# Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History/Chapter 2

Original title: Die Ethik des Zeitalters der Aufklärung
CHAPTER II.
The Ethical Systems of the Period of the Enlightenment.
After the Renaissance the study of Nature again began to arouse interest, and with it also philosophy, which from then until well into the 18th century became principally natural philosophy, and, as such, raised our knowledge of the world to far above the level reached in the ancient world; they set out from the progress which the Arabs had made in Natural Science during the Middle Ages over the Greeks. The high-water mark of this development is certainly to be found in the theory of Spinoza (1632–1677).
With these thinkers Ethics occupied a secondary place. They were subordinated to Natural Science, of which they formed a part. But they came again to the front so soon as the rapid development of capitalism in Western Europe in the 18th century had created a similar situation to that which had been created by the economic awakening which followed on the Persian wars in Greece. Then began, to speak in modern language, a re-valuing of all values, and therewith a zealous thinking out and investigation into the foundation and essence of all morality. With that commenced an eager research into the nature of the new method of production. Simultaneously with the appearance of Ethics arose a science of which the ancients had been Ignorant, the special child of the capitalist system of production, whose explanation it serves—Political Economy.
In Ethics, however, we find three schools of thought side by side, which often run parallel to the three systems of the Ancients—the Platonic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic. An anti-materialist one, the traditional Christian position; the materialist one; and finally a ​middle system between the two. The optimism and joy of life in the rising bourgeoisie—at least in their progressive elements, especially among their intellectuals—felt itself strong enough to come forth openly and to throw aside all the hypocritical masks which the ruling Christianity had hitherto enforced. And miserable though frequently the present might be, the rising bourgeoisie felt that the best part of reality, the future, belonged to them, and they felt themselves capable of changing this Vale of Tears into a Paradise, in which each could follow his inclinations. In reality, and in the natural impulses of man, their thinkers saw the source of all good and not of all evil. This new school of thought found a thankful public, not only among the more progressive elements in the bourgeoisie, but also in the Court nobility, who at that period had acquired such a power that even they thought that they could dispense with all Christian hypocrisy in their life of pleasure, all the more as they were divided by a deep chasm from the life of the people. They looked on citizens and peasants as beings of a lower order to whom their philosophy was incomprehensible, so that they could freely and undisturbedly develop it without fear of shaking their own means of rule—the Christian Religion and Ethics.
The conditions of the new life and Ethics developed most vigorously in France. There they came most clearly and courageously to expression. Just as in the case of the ancient Epicureanism so in the new enlightenment philosophy of Lamettrie (1709–1751), Holbach (1723–1789), Helvetius (1715–1771), the ethic of egoism, of utility or pleasure stood in the closest connection with a Materialist view of the universe. The world, as experience presents it to us, appeared the only one which could be taken into account by us.
The causes of this new Epicureanism had great similarity with the ancient one, as well as the results at which both arrived. Nevertheless they differed in one very essential point. The old Epicureanism had not arisen as the disturber of the traditional religious views, it had understood how to accommodate itself to them. ​It was not the theory of a revolutionary class; it did not preach war but contemplative enjoyment. Platonic Idealism and Theism represented far more the overthrow of the traditional religious views—a theory of the discontented classes.
But with the Philosophy of Enlightenment it was otherwise. Though certainly even this has a conservative root; it regarded contemplative enjoyment as happiness, that is, so far as it served the needs of the Court nobility, which drew its living from the existing absolutist State. But in the main it was the philosophy of the most intelligent and most developed as well as the most courageous elements in the bourgeoisie. It gave them a revolutionary character. Standing from the very beginning in the most absolute opposition to the traditional religion and Ethics, these classes acquired—in proportion as the bourgeoisie increased in strength and class consciousness—the conception of a fight—a conception quite foreign to the old Epicureans—a fight against priests and tyrants, a fight for the new ideals.
The nature and method of the moral views and the height of the moral passions are, according to human life, and especially by the constitution of the French Materialists, determined by the conditions of State, as well as by education. It is always self-interest that determines man; this can, however, become a very social interest, if society is so organised that the individual interest coincides with the interest of the community, so that the passions of men serve the common welfare. True virtue consists in the care for the commonweal; it can only flourish where the commonwealth at the same time advances the interests of the individual, where he cannot damage the commonwealth without damaging himself.
