The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenhauer

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:28 pm

Part 1 of 8

FOURTH BOOK: THE WORLD AS WILL. SECOND ASPECT

With the Attainment of Self-Knowledge, Affirmation and Denial of the Will-to-Live


Tempore quo cognitio simul advenit, amor e medio supersurrexit.
Oupnek'hat, studio Anquetil Duperron, Vol. ii. p. 216.

("The moment knowledge appeared on the scene, thence arose
desire." [Tr.])


53.

The last part of our discussion proclaims itself as the most serious, for it concerns the actions of men, the subject of direct interest to everyone, and one which can be foreign or indifferent to none. Indeed, to refer everything else to action is so characteristic of man's nature that, in every systematic investigation, he will always consider that part of it which relates to action as the result of its whole content, at any rate in so far as this interests him, and he will therefore devote his most serious attention to this part, even if to no other. In this respect, the part of our discussion which follows would, according to the ordinary method of expression, be called practical philosophy in contrast to the theoretical dealt with up to now. In my opinion, however, all philosophy is always theoretical, since it is essential to it always to maintain a purely contemplative attitude, whatever be the immediate object of investigation; to inquire, not to prescribe. But to become practical, to guide conduct, to transform character, are old claims which with mature insight it ought finally to abandon. For here, where it is a question of the worth or worthlessness of existence, of salvation or damnation, not the dead concepts of philosophy decide the matter, but the innermost nature of man himself, the daemon which guides him and has not chosen him, but has been chosen by him, as Plato would say; his intelligible character, as Kant puts it. Virtue is as little taught as is genius; indeed, the concept is just as unfruitful for it as it is for art, and in the case of both can be used only as an instrument. We should therefore be just as foolish to expect that our moral systems and ethics would create virtuous, noble, and holy men, as that our aesthetics would produce poets, painters, and musicians.

Philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what is present and at hand; it can never do more than bring to the distinct, abstract knowledge of the faculty of reason the inner nature of the world which expresses itself intelligibly to everyone in the concrete, that is, as feeling. It does this, however, in every possible relation and connexion and from every point of view. Now just as in the three previous books the attempt has been made to achieve the same thing with the generality proper to philosophy, from different points of view, so in the present book man's conduct will be considered in the same way. This side of the world might prove to be the most important of all, not only, as I remarked above, from a subjective, but also from an objective point of view. Here I shall remain absolutely faithful to the method of consideration we have hitherto followed, and shall support myself by assuming what has been stated up to now. Indeed, there is really only one thought that forms the content of this whole work, and as I have developed it hitherto as regards other subjects, I shall now develop it in the conduct of man. I shall thus do the last thing I am able to do for communicating this thought as fully and completely as possible.

The point of view given and the method of treatment announced suggest that in this ethical book no precepts, no doctrine of duty are to be expected; still less will there be set forth a universal moral principle, a universal recipe, so to speak, for producing all the virtues. Also we shall not speak of an "unconditioned ought," since this involves a contradiction, as is explained in the Appendix; or of a "law for freedom," which is in the same position. Generally we shall not speak of "ought" at all, for we speak in this way to children and to peoples still in their infancy, but not to those who have appropriated to themselves all the culture of a mature age. It is indeed a palpable contradiction to call the will free and yet to prescribe for it laws by which it is to will. "Ought to will!" wooden-iron! [l] But in the light of our whole view, the will is not only free, but even almighty; from it comes not only its action, but also its world; and as the will is, so does its action appear, so does its world appear; both are its self-knowledge and nothing more. The will determines itself, and therewith its action and its world also; for besides it there is nothing, and these are the will itself. Only thus is the will truly autonomous, and from every other point of view it is heteronomous. Our philosophical attempts can go only so far as to interpret and explain man's action, and the very different and even opposite maxims of which it is the living expression, according to their innermost nature and content. This is done in connexion with our previous discussion, and in precisely the same way in which we have attempted hitherto to interpret the remaining phenomena of the world, and to bring their innermost nature to distinct, abstract knowledge. Our philosophy will affirm the same immanence here as in all that we have considered hitherto. It will not, in opposition to Kant's great teaching, attempt to use as a jumping-pole the forms of the phenomenon, whose general expression is the principle of sufficient reason, in order to leap over the phenomenon itself, which alone gives those forms meaning, and to land in the boundless sphere of empty fictions. This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration. It is a world so rich in content that not even the profoundest investigation of which the human mind is capable could exhaust it. Now since the real, knowable world will never fail to afford material and reality to our ethical observations any more than it will to our previous observations, nothing will be less necessary than for us to take refuge in negative concepts devoid of content, and then somehow to make even ourselves believe that we were saying something when we spoke with raised eyebrows about the "absolute," the "infinite," the "supersensuous," and whatever other mere negations of the sort there may be ([x]. Nihil est, nisi negationis nomen, cum obscura notione. Julian, Oratio 5.) [2] Instead of this, we could call it more briefly cloud-cuckoo-land ([x]). [3] We shall not need to serve up covered, empty dishes of this sort. Finally, no more here than in the previous books shall we relate histories and give them out as philosophy. For we are of opinion that anyone who imagines that the inner nature of the world can be historically comprehended, however finely glossed over it may be, is still infinitely far from a philosophical knowledge of the world. But this is the case as soon as a becoming, or a having-become, or a will-become enters into his view of the inner nature of the world; whenever an earlier or a later has the least significance; and consequently whenever points of beginning and of ending in the world, together with a path between the two, are sought and found, and the philosophizing individual even recognizes his own position on this path. Such historical philosophizing in most cases furnishes a cosmogony admitting of many varieties, or else a system of emanations, a doctrine of diminutions, or finally, when driven in despair over the fruitless attempts of those paths to the last path, it furnishes, conversely, a doctrine of a constant becoming, springing up, arising, coming to light out of darkness, out of the obscure ground, primary ground, groundlessness, or some other drivel of this kind. But all this is most briefly disposed of by remarking that a whole eternity, in other words an endless time, has already elapsed up to the present moment, and therefore everything that can or should become must have become already. For all such historical philosophy, whatever airs it may assume, regards time, just as though Kant had never existed, as a determination of things-in-themselves, and therefore stops at what Kant calls the phenomenon in opposition to the thing-in-itself, and what Plato calls the becoming never the being in opposition to the being never the becoming, or finally what is called by the Indians the web of Maya. It is just the knowledge belonging to the principle of sufficient reason, with which we never reach the inner nature of things, but endlessly pursue phenomena only, moving without end or aim like a squirrel in its wheel, until in the end we are tired out, and stop still at some arbitrarily chosen point, and then wish to extort respect for this from others as well. The genuine method of considering the world philosophically, in other words, that consideration which acquaints us with the inner nature of the world and thus takes us beyond the phenomenon, is precisely the method that does not ask about the whence, whither, and why of the world, but always and everywhere about the what alone. Thus it is the method that considers things not according to any relation, not as becoming and passing away, in short not according to one of the four forms of the principle of sufficient reason. On the contrary, it is precisely what is still left over after we eliminate the whole of this method of consideration that follows the principle of sufficient reason; thus it is the inner nature of the world, always appearing the same in all relations, but itself never amenable to them, in other words the Ideas of the world, that forms the object of our method of philosophy. From such knowledge we get philosophy as well as art; in fact, we shall find in this book that we can also reach that disposition of mind which alone leads to true holiness and to salvation from the world.

54.

The first three books will, it is hoped, have produced the distinct and certain knowledge that the mirror of the will has appeared to it in the world as representation. In this mirror the will knows itself in increasing degrees of distinctness and completeness, the highest of which is man. Man's inner nature, however, receives its complete expression above all through the connected series of his actions. The self-conscious connexion of these actions is rendered possible by the faculty of reason, which enables him to survey the whole in the abstract.

The will, considered purely in itself, is devoid of knowledge, and is only a blind, irresistible urge, as we see it appear in inorganic and vegetable nature and in their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life. Through the addition of the world as representation, developed for its service, the will obtains knowledge of its own willing and what it wills, namely that this is nothing but this world, life, precisely as it exists. We have therefore called the phenomenal world the mirror, the objectivity, of the will; and as what the will wills is always life, just because this is nothing but the presentation of that willing for the representation, it is immaterial and a mere pleonasm if, instead of simply saying "the will," we say "the will-to-live."

As the will is the thing-in-itself, the inner content, the essence of the world, but life, the visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the will, this world will accompany the will as inseparably as a body is accompanied by its shadow; and if will exists, then life, the world, will exist. Therefore life is certain to the will-to-live, and as long as we are filled with the will-to-live we need not be apprehensive for our existence, even at the sight of death. It is true that we see the individual come into being and pass away; but the individual is only phenomenon, exists only for knowledge involved in the principle of sufficient reason, in the principium individuationis. Naturally, for this knowledge, the individual receives his life as a gift, rises out of nothing, and then suffers the loss of this gift through death, and returns to nothing. We, however, wish to consider life philosophically, that is to say, according to its Ideas, and then we shall find that neither the will, the thing-in-itself in all phenomena, nor the subject of knowing, the spectator of all phenomena, is in any way affected by birth and death. Birth and death belong only to the phenomenon of the will, and hence to life; and it is essential to this that it manifest itself in individuals that come into being and pass away, as fleeting phenomena, appearing in the form of time, of that which in itself knows no time, but must be manifested precisely in the way aforesaid in order to objectify its real nature. Birth and death belong equally to life, and hold the balance as mutual conditions of each other, or, if the expression be preferred, as poles of the whole phenomenon of life. The wisest of all mythologies, the Indian, expresses this by giving to the very god who symbolizes destruction and death (just as Brahma, the most sinful and lowest god of the Trimurti, symbolizes generation, origination, and Vishnu preservation), by giving, I say, to Shiva as an attribute not only the necklace of skulls, but also the lingam, that symbol of generation which appears as the counterpart of death. In this way it is intimated that generation and death are essential correlatives which reciprocally neutralize and eliminate each other. It was precisely the same sentiment that prompted the Greeks and Romans to adorn the costly sarcophagi, just as we still see them, with feasts, dances, marriages, hunts, fights between wild beasts, bacchanalia, that is with presentations of life's most powerful urge. This they present to us not only through such diversions and merriments, but even in sensual groups, to the point of showing us the sexual intercourse between satyrs and goats. The object was obviously to indicate with the greatest emphasis from the death of the mourned individual the immortal life of nature, and thus to intimate, although without abstract knowledge, that the whole of nature is the phenomenon, and also the fulfilment, of the will-to-live. The form of this phenomenon is time, space, and causality, and through these individuation, which requires that the individual must come into being and pass away. But this no more disturbs the will-to-live -- the individual being only a particular example or specimen, so to speak, of the phenomenon of this will -- than does the death of an individual injure the whole of nature. For it is not the individual that nature cares for, but only the species; and in all seriousness she urges the preservation of the species, since she provides for this so lavishly through the immense surplus of the seed and the great strength of the fructifying impulse. The individual, on the contrary, has no value for nature, and can have none, for infinite time, infinite space, and the infinite number of possible individuals therein are her kingdom. Therefore nature is always ready to let the individual fall, and the individual is accordingly not only exposed to destruction in a thousand ways from the most insignificant accidents, but is even destined for this and is led towards it by nature herself, from the moment that individual has served the maintenance of the species. In this way, nature quite openly expresses the great truth that only the Ideas, not individuals, have reality proper, in other words are a complete objectivity of the will. Now man is nature herself, and indeed nature at the highest grade of her self-consciousness, but nature is only the objectified will-to-live; the person who has grasped and retained this point of view may certainly and justly console himself for his own death and for that of his friends by looking back on the immortal life of nature, which he himself is. Consequently, Shiva with the lingam is to be understood in this way, and so are those ancient sarcophagi that with their pictures of glowing life exclaim to the lamenting beholder: Natura non contristatur. [4]

That generation and death are to be regarded as something belonging to life, and essential to this phenomenon of the will, arises also from the fact that they both exhibit themselves merely as the higher powers of expression of that in which all the rest of life consists. This is everywhere nothing but a constant change of matter under a fixed permanence of form; and this is precisely the transitoriness of the individuals with the imperishableness of the species. Constant nourishment and renewal differ from generation only in degree, and only in degree does constant excretion differ from death. The former shows itself most simply and distinctly in the plant, which is throughout only the constant repetition of the same impulse of its simplest fibre grouping itself into leaf and branch. It is a systematic aggregate of homogeneous plants supporting one another, and their constant reproduction is its simple impulse. It ascends to the complete satisfaction of this impulse by means of the gradation of metamorphosis, finally to the blossom and the fruit, that compendium of its existence and effort in which it attains in a shorter way what is its sole aim. It now produces at one stroke a thousandfold what till then it effected in the particular case, namely the repetition of itself. Its growth up to the fruit is related to that fruit as writing is to printing. In the case of the animal, it is obviously exactly the same. The process of nourishment is a constant generation; the process of generation is a higher power of nourishment. The pleasure that accompanies procreation is a higher power of the agreeableness of the feeling of life. On the other hand, excretion, the constant exhalation and throwing off of matter, is the same as what at a higher power is death, namely the opposite of procreation. Now, if here we are always content to retain the form without lamenting the discarded matter, we must behave in the same way when in death the same thing happens at a higher potential and to the whole, as occurs every day and hour in a partial way with excretion. Just as we are indifferent to the one, so we should not recoil at the other. Therefore, from this point of view, it seems just as absurd to desire the continuance of our individuality, which is replaced by other individuals, as to desire the permanence of the matter of our body, which is constantly replaced by fresh matter. It appears just as foolish to embalm corpses as it would be carefully to preserve our excreta. As for the individual consciousness bound to the individual body, it is completely interrupted every day by sleep. Deep sleep, while it lasts, is in no way different from death, into which it constantly passes, for example in the case of freezing to death, differing only as to the future, namely with regard to the awakening. Death is a sleep in which individuality is forgotten; everything else awakens again, or rather has remained awake. [5]

Above all, we must clearly recognize that the form of the phenomenon of the will, and hence the form of life or of reality, is really only the present, not the future or the past. Future and past are only in the concept, exist only in the connexion and continuity of knowledge in so far as this follows the principle of sufficient reason. No man has lived in the past, and none will ever live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, but it is also life's sure possession which can never be tom from it. The present always exists together with its content; both stand firm without wavering, like the rainbow over the waterfall. For life is sure and certain to the will, and the present is sure and certain to life. Of course, if we think back to the thousands of years that have passed, to the millions of men and women who lived in them, we ask, What were they? What has become of them? But, on the other hand, we need recall only the past of our own life, and vividly renew its scenes in our imagination, and then ask again, What was all this? What has become of it? As it is with our life, so is it with the life of those millions. Or should we suppose that the past took on a new existence by its being sealed through death? Our own past, even the most recent, even the previous day, is only an empty dream of the imagination, and the past of all those millions is the same. What was? What is? The will, whose mirror is life, and will-free knowledge beholding the will clearly in that mirror. He who has not already recognized this, or will not recognize it, must add to the above question as to the fate of past generations this question as well: Why precisely is he, the questioner, so lucky as to possess this precious, perishable, and only real present, while those hundreds of generations of men, even the heroes and sages of former times, have sunk into the night of the past, and have thus become nothing, while he, his insignificant ego, actually exists? Or, more briefly, although strangely: Why is this now, his now, precisely now and was not long ago? Since he asks such strange questions, he regards his existence and his time as independent of each other, and the former as projected into the latter. He really assumes two nows, one belonging to the object and the other to the subject, and marvels at the happy accident of their coincidence. Actually, however, only the point of contact of the object, the form of which is time, with the subject that has no mode of the principle of sufficient reason as its form, constitutes the present (as is shown in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason). But all object is the will, in so far as the will has become representation, and the subject is the necessary correlative of all object; only in the present, however, are there real objects. Past and future contain mere concepts and phantasms; hence the present is the essential form of the phenomenon of the will, and is inseparable from that form. The present alone is that which always exists and stands firm and immovable. That which, empirically apprehended, is the most fleeting of all, manifests itself to the metaphysical glance that sees beyond the forms of empirical perception as that which alone endures, as the nunc stans of the scholastics. The source and supporter of its content is the will-to-live, or the thing-in-itself -- which we are. That which constantly becomes and passes away, in that it either has been already or is still to come, belongs to the phenomenon as such by virtue of its forms which render coming into being and passing away possible. Accordingly, let us think: Quid fuit? Quod est. Quid erit? Quod fuit; [6] and take it in the strict sense of the words, understanding not simile but idem. For life is certain to the will, and the present is certain to life. Therefore everyone can also say: "I am once for all lord and master of the present, and through all eternity it will accompany me as my shadow; accordingly, 1 do not wonder where it comes from, and how it is that it is precisely now." We can compare time to an endlessly revolving sphere; the half that is always sinking would be the past, and the half that is always rising would be the future; but at the top, the indivisible point that touches the tangent would be the extensionless present. Just as the tangent does not continue rolling with the sphere, so also the present, the point of contact of the object whose form is time, does not roll on with the subject that has no form, since it does not belong to the knowable, but is the condition of all that is knowable. Or time is like an irresistible stream, and the present like a rock on which the stream breaks, but which it does not carry away. The will, as thing-in-itself, is as little subordinate to the principle of sufficient reason as is the subject of knowledge which is ultimately in a certain regard the will itself or its manifestation; and just as life, the will's own phenomenon, is certain to the will, so also is the present, the sole form of actual life. Accordingly, we have not to investigate the past before life or the future after death; rather have we to know the present as the only form in which the will manifests itself. [7] It will not run away from the will, nor the will from it. Therefore whoever is satisfied with life as it is, whoever affirms it in every way, can confidently regard it as endless, and can banish the fear of death as a delusion. This delusion inspires him with the foolish dread that he can ever be deprived of the present, and deceives him about a time without a present in it. This is a delusion which in regard to time is like that other in regard to space, in virtue of which everyone imagines the precise position occupied by him on the globe as above, and all the rest as below. In just the same way, everyone connects the present with his own individuality, and imagines that all present becomes extinguished therewith; that past and future are then without a present. But just as on the globe everywhere is above, so the form of all life is the present; and to fear death because it robs us of the present is no wiser than to fear that we can slip down from the round globe on the top of which we are now fortunately standing. The form of the present is essential to the objectification of the will. As an extensionless point, it cuts time which extends infinitely in both directions, and stands firm and immovable, like an everlasting midday without a cool evening, just as the actual sun bums without intermission, while only apparently does it sink into the bosom of the night. If, therefore, a person fears death as his annihilation, it is just as if he were to think that the sun can lament in the evening and say: "Woe is me! I am going down into eternal night." [8] Conversely, whoever is oppressed by the burdens of life, whoever loves life and affirms it, but abhors its torments, and in particular can no longer endure the hard lot that has fallen to just him, cannot hope for deliverance from death, and cannot save himself through suicide. Only by a false illusion does the cool shade of Orcus allure him as a haven of rest. The earth rolls on from day into night; the individual dies; but the sun itself burns without intermission, an eternal noon. Life is certain to the will-to-live; the form of life is the endless present; it matters not how individuals, the phenomena of the Idea, arise and pass away in time, like fleeting dreams. Therefore suicide already appears to us to be a vain and therefore foolish action; when we have gone farther in our discussion, it will appear to us in an even less favourable light.

