A Philosopher's View of the War

FEBRUARY, 1916

BY HERMANN KEYSERLING

I

THE intrinsic significance of Life’s fundamental facts cannot be grasped from the point of view of the individual. Death seems absurd, yet no mother ever gave birth to a child but in pains and pangs, and many diseases are inherent in normal growth; vicarious suffering seems supremely unjust, yet it is blessed. In the course of ages, man, through his efforts to understand life and himself, has worked out correspondences between the individual and the universal and codified these in dogmas, laws, and rules supposed to express absolute right and truth. But even the best-tested of them are not wholly true; several alternatives for judgment and action remain open in every case. It is impossible to settle the question once and for all as to which is better for the soul, wealth or poverty, comfort or suffering. Early Christianity decided for the latter, New Thought for the former, in agreement with the ancient Greeks; but classic optimism could not endure through an age of dissolution, and the denials of Christian Science sound blasphemous at a time when the brute force of high explosives rules supreme.

Again, Law is the guardian of Right, but there are bad laws more than enough; none meets all cases, and to the best, the Roman sentence, Summum jus summa injuria, only too often applies. The fact is, that man can think only as an individual, while life’s essence is supra-individual, so that no system of set beliefs may claim to be wholly right.

This fundamental truth has become clear once again to the few reflective among those citizens of the belligerent states who espoused the cause of their country unreservedly. They find that in doing so they have lost themselves and are now nothing but cells in the body of their nation, wholly ruled and controlled by forces and motives supraindividual; that this has made them fit to commit deeds (both bad and good) altogether alien to their individual character; and that, diminished though they be as personalities, — having lost in particular the capacity of impartial thought, — they live a life fuller than ever before, because consciously sharing that of a greater whole; they find last, and generally to their intense surprise, that they deem perfectly right and natural now the state and way of war.

The passive onlooker is, as a rule, unable to understand this. According to him, war is a beastly business all through, and no noble deeds of sacrifice and courage can redeem the essential atrocity of manslaughter. But then he judges as an individual, and war cannot be understood from that point of view, being, as it is, an expression of supra-individual necessity. It is no normal event and should be avoided by all means, just as disease should be; but the latter also cannot always be avoided, and once it is caught, it must follow its own particular course; its symptoms, however hideous, have to be taken as natural; the phagocytes must fight until all microbes are killed or eliminated; and sometimes it appears that temporary ill health means the threshold of a permanent state of better health.

Well, wars like this world-war are constitutional diseases; evil in themselves, they are yet inevitable at times as phases of growth. In any case, whether they are or are not inevitable, once entered upon they have to be got through with; no medicine can change the general character of their course, and the cells of the national bodies can do no better than perform their abnormal functions with the utmost devotion.

This being so, the question of right and wrong as usually posited by neutrals is not to the point. Some cell, or group of cells, may, of course, be called responsible ‘for the fact that the infection was caught ’; but then, bacilli never get hold of an unpredisposed body and this predisposition cannot be fairly called ‘quiet.’ If think you must of right and wrong in connection with this war, then the Greek idea of Fate seems nearer the truth than the modern one of responsible freedom. Œdipus was wrong in what he did, and had to bear punishment, but his career was preordained. Just so were and are the respective wrongs of Germany and her opponents truly fated,—which does not excuse them, but gives them a meaning transcending by far their immediate moral significance.

II

All great wars are truly fated. It is of little importance what immediate set of causes occasioned them. Had Germany’s conscious intentions been never so kind and her official morals never so exemplary, the mere fact of her gas-like expansion within a world packed with aggressive traditions, whose equilibrium depended on opposition instead of collaboration, would sooner or later have caused conflict; which in turn would inevitably have expanded into a world-war, because in this age of universal interdependence any serious shock to one larger part of the whole must needs upset the whole. Germany’s ambitions were no more the primum movens of this catastrophe than were Bonaparte’s dreams of worldpower the first cause of that of a century ago.

It is certainly true, that Napoleon always maintained that his was not a premeditated career; it is surely as true, that the Germans never strove consciously to set the world on fire: both were driven to act as they did by circumstances over which they had no command. Again, in both cases the revolutions would have happened, in some form or other, if the immediate causes we perceive had not been acting; the ancien régime would have fallen, in all Western Europe, without the Corsican’s sword; the European equilibrium of yesterday would have upset without the pressure brought to bear from within by German armaments, because both events were due in any case as inevitable stages in evolution.

