Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Will and Its Responsibilities 41
wills—and they are both beyond the reach of reason. In short, Schopenhauer
was right to believe that reason is the servant of will because it cannot
tell us what to desire, only how to achieve it, and he was wrong in his
“conviction that the will was the devil and the intellect the divine saviour”
(Collected Letters 1:317). The interior conflicts that so obsess the dutybound
idealist (and afflict us all from time to time) are not struggles between
Evil and Good (our base instincts and the principles of virtue) but
symptoms of the uneven development of the will.
Thus long before he began to promote Creative Evolution, Shaw believed
in the evolution of the will from something “lower” into something
“higher,” and he realized that these can exist together in the same soul (“A
Degenerate’s View of Nordau” 356). Ultimately we do what we do because
we want the action we take more than we want the one we reject. It may be
that we choose out of cowardice, fearing the opprobrium of our peers, and
take refuge in moral ideals, in which case we substitute the will of others
for our own. Conceivably this could be done realistically, rather than idealistically:
you might dislike clothing yet abstain from public nudity because
your distaste for garments is not stronger than your wish to avoid offending
your neighbors. It is not necessary to appeal to an ideal of decency. In
such a case it is not cowardice to defer to others but a judgment based on
the rational weighing of different aspects of your own desires. “An ideal,
pious or secular, is practically used as a standard of conduct; and whilst it
remains unquestioned, the simple rule of right is to conform to it” (Quintessence
238).
So far from being thwarted by his unfettered will, a man’s spiritual
growth depends on his doing “what he likes instead of doing what, on secondhand
principles, he ought” (Collected Letters 1:228). Those who think
Shaw inconsistent in trying to reconcile egoism and altruism, or individualism
and socialism, fail to see that the will embraces both. Whether we
declare with Andrew Undershaft that “thou shalt starve ere I starve,” or
we risk our lives to save the life of a stranger, we are responding to “appetites”
that are “simply primitive facts, so far utterly unaccountable, unreasonable,
miraculous, and mystical” (Everybody’s Political What’s What?
236). The distinction between egoism and altruism vanishes when the will
is truly heeded:
It is indeed a staring fact in history and contemporary life that nothing
is so gregarious as selfishness, and nothing so solitary as the selflessness
that loathes the word Altruism because to it there are no
‘others’: it sees and feels in every man’s case the image of its own.