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Advances in Bioenergy
The Sustainability Challenge

Edited by

PETER D. LUND
Aalto University School of Science, Finland

JOHN BYRNE
University of Delaware, USA

GÖRAN BERNDES
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

IACOVOS A. VASALOS
Centre for Research & Technology Hellas, Greece
This edition first published 2016
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
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ISBN: 9781118957875
Cover image: pandacube, Soft_Light, fotofjodor, jeancliclac/iStockphoto
CONTENTS
About the Editors
Preface
PART I PROMISING INNOVATION IN BIOMASS CONVERSION
1 Metabolic Engineering: Enabling Technology for Biofuels Production
ENGINEERING THE FUTURE OF BIOFUELS
TOOLS OF METABOLIC ENGINEERING
METABOLIC ENGINEERING ENABLES BIOFUELS DEVELOPMENT
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
2 Hydrolysis and Fermentation for Cellulosic Ethanol Production
INTRODUCTION
HYDROLYSIS TECHNOLOGY
ENZYMATIC BREAKDOWN OF CELLULOSE
BIOCONVERSION PROCESSES
BIODIVERSITY IN ETHANOL FERMENTATION
ETHANOL FERMENTATION OF CELLULOSE-DERIVED SUGARS BY
YEASTS
CONCLUSION
NOTE
REFERENCES
FURTHER READING
3 Lipid-Based Liquid Biofuels from Autotrophic Microalgae: Energetic and
Environmental Performance
INTRODUCTION
TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE PRODUCTION OF AUTOTROPHIC
MICROALGAE AND THEIR BIOMASS AND LIPID YIELDS
AN ENERGETIC CRITERION FOR ENERGY SOURCES
LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT
RESULTS OF LCAs RELEVANT TO THE EROI OF AUTOTROPHIC
MICROALGAL LIPID-BASED BIOFUELS
LCAs OF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS LINKED TO AUTOTROPHIC
MICROALGAL LIPID-BASED BIOFUELS
 LIFE CYCLE POLLUTION LINKED TO AUTOTROPHIC MICROALGAL LIPID-
BASED BIOFUELS
CONCLUSIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
4 Catalytic Pyrolysis of Biomass for Transportation Fuels
INTRODUCTION
REVIEW ON CATALYSTS FOR BIOMASS CATALYTIC PYROLYSIS
REVIEW ON CATALYTIC BIOMASS PYROLYSIS PROCESSES
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
5 Integrated Biomass Hydropyrolysis and Hydrotreating: A Brief Review
PYROLYSIS
INTEGRATED BIOMASS HYDROPYROLYSIS AND HYDROTREATING
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
6 Transportation Fuels from Biomass via Fast Pyrolysis and Hydroprocessing
INTRODUCTION
BIOMASS FAST PYROLYSIS
BIO-OIL HYDROPROCESSING
BIO-OIL DERIVED FUELS
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
FURTHER READING
7 Biomass Gasification for Synthesis Gas Production and Applications of the Syngas
SPIRIT AND PURPOSE OF BIOMASS GASIFICATION FOR SYNTHESIS GAS
PRODUCTION
TECHNOLOGIES FOR PRODUCTION OF SYNTHESIS GAS FROM BIOMASS
APPLICATIONS FOR SYNTHESIS GAS FROM BIOMASS
EXAMPLES OF SYNTHESIS GAS UTILIZATION
 CONCLUSION
NOTES
REFERENCES
8 Hydrogen Generation from Biomass Materials: Challenges and Opportunities
INTRODUCTION
LIGNO(HEMI)CELLULOSIC BIOMASS CHEMISTRY
LIGNO(HEMI)CELLULOSIC BIOMASS CONVERSION
PYROLYSIS OF BIOMASS TO PRODUCE BIO-OILS AND HYDROGEN
GASIFICATION OF BIOMASS FOR H2 PRODUCTION
CATALYTIC STEAM AND OXIDATIVE STEAM REFORMING OF BIOMASS
DERIVED OXYGENATES
AQUEOUS-PHASE REFORMING (APR)
AUTOTHERMAL REFORMING (ATR)
SEQUENTIAL CRACKING METHOD
BIOLOGICAL PROCESS FOR HYDROGEN PRODUCTION
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
9 Production of Renewable Hydrogen by Reformation of Biofuels
INTRODUCTION
PRODUCTION OF REFORMABLE BIOFUELS
REFORMATION OF BIOETHANOL
REFORMATION OF BIOGAS
SR OF BIO-OIL AND GLYCEROL
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
10 Fischer–Tropsch Conversion of Biomass-Derived Synthesis Gas to Liquid Fuels
INTRODUCTION
BRIEF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE AND MOTIVATION FOR RESEARCH ON
FT-BTL
DESCRIPTION OF THE FISCHER–TROPSCH PROCESS
CATALYSTS
 IMPURITIES IN BIO-DERIVED SYNTHESIS GAS
BTL PLANT LAYOUT
ECONOMY OF FT-BTL PLANTS
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
11 Critical Factors for High Temperature Processing of Biomass from Agriculture and
Energy Crops to Biofuels and Bioenergy
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
CRITICAL FACTORS FOR THE USE OF AGRICULTURAL AND ENERGY
CROP BIOMASS
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
12 Second-Generation Biofuels: Why They are Taking so Long
BACKGROUND
HYDROLYSIS TECHNOLOGIES
FERMENTATION OF LIBERATED SUGARS
THERMOCHEMICAL TECHNOLOGIES
PYROLYSIS
OTHER WAYS TO ALLOW FOR ECONOMICAL BIOFUELS
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
13 Separation Technologies for Current and Future Biorefineries—Status and Potential
of Membrane-Based Separation
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
STATUS AND POTENTIAL OF APPLYING MEMBRANE-BASED
SEPARATION IN BIOREFINERY
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
 14 Catalysis at Room Temperature: Perspectives for Future Green Chemical Processes
INTRODUCTION
HOMOGENEOUS/HETEROGENEOUS CATALYSIS
FUTURE PROSPECTS AND CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
15 Co-Firing of Biomass with Coal in Thermal Power Plants: Technology Schemes,
Impacts, and Future Perspectives
INTRODUCTION
CO-FIRING TECHNOLOGY OPTIONS
BIOMASS HANDLING, STORAGE, AND PRETREATMENT
FUEL CONVERSION
DEPOSITS AND CORROSION
EMISSIONS
ASH UTILIZATION FROM CO-FIRING APPLICATIONS
FUTURE PERSPECTIVE OF CO-FIRING
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
PART II CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FOR BIOMASS SUPPLY
16 Bioenergy and Land Use Change—State of the Art
LAND USE, LUC, AND GHG EMISSIONS
NEED FOR FURTHER RESEARCH AND COMPLEMENTARY PERSPECTIVES
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY
NOTES
REFERENCES
FURTHER READING
17 Forest Energy Procurement: State of The Art In Finland And Sweden
INTRODUCTION
RAW MATERIALS USED IN FOREST ENERGY PRODUCTION IN FINLAND
AND SWEDEN
FOREST ENERGY SUPPLY CHAINS IN FINLAND AND SWEDEN
THE NEXT DECADE AND BEYOND
 CONCLUSION: LESSONS LEARNED IN FINLAND AND SWEDEN
NOTES
REFERENCES
18 Options for Increasing Biomass Output from Long-Rotation Forestry
INTRODUCTION
OPTIONS IN PRIMARY PRODUCTION
STAND ESTABLISHMENT
FERTILIZATION AND IRRIGATION
OTHER OPTIONS
OPTIONS IN SECONDARY PRODUCTION
INCREASED OUTPUT OF BIOMASS FROM REGENERATION FELLING
INCREASED OUTPUT OF BIOMASS FROM THINNING
OPTIONS IN TERTIARY PRODUCTION
CONCLUSIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
