SECTION VI.

The most of historical heathen nations have indeed collections of ethical life-rules, based almost always 38upon religion, but before the golden age of Greek philosophy they had no ethics proper.—The ground-character of all heathen ethical consciousness and of heathen ethics is, that the starting-point and the goal of the moral is not an infinite spirit, but either the impersonal nature-entity, or a merely individually-personal being. The starting-point is not the infinite God, and the goal is not the perfection of the moral personality in a kingdom of God as resting upon the moral perfection of the individual person, and in the communion of the person with the infinite personality of God, but it is always merely a limited something,—either a merely earthly civic perfection with the rejection of a trans-mundane goal (the Chinese), or the giving-up of personal existence altogether (the Indians), or a merely individual perfection irrespective of the idea of a kingdom of God embracing the individual personality as a vital member (the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Germans).—There is throughout a lack of the knowledge of true moral freedom; either it is rejected on principle, or it is ascribed only to a few specially-gifted ones, while the rest of mankind are, as barbarians, incapable of any moral freedom and perfection. Hence there is, further, a general lack of a knowledge of humanity as called, in its totality, to the accomplishing of a moral task. It is uniformly only one people, or an aristocratic class of a people, that is morally active; the slave is incapable of true morality. But where humanity itself is regarded as called to morality—with the Buddhists—there the moral task is an essentially negating one,—is directed to the annihilating of personal existence. There is throughout a lack of the knowledge of the moral depravity of the natural man, and hence of the 39necessity of a spiritual new-birth; morality is not so much a struggle, as rather a simple development. There is indeed a consciousness of immoral conditions of humanity, yea, of a natural unaptness for the good; but these conditions are almost always attributed to mere civic and individual degeneracy, and this unaptness is confined to barbarians and slaves. And the idea of the highest good is embraced either merely negatively, or is referred to earthly weal, or is left entirely in doubt,—at best is sought in merely individual perfection.

The heathen moral consciousness can be understood, evidently, only in the light of the religious consciousness upon which it always rests. That, of the majority of heathen nations, we possess only loosely-connected moral precepts and observations, moral adages and practical life-rules, but not ethical systems proper, is no obstacle to our knowledge of their moral consciousness, inasmuch as systems always bear in fact traces of the subjective character of their authors, whereas, the popular collections in question, based, for the most part, on divine authority, are an objective unclouded expression of the consciousness dominant in a people.

It is the essence of heathenism to possess the idea of God only under some form of limitation, to conceive of God as a being in some degree limited;¹⁸¹⁸   See the author’s Gesch. d. Heidentums, 1, § 11 sqq. and to this corresponds also the moral consciousness. Where God is conceived of as an unspiritual nature-being, there morality bears essentially the character of un-freedom, as it were of impersonality,—is either a mechanical adapting of self to universal nature, an absolutely goal-less passive subordinating of self to the ever-uniform unchangeable order of the world (China), or a subordinating of the personal human spirit to the divine being conceived of as nature, with which the free personality is in essential contradiction (India). Where God, however, is conceived of as a limited individual spirit, and then consequentially as plurality, there the personal human spirit stands not in perfect moral dependence upon Him, 40but is relatively co-ordinate with Him,—has not God’s will as its unconditional law; the foundation of the moral becomes predominantly subjective and unsettled; the self-love and the self-seeking pride of the strong subject appears as the legitimate chief-motive of the moral life (West-Asia and Europe).

With the prevalence of such views the goal of moral effort, the highest good, can also be embraced only as a limited something. Among the naturalistic nations, the Chinese and the Indians, this goal has no positive contents at all, for the personal spirit as placed under the dominion of an impersonal nature-power cannot aim to attain to any thing positive which did not already exist; its goal can only be the greatest possible self-denial of the personal spirit as over against nature. In China the moral spirit can attain to nothing which has not already always existed by nature and hence with necessity; it behooves not to create a spiritual, moral kingdom, but to uphold the eternal kingdom of necessarily-determined order as already existing by nature without any personal act,—to subordinate to, and keep in passive harmony with, it, one’s own worthless individual existence.—In India, with the Brahmins as well as with the Buddhists, where the consciousness of the personal spirit has awakened to a much higher validity, moral effort assumes a truly tragic character, in that the total, violent contradiction of the personal spirit to the personality-overwhelming divine nature-entity comes to consciousness. The ultimate goal of the moral spirit is here not only not a positive entity, nor indeed even the upholding of an eternally-uniform world-order, but the passing away of personal existence into the general indeterminate nature-existence; the highest good is complete self-annihilation through moral effort.—With the Occidental Indo-Germanic nations the personal spirit is indeed no longer merged into the impersonal nature-existence, for the divine is itself conceived of as personality. But because of the merely limited individuality of the divine,—which rises to the height of an infinite personal spirit only in the last results of philosophy, not recognized by the masses of the people,—the certainty of the moral goal falls away also. The personal spirit looks not to cease to be, to vanish in the mechanical whirl-din of the great world-machine, as in China, nor to melt away into the incomprehensible and ineffable proto-Brahma or nirvana as in India, on the contrary, 41it looks to attain to a positive result, but it finds therefor no assured, firm footing; and, as in this life the moral hero sinks tragically under the envious disfavor of the gods or of fate, so also is the lot he has earned in the next world of an entirely doubtful character; Achilles would fain exchange his lot in the lower world for the position of a servant upon earth, and Socrates is not fully confident whether for his philosophical virtue he will attain to the enjoyment of converse with the great dead. At best, doubting hope looks only to a merely individual wellbeing, and the idea of a real kingdom of God, which has its roots in the earthly life of moral man, and its crown in a transmundane perfection, and of which the essence is the history of humanity, remains unknown even to the most highly enlightened heathendom.

