Richard Wagner, would hardly be met with among the
other
members of the related Indo-Teutonic group. In order to do justice to
this
view, we must in the first place know exactly what is here meant
15
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
by “art.“ When Schiller writes, “Nature
has formed creatures only, art has made men,“ we surely cannot believe
that he was thinking here of flute-playing or verse-writing? Whoever
reads
Schiller‘s writings (especially of course his Briefe über die
ästhetische
Erziehung des Menschen) carefully and repeatedly, will recognise
more
and more that the idea “art“ means to the poet-philosopher something
very
vivid, something glowing in him, as it were, and yet a very subtle
thing,
which can scarcely be confined within a brief definition. A man must
have
misunderstood him if he believes himself free of such a belief. Let us
hear what Schiller says, for an understanding of this fundamental idea
is indispensable not merely for the purpose of this chapter, but also
for
that of the whole book. He writes: “Nature does not make a better
beginning
with man than with her other works: she acts for him, while he cannot
yet
act for himself as a free intelligent being. But what precisely makes
him
a man is the fact that he does not stand still as mere nature made him,
but is endowed with the capacity of retracing with the aid of reason
the
steps which nature anticipated with him, of transforming the work of
necessity
into a work of his free choice and of raising the physical necessity to
a moral one.“ First and foremost then it is the eager struggle for
freedom
which, according to Schiller, betokens the artistic temperament. Man
cannot
escape necessity, but he “transforms“ it, and, in so doing, shows
himself
to be an artist. As such he employs the elements, which nature offers
him,
to create for himself a new world of semblance; but a second
consideration
follows from this, which must not on any account be overlooked: by
placing
himself “on his aesthetic standpoint,“ as it were, “outside the world
and
contemplating it,“ man for the first time clearly sees this world, the
world outside himself! The desire to tear himself away from nature had
indeed been a
16
HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY
delusion, but it is this very delusion
which is now bringing him to a full and proper consciousness of nature:
for “man cannot purge the semblance from the real without at the same
time
freeing the real of the semblance.“ It is only when man has begun to
invent
artistically that he also begins to think consciously, it is only when
he himself builds that he begins to perceive the architectonics of the
universe. Reality and semblance are at first mixed up in his
consciousness;
the conscious, freely creative dealing with the semblance is the first
step towards attaining to the freest and purest possible cognition of
reality.
True science — a science that not only measures and records, but
contemplates
and perceives — owes its origin, according to Schiller, to the direct
influence
of the artistic efforts of man. Then for the first time philosophy
finds
a place in the human intellect; for it hovers between the two worlds.
Philosophy
is based at once on art and on science: it is, if I may so express
myself,
the latest artistic elaboration of a reality which has been sifted and
purified. But this does not by any means exhaust the import of
Schiller‘s
conception of art. For “beauty“ (that freely transformed, new world) is
not simply an object, in it rather there is mirrored also “a condition
of our subject“: “Beauty is, in truth, form, because we contemplate it,
but it is at the same time life, because we feel it. In a word, it is
at
once a state and an achievement“ * To feel artistically, to think
artistically
denotes then a particular condition of man in general; it is a phase of
feeling, or rather attitude of mind — still better, perhaps, a latent
store
of power, which must everywhere act as a “freeing,“ “transforming,“
“purging“
element in the life of the individual man, as well as in the life of a
whole nation, even where art,
*
Cf.
Aesthetische
Erziehung, Bd. 3, 25, 26. Further particulars in chap.
ix. div. 7 of this book (vol. ii.).
17 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
science and philosophy are not directly
concerned. Or, to present this relation to ourselves from a different
side,
we can also — and indeed here too with Schiller * — say, “From being a
successful instrument, man became an unsuccessful artist.“ That is the
tragedy of which I spoke in the introductory remarks.
We must, I think,
admit that this German conception of “man becoming man“ goes deeper,
embraces
more, and throws a brighter light upon that future of mankind after
which
we have to strive than any narrowly scientific or purely utilitarian
one.
However that may be, one thing is certain: whether such a view is to
have
unconditional or merely conditional validity, it is of the very
greatest
service for a study of the Hellenic world and the sure revelation of
its
principle of life; for though in this subjective formulation it may be
a characteristically German conception, it leads back in the main to
Hellenic
art and to Hellenic philosophy, which embraced natural science, and
proves
that Hellenism lived on in the nineteenth century not merely outwardly
and historically, but also as an inherent force that has helped to
mould
the future. †
ANIMAL
AND MAN
Not every artistic
activity is art. Numerous animals evince extraordinary skill in the
construction
of dwellings; the song of the nightingale vies successfully with the
natural
song of the savage; capricious imitation we find
*
Cf.
Etwas
über die erste Menschengesellsehaft, div. I.
† To
avoid misunderstanding, I wish to mention that here at the beginning of
my book I have without further criticism joined hands with Schiller, to
ensure that what follows may be more easily understood; only in my
final
chapter can I establish my view that in the case of the Teutonic
peoples,
in contrast to the Hellenes, the turning point in “man becoming man“ is
to be sought not in art, but in religion — this however does not mean a
deviation from Schiller‘s conception of “art“ but purely and simply a
particular
gradation.
18 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
highly developed in the animal kingdom,
and that too in the most various spheres — imitation of activity, of
sound,
of form — and here it must also be remembered that we know next to
nothing
of the life of the higher apes; * language, that is, communication of
feelings
and judgments from one individual to another, is widespread throughout
the whole animal kingdom and the means adopted are so incredibly sure
that
not only anthropologists but also philologists † do not consider it
superfluous
to warn us against thinking that vibration of the human vocal chords —
or for that matter sound in general — is the only thing that can be
called
language. ‡ By instinctively uniting into civic organisations, no
matter
how complex and intricate they may be, the human race similarly
achieves
nothing which is in principle an advance on the exceedingly complex
animal
communities; modern sociologists, indeed, consider the origin of human
society as having a close organic connection with the development of
the
social instincts in the surrounding animal kingdom. § If we
consider
* See,
however, the observations of J. G. Romanes in the case of a female
chimpanzee,
given in fullest detail in Nature, vol. xi., p. 160 ff,
condensed
in the books of the same author. In a short time this ape learned to
count
up to seven with unfailing accuracy. On the other hand, the Bakairi
(South
American Indians) are able to count only up to six, and that with great
difficulty. (See Karl von Steinen: Unter den
Naturvölkern
Brasiliens.)
† See,
for example, Whitney, The Life of Language (Fr. edit. p. 238 f).
‡
Compare
especially the instructive remarks of Topinard in his Anthropologie,
pp. 159-162. It is interesting to know that so great and at the same
time
so extremely cautious a naturalist as Adolf Bastian, with all his
abhorrence
of everything fantastic, claims for the articulata (with the tentacles
with which they touch each other) a language analogous to ours and in
keeping
with their nature; see Das Beständige in den Menschenrassen,
p. viii. of the preface. In Darwin‘s Descent of Man, chap.
iii.,
we find an exceedingly interesting review of the facts pertaining to
this
question and an energetic refutation of the paradoxes of Max
Müller
and others.
§
See,
for example, the Principles of Sociology of the American
Professor
Franklin H. Giddings (Fr. edit., 1897, p. 189): “Les bases de l‘empire
de l‘homme furent posées sur les associations zoogéniques
des plus humbles formes de la vie consciente.“
19
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
the civic life of the ants, and see
by what daring refinements they ensure the practical efficiency of the
social mechanism and the faultless fitting of all parts into each other
— as an example I shall mention only the removal of the baneful sexual
impulse in a large percentage of the population, and that too not by
mutilation,
as is the case with our wretched makeshift castration, but by shrewd
manipulation
of the fecundating germs — then we must admit that the civic instinct
of
man is not of a high standard; compared with many animal species we are
nothing but political blunderers. * Even in the special exercise of
reason
we can indeed recognise a peculiar specific feature of man, but hardly
a fundamentally new natural phenomenon. Man in his natural condition
uses
his superior reason exactly as the stag his speed of foot, the tiger
his
strength, the elephant his weight; it is his finest weapon in the
struggle
for existence, it takes the place of agility, bulk and so many other
things
that he lacks. The times are past when men had the effrontery to deny
that
animals have reason; not only do the ape, the dog and all higher
animals
manifest conscious reflection and unerring judgment, but insects have
been
experimentally proved to do the same: a colony of bees, for example,
placed
in unaccustomed and absolutely new surroundings, adopts new measures,
tries
this and that, till it has found what
* See
Carl Vogt‘s amusing Untersuchungen über Thierstaaten
(1851).
In Brehm, Vom Nordpol zum Aequator (1890), we find very
noteworthy
facts concerning the waging of war by baboons; their tactics change
according
to the nature of the ground, they divide their forces into definite
groups,
first line, second line of attack, &c., several work together, so
as
to roll a large boulder down on the enemy, &c. Perhaps the most
amazing
social life is that of the farming ants from South America, first
reported
upon by Belt, Naturalist in Nicaragua, then by the German
Alfred
Möller; now we can observe these animals in the Zoological Garden
in London, where it is especially easy to follow the activity of the
large-headed
“overseers,“ which rush forward and shake up the workers whenever they
take things easy!
20 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
suits it. * There is no doubt that if
we investigate with more care and insight the psychological life — so
far
* Cf.
Huber, Nouvelles observations sur les abeilles, ii. 198, and
the
fine book by Maurice Maeterlinck, La vie des abeilles, 1901.
The
best and shortest recent résumé of the most
important
facts pertinent to our case is probably that by J. G. Romanes, Essays
on Instinct, 1897; even this distinguished pupil of Darwin is,
however,
under the constant necessity of referring to the series of observations
of the two Hubers as being the most brilliant and reliable; but too
little
known is another work, that of J. Traherne Moggridge, Observations
on
harvesting Ants and Trapdoor Spiders (Reeve, London, 1873); in
general
the psychologists of the animal kingdom should direct more attention to
the spiders, which beyond doubt are endowed with special gifts of their
own. But see H. C. MacCook, American Spiders
(Philadelphia,
1889), and the various volumes of the invaluable Souvenirs
entomologiques
by Fabre. Among older writings, Kirby‘s History, Habits, and
Instincts
of Animals is of lasting value. Of the more philosophic writings I
shall here call attention especially to Wundt‘s Vorlesungen
über
die Menschen- und Tierseele and to Fritz Schulze‘s Vergleichende
Seelenkunde (Second Part, “The Psychology of Animals and Plants,“
1897).
In this note I should like at the same time to put in an express
caveat,
namely, that here and further on I do not fail to recognise the deep
gulf
between the intellect of thinking man and that of the animal; it was
high
time that a Wundt with all his intellectual keenness should openly
oppose
our almost ineradicable inclination to anthropomorphic interpretations;
but it seems to me that Wundt himself and with him Schulze, Lubbock and
others fall into the opposite error: they make indeed a just protest
against
the uncritical over-estimation of the thought-life of the animals, yet
these learned men, accustomed from their earliest years to think and
speculate
unceasingly, do not seem to have any idea of the minimum of
consciousness
and reflection with which mankind as a whole manages to go through
life;
they are in general inclined to attach too great importance to
“consciousness“
and “reflection“; this manifests itself in their treatises on the
elementary
conditions of the human ψυχή
and — perhaps still more clearly — in their lack of ability
to explain the nature of the real act of creative genius (Art and
Philosophy).
One Wundt having reduced the estimate of animal intelligence to its
right
level, we should need a second to expose our tendency to overrate
enormously
our own importance. The following point also seems to me never to have
been properly emphasised: that in our observations of animals we, do
what
we will, remain anthropomorphists; for we cannot even conceive a sense
(I mean a physical instrument for acquiring knowledge of the
surrounding
world) if we do not possess it ourselves, and we must of necessity
remain
for ever blind and deaf to all manifestations of feeling and
understanding,
which are not immediately echoed in our own intellectual life. It is
all
very well for Wundt to warn against “false analogies“; in this whole
sphere
no conclusions but those of analogy are possible. As Clifford has
clearly
shown (cf. Seeing and
21 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
practically unknown to us — of animals
from remote classes, we shall everywhere find similar things.
Thinking), we
can
proceed neither purely objectively nor purely subjectively here; this
mixed
method of knowing he has therefore termed an “ejective“ one. We
estimate
those animals as most intelligent whose intelligence most closely
resembles
our own, and is therefore best understood by us, but is not this
extremely
simple and thoughtless in reference to a cosmic problem such as that of
intellect? Is this not disguised anthropomorphism? Most certainly. When
Wundt therefore maintains, “In this sphere experiment is in a high
degree
superior to mere observation,“ one can only very conditionally agree
with
him; for experiment is from the outset a reflex of our purely human
conceptions,
whereas the loving observation of a quite differently organised
creature
in its own most normal conditions and that with the desire not to
criticise
its achievements but to understand them — as far as our human narrow
intellectual
horizon permits us — would be bound to lead to many surprising
discoveries.
And so old blind Huber has taught us much more about bees than Lubbock
in his — nevertheless admirable — book on Ants, Bees and Wasps
(1883).
And so it is that the rough trainers, who demand of each animal only
such
tricks as they can expect from it on the basis of daily observation of
its capabilities, achieve such remarkable results. Here as elsewhere
our
science of to-day is still in the toils of Helleno-Jewish
anthropomorphism,
and not least just where it warns us against it. — Since the above has
been written, the sensational book of Bethe, Dürfen wir
Ameisen
und Bienen psychische Qualitäten zuschreiben? has appeared,
which
in its whole argumentation is a classical example of disguised
anthropomorphism.
By ingenious (though in my opinion by no means conclusive) tests, Bethe
has come to the conclusion that ants recognise by smell that they
belong
to the nest, and their finding of their way depends on the excretion of
a chemical substance, &c. The whole is “Chemoreflex,“ the whole
life
of these animals “purely mechanical.“ One is astonished to find such an
abyss of philosophical barbarity. Why, is not the whole sense-life as
such
inevitably mechanical? Can I recognise my own father without help of a
mechanism? Does not the dog recognise its master almost entirely by
smell?
Are Descartes‘ automata always to rise into life again, as though
science
and philosophy had stood still for three hundred years? Here we have
the
real ineradicable anthropomorphism. In the case of vertebrates their
strict
analogy with our own structure lets us draw conclusions about psychical
processes; in the insect, on the other hand, a totally strange being is
before us, built on a plan which is so fundamentally at variance with
that
of our body that we are not in a position to explain with certainty
even
the purely mechanical working of the organs of sense (see
Gegenbaur,
Vergleichende
Anatomie) and in consequence cannot know at all what a world of
sense-impressions
and of possibilities of communication, &c., quite closed to us, may
surround these creatures. Not to comprehend this fact is to display an
ant-like naïveté. — (Addenda of the
22 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
Thus the
comparatively
enormous development of the human brain * gives us after all only a
relative
superiority. Man does not walk upon earth like a God, but as a creature
among other creatures, perhaps it would be no exaggeration to say as primus
inter pares; for it is difficult to comprehend why a higher
differentiation,
with its countless disadvantages, should be forthwith regarded as
higher
“perfection“; the relative perfection of an organism should be judged,
in my opinion, by its suitability to given conditions. Through all the
fibres of his nature man is organically and closely connected with his
surroundings; all this is blood of his blood; if we think him apart
from
nature, he is a fragment, an uprooted stem.
What now
distinguishes
man from other beings? Many will answer, his inventive power: it is the
instrument which shows him to be prince among the animals. Yet even
with
this he still remains an animal among animals. Not only the anthropoid,
but also the common
third edition.) In
the
opening speech of the fourth International Congress of Zoologists on
August
23, 1898, Sir John Lubbock violently attacked the automata theory and
said,
inter
alia: “Many animals possess organs of sense, the meaning of which
is
inscrutable to us men. They notice sounds which we cannot hear, they
see
things which remain invisible to us, they receive impressions of sense,
which lie beyond the sphere of our power of conception. The world which
we know so well must have for them quite a different physiognomy.“
Montaigne
had already expressed the opinion: “Les bêtes ont plusieurs
conditions
qui se rapportent aux nôtres; de celles-là, par
comparaison,
nous pouvons tirer quelque conjecture: mais ce qu‘elles ont en
particulier,
que savons-nous que c‘est?“ The psychiatrician Forel became convinced
after
thirty years of diligent observation that ants possessed memory, had
the
capacity of unifying in their brain various impressions of sense and
acted
with conscious reflection. (Speech delivered on August 13, 1901, at the
Congress of Zoologists in Berlin.)
* It
is well known that Aristotle has made a serious mistake here, as he
often
does: man possesses, neither absolutely nor relatively (that is, in
relation
to weight of body), the largest brain; the superiority of this
apparatus
in his case is based on other things. (See Ranke, Der Mensch,
second edition, I., pp. 551 and 542 f.).
23
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
ape, invents simpler instruments (any
one can obtain information on this point by referring to Brehm‘s Tierleben),
and the elephant is, if perhaps not in invention, yet in the employment
of instruments a real master. (See Romanes, Die geistige
Entwickelung
im Tierreich, pp. 389 ff.) The most ingenious dynamo machine does
not
raise men one inch over the earth-surface which is common to all
creatures;
all such things denote merely a new accumulation of strength in the
struggle
for existence; man becomes thereby in a way a more highly potentiated
animal.
Instead of going to bed, he illumines with tallow candles, oil, gas or
electricity; he thereby gains time and can do more work; but there are
likewise countless animals which procure light for themselves, many by
phosphorescence, others, particularly the deep sea fishes, by
electricity;
* we travel by bicycle, by train, and shall perhaps soon travel by
airship
— the bird of passage and the inhabitant of the sea had brought
travelling
long ago into fashion, and just like them, men travel in order to
subsist.