It is incapacity to perceive the more durable interests of mankind, ignorance as to the best form of government, society, and education which renders a state of affairs possible, which of necessity brings the individual interest into conflict with that of the community. It only remains to make an end to this ignorance to find ​a form of State, society, and education corresponding to the demands of reason in order to establish happiness and virtue on a firm and eternal foundation. Here we arrive at the revolutionary essence of the French Materialism, which indicts the existing State as the source of immorality. With that it raises itself above the level of Epicureanism; but, at the same time it weakens the position of its own Ethics.
For it is no mere question of inventing the best form of State and society. These have got to be fought for; the powers that be must be confronted and overthrown in order to establish an empire of virtue. That requires, however, great moral zeal, and where is that to come from if the existing society is so bad that it prevents altogether the growth of morality or virtue? Must not morality be already there in order that a higher society may arise? Is if not necessary that the moral should be alive in us before the moral order can become a fact? But how is a moral ideal to be evolved from a vicious world?
To that we obtain no satisfactory answer.
In very different fashion to the French did the Englishmen of the 18th century endeavour to explain the moral law. They showed themselves in general less bold and more inclined to compromise, in character with the history of England until the Reformation. Their insular position was especially favourable to their economic development during this period. They were driven thereby to make sea voyages, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, owing to the Colonial system formed the quickest road to a fortune. It kept England free from all the burdens and ravages of wars on land, such as exhausted the European Powers. Thus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England acquired more wealth than all the Powers of Europe, and placed herself, so far as economic position was concerned, at their head. But when new classes and new class antagonisms, and with them new social problems arise in a country at an earlier date than elsewhere, the new classes attain only a small degree of class-consciousness, and still remain, to a ​large degree, imprisoned in the old methods of thought, so that the class antagonisms appear in a very undeveloped form. Thus in such countries it does not at once come to a final and decisive struggle in the class war; it comes to no decisive overthrow of the old classes, who here continue to rule without any limit, and in all the neighbouring countries remain at the height of their power. The new classes are still incapable of taking on the government because they do not realise their own position in society, and alarmed by the novelty of their own endeavour, themselves seek for support and points of contact in the traditional relations.
It would thus seem to be a general law of social development that countries which are pioneers in the economic development are tempted to great compromises in the place of radical solutions.
For example, France in the Middle Ages stood by the side of Italy at the head of the economic development of Europe. She came more and more into opposition with the Papacy—their Government first rebelled against Rome. But just because she opened the way in this direction, she never succeeded in founding a national Church, and was only able to force the Papacy to a compromise which, with unimportant interruptions, has lasted up to the present. On the other hand, the most radical champions against the Papal power were the two States which were economically the most backward—Scotland and Sweden.
Since the Reformation, England, together with Scotland, has taken the place of France and Italy, the pioneers of her economic development, and thus compromise became for both these countries the form of the solution of their class struggles. Just because in England in the seventeeth century capital acquired power more rapidly than elsewhere, because there earlier than in other countries did it come to a struggle with the feudal aristocracy, this fight has ended with a compromise, which accounts for the fact that the feudal system of landed property is stronger in England even to-day than in any other country of Europe—​Austro-Hungary alone, perhaps, excepted. For the same reason—that of her rapid economic development—the class war between proletariat and bourgeoisie first blazed up in England, of all countries in the world. But it was before the proletariat and industrial capitalists had yet got over the small bourgeois method of thought, when many, and even clear-sighted observers, confused the two classes together as the industrial class, and when the type of the proletariat, class-conscious and confident in the future of his own class as well as that of the industrial capitalist, autocrat and unlimited ruler in the State, had not yet developed. Thus the struggle of the two classes landed, after a short and stormy flare-up, in a compromise, which gave the bourgeoisie for many years to come more unlimited power than in any other land with the modern system of production.
Naturally the effects of this law, just as that of any other, can be disturbed by unfavourable currents and advanced by favourable ones. But in any case it is so far efficacious that it is necessary to be on our guard against the crude popular interpretation of the materialism of history, as if it meant that that land which leads in the economic development will always bring the corresponding forms of the class-war to the most decisive expression.