International life is as concrete and real an entity as the life of nations and individuals; its particular character and course result from milliards of seemingly incoherent single actions, each of which yet contributes to predetermine the next, and the resulting general tendency is, owing to the enormous number of determining factors, so strong that no conscious will can counteract it. The great men of history are accordingly those who realize a given tendency completely and embody it in their personal initiative; while the failings of a particular nation at a given time are always due to causes deeper than the inability of a particular statesman or general. This greater life runs smoothly sometimes, like that of an individual in normal health; more often jerkily, like that of a nervous person; yet steadily on the whole, the local disturbances not upsetting the general balance. At intervals it traverses a crisis and this issues, as often as not, in acute disease; any bacillus happening to be present may induce it. Then we have wars like those between the Greek and Latin worlds, between antique over-culture and savage Teutonic health, between Louis XIV and his neighbors, between revolutionized France and the whole Continent.

The inmost raison d’être of all these was a state of organic crisis; they were only occasioned by the factors immediately discernible. What causes were men fighting for in each of these cases? None really knew; every ideology was proved false in the end, no initial ideal has even been attained; a disproportion truly monstrous has always been apparent between the motives acting and the aims reached on the one side, the efforts made and the havoc wrought on the other. But then no organic crisis has ideological reasons and definite ends, nor can it have; all correspondences established between what it may mean to the body as a whole and to the particular organ or cell must needs be arbitrary. A crisis like this war intrinsically and essentially means the state of disease accompanying the breaking up and renewing of forms of life which have been outgrown.

This was the real purport of that period of ebullition which began with the French Revolution and ended with the Congress of Vienna; the same is true of the present cataclysm. Life will get through this crisis as it got through the last, according to its immanent law, the general shift of history, and the opportunities of the age, and in spite of all ideologies and prejudices. Contemporaries, unable to overlook the whole, can naturally do no justice, as a rule, to any particular phase, and stumble, only too often, from disillusion to disillusion, until they satisfy themselves with Talbot’s tragic outcry in Schiller’s Jungfrau: ‘ Unsinn, du siegst! ’ But only a hundred years hence, and possibly less, this world-war will be as full of meaning and seem as fated as the Napoleonic wars seem to the present generation.

It is no doubt deeply deplorable that mankind, in its normal evolution, must pass again and again through periods of inhumanity; but there we are! So long as individuals and nations will not recognize superiority before it has fought itself through, and modifications in the distribution of forces before they have proved their worth; so long as they will stick to their written rights and fail to realize that any order of things, as in treaties, privileges, and laws, becomes obsolete some day and must give way to a new order; so long as individuals and nations are not sufficiently well developed, spiritually and morally, to anticipate in spontaneous offers and renouncements the results of revolutions and wars, and not only to consent freely to, but to take the initiative in, those changes which are due at a given time, so long those changes must happen. And they can happen only owing to violence.

Now the way of violence is necessarily inhumane. You cannot overthrow governments or wage war without committing deeds which everybody considers criminal under ordinary circumstances; it is as absurd to talk of humane execution and humane warfare as of humane rapine, murder, and rape. What may or may not be done on this line is a matter of convention, and although it seems highly desirable that as many as possible should rein in the impulse of the brute, there is little, if any, fundamental change.

Recent experiences illustrate this truth only too strikingly. Apart from all casual atrocities, and in spite of all observed conventions, there seems no doubt whatever that war is a much more destructive and cruel business today than it was in the Middle Ages, simply because the means of destruction have inordinately increased in power; the more man progresses in civilization, the more terrible becomes war. And this change for the worse appears only partly compensated by the higher personal morality of the warriors: it seems, on the contrary, that in the atmosphere of war the most cultured revert to savagery. But I see no cause for wonder in it. International life, during a crisis like this, is in a state of disease, which necessarily affects most individual cells, the fighting men. Now man in a state of fever is not himself: he is ever, whether civilized or not, like a suffering animal. This leads one to think more kindly of the crimes committed, and to realize with gratitude that the horrors of these days do not, after all, bring European civilization to a reductio ad absurdum.