Dogmas change and our knowledge is deceptive, but nature does not err; her action is sure and certain, and she does not conceal it. Everything is entirely in nature, and she is entirely in everything. She has her centre in every animal; the animal has certainly found its way into existence just as it will certainly find its way out of it. Meanwhile, it lives fearlessly and heedlessly in the presence of annihilation, supported by the consciousness that it is nature herself and is as imperishable as she. Man alone carries about with him in abstract concepts the certainty of his own death, yet this can frighten him only very rarely and at particular moments, when some occasion calls it up to the imagination. Against the mighty voice of nature reflection can do little. In man, as in the animal that does not think, there prevails as a lasting state of mind the certainty, springing from innermost consciousness, that he is nature, the world itself. By virtue of this, no one is noticeably disturbed by the thought of certain and never-distant death, but everyone lives on as though he is bound to live for ever. Indeed, this is true to the extent that it might be said that no one has a really lively conviction of the certainty of his death, as otherwise there could not be a very great difference between his frame of mind and that of the condemned criminal. Everyone recognizes that certainty in the abstract and theoretically, but lays it on one side, like other theoretical truths that are not applicable in practice, without taking it into his vivid consciousness. Whoever carefully considers this peculiarity of the human way of thinking, will see that the psychological methods of explaining it from habit and acquiescence in the inevitable are by no means sufficient, but that the reason for it is the deeper one that we state. The same thing can also explain why at all times and among all peoples dogmas of some kind, dealing with the individual's continued existence after death, exist and are highly esteemed, although the proofs in support of them must always be extremely inadequate, whereas those which support the contrary are bound to be powerful and numerous. This is really in no need of any proof, but is recognized by the healthy understanding as a fact; it is confirmed as such by the confidence that nature no more lies than errs, but openly exhibits her action and her essence, and even expresses these naively. It is only we ourselves who obscure these by erroneous views, in order to explain from them what is agreeable to our limited view.

But we have now brought into clear consciousness the fact that, although the individual phenomenon of the will begins and ends in time, the will itself, as thing-in-itself, is not affected thereby, nor is the correlative of every object, namely the knowing but never known subject, and that life is always certain to the will-to-live. This is not to be numbered among those doctrines of immortality. For permanence no more belongs to the will, considered as thing-in-itself, or to the pure subject of knowing, to the eternal eye of the world, than does transitoriness, since passing away and transitoriness are determinations valid in time alone, whereas the will and the pure subject of knowing lie outside time. Therefore the egoism of the individual (this particular phenomenon of the will enlightened by the subject of knowing) can as little extract nourishment and consolation for his wish to assert himself through endless time from the view we express, as he could from the knowledge that, after his death, the rest of the external world will continue to exist in time; but this is only the expression of just the same view considered objectively, and so temporally. For it is true that everyone is transitory only as phenomenon; on the other hand, as thing-in-itself he is timeless, and so endless. But also only as phenomenon is the individual different from the other things of the world; as thing-in-itself, he is the will that appears in everything, and death does away with the illusion that separates his consciousness from that of the rest; this is future existence or immortality. His exemption from death, which belongs to him only as thing-in-itself, coincides for the phenomenon with the continued existence of the rest of the external world. [9] Hence it also comes about that the inward and merely felt consciousness of what we have just raised to distinct knowledge does, as we have said, prevent the thought of death from poisoning the life of the rational being. For such consciousness is the basis of that courage to face life which maintains every living thing and enables it to live on cheerfully, as if there were no death, so long as it is face to face with life and is directed thereto. However, the individual is not prevented in this way from being seized with the fear of death, and from trying in every way to escape from it, when it presents itself to him in real life in a particular case, or even only in his imagination, and he then has to face it. For as long as his knowledge was directed to life as such, he was bound to recognize imperishableness in it; and so when death is brought before his eyes, he is bound to recognize it as what it is, namely the temporal end of the particular temporal phenomenon. What we fear in death is by no means the pain, for that obviously lies on this side of death; moreover, we often take refuge in death from pain, just as, conversely, we sometimes endure the most fearful pain merely in order to escape death for a while, although it would be quick and easy. Therefore we distinguish pain and death as two entirely different evils. What we fear in death is in fact the extinction and end of the individual, which it openly proclaims itself to be, and as the individual is the will-to-live itself in a particular objectification, its whole nature struggles against death. Now when feeling leaves us helpless to such an extent, our faculty of reason can nevertheless appear and for the most part overcome influences adverse to it, since it places us at a higher standpoint from which we now view the whole instead of the particular. Therefore, a philosophical knowledge of the nature of the world which had reached the point we are now considering, but went no farther, could, even at this point of view, overcome the terrors of death according as reflection had power over direct feeling in the given individual. A man who had assimilated firmly into his way of thinking the truths so far advanced, but at the same time had not come to know, through his own experience or through a deeper insight, that constant suffering is essential to all life; who found satisfaction in life and took perfect delight in it; who desired, in spite of calm deliberation, that the course of his life as he had hitherto experienced it should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence; and whose courage to face life was so great that, in return for life's pleasures, he would willingly and gladly put up with all the hardships and miseries to which it is subject; such a man would stand "with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth," [10] and would have nothing to fear. Armed with the knowledge we confer on him, he would look with indifference at death hastening towards him on the wings of time. He would consider it as a false illusion, an impotent spectre, frightening to the weak but having no power over him who knows that he himself is that will of which the whole world is the objectification or copy, to which therefore life and also the present always remain certain and sure. The present is the only real form of the phenomenon of the will. Therefore no endless past or future in which he will not exist can frighten him, for he regards these as an empty mirage and the web of Maya. Thus he would no more have to fear death than the sun would the night. In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna puts his young pupil Arjuna in this position, when, seized with grief at the sight of the armies ready for battle (somewhat after the manner of Xerxex), Arjuna loses heart and wishes to give up the fight, to avert the destruction of so many thousands. Krishna brings him to this point of view, and the death of those thousands can no longer hold him back; he gives the sign for battle. This point of view is also expressed by Goethe's Prometheus, especially when he says:

"Here sit I, form men
In my own image,
A race that is like me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy and to rejoice,
And to heed you not,
As I!"


The philosophy of Bruno and that of Spinoza might also bring to this standpoint the person whose conviction was not shaken or weakened by their errors and imperfections. Bruno's philosophy has no real ethics, and the ethics in Spinoza's philosophy does not in the least proceed from the inner nature of his teaching, but is attached to it merely by means of weak and palpable sophisms, though in itself it is praiseworthy and fine. Finally, many men would occupy the standpoint here set forth, if their knowledge kept pace with their willing, in other words if they were in a position, free from every erroneous idea, to become clearly and distinctly themselves. This is for knowledge the viewpoint of the complete affirmation of the will-to-live.

The will affirms itself; this means that while in its objectivity, that is to say, in the world and in life, its own inner nature is completely and distinctly given to it as representation, this knowledge does not in any way impede its willing. It means that just this life thus known is now willed as such by the will with knowledge, consciously and deliberately, just as hitherto the will willed it without knowledge and as a blind impulse. The opposite of this, the denial of the will-to-live, shows itself when willing ends with that knowledge, since the particular phenomena known then no longer act as motives of willing, but the whole knowledge of the inner nature of the world that mirrors the will, knowledge that has grown up through apprehension of the Ideas, becomes the quieter of the will, and thus the will freely abolishes itself. It is hoped that these conceptions, quite unfamiliar and difficult to understand in this general expression, will become clear through the discussion, which will shortly follow, of the phenomena, namely the modes of conduct, in which is expressed affirmation in its different degrees on the one hand, and denial on the other. For both start from knowledge, though not from an abstract knowledge expressing itself in words, but from living knowledge expressing itself in deed and conduct alone. Such living knowledge remains independent of the dogmas that here, as abstract knowledge, concern the faculty of reason. To exhibit both and to bring them to the distinct knowledge of the faculty of reason can be my only aim, and not to prescribe or recommend the one or the other, which would be as foolish as it would be pointless. The will in itself is absolutely free and entirely self-determining, and for it there is no law. First of all, however, before we embark on the aforesaid discussion, we must explain and define more precisely this freedom and its relation to necessity. Then we must insert a few general remarks, relating to the will and its objects, as regards life, the affirmation and denial whereof are our problem. Through all this, we shall facilitate for ourselves the intended knowledge of the ethical significance of modes of conduct according to their innermost nature.

Since, as I have said, this whole work is only the unfolding of a single thought, it follows therefrom that all its parts have the most intimate connexion with one another. Not only does each part stand in a necessary relation to that which immediately precedes it, and thus presuppose it as within the reader's memory, as is the case with all philosophies consisting merely of a series of inferences, but every part of the whole work is related to every other part, and presupposes it. For this reason, it is required that the reader should remember not only what has just been said, but also every previous remark, so that he is able to connect it with what he is reading at any moment, however much else there may have been between the two. Plato has also made this exacting demand on his reader through the tortuous and complicated digressions of his dialogues which take up the main idea again only after long episodes; but precisely in this way is it made more clear. With us this demand is necessary, for the analysis of our one and only thought into many aspects is indeed the only means of communicating it, though it is not a form essential to the thought itself, but only an artificial form. The separation of the four principal points of view into four books, and the most careful connexion of what is related and homogeneous, help to render the discussion and its comprehension easier. But the subject-matter does not by any means admit of an advance in a straight line, like the progress of history, but renders a more complicated discussion necessary. This also makes necessary a repeated study of the book; only thus does the connexion of every part with every other become evident, and then all together elucidate one another and become clear. [11]
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:29 pm

Part 2 of 8

55.

That the will as such is free, follows already from the fact that, according to our view, it is the thing-in-itself, the content of all phenomena. The phenomenon, on the other hand, we recognize as absolutely subordinate to the principle of sufficient reason in its four forms. As we know that necessity is absolutely identical with consequent from a given ground, and that the two are convertible concepts, all that belongs to the phenomenon, in other words all that is object for the subject that knows as an individual, is on the one hand ground or reason, on the other consequent, and in this last capacity is determined with absolute necessity; thus it cannot be in any respect other than it is. The whole content of nature, the sum-total of her phenomena, is absolutely necessary, and the necessity of every part, every phenomenon, every event, can always be demonstrated, since it must be possible to find the ground or reason on which it depends as consequent. This admits of no exception; it follows from the unrestricted and absolute validity of the principle of sufficient reason. But on the other hand, this same world in all its phenomena is for us objectivity of the will. As the will itself is not phenomenon, not representation or object, but thing-in-itself, it is also not subordinate to the principle of sufficient reason, the form of all object. Thus it is not determined as consequent by a reason or ground, and so it knows no necessity; in other words, it is free. The concept of freedom is therefore really a negative one, since its content is merely the denial of necessity, in other words, the denial of the relation of consequent to its ground according to the principle of sufficient reason. Now here we have before us most clearly the point of unity of that great contrast, namely the union of freedom with necessity, which in recent times has often been discussed, yet never, so far as I know, clearly and adequately. Everything as phenomenon, as object, is absolutely necessary; in itself it is will, and this is perfectly free to all eternity. The phenomenon, the object, is necessarily and unalterably determined in the concatenation of grounds and consequents which cannot have any discontinuity. But the existence of this object in general and the manner of its existing, that is to say, the Idea which reveals itself in it, or in other words its character, is directly phenomenon of the will. Hence, in conformity with the freedom of this will, the object might not exist at all, or might be something originally and essentially quite different. In that case, however, the whole chain of which the object is a link, and which is itself phenomenon of the same will, would also be quite different. But once there and existent, the object has entered the series of grounds and consequents, is always necessarily determined therein, and accordingly cannot either become another thing, i.e., change itself, or withdraw from the series, i.e., vanish. Like every other part of nature, man is objectivity of the will; therefore all that we have said holds good of him also. Just as everything in nature has its forces and qualities that definitely react to a definite impression, and constitute its character, so man also has his character, from which the motives call forth his actions with necessity. In this way of acting his empirical character reveals itself, but in this again is revealed his intelligible character, i.e., the will in itself, of which he is the determined phenomenon. Man, however, is the most complete phenomenon of the will, and, as was shown in the second book, in order to exist, this phenomenon had to be illuminated by so high a degree of knowledge that even a perfectly adequate repetition of the inner nature of the world under the form of the representation became possible in it. This is the apprehension of the Ideas, the pure mirror of the world, as we have come to know them in the third book. Therefore in man the will can reach full self-consciousness, distinct and exhaustive knowledge of its own inner nature, as reflected in the whole world. As we saw in the preceding book, art results from the actual presence and existence of this degree of knowledge. At the end of our whole discussion it will also be seen that, through the same knowledge, an elimination and self-denial of the will in its most perfect phenomenon is possible, by the will's relating such knowledge to itself. Thus the freedom which in other respects, as belonging to the thing-in-itself, can never show itself in the phenomenon, in such a case appears in this phenomenon; and by abolishing the essential nature at the root of the phenomenon, whilst the phenomenon itself still continues to exist in time, it brings about a contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. In just this way, it exhibits the phenomena of holiness and self-denial. All this, however, will be fully understood only at the end of this book. Meanwhile, all this indicates only in a general way how man is distinguished from all the other phenomena of the will by the fact that freedom, i.e., independence of the principle of sufficient reason, which belongs only to the will as thing-in-itself and contradicts the phenomenon, may yet in his case possibly appear even in the phenomenon, where it is then, however, necessarily exhibited as a contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. In this sense not only the will in itself, but even man can certainly be called free, and can thus be distinguished from all other beings. But how this is to be understood can become clear only through all that follows, and for the present we must wholly disregard it. For in the first place we must beware of making the mistake of thinking that the action of the particular, definite man is not subject to any necessity, in other words that the force of the motive is less certain than the force of the cause, or than the following of the conclusion from the premisses. If we leave aside the above-mentioned case, which, as we have said, relates only to an exception, the freedom of the will as thing-in-itself by no means extends directly to its phenomenon, not even where this reaches the highest grade of visibility, namely in the rational animal with individual character, in other words, the man. This man is never free, although he is the phenomenon of a free will, for he is the already determined phenomenon of this will's free willing; and since he enters into the form of all objects, the principle of sufficient reason, he develops the unity of that will into a plurality of actions. But since the unity of that will in itself lies outside time, this plurality exhibits itself with the conformity to law of a force of nature. Since, however, it is that free willing which becomes visible in the man and in his whole conduct, and is related to this as the concept to the definition, every particular deed of the man is to be ascribed to the free will, and directly proclaims itself as such to consciousness. Therefore, as we said in the second book, everyone considers himself a priori (i.e., according to his original feeling) free, even in his particular actions, in the sense that in every given case any action is possible to him, and only a posteriori, from experience and reflection thereon, does he recognize that his conduct follows with absolute necessity from the coincidence of the character with the motives. Hence it arises that any coarse and uncultured person, following his feelings, most vigorously defends complete freedom in individual actions, whereas the great thinkers of all ages, and the more profound religious teachings, have denied it. But the person who has come to see clearly that man's whole inner nature is will, and that man himself is only phenomenon of this will, but that such phenomenon has the principle of sufficient reason as its necessary form, knowable even from the subject, and appearing in this case as the law of motivation; to such a person a doubt as to the inevitability of the deed, when the motive is presented to the given character, seems like doubting that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. In his Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, Priestley has very adequately demonstrated the necessity of the individual action. Kant, however, whose merit in this regard is specially great, was the first to demonstrate the coexistence of this necessity with the freedom of the will in itself, i.e., outside the phenomenon, for he established the difference between the intelligible and empirical characters. [12] I wholly support this distinction, for the former is the will as thing-in-itself, in so far as it appears in a definite individual in a definite degree, while the latter is this phenomenon itself as it manifests itself in the mode of action according to time, and in the physical structure according to space. To make the relation between the two clear, the best expression is that already used in the introductory essay, namely that the intelligible character of every man is to be regarded as an act of will outside time, and thus indivisible and unalterable. The phenomenon of this act of will, developed and drawn out in time, space, and all the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, is the empirical character as it exhibits itself for experience in the man's whole manner of action and course of life. The whole tree is only the constantly repeated phenomenon of one and the same impulse that manifests itself most simply in the fibre, and is repeated and easily recognizable in the construction of leaf, stem, branch, and trunk. In the same way, all man's deeds are only the constantly repeated manifestation, varying somewhat in form, of his intelligible character, and the induction resulting from the sum of these gives us his empirical character. However, I shall not repeat Kant's masterly exposition here, but shall presuppose that it is already known.

In 1840 I dealt thoroughly and in detail with the important chapter on the freedom of the will, in my crowned prize-essay on this subject. In particular, I exposed the reason for the delusion in consequence of which people imagined they found an empirically given, absolute freedom of the will, and hence a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, [13] in self-consciousness as a fact thereof; for with great insight the question set for the essay was directed to this very point. I therefore refer the reader to that work, and likewise to para. 10 of the prize-essay On the Basis of Morality, which was published along with it under the title Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, and I omit the discussion on the necessity of the acts of will which was inserted here in the first edition, and was still incomplete. Instead of this, I will explain the delusion above mentioned in a brief discussion which is presupposed by the nineteenth chapter of our second volume, and which therefore could not be given in the essay above mentioned.

Apart from the fact that the will, as the true thing-in-itself, is something actually original and independent, and that in self-consciousness the feeling of originality and arbitrariness must accompany its acts, though these are already determined; apart from this, there arises the semblance of an empirical freedom of the will (instead of the transcendental freedom which alone is to be attributed to it). Thus there arises the appearance of a freedom of the individual acts from the attitude of the intellect towards the will which is explained, separated out, and subordinated in the nineteenth chapter of the second volume, under No. 3. The intellect gets to know the conclusions of the will only a posteriori and empirically. Accordingly, where a choice is presented to it, it has no datum as to how the will is going to decide. For the intelligible character, by virtue of which with the given motives only one decision is possible, which is accordingly a necessary decision, the intelligible character, I say, does not come into the knowledge of the intellect; the empirical character only is successively known to it through its individual acts. Therefore it seems to the knowing consciousness (intellect) that two opposite decisions are equally possible to the will in a given case. But this is just the same as if we were to say in the case of a vertical pole, thrown off its balance and hesitating which way to fall, that "it can topple over to the right or to the left." Yet this "can" has only a subjective significance, and really means "in view of the data known to us." For objectively, the direction of the fall is necessarily determined as soon as the hesitation takes place. Accordingly, the decision of one's own will is undetermined only for its spectator, one's own intellect, and therefore only relatively and subjectively, namely for the subject of knowing. In itself and objectively, on the other hand, the decision is at once determined and necessary in the case of every choice presented to it. But this determination enters consciousness only through the ensuing decision. We even have an empirical proof of this when some difficult and important choice lies before us, yet only under a condition that has not yet appeared but is merely awaited, so that for the time being we can do nothing, but must maintain a passive attitude. We then reflect on how we shall decide when the circumstances that allow us freedom of activity and decision have made their appearance. It is often the case that far-seeing, rational deliberation speaks rather in support of one of the resolves, while direct inclination leans rather to the other. As long as we remain passive and under compulsion, the side of reason apparently tries to keep the upper hand, but we see in advance how strongly the other side will draw us when the opportunity for action comes. Till then, we are eagerly concerned to place the motives of the two sides in the clearest light by coolly meditating on the pro et contra, so that each motive can influence the will with all its force when the moment arrives, and so that some mistake on the part of the intellect will not mislead the will into deciding otherwise than it would do if everything exerted an equal influence. This distinct unfolding of the motives on both sides is all that the intellect can do in connexion with the choice. It awaits the real decision just as passively and with the same excited curiosity as it would that of a foreign will. Therefore, from its point of view, both decisions must seem to it equally possible. Now it is just this that is the semblance of the will's empirical freedom. Of course, the decision enters the sphere of the intellect quite empirically as the final conclusion of the matter. Yet this decision proceeded from the inner nature, the intelligible character, of the individual will in its conflict with given motives, and hence came about with complete necessity. The intellect can do nothing more here than clearly examine the nature of the motives from every point of view. It is unable to determine the will itself, for the will is wholly inaccessible to it, and, as we have seen, is for it inscrutable and impenetrable.