The incalculable superiority of man shows itself certainly in this,
that
he can invent all these things rationally and can unite individual
discoveries,
so as to make still further progress. The impulse to imitate and the
capacity
for assimilation which one certainly finds in all mammals are in his
case
of so high a standard that the same thing becomes, so to speak, a
different
thing; in analogous manner we see in chemical substances that
frequently
the addition of a single essentially similar atom,
*
Emin
Pasha and Stanley tell about chimpanzees which go out at night with
torches
on their predatory raids. With Romanes, one would do well to doubt this
fact till further information is available. Stanley did not see it
himself
and Emin Pascha was exceedingly shortsighted. If apes have really
discovered
the art of lighting fires, to us men there would remain nevertheless
the
invention of the figure of Prometheus, and that this, and not that, is
what makes man man forms exactly the substance of my remarks.
24
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
accordingly a simple numerical addition,
fundamentally changes the qualities of the substance in question; if
one
adds oxygen to oxygen, a new compound, ozone, is formed (O2+O1=O3).
One should, however, not forget that all human discoveries rest on
assimilation
and imitation; man “finds out“ (er-findet) what is there and has only
awaited
his coming, just as he “discovers“ what hitherto was covered with a
veil;
nature plays at “hide and seek“ and “blind man‘s buff“ with him.
Quod
invenitur, fuit, says Tertullian. The fact that he understands
this,
that he seeks what is hidden, and bit by bit reveals and finds so much,
certainly testifies to the possession of incomparable gifts; but if he
did not possess them, he would indeed be the most miserable of
creatures,
for there he stands weaponless, powerless, wingless; bitter necessity
is
his incentive, the faculty of invention his salvation.
Now man becomes truly
man, a creature differing from all animals, even human ones, when he
reaches
the stage of inventing without necessity, when he exercises his
incomparable
gifts of his own free will and not because nature compels him, or — to
use a deeper and more suitable expression — when the necessity which
impels
him to invent enters his consciousness, no longer from outside, but
from
his inner self; when that which was his salvation becomes his
sanctuary.
The decisive moment is when free invention consciously appears, that
is,
therefore, when man becomes artist. The study of surrounding nature,
as,
for example, of the starry heavens, may have made great strides, and a
complex cult of gods and spirits have been formed without thereby
anything
fundamentally new entering into the world. All this proves a latent
capacity;
essentially, however, it is nothing more than the half-unconscious
exercise
of an instinct. It is only when an individual man, like Homer, invents
the gods of his own free will as he wishes them
25
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
to be; it is only when an observer of
nature, like Democritus, from free creative power invents the
conception
of the atom; when a pensive seer, like Plato, with the wilfulness of
the
genius superior to the world throws overboard all visible nature and
puts
in its place the realm of ideas that man has created; it is only when a
most Sublime Teacher proclaims, “Behold the kingdom of Heaven is within
you“ — it is only then that a completely new creature is born, that
being
of whom Plato says, “He has generative power in his soul rather than in
his body,“ it is only then that the macrocosm contains a microcosm. The
only thing that deserves to be called culture is the daughter of such
“creative
freedom,“ or in a word “art,“ and with art philosophy — genuine,
creative
philosophy and science — is so closely related that both must be
recognised
as two sides of the same being; every great poet has been a
philosopher,
every philosopher of genius a poet. That which lies outside this
microcosmic
life of culture is nothing more than “civilisation,“ that is, a more
and
more highly potentiated, increasingly more industrious, easier and less
free ant-like state-existence, certainly rich in blessing and in so far
desirable, nevertheless a gift of the ages, in the case of which it
frequently
remains exceedingly questionable whether the human race does not pay
more
for it than it receives from it. Civilisation is in itself nothing, for
it denotes something merely relative; a higher civilisation could be
regarded
as a positive gain (i.e., an “advance“) only when it led to an
increasingly
intensive intellectual and artistic shaping of life and to an inner
moral
enlightenment. Because this seemed to him not to be the case with us,
Goethe,
as the most competent judge, could make the melancholy confession,
“These
times are worse than one thinks.“ On the other hand, the undying
importance
of Hellenism lies in this, that it understood how to create for itself
an age better than any that we can conceive,
26 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
an age incomparably better, if I may
so express it, than its own backward civilisation deserved. To-day all
ethnographists and anthropologists distinguish clearly between morals
and
religion, and recognise that both in a certain sense are independent of
each other; it would be just as useful to learn to distinguish clearly
between culture and civilisation. A highly developed civilisation is
compatible
with a rudimentary culture: Rome, for example, exemplifies a wonderful
civilisation with very insignificant and quite unoriginal culture.
Athens,
on the other hand (with its free citizens) reveals a stage of culture
in
comparison with which we Europeans of the nineteenth century are in
many
respects still barbarians, and this is united with a civilisation which
— in comparison with ours — may with perfect justice be termed really
barbaric.
* Compared with all other phenomena of history, Hellenism represents an
exuberantly rich blossoming of the human intellect, and the reason of
this
is that its whole culture rests on an artistic basis. The freely
creative
work of human imagination was the starting-point of the infinitely rich
life of the Hellenes. Their language, religion, politics, philosophy,
science
(even mathematics), history and geography, all forms of imaginative
invention
in words and sounds, their whole public life and the whole inner life
of
the individual — everything radiates from this work, and everything
finds
itself in it once more as in a figurative and at the same time organic
centre, a centre which reduces the greatest divergencies in characters,
*
We
have an excellent example of this in the case of the Indo-Aryans in
their
original home, where the formation of a language, “which surpassed all
others, was completely uniform and wonderfully perfect,“ apart from
other
intellectual achievements, pointed to a high culture. These men were
nevertheless
a race of shepherds who walked abroad almost naked and knew neither
cities
nor metals. (See in particular Jhering, Vorgeschichte der
Indoeuropäer,
p. 2.) For a definite distinction between knowledge, civilisation and
culture
I refer readers to vol. ii. chap. ix. of this book and the synopsis
contained
in it.
27 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
interests and endeavours to reach a
living conscious unity. At this central point stands Homer.
HOMER
The fact that the
existence of the poet Homer has been open to doubt will give later
generations
no very favourable idea of the intellectual acumen of our epoch. It is
exactly a century ago since F. A. Wolf published his hypothesis; since
that time our neo-Alexandrians have bravely “sniffed and shovelled
away,“
till at last they arrived at the conclusion that Homer was merely a
pseudo-mythical
collective term and the Iliad and the Odyssey nothing
more
than a skilful pasting together and re-editing of all sorts of
poems....
Pasted together by whom? and by whom so beautifully edited? Well,
naturally
by learned philologists, the ancestors of the modern ones! The only
matter
for surprise is that, as we are once more in possession of such an
ingenious
race of critics, these gentlemen have not taken the trouble to piece
together
for us poor wretches a new Iliad. There is truly no lack of
songs,
no lack of genuine, beautiful folksongs; is there, perhaps, a lack of
paste,
of brainpaste? The most competent judges in such a question are clearly
the poets, the great poets; the philologist clings to the shell which
has
been exposed to the caprice of centuries; but the congenial glance of
the
poet, on the other hand, penetrates to the kernel and perceives the
individual
creative process. Now Schiller, with his unerring instinct, immediately
stigmatised as “simply barbaric“ the view that the Iliad and
the
Odyssey
were not, in all essential points of their construction, the work of a
single inspired individual. Indeed, in his excitement, he so far
oversteps
the mark that he calls Wolf a “stupid Devil“! The opinion of Goethe is
almost more interesting. His much-lauded objectivity manifested itself,
among other things, in this, that he unreservedly
28 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
and unresistingly let himself be
influenced
by an impression; Wolf‘s great philological merits and the mass of
correct
statements which his expositions contained, misled the great man; he
felt
convinced and declared this openly. But later, when he again had the
opportunity
of studying the Homeric poems thoroughly — and viewed them no longer
from
a philologico-historical but from a purely poetic standpoint — he
retracted
his over-hasty endorsement of the “subjective trash“ (as he now called
it), for now his knowledge was precise; behind these works there stands
a “glorious unity, a single, higher poetical sense.“ * But the
philologists
too, in their necessarily roundabout way, have come to the same view,
and
Homer enters the twentieth century, the fourth millennium of his fame,
greater than ever. †
* See,
for example, the small work, Homer noch einmal, of the year
1826.
† I
must take care to avoid even the slightest assumption of a learning
which
I do not possess; a man in my position can only note the results of
learned
research; but it is his right and his duty to approach these results as
a free man, possessing unexceptionable critical power. Indeed, he must,
in my opinion, use his critical power above all in the same way as a
monarch
whose wisdom has especially to prove itself in the choice of his
advisers;
the layman cannot sit in judgment on the value of learned arguments, he
can, however, from style, language and train of thoughts very well form
an estimate of the individual scholar and distinguish between mason and
architect. It is not therefore in the sense of a material proof, but
merely
in order that the reader himself may be able, in the sense alluded to,
to gauge my ability to form a critical judgment, that I now and then
refer
in the notes to my “authorities.“ As I have pointed out in the text, I
here in the first place hold with Socrates that musicians are the best
judges of flute-playing, poets of poetical works. Goethe‘s opinion with
regard to Homer is worth more to me than that of all the philologists
together
who have lived since the beginning of the world. I have, however,
informed
myself, as far as a layman can, in regard to the latter, and in so
complicated
a question this is very essential. The summary accounts of Niese, Die
Entwickelung der Homerischen Poesie, 1882, and of Jebb, Homer,
1888, enable us to follow the course of the discussion up to modern
times,
but nothing more. On the other hand, in Bergk, Griechische
Litteraturgeschichte,
1872-84, we have a safe guide. That Bergk was a Hellenist of the first
rank is admitted by all Homeric scholars and even the ordinary man is
impressed
by the comprehensive and penetrating character of his knowledge, com-
29 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
For besides many
philologising nonentities, Germany has produced an undying race of
really
great linguistic and literary scholars; F. A. Wolf himself was one of
them;
he never lowered himself to the absurd idea afterwards propounded, that
a great work of art could be produced by the united efforts of a number
of insignificant men or directly from the vague consciousness of the
masses,
and he would be the first to learn with satisfaction of the successful
issue that finally attended the protracted scientific researches. Even
if as great a genius as Homer himself had devoted himself to improving
and embellishing Homer‘s works — this is of course almost a senseless
supposition
— the history of all art teaches us that genuine individuality defies
all
imitation; but the farther the critical investigations of the
nineteenth
century advanced, the more was every capable investigator compelled to
realise that even the most important imitators, completers and
restorers
of the epics of Homer all differed from him in this, that not one of
them
approached even in the slightest degree
bined as it is with a
moderation
which bordered on the jejune; Bergk is not a fiery spirit; his attitude
in this question forms the complement to the lightning intuition of a
Schiller.
One should read not only the chapter, “Homer an historical
personality,“
but particularly also in the later paragraph, “Homer in modern times,“
the remarks on the song-theory, of which Bergk says, “The general
premisses,
from which the advocates of the song-theory proceed, prove themselves
on
closer examination, especially when one considers the Homeric poems in
connection with the whole development of epic poetry, as quite
untenable.
This theory could only be formulated by critics by whom the Homeric
epic,
separated from its surroundings and without any regard to the history
of
Greek literature, was submitted to their disintegrating criticism“ (i.
525). One should read also his proof that the use of writing was common
in Homer‘s time and that external as well as internal facts testify
that
Homer actually left his works in writing (i. 527 ff). — 1905. In the
meantime
the discoveries in Crete have proved that the use of script was common
among the Hellenes long before the Achaeans entered the Peloponnese. In
the palace of Minos, the most modern parts of which can be proved to
have
been built not later than 1550 years before Christ, whole libraries and
archives have been discovered (cf. the publications of A. J.
Evans
in the last volumes of the Annual of the British School at Athens).
30 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
his commanding genius. Disfigured though
they were by countless misconceptions, copyists‘ mistakes, and still
more
by the supposed improvements of irrepressible wiseacres and the
interpolations
of well-meaning followers, the more the patchwork of the present form
of
these poems was shown up by the polishing work of research, the more
they
testified to the incomparable divine creative power of the original
artist.
What marvellous power of beauty must have been possessed by works which
could so successfully defy for centuries the stormy social conditions,
and for a still longer time the desecrating tempest of
narrow-mindedness,
mediocrity and pseudogenius, that even to-day, from the midst of the
ruins,
the ever youthful charm of artistic perfection greets us like the good
fairy of our own culture! At the same time other investigations, which
had gone their own independent way — historical and mythological
studies
— clearly proved that Homer must have been an historical personage. It
has, in fact, been shown that in these poems both saga and myth have
been
treated very freely and according to definite principles of conscious
artistic
shaping. To mention only the most essential point: Homer was a
remarkable
simplifier, he unravelled the tangled clue of popular myths, and from
the
planless medley of popular sagas, which had a different form in every
district,
he wove certain definite forms in which all Hellenes recognised
themselves
and their gods, although this very delineation was quite new to them.
What
we have now discovered after so much toil the ancients knew very well;
I quote in this connection the remarkable passage in Herodotus:
“From the Pelasgians the Hellenes took their gods. But whence each of
the
gods comes, whether they were always there, what their form is, we
Hellenes
only know as it were since yesterday. For it is Hesiod and Homer, in
the
first place, who created for the Greeks their race of
31 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
gods, who gave the gods their names,
distributed honours and arts among them, and described their forms. The
poets, however, who are supposed to have lived before these two men, in
my opinion at least, really came after them“ (Book II. 53). Hesiod
lived
about a hundred years after Homer and was directly influenced by him;
with
the exception of this little error the simple naive sentence of
Herodotus
contains all that the gigantic critical work of a century has brought
to
light. It has been proved that the poets who according to the priestly
tradition lived before Homer — e.g., Orpheus, Musaeos, Eumolpos
from the Thracian school, or Olen and others of the Delian school — in
reality lived after him; * and it is likewise proved that the religious
conceptions of the Greeks have been drawn from very different sources;
the Indo-European inheritance forms the main capital; to this were
added
all kinds of motley Oriental influences (as Herodotus had also shown in
the passage which precedes that above quoted): upon this chaos a hand
was
now laid by the one incomparable man with the sovereign authority of
the
freely creative, poetic genius, and out of it he formed by artistic
means
a new world; as Herodotus says: he creates for the Greeks their race of
gods.
May I here be
permitted
to quote the words of Erwin Rohde, † recognised as one of the most
learned
of living Hellenists: “The Homeric epic can only be called folk-poetry
because it is of such a nature that the whole Greek-speaking people
willingly
took it up and could make it their own, not because the ‘people‘ in any
mystic way were engaged in its production. Many hands have been at work
on the two poems, but all in
* See
in particular Flach, Geschichte der griechischen Lyrik nach den
Quellen
dargestellt, I. pp. 45 ff, 90 ff.
†
Since
the above was written, German science has had to deplore the death of
this
extraordinary man.
32
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
the direction and in the sense which
the greatest poetic genius among the Greeks, and probably of mankind,
and
not the people or the saga, as one certainly hears maintained, gave to
them. In Homer‘s mirror Greece appears united and uniform in belief, in
dialect, in constitution, customs and morals. One may, however, boldly
maintain that this unity cannot in reality have existed; the elements
of
Panhellenism were doubtless present, but it was the genius of the poet
alone that collected and fused them together in a merely imaginary
whole.“
* Bergk, whose whole rich scholastic life was devoted to the study of
Greek
poetry formulates the opinion: “Homer draws chiefly from himself, from
his own inner soul; he is a truly original spirit, not an imitator, and
he practises his art with full consciousness“ (Griechische
Litteraturgeschichte, p. 527).
Duncker, too, the historian, remarks that “what was lacking in the
imitators
of Homer — what accordingly distinguished this one man — was the
comprehensive
eye of genius.“ † And to close these quotations in a worthy manner I
refer
to Aristotle, in whom one must admit some competence, so far as
critical
acumen is concerned. It is striking and consoling to see that he too
discovers
the distinguishing-mark of Homer to be his eye; in the eighth chapter
of
his Poetics (he is speaking of the qualities of poetic action),
he says: “But Homer, just as he is different in other things also,
seems
here too to have seen aright, either by art or by nature.“ A profound
remark!
which prepares us for the surprising outburst of enthusiasm in the
twenty-third
chapter of the Poetics: Homer is above all other poets divine.
* Seelenkult
und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen, pp. 35, 36.
† Geschichte
des Altertums, v. 566).
33
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
ARTISTIC CULTURE
I have felt bound
to prove this, even at the cost of some detail; not because it is of
importance
for the subject treated in this book, whether one man named Homer wrote
the Iliad, or in how far the poem, which to-day is so entitled,
may correspond to the original poem; the special proof is a side issue.
It is, on the other hand, essential for my whole work that I should
emphasise
the incomparable importance of personality in general; it is likewise
essential
to recognise the fact that every work of art always and without
exception
presupposes a strong individual personality, — a great work of art a
personality
of the first rank, a Genius; it is, finally, imperative that we should
grasp the fact, that the secret of the magic power of Hellenism lies
locked
in this idea “personality.“ For indeed if we would understand what
Hellenic
art and Hellenic thought have meant for the nineteenth century, if we
would
know the secret of so lasting a power, we must realise especially that
it is the power of great personalities that, coming down from that
vanished
world, still influences us with the freshness of youth.
