Civilization and ethics

While still a student I was surprised to find the history of thought always written merely as a history of philosophical systems, never as the history of man’s effort to arrive...

Most people think that the crisis was produced by the war, but that is wrong. The war, with everything connected with it, is only a phenomenon of the condition of un-civilizatio...

But do the activities that are directed outwards and inwards necessarily belong together? Cannot the spiritual and moral perfecting of the individual, which is the ultimate aim...

It is a picture of confusion that unrolls itself before the eyes of anyone who undertakes a journey through the history of man’s search for the ethical. The progress made in tha...

The religious thinkers of China, Lao-tse (born 604 B.C.), Kung-tse (Confucius, 537-479 B.C.), Meng-tse (372-289 B.C.) and Chwang-tse (fourth century B.C.), all try to ground the...

IN the seventh century before Christ the Greek spirit begins to free itself from the world-view which underlay the traditional religion, and undertakes the task of establishing...

THE essential characteristic of the modern age is this, that it thinks and acts in the spirit of a world- and life-affirmation which has never before shown itself with such acti...

MODERN times find world- and life-affirmation so self-evident that they feel no need to give them a sure foundation, and to deepen them, by thought about the world and life. Pes...

THANKS to the fully worked out optimistic-ethical world-view with which the belief in progress surrounds itself in the course of the eighteenth century, these generations prove...

SO far as the general tendency of his thought goes Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) lives entirely in the optimistic-ethical world-view of rationalism._(_39_)_ He has, however, a feeli...

JUST when Kant is beginning to influence men’s minds, the entirely different ideas of a thinker who had now been dead for a century, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677),_(_40_)_ begin to...

THE vision of an optimistic-ethical philosophy cast in one mould hovers in front of speculative philosophy, which hopes to discover the meaning of the world by the most direct r...

VERY important is the fact that the deepened optimistic-ethical world-view of Kant and Fichte finds a champion in Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), who brings it to the mass o...

IN his speculative philosophy Fichte’s first and chief interest was ethical. Hegel, deeper and more objective than he, aims at truth before everything._(_47_)_ While using any h...

THE fact that speculative philosophy also is unable to establish the optimistic-ethical world-view upon nature-philosophy is not felt with all its weight in the intellectual lif...

AS bad luck will have it, the two most important ethical thinkers who speak to us in the second half of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, do not help the age i...

THE attempts of speculative philosophy to find a foundation for ethics in knowledge of the nature of the world have come to grief. Ethics based on science and sociology have sho...

THE greatness of European philosophy consists in its having chosen the optimistic-ethical world-view; its weakness in its having again and again imagined that it was putting tha...

THERE are two things which thought has to do for us; it must lead us up out of the naïve world- and life-affirmation to a deepened one, and it must let us go on from mere ethica...

THOUGHT, then, which reaches bottom, arrives at an unshakeable world-and-life affirmation. Let it now try whether it can lead us to an ethic. But that it may not proceed with us...

BEING sufficiently informed about the questions which have called for solution and the results attained in the search for an ethic down to the present time, the ethic of self-de...

COMPLICATED and laborious are the roads along which ethical thought, which has mistaken its way and lost itself, must be brought back. Its course, however, maps itself out quite...

THE reverence for life which has grown up in the will-to-live which has become reflective, contains world- and life-affirmation and ethics side by side and interpenetrating each...

3 Very important for our knowledge of the old philosophy and ethics are the ten books entitled _The Lives and Teaching of Famous Philosophers_, Diogenes Laertius in the third ce...

9 Bacon was Lord Chancellor under James I. of England, but was in 1621 deprived of his office because found guilty of corruption. His two chief works are the _Novum Organum Scie...

17 Jeremy Bentham: _An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation_ (1780). E. Dumont (1759-1828) of Geneva, an admirer of Bentham who was domiciled in England, rep...

30 The freely thinking, anti-dogmatic religiousness of Socinianism had maintained itself chiefly in Poland, Holland, Hungary, England, and North America. Its closer adherents ca...

43 The greatest representatives of Gnosticism are Basilides, Valentinus, and Marcion, all three living in the first half of the second century B.C. At the beginning of that cent...

46 D. E. Schleiermacher: _Discourses on Religion for the Educated among its Contemners_ (1799); _Monologues_ (1800); _Outlines of a Critique of Moral Philosophy down to the Pres...

47 Friedrich Hegel: _Phenomenology of the Spirit_ (1807); _The Science of Logic_ (3 vols., 1812-26); _Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences_ (1817); _The Philosophy of Law_...

50 F. E. Beneke: _Prolegomena to a Physiology of Morals_ (1822); _The Natural System of Practical Philosophy_ (3 vols., 1837-40). By his appearance as a champion of utilitariani...

68 What Schopenhauer wrote after this, his chief work, which was printed when he was thirty, are only appendixes and popular explanations of it: _Concerning the Will in Nature_...

94 “Toute idée enveloppe un élément impulsif; nulle idée n’est un état simplement représentatif.” (Every idea contains an element of impulse; no idea is merely a condition of re...

105 This book dates from about the eleventh century A.D. It has been translated into English by James Legge (_Sacred Books of the East_, 1891) and by T. Susuki and P. Carus (Chi...