If, under the same conditions, a man could act now in one way, now in another, then in the meantime his will itself would have had to be changed, and thus would have to reside in time, for only in time is change possible. But then either the will would have to be a mere phenomenon, or time would have to be a determination of the thing-in-itself. Accordingly, the dispute as to the freedom of the individual action, as to the liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, really turns on the question whether the will resides in time or not. If, as Kant's teaching as well as the whole of my system makes necessary, the will as thing-in-itself is outside time and outside every form of the principle of sufficient reason, then not only must the individual act in the same way in the same situation, and not only must every bad deed be the sure guarantee of innumerable others that the individual must do and cannot leave undone, but, as Kant says, if only the empirical character and the motives were completely given, a man's future actions could be calculated like an eclipse of the sun or moon. Just as nature is consistent, so also is the character; every individual action must come about in accordance with the character, just as every phenomenon comes about in accordance with a law of nature. The cause in the latter case and the motive in the former are only the occasional causes, as was shown in the second book. The will, whose phenomenon is the whole being and life of man, cannot deny itself in the particular case, and the man also will always will in the particular what he wills on the whole.

The maintenance of an empirical freedom of will, a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, is very closely connected with the assertion that places man's inner nature in a soul that is originally a knowing, indeed really an abstract thinking entity, and only in consequence thereof a willing entity. Such a view, therefore, regarded the will as of a secondary nature, instead of knowledge, which is really secondary. The will was even regarded as an act of thought, and was identified with the judgement, especially by Descartes and Spinoza. According to this, every man would have become what he is only in consequence of his knowledge. He would come into the world as a moral cipher, would know the things in it, and would then determine to be this or that, to act in this or that way. He could, in consequence of new knowledge, choose a new course of action, and thus become another person. Further, he would then first know a thing to be good, and in consequence will it, instead of first willing it, and in consequence calling it good. According to the whole of my fundamental view, all this is a reversal of the true relation. The will is first and original; knowledge is merely added to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of the will. Therefore every man is what he is through his will, and his character is original, for willing is the basis of his inner being. Through the knowledge added to it, he gets to know in the course of experience what he is; in other words, he becomes acquainted with his character. Therefore he knows himself in consequence of, and in accordance with, the nature of his will, instead of willing in consequence of, and according to, his knowing, as in the old view. According to this view, he need only consider how he would best like to be, and he would be so; this is its freedom of the will. It therefore consists in man's being his own work in the light of knowledge. I, on the other hand, say that he is his own work prior to all knowledge, and knowledge is merely added to illuminate it. Therefore he cannot decide to be this or that; also he cannot become another person, but he is once for all, and subsequently knows what he is. With those other thinkers, he wills what he knows; with me he knows what he wills.

The Greeks called the character [x] , and its expressions, i.e., morals, [x] . But this word comes from [x], custom; they chose it in order to express metaphorically constancy of character through constancy of custom. [x] . (a voce [x] , i.e., consuetudo, [x] est appellatum: ethica ergo dicta est [x] , sive ab assuescendo) says Aristotle [14] (Ethica Magna, I, 6, p. 1186 [Berlin ed.], and Ethica Eudemica, p. 1220, and Ethica Nicomachaea, p. 1103). Stobaeus, II, chap. 7, quotes: [x]. (Stoici autem, Zenonis castra sequentes, metaphorice ethos definiunt vitae fontem, e quo singulae manant actiones.) [15] In the Christian teaching we find the dogma of predestination in consequence of election and nonelection by grace (Rom. ix, 11-24), obviously springing from the view that man does not change, but his life and conduct, in other words his empirical character, are only the unfolding of the intelligible character, the development of decided and unalterable tendencies already recognizable in the child. Therefore his conduct is, so to speak, fixed and settled even at his birth, and remains essentially the same to the very end. We too agree with this, but of course the consequences which resulted from the union of this perfectly correct view with the dogmas previously found in Jewish theology, and which gave rise to the greatest of all difficulties, namely to the eternally insoluble Gordian knot on which most of the controversies of the Church turn; these I do not undertake to defend. For even the Apostle Paul himself scarcely succeeded in doing this by his parable of the potter, invented for this purpose, for ultimately the result was in fact none other than this:

"Let the human race
Fear the gods!
They hold the dominion
In eternal hands:
And they can use it
As it pleases them."

-- Goethe, Iphigenia [IV, 5].


But such considerations are really foreign to our subject. However, some observations on the relation between the character and the knowledge in which all its motives reside will here be appropriate.

The motives determining the phenomenon or appearance of the character, or determining conduct, influence the character through the medium of knowledge. Knowledge, however, is changeable, and often vacillates between error and truth; yet, as a rule, in the course of life it is rectified more and more, naturally in very different degrees. Thus a man's manner of acting can be noticeably changed without our being justified in inferring from this a change in his character. What the man really and generally wills, the tendency of his innermost nature, and the goal he pursues in accordance therewith -- these we can never change by influencing him from without, by instructing him, otherwise we should be able to create him anew. Seneca says admirably: velle non discitur; [16] in this he prefers truth to his Stoic philosophers, who taught: [x] (doceri posse virtutem). [17] From without, the will can be affected only by motives; but these can never change the will itself, for they have power over it only on the presupposition that it is precisely such as it is. All that the motives can do, therefore, is to alter the direction of the will's effort, in other words to make it possible for it to seek what it invariably seeks by a path different from the one it previously followed. Therefore instruction, improved knowledge, and thus influence from without, can indeed teach the will that it erred in the means it employed. Accordingly, outside influence can bring it about that the will pursues the goal to which it aspires once for all in accordance with its inner nature, by quite a different path, and even in an entirely different object, from what it did previously. But such an influence can never bring it about that the will wills something actually different from what it has willed hitherto. This remains unalterable, for the will is precisely this willing itself, which would otherwise have to be abolished. However, the former, the ability to modify knowledge, and through this to modify action, goes so far that the will seeks to attain its ever unalterable end, for example, Mohammed's paradise, at one time in the world of reality, at another in the world of imagination, adapting the means thereto, and so applying prudence, force, and fraud in the one case, abstinence, justice, righteousness, alms, and pilgrimage to Mecca in the other. But the tendency and endeavour of the will have not themselves been changed on that account, still less the will itself. Therefore, although its action certainly manifests itself differently at different times, its willing has nevertheless remained exactly the same. Velle non discitur.

For motives to be effective, it is necessary for them to be not only present but known; for according to a very good saying of the scholastics, which we have already mentioned, causa finalis movet non secundum suum esse reale, sed secundum esse cognitum. [18] For example, in order that the relation which exists in a given man between egoism and sympathy may appear, it is not enough that he possesses some wealth and sees the misery of others; he must also know what can be done with wealth both for himself and for others. Not only must another's suffering present itself to him, but he must also know what suffering is, and indeed what pleasure is. Perhaps on a first occasion he did not know all this so well as on a second; and if now on a similar occasion he acts differently, this is due simply to the circumstances being really different, namely as regards that part of them which depends on his knowledge of them, although they appear to be the same. Just as not to know actually existing circumstances deprives them of their effectiveness, so, on the other hand, entirely imaginary circumstances can act like real ones, not only in the case of a particular deception, but also in general and for some length of time. For example, if a man is firmly persuaded that every good deed is repaid to him a hundredfold in a future life, then such a conviction is valid and effective in precisely the same way as a safe bill of exchange at a very long date, and he can give from egoism just as, from another point of view, he would take from egoism. He himself has not changed: velle non discitur. In virtue of this great influence of knowledge on conduct, with an unalterable will, it comes about that the character develops and its different features appear only gradually. It therefore appears different at each period of life, and an impetuous, wild youth can be followed by a staid, sober, manly age. In particular, what is bad in the character will come out more and more powerfully with time; but sometimes passions to which a man gave way in his youth are later voluntarily restrained, merely because the opposite motives have only then come into knowledge. Hence we are all innocent to begin with, and this merely means that neither we nor others know the evil of our own nature. This appears only in the motives, and only in the course of time do the motives appear in knowledge. Ultimately we become acquainted with ourselves as quite different from what a priori we considered ourselves to be; and then we are often alarmed at ourselves.

Repentance never results from the fact that the will has changed -- this is impossible -- but from a change of knowledge. I must still continue to will the essential and real element of what I have always willed; for I am myself this will, that lies outside time and change. Therefore I can never repent of what I have willed, though I can repent of what I have done, when, guided by false concepts, I did something different from what was in accordance with my will. Repentance is the insight into this with more accurate knowledge. It extends not merely to worldly wisdom, the choice of means, and judging the appropriateness of the end to my will proper, but also to what is properly ethical. Thus, for example, it is possible for me to have acted more egoistically than is in accordance with my character, carried away by exaggerated notions of the need in which I myself stood, or even by the cunning, falseness, and wickedness of others, or again by the fact that I was in too much of a hurry; in other words, I acted without deliberation, determined not by motives distinctly known in the abstract, but by motives of mere perception, the impression of the present moment, and the emotion it excited. This emotion was so strong that I really did not have the use of my faculty of reason. But here also the return of reflection is only corrected knowledge, and from this repentance can result, which always proclaims itself by making amends for what has happened, so far as that is possible. But it is to be noted that, in order to deceive themselves, men prearrange apparent instances of precipitancy which are really secretly considered actions. For by such fine tricks we deceive and flatter no one but ourselves. The reverse case to what we have mentioned can also occur. I can be misled by too great confidence in others, or by not knowing the relative value of the good things of life, or by some abstract dogma in which I have now lost faith. Thus I act less egoistically than is in accordance with my character, and in this way prepare for myself repentance of another kind. Thus repentance is always corrected knowledge of the relation of the deed to the real intention. In so far as the will reveals its Ideas in space alone, that is to say, through mere form, the matter already controlled and ruled by other Ideas, in this case natural forces, resists the will, and seldom allows the form that was striving for visibility to appear in perfect purity and distinctness, i.e., in perfect beauty. This will, revealing itself in time alone, i.e., through actions, finds an analogous hindrance in the knowledge that rarely gives it the data quite correctly; and in this way the deed does not turn out wholly and entirely in keeping with the will, and therefore leads to repentance. Thus repentance always results from corrected knowledge, not from change in the will, which is impossible. Pangs of conscience over past deeds are anything but repentance; they are pain at the knowledge of oneself in one's own nature, in other words, as will. They rest precisely on the certainty that we always have the same will. If the will were changed, and thus the pangs of conscience were mere repentance, these would be abolished; for then the past could no longer cause any distress, as it would exhibit the manifestations of a will that was no longer that of the repentant person. We shall discuss in detail the significance of pangs of conscience later on.

The influence exerted by knowledge as the medium of motives, not indeed on the will itself, but on its manifestation in actions, is also the basis of the chief difference between the actions of men and those of animals, since the methods of cognition of the two are different. The animal has only knowledge of perception, but man through the faculty of reason has also abstract representations, concepts. Now, although animal and man are determined by motives with equal necessity, man nevertheless has the advantage over the animal of a complete elective decision (Wahlentscheidung). This has often been regarded as a freedom of the will in individual actions, although it is nothing but the possibility of a conflict, thoroughly fought out, between several motives, the strongest of which then determines the will with necessity. For this purpose the motives must have assumed the form of abstract thoughts, since only by means of these is real deliberation, in other words, a weighing of opposed grounds for conduct, possible. With the animal a choice can take place only between motives of perception actually present; hence this choice is restricted to the narrow sphere of its present apprehension of perception. Therefore the necessity of the determination of the will by motives, like that of the effect by the cause, can be exhibited in perception and directly only in the case of the animals, since here the spectator has the motives just as directly before his eyes as he has their effect. In the case of man, however, the motives are almost always abstract representations; these are not shared by the spectator, and the necessity of their effect is concealed behind their conflict even from the person himself who acts. For only in abstracto can several representations lie beside one another in consciousness as judgements and chains of conclusions, and then, free from all determination of time, work against one another, until the strongest overpowers the rest, and determines the will. This is the complete elective decision or faculty of deliberation which man has as an advantage over the animal, and on account of which freedom of will has been attributed to him, in the belief that his willing was a mere result of the operations of his intellect, without a definite tendency to serve as its basis. The truth is, however, that motivation works only on the basis and assumption of his definite tendency, that is in his case individual, in other words, a character. A more detailed discussion of this power of deliberation and of the difference between human and animal free choice brought about by it, is to be found in Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (first edition, pp. 35 seqq., second edition, pp. 33 seqq.), to which therefore I refer. Moreover, this faculty for deliberation which man possesses is also one of the things that make his existence so very much more harrowing than the animal's. For generally our greatest sufferings do not lie in the present as representations of perception or as immediate feeling, but in our faculty of reason as abstract concepts, tormenting thoughts, from which the animal is completely free, living as it does in the present, and thus in enviable ease and unconcern.

It seems to have been the dependence, described by us, of the human power of deliberation on the faculty of thinking in the abstract, and hence also of judging and inferring, which led both Descartes and Spinoza to identify the decisions of the will with the faculty of affirmation and denial (power of judgement). From this Descartes deduced that the will, according to him indifferently free, was to blame even for all theoretical error. On the other hand, Spinoza deduced that the will was necessarily determined by the motives, just as the judgement is by grounds or reasons. [19] However, this latter deduction is quite right, though it appears as a true conclusion from false premisses.

The distinction which we have demonstrated between the ways in which the animal and man are each moved by motives has a very far-reaching influence on the nature of both, and contributes most to the complete and obvious difference in the existence of the two. Thus while the animal is always motivated only by a representation of perception, man endeavours entirely to exclude this kind of motivation, and to let himself be determined only by abstract representations. In this way he uses his prerogative of reason to the greatest possible advantage, and, independent of the present moment, neither chooses nor avoids the passing pleasure or pain, but ponders over the consequences of both. In most cases, apart from quite insignificant actions, we are determined by abstract, considered motives. not by present impressions. Therefore, any particular privation for the moment is fairly light for us, but any renunciation is terribly hard. The former concerns only the fleeting present, but the latter concerns the future, and therefore includes in itself innumerable privations of which it is the equivalent. The cause of our pain as of our pleasure, therefore, lies for the most part not in the real present, but merely in abstract thoughts. It is these that are often unbearable to us, and inflict torments in comparison with which all the sufferings of the animal kingdom are very small; for even our own physical pain is often not felt at all when they are in question. Indeed, in the case of intense mental suffering, we cause ourselves physical suffering in order in this way to divert our attention from the former to the latter. Therefore in the greatest mental suffering men tear out their hair, beat their breasts, lacerate their faces, roll on the ground, for all these are really only powerful means of distraction from an unbearable thought. Just because mental pain, being much greater, makes one insensible to physical pain, suicide becomes very easy for the person in despair or consumed by morbid depression, even when previously, in comfortable circumstances, he recoiled from the thought of it. In the same way, care and passion, and thus the play of thought, wear out the body oftener and more than physical hardships do. In accordance with this, Epictetus rightly says: ([x]), a [x] (Perturbant homines non res ipsae, sed de rebus decreta) (Enchiridion, V) [20] and Seneca: Plura sunt, quae nos terrent, quam quae premunt, et saepius opinione quam re laboramus (Ep. 5). [21] Eulenspiegel also admirably satirized human nature, since when going uphill he laughed, but going downhill he wept. Indeed, children who have hurt themselves often cry not at the pain. but only at the thought of the pain, which is aroused when anyone condoles with them. Such great differences in conduct and suffering result from the diversity between the animal and human ways of knowing. Further, the appearance of the distinct and decided individual character that mainly distinguishes man from the animal, having scarcely more than the character of the species, is likewise conditioned by the choice between several motives, which is possible only by means of abstract concepts. For only after a precedent choice are the resolutions, which came about differently in different individuals, an indication of their individual character which is a different one in each case. On the other hand, the action of the animal depends only on the presence or absence of the impression, assuming that this is in general a motive for its species. Finally, therefore, in the case of man only the resolve, and not the mere wish, is a valid indication of his character for himself and for others. But for himself as for others the resolve becomes a certainty only through the deed. The wish is merely the necessary consequence of the present impression, whether of the external stimulus or of the inner passing mood, and is therefore as directly necessary and without deliberation as is the action of animals. Therefore, just like that action, it expresses merely the character of the species, not that of the individual, in other words, it indicates merely what man in general, not what the individual who feels the wish, would be capable of doing. The deed alone, because as human action it always requires a certain deliberation, and because as a rule man has command of his faculty of reason, and hence is thoughtful, in other words, decides according to considered abstract motives, is the expression of the intelligible maxims of his conduct, the result of his innermost willing. It is related as a letter is to the word that expresses his empirical character, this character itself being only the temporal expression of his intelligible character. Therefore in a healthy mind only deeds, not desires and thoughts, weigh heavily on the conscience; for only our deeds hold up before us the mirror of our will. The deed above mentioned, which is committed entirely without any thought and actually in blind emotion, is to a certain extent something between the mere wish and the resolve. Therefore through true repentance, which also shows itself in a deed, it can be obliterated as a falsely drawn line from the picture of our will, which our course of life is. Moreover, as a unique comparison, we may insert here the remark that the relation between wish and deed has an entirely accidental but accurate analogy to that between electrical accumulation and electrical discharge.

As a result of all this discussion on the freedom of the will and what relates to it, we find that, although the will in itself and apart from the phenomenon can be called free and even omnipotent, in its individual phenomena, illuminated by knowledge, and thus in persons and animals, it is determined by motives to which the character in each case regularly and necessarily always reacts in the same way. We see that, in virtue of the addition of abstract or rational knowledge, man has the advantage over the animal of an elective decision, which, however, simply makes him the scene of a conflict of motives, without withdrawing him from their control. Therefore this elective decision is certainly the condition of the possibility of the individual character's complete expression, but it is by no means to be regarded as freedom of the individual willing, in other words, as independence of the law of causality, whose necessity extends to man as to every other phenomenon. Thus the difference produced between human and animal willing by the faculty of reason or knowledge by means of concepts extends as far as the point mentioned, and no farther. But, what is quite a different thing, there can arise a phenomenon of the human will which is impossible in the animal kingdom, namely when man abandons all knowledge of individual things as such, which is subordinate to the principle of sufficient reason, and, by means of knowledge of the Ideas, sees through the principium individuationis. An actual appearance of the real freedom of the will as thing-in-itself then becomes possible, by which the phenomenon comes into a certain contradiction with itself, as is expressed by the word self-renunciation, in fact the in-itself of its real nature ultimately abolishes itself. This sole and immediate manifestation proper of the freedom of the will in itself even in the phenomenon cannot as yet be clearly explained here, but will be the subject at the very end of our discussion.

After clearly seeing, by virtue of the present arguments, the unalterable nature of the empirical character which is the mere unfolding of the intelligible character that resides outside time, and also the necessity with which actions result from its contact with motives, we have first of all to clear away an inference that might very easily be drawn from this in favour of unwarrantable tendencies. Our character is to be regarded as the temporal unfolding of an extra-temporal, and so indivisible and unalterable, act of will, or of an intelligible character. Through this, all that is essential in our conduct of life, in other words its ethical content, is invariably determined, and must express itself accordingly in its phenomenon, the empirical character. On the other hand, only the inessential of this phenomenon, the external form of our course of life, depends on the forms in which the motives present themselves. Thus it might be inferred that for us to work at improving our character, or at resisting the power of evil tendencies, would be labour in vain; that it would therefore be more advisable to submit to the inevitable and unalterable, and to gratify at once every inclination, even if it is bad. But this is precisely the same case as that of the theory of inevitable fate, and of the inference drawn therefrom, which is called [x], [22] and in more recent times Turkish or Mohammedan faith. Its correct refutation, as Chrysippus is supposed to have given it, is described by Cicero in his book De Fato, ch. 12, 13.

Although everything can be regarded as irrevocably predetermined by fate, it is so only by means of the chain of causes. Therefore in no case can it be determined that an effect should appear without its cause. Thus it is not simply the event that is predetermined, but the event as the result of preceding causes; and hence it is not the result alone, but also the means as the result of which it is destined to appear, that are settled by fate. Accordingly, if the means do not appear, the result also certainly does not appear; the two always exist according to the determination of fate, but it is always only afterwards that we come to know this.