19 Recovery Rate of Harvest Residues for Bioenergy in Boreal and Temperate Forests:
A Review
INTRODUCTION
MATERIAL AND METHODS
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
20 Forest Bioenergy Feedstock Harvesting Effects on Water Supply
INTRODUCTION
WATER SUPPLY FROM FORESTS
HYDROLOGIC CYCLE
MEASURED WATER QUANTITY CHANGES
MEASURED WATER QUALITY CHANGES
CONCLUSION
NOTES
 REFERENCES
FURTHER READING
21 Best Management Practices for Forest Bioenergy Programs
INTRODUCTION
FOREST BIOENERGY LIFE CYCLE
BMP HISTORY
BMP DEVELOPMENT
LIFE CYCLE COMPONENTS REQUIRING BMPs
EXAMPLES OF BMPs
Canada
NEW ZEALAND
IRELAND
CONCLUSION
NOTES
REFERENCES
22 Principles of Nutrient Management for Sustainable Forest Bioenergy Production
INTRODUCTION
PRINCIPLES
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
23 Crop Coefficients of Jatropha (Jatropha Curcas) and Pongamia (Pongamia
pinnata) Using Water Balance Approach
INTRODUCTION
MATERIALS AND METHODS
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
24 Brazilian Sugarcane Ethanol: Developments so far and Challenges for the Future
INTRODUCTION
ETHANOL PRODUCTION IN BRAZIL
AGRICULTURAL ISSUES
 INDUSTRIAL ISSUES
SUSTAINABILITY ASPECTS
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
25 The Climate Benefit of Swedish Ethanol: Present and Prospective Performance
INTRODUCTION
CROP-BASED ETHANOL PRODUCTION IN SWEDEN
LIGNOCELLULOSIC-BASED ETHANOL PRODUCTION SYSTEMS
LAND USE AND LAND USE CHANGES IN SWEDEN
INDIRECT LAND USE CHANGE
A SCENARIO FOR ETHANOL EXPANSION IN SWEDEN
CONCLUSIONS
NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
26 Performance of Small-Scale Straw-to-Heat Supply Chains in Norway
INTRODUCTION
STRAW SUPPLY
NORWEGIAN FARMERS USING STRAW FOR HEATING
DISCUSSION
CONCLUSIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
27 Transport Sector in Ireland: Can 2020 National Policy Targets Drive Indigenous
Biofuel Production to Success?
INTRODUCTION
POLICY
BIOFUELS
ALTERNATIVES
GHG EMISSIONS REDUCTIONS
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
NOTES
REFERENCES
28 Prospects for Domestic Biofuels for Transport in Sweden 2030 Based on Current
Production and Future Plans
RENEWABLE ENERGY IN THE SWEDISH TRANSPORT SECTOR
BIOFUEL OPTIONS
MAPPING THE PROSPECTS FOR DOMESTIC PRODUCTION OF BIOFUELS
FOR TRANSPORT
BIODIESEL: FAME
SCENARIOS FOR BIOFUELS PRODUCTION IN SWEDEN UNTIL 2030
DISCUSSION
CONCLUSION
NOTES
REFERENCES
29 Land and the Food–Fuel Competition: Insights from Modeling
INTRODUCTION
BIOFUEL CONSUMPTION—CURRENT STATUS, TRENDS, AND OUTLOOK
MODELING FRAMEWORK AND SCENARIO APPROACH
BIOFUELS AND CURRENT CROPLAND USE
REFERENCE PROJECTION UNTIL 2035 WITHOUT BIOFUEL EXPANSION
IMPACTS OF EXPANDING BIOFUEL PRODUCTION
GRASSLAND AVAILABILITY FOR BIOFUEL FEEDSTOCK PRODUCTION
CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
REFERENCES
FURTHER READING/RESOURCES
30 The Impact of Biofuel Demand on Agricultural Commodity Prices: A Systematic
Review
INTRODUCTION
MATERIALS AND METHOD
RESULTS—BIOFUEL MULTIPLIERS
EXPLORING AND EXPLAINING DIFFERENCES IN RESULTS BETWEEN
STUDIES
WHAT CAN CURRENT STUDIES SAY ABOUT THE PRICE IMPACTS OF A
 LARGE-SCALE GLOBAL EXPANSION OF BIOFUEL DEMAND?
DISCUSSION AND MAIN FINDINGS
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
FURTHER READING
31 How do Sustainability Standards Consider Biodiversity?
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
ASSESSING BIODIVERSITY CONSIDERATIONS IN SUSTAINABILITY
STANDARDS
ASSESSMENT OUTCOME
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION OF ASSESSMENT OUTCOME
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
ENDNOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
32 A Global Survey of Stakeholder Views and Experiences for Systems Needed to
Effectively and Efficiently Govern Sustainability of Bioenergy
DEVELOPMENTS IN GOVERNANCE OF BIOMASS AND BIOENERGY
SUSTAINABILITY
METHODOLOGY
SURVEY RESPONSES
DISCUSSION OF SURVEY RESPONSES
CONCLUSION
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
Index
EULA
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Table 2.2
Table 2.3
Chapter 3
Table 3.1
Table 3.2
Chapter 4
Table 4.1
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
Chapter 6
Table 6.1
Chapter 7
Table 7.1
Table 7.2
Chapter 8
Table 8.1
Table 8.2
Table 8.3
Table 8.4
Table 8.5
Table 8.6
Table 8.7
Chapter 9
Table 9.1
Chapter 10
Table 10.1
Table 10.2
 Table 10.3
Table 10.4
Chapter 11
Table 11.1
Table 11.2
Table 11.3
Table 11.4
Chapter 12
Table 12.1
Table 12.2
Chapter 13
Table 13.1
Table 13.2
Chapter 14
Table 14.1
Table 14.2
Table 14.3
Table 14.4
Table 14.5
Table 14.6
Table 14.7
Table 14.8
Table 14.9
Table 14.10
Table 14.11
Table 14.12
Table 14.13
Chapter 15
Table 15.1
Chapter 19
 Table 19.1
Table 19.2
Table 19.3
Chapter 20
Table 20.1
Chapter 21
Table 21.1
Table 21.2
Table 21.3
Table 21.4
Table 21.5
Table 21.6
Table 21.7
Table 21.8
Chapter 23
Table 23.1
Table 23.2
Chapter 24
Table 24.1
Table 24.2
Table 24.3
Chapter 25
Table 25.1
Table 25.2
Table 25.3
Table 25.4
Chapter 26
Table 26.1
Table 26.2
Chapter 27
 Table 27.1
Table 27.2
Chapter 28
Table 28.1
Table 28.2
Table 28.3
Table 28.4
Table 28.5
Table 28.6
Table 28.7
Chapter 29
Table 29.1
Table 29.2
Table 29.3
Table 29.4
Table 29.5
Table 29.6
Table 29.7
Chapter 30
Table 30.1
Table 30.2
Table 30.3
Table 30.4
Chapter 31
Table 31.1
Table 31.2
Table 31.3
Table 31.4
Table 31.5
Table 31.6
 Figure 20.7 Stacking of a Eucalyptus nitens stems in a SMZ in northern Tasmania,
Australia, by a Tigercat tracked harvester (photo by Daniel G. Neary).
Chapter 21
Figure 21.1 A Streamside Management Zone along the Black River, Arizona, USA.
Reproduced with permission of the USDA Forest Service and Daniel G. Neary.
Figure 21.2 Schematic of a lifecycle for forest bioenergy. Reproduced with permission
of Daniel G. Neary.
Figure 21.3 Life cycle assessment phases according to ISO 14040 (1997). Reproduced
from Ref 41. Copyright 2004, Elsevier.
Figure 21.4 USDA Forest Service nonpoint source strategy. Reproduced from Ref 9.
Copyright 2012, United States Department of Agriculture.
Figure 21.5 Stream protection BMP system for Queensland, Australia, based on
distances from waterways and harvesting operations guidelines. Reproduced from Ref
66 with permission from the Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland,
Australia, 2013.
Figure 21.6 Hypothertical SMZ design typical of the flexible boundary RMZ forest