- Höchstes Glück der
Erdenkinder
- Ist nur die Persönlichkeit:
says Goethe; this greatest gift — höchstes
Glück — the Greeks possessed as no other people ever did, and
it is this very thing that surrounds them with that sunny halo which is
peculiarly theirs. Their great poems and their great thoughts are not
the
work of anonymous commercial companies as are the so-called art and
wisdom
of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, e tutu quanti; the
life-principle
of this people is heroism; the individual steps forward alone: boldly
crossing
the boundary
34
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
of what is common to all, he leaves
behind all that civilisation which has accumulated instinctively,
unconsciously
and uselessly, and fearlessly hews out a path in the ever-deepening
gloom
of the primeval forest of accumulated superstitions, — he dares to have
Genius! And this daring gives rise to a new conception of manhood; for
the first time man has “entered into the daylight of life.“
The individual,
however,
could not accomplish this alone. Personalities can clearly reveal
themselves
as such, only when surrounded by other personalities; action receives a
conscious existence only after reaction has taken place; the genius can
breathe only in an atmosphere of genius. If then a single, surpassingly
great, incomparably creative personality has undoubtedly been the
condition
and absolutely indispensable primum mobile of the whole Grecian
culture, we must recognise as the second characteristic factor in this
culture the fact that the surroundings proved themselves worthy of so
extraordinary
a personality. That which is lasting in Hellenism, that which keeps it
alive to-day and has enabled it to be a bright ideal, a consolation and
a hope to so many of the best men in the nineteenth century, can be
summed
up in one word: it is its element of Genius. What would a Homer have
availed
in Egypt or Phoenicia? The one would have paid no heed to him, the
other
would have crucified him; yes, even in Rome... but here we have the
experimental
proof before our eyes. Has all the poetry of Greece succeeded in
striking
even a single spark out of this sober, inartistic heart? Is there among
the Romans a single true poetic genius? Is it not pitiful that our
schoolmasters
are condemned to embitter the fresh years of our childhood by
compulsory
admiration of these rhetorical, unnatural, soulless, hypocritical
imitations
of genuine poetry? And is this example alone not
35
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
enough to prove — a few poets more or
less make really no difference — how all culture is linked to art? What
is one to say to a history which embraces more than 1200 years and does
not show a single philosopher, not even a philosopher in miniature?
What
to a people which has to conceal its own modest claims in this respect
by the importation of the latter-day persecuted, anaemic Greeks, who,
however,
are not philosophers at all but merely very commonplace moralists? How
low must the quality of genius have sunk when a good Emperor, who wrote
maxims in his leisure hours, is commended to the reverence of coming
generations
as a thinker! * Where is there a great, creative natural scientist
among
the Romans? Surely not the industrious encyclopaedist, Pliny? Where is
there a mathematician
*
Lucretius
might be named as a man certainly worthy of admiration both as a
thinker
and as a poet; but his thoughts are, as he admits, always Greek
thoughts,
and his poetical apparatus is predominantly Greek. And withal there
lies
over his great poem the deadly shadow of that scepticism, which sooner
or later leads to unproductivity, and which must be carefully
distinguished
from the deep insight of truly religious minds, which become aware of
the
figurative element in their conceptions, without for that reason
doubting
the sublime truth of what they vaguely feel in their hearts but cannot
fathom, as when, for example, the Vedish seer suddenly exclaims:
- From what it has
arisen, this
creation
- Whether created it
has been
or not —
- Whoever in the
heavens watches
o‘er it,
- He knows it well!
Or does
he too not know?
- Rigveda, x.
129.
or as Herodotus in the
passage
quoted a few pages previously, where he expresses the opinion that the
poet created the gods. And Epicurus himself, the “atheist,“ the man
whom
Lucretius describes as the greatest of all mortals, the man from whom
he
takes his whole system — do we not learn that in his case “religious
feeling
must have been so to speak inborn?“ (See the sketch of Epicurus‘
life by K. L. von Knebel, which Goethe recommends.) “Never,“ exclaimed
Diocles when he found Epicurus in the temple, “never have I seen Zeus
greater
than when Epicurus lay at his feet!“ The Latin fancied he had spoken
the
last word of wisdom with his Primus in orbe deos fecit timor;
the
Greek, on the other hand, as an enlightened being, knelt more fervently
than ever before the glorious god-image, which heroism had freely
created
for itself, and in so doing testified to his own genius.
36 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
of importance? Where a meteorologist,
a geographer, an astronomer? All that was achieved under the sway of
Rome,
in these and other sciences, is derived without exception from the
Greeks.
But the poetical fountain had dried up, and so too, bit by bit,
creative
thinking and creative observation were exhausted, even among the Greeks
of the Roman Empire. The life-giving breath of genius was gone; neither
in Rome nor in Alexandria was there anything of this manna of the human
spirit for the ever upward-soaring Hellenes; in the one city the
superstition
of utility, in the other, scientific elephantiasis, gradually choked
every
movement of life. Learning indeed steadily increased, the number of
known
facts multiplied continually, but the motive-power, instead of
increasing,
decreased, where increase was badly needed. Thus the European world, in
spite of its great progress in civilisation, underwent a gradual
decline
in culture — sinking down into naked bestiality. Nothing probably is
more
dangerous for the human race than science without poetry, civilisation
without culture. *
In Hellas the course
of events was quite different. So long as art flourished, the torch of
genius flashed up heavenward in all spheres. The power, which in Homer
had fought its way to a dominant individuality, recognised in him its
vocation,
narrowed down in the first instance to the purely artistic creation of
a world of beautiful semblance. Around the radiant central figure arose
a countless army of poets and a rich gradation of poetical styles.
Immediately
after Homer‘s time and later, originality formed the hall-mark of Greek
creation. Inferior powers naturally took their direction from those of
greater eminence; but there were so many of the latter, and
*
Compare
in vol. ii., chap. ix., the remarks about China, &c.
37 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
these had invented so infinitely
manifold
forms, that the lesser talent was enabled to choose what was exactly
fitted
to it, and thus achieve its highest possibilities. I am speaking not
only
of poetry in words wedded to music, but also of the unexampled glory of
the poetry that delights the eye, which grew up beside the other, like
a dearly beloved younger sister. Architecture, sculpture, painting,
like
epic, lyric and dramatic poetry, like the hymn, the dithyramb, the ode,
the romance, and the epigram, were all rays of that same sun of art,
only
differently refracted according to the individual eye. It is surely
ridiculous
that schoolmen cannot distinguish between true culture and ballast, and
should inflict on us interminable lists of unimportant Greek poets and
sculptors; the protest — ever growing in violence — which began to be
made
against this at the end of the nineteenth century, must be welcome; but
before we consign the many superfluous names to a deserved oblivion, we
would express our admiration of the phenomenon as a whole; it gives
evidence
of a supremacy of good taste which is always desirable, of a fineness
of
judgment never since equalled, and of a widespread creative impulse.
Greek
art was a truly “living“ thing, and so it is alive to-day. That which
lives
is immortal. It possessed a solid, organic central point, and obeyed a
spontaneous and therefore unerring impulse, which knitted into one
creative
artistic whole of the most varied luxuriance the most trifling
fragments,
and even the wildest excrescences. In short — if I may be forgiven for
the apparent tautology — Hellenic art was an artistic art, and no
individual,
not even a Homer, could make it that; it could only become such by the
united efforts of a whole body of artists. Since that time nothing
similar
has happened, and so it is that Greek art not only still lives, works
and
preaches in our midst, but the greatest of our artists (of our artistic
38 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
creators of actions, sounds, words,
figures) have in the nineteenth century as in former ages felt
themselves
drawn to Greece as to a home. Among us the man of the people has only
an
indirect knowledge of Greek art; for him the gods have not, as for
Epicurus,
ascended a still higher Olympus; they have been hurled down and dashed
to pieces by rude Asiatic scepticism and rude Asiatic superstition; but
he meets them on our fountains and theatre curtains, in the park,
whither
he resorts on Sundays for fresh air, and in the museums, where
sculpture
has always had a greater attraction for the masses than painting. The
“man
of culture“ carries fragments of this art in his head as the undigested
material of education: names rather than living conceptions; yet he
meets
it too frequently at every step, to be able ever to lose sight of it
completely;
it has a greater share in the building of his intellect than he himself
is aware of. The artist, on the other hand — and here I mean every
artistic
mind — cannot help turning eyes of longing to Greece, not merely
because
of the individual works which arose there — for among us too many a
glorious
thing has been created since the year 1200: Dante stands alone,
Shakespeare
is greater and richer than Sophocles, the art of a Bach would have been
a complete novelty for a Greek — no, what the artist finds there and
misses
here is the artistic element, artistic culture. Since the time of the
Romans,
European life has had a political basis: and now it is gradually
becoming
economic. Whereas among the Greeks no free man could venture to be a
merchant,
among us every artist is a born slave: art is for us a luxury, a realm
of caprice; it is not a State necessity, and it does not lay down for
our
public life the law that the feeling for beauty should pervade
everything.
Even in Rome it was the caprice of a single Maecenas that called poetry
into life, and
39 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
since that time the greatest
achievements
of the most glorious minds have depended largely on a Pope‘s passion
for
building, on the conceit of a prince educated in the classics, or on
the
extravagant taste of a pompous commercial guild. Now and then a
lifegiving
breath was wafted from higher spheres, as, for example, from the
religious
New Birth which the great and saintly Francis of Assisi tried to bring
about — a movement which gave the first impetus to our modern art of
painting
— or from the gradual awakening of the German soul to which we owe that
glorious new art German music. But what has become of the pictures? The
wall-paintings were covered over with plaster because they were thought
ugly; the pictures were torn from the sacred places of worship and hung
side by side on the walls of museums; and then — because otherwise the
evolution up to these most treasured masterpieces could not have been
scientifically
explained — the plaster was scratched off, well or badly as the case
might
be, the pious monks were turned out and cloisters and campi santi
became a second class of museums. Music fared little better; I have
myself
been present at a concert where J. S. Bach‘s “Passion of Matthew“ was
given.
It was in one of the capitals of Europe — which, moreover, is specially
famed for its educated musical taste — and here every “number“ was
followed
by applause and the Chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden“ was actually
received with cries of “Da capo“! We have much that the Greeks did not
possess, but such instances are clear yet painful proofs of how much is
lacking in us that they possessed. One can well understand how
Hölderlin
could exclaim to the artist of to-day:
- Stirb! Du suchst auf diesem
Erdenrunde,
- Edler Geist, umsonst dein Element!
- (Die! Thou seekest on this earthly
ball,
- In vain, O noble mind, thine
element!)
40 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
It is not lack of inner strength or
of originality that draws the heart of the artist of to-day to Greece,
but the consciousness and the experience that the individual, by
himself,
cannot be really original. For originality is quite different from
caprice;
originality is the free pursuit of the path involuntarily marked out
for
itself by the particular nature of the personality in question; but the
artist can only find this freedom where he is surrounded by a
thoroughly
artistic culture; such a culture he cannot find to-day. It would of
course
be absolutely unjust to deny to our European world of to-day artistic
impulses:
the interest in music shows that men‘s minds are in a mighty ferment,
and
modern painting is laying hold upon well-defined but at the same time
extensive
circles, and rousing an enthusiasm which amounts to an almost uncanny
passion,
but all this remains outside the life of the nations, it is a
supplement
— for hours of leisure and men of leisure; and so fashion and caprice
and
manifold hypocrisy are predominant, and the atmosphere in which the
genuine
artist lives lacks all elasticity. Even the most powerful genius is now
bound, hemmed in, repelled on many sides. And so Hellenic art lives on
in our midst as a lost ideal, which we must strive to recover.
SHAPING
Under a happier
star
Hellenic philosophy and natural science enjoy with us children of the
nineteenth
and twentieth centuries a hospitality gladly and gratefully bestowed.
Here
too it is not a question of mere lares, or worship of ancestry;
on the contrary, Hellenic philosophy is very much alive among us, and
Hellenic
science, so helpless on the one hand, and so incredibly powerful in
intuition
on the other, compels
41 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
us to take in it not merely an
historical
but also a living interest. The pure joy excited in us by contemplating
Greek thought may be due, to some extent, to the consciousness that we
have advanced so much further here than our great ancestors. Our
philosophy
has become more philosophical, our science more scientific: an advance
which, unfortunately, we do not find in the domain of art. So far as
philosophy
and science are concerned, our modern culture has shown itself worthy
of
its Hellenic origin; we have a good conscience.
It cannot pertain
to my purpose here to point out connections of which every educated man
must be aware. These connections, so far as philosophy is concerned,
are
purely genetic, since it was only through contact with Greek thought
that
modern thought awoke, acquiring from it indeed that power of
contradiction
and independence which was the last to reach maturity: so far as
mathematics,
the foundation of all science, are concerned, they were equally
genetic;
in the case of the sciences of observation * they were less genetic,
and
in former years rather a hindrance than a help. My one task must be to
explain in a few words what secret power gave these old thoughts such a
tenacious spirit of life.
How much of what
has been done since has passed into everlasting oblivion, while Plato
and
Aristotle, Democritus, Euclid and Archimedes still live on in our
midst,
inspiring and teaching us, and while the half-fabulous form of
Pythagoras
grows greater with every century! † And I am of opinion that what gives
everlasting youth to the thought of a Democritus, a Plato, a Euclid, an
*
With
regard to the last point one must, however, remark that many a splendid
achievement of Hellenic talent in this sphere remained unknown to us
till
a short time ago.
†
This
is a return to a former view. When the Romans were commanded by an
oracle
to erect a statue to the wisest of the Hellenes, they put up the statue
of Pythagoras (Plutarch, Numa, chap. xi.)
42
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
Aristarchus * is that same spirit, that
same mental power which makes Homer and Phidias ever young: it is the
creative
and — in the widest sense of the word — the really artistic element.
For
the important thing is that the conception by which man seeks to master
the inner world of his Ego, or the outer world, and assimilate them in
himself, should be sharply defined and shaped with absolute clearness.
If we glance back at about three thousand years of history, we shall
see
that while the human mind has certainly been broadened by the knowledge
of new facts, it has been enriched only by new ideas, that is, by new
conceptions.
This is that creative power, of which Goethe speaks in the Wanderjahre,
which “glorifies nature“ and without which in his opinion “the outer
world
would remain cold and lifeless.“ † But its creations are lasting only
when
beautiful and perspicuous, that is, artistic.
- As imagination bodies forth
- The forms of things unknown, the
poet‘s
pen
- Turns them to shapes.
- SHAKESPEARE.
But only those
conceptions
which have been transformed into shapes form a lasting possession of
human
consciousness. The supply of facts is ever changing, hence the centre
of
gravity of the Actual (if I may so express it) is subject to constant
shifting;
besides, about the half of our knowledge or even more is provisional:
what
was yesterday regarded as true is false to-day; nor can the future
change
anything in this respect, since the multiplication of the material of
knowledge
keeps pace with the extension of knowledge itself. ‡ On the other hand,
that which man in the capacity of
*
Aristarchus
of Samos, the discoverer of the so-called Copernican system of the
world.
† One
sees that according to Goethe a creative act of the human mind is
necessary,
in order that life itself may become “living“!
‡ A
general text-book of botany or of zoology of the year 1875 is, for
example,
useless to-day, and that not solely or even chiefly
43
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
artist has formed, the figure into which
he has breathed the breath of life, does not decay. I must repeat what
I have already said: what lives is immortal. We know that to-day most
zoologists
teach the theory of immortality — physical immortality — of the
germ-plasma;
the gulf between organic and inorganic, that is, between living and
dead
nature, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was thought to
have been bridged,
because of the new
material
collected, but because actual relations are viewed differently and
exact
observations are overthrown by still more exact ones. Trace, for
example,
the dogma of Imbibition with its endless series of observations from
its
first appearance in 1838 to its point of highest popularity, about
1868;
then begins the countermine and in the year 1898 the zealous student
hears
no more about it. It is particularly interesting to observe how in
zoology,
in which at the beginning of the nineteenth century great
simplification
had been considered possible and in which, under Darwin‘s influence,
there
had been an effort to reduce, if possible, all animal forms to one
single
family, now, as our knowledge has gradually increased, an ever greater
complication of the original scheme of types has revealed itself.
Cuvier
thought four “general structure-plans“ sufficient. Soon, however, it
was
necessary to recognise seven different types, all disconnected, and
about
thirty years ago Carl Claus found that nine was the minimum. But this
minimum
is not enough. When we disregard all but the convenience and needs of
the
beginner (Richard Hertwig‘s well-known and otherwise excellent
text-book
is an example), when we weigh structural differences against each other
without reference to richness of forms and so on — we find now that
anatomical
knowledge is more thorough, that not less than sixteen different
groups,
all equally important as types, must be taken into account. (See
especially the masterly Lehrbuch der Zoologie, by Fleischmann,
1898.)
— At the same time opinions with regard to many fundamental zoological
facts have been quite changed by more exact knowledge. For instance,
twenty
years ago when I studied zoology under Karl Vogt it was considered an
established
fact that worms stood in direct genetic relation to vertebrates; even
such
critically independent Darwinists as Vogt considered this settled and
could
tell many splendid things about the worm, which had developed as high
as
man. In the meantime much more accurate and comprehensive
investigations
on the development of animals in the embryo have led to the recognition
of the fact that there are two great groups inside the “metazoa“ (which
comprises animals that do not consist of simple separable cells), the
development
of which from the moment of the fecundation of the embryo proceeds on
quite
different lines, so that every true — not merely apparent —
relationship
between them is out of the question, not only the genetic relationship
which the evolutionists assume, but also the purely architectonic. And
behold! the worms belong to
44 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
becomes deeper every day; * this is
not the proper place for a discussion on the subject; I merely adduce
this
fact by way of analogy, to justify me in extending to the intellectual
sphere the sharp distinction which I have drawn between organised and
inorganised
conceptions, and in expressing my conviction that nothing which the
style
of the creative artist has formed into a living figure has ever yet
died.