Just as events always come about in accordance with fate, in other words, according to the endless concatenation of causes, so do our deeds always come about according to our intelligible character. But just as we do not know the former in advance, so also are we given no a priori insight into the latter; only a posteriori through experience do we come to know ourselves as we come to know others. If the intelligible character made it inevitable that we could form a good resolution only after a long conflict with a bad disposition, this conflict would have to come first and to be waited for. Reflection on the unalterable nature of the character, on the unity of the source from which all our deeds flow, should not mislead us into forestalling the decision of the character in favour of one side or the other. In the ensuing resolve we shall see what kind of men we are, and in our deeds we shall mirror ourselves. From this very fact is explained the satisfaction or agony of mind with which we look back on the course of our life. Neither of these results from past deeds still having an existence. These deeds are past; they have been, and now are no more, but their great importance to us comes from their significance, from the fact that such deeds are the impression or copy of the character, the mirror of the will; and, looking into this mirror, we recognize our innermost self, the kernel of our will. Because we experience this not before but only after, it is proper for us to fight and strive in time, simply in order that the picture we produce through our deeds may so turn out that the sight of it will cause us the greatest possible peace of mind, and not uneasiness or anxiety. The significance of such peace or agony of mind will, as we have said, be further investigated later. But the following discussion, standing by itself, belongs here.

Besides the intelligible and empirical characters, we have still to mention a third which is different from these two, namely the acquired character. We obtain this only in life, through contact with the world, and it is this we speak of when anyone is praised as a person who has character, or censured as one without character. It might of course be supposed that, since the empirical character, as the phenomenon of the intelligible, is unalterable, and, like every natural phenomenon, is in itself consistent, man also for this very reason would have to appear always like himself and consistent, and would therefore not need to acquire a character for himself artificially through experience and reflection. But the case is otherwise, and although a man is always the same, he does not always understand himself, but often fails to recognize himself until he has acquired some degree of real self-knowledge. As a mere natural tendency, the empirical character is in itself irrational; indeed its expressions are in addition disturbed by the faculty of reason, and in fact the more so, the more intellect and power of thought the man has. For these always keep before him what belongs to man in general as the character of the species, and what is possible for him both in willing and in doing. In this way, an insight into that which alone of all he wills and is able to do by dint of his individuality, is made difficult for him. He finds in himself the tendencies to all the various human aspirations and abilities, but the different degrees of these in his individuality do not become clear to him without experience. Now if he resorts to those pursuits that alone conform to his character, he feels, especially at particular moments and in particular moods, the impulse to the very opposite pursuits that are incompatible with them; and if he wishes to follow the former pursuits undisturbed, the latter must be entirely suppressed. For, as our physical path on earth is always a line and not a surface, we must in life, if we wish to grasp and possess one thing, renounce and leave aside innumerable others that lie to the right and to the left. If we cannot decide to do this, but, like children at a fair, snatch at everything that fascinates us in passing, this is the perverted attempt to change the line of our path into a surface. We then run a zigzag path, wander like a will-o'-the-wisp, and arrive at nothing. Or, to use another comparison, according to Hobbes's doctrine of law, everyone originally has a right to everything, but an exclusive right to nothing; but he can obtain an exclusive right to individual things by renouncing his right to all the rest, while the others do the same thing with regard to what was chosen by him. It is precisely the same in life, where we can follow some definite pursuit, whether it be of pleasure, honour, wealth, science, art, or virtue, seriously and successfully only when we give up all claims foreign to it, and renounce everything else. Therefore mere willing and mere ability to do are not enough of themselves, but a man must also know what he wills, and know what he can do. Only thus will he display character, and only then can he achieve anything solid. Until he reaches this, he is still without character, in spite of the natural consistency of the empirical character. Although, on the whole, he must remain true to himself and run his course drawn by his daemon, he will not describe a straight line, but a wavering and uneven one. He will hesitate, deviate, turn back, and prepare for himself repentance and pain. All this because, in great things and in small, he sees before him as much as is possible and attainable for man, and yet does not know what part of all this is alone suitable and feasible for him, or even merely capable of being enjoyed by him. Therefore he will envy many on account of a position and circumstances which yet are suitable only to their character, not to his, in which he would feel unhappy, and which he might be unable to endure. For just as a fish is happy only in water, a bird only in the air, and a mole only under the earth, so every man is happy only in an atmosphere suitable to him. For example, not everyone can breathe the atmosphere of a court. From lack of moderate insight into all this, many a man will make all kinds of abortive attempts; he will do violence to his character in particulars, and yet on the whole will have to yield to it again. What he thus laboriously attains contrary to his nature will give him no pleasure; what he learns in this way will remain dead. Even from an ethical point of view, a deed too noble for his character, which has sprung not from pure, direct impulse, but from a concept, a dogma, will lose all merit even in his own eyes through a subsequent egoistical repentance. Velle non discitur. Only through experience do we become aware of the inflexibility of other people's characters, and till then we childishly believe that we could succeed by representations of reason, by entreaties and prayers, by example and noble-mindedness, in making a man abandon his own way, change his mode of conduct, depart from his way of thinking, or even increase his abilities; it is the same, too, with ourselves. We must first learn from experience what we will and what we can do; till then we do not know this, are without character, and must often be driven back on to our own path by hard blows from outside. But if we have finally learnt it, we have then obtained what in the world is called character, the acquired character, which, accordingly, is nothing but the most complete possible knowledge of our own individuality. It is the abstract, and consequently distinct, knowledge of the unalterable qualities of our own empirical character, and of the measure and direction of our mental and bodily powers, and so of the whole strength and weakness of our own individuality. This puts us in a position to carry out, deliberately and methodically, the unalterable role of our own person, and to fill up the gaps caused in it by whims or weaknesses, under the guidance of fixed concepts. This role is in itself unchangeable once for all, but previously we allowed it to follow its natural course without any rule. We have now brought to clearly conscious maxims that are always present to us, the manner of acting necessarily determined by our individual nature. In accordance with these, we carry it out as deliberately as though it were one that had been learnt, without ever being led astray by the fleeting influence of the mood or impression of the present moment, without being checked by the bitterness or sweetness of a particular thing we meet with on the way, without wavering, without hesitation, without inconsistencies. Now we shall no longer, as novices, wait, attempt, and grope about, in order to see what we really desire and are able to do; we know this once for all, and with every choice we have only to apply general principles to particular cases, and at once reach a decision. We know our will in general, and do not allow ourselves to be misled by a mood, or by entreaty from outside, into arriving at a decision in the particular case which is contrary to the will as a whole. We also know the nature and measure of our powers and weaknesses, and shall thus spare ourselves much pain and suffering. For there is really no other pleasure than in the use and feeling of our own powers, and the greatest pain is when we are aware of a deficiency of our powers where they are needed. Now if we have found out where our strong and weak points lie, we shall attempt to develop, employ, and use in every way those talents that are naturally prominent in us. We shall always turn to where these talents are useful and of value, and shall avoid entirely and with self-restraint those pursuits for which we have little natural aptitude. We shall guard against attempting that in which we do not succeed. Only the man who has reached this will always be entirely himself with complete awareness, and will never fail himself at the critical moment, because he has always known what he could expect from himself. He will then often partake of the pleasure of feeling his strength, and will rarely experience the pain of being reminded of his weaknesses. The latter is humiliation, which perhaps causes the greatest of mental suffering. Therefore we are far better able to endure the clear sight of our ill-luck than that of our incapacity. Now if we are thus fully acquainted with our strength and weakness, we shall not attempt to display powers we do not possess; we shall not play with false coin, because such dissimulation in the end misses its mark. For as the whole man is only the phenomenon of his will, nothing can be more absurd than for him, starting from reflection, to want to be something different from what he is; for this is an immediate contradiction of the will itself. Imitating the qualities and idiosyncrasies of others is much more outrageous than wearing others' clothes, for it is the judgement we ourselves pronounce on our own worthlessness. Knowledge of our own mind and of our capabilities of every kind, and of their unalterable limits, is in this respect the surest way to the attainment of the greatest possible contentment with ourselves. For it holds good of inner as of outer circumstances that there is no more effective consolation for us than the complete certainty of unalterable necessity. No evil that has befallen us torments us so much as the thought of the circumstances by which it could have been warded off. Therefore nothing is more effective for our consolation than a consideration of what has happened from the point of view of necessity, from which all accidents appear as tools of a governing fate; so that we recognize the evil that has come about as inevitably produced by the conflict of inner and outer circumstances, that is, fatalism. We really wail or rage only so long as we hope either to affect others in this way, or to stimulate ourselves to unheard-of efforts. But children and adults know quite well how to yield and to be satisfied, as soon as they see clearly that things are absolutely no different;

[x]
(Animo in pectoribus nostro domito necessitate.) [23]


We are like entrapped elephants, which rage and struggle fearfully for many days, until they see that it is fruitless, and then suddenly offer their necks calmly to the yoke, tamed for ever. We are like King David who, so long as his son was still alive, incessantly implored Jehovah with prayers, and behaved as if in despair; but as soon as his son was dead, he thought no more about him. Hence we see that innumerable permanent evils, such as lameness, poverty, humble position, ugliness, unpleasant dwelling-place, are endured with complete indifference, and no longer felt at all by innumerable persons, just like wounds that have turned to scars. This is merely because they know that inner or outer necessity leaves them nothing here that could be altered. On the other hand, more fortunate people do not see how such things can be endured. Now as with outer necessity so with inner, nothing reconciles so firmly as a distinct knowledge of it. If we have clearly recognized once for all our good qualities and strong points as well as our defects and weaknesses; if we have fixed our aim accordingly, and rest content about the unattainable, we thus escape in the surest way, as far as our individuality allows, that bitterest of all sufferings, dissatisfaction with ourselves, which is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of our own individuality, of false conceit, and of the audacity and presumption that arise therefrom. Ovid's verses admit of admirable application to the bitter chapter of self-knowledge that is here recommended:

Optimus ille animi vindex laedentia pectus
Vincula qui rupit, dedoluitque semel. [24]


So much as regards the acquired character, that is of importance not so much for ethics proper as for life in the world. But a discussion of it was related to that of the intelligible and empirical characters, and we had to enter into a somewhat detailed consideration of it in order to see clearly how the will in all its phenomena is subject to necessity, while in itself it can be called free and even omnipotent.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:29 pm

Part 3 of 8

56.

This freedom, this omnipotence, as the manifestation and copy of which the whole visible world, the phenomenon of this omnipotence, exists and progressively develops according to laws necessitated by the form of knowledge, can now express itself anew, and that indeed where, in its most perfect phenomenon, the completely adequate knowledge of its own inner nature has dawned on it. Thus either it wills here, at the summit of mental endowment and self-consciousness, the same thing that it willed blindly and without knowledge of itself; and then knowledge always remains motive (or it, in the whole as well as in the particular. Or, conversely, this knowledge becomes for it a quieter, silencing and suppressing all willing. This is the affirmation and denial of the will-to-live already stated previously in general terms. As a general, not a particular, manifestation of will in regard to the conduct of the individual, it does not disturb and modify the development of the character, nor does it find its expression in particular actions; but either by an ever more marked appearance of the whole previous mode of action, or conversely, by its suppression, it vividly expresses the maxims that the will has freely adopted in accordance with the knowledge now obtained. The clearer development of all this, the main subject of this last book, is now facilitated and prepared for us to some extent by the considerations on freedom, necessity, and character which have been set forth. This will be even more so after we have postponed it once again, and have first turned our attention to life itself, the willing or not willing of which is the great question; indeed we shall attempt to know in general what will really come to the will itself, which everywhere is the innermost nature of this life, through its affirmation, in what way and to what extent this affirmation satisfies the will or indeed can satisfy it. In short, we shall try to find out what is generally and essentially to be regarded as its state or condition in this world which is its own, and which belongs to it in every respect.

In the first place, I wish the reader here to recall those remarks with which we concluded the second book, and which were occasioned by the question there raised as to the will's aim and object. Instead of the answer to this question, we clearly saw how, at all grades of its phenomenon from the lowest to the highest, the will dispenses entirely with an ultimate aim and object. It always strives, because striving is its sole nature, to which no attained goal can put an end. Such striving is therefore incapable of final satisfaction; it can be checked only by hindrance, but in itself it goes on for ever. We saw this in the simplest of all natural phenomena, namely gravity, which does not cease to strive and press towards an extensionless central point, whose attainment would be the annihilation of itself and of matter; it would not cease, even if the whole universe were already rolled into a ball. We see it in other simple natural phenomena. The solid tends to fluidity, either by melting or dissolving, and only then do its chemical forces become free: rigidity is the imprisonment in which they are held by cold. The fluid tends to the gaseous form, into which it passes at once as soon as it is freed from all pressure. No body is without relationship, i.e., without striving, or without longing and desire, as Jacob Boehme would say. Electricity transmits its inner self-discord to infinity, although the mass of the earth absorbs the effect. Galvanism, so long as the pile lasts, is also an aimlessly and ceaselessly repeated act of self-discord and reconciliation. The existence of the plant is just such a restless, never satisfied striving, a ceaseless activity through higher and higher forms, till the final point, the seed, becomes anew a starting-point; and this is repeated ad infinitum; nowhere is there a goal, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a point of rest. At the same time, we recall from the second book that everywhere the many different forces of nature and organic forms contest with one another for the matter in which they desire to appear, since each possesses only what it has wrested from another. Thus a constant struggle is carried on between life and death, the main result whereof is the resistance by which that striving which constitutes the innermost nature of everything is everywhere impeded. It presses and urges in vain; yet, by reason of its inner nature, it cannot cease; it toils on laboriously until this phenomenon perishes, and then others eagerly seize its place and its matter.

We have long since recognized this striving, that constitutes the kernel and in-itself of everything, as the same thing that in us, where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullest consciousness, is called will. We call its hindrance through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering; its attainment of the goal, on the other hand, we call satisfaction, well-being, happiness. We can also transfer these names to those phenomena of the world-without-knowledge which, though weaker in degree, are identical in essence. We then see these involved in constant suffering and without any lasting happiness. For all striving springs from want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction with one's own state or condition, and is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied. No satisfaction, however, is lasting; on the contrary, it is always merely the starting-point of a fresh striving. We see striving everywhere impeded in many ways, everywhere struggling and fighting, and hence always as suffering. Thus that there is no ultimate aim of striving means that there is no measure or end of suffering.

But what we thus discover in nature-without-knowledge only by sharpened observation, and with an effort, presents itself to us distinctly in nature-with-knowledge, in the life of the animal kingdom, the constant suffering whereof is easily demonstrable. But without dwelling on these intermediate stages, we will turn to the life of man, where everything appears most distinctly and is illuminated by the clearest knowledge. For as the phenomenon of the will becomes more complete, the suffering becomes more and more evident. In the plant there is as yet no sensibility, and hence no pain. A certain very small degree of both dwells in the lowest animals, in infusoria and radiata; even in insects the capacity to feel and suffer is still limited. It first appears in a high degree with the complete nervous system of the vertebrate animals, and in an ever higher degree, the more intelligence is developed. Therefore, in proportion as knowledge attains to distinctness, consciousness is enhanced, pain also increases, and consequently reaches its highest degree in man; and all the more, the more distinctly he knows, and the more intelligent he is. The person in whom genius is to be found suffers most of all. In this sense, namely in reference to the degree of knowledge generally, not to mere abstract knowledge, I understand and here use that saying in Ecclesiastes: Qui auget scientiam, auget et dolorem. [25] This precise relation between the degree of consciousness and that of suffering has been beautifully expressed in perceptive and visible delineation in a drawing by Tischbein, that philosophical painter or painting philosopher. The upper half of his drawing represents women from whom their children are being snatched away, and who by different groupings and attitudes express in many ways deep maternal pain, anguish, and despair. The lower half of the drawing shows, in exactly the same order and grouping, sheep whose lambs are being taken from them. In the lower half of the drawing an animal analogy corresponds to each human head, to each human attitude, in the upper half. We thus see clearly how the pain possible in the dull animal consciousness is related to the violent grief that becomes possible only through distinctness of knowledge, through clearness of consciousness.

For this reason, we wish to consider in human existence the inner and essential destiny of the will. Everyone will readily find the same thing once more in the life of the animal, only more feebly expressed in various degrees. He can also sufficiently convince himself in the suffering animal world how essentially all life is suffering.

57.

At every stage illuminated by knowledge, the will appears as individual. The human individual finds himself in endless space and time as finite, and consequently as a vanishing quantity compared with these. He is projected into them, and on account of their boundlessness has always only a relative, never an absolute, when and where of his existence; for his place and duration are finite parts of what is infinite and boundless. His real existence is only in the present, whose unimpeded flight into the past is a constant transition into death, a constant dying. For his past life, apart from its eventual consequences for the present, and also apart from the testimony regarding his will that is impressed in it, is entirely finished and done with, dead, and no longer anything. Therefore, as a matter of reason, it must be indifferent to him whether the contents of that past were pains or pleasures. But the present in his hands is constantly becoming the past; the future is quite uncertain and always short. Thus his existence, even considered from the formal side alone, is a continual rushing of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. And if we look at it also from the physical side, it is evident that, just as we know our walking to be only a constantly prevented falling, so is the life of our body only a constantly prevented dying, an ever-deferred death. Finally, the alertness and activity of our mind are also a continuously postponed boredom. Every breath we draw wards off the death that constantly impinges on us. In this way, we struggle with it every second, and again at longer intervals through every meal we eat, every sleep we take, every time we warm ourselves, and so on. Ultimately death must triumph, for by birth it has already become our lot, and it plays with its prey only for a while before swallowing it up. However, we continue our life with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, just as we blowout a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.

We have already seen in nature-without-knowledge her inner being as a constant striving without aim and without rest, and this stands out much more distinctly when we consider the animal or man. Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst. The basis of all willing, however, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents. This has been expressed very quaintly by saying that, after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom.

But the constant striving, which constitutes the inner nature of every phenomenon of the will, obtains at the higher grades of objectification its first and most universal foundation from the fact that the will here appears as a living body with the iron command to nourish it. What gives force to this command is just that this body is nothing but the objectified will-to-live itself. Man, as the most complete objectification of this will, is accordingly the most necessitous of all beings. He is concrete willing and needing through and through; he is a concretion of a thousand wants and needs. With these he stands on the earth, left to his own devices, in uncertainty about everything except his own need and misery. Accordingly, care for the maintenance of this existence, in the face of demands that are so heavy and proclaim themselves anew every day, occupies, as a rule, the whole of human life. With this is directly connected the second demand, that for the propagation of the race. At the same time dangers of the most varied kinds threaten him from all sides, and to escape from them calls for constant vigilance. With cautious step and anxious glance around he pursues his path, for a thousand accidents and a thousand enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went in the savage state, and thus he goes in civilized life; there is no security for him:

Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis
Degitur hocc' aevi, quodcunque est! [26]

-- Lucretius, ii, 15.


The life of the great majority is only a constant struggle for this same existence, with the certainty of ultimately losing it. What enables them to endure this wearisome battle is not so much the love of life as the fear of death, which nevertheless stands in the background as inevitable, and which may come on the scene at any moment. Life itself is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools that man avoids with the greatest caution and care, although he knows that, even when he succeeds with all his efforts and ingenuity in struggling through, at every step he comes nearer to the greatest, the total, the inevitable and irremediable shipwreck, indeed even steers right on to it, namely death. This is the final goal of the wearisome voyage, and is worse for him than all the rocks that he has avoided.

