Overview of Rée’s Moral Philosophy

Reé’s theory of morality is presented most methodically in The Origin of Moral Sentiments, but Psychological Observations, a collection of aphorisms and a single essay that provides many ideas that are reproduced in The Origin of Moral Sentiments, contains passages that highlight certain features of his theory particularly well. Therefore, I will consider the two works as basically presenting the same theory of morality and will consequently refer to both in my explanation of that theory. Rée’s theory is less straightforward than Schopenhauer’s, as Rée introduces historicism to the subject and also tries to reconcile ideas that he adapts from the writings of Darwin, Schopenhauer, and La Rochefoucauld. Therefore, I will also attempt to identify the various strands of his thought and show how they are intended to relate to one other. 25 As Small points out in an introduction to Rée’s writings, “Rée’s primary [moral] model is Schopenhauer’s essay On the Basis of Morality” (BW, xx). As we will see, Rée clearly echoes many of the ideas presented by Schopenhauer. However, Small also asserts that Rée “accepts Schopenhauer’s answer to the question about the basis of morality, but not his further speculation” (BW, xxi). This is quite a different statement to make and one that is only partially accurate. Small means to suggest that Rée agrees with Schopenhauer’s claim that compassion forms the basis of morality but disagrees with Schopenhauer’s claim that metaphysics provides an explanation for that compassion. However, while Rée does indeed agree with Schopenhauer that the prevailing morality bases itself on compassion, he suggests that all morality has a more fundamental, historical basis. Rée’s proposed historical basis of morality is particularly important, because as we will see in later chapters, Nietzsche frees it from the entanglement of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and uses it to develop his own elaborate genealogy of morals.

Before going into the non-Schopenhauerian basis of morality that Rée presents, however, it will be necessary to describe how Rée does endorse Schopenhauer’s basis of morality up to a point. His advocacy of Schopenhauer’s theory of morality is most evident in the chapter of The Origin of Moral Sentiments entitled “The Origin of the Concepts ‘Good’ and ‘Evil.’” Rée simplifies Schopenhauer’s four incentives by asserting that “every person combines two drives within himself, namely the egoistic drive and the non-egoistic drive” (BW, 89). The egoistic drive is the same as the egoism described by Schopenhauer and the non-egoistic drive is the same as compassion. Like Schopenhauer, Rée describes egoism as the more powerful drive by contending that “the egoistic instinct 26 is the older and stronger, and the non-egoistic instinct is the later and the weaker” (BW, 96). He indicates that he shares the exact same idea of compassion as Schopenhauer by specifying that non-egoistic actions cannot even be motivated by a desire to relieve one’s own pain or receive pleasure from ameliorating the suffering of others (BW, 90). Thus, Rée agrees with Schopenhauer that actions motivated by the non-egoistic drive exist and that the non-egoistic drive is entirely untainted by considerations of self-interest.

Furthermore, Rée agrees with Schopenhauer that non-egoistic actions are considered morally good, while differing in a relatively insignificant way in what he considers morally bad actions. Rée asserts that “non-egoistic actions in which the acting person, sometimes at the expense of his own well-being, seeks the well-being of others for their own sake or refrains from harming others for their own sake…are felt as morally good and praiseworthy” (BW, 93). On the other hand, “those egoistic actions in which the acting person gains his well-being at the expense of others…are felt by each of us as morally bad and blameworthy” (BW, 93). His view of morally bad actions differs from

Schopenhauer’s in that Schopenhauer believed morally bad actions were those that involved the intention to harm others, whereas Rée does not appear to think that any such intention is necessary. Nevertheless, they both agree that “whenever we want to pass judgment on the moral value of an action, we investigate its motive and describe the action as morally good only if it has the well-being of others as its motive” (BW, 93).

Rée’s theory of morality, however, begins to quickly diverge from

Schopenhauer’s as soon as Rée brings historicism into the discussion. While Schopenhauer assumes that men have always had their particular drives and that non- 27 egoistic actions have always been considered morally good, Rée believes that evolutionary and social forces have played vital roles in shaping men and morality into what they are today. Rée’s ideas concerning the role of evolutionary forces are extensions of Darwinian thought, and his ideas concerning the role of social forces are largely extensions of Rochefoucauldian thought. As we will see, by denying the permanence of Schopenhauer’s basis of morality, he ends up undermining that very basis and suggesting a more social-historical one.

Rée first disagrees with Schopenhauer regarding the metaphysical basis of morality. Rée gives Schopenhauer credit for making an attempt to explain where the non- egoistic drive comes from, especially since philosophers before Schopenhauer, such as Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) and David Hume (1711-1776), simply assumed this drive did not need an explanation (BW, 90). However, Rée contends that Schopenhauer’s metaphysical explanation, in which compassion results from the suspension of the principium individuationis, “must give way to Darwin’s simpler explanation” (BW, 90).