Cataclysms may bury
the one group (which
reaches
its highest point in the insects), and the vertebrates belong to the
other
and might as well be said to be descended from cuttle-fishes and
sea-urchins!
(Cf. especially Karl Camillo Schneider: Grundzüge der
tierischen
Organisation in the Preussische Jahrbücher, 1900, July
number, p. 73 ff.) Such facts serve to prove and confirm what has been
said on p. 42, and it is absolutely necessary that the layman, who is
ever
apt to suppose that the science of his time is perfection, should learn
to recognise in it only a transition stage between a past and a future
theory.
* See,
for example, the standard work of the American zoologist, E. B. Wilson
(Professor in Columbia): The Cell in Development and Inheritance,
1896, where we read: “The investigation of cell activity has on the
whole
rather widened than narrowed the great gulf which separates the lowest
forms of life from the phenomena of the inorganic world.“ Privy
Councillor
Wiesner lately assured me of the absolute correctness of this statement
from the standpoint of pure natural science. Wilson‘s book has in the
meantime
(1900) appeared in a second enlarged edition. The sentence quoted
stands
unaltered on p. 434. The whole of the last chapter, Theories of
Inheritance
and Development, is to be recommended to all who desire not mere
phrases
but real insight into the present state of scientific knowledge with
reference
to the important facts of the animal form. They will find a chaos. As
the
author says (p. 434), “The extraordinary dimensions of the problem of
development,
whether ontogenetic or phylogenetic, have been underestimated.“ Now it
is recognised that every newly discovered phenomenon does not bring
enlightenment
and simplification, but new confusion and new problems, so that a
well-known
embryologist (see Introduction) lately exclaimed: “Every animal
embryo seems to carry its own law in itself!“ Rabl arrives at similar
results
in his investigations on Der Bau und die Entwickelung der Linse
(1900); he finds that every animal form possesses its specific organs
of
sense, the differences between which are already conditioned in the
embryo
cell. And thus by the progress of true science — as distinguished from
the nonsense regarding power and matter, with which generations of
credulous
laymen have been befooled — our view of life became always “more
living,“
and the day is surely not far distant when it will be recognised as
more
reasonable to try to interpret the dead from the standpoint of the
living
than the other way about. (I refer to my Immanuel Kant, p. 482
f.)
45 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
such figures, but centuries later they
once more emerge in perpetual youth from their supposed grave; it
frequently
occurs also that the children of thought, like their brothers and
sisters,
the marble statues, become maimed, broken or even completely shattered;
that is, however, a mechanical destruction, not death. And thus Plato‘s
theory of ideas, more than one thousand years old, has been a living
factor
in the intellectual life of the nineteenth century, an “origin“ of very
many thoughts; almost every philosophical speculation of importance has
been connected with it at one point or another. In the meantime the
spirit
of Democritus has been paramount in natural science: fundamental as
were
the alterations that had to be made on his brilliant theory of atoms in
order to adapt it to the knowledge of to-day, he still remains the
inventor,
the artist. It is he who, to use the language of Shakespeare, has by
the
force of his imagination bodied forth “the forms of things unknown,“
and
then “turned them to shapes.“
PLATO
Instances of the
manner
in which Hellenic creative power has given life and efficacy to thought
are not difficult to find. Take Plato‘s philosophy. His material is not
new; he does not sit down, like Spinoza, to evolve a logical system of
the world out of the depths of his own consciousness; nor does he with
the splendid simplicity of Descartes reach into the bowels of nature,
in
the delusion that he will there find as explanation of the world a kind
of clockwork; he rather takes here and there what seems to him the best
— from the Eleatics, from Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans, Socrates — and
forms out of this no really logical, but certainly an artistic, whole.
The relation of Plato to the former philosophers of Greece is not at
all
unlike that of Homer
46
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
to past and contemporary poets. Homer,
too, probably “invented“ nothing, just as little as Shakespeare did
later
on; but from various sources he laid hold of that which suited his
purpose
and welded it into a new whole, something thoroughly individual,
endowed
with the incomparable qualities of the living individual and burthened
with the limitations, failings, and peculiarities inseparably bound up
with his nature — for every individual says with the God of the
Egyptian
mysteries: “I am who I am,“ and stands before us a new, inscrutable,
unfathomable
thing. * Similar is Plato‘s philosophy. Professor Zeller, the famous
historian
of Greek philosophy, expresses the opinion that “Plato is too much of a
poet to be quite a philosopher.“ It would probably be difficult to
extract
any definite sense out of this criticism. Heaven knows what a
philosopher
in
abstracto may be. Plato was himself, and no one else, and his
example
shows us how a mind had to be fashioned in order that Greek thought
might
yield its highest fruit. He is the Homer of this thought. If a
competent
man were to analyse the doctrine of Plato in such a way that we could
clearly
see what portions are the original property of the great thinker, not
merely
by the process of reproduction through genius but as entirely new
inventions,
then the poetical element in his work would certainly become specially
clear. For Montesquieu, too (in his Pensées), calls
Plato
one of the four great poets of mankind. Especially that which is blamed
as inconsistent and contradictory would reveal itself as an artistic
necessity.
Life is in itself a contradiction: la vie est l‘ensemble des
fonctions
qui résistent à la mort, said the great Bichat; each
living thing has therefore something fragmentary about it, something
*
“A
genuine work of art is, like a work of nature, always infinite to our
mind;
it is seen, felt; it produces its effect, but it cannot really be
known,
much less can its essence, its merit, be expressed in words.“ (Goethe.)
47 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
which might be called arbitrary; the
addition which man makes to it — a free, poetical and only
conditionally
valid addition — is the sole thing that makes the joining of the two
ends
of the magic girdle possible. Works of art are no exception. Homer‘s Iliad
is a splendid example of this, Plato‘s philosophy a second, Democritus‘
theory of the world a third of equal importance. And while the
philosophies
and theories so finely carved by the “logical“ method disappear one
after
the other in the gulf of time, these old ideas take their place in all
the freshness of youth, side by side with the most recent. Clearly it
is
not “objective truth,“ but the manner in which things receive shape, l‘ensemble
des fonctions, as Bichat would say, that is the decisive thing.
Still another remark
in reference to Plato; again it is only a hint — for the space at my
disposal
will not allow of lengthy treatment — but enough, I hope, to leave
nothing
vague. That Indian thought has exercised an influence of quite a
determinative
character upon Greek philosophy is now a settled fact; our Hellenists
and
philosophers have, it is true, long combated this with the violent
obstinacy
of prejudiced scholars; everything was supposed to have originated in
Hellas
as autochthon; at most the Egyptians and the Semites were
allowed
to have exercised a moulding influence — whereby philosophy would in
truth
have had little to gain; the more modern Indologists, however, have
confirmed
the conjectures of the oldest (particularly of that genius Sir William
Jones). It has been fully proved in regard to Pythagoras especially
that
he had a thorough knowledge of Indian doctrines, * and as Pythagoras is
being recognised more and more as the ancestor of Greek thought, that
in
itself means a great deal. Besides, direct influence upon the Eleatics,
Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Democritus, &c., has been
* Cf.
on this point Schroeder: Pythagoras und die Inder (1884).
48 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
shown to be most probable. * In these
circumstances it cannot be surprising that so lofty a spirit as Plato
forced
his way through much misleading extraneous matter and — especially in
reference
to some essential points in all genuine metaphysics — endorses in every
detail some of the sublimest views of Indian thinkers. † But compare
Plato
and the Indians, his works and their works! Then we shall no longer
wonder
why Plato lives and influences, while the Indian philosophers live
indeed
but do not directly affect the wide world and the progress of mankind.
Indian thought is unsurpassed in depth and comprehensive
many-sidedness;
if Professor Zeller thought that Plato was “too much of a poet to be
quite
a philosopher,“ we see from the example of the Indian what becomes of a
philosopher when a thinker is too “completely“ a philosopher to be at
the
same time something of a poet. This pure thinking of the Indians lacks
all capacity of being communicated — and we find this simply but at the
same time profoundly expressed by the Indians themselves, for according
to their books the highest and final wisdom can be taught only by
silence.
‡ How different the Greek! Cost what it
*
The
best summary account of recent times that is known to me is that of
Garbe
in his Sâmkhya-Philosophie (1894), p. 85 f.; there we
also
find the most important bibliography.
† For
the comparison between Plato and the Indians in reference to the
recognition
of the empirical reality and transcendental ideality of experience see
specially Max Müller: Three Lectures on the Vedânta
Philosophy
(1894), p. 128 f. Plato‘s relation to the Eleatics becomes hereby
for the first time clear. Fuller information in Deussen‘s works,
especially
in his lecture, “On the Philosophy of the Vedânta in Relation to
the Metaphysical Doctrines of the West,“ Bombay, 1893.
‡
“When
Bâhva was questioned by Vâshkali, the former explained
Brahmanism
to him by remaining silent. And Vâshkali said, ‘Teach me, O
revered
one, Brahmanism!‘ But the latter remained quite silent. When now the
other
for the second or third time asked, he said, ‘I am indeed teaching you
it, but you do not understand it; this Brahmanism is silence.‘ “
(Sankara
in the Sûtra‘s of Vedânta, iii. 2, 17). And in the Taittiriya
Upanishad we read (ii. 4): “From the great joy of knowledge all
language
and all thought turn away, unable to reach it.“
49 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
might, he must “body forth the forms
of things unknown and give them shape.“ Read in this connection the
laboured
explanation in Plato‘s Theaetetus, where Socrates ultimately
admits
that we may possess truth without being able to explain it, but that
this
is not knowledge; what knowledge is remains certainly undecided at the
end (a proof of Plato‘s profundity!); however, in the culminating-point
of the dialogue it is termed “right conception,“ and the remark is made
that we must be able to give a reasoned explanation of right
conception;
we should also read in this connection the famous passage in the Timaeus,
where the cosmos is compared to a “living animal.“ It must be conceived
and endowed with shape: that is the secret of the Greek, from Homer to
Archimedes. Plato‘s theory of ideas bears exactly the same relation to
metaphysics as Democritus‘ theory of atoms to the physical world: they
are creations of a freely creative, shaping power and in them, as in
all
works of art, there wells up an inexhaustible fountain of symbolical
truth.
Such creations bear the same relation to material facts as the sun to
the
flowers. Hellenic influence has not been an unqualified blessing: much
that we have received from the Greeks still weighs like a nightmare
upon
our struggling culture. But the goodly inheritance which we hold from
them
has been first and foremost this flower-compelling sunshine.
ARISTOTLE
It was under the
direct
influence of Plato that Aristotle, one of the mightiest sages that the
world has ever seen, shot up into the empyrean. The nature of his
intellect
accounts for the fact that in certain respects he developed as the
opposite
of Plato: but without Plato he would never have become a philosopher,
at
any rate not a metaphysician. A critical appreciation of this
50 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
great man would take me too far: I could
not do it adequately even if I were to limit myself to the scope and
object
of this chapter. I could not, however, pass him by unnoticed, and I
take
it for granted that no one fails to admire the creative power that he
revealed
in his logical Organon, his Animal History, his Poetics,
&c. These have been the admiration of all ages. To appropriate a
remark
of Scotus Erigena: it was in the sphere of naturalium rerum
discretio
that he achieved unparalleled results and won the gratitude of the most
distant generations. Aristotle‘s greatness lies not in the fact that he
was right — no man of the first rank has made more frequent or more
flagrant
mistakes — but in the fact that he knew no peace, till he had wrought
in
all spheres of human life and evolved order out of chaos. * In so far
he
is a genuine Hellene. Certainly we have paid dear for this “order.“
Aristotle
was less of a poet than perhaps any of the great philosophers of
Greece;
Herder says of him that he was perhaps the driest writer that ever used
a stylus; † he must, I fancy, be “philosopher enough“ even for
Professor
Zeller; certainly he was this in a sufficient degree — thanks to his
Hellenic
creative power — to sow more persistent error in the world than any man
before or after him. Till a short time ago he had paralysed the natural
sciences at all points; philosophy and especially metaphysics have not
yet shaken off his yoke; our theology is, if I might call it so, his
natural
child. In truth, this great and important legacy of the old world was a
two-edged sword. I shall return shortly in another connection to
Aristotle
and Greek philosophy; here I shall only add that the Greeks certainly
had
great need of an Aristotle to lay emphasis
*
Eucken
says in his essay, Thomas von Aquin und Kant, p. 30 (Kantstudien,
1901, vi. p. 12): The intellectual work of Aristotle is “an artistic or
more accurately speaking a plastic shaping.“
† Ideen
zur Geschichte der Menschheit, XIII., chap. v.
51 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
upon empiric methods and in all things
to recommend the golden mean; in their brilliant exuberance of pride
and
creative impulse they were inclined to dash upwards and onwards with
thoughtless
disregard of the serious ground of reality, and this in time was bound
to have a baneful influence; it is nevertheless characteristic that
Aristotle,
Greek as he was, exercised comparatively little influence, to begin
with,
on the development of Greek intellectual life; the healthy instinct of
a people that rejoiced in creating rebelled against a reaction which
was
so fatally violent, and had perhaps a vague feeling that this pretended
empiricist brought with him as his curative medicine the poison of
dogma.
Aristotle was, of course, by profession a doctor — he was a fine
example
of the doctor who kills to cure. But this first patient of his had a
will
of his own; he preferred to save himself by flying to the arms of the
neo-Platonic
quack. But we, hapless posterity, have inherited as our legacy both
doctor
and quack, who drench our healthy bodies with their drugs. Heaven help
us!
NATURAL
SCIENCE
One word more
about
Hellenic science. It is only natural that the scientific achievements
of
the Greeks should hardly possess for us anything more than an
historical
interest. But what cannot be indifferent to us is the perception of the
incredible advances which were made in the correct interpretation of
nature
when newly discovered artistic capacities began to develop and exercise
influence. We are involuntarily reminded of Schiller‘s statement that
we
cannot separate the phantom from the real without at the same time
purging
the real of the phantom.
If there is a sphere
in which one might expect less than nothing from the Greeks, it is that
of geography. What we remember having read in their poems — the
52
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
wanderings of Odysseus and of Io &c.
— seemed to us rather confused and was rendered still more confusing by
contradictory commentaries. Moreover, up to the time of Alexander, the
Greeks did not travel far. But if we glance at Dr. Hugo Berger‘s Geschichte
der wissenschaftlichen Erdkunde der Griechen, a strictly scientific
work, we shall be lost in amazement. At school we learn at most
something
of Ptolemaeus, and his geographical map strikes us as almost as curious
as his heavenly spheres encased in each other; that, however, is all
the
result of a period of decay, of a science wonderfully perfect, which,
however,
had become weak in intuition, the science of a raceless chaos of
peoples.
Let us, on the other hand, inquire into the geographical conceptions of
the genuine Greeks, from Anaximander to Eratosthenes, and we shall
understand
Berger‘s assertion: “The achievements of the remarkably gifted Greek
nation
in the sphere of scientific geography are indeed worth investigating.
Even
to-day we find their traces at every step and cannot do without the
foundations
laid by them“ (i. p. vi.). Particularly striking are the comparatively
widespread knowledge and the healthy conceptive power possessed by the
ancient Ionians. There was serious falling off later, due especially to
the influence of “the despisers of physics, meteorology and
mathematics,
the cautious people, who would believe only their own eyes or the
credible
information gained at first hand by eye-witnesses“ (i. 139). Still
later,
investigators had further to contend with so deeply rooted scientific
prejudices
that the voyages of the “first North Pole explorer,“ Pytheas (a
contemporary
of Aristotle), with their accurate descriptions of the coasts of Gaul
and
Britain, their narratives of the sea of ice, their decisive
observations
with regard to the length of day and night in the northern latitudes
were
declared by all scholars of antiquity to be lies (iii. 7, compare the
53 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
opinion of men of to-day, iii. 36).
Philipp Paulitschke in his work, Die geographische Erforschung des
afrikanischen
Kontinents (second edition, p. 9), calls attention to the fact that
Herodotus possessed a more accurate conception of the outlines of
Africa
than Ptolemaeus. The latter, however, was considered an “authority.“
Thereby
hangs a tale, and it is with genuine regret that I establish the fact
that
we have inherited from the Hellenes not only the results of their
“remarkable
ability,“ as Berger puts it, but also their mania for creating
“authorities“
and believing in them. In this connection the history of palaeontology
is specially instructive. With the artless simplicity of unspoiled
intuitive
power the ancient Greeks had, long before Plato and Aristotle, noticed
the mussels on mountain-tops, and recognised even the impressions of
fishes
for what they are; upon these observations men like Xenophanes and
Empedocles
had based theories of historical development and geocyclic doctrines.
But
the authorities declared this view to be absurd; when the facts
multiplied,
they were simply explained away by the grand theory of vis plastica;
* and it was not till the year 1517 that a man ventured once more to
express
the old opinion, that the mountain-tops once lay beneath the sea: “in
the
year of the Reformation, accordingly, after 1500 years, knowledge had
reached
the point at which it had stood in classical antiquity.“ †
Fracastorius‘
idea received but scant support, and should it be desired to estimate —
it is really very difficult after the advance of science — how great
and
venerable a power of truth lay in the seeing eye of these ancient poets
(Xenophanes and Empedocles were in the first place poets and singers),
I recommend the student to consult the writings of the
*
According
to Quenstedt this hypothesis is due to Avicenna; but it is to be traced
back to Aristotle and was taught definitely by Theophrastus (see
Lyell, Principles of Geology, 12th ed., i. 20).
†
Quenstedt,
Handbuch
der Petrefaktenkunde, 2nd ed., p. 2.