Even Materialism and Atheism, as well as Ethics, were subject to the spirit of compromise, as it has ruled since the sixteenth century. The fight of the democratic and rising class against a governing power independent of the bourgeoisie, and subject to the feudal aristocracy, with their court nobility and their State Church, commenced in England more than a century before France, at a time when but few had surpassed the Christian form of thought. Wherein France the fight against the State Church had become a fight between Christianity and atheistic Materialism, in England it had become merely a struggle between special democratic Christian sects and the State as an organised sect. And while in France in the period of enlightenment the majority of the intelligence and the ​classes that came under its influence thought as Materialists and Atheists; the English intelligence searched for a compromise between Materialism and Christianity. Certainly it was in England that Materialism found its first public expression in the theory of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679); there certainly were to be found thinkers on ethical questions, whose courage surpassed that of the most courageous Frenchmen, who, like Mandeville (1670–1733), declared morality to be a means of rule, a discovery to keep the workers in subjection, and who regarded vice as the root of all social good. But such ideas had little influence on the thought of the many. A Christian profession remained the sign of respectability, and the pretence of this, even where not really felt, became the duty of every man of learning who did not wish to come into conflict with society.
Thus Englishmen remained very sceptical of the Materialistic Ethics which wished to found the moral law on self-love, or on the pleasure and utility of the individual. Certainly the intellectual circles of the rising bourgeoisie sought even in England to explain the moral law as a natural phenomenon, but they saw that its compulsion was not to be explained from simple considerations of utility, and that the combinations were too artificial which were required to unite the commands of morality with the motives of utility—still less to think of making out of the latter an energetic motive force of the former. Thus they distinguished very nicely between the sympathetic and the egoistic instincts in man, recognised a moral sense which drives man to be active for the good of his fellows. After the Irishman Hutcheson (1694–1747), the most distinguished representative of this theory was Adam Smith (1723–1790). In his two principal works he investigated the two main springs of human action. In the "Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759) he started out from sympathy as the most important law of human society; while his "Wealth of Nations" assumes the egoism—the material interest of the individual—to be the mainspring of human action. That book appeared in 1776, but the principles which it contained were enunciated ​by the author in Glasgow as early as 1752 or 1753. His theory of Egoism and his theory of Sympathy were not mutually exclusive, but were complementary one of the other.
This placing in contrast of egoism and moral sense by Englishmen, was as compared to the Materialists an approach to Platonism and Christianity. Nevertheless their views remained very different from these. While, according to Christianity, man is bad by nature, and according to the Platonic theory our natural impulses are the source of evil in us, so for the English school of the eighteenth century the moral sense was opposed certainly to egoism, but was just as much as the latter a natural impulse. Even egoism appeared here not as a bad but as a justifiable impulse which was as necessary for the welfare of society as sympathy with others. The moral sense was a sense just as any other human sense, and to a certain extent a sixth sense.
Certainly with this assumption, as in the case of the French Materialists, the difficulty was only postponed, not solved. To the question whence comes this peculiar sense in man the Englisnman had no answer. It was given by Nature to man. That might suffice for those who traded in a creator of the universe, but it did not make this assumption superfluous.
The task for the farther scientific development of Ethics appeared clear in this state of the question. The French, as well as the English school, had achieved much for the psychological and historical explanation of the moral feelings and views. But neither the one nor the other could succeed in making quite clear that morality was the outcome of causes which lie in the realm of experience. The English school had to be surpassed and the causes of the moral sense investigated. It was necessary to go beyond the French school and to lay bare the causes of the moral ideal.
But the development moves in no straight but in a dialectical line. It moves in contradictions. So the next step of ethical philosophy did not go in this direction, but in the contrary. Instead of investigating the ethical nature of man in order to bring it more strictly than ​ever under the general laws of nature, it came to quite other conclusions.
This step was achieved by German philosophy, with Kant (1724–1804). Certain people like to cry now, "Back to Kant!" But those meaning by that the Kantian Ethic might just as well cry, "Back to Plato!"