Now it is at once well worth noting that, on the one hand, the sufferings and afflictions of life can easily grow to such an extent that even death, in the flight from which the whole of life consists, becomes desirable, and a man voluntarily hastens to it. Again, on the other hand, it is worth noting that, as soon as want and suffering give man a relaxation, boredom is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion and amusement. The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them in motion. When existence is assured to them, they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, "to kill time," in other words, to escape from boredom. Accordingly we see that almost all men, secure from want and cares, are now a burden to themselves, after having finally cast off all other burdens. They regard as a gain every hour that is got through, and hence every deduction from that very life, whose maintenance as long as possible has till then been the object of all their efforts. Boredom is anything but an evil to be thought of lightly; ultimately it depicts on the countenance real despair. It causes beings who love one another as little as men do, to seek one another so much, and thus becomes the source of sociability. From political prudence public measures are taken against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities, since this evil, like its opposite extreme, famine, can drive people to the greatest excesses and anarchy; the people need panem et circenses. The strict penitentiary system of Philadelphia makes mere boredom an instrument of punishment through loneliness and idleness. It is so terrible an instrument, that it has brought convicts to suicide. Just as need and want are the constant scourge of the people, so is boredom that of the world of fashion. In middle-class life boredom is represented by the Sunday, just as want is represented by the six weekdays.

Now absolutely every human life continues to flow on between willing and attainment. Of its nature the wish is pain; attainment quickly begets satiety. The goal was only apparent; possession takes away its charm. The wish, the need, appears again on the scene under a new form; if it does not, then dreariness, emptiness, and boredom follow, the struggle against which is just as painful as is that against want. For desire and satisfaction to follow each other at not too short and not too long intervals, reduces the suffering occasioned by both to the smallest amount, and constitutes the happiest life. What might otherwise be called the finest part of life, its purest joy, just because it lifts us out of real existence, and transforms us into disinterested spectators of it, is pure knowledge which remains foreign to all willing, pleasure in the beautiful, genuine delight in art. But because this requires rare talents, it is granted only to extremely few, and even to those only as a fleeting dream. Then again higher intellectual power makes those very few susceptible to much greater sufferings than duller men can ever feel. Moreover, it makes them feel lonely among beings that are noticeably different from them, and in this way also matters are made even. But purely intellectual pleasures are not accessible to the vast majority of men. They are almost wholly incapable of the pleasure to be found in pure knowledge; they are entirely given over to willing. Therefore, if anything is to win their sympathy, to be interesting to them, it must (and this is to be found already in the meaning of the word) in some way excite their will, even if it be only through a remote relation to it which is merely within the bounds of possibility. The will must never be left entirely out of question, since their existence lies far more in willing than in knowing; action and reaction are their only element. The naive expressions of this quality can be seen in trifles and everyday phenomena; thus, for example, they write their names up at places worth seeing which they visit, in order thus to react on, to affect the place, since it does not affect them. Further, they cannot easily just contemplate a rare and strange animal, but must excite it, tease it, play with it, just to experience action and reaction. But this need for exciting the will shows itself particularly in the invention and maintenance of card-playing, which is in the truest sense an expression of the wretched side of humanity.

But whatever nature and good fortune may have done, whoever a person may be and whatever he may possess, the pain essential to life cannot be thrown off:

[x]
(Pelides autem ejulavit, intuitus in coelum latum). [27]


And again:

[x]
[x]
(Jovis quidem filius eram Saturnii; verum aerumnam
Habebam infinitam.) [28]


The ceaseless efforts to banish suffering achieve nothing more than a change in its form. This is essentially want, lack, care for the maintenance of life. If, which is very difficult, we have succeeded in removing pain in this form, it at once appears on the scene in a thousand others, varying according to age and circumstances, such as sexual impulse, passionate love, jealousy, envy, hatred, anxiety, ambition, avarice, sickness, and so on. Finally, if it cannot find entry in any other shape, it comes in the sad, grey garment of weariness, satiety, and boredom, against which many different attempts are made. Even if we ultimately succeed in driving these away, it will hardly be done without letting pain in again in one of the previous forms, and thus starting the dance once more at the beginning; for every human life is tossed backwards and forwards between pain and boredom. Depressing as this discussion is, I will, however, draw attention in passing to one aspect of it from which a consolation can be derived, and perhaps even a stoical indifference to our own present ills may be attained. For our impatience at these arises for the most part from the fact that we recognize them as accidental, as brought about by a chain of causes that might easily be different. We are not usually distressed at evils that are inescapably necessary and quite universal, for example, the necessity of old age and death, and of many daily inconveniences. It is rather a consideration of the accidental nature of the circumstances that have brought suffering precisely on us which gives this suffering its sting. Now we have recognized that pain as such is inevitable and essential to life; that nothing but the mere form in which it manifests itself depends on chance; that therefore our present suffering fills a place which without it would be at once occupied by some other suffering which the one now present excludes; and that, accordingly, fate can affect us little in what is essential. If such a reflection were to become a living conviction, it might produce a considerable degree of stoical equanimity, and greatly reduce our anxious concern about our own welfare. But such a powerful control of the faculty of reason over directly felt suffering is seldom or never found in fact.

Moreover, through this consideration of the inevitability of pain, of the supplanting of one pain by another, of the dragging in of a fresh pain by the departure of the preceding one, we might be led to the paradoxical but not absurd hypothesis that in every individual the measure of the pain essential to him has been determined once for all by his nature, a measure that could not remain empty or be filled to excess, however much the form of the suffering might change. Accordingly, his suffering and well-being would not be determined at all from without, but only by that measure, that disposition, which might in fact through the physical condition experience some increase and decrease at different times, but which on the whole would remain the same, and would be nothing but what is called his temperament. More accurately, this is called the degree in which he might be [x] or [x], as Plato puts it in the first book of the Republic, in other words, of an easy or difficult nature. In support of this hypothesis is the well-known experience that great sufferings render lesser ones quite incapable of being felt, and conversely, that in the absence of great sufferings even the smallest vexations and annoyances torment us, and put us in a bad mood. But experience also teaches us that if a great misfortune, at the mere thought of which we shuddered, has now actually happened, our frame of mind remains on the whole much the same as soon as we have overcome the first pain. Conversely, experience also teaches us that, after the appearance of a long-desired happiness, we do not feel ourselves on the whole and permanently much better off or more comfortable than before. Only the moment of appearance of these changes moves us with unusual strength, as deep distress or shouts of joy; but both of these soon disappear, because they rested on illusion. For they do not spring from the immediately present pleasure or pain, but only from the opening up of a new future that is anticipated in them. Only by pain or pleasure borrowing from the future could they be heightened so abnormally, and consequently not for any length of time. The following remarks may be put in evidence in support of the hypothesis we advanced, by which, in knowing as well as in feeling suffering or well-being, a very large part would be subjective and determined a priori. Human cheerfulness or dejection is obviously not determined by external circumstances, by wealth or position, for we come across at least as many cheerful faces among the poor as among the rich. Further, the motives that induce suicide are so very different, that we cannot mention any misfortune which would be great enough to bring it about in any character with a high degree of probability, and few that would be so small that those like them would not at some time have caused it. Now although the degree of our cheerfulness or sadness is not at all times the same, yet in consequence of this view we shall attribute it not to the change of external circumstances, but to that of the internal state, the physical condition. For when an actual, though always only temporary, enhancement of our cheerfulness takes place, even to the extent of joy, it usually appears without any external occasion. It is true that we often see our pain result only from a definite external relation, and that we are visibly oppressed and saddened merely by this. We then believe that, if only this were removed, the greatest contentment would necessarily ensue. But this is a delusion. The measure of our pain and our well-being is, on the whole, subjectively determined for each point of time according to our hypothesis; and in reference to this, that external motive for sadness is only what a blister is for the body, to which are drawn all the bad humours that would otherwise be spread throughout it. The pain to be found in our nature for this period of time, which therefore cannot be shaken off, would be distributed at a hundred points were it not for that definite external cause of our suffering. It would appear in the form of a hundred little annoyances and worries over things we now entirely overlook, because our capacity for pain is already filled up by that principal evil that has concentrated at a point all the suffering otherwise dispersed. In keeping with this is also the observation that, if a great and pressing care is finally lifted from our breast by a fortunate issue, another immediately takes its place. The whole material of this already existed previously, yet it could not enter consciousness as care, because the consciousness had no capacity left for it. This material for care, therefore, remained merely as a dark and unobserved misty form on the extreme horizon of consciousness. But now, as there is room, this ready material at once comes forward and occupies the throne of the reigning care of the day ([x]). If so far as its matter is concerned it is very much lighter than the material of the care that has vanished, it knows how to blow itself out, so that it apparently equals it in size, and thus, as the chief care of the day, completely fills the throne.

Excessive joy and very severe pain occur always only in the same person, for they reciprocally condition each other, and are also conditioned in common by great mental activity. As we have just now found, both are brought about not by what is actually present, but by anticipation of the future. But as pain is essential to life, and is also determined as regards its degree by the nature of the subject, sudden changes, since they are always external, cannot really change its degree. Thus an error and delusion are at the root of immoderate joy or pain; consequently, these two excessive strains of the mind could be avoided by insight. Every immoderate joy (exultatio, insolens laetitia) always rests on the delusion that we have found something in life that is not to be met with at all, namely permanent satisfaction of the tormenting desires or cares that constantly breed new ones. From each particular delusion of this kind we must inevitably later be brought back; and then, when it vanishes, we must pay for it with pains just as bitter as the joy caused by its entry was keen. To this extent it is exactly like a height from which we can descend again only by a fall; we should therefore avoid them; and every sudden, excessive grief is just a fall from such a height, the vanishing of such a delusion, and is thus conditioned by it. Consequently, we could avoid both, if we could bring ourselves always to survey things with perfect clearness as a whole and in their connexion, and resolutely to guard against actually lending them the colour we should like them to have. The Stoic ethics aimed principally at freeing the mind from all such delusion and its consequences, and at giving it an unshakable equanimity instead. Horace is imbued with this insight in the well-known ode:

Aequam memento rebus in arduis
Servare mentem, non secus in bonis
Ab insolenti temperatam
Laetitia. -- [29]


But we frequently shut our eyes to the truth, comparable to a bitter medicine, that suffering is essential to life, and therefore does not flow in upon us from outside, but that everyone carries around within himself its perennial source. On the contrary, we are constantly looking for a particular external cause, as it were a pretext for the pain that never leaves us, just as the free man makes for himself an idol, in order to have a master. For we untiringly strive from desire to desire, and although every attained satisfaction, however much it promised, does not really satisfy us, but often stands before us as a mortifying error, we still do not see that we are drawing water with the vessel of the Danaides, and we hasten to ever fresh desires:

Sed, dum abest quod avemus, id exsuperare videtur
Caetera; post aliud, quum contigit illud, avemus;
Et sitis aequa tenet vitai semper hiantes. [30]

-- (Lucretius, iii, 1082.)


Thus it goes on either ad infinitum, or, what is rarer and already presupposes a certain strength of character, till we come to a wish that is not fulfilled, and yet cannot be given up. We then have, so to speak, what we were looking for, namely something that we can denounce at any moment, instead of our own inner nature, as the source of our sufferings. Thus, although at variance with our fate, we become reconciled to our existence in return for this, since the knowledge that suffering is essential to this existence itself and that true satisfaction is impossible, is again withdrawn from us. The consequence of this last kind of development is a somewhat melancholy disposition, the constant bearing of a single, great pain, and the resultant disdain for all lesser joys and sorrows. This is in consequence a worthier phenomenon than the constant hunting for ever different deceptive forms which is much more usual.

58.

An satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is really and essentially always negative only, and never positive. It is not a gratification which comes to us originally and of itself, but it must always be the satisfaction of a wish. For desire, that is to say, want, is the precedent condition of every pleasure; but with the satisfaction, the desire and therefore the pleasure cease; and so the satisfaction or gratification can never be more than deliverance from a pain, from a want. Such is not only every actual and evident suffering, but also every desire whose importunity disturbs our peace, and indeed even the deadening boredom that makes existence a burden to us. But it is so difficult to attain and carry through anything; difficulties and troubles without end oppose every plan, and at every step obstacles are heaped up. But when everything is finally overcome and attained, nothing can ever be gained but deliverance from some suffering or desire; consequently, we are only in the same position as we were before this suffering or desire appeared. What is immediately given to us is always only the want, i.e., the pain. The satisfaction and pleasure can be known only indirectly by remembering the preceding suffering and privation that ceased on their entry. Hence it comes about that we are in no way aware of the blessings and advantages we actually possess; we do not value them, but simply imagine that they must be so, for they make us happy only negatively by preventing suffering. Only after we have lost them do we become sensible of their value, for the want, the privation, the suffering is what is positive, and proclaims itself immediately. Thus also we are pleased at remembering need, sickness, want, and so on which have been overcome, because such remembrance is the only means of enjoying present blessings. It is also undeniable that in this respect, and from this standpoint of egoism, which is the form of the will-to-live, the sight or description of another's sufferings affords us satisfaction and pleasure, just as Lucretius beautifully and frankly expresses it at the beginning of his second book:

Suave, mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem:
Non, quia vexari quemquam est jucunda voluptas;
Sed, quibus ipse malis careas, quia cernere suave est. [31]


Yet later on we shall see that this kind of pleasure, through knowledge of our own well-being obtained in this way, lies very near the source of real, positive wickedness.

In art, especially in poetry, that true mirror of the real nature of the world and of life, we also find evidence of the fact that all happiness is only of a negative, not a positive nature, and that for this reason it cannot be lasting satisfaction and gratification, but always delivers us only from a pain or want that must be followed either by a new pain or by languor, empty longing, and boredom. Every epic or dramatic poem can always present to us only a strife, an effort, and a struggle for happiness, never enduring and complete happiness itself. It conducts its heroes to their goal through a thousand difficulties and dangers; as soon as the goal is reached, it quickly lets the curtain fall. For there would be nothing left for it but to show that the glittering goal, in which the hero imagined he could find happiness, had merely mocked him, and that he was no better after its attainment than before. Since a genuine, lasting happiness is not possible, it cannot be a subject of art. It is true that the real purpose of the idyll is the description of such a happiness, but we also see that the idyll as such cannot endure. In the hands of the poet it always becomes an epic, and is then only a very insignificant epic made up of trifling sorrows, trifling joys, and trifling efforts; this is the commonest case. Or it becomes a merely descriptive poem, depicting the beauty of nature, in other words, really pure, will-free knowing, which is of course the only pure happiness which is not preceded either by suffering or need, or yet followed by repentance, suffering, emptiness, or satiety. This happiness, however, cannot fill the whole of life, but only moments of it. What we see in poetry we find again in music, in the melodies of which we again recognize the universally expressed, innermost story of the will conscious of itself, the most secret living, longing, suffering, and enjoying, the ebb and flow of the human heart. Melody is always a deviation from the keynote through a thousand crotchety wanderings up to the most painful discord. After this, it at last finds the keynote again, which expresses the satisfaction and composure of the will, but with which nothing more can then be done, and the continuation of which would be only a wearisome and meaningless monotony corresponding to boredom.

All that these remarks are intended to make clear, namely the impossibility of attaining lasting satisfaction and the negative nature of all happiness, finds its explanation in what is shown at the end of the second book, namely that the will, whose objectification is human life like every phenomenon, is a striving without aim or end. We find the stamp of this endlessness imprinted on all the parts of the will's phenomenon as a whole, from its most universal form, namely endless time and space, up to the most perfect of all phenomena, the life and efforts of man. We can in theory assume three extremes of human life, and consider them as elements of actual human life. Firstly, powerful and vehement willing, the great passions (Raja-Guna); it appears in great historical characters, and is described in the epic and the drama. It can also show itself, however, in the small world, for the size of the objects is here measured only according to the degree in which they excite the will, not to their external relations. Then secondly, pure knowing, the comprehension of the Ideas, conditioned by freeing knowledge from the service of the will: the life of the genius (Sattva-Guna). Thirdly and lastly, the greatest lethargy of the will and also of the knowledge attached to it, namely empty longing, life-benumbing boredom (Tama-Guna). The life of the individual, far from remaining fixed in one of these extremes, touches them only rarely, and is often only a weak and wavering approximation to one side or the other, a needy desiring of trifling objects, always recurring and thus running away from boredom. It is really incredible how meaningless and insignificant when seen from without, and how dull and senseless when felt from within, is the course of life of the great majority of men. It is weary longing and worrying, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts. They are like clockwork that is wound up and goes without knowing why. Every time a man is begotten and born the clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations. Every individual, every human apparition and its course of life, is only one more short dream of the endless spirit of nature, of the persistent will-to-live, is only one more fleeting form, playfully sketched by it on its infinite page, space and time; it is allowed to exist for a short while that is infinitesimal compared with these, and is then effaced, to make new room. Yet, and here is to be found the serious side of life, each of these fleeting forms, these empty fancies, must be paid for by the whole will-to-live in all its intensity with many deep sorrows, and finally with a bitter death, long feared and finally made manifest. It is for this reason that the sight of a corpse suddenly makes us serious.

The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy. The never-fulfilled wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate, the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end, always give us a tragedy. Thus, as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy.

Now however much great and small worries fill up human life, and keep it in constant agitation and restlessness, they are unable to mask life's inadequacy to satisfy the spirit; they cannot conceal the emptiness and superficiality of existence, or exclude boredom which is always ready to fill up every pause granted by care. The result of this is that the human mind, still not content with the cares, anxieties, and preoccupations laid upon it by the actual world, creates for itself an imaginary world in the shape of a thousand different superstitions. Then it sets itself to work with this in all kinds of ways, and wastes time and strength on it, as soon as the real world is willing to grant it the peace and quiet to which it is not in the least responsive. Hence this is at bottom most often the case with those peoples for whom life is made easy by the mildness of the climate and of the soil, above all the Hindus, then the Greeks and Romans, and later the Italians, Spaniards, and others. Man creates for himself in his own image demons, gods, and saints; then to these must be incessantly offered sacrifices, prayers, temple decorations, vows and their fulfilment, pilgrimages, salutations, adornment of images and so on. Their service is everywhere closely interwoven with reality, and indeed obscures it. Every event in life is then accepted as the counter-effect of these beings. Intercourse with them fills up half the time of life, constantly sustains hope, and, by the charm of delusion, often becomes more interesting than intercourse with real beings. It is the expression and the symptom of man's double need, partly for help and support, partly for occupation and diversion. While it often works in direct opposition to the first need, in that, with the occurrence of accidents and dangers, valuable time and strength, instead of averting them, are uselessly wasted on prayers and sacrifices, then, by way of compensation, it serves the second need all the better by that imaginary conversation with a visionary spirit-world; and this is the advantage of all superstitions, which is by no means to be despised.

59.