54 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
free-thinker Voltaire and to see what
abuse he hurled at the palaeontologists even as late as the year 1768.
* Just as amusing are the frantic efforts of his scepticism to resist
evidence.
Oysters had been found on Mont Cenis: Voltaire is of opinion that they
fell from the hats of Roman pilgrims! Hippopotamus bones had been dug
up
not far from Paris: Voltaire declares un curieux a eu autrefois
dans
son cabinet le squelette d‘un hippopotame! Evidently scepticism
does
not suffice to clear a man‘s sight. † On the other hand, the oldest
poems
provide us with examples of peculiar discernment. Even in the Iliad,
for instance, Poseidon is called the “shaker of the earth,“ this god,
that
is, water and especially the sea, is always mentioned as the cause of
earthquakes:
that is exactly in accordance with the results arrived at by science
to-day.
However, I wish merely to point to such features as a contrast to the
ignorance
of those heroes of a pretended “age of enlightenment.“ — Much more
striking
examples of the freeing of the real from the phantom are met with in
the
sphere of astrophysics, especially in the school of Pythagoras. The
theory
of the spherical shape of the earth is found in the earliest adepts,
and
even a great deal that is fantastic in the conceptions of these
ancients
is rich in instruction, because it contains in a manner in nuce
what afterwards proved to be correct. ‡ And so
*
See
Des
singularités de la Nature, chaps. xii. to xviii., and
L‘Homme
aux quarante écus, chap. vi., both written in the year 1768.
Similar remarks in his letters (see especially, Lettre sur
un
écrit anonyme, 19.4.1772).
†
This
same Voltaire had the presumption to describe the great astronomical
speculations
of the Pythagoreans as “galimatias,“ on which the famous astronomist
Schiaparelli
remarks with justice: “Such men do not deserve to understand what great
speculative power was necessary to attain to a conception of the
spherical
form of the earth, of its free floating in space and its mobility;
ideas
without which we should have had neither a Copernicus nor a Kepler, a
Galileo
nor a Newton“ (see the work mentioned below, p. 16).
‡
Zeller,
Die
Philosophie der Griechen, 5th ed., Pt. I., p. 414 ff. More
technical,
but explained with remarkable lucidity in the work of
55 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
in the case of the Pythagoreans, as
time went on, to the theory of the earth as a sphere and the
inclination
of its orbit, there was added that of its revolving on its axis, and
that
of motion round a central point in space, vouched for from Philolaeus,
a contemporary of Democritus, onward; a generation later the
hypothetical
“central fire“ had been replaced by the sun. Not of course as a
philosopher,
but as an astronomer, Aristarchus had at a later time (about 250 B.C.)
founded the heliocentric system upon clear lines and had undertaken to
calculate the distance from sun and moon, and recognised in the sun
(1900
years before Giordano Bruno) one of the countless fixed stars. *
Schiaparelli, Die
Vorläufer
des Kopernikus im Altertum (translated into German from the Italian
original by the author and M. Curtze, published in the Altpreussische
Monatsschrift, 1876). “We are in a position to assert that the
development
of the physical principles of this school was bound by logical
connection
of ideas to lead to the theory of the earth‘s motion“ (see 5
f.).
More details of the “really revolutionary view, that it is not the
earth
that occupies the centre of the universe,“ in the recently published
book
of Wilhelm Bauer, Der ältere Pythagoreismus (1897), p. 54
ff.
64 ff. &c. The essay too of Ludwig Ideler, Über das
Verhältnis
des Kopernikus zum Altertum in the Museum für
Altertumswissenschaft,
published by Fr. Aug. Wolf, 1810, p. 391 ff. is still worth reading.
*
“Aristarchus
puts the sun among the number of the fixed stars and makes the earth
move
through the apparent track of the sun (that, is the ecliptic), and
declares
that it is eclipsed according to its inclination,“ says Plutarch. For
this
and the other evidences in reference to Aristarchus compare the
above-mentioned
book of Schiaparelli (pp. 121 ff. and 219). This astronomer is moreover
convinced that Aristarchus only taught what was already discovered at
the
time of Aristotle (p. 117), and here too he shows how the method
adopted
by the Pythagoreans was bound to lead to the correct solution. But for
Aristotle and neo-Platonism the heliocentric system would, even at the
time of Christ‘s birth, have been generally accepted; in truth, the
Stagyrite
has honestly deserved his position as official philosopher of the
orthodox
church! On the other hand, the story of the Egyptians having
contributed
something to the solution of the astrophysical problem has been proved
to be quite unfounded, like so many other Egyptian stories
(Schiaparelli,
pp. 105-6). Moreover Copernicus himself tells us in his introduction
dedicated
to Pope Paul III.: “I first found in Cicero that Nicetus had believed
that
the earth moved. Afterwards I found also in Plutarch that some others
had
likewise been of this opinion. This was what caused me too to begin to
think about the earth‘s mobility.“
56 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
What imaginative power, what capacity
of bodying forth, as Shakespeare calls it, this presupposes is clearly
seen by later history: Bruno had to pay for his imaginative power with
his life, Galileo with his freedom; it was not till the year 1822 (2000
years after Aristarchus) that the Roman Church took the work of
Copernicus
off the Index and sanctioned the printing of books which taught that
the
earth moves, without, however, annulling or in any way lessening the
validity
of the Papal bulls, in which it is forbidden to believe in the motion
of
the earth. * We must, moreover, always bear in mind that it was the
Pythagoreans,
who were decried as mystagogues, who led up to this brilliant “purging
the real of phantom,“ and they were supported by the idealist Plato,
particularly
towards the end of his life, whereas the herald of the sole saving
grace
of induction, Aristotle, attacked the theory of the motion of the earth
with the whole weight of his empiricism. “The Pythagoreans,“ he writes,
in reference to the theory of the earth‘s turning on its axis, which he
denied, “do not deduce grounds and causes from phenomena observed, but
endeavour to make phenomena harmonise with views and assumptions of
their
own; they thus attempt to interfere with the formation of the world“ (De
Coelo, ii. 13). This contrast should certainly give pause to many
of
our contemporaries; for we have no lack of natural scientists who still
cling to Aristotle, and in our newest scientific theories there is
still
as much stiff-necked dogmatism as in the Aristotelian and Semitic
doctrines
grafted upon the Christian Church. † — The progress of mathematics and
especially of geometry affords us in quite a different
* Cf.
Franz Xaver Kraus in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 1900. Nr. 1.
†
What
the English scientist, John Tyndall, in his well-known speech in
Belfast,
1874, said, “Aristotle put words in the place of things; he preached
induction,
without practising it,“ will be considered by later ages as just as apt
for many an Ernst Haeckel of the nineteenth century. It should also be
mentioned that the system of
57 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
form a proof of the life-giving
influence
of Greek creative power. Pythagoras is the founder of scientific
mathematics
in Europe; that he owed his knowledge, especially the so-called
“Pythagorean
theorem,“ the idea of irrational magnitudes, and — very probably — also
his arithmetic, to the Indians is of course an established fact, * and
with regard to abstract arithmetical calculation, the so-called
“Arabian
cyphers“ which we owe to the Aryan Indians, Cantor says, “Algebra
attained
among the Indians to a height which it has never been able to reach in
Greece.“ † But see to what transparent perfection the Greeks have
brought
formal mathematics, geometry! In the school of Plato was educated
Euclid,
whose Elements of Geometry are such a perfect work of art that
it
would be exceedingly regrettable if the introduction of simplified and
more modern methods of teaching were to remove such a jewel from the
horizon
of educated people. Perhaps I should be expressing my partiality for
mathematics
too simply if I confessed that Euclid‘s Elements seem to me
almost
as fine as Homer‘s Iliad. At any rate I may look upon it as no
accident
that the incomparable geometrician was also an enthusiastic musician,
whose
Elements
of Music, if we possessed them in the original form, would perhaps
form a worthy counterpart to his Elements of Geometry. And here
I may recognise the cognate poetical spirit, that power of bodying
forth
and of giving an artistic form to conceptions. This sunbeam will not
readily
be extinguished. Let me here make a remark which is of the highest
importance
for our subject: it was the almost pure poetry of arithmetical theory
and
geometry that caused the Greeks at a later
Tycho de Brahe is
also
of Hellenic origin; see details in Schiaparelli, (p. 107 ff.
and
especially p. 115); no possible combination could indeed escape the
richness
of this imagination.
* See
Leopold von Schroeder: Pythagoras und die Inder, p. 39 ff.
†
Cantor:
Vorlesungen
über Geschichte der Mathematik, i. 511 (quoted from Schroeder,
p. 56).
58 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
time to become the founders of
scientific
mechanics. As in the case of everything Hellenic so here too the
meditation
of many minds received shape and living power in the life-work of one
single
all-powerful genius: the “century of mechanics“ has, I think, every
reason
to venerate Archimedes as its father.
PUBLIC
LIFE
Inasmuch as I am
only
concerned here with the achievements and the individuality of the
Greeks
in so far as they were important factors in our modern culture and
living
elements of the nineteenth century, much must be omitted, though in
connection
with what has been said, one would be tempted to go into more detail.
Rohde
told us above that creative art was the unifying force for all Greece.
Then we saw art — widening gradually to philosophy and science — laying
the foundations of a harmony of thinking, feeling and knowing. This
next
spread to the sphere of public life. The endless care devoted to the
development
of beautiful, powerful human frames followed artistic rules; the poet
had
created the ideals, which people henceforth strove to realise. Every
one
knows how great importance was attached to music in Greek education;
even
in rough Sparta it was highly honoured and cultivated. The great
statesmen
have all a direct connection with art or philosophy: Thales, the
politician,
the practical man, is at the same time lauded as the first philosopher
and the first mathematician and astronomer; Empedocles, the daring
rebel,
who deals the death-blow to the supremacy of the aristocracy in his
native
city, the inventor of public oratory (as Aristotle tells us), is also
poet,
mystic, philosopher, natural investigator and evolutionist. Solon is
essentially
a poet and a singer, Lycurgus was the first to collect the Homeric
59 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
poems and that too “in the interests
of the State and of morality.“ * Pisistratus is another instance: the
creator
of the Theory of Ideas is statesman and reformer; it was Cimon who
prepared
for Polygnotus a suitable sphere of activity, and Pericles did the same
for Phidias. As Hesiod puts it, “Justice (Diké) is the maiden
daughter
of Zeus“ † and in this observation is contained a definite philosophy
embracing
all state relations, a philosophy which though also religious is mainly
artistic; all literature, too, even the most abstruse writings of
Aristotle,
and even remarks like that of Xenophanes (meant, indeed, as a reproach)
that the Greeks were accustomed to derive all their culture from Homer,
‡ testify to the same fact. In Egypt, in Judea, and later in Rome we
see
the law-giver laying down the rules of religion and worship; among the
Teutonic peoples the king decrees what his people shall believe; §
in Hellas the reverse holds good: it is the poet, the “creator of the
race
of gods,“ the poetical philosopher (Anaxagoras, Plato, &c.), who
understands
how to lead all men to profound conceptions of the divine and the
moral.
And those men who — in the period of its greatness — give the land its
laws, have been educated in the school of these same poets and
philosophers.
When Herodotus gives each separate book of his history the name of a
Muse,
when Plato makes Socrates deliver his finest speeches only in the most
beautiful spots inhabited by nymphs, and represents him as closing
dialectical
discussions with an invocation to Pan — “Oh, grant that I may be
inwardly
beautiful.
*
Plutarch,
Life
of Lycurgus, chap. iv.
† Work
and Days, 256.
‡
Fragment
4 (quoted from Flach, Geschichte der griechischen Lyrik, ii. p.
419).
§
The principle introduced at the time of the Reformation “cujus est
regio,
illius est religio“ only expresses the old condition of law as it
existed
from time immemorial.
60 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
and that my outward appearance may be
in harmony with the inner!“ — when the oracle at Thespiae promises a
“land
rich in fruits of the soil“ to those who “obey the agricultural
teaching
of the poet Hesiod“ * — such traits (and we meet them at every step)
point
to an artistic atmosphere permeating the whole life: the memory of it
has
descended to us and coloured many an ideal of our time.
HISTORICAL
FALSEHOODS
Hitherto I have
spoken
almost solely of a positive beneficial inheritance. It would, however,
be entirely one-sided and dishonest to let the matter rest there. Our
life
is permeated with Hellenic suggestions and achievements and I fear that
we have adopted the baneful to a greater extent than the good. If Greek
intellectual achievements have enabled us to enter the daylight of
human
life, Greek achievements have, on the other hand — thanks perhaps to
the
artistic creative power of this remarkable people — also played a great
part in casting a mist over the light of day and hiding the sun behind
a jealous mask of clouds. Some items of the Hellenic inheritance which
we have dragged into the nineteenth century, but which we had been
better
without, need not be touched upon until we come to deal with that
century;
some other points must, however, be taken up here. And in the first
place
let us consider what lies on the surface of Greek life.
That to-day, for
example, — when so much that is great and important claims our whole
attention,
when we have piled up endless treasures of thought, of poetry
*
French
excavation of the year 1890. (See Peppmüller: Hesiodos
1896, p. 152.) One should note also such passages as Aristophanes, Frogs,
I, 1037 ff.
61 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
and above all of knowledge, of which
the wisest Greeks had not the faintest idea and to a share of which
every
child should have a prescriptive right — that to-day we are still
compelled
to spend valuable time learning every detail of the wretched history of
the Greeks, to stuff our poor brains with endless registers of names of
vainglorious heroes in ades, atos, enes, eiton, &c., and,
if
possible, wax enthusiastic over the political fate of these cruel,
short-sighted
democracies, blinded with self-love, and based upon slavery and
idleness,
is indeed a hard destiny, the blame for which, however, if we do but
reflect,
lies not with the Greeks but with our own shortsightedness. * Certainly
the Greeks frequently set
*
I
said “cruel“ and in fact this trait is one of the most characteristic
of
the Hellenes, common to them and the Semites. Humanity, generosity,
pardon
were as foreign to them as love of truth. When they meet these traits
for
the first time in the Persians, the Greek historians betray an almost
embarrassed
astonishment: to spare prisoners, to give a kingly reception to a
conquered
prince, to entertain and give presents to envoys of the enemy, instead
of killing them (as the Lacedaemonians and Athenians did, Herodotus,
vii.
113), indulgence to criminals, generosity even to spies, the assumption
that the first duty of every man is to speak the truth, ingratitude
being
regarded as a crime punishable by the State — all this seems to a
Herodotus,
a Xenophon, almost as ridiculous as the Persian custom not to spit in
presence
of others, and other such rules of etiquette (cf. Herodotus i,
133
and 138). How is it possible that in the face of such a mass of
indubitable
facts our historians can go on systematically falsifying history?
Leopold
van Ranke, for instance, tells in his Weltgeschichte (Text
edition,
i. 129) the well-known anecdote of the disgraceful treatment of the
corpse
of Leonidas, and how Pausanias rejected the proposal to avenge himself
by a similar sin against the corpse of the Persian commander Mardonius,
and continues: “This refusal affords food for endless thought. The
contrast
between East and West is here expressed in a manner which henceforth
was
to remain the tradition.“ And yet the whole of Greek history is filled
with the mutilation not only of corpses, but of living people, torture,
and every kind of cruelty, falsehood and treachery. And thus, in order
to get in a high-sounding empty phrase, to remain true to the old
absurd
proverb of the contrast between Orient and Occident (how ridiculous in
a spherical world!), in order to retain cherished prejudices and give
them
a stronger hold than ever, one of the first historians of the
nineteenth
century simply puts aside all the facts of history — facts concerning
which
even the most ignorant man can inform himself in Duncker,
62 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
an example of heroism, though indeed
frequently also of the opposite; but courage is the commonest of all
human
virtues, and the constitution of such a State as the Lacedaemonian
would
lead us rather to conclude that the Hellenes had to be forced to be
brave,
than that they naturally possessed the proud contempt of death which
distinguishes
every Gallic circus-fighter, every Spanish toreador and every Turkish
Bashi-bazouk.
* “Greek history,“ says Goethe, “has in it little that is gratifying —
besides, that of our own days is really great and stirring; the battles
of Leipzig and Waterloo, for example, after all throw into the shade
Marathon
and others like it. Our own heroes, too, are not behindhand; the French
marshals, and Blücher and Wellington may well be put side by side
with those of antiquity.“ † But Goethe does not go nearly far enough.
The
traditional history of Greece is, in many points, a huge mystification:
we see that more clearly every day; and our modern teachers — under the
influence of a “suggestion“ that has completely paralysed their honesty
— have falsified it worse than the Greeks themselves. With regard to
the
battle of Marathon, for example, Herodotus admits quite honestly that
the
Greeks were in this battle put to flight,
Geschichte des
Altertums;
Gobineau, Histoire des Perses; Maspero, Les
premières
Mêlées des peuples, &c. — and the credulous
student
is forced to accept a manifest untruth with regard to the moral
character
of the different human races, on the basis of a doubtful anecdote. Such
unscrupulous perfidy can only be explained in the case of such a man by
the supposition of a “suggestion“ paralysing all judgment. As a matter
of fact, from India and Persia we derive the one kind of humanity and
generosity
and love of truth, from Judea and Arabia the other (caused by reaction)
— but none from Greece, nor from Rome, that is, therefore, none from
the
“Occident.“ How far removed Herodotus is from such designed
misrepresentation
of history! for, when he has told of the mutilation of Leonidas, he
adds,
“Such treatment is not the custom among the Persians. They more than
all
other nations are wont to honour brave warriors“ (vii. 238).