Furthermore, he claims that Schopenhauer was wrong “to make the non-egoistic sentiment by itself the object of speculation, without attention to the history of its origin” (BW, 92). He generalizes this statement by claiming that “the nature of any sensation is clear only to the extent that the history of its origin is also clear” (BW, 92). Therefore, he believes metaphysical explanations for human characteristics are not only unnecessarily complex but they also ignore the development of those characteristics in the phenomenal world by assuming incorrectly that they did not need to develop at all. 28 The Darwinian explanation that Rée gives for the rise of the non-egoistic drive is relatively straightforward, if also rather incomplete and consequently unconvincing. He claims that we inherited the non-egoistic, or so-called “social drive,” from “our ancestors the apes” (BW, 92). He suggests that the social drive in these apes arose “from an extension of the parental instinct and [was] then maintained and strengthened by natural selection, that is, by the fact that the animal species whose members were most closely bound together by social instincts displaced other species and so continued alone” (BW, 92). Rée makes two assertions in this statement that are particularly important to examine. First, he claims that there originally developed a parental instinct of an essentially non-egoistic manner. Presumably, he means that parent apes came to possess a non- egoistic drive with regard to their children alone, because that drive promoted the well- being and survival of their children and consequently the survival of their own traits. This claim is quite plausible given the direct and immediate relationship between the survival of progeny and the survival of a parent’s genotype.

Secondly, he claims that this parental instinct somehow broadened so that parent apes no longer discriminated between whom they felt compassionate about. He assumes here that a prevalence of non-egoistic feeling in a community of apes promotes the well- being of the individuals in that community and its survival as a unit. Furthermore, he assumes that non-egoism in an individual could possibly evolve even though that trait puts the individual himself at an evolutionary disadvantage to other individuals in a community. Whereas the first assumption about the power of reciprocity to improve the 29 fitness of a community is relatively unproblematic, the second assumption is highly questionable because it implies the natural selection of opposite drives (egoistic and non- egoistic). Because Rée does not explain how such opposite drives can simultaneously be selected for in an individual, his evolutionary explanation for the emergence of non- egoism is ultimately unpersuasive.

Regardless of whether Rée’s explanation for the existence of compassion is more persuasive than Schopenhauer’s, Rée agrees with Schopenhauer that the basis of morality is compassion. Therefore, his use of Darwinism does not put him in disagreement with the main part of On the Basis of Morality, just its supplement. However, Rée endeavors to show how actions arising from the non-egoistic drive came to be considered morally good and actions arising from the egoistic drive came to be considered morally bad. In doing so, Rée suggests that non-egoistic actions are not inherently good, thereby contradicting Schopenhauer’s central assumption that they are. Furthermore, he shows that the historical attribution of non-egoistic actions as morally good depended on considerations of social welfare, and consequently, could have been made differently had those considerations been different. Eventually, Rée’s theory of how the non-egoistic drive became associated with moral goodness leads him to a different basis of morality than that posed by Schopenhauer.

Rée claims that non-egoistic behavior came to be considered morally good because communities praised it for its utility. He asserts that prehistorically “each person [found] himself, so to speak, in competition with others” because the “human being… [had] not only the drives of hunger and sexuality, which are at least satisfied from time to 30 time, but other drives as well” (BW, 95). This state of competition “pushed the non- egoistic drive…so much into the background that, for example, true friendships… belong[ed] to mythology” (BW, 95). Rée thinks that modern human beings are still overwhelmingly egoistic. However, he suggests that prehistoric men developed mechanisms to combat this egoism. In order to settle “the war of all against all within a community,” men instituted punishment to keep individuals in restraint out of fear (BW, 96). Furthermore, men began to praise people “who were useful to other members of the community and refrained from harming them, whatever the motives of their actions may have been” (BW, 96). Eventually, men began to praise people for the non-egoistic motivations behind their actions, because they realized that men who acted unegoistically would promote the community’s well-being more consistently than those who promoted the community’s well-being incidentally. The praise of non-egoism led men to behave in ways that promoted the well-being of the community, because men felt “the satisfying feeling of having done what is good and praiseworthy with [their] own non-egoistic actions” (BW, 96). Thus, men began equating the non-egoistic drive with moral goodness because of that drive’s social utility and the ability of praise to change men’s behavior.

Rée recognizes that modern men automatically associate selfless behavior with moral goodness and selfish behavior with moral badness, but he insists that this association is not, strictly speaking, necessary (in the sense that given different conditions, men would still necessarily associate selflessness with moral goodness). He quotes the following passage from John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): 31 When we have often seen and thought of two things together, and have never in any one instance either seen or thought of them separately, there is by the primary law of association an increasing difficulty, which may in the end become insuperable, of conceiving the two things apart. (BW, 101)

Rée claims that this is exactly what has happened with non-egoism and moral goodness. He contends that “nowadays…we do not praise the good because of its useful consequences, but instead it appears to us praiseworthy in its own rights, independently of all consequences” (BW, 98). Modern men, including Schopenhauer, consider non- egoistic behavior as intrinsically morally good simply because they have always seen non-egoism and moral goodness associated with one another. Furthermore, Rée asserts that social conditioning could even invert the prevailing morality, despite the apparent usefulness of non-egoism for society. He claims that if “anyone from his childhood…heard hard-heartedness, envy, and malicious pleasure called good and praised, and selflessness in contrast called bad and blamed,” that person would learn to consider egoism morally good and non-egoism morally bad (BW, 100). He cites the “diversity of the customs prevailing in different nations” as confirmation of the idea that morals are ultimately decided by whoever teaches them. Thus, Rée believes that moral goodness is not necessarily attributed to non-egoistic behavior but rather to whatever quality a community wishes to attribute it.