Now if we have so far convinced ourselves a priori by the most universal of all considerations, by investigation of the first, elementary features of human life, that such a life, by its whole tendency and disposition, is not capable of any true bliss or happiness, but is essentially suffering in many forms and a tragic state in every way, we might now awaken this conviction much more vividly within us, if, by proceeding more a posteriori, we turned to more definite instances, brought pictures to the imagination, and described by examples the unspeakable misery presented by experience and history, wherever we look, and whatever avenue we explore. But the chapter would be without end, and would carry us far from the standpoint of universality which is essential to philosophy. Moreover, such a description might easily be regarded as a mere declamation on human misery, such as has often been made already, and as such it might be charged with one-sidedness, because it started from particular facts. From such reproach and suspicion our perfectly cold and philosophical demonstration of the inevitable suffering at the very foundation of the nature of life is free; for it starts from the universal and is conducted a priori. However, confirmation a posteriori can easily be obtained everywhere. Anyone who has awakened from the first dreams of youth; who has considered his own and others' experience; who has looked at life in the history of the past and of his own time, and finally in the works of the great poets, will certainly acknowledge the result, if his judgement is not paralysed by some indelibly imprinted prejudice, that this world of humanity is the kingdom of chance and error. These rule in it without mercy in great things as in small; and along with them folly and wickedness also wield the scourge. Hence arises the fact that everything better struggles through only with difficulty; what is noble and wise very rarely makes its appearance, becomes effective, or meets with a hearing, but the absurd and perverse in the realm of thought, the dull and tasteless in the sphere of art, and the wicked and fraudulent in the sphere of action, really assert a supremacy that is disturbed only by brief interruptions. On the other hand, everything excellent or admirable is always only an exception, one case in millions; therefore, if it has shown itself in a lasting work, this subsequently exists in isolation, after it has outlived the rancour of its contemporaries. It is preserved like a meteorite, sprung from an order of things different from that which prevails here. But as regards the life of the individual, every life-history is a history of suffering, for, as a rule, every life is a continual series of mishaps great and small, concealed as much as possible by everyone, because he knows that others are almost always bound to feel satisfaction at the spectacle of annoyances from which they are for the moment exempt; rarely will they feel sympathy or compassion. But perhaps at the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and at the same time in possession of his faculties, will ever wish to go through it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete non-existence. The essential purport of the world-famous monologue in Hamlet is, in condensed form, that our state is so wretched that complete non-existence would be decidedly preferable to it. Now if suicide actually offered us this, so that the alternative "to be or not to be" lay before us in the full sense of the words, it could be chosen unconditionally as a highly desirable termination ("a consummation devoutly to be wish'd"). [32] There is something in us, however, which tells us that this is not so, that this is not the end of things, that death is not an absolute annihilation. Similarly, what has been said by the father of history (Herodotus, vii, 46) has not since been refuted, namely that no person has existed who has not wished more than once that he had not to live through the following day. Accordingly, the shortness of life, so often lamented, may perhaps be the very best thing about it. If, finally, we were to bring to the sight of everyone the terrible sufferings and afflictions to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror. If we were to conduct the most hardened and callous optimist through hospitals, infirmaries, operating theatres, through prisons, torture-chambers, and slave-hovels, over battlefields and to places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it shuns the gaze of cold curiosity, and finally were to allow him to glance into the dungeon of Ugolino where prisoners starved to death, he too would certainly see in the end what kind of a world is this meilleur des mondes possibles. [33] For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it. On the other hand, when he came to the task of describing heaven and its delights, he had an insuperable difficulty before him, just because our world affords absolutely no materials for anything of the kind. Therefore, instead of describing the delights of paradise, there was nothing left for him but to repeat to us the instruction imparted to him there by his ancestor, by his Beatrice, and by various saints. But it is clear enough from this what kind of a world this is. Certainly human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself. On the other hand, everyone parades whatever pomp and splendour he can obtain by effort, and the more he is wanting in inner contentment, the more he desires to stand out as a lucky and fortunate person in the opinion of others. Folly goes to such lengths, and the opinion of others is a principal aim of the efforts of everyone, although the complete futility of this is expressed by the fact that in almost all languages vanity, vanitas, originally signifies emptiness and nothingness. But even under all this deception, the miseries of life can very easily increase to such an extent -- and this happens every day -- that death, which is otherwise feared more than everything, is eagerly resorted to. In fact, if fate wants to show the whole of its malice, even this refuge can be barred to the sufferer, and in the hands of enraged enemies he may remain exposed to merciless and slow tortures without escape. In vain does the tortured person then call on his gods for help; he remains abandoned to his fate without mercy. But this hopeless and irretrievable state is precisely the mirror of the invincible and indomitable nature of his will, the objectivity of which is his person. An external power is little able to change or suppress this will, and any strange and unknown power is just as little able to deliver him from the miseries resulting from the life that is the phenomenon of this will. As in everything, so in the principal matter, a man is always referred back to himself. In vain does he make gods for himself, in order to get from them by prayers and flattery what can be brought about only by his own will-power. While the Old Testament made the world and man the work of a God, the New saw itself compelled to represent that God as becoming man, in order to teach that holiness and salvation from the misery of this world can come only from the world itself. It is and remains the will of man on which everything depends for him. Sannyasis, martyrs, saints of every faith and name, have voluntarily and gladly endured every torture, because the will-to-live had suppressed itself in them; and then even the slow destruction of the phenomenon of the will was welcome to them. But I will not anticipate the further discussion. For the rest, I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind. Let no one imagine that the Christian teaching is favourable to optimism; on the contrary, in the Gospels world and evil are used almost as synonymous expressions. [34]
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:31 pm

Part 4 of 8

60.

We have now completed the two discussions whose insertion was necessary; namely that about the freedom of the will in itself simultaneously with the necessity of its phenomenon; and that about its fate in the world that reflects its inner nature, on the knowledge of which it has to affirm or deny itself. We can now bring to greater clearness this affirmation and denial, which above we expressed and stated only in general terms. This we can do by describing the modes of conduct in which alone they find their expression, and considering them according to their inner significance.

The affirmation of the will is the persistent willing itself, undisturbed by any knowledge, as it fills the life of man in general. For the body of man is already the objectivity of the will, as it appears at this grade and in this individual; and thus his willing that develops in time is, so to speak, the paraphrase of the body, the elucidation of the meaning of the whole and of its parts. It is another way of exhibiting the same thing-in-itself of which the body is already the phenomenon. Therefore, instead of affirmation of the will, we can also say affirmation of the body. The fundamental theme of all the many different acts of will is the satisfaction of the needs inseparable from the body's existence in health; they have their expression in it, and can be reduced to the maintenance of the individual and the propagation of the race. But indirectly, motives of the most various kinds in this way obtain power over the will, and bring about acts of will of the most various kinds. Each of these is only a pattern, an example, of the will which appears here in general. The nature of this example, and what form the motive may have and impart to it, are not essential; the important points are only that there is a willing in general, and the degree of intensity of this willing. The will can become visible only in the motives, just as the eye manifests its visual faculty only in light. The motive in general stands before the will in protean forms; it always promises complete satisfaction, the quenching of the thirst of will. But if this is attained, it at once appears in a different form, and therein moves the will afresh, always according to the degree of the will's intensity and to its relation to knowledge, which in these very patterns and examples are revealed as empirical character.

From the first appearance of his consciousness, man finds himself to be a willing being, and his knowledge, as a rule, remains in constant relation to his will. He tries to become thoroughly acquainted only with the objects of his willing, and then with the means to attain these. Now he knows what he has to do, and does not, as a rule, aim at other knowledge. He proceeds and acts; consciousness keeps him always working steadfastly and actively in accordance with the aim of his willing; his thinking is concerned with the choice of means. This is the life of almost all men; they will, they know what they will, and they strive after this with enough success to protect them from despair, and enough failure to preserve them from boredom and its consequences. From this results a certain serenity, or at any rate composure, that cannot really be changed by wealth or poverty; for the rich and the poor enjoy, not what they have, since, as we have shown, this acts only negatively, but what they hope to obtain by their efforts. They press forward with much seriousness and indeed with an air of importance; children also pursue their play in this way. It is always an exception, when such a life suffers an interruption through the fact that either the aesthetic demand for contemplation or the ethical demand for renunciation proceeds from a knowledge independent of the service of the will, and directed to the inner nature of the world in general. Most men are pursued by want throughout their lives, without being allowed to come to their senses. On the other hand, the will is often inflamed to a degree far exceeding the affirmation of the body. This degree is then revealed by violent emotions and powerful passions in which the individual not merely affirms his own existence, but denies and seeks to suppress that of others, when it stands in his way.

The maintenance of the body by its own powers is so small a degree of the will's affirmation that, if it voluntarily stopped at this, we might assume that, with the death of this body, the will that appeared in it would also be extinguished. But the satisfaction of the sexual impulse goes beyond the affirmation of one's own existence that fills so short a time; it affirms life for an indefinite time beyond the death of the individual. Nature, always true and consistent, here even naive, exhibits to us quite openly the inner significance of the act of procreation. Our own consciousness, the intensity of the impulse, teaches us that in this act is expressed the most decided affirmation of the will-to-live, pure and without further addition (say of the denial of other and foreign individuals). Now, as the consequence of the act, a new life appears in time and the causal series, i.e., in nature. The begotten appears before the begetter, different from him in the phenomenon, but in himself, or according to the Idea, identical with him. It is therefore by this act that every species of living thing is bound to a whole and perpetuated as such. In reference to the begetter, procreation is only the expression, the symptom, of his decided affirmation of the will-to-live. In reference to the begotten, procreation is not the ground or reason of the will that appears in him, for the will in itself knows neither reason nor consequent; but, like every cause, this procreation is only the occasional cause of this will's phenomenon, at a given time and in a given place. As thing-in-itself, the will of the begetter is not different from that of the begotten, for only the phenomenon, not the thing-in-itself, is subordinate to the principium individuationis. With that affirmation beyond one's own body to the production of a new body, suffering and death, as belonging to the phenomenon of life, are also affirmed anew, and the possibility of salvation, brought about by the most complete faculty of knowledge, is for this time declared to be fruitless. Here is to be seen the profound reason for the shame connected with the business of procreation. This view is mythically expressed in the dogma of the Christian teaching that we all share the sin of Adam (which is obviously only the satisfaction of sexual passion), and through it are guilty of suffering and death. In this respect, religious teaching goes beyond the consideration of things according to the principle of sufficient reason; it recognizes the Idea of man. The unity of this Idea is re-established out of its dispersion into innumerable individuals through the bond of procreation that holds them all together. According to this, religious teaching regards every individual, on the one hand, as identical with Adam, with the representative of the affirmation of life, and to this extent as fallen into sin (original sin), suffering, and death. On the other hand, knowledge of the Idea also shows it every individual as identical with the Saviour, with the representative of the denial of the will-to-live, and to this extent as partaking of his self-sacrifice, redeemed by his merit, and rescued from the bonds of sin and death, i.e., of the world (Rom. v, 12-21).

Another mythical description of our view of sexual satisfaction as the affirmation of the will-to-live beyond the individual life, as a falling into life first brought about in this way, or, so to speak, as a renewed assignment to life, is the Greek myth of Proserpine. A return from the nether world was still possible for her, so long as she had not tasted the fruits of the lower world; but she was wholly buried there through eating the pomegranate. The meaning of this is very clearly expressed in Goethe's incomparable telling of this myth, especially when, immediately after she has tasted the pomegranate, the invisible chorus of the three Parcae joins in and says:

"You are ours!
Fasting you could return:
The bite of the apple makes you ours!"

-- [Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, IV]


It is noteworthy that Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, iii, c. 15) describes the matter through the same image and expression: [x] (Qui se castrarunt ab omni peccato propter regnum coelorum, ii sunt beati, A MUNDO JEJUNANTES.) [35]

The sexual impulse is proved to be the decided and strongest affirmation of life by the fact that for man in the natural state, as for the animal, it is his life's final end and highest goal. Self-preservation and maintenance are his first aim, and as soon as he has provided for that, he aims only at the propagation of the race; as a merely natural being, he cannot aspire to anything more. Nature too, the inner being of which is the will-to-live itself, with all her force impels both man and the animal to propagate. After this she has attained her end with the individual, and is quite indifferent to its destruction; for, as the will-to-live, she is concerned only with the preservation of the species; the individual is nothing to her. Because the inner being of nature, the will-to-live, expresses itself most strongly in the sexual impulse, the ancient poets and philosophers -- Hesiod and Parmenides -- said very significantly that Eros is the first, that which creates, the principle from which all things emerge. (See Aristotle, Metaphysica, i, 4.) Pherecydes said: [x]. (Jovem, cum mundum fabricare vellet, in cupidinem sese transformasse.) [36] Proclus ad Platonis Timaeum, Bk. iii. We have recently had from G. F. Schoemann, De Cupidine Cosmogonico, 1852, a detailed treatment of this subject. The Maya of the Indians, the work and fabric of which are the whole world of illusion, is paraphrased by amor.

Far more than any other external member of the body, the genitals are subject merely to the will, and not at all to knowledge. Here, in fact, the will shows itself almost as independent of knowledge as it does in those parts which, on the occasion of mere stimuli, serve vegetative life, reproduction, and in which the will operates blindly as it does in nature-without-knowledge. For generation is only reproduction passing over to a new individual, reproduction at the second power so to speak, just as death is only excretion at the second power. By reason of all this, the genitals are the real focus of the will, and are therefore the opposite pole to the brain, the representative of knowledge, i.e., to the other side of the world, the world as representation. The genitals are the life-preserving principle assuring to time endless life. In this capacity they were worshipped by the Greeks in the phallus, and by the Hindus in the lingam, which are therefore the symbol of the affirmation of the will. On the other hand, knowledge affords the possibility of the suppression of willing, of salvation through freedom, of overcoming and annihilating the world.

At the beginning of this fourth book, we considered in detail how the will-to-live in its affirmation has to regard its relation to death. We saw that it is not troubled by death, because death exists as something already included in and belonging to life. Its opposite, namely generation, completely balances it, and, in spite of the death of the individual, ensures and guarantees life for all time to the will-to-live. To express this, the Indians gave the lingam as an attribute to Shiva, the god of death. We also explained there how the man who has perfect awareness and occupies the standpoint of a decided affirmation of life, faces death fearlessly. Therefore nothing more will be said about this here. Without clear awareness, most people occupy this standpoint, and continue to affirm life. The world stands out as the mirror of this affirmation, with innumerable individuals in endless time, and endless space, and endless suffering, between generation and death without end. Yet no further complaint of this can be made from any direction, for the will performs the great tragedy and comedy at its own expense, and is also its own spectator. The world is precisely as it is, because the will, whose phenomenon is the world, is such a will as it is, because it wills in such a way. The justification for suffering is the fact that the will affirms itself even in this phenomenon; and this affirmation is justified and balanced by the fact that the will bears the suffering. Here we have a glimpse of eternal justice in general; later on we shall also recognize it more clearly and distinctly in the particular. We must first, however, speak of temporal or human justice. [37]

61.

We recall from the second book that in the whole of nature, at an grades of the will's objectification, there was necessarily a constant struggle between the individuals of every species, and that precisely in this way was expressed an inner antagonism of the will-to-live with itself. At the highest grade of objectification, this phenomenon, like everything else, will manifest itself in enhanced distinctness, and can be further unravelled. For this purpose we will first of all trace to its source egoism as the starting-point of all conflict.

We have called time and space the principium individuationis, because only through them and in them is plurality of the homogeneous possible. They are the essential forms of natural knowledge, in other words, knowledge that has sprung from the will. Therefore, the will will everywhere manifest itself in the plurality of individuals. This plurality, however, does not concern the will as thing-in-itself, but only its phenomena. The will is present, whole and undivided, in each of these, and perceives around it the innumerably repeated image of its own inner being; but this inner nature itself, and hence what is actually real, it finds immediately only in its inner self. Therefore everyone wants everything for himself, wants to possess, or at least control, everything, and would like to destroy whatever opposes him. In addition, there is in the case of knowing beings the fact that the individual is the bearer of the knowing subject, and this knowing subject is the bearer of the world. This is equivalent to saying that the whole of nature outside the knowing subject, and so all remaining individuals, exist only in his representation; that he is conscious of them always only as his representation, and so merely indirectly, and as something dependent on his own inner being and existence. With his consciousness the world also necessarily ceases to exist for him, in other words, its being and non-being become synonymous and indistinguishable. Every knowing individual is therefore in truth, and finds himself as, the whole will-to-live, or as the in-itself of the world itself, and also as the complementary condition of the world as representation, consequently as a microcosm to be valued equally with the macrocosm. Nature herself, always and everywhere truthful, gives him, originally and independently of all reflection, this knowledge with simplicity and immediate certainty. Now from the two necessary determinations we have mentioned is explained the fact that every individual, completely vanishing and reduced to nothing in a boundless world, nevertheless makes himself the centre of the world, and considers his own existence and well-being before everything else. In fact, from the natural standpoint, he is ready for this to sacrifice everything else; he is ready to annihilate the world, in order to maintain his own self, that drop in the ocean, a little longer. This disposition is egoism, which is essential to everything in nature. But it is precisely through egoism that the will's inner conflict with itself attains to such fearful revelation; for this egoism has its continuance and being in that opposition of the microcosm and macrocosm, or in the fact that the objectification of the will has for its form the principium individuationis, and thus the will manifests itself in innumerable individuals in the same way, and moreover in each of these entirely and completely in both aspects (will and representation). Therefore, whereas each individual is immediately given to himself as the whole will and the entire representer, all others are given to him in the first instance only as his representations. Hence for him his own inner being and its preservation come before all others taken together. Everyone looks on his own death as the end of the world, whereas he hears about the death of his acquaintances as a matter of comparative indifference, unless he is in some way personally concerned in it. In the consciousness that has reached the highest degree, that is, human consciousness, egoism, like knowledge, pain, and pleasure, must also have reached the highest degree, and the conflict of individuals conditioned by it must appear in the most terrible form. Indeed, we see this everywhere before our eyes, in small things as in great. At one time we see it from its dreadful side in the lives of great tyrants and evildoers, and in world-devastating wars. On another occasion we see its ludicrous side, where it is the theme of comedy, and shows itself particularly in self-conceit and vanity. La Rochefoucauld understood this better than anyone else, and presented it in the abstract. We see it in the history of the world and in our own experience. But it appears most distinctly as soon as any mob is released from all law and order; we then see at once in the most distinct form the bellum omnium contra omnes [38] which Hobbes admirably described in the first chapter of his De Cive. We see not only how everyone tries to snatch from another what he himself wants, but how one often even destroys another's whole happiness or life, in order to increase by an insignificant amount his own well-being. This is the highest expression of egoism, the phenomena of which in this respect are surpassed only by those of real wickedness that seeks, quite disinterestedly, the pain and injury of others without any advantage to itself; we shall shortly speak about this. With this disclosure of the source of egoism the reader should compare my description of it in my essay On the Basis of Morality, § 14.

A principal source of the suffering that we found above to be essential and inevitable to all life, is, when it actually appears in a definite form, that Eris, the strife of all individuals, the expression of the contradiction with which the will-to-live is affected in its inner self, and which attains visibility through the principium individuationis. Wild-beast fights are the barbarous means of making it directly and strikingly clear. In this original discord is to be found a perennial source of suffering, in spite of the precautions that have been taken against it; we shall now consider it more closely.

62.

It has already been explained that the first and simplest affirmation of the will-to-live is only affirmation of one's own body, in other words, manifestation of the will through acts in time, in so far as the body, in its form and suitability, exhibits the same will spatially, and no farther. This affirmation shows itself as maintenance and preservation of the body by means of the application of its own powers. With it is directly connected the satisfaction of the sexual impulse; indeed, this belongs to it in so far as the genitals belong to the body. Hence voluntary renunciation of the satisfaction of that impulse, such renunciation being set at work by no motive at all, is already a degree of denial of the will-to-live; it is a voluntary self-suppression of it on the appearance of knowledge acting as a quieter. Accordingly, such denial of one's own body exhibits itself as a contradiction by the will of its own phenomenon. For although here also the body objectifies in the genitals the will to propagate, yet propagation is not willed. Just because such renunciation is a denial or abolition of the will-to-live, it is a difficult and painful self-conquest; but we shall discuss this later. Now since the will manifests that self-affirmation of one's own body in innumerable individuals beside one another, in one individual, by virtue of the egoism peculiar to all, it very easily goes beyond this affirmation to the denial of the same will appearing in another individual. The will of the first breaks through the boundary of another's affirmation of will, since the individual either destroys or injures this other body itself, or compels the powers of that other body to serve his will, instead of serving the will that appears in that other body. Thus if from the will, appearing as the body of another, he takes away the powers of this body, and thereby increases the power serving his will beyond that of his own body, he in consequence affirms his own will beyond his own body by denying the will that appears in the body of another. This breaking through the boundary of another's affirmation of will has at all times been distinctly recognized, and its concept has been denoted by the word wrong (Unrecht). For both parties instantly recognize the fact, not indeed as we do here in distinct abstraction, but as feeling. The sufferer of the wrong feels the transgression into his own body's sphere of affirmation through the denial of this by another individual, as an immediate and mental pain. This is entirely separate and different from the physical suffering through the deed or annoyance at the loss, which is felt simultaneously with it. On the other hand, to the perpetrator of wrong the knowledge presents itself that in himself he is the same will which appears also in that body, and affirms itself in the one phenomenon with such vehemence that, transgressing the limits of its own body and its powers, it becomes the denial of this very will in the other phenomenon. Consequently, regarded as will in itself, it struggles with itself through its vehemence and tears itself to pieces. I say that this knowledge presents itself to him instantly, not in the abstract, but as an obscure feeling. This is called remorse, the sting of conscience, or more accurately in this case, the feeling of wrong committed.