harvesting designs used by the Minnesota Forest Resources Council to protect water
quality. Reproduced with permission from Ref 33. Copyright 2010, ECOMED.
Chapter 22
Figure 22.1 Relationship of management objectives to removal of nutrient-rich plant
material and associated nutrient stress.
Figure 22.2 Overview of site assessment, level of monitoring, and need for nutrient
amendments in relation to nutrient stresses imposed by bioenergy production (see text
for details).
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 Layout of neutron probe access tubes for soil moisture measurement in
Jatropha and Pongamia field at ICRISAT, Patancheru.
Figure 23.2 (a) Depth wise soil moisture content during 12 months in Jatropha
experimental field; (b) depth wise soil moisture content during 12 months in Pongamia
experimental field.
Figure 23.3 Monthly simulated water balance of Jatropha and Pongamia fields at
ICRISAT for a selected normal year (2003–2004); the upper part of the graphs show
the source of the water (rainfall and change in soil moisture content), and the lower
part presents various sink components: ET, surface runoff, deep percolation, change in
soil moisture content.
Chapter 24
Another random document with
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which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete master-
work, deliberately and correctly called the Coming of Nihilism. Every
one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep necessity inherent
in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was a nihilist, and
Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese de-souling
of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a matter not
of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic,
transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever,
but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in
full. It is easy, but useless, to point to the bigness of Hellenistic and
of modern European achievement. Mass slavery and mass machine-
production, “Progress” and Ataraxia, Alexandrianism and modern
Science, Pergamum and Bayreuth, social conditions as assumed in
Aristotle and as assumed in Marx, are merely symptoms on the
historical surface. Not external life and conduct, not institutions and
customs, but deepest and last things are in question here—the
inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the
provincial as well.[436] For the Classical world this condition sets in
with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.
Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy
of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year
1800—on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of
itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted
evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the
other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under
forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture and Civilization—the
organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from
hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man
outwards in space and amongst bodies and “facts.” That which the
one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes
and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist—in the sense of
the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization—whether he wills it
or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the
garb of religion or not.
To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast
form-world of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was
easy. They could carry it and actualize it without “knowing” it. They
had over the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that
Mozart possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of
strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from
which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to
overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better
account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality
of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire.
Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an
unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a
“natural law” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are
invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or
mastered; when men conceive of the State as an “order of society”
which not only can be but must be altered[437]—then it is evident that
something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the
supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-
landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using
up.
Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and
purely extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of
Socialism alike rest upon them.[438] Life is no longer to be lived as
something self-evident—hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone
choice—or to be accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated
as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by “utilitarian”
or “rational” criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The
brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live
unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis—
sceptical, practical, artificial—alone represents Civilization to-day.
The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The “People”
means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating.
The peasant is not democratic—this again being a notion belonging
to mechanical and urban existence[439]—and he is therefore
overlooked, despised, detested. With the vanishing of the old
“estates”—gentry and priesthood—he is the only organic man, the
sole relic of the Early Culture. There is no place for him either in
Stoic or in Socialistic thought.
Thus the Faust of the First Part of the tragedy, the passionate
student of solitary midnights, is logically the progenitor of the Faust
of the Second Part and the new century, the type of a purely
practical, far-seeing, outward-directed activity. In him Goethe
presaged, psychologically, the whole future of West Europe. He is
Civilization in the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of
internal organism, intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul. As the
Faust of the beginning is to the Faust of the end, so the Hellene of
Pericles’s age is to the Roman of Cæsar’s.