Rée’s insistence that morality has been determined by communal considerations drastically undercuts Schopenhauer’s theory of morality by portraying morality as a socially constructed phenomenon rather than an unchangeable fact of human nature. Whereas Schopenhauer identifies compassion as the basis of morality, Rée identifies 32 social custom. Rée does not discard Schopenhauer’s theory, because social custom does indeed hold compassion to be the basis of the prevailing morality. However, Rée realizes that the applicability of Schopenhauer’s theory depends on the coincidence that social custom currently holds non-egoistic behavior to be morally good. Thus, Schopenhauer’s theory is reduced to an account of how morality currently is, rather than an account of how it must be. In addition to providing a new basis of morality, Rée undermines the role that the non-egoistic drive plays in human behavior by attributing much of human behavior to vanity. As we have seen already, he believes that non-egoistic behavior was originally praised because of its social utility, and that praise was meant to encourage men to act more selflessly. However, there is a contradiction in the very idea that you can encourage selfless behavior by praising it. When praise gives men an incentive to do something, it unavoidably appeals to their egoism, because men receive pleasure from being praised (and conversely, pain from being blamed). Therefore, the attribution of non-egoistic behavior as morally good does not actually lead to more non-egoistic behavior but rather to more egoistic behavior that just appears unegoistic. As Rée puts it, “the consequence of the fact that people find non-egoism good and egoism bad is that, far from openly satisfying [the] egoistic drive, we never let it be seen but conceal it and affect non- egoistic feelings in its place” (BW, 142). More pointedly, he makes the following Rochefoucauldian conclusion: “from this results an encompassing state of illusion: everyone acts as if they were highly interested in the well-being of others, when in fact they are highly interested only in their own well-being” (BW, 142). Thus, while the 33 prevailing morality considers non-egoistic action morally good, socially beneficial behavior results mostly (and quite ironically) from vanity, which is a powerful form of egoism.

Rée provides several aphorisms in Psychological Observations that highlight his belief that men often appear morally good despite their selfish motivations. In aphorism 49 he claims that “our moral behavior can be improved by experience and instruction, but our moral character is constant” (BW, 13). By this he means that the strength of a man’s non-egoistic drive is inborn whereas the extent to which a man acts in a praiseworthy manner can be affected by social conditioning. In aphorism 85, he contends that “good morals are a constraint that one imposes on oneself out of fear of sickness or punishment or disgrace” (BW, 17). Here he points out the selfish motives behind men’s seemingly selfless behavior. And finally, he asserts in aphorism 331 that “whether the world speaks well or badly of us depends least of all on whether we are actually good or bad,” thereby emphasizing the notion that praise of non-egoistic behavior is routinely misdirected (BW, 53). In the next chapters, I will describe how Nietzsche developed Rée’s idea that social custom forms the basis of all morality.

Before proceeding, it will be useful to point out Rée’s views concerning moral responsibility and punishment. He agrees with Schopenhauer that there is no freedom of the will. Consequently, he believes that the idea that men could have acted differently in the past is a “deceptive illusion that commonly misleads people” (BW, 105). However, he does not believe, as Schopenhauer and Kant did, that men possess “a mysterious intelligible freedom” (BW, 108). Rather, he believes 34 that “we have received our innate character not through any fault of our own” (BW, 108). Therefore, he contends that men have no freedom whatsoever and should not be held accountable, either by themselves or by others, for their past deeds. This stance has implications for both remorse and punishment.

With regard to remorse, he asserts that men ought not to feel badly about having committed a blameworthy action, because they could not have acted any other way in the past.

With regard to punishment, he believes that men are punished not with the purpose of retribution, which assumes men could have acted differently, but with the purpose of deterrence, which aims to prevent blameworthy actions from being repeated in the future by creating a disincentive. He asserts that “the feeling of justice…arises out of two errors, namely, because the punishments inflicted by authorities and educators appear as acts of retribution, and because people believe in the freedom of the will” (BW, 115). Thus, Rée believes that neither society nor the individual ought to dwell on past misdeeds, because those misdeeds could not have been avoided.

While Rée applies his belief in determinism to emphasize the purpose of punishment as deterrence, he does not apply it to criticize morality for holding men accountable for their actions. As we will see in the next chapter, Nietzsche shares Rée’s belief in determinism but applies that belief to additional ends. In Human, All Too Human, he too asserts that retribution is not an acceptable reason for punishment, but he also uses the idea of determinism as the basis for his first major criticism of morality.

Footnotes