Wrong, the concept of which we have analysed here in its most universal abstraction, is most completely, peculiarly, and palpably expressed in cannibalism. This is its most distinct and obvious type, the terrible picture of the greatest conflict of the will with itself at the highest grade of its objectification which is man. After this, we have murder, the commission of which is therefore instantly followed with fearful distinctness by the sting of conscience, whose significance we have just stated dryly in the abstract. It inflicts on our peace of mind a wound that a lifetime cannot heal. Our horror at a murder committed, and our shrinking from committing it, correspond to the boundless attachment to life with which every living thing is permeated, precisely as phenomenon of the will-to-live. (Later on, however, we shall analyse still more fully, and raise to the distinctness of a concept, that feeling which accompanies the doing of wrong and evil, in other words, the pangs of conscience.) Intentional mutilation or mere injury of the body of another, indeed every blow, is to be regarded essentially as of the same nature as murder, and as differing therefrom only in degree. Moreover, wrong manifests itself in the subjugation of another individual, in forcing him into slavery, and finally in seizing the property of another, which, in so far as that property is considered as the fruit of his labour, is essentially the same thing as slavery, and is related thereto as mere injury is to murder.

For property, that is not taken from a person without wrong, can, in view of our explanation of wrong, be only what is made by his own powers. Therefore by taking this, we take the powers of his body from the will objectified in it, in order to make them serve the will objectified in another body. For only in this way does the wrongdoer, by seizing not another's body, but an inanimate thing entirely different from it, break into the sphere of another's affirmation of will, since the powers, the work of another's body, are, so to speak, incorporated in, and identified with, this thing. It follows from this that all genuine, i.e., moral, right to property is originally based simply and solely on elaboration and adaptation, as was pretty generally assumed even before Kant, indeed as the oldest of all the codes of law clearly and finely expresses it: "Wise men who know olden times declare that a cultivated field is the property of him who cut down the wood and cleared and ploughed the land, just as an antelope belongs to the first hunter who mortally wounds it." (Laws of Manu, ix, 44.) Kant's whole theory of law is a strange tangle of errors, one leading to another, and he attempts to establish the right to property through first occupation. I can explain this only by Kant's feebleness through old age. For how could the mere declaration of my will to exclude others from the use of a thing give me at once a right to it? Obviously the declaration itself requires a foundation of right, instead of Kant's assumption that it is one. How could the person act wrongly or unjustly in himself, i.e., morally, who paid no regard to those claims to the sole possession of a thing which were based on nothing but his own declaration? How would his conscience trouble him about it? For it is so clear and easy to see that there can be absolutely no just and lawful seizure of a thing, but only a lawful appropriation or acquired possession of it, through our originally applying our own powers to it. A thing may be developed, improved, protected, and preserved from mishaps by the efforts and exertions of some other person, however small these may be; in fact, they might be only the plucking or picking up from the ground fruit that has grown wild. The person who seizes such a thing obviously deprives the other of the result of his labour expended on it. He makes the body of the other serve his will instead of the other's will; he affirms his own will beyond its phenomenon to the denial of the other's will; in other words, he does wrong or injustice. [39] On the other hand, the mere enjoyment of a thing, without any cultivation or preservation of it from destruction, gives us just as little right to it as does the declaration of our will to its sole possession. Therefore, although a family has hunted over a district alone even for a century without having done anything to improve it, it cannot without moral injustice prevent a newcomer from hunting there, if he wants to. Thus morally the so-called right of preoccupation is entirely without foundation; according to it, for the mere past enjoyment of a thing, a man demands a reward into the bargain, namely the exclusive right to enjoy it further. To the man who rests merely on this right, the newcomer might retort with much better right: "Just because you have already enjoyed it for so long, it is right for others also to enjoy it now." There is no morally grounded sole possession of anything that is absolutely incapable of development by improvement or preservation from mishaps, unless it be through voluntary surrender on the part of all others, possibly as a reward for some other service. This, however, in itself presupposes a community or commonwealth ruled by convention, namely the State. The morally established right to property, as deduced above, by its nature gives the possessor of a thing a power over it just as unlimited as that which he has over his own body. From this it follows that he can hand over his property to others by exchange or donation, and those others then possess the thing with the same moral right as he did.

As regards the doing of wrong generally, it occurs either through violence or through cunning; it is immaterial as regards what is morally essential. First, in the case of murder, it is morally immaterial whether I make use of a dagger or of poison; and the case of every bodily injury is analogous. The other cases of wrong can all be reduced to the fact that I, as the wrongdoer, compel the other individual to serve my will instead of his own, or to act according to my will instead of to his. On the path of violence, I attain this through physical causality; but on the path of cunning by means of motivation, in other words, of causality that has passed through knowledge. Through cunning I place before the other man's will fictitious motives, on the strength of which he follows my will, while believing that he follows his own. As knowledge is the medium in which the motives are to be found, I can achieve this only by falsifying his knowledge, and this is the lie. The lie always aims at influencing another's will, not at influencing his knowledge alone by itself and as such, but merely as means, namely in so far as it determines his will. For my lying itself, as coming from my will, requires a motive; but only the will of another can be such a motive, not his knowledge in and by itself. As such, his knowledge can never have an influence on my will, and hence can never move it, can never be a motive of its aims; only the willing and doing of another can be such a motive, and his knowledge through these, and consequently only indirectly. This holds good not only of all lies that arise from obvious selfishness, but also of those that arise from pure wickedness which wishes to delight in the painful consequences of another person's error that it has caused. Even mere boasting aims at influencing the will and action of others more or less by means of enhanced respect or improved opinion on their part. The mere refusal of a truth, i.e., of a statement in general, is in itself no wrong; but every imposing of a lie is a wrong. The person who refuses to show the right path to the wanderer who has last his way, does not do him any wrong; but whoever directs him on to a false path certainly does. From what has been said, it follows that every lie, like every act of violence, is as such wrong, since it has, as such, the purpose of extending the authority of my will over other individuals, of affirming my will by denying theirs, just as violence has. The most complete lie, however, is the broken contract, since all the stipulations mentioned are here found completely and clearly together. For, by my entering into a contract, the promised performance of the other person is immediately and admittedly the motive for my performance now taking place. The promises are deliberately and formally exchanged; it is assumed that the truth of the statement made in the contract is in the power of each of the parties. If the other breaks the contract, he has deceived me, and, by substituting merely fictitious motives in my knowledge, he has directed my will in accordance with his intention, has extended the authority of his will to another individual, and has thus committed a distinct and complete wrong. On this are based the moral legality and validity of contracts.

Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race. The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being. Moreover, lying and deception can succeed only through the fact that the person who practises them is at the same time compelled to express horror and contempt of them, in order to gain confidence; and his triumph rests on the fact that he is credited with an honesty he does not possess. The deep horror everywhere excited by cunning, perfidy, and treachery, rests on the fact that faithfulness and honesty are the bond which once more binds into a unity from outside the will that is split up into the plurality of individuals, and thus puts a limit to the consequences that arise from that dispersion. Faithlessness and treachery break this last, outer bond, and thus afford boundless scope for the consequences of egoism.

In connexion with our method of discussion, we have found the content of the concept of wrong to be that quality of an individual's conduct in which he extends the affirmation of the will that appears in his own body so far that it becomes the denial of the will that appears in the bodies of others. We have also indicated by quite general examples the boundary where the province of wrong begins, in that we determined at the same time its gradations from the highest degree to the lowest by a few main concepts. According to this, the concept of wrong is the original and positive; the opposite concept of right is the derivative and negative, for we must keep to the concepts, and not to the words. Indeed, there would be no talk of right if there were no wrong. The concept of right contains merely the negation of wrong, and under it is subsumed every action which is not an overstepping of the boundary above described, in other words, is not a denial of another's will for the stronger affirmation of one's own. This boundary, therefore, divides, as regards a purely moral definition, the whole province of possible actions into those that are wrong and those that are right. An action is not wrong the moment it does not encroach, in the way explained above, on the sphere of another's affirmation of will and deny this. Thus, for example, the refusal to help another in dire distress, the calm contemplation of another's death from starvation while we have more than enough, are certainly cruel and diabolical, but are not wrong. It can, however, be said with complete certainty that whoever is capable of carrying uncharitableness and hardness to such lengths, will quite certainly commit any wrong the moment his desires demand it, and no compulsion prevents it.

The concept of right, however, as the negation of wrong, finds its principal application, and doubtless also its first origin, in those cases where an attempted wrong by violence is warded off. This warding off cannot itself be wrong, and consequently is right, although the violent action committed in connexion with it, and considered merely in itself and in isolation, would be wrong. It is justified here only by its motive, in other words, it becomes right. If an individual goes so far in the affirmation of his own will that he encroaches on the sphere of the will-affirmation essential to my person as such, and denies this, then my warding off of that encroachment is only the denial of that denial, and to this extent is nothing more on my part than the affirmation of the will appearing essentially and originally in my body, and implicitly expressed by the mere phenomenon of this body; consequently it is not wrong and is therefore right. This means, then, that I have a right to deny that other person's denial with what force is necessary to suppress it; and it is easy to see that this may extend even to the killing of the other person whose encroachment as pressing external violence can be warded off with a counteraction somewhat stronger than this, without any wrong, consequently with right. For everything that happens on my part lies always only in the sphere of will-affirmation essential to my person as such, and already expressed by it (which is the scene of the conflict); it does not encroach on that of another, and is therefore only negation of the negation, and hence affirmation, not itself negation. Thus, if the will of another denies my will, as this appears in my body and in the use of its powers for its preservation without denying anyone else's will that observes a like limitation, then I can compel it without wrong to desist from this denial, in other words, I have to this extent a right of compulsion.

In all cases in which I have a right of compulsion, a perfect right to use violence against others, I can, according to the circumstances, just as well oppose another's violence with cunning without doing wrong, and consequently I have an actual right to lie precisely to the extent that I have a right to compulsion. Therefore, anyone acts with perfect right who assures a highway robber who is searching him that he has nothing more on him. In just the same way, a person acts rightly who by a lie induces a burglar at night to enter a cellar, and there locks him up. A person who is carried off in captivity by robbers, pirates for example, has the right to kill them not only by violence, but even by cunning, in order to gain his freedom. For this reason also, a promise is in no way binding when it has been extorted by a direct bodily act of violence, since the person who suffers such compulsion can with absolute right free himself by killing, not to mention deceiving, his oppressors. Whoever cannot recover his stolen property by violence, commits no wrong if he obtains it by cunning. Indeed, if anyone gambles with me for money stolen from me, I have the right to use false dice against him, since everything I win from him belongs to me already. If anyone should deny this, he would have still more to deny the legality of any ruse adopted in war, of stratagem; this is just the lie founded on fact, and is a proof of the saying of Queen Christina of Sweden that "The words of men are to be esteemed as nothing; hardly are their deeds to be trusted." So sharply does the limit of right border on that of wrong. But I regard it as superfluous to show that all this agrees entirely with what was said above about the illegality of the lie as well as of violence. It can also serve to explain the strange theories of the white lie (Notluge). [40]

Therefore, by all that has so far been said, right and wrong are merely moral determinations, i.e., such as have validity with regard to the consideration of human conduct as such, and in reference to the inner significance of this conduct in itself. This announces itself directly in consciousness by the fact that, on the one hand, the wrongdoing is accompanied by an inner pain, and this is the merely felt consciousness of the wrongdoer of the excessive strength of will-affirmation in himself which reaches the degree of denial of another's phenomenon of will, as also the fact that, as phenomenon, he is different from the sufferer of wrong, but is yet in himself identical with him. The further explanation of this inner significance of all the pangs of conscience cannot follow until later. On the other hand, the sufferer of wrong is painfully aware of the denial of his will, as it is expressed through his body and its natural wants, for whose satisfaction nature refers him to the powers of this body. At the same time he is also aware that, without doing wrong, he could ward off that denial by every means, unless he lacked the power. This purely moral significance is the only one which right and wrong have for men as men, not as citizens of the State, and which would, in consequence, remain even in the state of nature, without any positive law. It constitutes the basis and content of all that has for this reason been called natural right, but might better be called moral right; for its validity does not extend to the suffering, to the external reality, but only to the action and the self-knowledge of the man's individual will which arises in him from this action, and is called conscience. However, in a state of nature, it cannot assert itself in every case on other individuals even from outside, and cannot prevent might from reigning instead of right. In the state of nature, it depends on everyone merely in every case to do no wrong, but by no means in every case to suffer no wrong, which depends on his accidental, external power. Therefore, the concepts of right and wrong, even for the state of nature, are indeed valid and by no means conventional; but they are valid there merely as moral concepts, for the self-knowledge of the will in each of us. They are, on the scale of the extremely different degrees of strength with which the will-to-live affirms itself in human individuals, a fixed point like the freezing-point on the thermometer; namely the point where the affirmation of one's own will becomes the denial of another's, in other words, specifies through wrongdoing the degree of its intensity combined with the degree in which knowledge is involved in the principium individuationis (which is the form of knowledge wholly in the service of the will). Now whoever wishes to set aside the purely moral consideration of human conduct, or to deny it, and to consider conduct merely according to its external effect and the result thereof, can certainly, with Hobbes, declare right and wrong to be conventional determinations arbitrarily assumed, and thus not existing at all outside positive law; and we can never explain to him through external experience what does not belong to external experience. Hobbes characterizes his completely empirical way of thinking very remarkably by the fact that, in his book De Principiis Geometrarum, he denies the whole of really pure mathematics, and obstinately asserts that the point has extension and the line breadth. Yet we cannot show him a point without extension or a line without breadth; hence we can just as little explain to him the a priori nature of mathematics as the a priori nature of right, because he pays no heed to any knowledge that is not empirical.

The pure doctrine of right is therefore a chapter of morality, and is directly related merely to doing, not to suffering; for the former alone is manifestation of the will, and only this is considered by ethics. Suffering is mere occurrence; morality can have regard to suffering only indirectly, namely to show merely that what is done simply in order not to suffer any wrong, is not wrongdoing. The working out of this chapter of morality would contain the exact definition of the limit to which an individual could go in the affirmation of the will already objectified in his own body, without this becoming the denial of that very will in so far as it appeared in another individual. It would contain also a definition of the actions that transgress this limit, and are consequently wrong, and which can therefore in turn be warded off without wrong. Hence one's own action would always remain the object of consideration.

Now the suffering of wrong appears as an event in external experience, and, as we have said, there is manifested in it more distinctly than anywhere else the phenomenon of the conflict of the will-to-live with itself, arising from the plurality of individuals and from egoism, both of which are conditioned by the principium individuationis which is the form of the world as representation for the knowledge of the individual. We also saw above that a very great part of the suffering essential to human life has its constantly flowing source in the conflict of individuals.

The faculty of reason that is common to all these individuals, and enables them to know not merely the particular case, as the animals do, but also the whole abstractly in its connexion, has taught them to discern the source of that suffering. It has made them mindful of the means of diminishing, or if possible suppressing, this suffering by a common sacrifice which is, however, outweighed by the common advantage resulting therefrom. However agreeable wrongdoing is to the egoism of the individual in particular cases, it still has a necessary correlative in another individual's suffering of wrong, for whom this is a great pain. Now since the faculty of reason, surveying the whole in thought, left the one-sided standpoint of the individual to which it belongs, and for the moment freed itself from attachment thereto, it saw the pleasure of wrongdoing in an individual always outweighed by a relatively greater pain in the other's suffering of wrong. This faculty of reason also found that, because everything was here left to chance, everyone was bound to fear that the pleasures of occasional wrongdoing would much more rarely fall to his lot than would the pain of suffering wrong. Reason recognized from this that, to diminish the suffering spread over all, as well as to distribute it as uniformly as possible, the best and only means was to spare all men the pain of suffering wrong by all men's renouncing the pleasure to be obtained from doing wrong. This means is the State contract or the law. It is readily devised and gradually perfected by egoism which, by using the faculty of reason, proceeds methodically, and forsakes its one-sided point of view. The origin of the State and of the law, as I have here mentioned, was described by Plato in the Republic. Indeed, this origin is essentially the only one, and is determined by the nature of the case. Moreover, in no land can the State have ever had a different origin, just because this mode of origination alone, this aim, makes it into a State. But it is immaterial whether in each definite nation the condition that preceded it was that of a horde of savages independent of one another (anarchy), or that of a horde of slaves arbitrarily ruled by the stronger (despotism). In neither case did any State as yet exist; it first arises through that common agreement, and according as this agreement is more or less unalloyed with anarchy or despotism, the State is more or less perfect. Republics tend to anarchy, monarchies to despotism; the mean of constitutional monarchy, devised on this account, tends to government by factions. In order to found a perfect State, we must begin by producing beings whose nature permits them generally to sacrifice their own good to that of the public. Till then, however, something can be attained by there being one family whose welfare is quite inseparable from that of the country, so that, at any rate in the principal matters, it can never advance the one without the other. On this rest the power and advantage of hereditary monarchy.