So long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfilment

still continues to live straight before him naturally and
unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is the instinctive
morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms
but which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As soon
as Life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of
great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs
a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into
a problem. Culture-morale is that which a man has, Civilization-
morale that which he looks for. The one is too deep to be exhaustible
by logical means, the other is a function of logic. As late as Plato and
as late as Kant ethics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts,
or the rounding-off of a metaphysical system, something that at
bottom would not be thought really necessary. The Categorical
Imperative is merely an abstract statement of what, for Kant, was not
in question at all. But with Zeno and with Schopenhauer this is no
longer so. It had become necessary to discover, to invent or to
squeeze into form, as a rule of being, that which was no longer
anchored in instinct; and at this point therefore begin the civilized
ethics that are no longer the reflection of Life but the reflection of
Knowledge upon Life. One feels that there is something artificial,
soulless, half-true in all these considered systems that fill the first
centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and
almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts.
All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before
the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a
practical morale for the governance of a Life that can no longer
govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aristotle, up to the Yoga and Vedanta
doctrines, philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-systems
in which formal ethics occupied a very modest place. But now it
became “moral philosophy” with a metaphysic as background. The
enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to hard practical needs.
Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type.
To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Æschylus,
Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive
actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s. This
exchange is a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization.
Every ethic is a formulation of a soul’s view of its destiny—heroic or
practical, grand or commonplace, manly or old-manly. I distinguish,
therefore, between a tragic and a plebeian morale. The tragic morale
of a Culture knows and grasps the heaviness of being, but it draws
therefrom the feeling of pride that enables the burden to be borne.
So Æschylus, Shakespeare, the thinkers of the Brahman philosophy
felt it; so Dante and German Catholicism. It is heard in the stern
battle-hymn of Lutheranism “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” and it
echoes still in the Marseillaise. The plebeian morale of Epicurus and
the Stoa, the sects of Buddha’s day and the 19th Century made
rather battle-plans for the outmanœuvring of destiny. What Æschylus
did in grand, the Stoa did in little—no more fullness, but poverty,
coldness and emptiness of life—and all that Roman bigness
achieved was to intensify this same intellectual chill and void. And
there is the same relation between the ethical passion of the great
Baroque masters—Shakespeare, Bach, Kant, Goethe—the manly
will to inward mastery of natural things that it felt to be far below
itself, and modern Europe’s state-provision, humanity-ideals, world-
peace, “greatest happiness of greatest number,” etc., which express
the will to an outward clearance from the path of things that are on
the same level. This, no less than the other, is a manifestation of the
will-to-power, as against the Classical endurance of the inevitable,
but the fact remains that material bigness is not the same as
metaphysical majesty of achievement. The former lacks depth, lacks
that which former men had called God. The Faustian world-feeling of
deed, which had been efficient in every great man from the
Hohenstaufen and the Welf to Frederick the Great, Goethe and
Napoleon, smoothes itself down to a philosophy of work. Whether
such a philosophy attacks or defends work does not affect its inward
value. The Culture-idea of Deed and the Civilization-idea of Work are
related as the attitude of Æschylus’s Prometheus and that of
Diogenes. The one suffers and bears, the other lolls. It was deeds of
science that Galileo, Kepler and Newton performed, but it is scientific
work that the modern physicist carries out. And, in spite of all the
great words from Schopenhauer to Shaw, it is the plebeian morale of
every day and “sound human reason” that is the basis of all our
expositions and discussions of Life.