III

Here, then, is the point from which to get at the purport of this war’s ideology, as professed by the Allies and most Americans. As everybody knows who has frequented intimately political circles, ideals and programmes mean to statesmen (at any rate to old-world statesmen) much the same as do the letters x and y to mathematicians: they use them as symbols for other more strictly practical values, without thinking much of their intrinsic meaning; and they use this or that ideal, they do so more or less frequently and emphatically, in correspondence to the state of public opinion. Frederick the Great and Napoleon talked much of Freedom and Right, but they could do without them as well, having little to fear from an opposition imbued with idealism. In our days, when the public conscience is wide awake, statesmen have to reckon with it very seriously; since no nation would take to and persevere in arms, unless she believed herself in the right and called to fight for some noble cause, their speeches are so many professions of idealism.

Now, at the beginning of this war, the Germans made things extremely easy in this respect for their enemies. Having declared war, invaded and run down neutral Belgium, applied the rules of their war-code all too strictly at first, and said, through the mouths of their statesmen, several things which would have been better left unsaid, they themselves laid the foundations of that theory which has proved to the Allies such an admirably moral working hypothesis ever since. Henceforth nothing could sound more plausible than the pretense that fighting Germany meant fighting war in itself, - unrighteousness, aggressiveness, bad faith, — and for the freedom and right of small nations.

This ideology still rules most minds on the Allies’ side. But as a matter of fact, however grave were Germany’s initial wrongs, her enemies also deviated all too soon from the flowery path of unselfish righteousness. No sooner had the struggle begun, than France took up the idea of revanche and made up her mind to conquer the left bank of the Rhine, although entirely German; than England undertook to acquire absolute supremacy on all the seas and to increase and consolidate her colonial empire; than Russia proceeded to found that Pan-Slavonic caliphate, which had been her dream of aye; and when Italy arose, her conscious object was to reconstitute as much of the Mediterranean Empire of ancient Rome as seemed possible at the time. Worse still: all these states agreed among themselves to make an end of Germany as such. No wonder, therefore, that the latter from the very beginning protested that in reality she was the attacked, from which belief, ever firmer the more numerous her enemies became, she got and still gets immense moral support. Little wonder, too, that since she fought for her own threatened independence and could hope to do the same, if luck was on her side, for some of the smaller nations of the East, — in particular, Poland, — she came to believe that she was the true champion of freedom, employing the same arguments against the Allies that the latter are using against herself.

Thus we assist at a show that would appear comic, were it not for the tremendous tragedy it involves: all contending nations are playing with the same ideals, like tennis-players with the same set of balls, and all have in reality a scope altogether independent of the ideal: they just want to win. This being so, it is hardly to be wondered at that most politicians are incorrigible moral skeptics.

Is there no reality, then, behind the professed ideals? There is indeed; and the very figure I was using will make clear at once, in what sense. Since all players are using the same balls, victory will belong to the balls, whoever wins. That is to say, the ideals for which we fight are sure to triumph, whatever be the material issue of the war. We are not essentially fighting against, but in common with, one another, for the selfsame end. During war, as Americans know only too well, humane notions have little hold on the struggling parties; after, none will be strong enough to withstand universal public opinion. To-day high ideals may no longer be frivolously evoked and gayly dropped again, when wanted no longer, as was the case before the conscience of the people awoke; to-day they mean forces of tremendous power which, once evoked, will work themselves out. The ideals at stake will have to be realized, one way or another; if the terms of peace do not provide for this, then new wars, new revolutions will follow, and this until they have been realized.

To what extent this will happen in consequence of this war, is a question of historical circumstance, impossible to answer beforehand. The ideals of right and justice, for which both the Allies and the Germans believe themselves to be fighting; in particular the right of nations to decide their fate for themselves, — which is actually in force up to now only on the American continent, in the shape of the Monroe Doctrine, — were first proclaimed by the French in 1793. For these they fought, and in spite of the fact that, too soon, owing to the blind momentum of victory, their warring degenerated into pure conquest and the most generous of nations enslaved Europe to a degree and on a scale never seen since the Huns, these ideals got incarnated in institutions to a considerable extent. Then, the same ideals became practical programmes once more in 1848; and although that revolution failed and was followed by a reaction unusually strong, they gained some ground again. The third great actualization of the programme of European democracy is the present world-war, which undoubtedly will lead a long step further still.

History will probably consider this conflagration as the second chief act of that great drama of which the French Revolution was the first. The latter inaugurated the emancipation of all nations, notwithstanding the fact that at first it brought oppression and even slavery to many of them; this war, horrible though it be, means the prelude to a still more wide-reaching emancipation. And the latter’s process has already begun; even now the ideals we fight for are shaping the world. Whoever may be eventually the master between the Vistula and the Bug, free shall Poland become; Austria, once the stronghold of reaction, is developing, for fear of losing her Slav subjects, a capacity for ruling on liberal lines, which may become an example to all states inhabited by diverse races. Russia has started full speed on a process of entire renewal, the ultimate result of which none can as yet foretell.