*
Helvétius
remarks exquisitely (De l‘Esprit, ed. 1772, II. 52): “La
législation
de Lycurgue métamorphosait les hommes en héros.“
†
Conversation
with Eckermann, Nov. 24, 1824.
63 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
where they were opposed by Persians
and not Hellenes (iv. 113); how this fact is always explained away by
us!
And with what infantile credulity — though we know quite well how
utterly
unreliable Greek numbers are — all our historians still copy from the
old
stories the number of 6400 Persian slain and 192 Hoplites who met their
death bravely, but omit to mention what Herodotus in the same chapter
(vi.
117) relates with inimitable artlessness how an Athenian became blind
with
fright in that battle. This “glorious victory“ was in reality an
unimportant
skirmish, in which the Greeks had rather the worst than the best of it.
* The Persians, who had come to Greece in Ionian ships, not of their
own
accord, but because they were invited by the Greeks, returned in all
tranquillity
to Ionia with several thousand prisoners and rich booty, because these
ever fickle allies thought the moment unfavourable (see
Herodotus,
vi. 118). † In the same way the whole description of the later struggle
between Hellas and the Persian empire is falsified, ‡ but after all we
must not criticise the Greeks too harshly
*
Since
these lines were written, I have received the well known English
Hellenist
Professor Mahaffy‘s A Survey of Greek Civilisation, 1897, in
which
the battle of Marathon is termed “a very unimportant skirmish.“
† See
Gobineau: Histoire des Perses, ii. 138-142.
‡
Particularly
the famous battle of Salamis, of which one gets a refreshing
description
in the above-mentioned work of Count Gobineau, ii. 205-211): “C‘est
quand
les derniers bataillons de l‘arrière-garde de Xerxès
eurent
disparu dans la direction de la Béotie et que toute sa flotte
fut
partie, que les Grecs prirent d‘eux-mêmes et de ce qu‘ils
venaient
de faire et de ce qu‘ils pouvaient en dire l‘opinion que la
poésie
a si heureusement mise en oeuvre. Encore fallut-il que les
alliés
apprissent que la flotte ennemie ne s‘était pas
arrêtée
à Phalère pour qu‘ils osassent se mettre en mouvement. Ne
sachant où elle allait — ils restaient comme éperdus. Ils
se hasardèrent enfin à sortir de la baie de Salamine, et
se risquèrent jusqu‘à la hauteur d‘Andros. C‘est ce
qu‘ils
appelèrent plus tard avoir poursuivi les Perses! Ils se
gardèrent
cependant d‘essayer de les joindre, et rebroussant chemin, ils
retournèrent
chacun dans leurs patries respectives“ (p. 208). In another place (ii,
360) Gobineau characterises Greek history as “la plus
élaborée
des fictions du plus artiste des peuples.“
64 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
for this, as the same tendency * has
manifested and still manifests itself among all other nations. However,
if Hellenic history is really to mould the intellect and the judgment,
it would need, one would fancy, to be a true, just history, grasping
events
by their deepest roots and revealing organic connections, not the
immortalisation
of half-invented anecdotes and views, which could only be excused by
the
bitterness of the struggle for existence, and the crass ignorance and
infatuation
of the Greeks. Glorious indeed is the poetic power by which gifted men
in that land sought to inspire with patriotic heroism a fickle,
faithless,
corruptible people inclined to panic, and — where the discipline was
firm
enough, as in Sparta — actually succeeded in doing so. Here too we see
art as the animating and moving power. But that we should impose as
truth
upon our children the patriotic lies of the Greeks, and not merely on
our
children, but also — in works like Grote‘s — should force them as
dogmas
upon the judgment of healthy men and let them become an influential
factor
in the politics of the nineteenth century, is surely an extreme abuse
of
our Hellenic legacy, after Juvenal 1800 years ago mockingly had said:
- creditur quidquid Graecia mendax
audet in
historia.
Still worse does it seem to me to force
us to admire
*
The
principal thing is clearly not what is found in learned books, but what
is taught in school, and here I can speak from experience, for I was
first
in a French “Lycée,“ then in an English “college,“ afterwards I
received instruction from the teachers of a Swiss private school, and
last
of all from a learned Prussian. I testify that in these various
countries
even the best certified history, that of the last three centuries
(since
the Reformation), is represented in so absolutely different ways that
without
exaggerating I may affirm that the principle of historical instruction
is still everywhere in Europe systematic misrepresentation. While the
achievements
of our own country are always emphasised, those of others passed over
or
suppressed, certain things put always in the brightest light, others
left
in the deepest shadow, there is formed a general picture which in many
parts differs only for the subtlest eye from naked lies. The foundation
of all genuine truth: the absolutely disinterested love of justice is
almost
everywhere absent; a proof that we are still barbarians!
65 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
political conditions, which should
rather
be held up as an example to be avoided. It is no business of mine to
take
any side, either that of Great Greece or of Little Greece, of Sparta or
of Athens, either (with Mitford and Curtius) that of the nobility, or
(with
Grote) of the Demos; where the political characters, individually or as
a class, are so pitiful, no lofty political conditions could exist. The
belief that we even received the idea of freedom from the Hellenes is a
delusion; for freedom implies patriotism, dignity, sense of duty,
self-sacrifice,
but from the beginning of their history to their suppression by Rome,
the
Hellenic States never cease to call in the enemies of their common
fatherland
against their own brothers; indeed, within the individual States, as
soon
as a statesman is removed from power, away he hurries, it may be to
other
Hellenes, or to Persia or to Egypt, later to the Romans, in order to
reduce
his own city to ruin with their help. Numerous are the complaints of
the
immorality of the Old Testament; to me the history of Greece seems just
as immoral; for among the Israelites we find, even in their crimes,
character
and perseverance, as well as loyalty to their own people. It is not so
with the Greeks. Even a Solon goes over at last to Pisistratus, denying
the work of his life, and a Themistocles, the “hero of Salamis,“
bargains
shortly before the battle about the price for which he would betray
Athens,
and later actually lives at the court of Artaxerxes as “declared enemy
of the Greeks,“ but rightly regarded by the Persians as a “crafty Greek
serpent“ and of little account; as for Alcibiades, treachery had become
with him so entirely a life-principle that Plutarch can jokingly say
that
he changed colour “quicker than a chameleon.“ All this was so much a
matter
of course with the Hellenes that their historians do not disturb
themselves
about it. Herodotus, for instance, tells us with the greatest tran-
66 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
quillity how Miltiades forced on the
battle of Marathon by calling the attention of the commander-in-chief
to
the fact that the Athenian troops were inclined to go over to the
Persians,
and urging him to attack as soon as possible, that there might not be
time
to put this “evil design“ into execution; half an hour later, and the
“heroes
of Marathon“ would have marched with the Persians against Athens. I
remember
nothing like this in Jewish history. In such a soil it is manifest that
no admirable political system could flourish. “The Greeks,“ says Goethe
again, “were friends of freedom, yes, but each one only of his own
freedom;
and so in every Greek there was a tyrant.“ If any one wishes to make
his
way to the light through this primeval forest of prejudices, phrases
and
lies, which have grown up luxuriantly in the course of centuries, I
strongly
recommend him to read the monumental work of Julius Schvarcz, Die
Demokratie
von Athen, in which a statesman educated theoretically as well as
practically,
who is at the same time a philologist, has shown once for all what
importance
is to be attached to this legend. The closing words of this full and
strictly
scientific account are: “Inductive political science must now admit
that
the democracy of Athens does not deserve the position which the
delusion
of centuries has been good enough to assign to it in the history of
mankind“
(p. 589). *
One single trait
moreover suffices to characterise the whole political economy of the
Greeks
— the fact that Socrates found it necessary to prove at such length
that
to be a statesman one must understand something of the business of
State!
He was condemned to death for preaching this simple elementary truth.
“The
cup of poison was given purely and simply to the political
*
It
is the first part (published 1877) of a larger work: Die Demokratie,
the second part of which appeared in two volumes in 1891 and 1898 under
the title Die Römische Massenherrschaft.
67 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
reformer,“ * not to the atheist. These
ever-gossiping Athenians combined in themselves the worst conceit of an
arrogant aristocracy and the passionate spitefulness of an ignorant
impudent
rabble. They had at the same time the fickleness of an Oriental despot.
When, shortly after the death of Socrates, as the story goes, the
tragedy
Palamedes
was acted, the assembled spectators burst into tears over the execution
of the noble, wise hero; the tyrannical people lamented its mean act of
vengeance. † Not a jot more did it listen to Aristotle and other wise
men,
on the contrary it banished them. And these wise men! Aristotle is
wondrous
acute and as a political philosopher as worthy of our admiration as the
great Hellenes always are, when they rise to artistically philosophical
intuition; he, however, played no part as a statesman, but calmly and
contentedly
watched the conquests of Philip, which brought ruin on his native land,
but procured for him the skeletons and skins of rare animals; Plato had
the success in statesmanship which one would expect from his fantastic
constructions. And even the real statesmen — a Draco, a Solon, a
Lycurgus,
yes, even a Pericles — seem to me, as I said already in the preface to
this chapter, rather clever dilettanti than politicians who in any
sense
laid firm foundations. Schiller somewhere characterises Draco as a
“beginner“
and the constitution of Lycurgus as “schoolboyish.“ More decisive is
the
judgment of the great teacher of Comparative History of Law, B. W.
Leist:
“The Greek, without understanding the historical forces that rule the
life
of nations, believed himself to be completely master of the present.
Even
in his highest aspirations he looked upon the actual present of the
State
as an object
*
Schvarcz,
loc.
cit. p. 394 ff.
†
According
to Gomperz, Griechische Denker, ii 95, this anecdote is an
“empty
tale“: but in all such inventions, as in the eppur si muove,
&c.,
there lives an element of higher truth; they are just the reverse of
“empty.“
68 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
in which the philosopher might freely
realise his theory, taking over from history as a guide only so much as
might suit this theory.“ * In this sphere the Greeks lack all
consistency
and self-control; no being is more immoderate than the Hellene, the
preacher
of moderation (Sophrosyne) and the “golden mean“; we see his various
constitutions
sway hither and thither between hyperfantastic systems of perfection
and
purblind prejudice for the interests of the immediate present. Even
Anacharsis
complained, “In the councils of the Greeks it is the fools who decide.“
And so it is clear we should seek to admire and emulate not Greek
history
in truth, but Greek historians, not the heroic acts of the Greeks —
which
are paralleled everywhere — but the artistic celebration of their
deeds.
It is quite unnecessary to talk nonsense about Occident and Orient, as
if “man“ in the true sense could arise only in a definite longitude;
the
Greeks stood with one foot in Asia and the other in Europe; most of
their
great men are Ionians or Sicilians; it is ridiculous to seek to oppose
their fictions with the weapons of earnest scientific method, and to
educate
our children with phrases; on the other hand, we shall ever admire and
emulate in Herodotus his grace and naturalness, a higher veracity, and
the victorious eye of the genuine artist. The Greeks fell, their
wretched
characteristics ruined them, their morality was already too old, too
subtle
and too corrupt to keep pace with the enlightenment of their intellect;
the Hellenic intellect, however, won a greater victory than any other
intellect
has won; by it — and by it alone — “man entered into the daylight of
life“;
the freedom which the Greek hereby won for mankind was not political
freedom
— he was and remained a tyrant and a slave-dealer — it was the freedom
to shape not merely instinctively but with conscious creative power —
the
freedom to invent as a poet. This is the freedom of
* Graeco-italische
Rechtsgeschichte, pp. 589, 595, &c.
69
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
which Schiller spoke, a valuable legacy,
for which we should be eternally grateful to the Hellenes, one worthy
of
a much higher civilisation than theirs and of a much purer one than
ours.
It has been necessary
for me to discuss these matters as paving the way for a last
consideration.
DECLINE
OF RELIGION
If we realise the
fact that the educationist has the power to restore dead bodies to life
and to force mummies as models upon an active, industrious generation,
then we must on closer investigation see that others can do the same
thing
in a still higher degree, since among the most living portions of our
Hellenic
inheritance we find a really considerable part of our Church doctrine —
not indeed its bright side, but the deep shade of weird and stupid
superstition,
as well as the arid thorns of scholastic sophistry, bereft of all the
leaves
and blossoms of poetry. The angels and devils, the fearful conception
of
hell, the ghosts of the dead (which in this presumably enlightened
nineteenth
century set tables in motion to such an extent with knocking and
turning),
the ecstatically religious delirium, the hypostasis of the Creator and
of the Logos, the definition of the Divine, the conception of the
Trinity,
in fact the whole basis of our Dogmatics we owe to a great extent to
the
Hellenes or at least to their mediation; at the same time we are
indebted
to them for the sophistical manner of treating these things: Aristotle
with his theory of the Soul and of the Godhead is the first and
greatest
of all schoolmen; his prophet, Thomas Aquinas, was nominated by the
infallible
Pope official philosopher of the Catholic Church towards the end of the
nineteenth century (1879); at the same time a large proportion of the
logic-chopping
70
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
free-thinkers, enemies of all
metaphysics
and proclaimers of a new “religion of reason,“ like John Stuart Mill
and
David Strauss, &c., based their theories on Aristotle. Here, as is
evident, we have to deal with a legacy of real living force, and it
reminds
us that we should speak with humility of the advances made in our time.
The matter is an
exceedingly complicated one; if in this whole chapter I have had to be
satisfied with mere allusions, I shall here have to confine myself to
hinting
at allusions. And yet in this very matter relations have to be pointed
out, which, so far as I know, have never been revealed in their proper
connection. I wish to do this with all modesty, and yet with the utmost
precision.
It is the common
practice to represent the religious development of the Hellenes as a
popular
superstitious polytheism, which in the consciousness of some
pre-eminent
men had gradually transformed itself into a purer and more
spiritualised
faith in a single God; — the human spirit thus advancing from darkness
to ever brighter light. Our reason loves simplifications: this gradual
soaring of the Greek spirit, till it was ripe for a higher revelation,
is very much in tune with our inborn sluggishness of thought. But this
conception is in reality utterly false and proved to be false: the
faith
in gods, as we meet it in Homer, is the most elevated and pure feature
of Greek religion. This religious philosophy, though, like all things
human,
compassed and limited in many ways, was suited to the knowledge,
thought
and feeling of a definite stage of civilisation, and yet it was in all
probability as beautiful, noble and free as any of which we have
knowledge.
The distinguishing-mark of the Homeric creed was its intellectual and
moral
freedom — indeed, as Rohde says, “almost free-thinking“; this religion
is the faith acquired through artistic intuition and
71 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
analogy (that is, purely by way of
genius)
in a cosmos — an “order of the world,“ which is everywhere perceived,
but
which we are never able to think out or comprehend, because we after
all
are ourselves elements of this cosmos — an order which nevertheless
reflects
itself of necessity in everything, and which therefore in Art becomes
visible
and directly convincing. The conceptions which are held by the people,
and have been produced by the poetical and symbolising faculty of each
simple mind as yet innocent of dialectics, are here condensed and made
directly visible, and that, too, by lofty minds, which are still strong
enough in faith to possess the most glowing fervour and at the same
time
free enough to fashion according to their own sovereign artistic
judgment.
This religion is hostile to all faith in ghosts and spirits, to all
clerical
formalism; everything of the nature of popular soul-cult and the like
which
occurs in the Iliad and the Odyssey is wonderfully
cleared,
stripped of all that is terrible, and raised to the eternal truth of
something
symbolical; it is equally hostile to every kind of sophistry, to all
idle
inquiries regarding cause and purpose, to that rationalistic movement,
therefore, which has subsequently shown itself in its true colours as
merely
the other side of superstition. So long as these conceptions, which had
found their most perfect expression in Homer and some other great
poets,
still lived among the people, the Greek religion possessed an ideal
element;
later (particularly in Alexandria and Rome) it became an amalgam of
Pyrrhonic,
satirical, universal sceptisism, gross superstitious belief in magic
and
sophistical scholasticism. The fine structure was undermined from two
different
quarters, by men who appeared to possess little in common, who,
however,
later joined hands like brothers, when the Homeric Parthenon (i.e.,
“temple of the Virgin“) had become a heap of ruins within which a
philological
“stone-polishing workshop“ had been set
72 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
up: it was these two parties that had
found no favour with Homer, priestly superstition and hypersubtle
hunting
after causality. *
The results of
anthropological
and ethnographic study allow us, I think, to distinguish between
superstition
and religion. Superstition we find everywhere, over the whole earth,
and
that too in definite forms which resemble each other very much in all
places
and among the most different races, and which are subject to a
demonstrable
law of development; superstition cannot in reality be eradicated.
Religion,
on the other hand, as being a collective image of the order of the
world
as it hovers before the imagination, changes very much with times and
peoples;
many races (for instance the Chinese) feel little or no religious
craving;
in others the need is very pronounced; religion may be metaphysical,
materialistic
or symbolistic, but it always appears — even where its external
elements
are all borrowed — in a completely new, individual form according to
time
and country, and each of its forms is, as history teaches us,
altogether
transitory. Religion has something passive in it; while it lives it
reflects
a condition of culture; at the same time it contains arbitrary moments
of inestimable consequence; how much freedom was manifested by the
Hellenic
poets in their treatment of the material of their faith! To what an
extent
did the resolutions of the Council of Trent, as to what Christendom
should
believe and should not believe, depend on diplomatic moves and the
fortune
of arms! This cannot be said of superstition; its might is assailed in
vain by power of Pope and of poets; it crawls along a thousand hidden
paths,
slumbers unconsciously in every
*
It
matters little that in Homer‘s time there may have been no
“philosophers“;
the fact that in his works nothing is “explained,“ that not the least
attempt
at a cosmogony is found, shows the tendency of his mind with sufficient
clearness. Hesiod is already a manifest reaction, but still too
magnificently
symbolical to find favour with any rationalist.