VI

Each Culture, further, has its own mode of spiritual extinction,

which is that which follows of necessity from its life as a whole. And
hence Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism are morphologically
equivalent as end-phenomena.
For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has
always been misunderstood. It was not a Puritan movement like, for
instance, Islamism and Jansenism, not a Reformation as the
Dionysiac wave was for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally,
not a religion like the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the
Apostle Paul,[440] but a final and purely practical world-sentiment of
tired megalopolitans who had a closed-off Culture behind them and
no future before them. It was the basic feeling of the Indian
Civilization and as such both equivalent to and “contemporary” with
Stoicism and Socialism. The quintessence of this thoroughly worldly
and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the famous sermon
near Benares, the Four Noble Truths that won the prince-philosopher
his first adherents.[441] Its roots lay in the rationalist-atheistic Sankhya
philosophy, the world-view of which it tacitly accepts, just as the
social ethic of the 19th Century comes from the Sensualism and
Materialism of the 18th and the Stoa (in spite of its superficial
exploitation of Heraclitus) is derived from Protagoras and the
Sophists. In each case it is the all-power of Reason that is the
starting-point from which to discuss morale, and religion (in the
sense of belief in anything metaphysical) does not enter into the
matter. Nothing could be more irreligious than these systems in their
original forms—and it is these, and not derivatives of them belonging
to later stages of the Civilizations, that concern us here.
Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic
problems; only self and the conduct of actual life are important to it.
And it definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the
Indian psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western
psychologist and the Western “Socialist” of to-day, who reduce the
inward man to a bundle of sensations and an aggregation of
electrochemical energies. The teacher Nagasena tells King
Milinda[442] that the parts of the car in which he is journeying are not
the car itself, that “car” is only a word and that so also is the soul.
The spiritual elements are designated Skandhas, groups, and are
impermanent. Here is complete correspondence with the ideas of
association-psychology, and in fact the doctrines of Buddha contain
much materialism.[443] As the Stoic appropriated Heraclitus’s idea of
Logos and flattened it to a materialist sense, as the Socialism based
on Darwin has mechanicalized (with the aid of Hegel) Goethe’s deep
idea of development, so Buddhism treated the Brahman notion of
Karma, the idea (hardly achievable in our thought) of a being actively
completing itself. Often enough it regarded this quite materially as a
world-stuff under transformation.
What we have before us is three forms of Nihilism, using the word
in Nietzsche’s sense. In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the
religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through
the centuries, are undone; yet even in this last act, this self-
repudiation, each several Culture employs the prime-symbol of its
whole existence. The Faustian nihilist—Ibsen or Nietzsche, Marx or
Wagner—shatters the ideals. The Apollinian—Epicurus or
Antisthenes or Zeno—watches them crumble before his eyes. And
the Indian withdraws from their presence into himself. Stoicism is
directed to individual self-management, to statuesque and purely
present being, without regard to future or past or neighbour.
Socialism is the dynamic treatment of the same theme; it is
defensive like Stoicism, but what it defends is not the pose but the
working-out of the life; and more, it is offensive-defensive, for with a
powerful thrust into distance it spreads itself into all future and over
all mankind, which shall be brought under one single regimen.
Buddhism, which only a mere dabbler in religious research could
compare with Christianity,[444] is hardly reproducible in words of the
Western languages. But it is permissible to speak of a Stoic Nirvana
and point to the figure of Diogenes, and even the notion of a
Socialist Nirvana has its justification in so far that European
weariness covers its flight from the struggle for existence under
catchwords of world-peace, Humanity and brotherhood of Man. Still,
none of this comes anywhere near the strange profundity of the
Buddhist conception of Nirvana. It would seem as though the soul of
an old Culture, when from its last refinements it is passing into death,
clings, as it were, jealously to the property that is most essentially its
own, to its form-content and the innate prime-symbol. There is
nothing in Buddhism that could be regarded as “Christian,” nothing in
Stoicism that is to be found in the Islam of A.D. 1000, nothing that
Confucius shares with Socialism. The phrase “si duo faciunt idem,
non est idem”—which ought to appear at the head of every historical
work that deals with living and uniquely-occurring Becomings and
not with logically, causally and numerically comprehensible Becomes
—is specially applicable to these final expressions of Culture-
movements. In all Civilizations being ceases to be suffused with soul
and comes to be suffused with intellect, but in each several
Civilization the intellect is of a particular structure and subject to the
form-language of a particular symbolism. And just because of all this
individualness of the Being which, working in the unconscious,
fashions the last-phase creations on the historical surface,
relationship of the instances to one another in point of historical
position becomes decisively important. What they bring to
expression is different in each case, but the fact that they bring it to
expression so marks them as “contemporary” with one another. The
Buddhistic abnegation of full resolute life has a Stoic flavour, the
Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavour. Allusion has
already been made to the affinity between the Katharsis of the Attic
drama and the Nirvana-idea. One’s feeling is that ethical Socialism,
although a century has already been given to its development, has
not yet reached the clear hard resigned form of its own that it will
finally possess. Probably the next decades will impart to it the ripe
formulation that Chrysippus imparted to the Stoa. But even now
there is a look of the Stoa in Socialism, when it is that of the higher
order and the narrower appeal, when its tendency is the Roman-
Prussian and entirely unpopular tendency to self-discipline and self-
renunciation from sense of great duty; and a look of Buddhism in its
contempt for momentary ease and carpe diem. And, on the other
hand, it has unmistakably the Epicurean look in that mode of it which
alone makes it effective downward and outward as a popular ideal,
in which it is a hedonism (not indeed of each-for-himself, but) of
individuals in the name of all.
Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its
existence. All living forms in which it expresses itself—all arts,
doctrines, customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds,
all ornament, every column and verse and idea—are ultimately
religious, and must be so. But from the setting-in of Civilization they
cannot be so any longer. As the essence of every Culture is religion,
so—and consequently—the essence of every Civilization is irreligion
—the two words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the
creativeness of Manet as against Velasquez, of Wagner as against
Haydn, of Lysippus as against Phidias, of Theocritus as against
Pindar, knows not what the best means in art. Even Rococo in its
worldliest creations is still religious. But the buildings of Rome, even
when they are temples, are irreligious; the one touch of religious
architecture that there was in old Rome was the intrusive Magian-
souled Pantheon, first of the mosques. The megalopolis itself, as
against the old Culture-towns—Alexandria as against Athens, Paris
as against Bruges, Berlin as against Nürnberg—is irreligious[445]
down to the last detail, down to the look of the streets, the dry
intelligence of the faces.[446] And, correspondingly, the ethical
sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis are
irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world-feeling
become irreligious; “Christianity,” so called (and qualified even as
“true Christianity”), is always on the lips of the English Socialist, to
whom it seems to be something in the nature of a “dogma-less
morale.” Stoicism also was irreligious as compared with Orphic
religion, and Buddhism as compared with Vedic, and it is of no
importance whatever that the Roman Stoic approved and conformed
to Emperor-worship, that the later Buddhist sincerely denied his
atheism, or that the Socialist calls himself an earnest Freethinker or
even goes on believing in God.
It is this extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually
tells upon even the most insignificant element in a man’s being, that
becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from
the Culture to the Civilization, the Climacteric of the Culture, as I
have already called it, the time of change in which a mankind loses
its spiritual fruitfulness for ever, and building takes the place of
begetting. Unfruitfulness—understanding the word in all its direct
seriousness—marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of
fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical
symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction
of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great
style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and
“race-suicide” of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not
peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored—and of
course not remedied—in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.[447]