But nowhere will the ideals of democracy gain more ground than on German soil. For a good while already, in spite of all appearance to the contrary, the Germans have been tending toward a political and social state involving more equality (if not freedom, for which, in opposition to the AngloSaxons, they care almost as little as the French) than exists in America; all thoughtful observers know that if the practical part of the socialist programme is realized anywhere, this will be in Germany. Now the day when the soul of Germany will shape for herself an appropriate body is close at hand. It is to the Liberals, in particular the Socialists, not to the Junkers, that she owes her amazing strength and power; they, consequently, will shape her further destinies; there is no example in history to prove that those who did the things did not ask for and eventually acquire the corresponding rights.

Let none be prejudiced by the fact that a year ago Germany stood for oppression, conquest, and autocracy: soon she may stand where the Allies stood. No nation is essentially autocratic or liberal; both tendencies exist side by side in every nation, and the predominance of one or the other at a given time is due to circumstance. Looked at from above, the different peoples appear like so many figures on a gigantic chess-board, each keeping to a particular way of moving, but unstable as far as color goes. Each may be black, and each may be white; the momentary color decides its temporary fate. But History, the player, cares little about that; she considers the game alone, which is ideal progress, and if one figure be taken, if one party lose, this means to her the failure of an idea, not of a race; in the following game the same nation may carry a victorious banner.

Thus, even in this war the ideals at stake are by no means individually wedded to the one party. There is no doubt that the cause of the Allies will triumph; whether material victory will be on their side is not as certain. It may even happen that, during the fight or at the conference of peace, the Great Player, in one of his humorous moods, may suddenly choose to reverse the parts. This would not be the first case of this kind: at the Congress of Vienna, the same Prince Talleyrand who for so long had been negotiating Napoleon’s usurpations laid the foundations of the new order of things, which was based on the idea of legitimacy. The cause of the Allies will win, somehow or other, sooner or later, immediately or mediately. It is unthinkable that that system of international politics which made possible this catastrophe should survive; it is altogether unlikely that the new treaties to be concluded will not reflect the aspirations and hopes of the whole world; the purgatory of this war will have consumed the decay, transmuted old forms into new ones, accelerated their development, cleared the minds of the nations. Even a victorious Germany, in her ancient mood, would not dare to dictate peace on reactionary terms; it would never be accepted by public opinion, and could not possibly last if pressed. But the Germany of to-morrow will be very different from that of yesterday; the ordeal will have changed her much. Like France, like England, like Russia, she will have found her new soul or at least be near to finding it. And this will be the soul of an intensely democratic nation.

IV

There is no reason, therefore, for pessimism, in spite of the hideousness of the present situation. War cannot be other than hideous, if conducted on such a gigantic scale and with such intensity of passion as now happens; if the best intellects seem blinded and the best hearts crippled by hate, the condition of the majority must be appalling. But as I explained before, these facts, however distressing they be, mean very little, since men are not themselves during fever; and most of the horrors will be entirely forgotten afterwards, just as most healthy persons, after having safely got over a mortal disease, think little of the sufferings they have gone through. Let us never forget that this war means a constitutional crisis, and judge it accordingly. Only then shall we be able to understand its phases.

I said that the cause of the Allies is sure to win. This does not imply, however, that any of the particular concrete aims which it has put forth so far, will be achieved. It will be impossible to secure peace everlasting to prevent once and for all the violation of treaties; a single nation will no more be able to decide its own fate unhindered than an individual is able to disentangle himself from parental and social ties and follow exclusively his own sweet will; the nationalistic principle cannot possibly triumph, since most countries are inhabited in common by several races. But other improvements will take place instead. Very likely the traditional idea of a state, which justified one nation in oppressing others, will explode, giving place to a new idea, based exclusively on economic and military considerations and leaving full independence to all on cultural lines. Very likely Europe’s future equilibrium will depend more than before on collaboration rather than on opposition, which in itself would render wars less frequent.