73 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
breast and is every moment ready to
burst out into flame; it has, as Lippert says, “a tenacity of life
which
no religion possesses“; * it is at the same time a cement for every new
religion and an enemy in the path of every old one. Almost every man
has
doubts about his religion, no one about his superstition; expelled from
the direct consciousness of the so-called “educated“ classes, it
nestles
in the innermost folds of their brains and plays its tricks there all
the
more wantonly, as it reveals itself in the mummery of authentic
learning,
or of the noisiest freethinking. We have had plenty of opportunity † of
observing all this in our century of Notre Dame de Lourdes, “Shakers,“
phrenology, odic force, spirit photographs, scientific materialism, and
“healing priestcraft,“ ‡ &c. To understand rightly the Hellenic
inheritance
we must learn to make a distinction there too. If we do so, our eyes
will
open to the fact that even in Hellas, at the brilliant epoch of the
glorious
art-inspired religion, an undercurrent of superstitions and cults of
quite
a different kind had never ceased to flow: at a later period, when the
Greek spirit began to decline and the belief in gods was a mere form,
it
broke out in a flood and united with the rationalistic scholasticism
which
had in the meantime been abundantly fed from various sources, till
finally
it presented in pseudo-Semitic neo-Platonism the grinning caricature of
lofty, free intellectual achievements. This stream of popular belief,
restrained
in the Dionysian cult, which through tragedy reached the highest
artistic
perfection, flowed on underground by Delphi and Eleusis; the ancient
soul-cult,
the awe-stricken and reverent remem-
* Christentum,
Volksglaube und Volksbrauch, p. 379. In the second part of this
book
there is an instructive list of pre-Christian customs and superstitions
still prevalent in Europe.
†
“Even
the most civilised nations do not easily shake off their belief in
magic.“
— Sir John Lubbock, The Prehistoric Age (German edition, ii.
278).
‡ F.
A. Lange used the expression, “medizinisches Pfaffentum,“ somewhere in
his Geschichte des Materialismus.
74 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
brance of the dead formed its first
and richest source; with this became gradually associated, by
inevitable
progression (and in various forms) the belief in the immortality of the
soul. Doubtless the Hellenes had brought the original stock of their
various
superstitions from their former home; but new elements were constantly
added, partly as Semitic * imports from the coasts and islands of Asia
Minor, but with more permanent and disturbing influence from that North
which the Greeks thought they despised. It was not poets that
proclaimed
these sacred “redeeming“ mysteries but Sibyls, Bacchides, female
utterers
of Pythian oracles; ecstatic frenzy took hold of one district after the
other, whole nations became mad, the sons of the heroes who had fought
before Troy whirled round in circles like the Dervishes of today,
mothers
strangled their children with their own hands. It was these people,
however,
who fostered the real faith in souls, and even the belief in the
immortality
of the soul was spread by them from Thrace to Greece. †
*
The
Semitic peoples in old times do not seem to have believed in the
immortality
of the individual soul; but their cults supplied the Hellene, as soon
as
he grasped this thought, with weighty stimulus. The Phoenician divine
system
of the Cabiri (i.e., the seven powerful ones) was found by the
Greeks
on Lemnos, Rhodes and other islands, and with regard to this Duncker
writes
in his Geschichte des Altertums, I4, 279, “The myth of Melcart
and
Astarte, of Astarte who was adopted into the number of these gods, and
of Melcart, who finds again the lost goddess of the moon in the land of
darkness and returns from there with her to new light and life — gave
the
Greeks occasion to associate with the secret worship of the Cabiri the
conceptions of life after death, which had been growing among them
since
the beginning of the sixth century.“
† We
need not be surprised that this belief (according to Herodotus, iv. 93)
was prevalent in the Indo-European race of the Getae and from there
found
its way into Greece; it was an old racial possession; it is very
striking,
on the other hand, that the Hellene at the period of his greatest
strength
had lost this belief or rather was quite indifferent to it. “An
everlasting
life of the soul is neither asserted nor denied from the Homeric
standpoint.
Indeed, this thought does not come into consideration at all“ (Rohde, Psyche,
p. 195); a remarkable confirmation of Schiller‘s assertion that the
aesthetic
man, i.e., he in whom the sensual and the moral are not
diametrically
opposed in aim “needs no
75 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
In the mad Bacchantic dance the soul
for the first time (among the Greek people] separated itself from the
body
— that same soul about which Aristotle from the stillness of his study
had so much that was edifying to tell us; in the Dionysian ecstasy man
felt himself one with the immortal gods and concluded that his
individual
human soul must also be immortal, a conclusion which Aristotle and
others
at a later time attempted ingeniously to justify. * It seems to me that
we are still suffering from something of this vertigo! And for that
reason
let us attempt to come to a sensible conclusion regarding this legacy
which
clings so firmly to us.
To this belief in
a soul Hellenic poetry as such has contributed nothing; it reverently
adapted
itself to the conventional — the ceremonious burial of Patroclus, for
instance,
who otherwise could not enter on his last rest — the performance of the
necessary acts of consecration by Antigone beside the corpse of her
brother
— and nothing more. It did unconsciously help to promote the belief in
immortality, by maintaining that the gods must be conceived not indeed
as uncreated but, for their greater glorification, as undying — an idea
quite foreign to the Aryan Indians. † The idea of sempiternity, that
is,
the
immortality to
support
and hold him“ (Letter to Goethe, August 9, 1796). Whether or not the
Getae
were Goths and so belonged to the Teutonic peoples, as Jacob Grimm
asserted,
does not here much matter; however, a full discussion of this
interesting
question is to be found in Wietersheim-Dahn, Geschichte der
Völkerwanderung,
i. 597; the result of the investigation is against Grimm‘s view. The
story
that the Getic King Zalmoxis learned the doctrine of immortality from
Pythagoras
is characterised by Rohde as an “absurd pragmatical tale“ (Psyche,
p. 320).
* On
this very important point, the genesis of the belief in immortality
among
the Greeks, see especially Rohde, Psyche, p. 296.
† In
an old Vedic hymn, which I quoted on p. 35, a verse
runs, “The Gods have arisen on this side of creation“; in their
capacity
as individuals, however, they too cannot, according to the Indian
conviction,
possess “sempiternity,“ and Çankara says in the Vedânta
Sutra‘s, when speaking of the individual gods, “Such words as
Indra,
&c., signify, like the word ‘General,‘ only occupation of a
definite
post. Whoever therefore occupies the post in question bears the title
Indra“
(i. 3, 28, p. 170 of Deussen‘s translation).
76 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
immortality of an individual who at
some time had come into being, was in consequence familiar to the
Greeks
as an attribute of their gods; poetry probably found it already
existing,
but at any rate it was first raised to a definite reality by the power
of poetical imagination. Art had no greater share in it than this. Art
rather endeavours as far as possible to remove, to temper, to minimise
that “belief in daemons which has everywhere to be taken as primeval,“
* the conception of a “lower world,“ the story of “islands of the
blest“
— in short, all those elements which, growing up out of the subsoil of
superstition, force themselves on the human imagination — and all this
in order to gain a free, open field for the given facts of the world
and
of life, and for their poetically religious, imaginative treatment.
Unlike
art, popular belief, not being satisfied with a religion so lofty and
poetic,
preferred the teaching of the barbarous Thracians. Neither was it
accepted
by philosophy, which held a position inferior to such poetical
conceptions,
until the day came when it felt itself strong enough to set history
against
fable, and detailed knowledge against symbol; but the stimulus in this
direction was not drawn by philosophy from itself nor from the results
of empiric science, which had nowhere dealt with the doctrines of
souls,
the entelechies of Aristotle, immortality and the rest; it was received
from the people, partly from Asia (through Pythagoras), partly from
Northern
Europe (as Orphic or Dionysian cult). The theory of a soul separable
from
the living body and more or less independent; the theory easily deduced
therefrom of bodiless and yet living souls — those, for example, of the
dead, which live on as mere souls, as also of a “soul-possessed“ divine
principle (quite analogous to the Nous of Anaxagoras, that is,
of
power distinct from matter) — furthermore, the theory of
*
Deussen,
Allgemeine
Geschichte der Philosophie, i. 39. See also Tylor.
77 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
the immortality of this soul — all these
are, to begin with, not results of quickened philosophical thought, nor
do they form in any sense an evolutional development, a glorification
of
that Hellenic national religion which had found its highest expression
in the poets; it is rather that people and thinker here put themselves
in opposition to poet and religion. And though obeying different
impulses,
people and thinker played into each other‘s hands, and together caused
the decline and fall of poetry and religion. And when the crisis thus
brought
about was past, the result was that philosophers had taken the place of
artists as the heralds of religion. To begin with, both poets and
philosophers
had of course derived their material from the people; but which of the
two, I ask, has employed it the better and more wisely? Which has
pointed
the way to freedom and beauty, and which to bondage and ugliness? Which
has paved the way for healthy empiric science and which has checked it
for almost twenty centuries? In the meantime, from quite another
direction,
from the midst of a people that possessed neither art nor philosophy, a
religious force had entered the world, so strong that it could bear,
without
breaking down, the madness of the whirling dance that had been elevated
to a system of reason — so full of light that even the dark power of
purely
abstract logic could never dim its radiance — a religious power,
qualified
by its very origin to promote civilisation rather than culture; had
that
power not arisen, then this supposed elevation to higher ideals would
have
ended miserably in ignominy, or rather its actual wretchedness would
never
have remained concealed. If any one doubts this, let him read the
literature
of the first centuries of our era, when the State-paid, anti-Christian
philosophers entitled their theory of knowledge “Theology“ (Plotinus,
Proclus,
&c.), let him see how these worthies in the leisure hours which
remained
to
78
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
them after picking Homer to pieces,
commenting on Aristotle, building up Trinities, and discussing the
question
whether God had the attribute of life as well as of being, and other
such
subtleties, wandered from one place to another in order that they might
be initiated into mysteries, or admitted as hierophants into Orphic
societies
— the foremost thinkers sunk to the grossest belief in magic. Or if
such
reading appals him, let him take up the witty Heinrich Heine of the
second
century, Lucian, and complete the information there given by the more
serious
but no less interesting writings of his contemporary Apuleius * — and
then
say where there is more religion to be found and where more
superstition,
where there is free, sound, creative human power and where fruitless,
slovenly
working of the treadmill in a continual circle. And yet the men who
stand
in that Homeric circle seem to us childishly pious and superstitious,
these
on the other hand enlightened thinkers! †
One more example!
We are wont according to old custom to commend Aristotle more warmly
for
his teleological theory of the universe than for anything else, whereas
we reproach Homer with his anthropomorphism. If we did not suffer from
artificially produced atrophy of the brain, we should be bound to see
the
absurdity of this. Teleology, that is, the theory of finality according
to the measure of human reason, is anthropomorphism in its highest
potency.
When man can grasp the plan of the cosmos, when he can say whence the
world
comes, whither it goes and what the purpose of each individual thing is,
* See
particularly in the eleventh book of the Golden Ass the
initiation
into the mysteries of Isis, Osiris, Serapis and the admission into the
association of the Pastophori. Plutarch‘s writing On Isis and Osiris
should also be read.
†
Bussell,
The
School of Plato, 1896, p. 345, writes of this philosophical period:
“The daemons monopolise a worship, which cannot be devoted to a mere
idea,
and philosophy breathes out its life on the steps of smoking
sacrificial
altars and amid the incantations and delusions of prophecy and magic.“
79 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
then he is really himself God and the
whole world is “human“; this is expressly stated by the Orphics and —
Aristotle.
But the poet‘s attitude is quite different. Every one quotes, and has
done
so even from the times of Heraclitus and down to those of Ranke, the
charge
which Xenophanes made against Homer that he forms the gods like
Hellenes,
but that the negroes would invent a black Zeus and horses would think
of
the gods as horses. No remark could be more senseless or superficial. *
The reproach is not even correct in fact, since the gods in Homer
appear
in all possible forms. As K. Lehrs says in his fine but unfortunately
almost
forgotten book, Ethik und Religion der Griechen (pp. 136-7):
“The
Greek gods are by no means images of men, but antitypes. They are
neither
cosmic potencies (as the philosophers first regarded them) nor
glorified
men! They frequently occur in animal form and only bear as a rule the
human
form as being the noblest, most beautiful and most suitable, but every
other form is in itself just as natural to them.“ Incomparably more
important,
however, is the fact that in Homer and the other great poets all
teleology
is wanting; for undeniable anthropomorphism did not appear till this
idea
did. Why should I not represent the gods in the image of man? Should I
introduce them into my poem as sheep or beetles? Did not Raphael and
Michael
Angelo do the very same thing as Homer? Has the Christian religion not
accepted the idea that God appeared in human form? Is the Jehovah of
the
Israelites not a prototype of the noble and yet quarrelsome and
revengeful
Jew? It would surely not be advisable to recommend to the imagination
of
the artist the Aristotelian “being without size which thinks
*
Giordano
Bruno, enraged at this fundamentally wrong and pedantically narrow
judgment,
writes: “Only insensate bestie et veri bruti would be capable
of
making such a statement“ (Italienische Schriften, ed. Lagarde,
p.
534). One should compare also M. W. Visser, Die nicht
menschengestaltigen
Götter der Griechen, Leyden, 1903.
80 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
the thing thought.“ On the other hand,
the poetical religion of the Greeks does not presume to give
information
about the “uncreated“ and to “explain according to reason“ the future.
It gives a picture of the world as in a hollow mirror and thinks
thereby
to quicken and to purify the spirit of man, and nothing more. Lehrs
demonstrates,
in the book mentioned above, how the idea of teleology was introduced
by
the philosophers, from Socrates to Cicero, but found no place in
Hellenic
poetry. “The idea of beautiful order, harmony, cosmos, which pervades
Greek
religion, is,“ he says (p. 117), “a much higher idea than that of
teleology,
which in every respect has something paltry about it.“ To bring the
matter
quite home to us, I ask, Which is the anthropomorphist, Homer or Byron?
Homer, whose personal existence could be doubted, or Byron, who so
powerfully
grasped the strings of the harp and attuned the poetry of our century
to
the melody, in which Alps and Ocean, Past and Present of the human race
only serve to mirror, and form a frame for the individual Ego? I should
think it almost impossible for each of us to-day, surrounded as we are
by human actions and permeated with the dim idea of an ordered Cosmos
to
remain to so small a degree anthropomorphic, so very “objective“ as
Homer.
METAPHYSICS
It is essential to
distinguish between philosophy and philosophy, and I think I have above
warmly expressed my admiration for the Hellenic philosophy of the great
epoch, particularly where it appeared as a creative activity of the
human
spirit closely related to poetry; in this respect Plato‘s theory of
ideas
is unsurpassed, while Aristotle appears to be incomparably great in
analysis
and method, but at the same time, as a philosopher in the
81 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
sense given, the real originator of
the decay of the Hellenic spirit. But here as elsewhere we must guard
against
over-simplification; we must not attribute to a single man what was
peculiar
to his people and only found in him its most definite expression. In
reality
Greek philosophy from the very beginning contained the germ of its
fatal
development later; the inheritance which still lies heavily upon us
goes
back almost to Homer‘s time. For it will be found upon reflection, that
the old Hylozoists are related to the Neoplatonists: whoever, like
Thales,
without further ado “explains“ the world as having arisen from water,
will
afterwards equally find an “explanation“ of God; his nearest successor,
Anaximander, establishes as principle the “Infinite“ (the Apeiron), the
“Unchangeable amid all changes“: here in truth we are already in the
toils
of the most unmitigated scholasticism and can calmly wait till the
wheel
of time sets down on the surface of the earth Ramon Lull and Thomas
Aquinas.
The fact that the oldest among the well-known Greek thinkers believed
in
the presence of countless daemons, but at the same time from the
beginning
* attacked the gods of the popular religion and of the poets —
Heraclitus
would “gladly have scourged“ † Homer — serves only to complete the
picture.
However, one thing must be added: a man like Anaximander, so
subordinate
as a thinker, was a naturalist and theorist of the first rank, a
founder
of scientific geography, a promoter of astronomy; all these people are
presented to us as philosophers, but in reality philosophy was for them
something quite apart; surely we should not reckon the agnosticism of
Charles
Darwin or the creed of Claude Bernard among the philosophical
achievements
of our
*
Authenticated
at least from Xenophanes and Heraclitus onwards.
† I
quote from Gomperz: Griechische Denker, i. 50; according to
Zeller‘s
account so violent an expression would seem unlikely. If I remember
rightly,
it is Xenophanes who assigns the words to Heraclitus.
82
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
century? Here is a characteristic
example
of the many traditional consecrated confusions; we find the name of
Sankara
(certainly one of the greatest metaphysicians that ever lived) in no
history
of philosophy, while on the other hand the worthy olive-farmer Thales
is
ever paraded as the “first philosopher.“ And, if the matter be closely
investigated, it will be found that almost all so-called philosophers
at
the zenith of Hellenic greatness are in a similar position: so far as
we
can judge from contradictory reports, Pythagoras did not found a
philosophic
school, but a political, social, dietetic and religious brotherhood;
Plato
himself, the metaphysician, was a statesman, moralist, practical
reformer;
Aristotle was a professional encyclopaedist, and the unity of his
philosophy
is due much more to his character than to his forced, half-traditional,
contradictory metaphysics. Without therefore underestimating in any way
the achievements of the Greek thinkers, we shall yet, I think, be able
to assert (and so put an end to the confusion), that these men have
paved
the way for our science (including logic and ethics), and for our
theology,
and that they, through their poetically creative genius, have poured a
flood of light upon the paths which speculation and intellectual
investigation
were afterwards to follow; as metaphysicians, in the real narrower
sense
of the word, they were, however, with the solo exception of Plato,
comparatively
of much less importance.