VII

As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual

creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every decline-
time founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the
fluid megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass (οἱ πολλοί, as
Athens called it) that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that
was sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in
towns. They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome,
the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the
“educated” man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual
mediocrity and a church of advertisement;[448] the man of the theatres
and places of amusement, of sport and “best-sellers.” It is this late-
appearing mass and not “mankind” that is the object of Stoic and
Socialist propaganda, and one could match it with equivalent
phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire, Buddhist India and
Confucian China.
 Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the
Diatribe.[449] First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an
efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian
through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far-ranging
Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the small
and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansion-
element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of
outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also.
Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must
not confuse this hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-
power. All it means is that creative inner life is at an end and
intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward
effect in the space of the City. Diatribe belongs necessarily to the
“religion of the irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure
of souls” takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the
Classical rhetoric, and the Western journalism. It appeals not to the
best but to the most, and it values its means according to the
number of successes obtained by them. It substitutes for the old
thoughtfulness an intellectual male-prostitution by speech and
writing, which fills and dominates the halls and the market-places of
the megalopolis. As the whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical,
so the social-ethic system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is
journalistic. If Christianity in its original expansion became involved
with this spiritual prostitution, it must not be confounded with it. The
essential point of Christian missionarism has almost always been
missed.[450] Primitive Christianity was a Magian religion and the soul
of its Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact
or depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul[451] that—against
the determined opposition of the original community, as we all know
—introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the
Imperium Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have
been, it sufficed to make him outwardly a part of the Classical
Civilization. Jesus had drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants,
Paul devoted himself to the market-places of the great cities and the
megalopolitan form of propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the
heath or country-side) survives to this day to tell us who it was that
this propaganda affected last. What a difference, indeed what
diametrical opposition, between Paul and Boniface the passionate
Faustian of woods and lone valleys, the joyous cultivating
Cistercians, the Teutonic Knights of the Slavonic East! Here was
youth once more, blossoming and yearning in a peasant landscape,
and not until the 19th Century, when that landscape and all
pertaining to it had aged into a world based on the megalopolis and
inhabited by the masses, did Diatribe appear in it. A true peasantry
enters into the field of view of Socialism as little as it did into those of
Buddha and the Stoa. It is only now, in the Western megalopolis, that
the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in Christian or anti-
Christian, social or theosophical “causes,” Free Thought or the
making of religious fancy-ware.
This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life—that is,
life as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead
of as Destiny—is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with
which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and
hygiene. Alcohol-questions and Vegetarianism are treated with
religious earnestness—such, apparently, being the gravest problems
that the “men of the New Order,” the generations of frog-perspective,
are capable of tackling. Religions, as they are when they stand new-
born on the threshold of the new Culture—the Vedic, the Orphic, the
Christianity of Jesus and the Faustian Christianity of the old
Germany of chivalry—would have felt it degradation even to glance
at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one rises to them. Buddhism is
unthinkable without a bodily diet to match its spiritual diet, and
amongst the Sophists, in the circle of Antisthenes, in the Stoa and
amongst the Sceptics such questions became ever more and more
prominent. Even Aristotle wrote on the alcohol-question, and a whole
series of philosophers took up that of vegetarianism. And the only
difference between Apollinian and Faustian methods here is that the
Cynic theorized about his own digestion while Shaw treats of
“everybody’s.” The one disinterests himself, the other dictates. Even
Nietzsche, as we know, handled such questions with relish in his
Ecce Homo.