But there is no use prophesying unless one knows. The one thing certain is that this world-war, being a constitutional crisis, will accelerate those changes within the nations and their interrelations which have been needed more urgently every year but whose formulas none so far could find. There is purpose in the blind working of History. Most men think they fight for ideals, which, if they triumphed just as contemplated, would probably ruin the world; but they will not triumph in this form. Nothing turns out exactly as we had anticipated, but the result is on the whole better than it would have been if our schemes had been adopted unmodified. Germany complains of having the whole world in arms against her, and surely not all her enemies are inspired by noble motives. But now that her real strength is known, the most formidable the world ever saw, must we not consider it a blessing that things did happen as they did? Two opponents would easily have been crushed and nothing would have prevented the German war-machine then from overrunning and subjecting the world. But on the other hand it is a blessing too that the Allies cannot annihilate Germany, for the end of that great nation would mean a cultural catastrophe.

I do not mean to pretend that all the results of this war must needs be good: far from that. Its immediate material effects cannot be other than disastrous. The premature death of millions of the strongest and best cannot possibly improve the living stocks. The hatreds and resentments sown will hamper for some time all international dealings. What Romain Rolland has said will prove all too true at first: ‘ Quelque soit le vainqueur, c’est l’Europe qui sera la vaincue.’ Then, after the long and terrible strain a reaction must follow, — a temporary downfall all the more marked as the upheaval was great. We may temporarily lose again all we had gained morally in the hours of danger. (The unequaled patriotic revival of 1815 was immediately followed by a period of sordid egoism and pettiness.) A democratization that should proceed too quickly might dangerously lower the level of general culture. To anticipate the worst: if the struggle lasts too long we may witness all over Europe a repetition of what happened in Germany after the Thirty Years’ War: all traditional, all hereditary culture may die with the death of its bearers. At first, all immediate effects of this war may seem frankly negative.

Still I do not take back, indeed would not even if I knew of events still worse in store for us, a single one of the hopeful words I have written. For the one path of progress that really matters is progress in idealism, and this is not to be arrested by periods of material regress, however long. In what sense did the advent of Christ, or of the French Revolution, work for good? Not materially at first, not materially for long; nay, it may be doubted, even to-day, if the improvement in the material condition of the world induced by either event is at all considerable. But they have changed the minds of men, they have changed their consciousness of things; and this is all-important, for only a changed consciousness of things is able to change intimately the things themselves. Mind moulds matter very slowly — this is all too true; but then nothing else moulds it at all. Law began to reflect righteousness only on the day that men began to realize what righteousness meant. Institutions as such are nothing; the most perfect imaginable are mere outward crusts apt to be exploded by the first outbreak of passion, if they do not express a corresponding degree of spiritual understanding. Thus, the perfect civilization of ancient Rome could not last, because it expressed a limited understanding; on the contrary, the germ of deep insight, sown by the gospel of Christ in barbaric souls, has rendered them fit for indefinite progress.

Never as yet have insight and its exteriorization stood on an equal level. In the beginning of our era spiritual insight was deep, but the state of outward culture was low; to-day the latter seems infinitely superior to the former. This explains the unequaled horror of this war. It has revealed the monstrous disparity existing between our outward civilization and the state of our souls. But this very horror opens our spiritual eyes. Never again will public opinion anywhere support the traditional, deeply immoral ways of international dealings; never again will it be consciously admitted that might is right. Our consciousness of things will change. And this is the one kind of progress which counts. This acquirement no material failings can annul.

Progress in idealism alone creates a secure basis for material advance. Nay, it inevitably expresses itself, sooner or later, as the outer plane. Well, this progress will unquestionably be ours after the war, no matter what course material events may take. Bitter experience will have shown to all what is wrong with us, what must be changed; experience, too, will have taught us all which of the forces and factors now alive may be relied upon as leading onward. Many truths, dimly guessed so far, will have become clear. Many new ways will lie open before our mental eyes. And once man knows what he has to do, he can achieve it. For it is of the very nature of the word to transmute itself into flesh.

We, the contemporaries of the most destructive war the world ever saw, think it often unjust that precisely our generation has been chosen for this dire experience. Let us comfort ourselves with the idea of vicarious sacrifice. Were it not for our sufferings, were it not for the woe we have both endured and wrought, those who come after us would know less than they will and not be fit to live a better life than ours. If knowledge inevitably becomes incarnate some day in action and life, it is true as well that only deeds performed give rise, as a rule, to new realizations. The Indian sages truly teach that all karma must be worked out. No idea ceases to operate until it has been refuted by life; no motive for action ceases to work before its noxious consequences become clear. A new world has never been born but out of the agony of its predecessor.