Philosophy, in the minds of many writers, must be given a high place
among the causes of war, and a considerable fraction of the literature
of the late war is devoted to the problem of discovering, in the field
of abstract thought, the influences that led to the great conflict.
Nietzsche, especially, seems to have been held responsible for the
European conflagration. As the philosopher of the New Germany, as the
chief expositor of the doctrine of force, the inventor of the
super-man and of the idea of the beyond-good, Nietzsche seems to stand
convicted of furnishing precisely the concepts that have become the
German's gospel of war; and since the German is prone to be guided by
abstractions, the evidence, even though circumstantial, seems to many
to be convincing.
Schopenhauer, also, as the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine
of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on
earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle;
English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism,
as the philosophy of inconsistency and dual principles of thought and
conduct; even the whole spirit of the English philosophy, which Wundt
says is nothing but an attempt to reconcile thought with the ideas of
peace and comfort--all these have been charged with being instigators
of the war.
Bergson (17) takes a different view. He says that the desire comes
first, the doctrine afterwards. Germany, determined upon war, invokes
Nietzsche or Hegel. Germany in a moral temper would appeal to Kant, or
in still a different mood to the Romanticists. Le Bon (42) says that
nations are pushed forward by forces which they cannot understand, and
that rational thoughts and desires play but a little part in war. That
appears to be true. We cannot say that philosophies do not enter at
all into the causes of war, but among these causes they must be
insignificant as compared with other causes that neither arise from
abstract thought nor are greatly modified by reason in any way.
Consider the influence of Napoleon (himself so little a product of any
philosophical influence), as compared with Hegel; or of Bismarck as
compared with Nietzsche, and this will be apparent.
There are in the
course of the centuries books and men that, as rational forces, do
exert profound effect upon the practical life, but they must be rarer
than is sometimes supposed. It is all too easy to assume a relation of
cause and effect when there is only a similarity between thought and
subsequent conduct. Rousseau may or may not have inspired the French
Revolution. Probably he did not. The recent great war, we might say,
has occurred in spite of philosophy, and if Nietzsche's influence
gravitated toward war, it can hardly be thought to have had any
deciding force in turning the scales already so overloaded by fate.
Philosophy failed to prevent war. Nietzsche's philosophy did not cause
it. His philosophy affords a convenient phraseology in which to
express a philosophy of war, granting sufficient misinterpretation of
his philosophy. Probably what influence he has had has been due rather
to his literary impressiveness than to his thought as a contribution
to philosophy.
Darwin, as the great force behind a new and varied development of
science, has had the fate to be, in some sense, a factor in the moods
and the new habits of life that led toward the final issue in the
great war. It is not so much that his principle, misapplied, or
applied uncritically may become a justification of war or even its
basic principle that has made him so great an influence, but
precisely because his thought, by becoming one of the great
coordinating principles of all the natural sciences has given power to
a movement which has had various practical consequences, not all of
them good, or at least not all yielding fruit for our own age.
Darwin's great influence as a force turning scholarly interest toward
naturalism and away from classicism, as a factor in modern materialism
and even pessimism, as a background, if no more, for the Haeckels and
Ostwalds of science is no inconsiderable factor in the scientific and
objective spirit of the day.
Facts must be faced. It is not such influences as that of
Schopenhauer, who expresses a logical or at least an abstract and we
might add literary form of pessimism, that in the generations just
past have transformed most of the conceptions of religion, with all
the effects upon the practical life that have followed, but the force
of our modern science combining with tendencies which it fosters but
perhaps does not create, giving momentum to industrialism and
specialization,--it is this change in the ideas of men that we must
suspect of being implicated in the present catastrophe of the world,
if any influence from the rational life is to be counted at all. Hegel
and Kant hover in the background. The author of the plan for universal
peace provides us with a subjective principle of morality which can be
distorted into a philosophy of moral independence and even of
independence from morality, and Hegel must have helped to establish
the German theory of the State, although with Treitschke and with the
practical state-makers like Frederick the Great and his followers, we
can hardly believe Hegel indispensable. The causes of war are too
general, too old and too fundamental to be greatly added to or
detracted from as yet by philosophy. Philosophy is the hope of the
world, it may be, and by no means a forlorn hope, but it is not yet
one of the great powers. When philosophy is a mere endorsement by
reason of some motive that has arisen in the practical life, or is a
literary expression of views about life, it may give the appearance
of being a profound force in the world. But this is not real
philosophy, in any case. Philosophy has not as yet shown itself highly
creative even in the calm fields of education and the moral life.
No! Philosophy is a factor in the motives of war rather by reason of
what it has not done, than because of its positive teachings. To-day
we ought no longer to be under illusions on that point.