VIII
 Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the
economic movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of
Civilization-ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its
enemies as a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all
Socialists, wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even
resistance to it wears its form.
Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late
period were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body,
has a Stoic soul. The genuine Roman, the very man who fought
Stoicism hardest, was a Stoic of a stricter sort than ever a Greek
was. The Latin language of the last centuries before Christ was the
mightiest of Stoic creations.
Ethical Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a life-
feeling under the aspect of Aims;[452] for the directional movement of
Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form
of an intellectual machinery of means and end. Direction is the living,
aim the dead. The passionate energy of the advance is generically
Faustian, the mechanical remainder—“Progress”—is specifically
Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. And of the
two it is the generic quality that distinguishes Socialism from
Buddhism and Stoicism; these, with their respective ideals of
Nirvana and Ataraxia, are no less mechanical in design than
Socialism is, but they know nothing of the latter’s dynamic energy of
expansion, of its will-to-infinity, of its passion of the third dimension.
In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is not a
system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of
will-to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The aim is through
and through imperialist; welfare, but welfare in the expansive sense,
the welfare not of the diseased but of the energetic man who ought
to be given and must be given freedom to do, regardless of
obstacles of wealth, birth and tradition. Amongst us, sentimental
morale, morale directed to happiness and usefulness, is never the
final instinct, however we may persuade ourselves otherwise. The
head and front of moral modernity must ever be Kant, who (in this
respect Rousseau’s pupil) excludes from his ethics the motive of
Compassion and lays down the formula “Act, so that....” All ethic in
this style expresses and is meant to express the will-to-infinity, and
this will demands conquest of the moment, the present, and the
foreground of life. In place of the Socratic formula “Knowledge is
Virtue” we have, even in Bacon, the formula “Knowledge is Power.”
The Stoic takes the world as he finds it, but the Socialist wants to
organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own
spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would
have the whole world bear the form of his view, thus transferring the
idea of the “Critique of Pure Reason” into the ethical field. This is the
ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative, which he brings to
bear in political, social and economic matters alike—act as though
the maxims that you practise were to become by your will the law for
all. And this tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the
shallowest phenomena of the time.
It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As
in China and in Egypt, life only counts in so far as it is deed. And it is
the mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the
concept of work as commonly understood, the civilised form of
Faustian effecting. This morale, the insistent tendency to give to Life
the most active forms imaginable, is stronger than reason, whose
moral programs—be they never so reverenced, inwardly believed or
ardently championed—are only effective in so far as they either lie,
or are mistakenly supposed to lie, in the direction of this force.
Otherwise they remain mere words. We have to distinguish, in all
modernism, between the popular side with its dolce far niente, its
solicitude for health, happiness, freedom from care, and universal
peace—in a word, its supposedly Christian ideals—and the higher
Ethos which values deeds only, which (like everything else that is
Faustian) is neither understood nor desired by the masses, which
grandly idealizes the Aim and therefore Work. If we would set
against the Roman “panem et circenses” (the final life-symbol of
Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at bottom, of Indian existence also)
some corresponding symbol of the North (and of Old China and
Egypt) it would be the “Right to Work.” This was the basis of Fichte’s
thoroughly Prussian (and now European) conception of State-
Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will culminate
in the Duty to Work.
 Think, lastly, of the Napoleonic in it, the "ære perennius," the will-
to-duration. Apollinian man looked back to a Golden Age; this
relieved him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come.
The Socialist—the dying Faust of Part II—is the man of historical
care, who feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the
happiness of the moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical
spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future,
but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the
Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—
arrows of yearning to the other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every
great man has linked his life to an eternal morning. Alexander’s life
was a wondrous paroxysm, a dream which conjured up the Homeric
ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life was an immense toil, not for
himself nor for France, but for the Future.
It is well, at this point, to recall once more that each of the different
great Cultures has pictured world-history in its own special way.
Classical man only saw himself and his fortunes as statically present
with himself, and did not ask “whence” or “whither.” Universal history
was for him an impossible notion. This is the static way of looking at
history. Magian man sees it as the great cosmic drama of creation
and foundering, the struggle between Soul and Spirit, Good and Evil,
God and Devil—a strictly-defined happening with, as its culmination,
one single Peripeteia—the appearance of the Saviour. Faustian man
sees in history a tense unfolding towards an aim; its “ancient-
mediæval-modern” sequence is a dynamic image. He cannot picture
history to himself in any other way. This scheme of three parts is not
indeed world-history as such, general world-history. But it is the
image of world-history as it is conceived in the Faustian style. It
begins to be true and consistent with the beginning of the Western
Culture and ceases with its ceasing; and Socialism in the highest
sense is logically the crown of it, the form of its conclusive state that
has been implicit in it from Gothic onwards.
And here Socialism—in contrast to Stoicism and Buddhism—
becomes tragic. It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so
completely clear and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed,
what transvalued, loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as
he comes to discuss the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence
is unanswerable, but his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air.
It is the same with Ibsen—“Brand” and “Rosmersholm,” “Emperor
and Galilean” and “Master-builder”—and with Hebbel, with Wagner
and with everyone else. And therein lies a deep necessity; for, from
Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in
anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to
an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and
of the dynamic force and insistence that had expressed itself in
world-historical visions of the future—visions of millennial scope—
nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion yearning to
create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and nothing
but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its
inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And
so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity,
even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life. There is
something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization,
so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of
philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom. For deep down
beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this
hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may not and cannot rest to
deceive itself. This is the tragic situation—the inversion of the Hamlet
motive—that produced Nietzsche’s strained conception of a “return,”
which nobody really believed but he himself clutched fast lest the
feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This Life’s lie is the
foundation of Bayreuth—which would be something whereas
Pergamum was something—and a thread of it runs through the
entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which
forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final
implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity
of its own existence.