That nothing may
remain obscure in a matter so weighty that it strikes into the depths
of
our life to-day, I should like briefly to refer to the fact, that in
the
person of the great Leonardo da Vinci we have an example — closely
related
to modern thought and feeling — of the deep gulf which separates
poetical
from abstract perception, religion from theologising philosophy.
Leonardo
brands the intellectual sciences as “deceptive“ (le
83 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
bugiarde scientie mentali); “all
knowledge,“
he says, “is vain and erroneous, unless brought into the world by
sense-experience,
the mother of all certainty“; especially offensive to him are the
disputes
and proofs regarding the entity of God and of the soul: he is of
opinion
that “our senses revolt against“ these conceptions, consequently we
should
not let ourselves be deluded: “where arguments of reason and clear
right
are wanting, clamour takes their place; in the case of things which are
certain, however, this does not happen“; and thus he arrives at the
conclusion:
“dove si grida non è vera scientia,“ where there is clamour
there
is no genuine knowledge (Libro di pittura, Part I., Division 33,
Heinrich Ludwig‘s edition). This is Leonardo‘s theology! Yet it is this
very man — and surely the only one, the greatest not excepted — who
paints
a Christ which comes near being a revelation, “perfect God and perfect
man,“ as the Athanasian creed puts it. Here we have close intrinsic
relationship
with Homer: all knowledge is derived from the experience of sense, and
from this the Divine, proved by no subtleties of reasoning, is formed
as
free creation, with popular belief as its basis — something
everlastingly
true. Thanks to special circumstances and particular mental gifts,
thanks
above all to the advent of men of great genius who alone give life,
this
particular faculty had become so intensely developed in Greece that the
sciences of experience received a new and greater impulse, as they did
later among us through the influence of Leonardo, whereas the reaction
of philosophising abstraction was never able to develop freely and
naturally,
but degenerated either into scholasticism or the clouds of fancy. The
Hellenic
artist awoke to life in an atmosphere which gave him at the same time
personal
freedom and the elevating consciousness that he was understood by all;
the Hellenic philosopher (as soon as he trod the path of logical
abstraction)
had not this gift; on the contrary
84 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
he was hemmed in on all sides, outwardly
by custom, beliefs and civic institutions, inwardly by his whole
personal
education, which was principally artistic, by everything that
surrounded
him during his whole life, by all impressions which eye and ear
conveyed
to him; he was not free: because of his talent he did achieve great
things,
but nothing that satisfied — as his art did — the highest demands of
harmony,
truth and universal acceptance. In the case of Greek art the national
element
is comparable to pinions that raise the spirit to lofty heights, where
“all men become brothers,“ where the separating gulf of times and races
adds to rather than detracts from the charm; Hellenic philosophy, on
the
contrary, is in the limiting sense of the word fettered to a definite
national
life and consequently hemmed in on all sides. *
It is exceedingly
difficult with such a view to prevail against the prejudice of
centuries.
Even such a man as Rohde calls the Greeks the “most fruitful in thought
among nations“ and asserts that their philosophers “thought in advance
for all mankind“; † Leopold von Ranke, who has no other epithet for
Homeric
religion than “idolatry“ (!) writes as follows: “What Aristotle says
about
the distinction between active and passive reason, only the first of
which,
however, is the true one, autonomous and related to God, I should be
inclined
to say was the best thing that could be said about the human spirit,
with
the exception of the Revelation of the Bible. We may say the same, if I
am not mistaken, of Plato‘s doctrine of the soul.“ ‡ Ranke tells us
further
that the mission of Greek philosophy was to purge the old faith of its
idolatrous element, to unite rational and
* Cf.,
further, vol. ii. pp. 270
and 554.
† Psyche,
p. 104.
‡ Weltgeschichte
(Text edition) i. 230. This axiom of wisdom reminds one perilously of
the
well-known story from the nursery: “Whom do you love most, papa or
mamma?
— Both!“ For though Aristotle starts from Plato, one can hardly imagine
anything more
85
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
religious truth; but that the democracy
frustrated this noble design, because it “held fast to idolatry“ (i.
230).
* These examples may suffice, though one could quote many others. I am
convinced that this is all illusion, indeed baneful illusion, and in
essential
points the very opposite of truth. It is not true that the Greeks have
thought in advance for all mankind: before them, at their time and
after
them there has been deeper thinking, more acute and more correct. It is
not true that the red-tape theology of Aristotle ad usum of the
mainstays of society is “the best thing that could be said“: this
Jesuitical
scholastic sophistry has been the black plague of philosophy. It is not
true that Greek thinkers have purified the old religion: they have
rather
attacked in it that very thing that deserved everlasting admiration,
namely,
its free, purely artistic beauty; and while they pretended to
substitute
rational for symbolical truth, they in reality only adopted popular
superstition
and set it, clad in logical rags, upon the throne, from which they — in
company with the mob — had hurled down that poetry which proclaimed an
everlasting truth.
As regards the
so-called
“thinking in advance,“ it will suffice to call attention to two
circumstances
to prove the erroneous nature of this assertion: in the first place,
the
Indians began to think before the Greeks, their thought was profounder
and more consistent, and in their various systems they have exhausted
more
possibilities; in the second place, our own western European thought
only
began on the day when a great man said, “We must admit that the
philosophy
which we have received from
different than their
theories
of the soul (as well as their whole metaphysics). How then can both
have
said “the best thing“? Schopenhauer has expressed the matter correctly
and concisely, “The radical contrast to Aristotle is Plato.“
* O
twenty-fourth century! What sayest thou to this? I for my part am
silent
— at least with regard to personalities — and follow the example of
wise
Socrates in sacrificing a cock to the idols of my century!
86
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
the Greeks is childish, or at least
that it rather encourages talk than acts as a creative stimulus.“ * To
pretend that Locke, Gassendi, Hume, Descartes, Kant, &c., chewed
the
cud of Greek philosophy is one of the worst sins of Hellenic
megalomania
against our new culture. Pythagoras, the first great Hellenic thinker,
offers a conclusive instance in reference to Hellenic thought. From his
Oriental journeys he brought back all kinds of knowledge, significant
and
trifling, from the idea of redemption to the conception of the ether
and
the forbidding of the eating of beans: all of it was Indian ancestral
property.
One doctrine in particular became the central point of Pythagoreanism,
its religious lever, if I may say so: this was the secret doctrine of
the
transmigration of souls. Plato afterwards robbed it of the aureole of
secrecy
and gave it a place in public philosophy. But among the Indians the
belief
in the transmigration of souls long before Pythagoras formed the basis
of all ethics; though much divided in politics, religion and
philosophy,
and though living in open opposition, the whole people was united in
the
belief in the never-ending series of rebirths.“ In India one never
finds
the question put, as to whether the soul transmigrates: it is
universally
and firmly believed.“ † But there was a class there, a small class,
which
did not believe in the transmigration of souls, in so far as they
considered
it to be a symbolical conception, a conception which to those wrapt in
the illusions of world-contemplation allegorically conveys a loftier
truth
to be grasped more correctly by deep metaphysical thinking alone: this
small class was (and is to-day) that of the philosophers. “The idea of
*
Bacon
of Verulam: Instauratio Magna, Introduction. “Et de utilitate
aperte
dicendum est: sapientiam istam, quam a Graecis potissimum hausimus,
pueritiam
quandam scientiae videri, atque habere quod proprium est puerorum; ut
ad
garriendum prompta, ad generandum invalida et immatura sit.
Controversiarum
enim ferax, operum effoeta est.“
†
Schroeder,
Indiens
Litteratur und Kultur, p. 252.
87 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
the soul transmigrating rests on
ignorance,
while the soul in the sense of the highest reality is not
transmigratory“:
such is the teaching of the Indian thinker. * A really “secret
doctrine,“
such as the Greeks following Egyptian example loved, the Indians never
knew: men of all castes, even women, could attain to the highest
knowledge;
but these profound sages knew very well that metaphysical thought
requires
special faculties and special development of those faculties; and so
they
let the figurative alone. And this figure, this magnificent conception
of the transmigration of souls, which is perhaps indispensable for
morals
though essentially but a popular belief, while in India it was
prevalent
among the whole people from the highest to the lowest with the
exception
of the thinkers alone, became in Greece the most sublime “secret
doctrine“
of their first great philosopher, never quite disappeared from the
highest
regions of their philosophical views, and received from Plato the
alluring
charm of poetical form. These are the people who are said to have paved
the way for us in thought, “the richest in thought of nations“! No, the
Greeks were no great metaphysicians.
THEOLOGY
But they have just
as little claim to be considered great moralists and theologians. Here
too one example
*
Sankara:
Sûtra‘s
des Vedânta, i, 2, 11. Of course Sankara lived long after
Pythagoras
(about the eighth century of our era) but his teaching is strictly
orthodox,
he makes no risky assertion which is not based on old canonical
Upanishads.
It is clear that an actual “transmigration“ was, even at the time of
and
according to the oldest Upanishads, for the man who truly had insight,
a conception only serving popular ends. Further proof with regard to
this
matter will be found in Sankara in the introduction to the Sûtra‘s
and in i. 1, 4, but especially in the magnificent passage ii. 1, 22,
where
the Samsâra, in conjunction with the whole creation, is described
as an illusion, “which like the illusion of partings and separations by
birth and death does not exist in the sense of the highest reality.“
88 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
instead of many. The belief in daemons
is everywhere current; the idea of a special intermediate race of
daemons
(between the gods in heaven and men on earth) was very probably derived
by the Greeks from India (by way of Persia), * but that does not
matter;
in philosophy, or, as it may be called, in “rational religion,“ these
creatures
of superstition were first adopted by Plato. Rohde writes on this point
as follows: † “Plato is the first of many to write about a whole
intermediate
hierarchy of daemons, entrusted with all that is wrought by invisible
powers
but seems beneath the dignity of the sublime gods. Thus the Divine
itself
is freed from everything evil and degrading.“ So with full
consciousness
and for the “rational“ and flagrantly anthropomorphic purpose of
“freeing“
God of what seems evil to us men, that superstition which the Hellenes
shared with bushmen and Australian blacks was adorned with a
philosophical
and theological aureole, recommended to the noblest minds by a noble
mind
and bequeathed to all future generations as an inheritance. The
fortunate
Indians had long before discarded the belief in daemons; it was
retained
only by the totally uneducated people; among the Indians the
philosopher
was bound no longer to any religious ceremony; for without denying
their
existence, like the superficial Xenophanes, he had learned to see in
the
gods symbols of a higher truth not able to be grasped by the senses —
what
use then had such people for daemons? Homer, however, it should be
noticed,
had been on the same path. It is true that the hand of Athene stops the
hastily raised arm of Achilles, and Here inspires the hesitating
Diomedes
with courage — with such divine freedom does the poet interpret,
inspiring
all ages with poetical thoughts — but genuine
*
Colebrooke,
Miscellaneous
Essays, p. 442.
† In
a short summary, Die Religion der Griechen, published in 1895
in
the Bayreuther Blätter (also printed separately in 1902).
89
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
superstition plays a very subordinate
part in Homer, and by his “divine“ interpretation he raises it out of
the
sphere of real daemonism; his path was sunnier, more beautiful than
that
of the Indo-Aryan; instead of indulging in speculative metaphysics like
the latter, he consecrated the empiric world and thereby guided mankind
to a glorious goal. * Then came Socrates; — old, superstitious, advised
by Pythian oracles, taught by priestesses, possessed by daemons, and
after
him Plato and the others. O Hellenes! if only you had remained true to
the religion of Homer and the artistic culture which it founded! If you
had but trusted your divine poets, and not listened to your Heraclitus
and Xenophanes, your Socrates and Plato, and all the rest of them! Alas
for us who have for centuries been plunged into unspeakable sorrow and
misery by this belief in daemons, now raised to sacred orthodoxy, who
have
been hampered by it in our whole intellectual development, who even to
this day are under the delusions of the Thracian peasants! †
SCHOLASTICISM
Not one whit
better
is that Hellenic thought which follows neither the path of mysticism
nor
that of poetical suggestion, but openly links itself to natural science
and with the
* See,
for example, in Book XXIV. of the Iliad (verse 300 ff.) the
appearance
“from the right“ of the eagle which presages good. Very significant are
the words of Priam in the same book with regard to a vision he has seen
(verse 220 ff.): “Had any other of mortal men bidden me believe it, an
interpreter of signs or prophet or sacrificial priest, I should have
called
it deceit and turned from it with contempt.“ Magnificent, too, is the
conception
of “spirits“ in Hesiod, although he is much nearer to the popular
superstition
than Homer (Works and Days, 124 ff.): “They defend the right and
hinder deeds of impiety: everywhere over the earth they wander, hidden
in mist, and scatter blessings; this is the kingly office which they
have
received.“
†
Döllinger
calls the “systematic belief in daemons“ one of the “Danaan gifts of
Greek
imagining“ (Akad. Vorträge, i. 182).
90
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
help of philosophy and rational
psychology
undertakes to solve the great problems of existence. Here the Greek
spirit
at once falls into scholasticism, as already hinted. “Words, words,
nothing
but words!“ In this case detailed treatment would unfortunately go far
beyond the scope of this book. But if any one is shy of the higher
philosophy,
let him take up a catechism, he will find plenty of Aristotle in it.
Talk
of the Divinity with such a man, and tell him that it “did not come
into
existence and was not created; that it has been from all time and is
immortal,“
and he will think that you are quoting from the creed of an oecumenical
council, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is a quotation from
Aristotle!
And if you further say to him that God is “an everlasting, perfect,
unconditioned
being, gifted with life, but without bulk, one who in eternal actuality
thinks himself, for (this serves as explanation) thinking becomes
objective
to itself by the thinking of the thing thought, so that thinking and
the
thing thought become identical,“ the poor man will fancy that you are
reading
from Thomas Aquinas or at least from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but
again it is a quotation from Aristotle. * The rational doctrine of God,
the rational doctrine of the soul, above all the doctrine of a purposed
order of the world suitable to human reason, or teleology (through
which
Aristotle, by the way, introduced such grotesque errors into his
natural
science), that was the inheritance in this sphere! How many centuries
did
it take till there came a brave man who threw this ballast overboard
and
showed that one cannot prove the existence of God, as Aristotle had
made
twenty centuries believe: — till a man came who ventured to write the
words,
“Neither experience nor conclusions of reason adequately inform us
whether
man possesses a soul (as a substance dwelling in him, distinct from
body
and capable of thinking independently of it and
* Metaphysics,
Book XII. chap. vii.
91 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
therefore a spiritual substance), or
whether life may not rather be a property of matter.“ *
But enough. I think
I have shown with sufficient clearness that Hellenic philosophy is only
genuinely great when we take the word in its widest sense, somewhat in
the English sense, according to which a Newton and a Cuvier, or a Jean
Jacques Rousseau and a Goethe are called “philosophers.“ As soon as the
Greek left the sphere of intuition — right from Thales onward — he
became
fatal; he became all the more fatal when he proceeded to use his
incomparable
plastic power (which is so strikingly absent in the metaphysical
Indian)
in giving a seductive shape to shadowy chimeras and in emasculating and
bowdlerising deep conceptions and ideas that do not lend themselves to
any analysis. I do not blame bim because he had mystical tendencies and
a plainly expressed need of metaphysics, but because he attempted to
give
shape to mysticism in a way other than the artistically mythical, and,
going blindly past the central point of all metaphysics (I always
naturally
except Plato), tried to solve transcendent questions by prosaic
empirical
means. If the Greek had continued to develop his faculties on the one
hand
purely poetically, on the other purely empirically, his influence would
have become an unmixed and inexpressible blessing for mankind; but, as
it is, that same Greek who in poetry and science had given us an
example
of what true creative power can effect, and so of the way in which the
development of man has taken place, at a later time proved to be a
cramping
and retarding element in the growth of the human intellect.
CONCLUSION
It may be that
these
last remarks rather trespass on the province of a later part of my
book.
But I had to
*
Kant:
Metaphysische
Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre, Part I., Ethische
Elementarlehre,
§ 4.
92 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
face the difficulty. Great as has been
the influence which the Hellenic inheritance has exercised upon our
century,
as upon those which preceded it, there has been no little confusion and
no lack of misunderstanding concerning it. In order that the sequel
might
be understood, it was necessary that the mental condition of the heirs
should be set out as clearly as the many-sided and complex nature of
the
inheritance which they received.
No summary is needed.
Indeed what I have said about our rich Hellenic inheritance, which so
deeply
penetrates our intellectual life, is of itself a mere summary — a mere
indication. If we were to carry this experiment further we should
arrive
at a point where every concrete idea would become sublimated, where the
sinuous lines of Life would shrivel into mere degrees in a scale, and
there
would remain nothing but a geometrical figure — a construction of the
mind
— instead of the representation of that manifold truth which has the
gift
of uniting in itself all contradictions. The philosophy of history,
even
in the hands of the most distinguished men, such as Herder for example,
has a tendency rather to provoke contradiction than to encourage the
formation
of correct opinions. My object, moreover, is not so far-reaching. It is
no part of my plan to pronounce judgment upon or to explain
historically
the spirit of ancient Greece: it suffices for me to bring home to our
consciousness
how boundless is the gift which it has brought us, and how actively
that
gift still works upon our poetry, our thought, our faith, our
researches.
I could not be exhaustive; — I have contented myself with the endeavour
to give a vivid and truthful picture. In so doing I have inflicted upon
my readers some trouble, but this could not be avoided.
End of page. Last
update: November 8th, 2007