The moral freedom of the person is indeed actually denied only by a few of the more consequential philosophers of India, but yet it is nowhere recognized in its full truth. With the Chinese, it is smothered under the weight of all-dictating State-law; with the Brahminic Indians a radical Pantheism admits only for the less-clearly and less-logically thinking casses of the masses, a very limited form of freedom; but to the more educated consciousness all initiatorily-active freedom appears as illegitimate, as per se sinful, or, more consequentially still, as mere appearance. Impersonal Brahma is the solely real existence, and all individuality is but an absolutely dependent, immediate manifestation-form of this One, utterly devoid of free self-determination.—The Greek even in the highest philosophy, far beyond the limits of the national consciousness, concedes free moral self-determination not to man as man, but only to the free Greek; the barbarian has only a half-humanity, is utterly incapable of true virtue, and is not called to free service under the moral idea, but only to an unfree service under the free Greek. Even Aristotle knows nothing of a general morality for all men.

One of the most hampering limits of heathen morality, is its total lack of the idea of humanity. The religion of the Buddhists,—the sole one which transcends the limits of nationality, and even in many respects approximates Christian views,—has indeed conceived the thought of humanity as equally called in all its representatives to truth and morality, and has sent out 42missions beyond its national boundaries, but it has done this only because, religiously and morally, it bears a predominantly negating character; in the consciousness of the nullity of all being, fall away also, as null, the limits between nations; but this morality aims not to build up a spiritual kingdom of moral reality, but, on the contrary, to liberate the moral spirit from all reality as being per se null,—even from its own personal existence.

The consciousness of a guiltily-incurred moral depravity of unredeemed humanity, which gives to Christian morality a so deeply earnest back-ground, finds in heathendom but faint and even delusory echoes. To the Chinese all reality is good; the sea of life is mirror-smooth, at worst, is but superficially disturbed by light waves which the shortest calm suffices to settle again. To the Indian all existence is equally good and equally evil,—equally good, in that all reality is the divine existence itself,—equally evil, in that it is at the same time an untrue and an illegitimate self-alienation of the solely-existing Brahma, or, with the Buddhists, an expression of absolute nullity. The guilt lies not on man, but on God and on existence in general; man suffers from the untruthfulness of reality, but has not himself guiltily occasioned it.—The Persian conceives of evil in the world much more earnestly and with higher moral truthfulness. Humanity is really morally corrupted, and is so because of a moral guilt, because of a fall from the good; and man has the task of morally battling against the evil and for the good. But this fall lies yon-side of human action and of human guilt,—lies in the sphere of the divine itself. Not the rational creature, not man, has guiltily fallen, but a god; the divine is itself hostilely dualistic,—the good god is from the beginning opposed by the guilty evil one, and the real world-not merely the moral one, but also nature—is the work of two mutually morally-opposing divine creative powers. In this—no longer naturalistic, but moral—dualism there lies a much higher truth than in the Indian doctrine of unity, according to which the distinction of the world from God is explained away into a mere appearance, into a self-deception, either of Brahma, or, and more consequentially, of man; and man has, in the Persian view, a much higher personal moral task. But in that this view throws the weight of the guilt from man and upon the divinity, the moral struggle 43lacks, after all, its true ground and truth.—With the Greek even this (in its principal nerve paralyzed) earnestness of the Persian is thrown into the shade by the, in other respects, higher theory of an inner harmony of existence. That which in the Christian world-view is the moral goal, is conceived here as the essence indestructibly inherent in reality, so that the moral activity has only to develop the per se essentially faultless germ of the spiritual essence of man, in order to attain to the highest good. Of a positive struggle against a potent reality of evil in man, even the most enlightened philosophers have no consciousness; and whatever reality of such an evil in existence forces itself upon the sound feelings and judgment, is sought for, by the intensified self-complacence of the most highly-cultivated Greeks, not in the moral essence proper of man, but yon-side of man in the world of the gods, which world appears itself in the morally better-feeling poets as morally tarnished, as an object of just censure,—or yon-side of the god-world in irrationally dominating fate,—or in the extra-Greek world of mankind, which, as barbarous, is also involved in moral degradation.—By far the highest view of the moral and of guilt, appears among the ancient Germanic nations, the world-view of whom was indeed more fully developed only in Christian times, and not unaffected by Christian influences.