IX

It remains, now, to say a word as to the morphology of a history of

philosophy.
There is no such thing as Philosophy “in itself.” Every Culture has
its own philosophy, which is a part of its total symbolic expression
and forms with its posing of problems and methods of thought an
intellectual ornamentation that is closely related to that of
architecture and the arts of form. From the high and distant
standpoint it matters very little what “truths” thinkers have managed
to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in
every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms
that are the basic elements. Infinitely more important than the
answers are the questions—the choice of them, the inner form of
them. For it is the particular way in which a macrocosm presents
itself to the understanding man of a particular Culture that
determines a priori the whole necessity of asking them, and the way
in which they are asked.
The Classical and the Faustian Cultures, and equally the Indian
and the Chinese, have each their proper ways of asking, and further,
in each case, all the great questions have been posed at the very
outset. There is no modern problem that the Gothic did not see and
bring into form, no Hellenistic problem that did not of necessity come
up for the old Orphic temple-teachings.
It is of no importance whether the subtilizing turn of mind
expresses itself here in oral tradition and there in books, whether
such books are personal creations of an “I” as they are amongst
ourselves or anonymous fluid masses of texts as in India, and
whether the result is a set of comprehensible systems or, as in
Egypt, glimpses of the last secrets are veiled in expressions of art
and ritual. Whatever the variations, the general course of
philosophies as organisms is the same. At the beginning of every
springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to great architecture
and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty metaphysical living,
and its task is to establish critically the sacred causality in the world-
image seen with the eye of faith.[453] The basic distinctions, not only
of science but also of philosophy, are dependent on, not divorced
from, the elements of the corresponding religion. In this springtime,
thinkers are, not merely in spirit but actually in status, priests. Such
were the Schoolmen and the Mystics of the Gothic and the Vedic as
of the Homeric[454] and the Early-Arabian[455] centuries. With the
setting-in of the Late period, and not earlier, philosophy becomes
urban and worldly, frees itself from subservience to religion and even
dares to make that religion itself the object of epistemological
criticism. The great theme of Brahman, Ionic and Baroque
philosophies is the problem of knowing. The urban spirit turns to look
at itself, in order to establish the proposition that there is no higher
judgment-seat of knowing beyond itself, and with that thought draws
nearer to higher mathematics and instead of priests we have men of
the world, statesmen and merchants and discoverers, tested in high
places and by high tasks, whose ideas about thought rest upon deep
experience of life. Of such are the series of great thinkers from
Thales to Protagoras and from Bacon to Hume, and the series of
pre-Confucian and pre-Buddha thinkers of whom we hardly know
more than the fact that they existed.
At the end of such series stand Kant and Aristotle,[456] and after
them there set in the Civilization-philosophies. In every Culture,
thought mounts to a climax, setting the questions at the outset and
answering them with ever-increasing force of intellectual expression
—and, as we have said before, ornamental significance—until
exhausted; and then it passes into a decline in which the problems of
knowing are in every respect stale repetitions of no significance.
There is a metaphysical period, originally of a religious and finally of
a rationalistic cast—in which thought and life still contain something
of chaos, an unexploited fund that enables them effectively to create
—and an ethical period in which life itself, now become
megalopolitan, appears to call for inquiry and has to turn the still
available remainder of philosophical creative-power on to its own
conduct and maintenance. In the one period life reveals itself, the
other has life as its object. The one is “theoretical” (contemplative) in
the grand sense, the other perforce practical. Even the Kantian
system is in its deepest characters contemplated in the first instance
and only afterwards logically and systematically formulated and
ordered.
We see this evidenced in Kant’s attitude to mathematics. No one is
a genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world
of numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism.
And in fact it was the great thinkers of the Baroque who created the
analytical mathematic, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the
great pre-Socratics and Plato. Descartes and Leibniz stand beside
Newton and Gauss, Pythagoras and Plato by Archytas and
Archimedes, at the summits of mathematical development. But
already in Kant the philosopher has become, as mathematician,
negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the last subtleties of the
Calculus as it stood in his own day than he absorbed the axiomatic
of Leibniz. The same may be said of Aristotle. And thenceforward
there is no philosopher who is counted as a mathematician. Fichte,
Hegel and the Romantics were entirely unmathematical, and so were
Zeno[457] and Epicurus. Schopenhauer in this field is weak to the
point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said the better. When the
form-world of numbers passed out of its ken, philosophy lost a great
convention, and since then it has lacked not only structural strength
but also what may be called the grand style of thinking.
Schopenhauer himself admitted that he was a hand-to-mouth thinker
(Gelegenheitsdenker).
With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as
a subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it is philosophy,
the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living
becoming the centre of consideration. The passion of pure thought
sinks down. Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it
is required to do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And
the foundation becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the
custom to despise and mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical,
the philosophy of “stone for bread.” In Schopenhauer it is for the
sake of the fourth book that the first three exist at all. Kant merely
thought that it was the same with him; in reality, pure and not applied
reason is still his centre of creation. There is exactly the same
difference in Classical philosophy before and after Aristotle—on the
one hand, a grandly conceived Cosmos to which a formal ethic adds
almost nothing, and, on the other, ethics as such, as programme, as
necessity with a desultory ad hoc metaphysic for basis. And the
entire absence of logical scruple with which Nietzsche, for instance,
dashes off such theories makes no difference whatever to our
appreciation of his philosophy proper.
It is well known[458] that Schopenhauer did not proceed to
Pessimism from his metaphysic but, on the contrary, was led to
develop his system by the pessimism that fell upon him in his
seventeenth year. Shaw, a most significant witness, observes in his
“Quintessence of Ibsenism” that one may quite well accept
Schopenhauer’s philosophy and reject his metaphysics—therein
quite accurately discriminating between that which makes him the
first thinker of the new age and that which is included because an
obsolete tradition held it to be indispensable in a complete
philosophy. No one would undertake to divide Kant thus, and the
attempt would not succeed if it were made. But with Nietzsche one
has no difficulty in perceiving that his “philosophy” was through-and-
through an inner and very early experience, while he covered his
metaphysical requirements rapidly and often imperfectly by the aid of
a few books, and never managed to state even his ethical theory
with any exactitude. Just the same overlay of living seasonable
ethical thought on a stratum of metaphysics required by convention
(but in fact superfluous) is to be found in Epicurus and the Stoics.
We need have no doubt after this as to what is the essence of a
Civilization-philosophy.
Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city
has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory
proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless.
Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by
the word “brain.” And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power,
the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize
everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as
it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily
assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character. The
philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer
is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g., Lotze and
Herbart do not), a critique of society.
The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner
devotes to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy
has given rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner)
and to the problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is
political economy converted into the ethical and, moreover, the
imperative mood. So long as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant)
political economy remained a science. But as soon as “philosophy”
became synonymous with practical ethics, it replaced mathematics
as the basis of thought about the world—hence the importance of
Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.
To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher,
neither is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the
same. There are no eternal questions, but only questions arising out
of the feelings of a particular being and posed by it. Alles
Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis applies also to every genuine
philosophy as the intellectual expression of this being, as the
actualization of spiritual possibilities in a form-world of concepts,
judgments and thought-structures comprised in the living
phenomenon of its author. Any and every such philosophy is, from
the first word to the last, from its most abstract proposition to its most
telltale trait of personality, a thing-become, mirrored over from soul
into world, from the realm of freedom into that of necessity, from the
immediate-living into the dimensional-logical; and on that very
account it is mortal, and its life has prescribed rhythm and duration.
The choice of them, therefore, is subject to strict necessity. Each
epoch has its own, important for itself and for no other epoch. It is
the mark of the born philosopher that he sees his epoch and his
theme with a sure eye. Apart from this, there is nothing of any
importance in philosophical production—merely technical knowledge
and the industry requisite for the building up of systematic and
conceptual subtleties.
Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is
only Ethics and social critique in the productive sense—nothing
more. And consequently, again, its most important representatives
(apart from actual practitioners) are the dramatists. They are the real
philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one
of the lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All
that these unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and
rewrite the history of philosophy (and what history!—collections of
dates and “results”) that no one to-day knows what the history of
philosophy is or what it might be.
Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch
has never yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the
philosophical point of view, can be precised by asking the question:
In how far is Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question