Neither
Christianity nor philosophy can make or prevent wars as yet. They have
not been able to cope with the practical forces of the world which
make for nationalism, partisanship and personal interests. It would
require a greater amount both of religion and of philosophy than we
now can bring to bear upon the world to offset the influence of
Napoleon alone in the practical life of nations. It is the Napoleonic
spirit that still governs Europe. Philosophy has been thus far a
science of being an explanation of the world after the fact, and not
even to any great extent a science of its progress, except in so far
as, we may say, beginning with Hegel and with Spencer, there has been
some development of the methods and the most formal conceptions of
such a science. It is asking too much of philosophy, in its present
stage, to expect it to preach the gospel, or to teach school, or to
direct politics, and for the same reason it is unjust to charge
philosophy with having created the greatest catastrophe of history. If
philosophy cannot wield any great power now in those parts of life
that are by their nature presumably most amenable to reason, its
effect upon those events that express the supreme force of human
passions and the totality of life will not be very important. The
influences of philosophy are academic, and presumably any doctrine of
life that preaches achievement, virility and unmorality will include
in some degree war among the interests that it will affect, within the
limits of its academic nature. But youth is inherently warlike,
because above everything else it seeks to realize life in its
fullness, and war at least does symbolize this reality and abundance
of life. A philosophy which preached peace would hardly become a great
influence with youth. A philosophy advocating the cause of war would
form a natural background for the essential motives of youth. If the
scales were evenly balanced, it might turn them. It is hard at least
to see the relations of philosophy to the practical life in any other
light to-day. Philosophies are tenuous and adaptable things. We see
them used to support opposite causes, and they change color under the
influence of strong desires. Bosanquet (91) shows us how Hegel's noble
conception of the State, if we but substitute for its central thought
of welfare of the State, that of selfish interest, may be made to
change before our eyes into the meanest of maxims. This process is,
however, not unique in the history of the relations of thought and
life.
A detailed study of the relations of intellectual factors to war would
need to consider the effects of a great number of more or less
philosophical ideas which throw their weight on the side of war. So
far as these ideas are simple and clear, and especially if they can be
conveyed in the form of the phrase, their influence cannot wholly be
ignored. Some we have already referred to. The doctrine that might
makes right, the conception of state as supreme, the belief in the
divine right of kings, the belief in the ordained rights of
aristocracy, belief in militarism as a social institution, the
doctrine that life may be controlled by reason, all intellectual
pessimism, skepticism, any form of concept-worship, whether Hegelian
or other, acceptance of the methods of science and the results of
science as applicable to all the problems of life--all such principles
which inhabit the region, so to speak, between philosophy and the
practical life manifestly have some relation to the spirit of war. In
a very general way they may be counted as philosophical factors in
war. For the most part, however, those ideas that have been accused
of abetting war are exaggerations and perversions of philosophical
ideas. Nietzsche, Darwin and Hegel have all been exploited and made to
stand sponsor for specific philosophies of war. In the new philosophy
of life which Patten thinks has greatly influenced German conduct, and
which may be expressed in the words _Dienst_, _Ordnung_, and _Kraft_,
we can see both the effects of impulses that have grown out of the new
life itself, and the influences of formal philosophy.
That such ideas
have had relatively a greater influence in Germany than elsewhere must
be admitted, but that either this devotion to ideas or the ideas
themselves have been derived from philosophical interests and from
philosophies that have played any important part in the history of
thought we may well doubt. We should suspect that the same practical
interest that works unceasingly to distort and popularize philosophy
would help to create such pseudo-philosophy.
Von Bülow (65) says that the German people have a passion for logic,
and that this passion amounts to fanaticism:--that when an
intellectual form or system has been found for anything, they insist
with obstinate perseverance on fitting realities into the system.
Durkheim (16) says that the Germans' organized system of ideas is a
cause of war. It is also true, we should say, that the tendency to
organize ideas and even the fundamental ideas by which the Germans
have been guided are deeply rooted in temperament, in history and in
the social order of the past. Boutroux (13) says that the Germans
themselves regard the war as the culmination of their philosophy. We
should say on the contrary that the whole war philosophy of Europe is
almost wholly a product of strife and comes from impulses that arise
irresistibly in the practical life. Into these movements philosophy
fits or may be made to fit, and the presence of ideas in a society in
which the academic life has great prestige, ideas which coincide with
beliefs readily gives an illusion of an order governed by the higher
reason. The fact that Germany's recent wars had all been highly
successful, the fact that Germany had learned to depend upon her good
sword in time of need are the chief sources of Germany's doctrines of
war: the Hegelian background in the light of what we have learned in
recent times about the psychology of nations, must seem to be rather
of the nature of the ornamental. The ideal of the Prussian State to be
a power directed by intelligence suggests Hegel, but it seems highly
improbable, to say the least, that Hegelian philosophy has had much to
do with shaping this ideal. Behind all this is the necessity of
shaping German life in the form which it has taken--
necessity if we
accept, at least, Germany's national temperament itself as a
necessity. That other belief, widely held by German intellectuals and
officers that war is the testing of the validity of national cultures
would also probably never have appeared on the scene had not Germany
been secure in the belief that she herself had both the right and the
might on her side. It is possible, of course, that the war has
distorted our vision so that the relations of the practical life and
the life of reason have all been thrown out of focus, but when we see
what forces have been at work, and what they have done, it is
difficult to escape the conviction that we have been inclined to
believe too much in the power of mere ideas. This may be the great
lesson of the war. We may learn from it how to make ideas become the
power that hitherto they have failed to be.