Now if morality is concerned exclusively with the doing of right and wrong, and can accurately define the limits of his conduct for the man who is resolved to do no wrong, political science, the theory of legislation, on the other hand, is concerned solely with the suffering of wrong. It would never trouble itself about the doing of wrong, were it not on account of its ever-necessary correlative, the suffering of wrong, which is kept in view by legislation as the enemy against which it works. Indeed, if it were possible to conceive a wrongdoing unconnected with the suffering of wrong by another party, then, consistently, the State would not prohibit it at all. Further, since in morality the will, the disposition, is the object of consideration and the only real thing, the firm will to commit wrong, restrained and rendered ineffective only by external force, and the actually committed wrong, are for it exactly the same, and at its tribunal it condemns as unjust the person who wills this. On the other hand, will and disposition, merely as such, do not concern the State at all; the deed alone does so (whether it be merely attempted or carried out), on account of its correlative, namely the suffering of the other party. Thus for the State the deed, the occurrence, is the only real thing; the disposition, the intention, is investigated only in so far as from it the significance of the deed becomes known. Therefore, the State will not forbid anyone constantly carrying about in his head the thought of murder and poison against another, so long as it knows for certain that the fear of sword and wheel will always restrain the effects of that willing. The State also has by no means to eradicate the foolish plan, the inclination to wrongdoing, the evil disposition, but only to place beside every possible motive for committing a wrong a more powerful motive for leaving it undone, in the inescapable punishment. Accordingly, the criminal code is as complete a register as possible of counter-motives to all the criminal actions that can possibly be imagined, -- both in the abstract, in order to make concrete application of any case that occurs. Political science or legislation will borrow for this purpose from morality that chapter which is the doctrine of right, and which, besides the inner significance of right and wrong, determines the exact limit between the two, yet simply and solely in order to use the reverse side of it, and to consider from that other side all the limits which morality states are not to be transgressed, if we wish to do no wrong, as the limits we must not allow another to transgress, if we wish to suffer no wrong, and from which we therefore have a right to drive others back. Therefore these limits are barricaded by laws as much as possible from the passive side. It follows that, as a historian has very wittily been called an inverted prophet, the professor of law is the inverted moralist, and therefore even jurisprudence in the proper sense, i.e., the doctrine of the rights that may be asserted, is inverted morality, in the chapter where it teaches the rights that are not to be violated. The concept of wrong and of its negation, right, which is originally moral, becomes juridical by shifting the starting-point from the active to the passive side, and hence by inversion. This, together with Kant's theory of law, which very falsely derives from his categorical imperative the foundation of the State as a moral duty, has even in quite recent times occasionally been the cause of that very strange error, that the State is an institution for promoting morality, that it results from the endeavour to achieve this, and that it is accordingly directed against egoism. As if the inner disposition, to which alone morality or immorality belongs, the eternally free will, could be modified from outside, and changed by impression or influence! Still more preposterous is the theorem that the State is the condition of freedom in the moral sense, and thus the condition of morality; for freedom lies beyond the phenomenon, to say nothing of human institutions. As we have said, the State is so little directed against egoism in general and as such, that, on the contrary, it is precisely from egoism that it has sprung, and it exists merely to serve it. This egoism well understands itself, proceeds methodically, and goes from the one-sided to the universal point of view, and thus by summation is the common egoism of all. The State is set up on the correct assumption that pure morality, i.e., right conduct from moral grounds, is not to be expected; otherwise it itself would be superfluous. Thus the State, aiming at well-being, is by no means directed against egoism, but only against the injurious consequences of egoism arising out of the plurality of egoistic individuals, reciprocally affecting them, and disturbing their well-being. Therefore, even Aristotle says (Politics, iii, 9): [x] . (Finis civitatis est bene vivere, hoc autem est beate et pulchre vivere.) [41] Hobbes has also quite correctly and admirably explained this origin and object of the State; the old fundamental principle of all State law and order, salus publica prima lex esto, [42] indicates the same thing. If the State attains its object completely, it will produce the same phenomenon as if perfect justice of disposition everywhere prevailed; but the inner nature and origin of both phenomena will be the reverse. Thus in the latter case, it would be that no one wished to do wrong, but in the former that no one wished to suffer wrong, and the means appropriate to this end would be fully employed. Thus the same line can be drawn from opposite directions, and a carnivorous animal with a muzzle is as harmless as a grass-eating animal. But the State cannot go beyond this point; hence it cannot exhibit a phenomenon like that which would spring from universal mutual benevolence and affection. For we found that, by its nature, the State would not forbid a wrongdoing to which corresponded absolutely no suffering of wrong by the other party; and, simply because this is impossible, it prohibits all wrongdoing. So, conversely, in accordance with its tendency directed to the well-being of all, the State would gladly see to it that everyone experienced benevolence and works of every kind of human affection, were it not that these also have an inevitable correlative in the performance of benevolent deeds and of works of affection. But then every citizen of the State would want to assume the passive, and none the active role, and there would be no reason for exacting the latter from one citizen rather than from another. Accordingly, only the negative, which is just the right, not the positive, which is understood by the name of charitable duties, or incomplete obligations, can be enforced.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:31 pm

Part 5 of 8

As we have said, legislation borrows the pure doctrine of right, or the theory of the nature and limits of right and wrong, from morality, in order to apply this from the reverse side to its own ends which are foreign to morality, and accordingly to set up positive legislation and the means for maintaining it, in other words the State. Positive legislation is therefore the purely moral doctrine of right applied from the reverse side. This application can be made with reference to the peculiar relations and circumstances of a given people. But only if positive legislation is essentially determined throughout in accordance with the guidance of the pure doctrine of right, and a reason for each of its laws can be indicated in the pure theory of right, is the resultant legislation really a positive right, and the State a legal and just association, a State in the proper sense of the word, a morally admissible, not an immoral, institution. In the opposite case, positive legislation is the establishment of a positive wrong; it is a publicly avowed enforced wrong. Such is every despotism, the constitution of most Mohammedan kingdoms; and several parts of many constitutions are of the same kind, as, for example, serfdom, villeinage, and so on. The pure theory of right or natural right, better moral right, though always by inversion, is the basis of every just positive legislation, as pure mathematics is the basis of every branch of applied. The most important points of the pure doctrine of right, as philosophy has to hand it on to legislation for that purpose, are the following: (1) Explanation of the inner and real significance and the origin of the concepts of wrong and right, and of their application and position in morality. (2) The derivation of the right to property. (3) The derivation of the moral validity of contracts, for this is the moral basis of the contract of the State. (4 ) The explanation of the origin and object of the State, of the relation of this object to morality, and of the appropriate transference of the moral doctrine of right by inversion to legislation, in consequence of this relation. (5) The derivation of the right to punish. The remaining contents of the doctrine of right are mere applications of those principles, a closer definition of the limits of right and wrong in all possible circumstances of life, which are therefore united and arranged under certain aspects and titles. In these particular theories the text-books of pure law are all in fair agreement; only in the principles are they worded very differently, since the principles are always connected with some philosophical system. After having discussed briefly and generally, yet definitely and distinctly, the first four of these main points in accordance with our own system, we have still to speak of the right to punish.

Kant makes the fundamentally false assertion that, apart from the State, there would be no perfect right to property. According to the deduction we have just made, there is property even in the state of nature with perfect natural, i.e., moral, right, which cannot be encroached on without wrong, and without wrong can be defended to the uttermost. On the other hand it is certain that, apart from the State, there is no right to punish. All right to punish is established by positive law alone, which has determined before the offence a punishment therefor, and the threat of such punishment should, as counter· motive, outweigh all possible motives for that offence. This positive law is to be regarded as sanctioned and acknowledged by all the citizens of the State. Thus it is based on a common contract that the members of the State are in duty bound to fulfil in all circumstances, and hence to inflict the punishment on the one hand, and to endure it on the other; therefore the endurance is with right enforceable. Consequently, the immediate object of punishment in the particular case is fulfilment of the law as a contract; but the sole object of the law is to deter from encroachment on the rights of others. For, in order that each may be protected from suffering wrong, all have combined into the State, renounced wrongdoing, and taken upon themselves the burdens of maintaining the State. Thus the law and its fulfilment, namely punishment, are directed essentially to the future, not to the past. This distinguishes punishment from revenge, for revenge is motivated simply by what has happened, and hence by the past as such. All retaliation for wrong by inflicting a pain without any object for the future is revenge, and can have no other purpose than consolation for the suffering one has endured by the sight of the suffering one has caused in another. Such a thing is wickedness and cruelty, and cannot be ethically justified. Wrong inflicted on me by someone does not in any way entitle me to inflict wrong on him. Retaliation of evil for evil without any further purpose cannot be justified, either morally or otherwise, by any ground of reason, and the jus talionis, set up as an independent, ultimate principle of the right to punish, is meaningless. Therefore, Kant's theory of punishment as mere requital for requital's sake is a thoroughly groundless and perverse view. Yet it still haunts the writings of many professors of law under all kinds of fine phrases which amount to nothing but empty verbiage; as that, for example, through the punishment the crime is expiated or neutralized and abolished, and many others of the same kind. But no person has the authority or power to set himself up as a purely moral judge and avenger, to punish the misdeeds of another with pains he inflicts on him, and thus to impose penance on him for these misdeeds. On the contrary, this would be a most impudent presumption; therefore the Bible says: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." Yet man has the right to provide for the safety of society; but this can be done only by interdicting all those actions denoted by the word "criminal," in order to prevent them by means of counter-motives, which are the threatened punishments. This threat can be effective only by carrying out the punishment when the case occurs in spite of it. Therefore that the object of punishment, or more precisely of the penal law, is deterrence from crime is a truth so generally recognized, and indeed self-evident, that in England it is expressed even in the very old form of indictment still made use of in criminal cases by counsel for the Crown, since it ends with the words: "If this be proved, you, the said N.N., ought to be punished with pains of law, to deter others from the like crimes in all time coming." If a prince desires to pardon a criminal who has been justly condemned, his minister will represent to him that the crime will soon be repeated. Object and purpose for the future distinguish punishment from revenge, and punishment has this object only when it is inflicted in fulfilment of a law. Only in this way does it proclaim itself to be inevitable and infallible for every future case; and thus it obtains for the law the power to deter; and it is precisely in this that the object of the law consists. Now a Kantian would infallibly reply here that, according to this view, the criminal punished would be used "merely as a means." This proposition, repeated so indefatigably by all the Kantians, namely that "Man must always be treated only as an end, never as a means," certainly sounds important, and is therefore very suitable for all those who like to have a formula that relieves them of all further thinking. Closely examined, however, it is an extremely vague, indefinite assertion which reaches its aim quite indirectly; it needs for every case of its application a special explanation, definition, and modification, but, taken generally, it is inadequate, says little, and moreover is problematical. The murderer who is condemned to death according to the law must, it is true, be now used as a mere means, and with complete right. For public security, which is the principal object of the State, is disturbed by him; indeed it is abolished if the law remains unfulfilled. The murderer, his life, his person, must be the means of fulfilling the law, and thus of reestablishing public security. He is made this with every right for the carrying out of the State contract, into which he also entered in so far as he was a citizen of the State. Accordingly, in order to enjoy security for his life, his freedom, and his property, he had pledged his life, his freedom, and his property for the security of all, and this pledge is now forfeit.

The theory of punishment here advanced, and immediately obvious to sound reason, is certainly in the main no new idea, but only one that was well-nigh supplanted by new errors; and to this extent its very clear statement was necessary. The same thing is contained essentially in what Pufendorf says about it in De Officio Hominis et Civis (Book II, chap. 13). Hobbes also agrees with it (Leviathan, chaps. 15 and 28). It is well known that Feuerbach has upheld it in our own day. Indeed, it is already found in the utterances of the philosophers of antiquity. Plato clearly expounds it in the Protagoras (p. 114, edit. Bip.), also in the Gorgias (p. 168), and finally in the eleventh book of the Laws (p. 165). Seneca perfectly expresses Plato's opinion and the theory of all punishment in the short sentence: "Nemo prudens punit, quia peccatum est; sed ne peccetur" (De Ira, I, 19). [48]

We have thus learnt to recognize in the State the means by which egoism, endowed with the faculty of reason, seeks to avoid its own evil consequences that turn against itself; and then each promotes the well-being of all, because he sees his own well-being bound up therewith. If the State attained its end completely, then, since it is able to make the rest of nature more and more serviceable by the human forces united in it, something approaching a Utopia might finally be brought about to some extent by the removal of all kinds of evil. But up to now the State has always remained very far from this goal; and even with its attainment, innumerable evils, absolutely essential to life, would still always keep it in suffering. Finally, even if all these evils were removed, boredom would at once occupy the place vacated by the other evils. Moreover, even the dissension and discord of individuals can never be wholly eliminated by the State, for they irritate and annoy in trifles where they are prohibited in great things. Finally, Eris, happily expelled from within, at last turns outwards; as the conflict of individuals, she is banished by the institution of the State, but she enters again from without as war between nations, and demands in bulk and all at once, as an accumulated debt, the bloody sacrifices that singly had been withheld from her by wise precaution. Even supposing all this were finally overcome and removed by prudence based on the experience of thousands of years, the result in the end would be the actual over-population of the whole planet, the terrible evil of which only a bold imagination can conjure up in the mind. [44]

63.

We have learnt to recognize temporal justice, which has its seat in the State, as requiting or punishing, and have seen that this becomes justice with regard only to the future. For without such regard, all punishing and requital of an outrage would remain without justification, would indeed be a mere addition of a second evil to that which had happened, without sense or significance. But it is quite different with eternal justice, which has been previously mentioned, and which rules not the State but the world; this is not dependent on human institutions, not subject to chance and deception, not uncertain, wavering, and erring, but infallible, firm, and certain. The concept of retaliation implies time, therefore eternal justice cannot be a retributive justice, and hence cannot, like that, admit respite and reprieve, and require time in order to succeed, balancing the evil deed against the evil consequence only by means of time. Here the punishment must be so linked with the offence that the two are one.

[x]
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Euripides, Apud Stobaeus, Eclog., I, c. 4.

(Volare pennis scelera ad aetherias domus
Putatis, illic in Jovis tabularia
Scripto referri; tum Jovem lectis super
Sententiam proferre? sed mortalium
Facinora coeli, quantaquanta est, regia
Nequit tenere: nec legendis Juppiter
Et puniendis par est. Est tamen ultio,
Et, si intuemur, ilia nos habitat prope.) [45]


Now that such an eternal justice is actually to be found in the inner nature of the world will soon become perfectly clear to the reader who has grasped in its entirety the thought that we have so far developed.

The phenomenon, the objectivity of the one will-to-live, is the world in all the plurality of its parts and forms. Existence itself, and the kind of existence, in the totality as well as in every part, is only from the will. The will is free; it is almighty. The will appears in everything, precisely as it determines itself in itself and outside time. The world is only the mirror of this willing; and all finiteness, all suffering, all miseries that it contains, belong to the expression of what the will wills, are as they are because the will so wills. Accordingly, with the strictest right, every being supports existence in general, and the existence of its species and of its characteristic individuality, entirely as it is and in surroundings as they are, in a world such as it is, swayed by chance and error, fleeting, transient, always suffering; and in all that happens or indeed can happen to the individual, justice is always done to it. For the will belongs to it; and as the will is, so is the world. Only this world itself -- no other -- can bear the responsibility for its existence and its nature; for how could anyone else have assumed this responsibility? If we want to know what human beings, morally considered, are worth as a whole and in general, let us consider their fate as a whole and in general. This fate is want, wretchedness, misery, lamentation, and death. Eternal justice prevails; if they were not as a whole contemptible, their fate as a whole would not be so melancholy. In this sense we can say that the world itself is the tribunal of the world. If we could lay all the misery of the world in one pan of the scales, and all its guilt in the other, the pointer would certainly show them to be in equilibrium.

But of course the world does not exhibit itself to knowledge which has sprung from the will to serve it, and which comes to the individual as such in the same way as it finally discloses itself to the inquirer, namely as the objectivity of the one and only will-to-live, which he himself is. On the contrary, the eyes of the uncultured individual are clouded, as the Indians say, by the veil of Maya. To him is revealed not the thing-in-itself, but only the phenomenon in time and space, in the principium individuationis, and in the remaining forms of the principle of sufficient reason. In this form of his limited knowledge he sees not the inner nature of things, which is one, but its phenomena as separated, detached, innumerable, very different, and indeed opposed. For pleasure appears to him as one thing, and pain as quite another; one man as tormentor and murderer, another as martyr and victim; wickedness as one thing, evil as another. He sees one person living in pleasure, abundance, and delights, and at the same time another dying in agony of want and cold at the former's very door. He then asks where retribution is to be found. He himself in the vehement pressure of will, which is his origin and inner nature, grasps the pleasures and enjoyments of life, embraces them firmly, and does not know that, by this very act of his will, he seizes and hugs all the pains and miseries of life, at the sight of which he shudders. He sees the evil, he sees the wickedness in the world; but, far from recognizing that the two are but different aspects of the phenomenon of the one will-to-live, he regards them as very different, indeed as quite opposed. He often tries to escape by wickedness, in other words, by causing another's suffering, from the evil, from the suffering of his own individuality, involved as he is in the principium individuationis, deluded by the veil of Maya. Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individuationis, or the way in which the individual knows things as phenomenon. The boundless world, everywhere full of suffering in the infinite past, in the infinite future, is strange to him, is indeed a fiction. His vanishing person, his extensionless present, his momentary gratification, these alone have reality for him; and he does everything to maintain them, so long as his eyes are not opened by a better knowledge. Till then, there lives only in the innermost depths of his consciousness the wholly obscure presentiment that all this is indeed not really so strange to him, but has a connexion with him from which the principium individuationis cannot protect him. From this presentiment arises that ineradicable dread, common to all human beings (and possibly even to the more intelligent animals), which suddenly seizes them, when by any chance they become puzzled over the principium individuationis, in that the principle of sufficient reason in one or other of its forms seems to undergo an exception. For example, when it appears that some change has occurred without a cause, or a deceased person exists again; or when in any other way the past or the future is present, or the distant is near. The fearful terror at anything of this kind is based on the fact that they suddenly become puzzled over the forms of knowledge of the phenomenon which alone hold their own individuality separate from the rest of the world. This separation, however, lies only in the phenomenon and not in the thing-in-itself; and precisely on this rests eternal justice. In fact, all temporal happiness stands, and all prudence proceeds, on undermined ground. They protect the person from accidents, and supply it with pleasures, but the person is mere phenomenon, and its difference from other individuals, and exemption from the sufferings they bear, rest merely on the form of the phenomenon, on the principium individuationis. According to the true nature of things, everyone has all the sufferings of the world as his own; indeed, he has to look upon all merely possible sufferings as actual for him, so long as he is the firm and constant will-to-live, in other words, affirms life with all his strength. For the knowledge that sees through the principium individuationis, a happy life in time, given by chance or won from it by shrewdness, amid the sufferings of innumerable others, is only a beggar's dream, in which he is a king, but from which he must awake, in order to realize that only a fleeting illusion had separated him from the suffering of his life.

Eternal justice is withdrawn from the view that is involved in knowledge following the principle of sufficient reason, in the principium individuationis; such a view altogether misses it, unless it vindicates it in some way by fictions. It sees the wicked man, after misdeeds and cruelties of every kind, live a life of pleasure, and quit the world undisturbed. It sees the oppressed person drag out to the end a life full of suffering without the appearance of an avenger or vindicator. But eternal justice will be grasped and comprehended only by the man who rises above that knowledge which proceeds on the guiding line of the principle of sufficient reason and is bound to individual things, who recognizes the Ideas, who sees through the principium individuationis, and who is aware that the forms of the phenomenon do not apply to the thing-in-itself. Moreover, it is this man alone who, by dint of the same knowledge, can understand the true nature of virtue, as will soon be disclosed to us in connexion with the present discussion, although for the practice of virtue this knowledge in the abstract is by no means required. Therefore, it becomes clear to the man who has reached the knowledge referred to, that, since the will is the in-itself of every phenomenon, the misery inflicted on others and that experienced by himself, the bad and the evil, always concern the one and the same inner being, although the phenomena in which the one and the other exhibit themselves stand out as quite different individuals, and are separated even by wide intervals of time and space. He sees that the difference between the inflicter of suffering and he who must endure it is only phenomenon, and does not concern the thing-in-itself which is the will that lives in both. Deceived by the knowledge bound to its service, the will here fails to recognize itself; seeking enhanced well-being in one of its phenomena, it produces great suffering in another. Thus in the fierceness and intensity of its desire it buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it always injures only itself, revealing in this form through the medium of individuation the conflict with itself which it bears in its inner nature. Tormentor and tormented are one. The former is mistaken in thinking he does not share the torment, the latter in thinking he does not share the guilt. If the eyes of both were opened, the inflicter of the suffering would recognize that he lives in everything that suffers pain in the whole wide world, and, if endowed with the faculty of reason, ponders in vain over why it was called into existence for such great suffering, whose cause and guilt it does not perceive. On the other hand, the tormented person would see that all the wickedness that is or ever was perpetrated in the world proceeds from that will which constitutes also his own inner being, and appears also in him. He would see that, through this phenomenon and its affirmation, he has taken upon himself all the sufferings resulting from such a will, and rightly endures them so long as he is this will. In Life a Dream the prophetic poet Calderon speaks from this knowledge:

Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido.

(For man's greatest offence
Is that he has been born.)


How could it fail to be an offence, as death comes after it in accordance with an eternal law? In that verse Calderon has merely expressed the Christian dogma of original sin.

The vivid knowledge of eternal justice, of the balance inseparably uniting the malum culpae with the malum poenae, demands the complete elevation above individuality and the principle of its possibility. It will therefore always remain inaccessible to the majority of men, as also will the pure and distinct knowledge of the real nature of all virtue which is akin to it, and which we are about to discuss. Hence the wise ancestors of the Indian people have directly expressed it in the Vedas, permitted only to the three twice-born castes, or in the esoteric teaching, namely in so far as concept and language comprehend it, and in so far as their method of presentation, always pictorial and even rhapsodical, allows it. But in the religion of the people, or in exoteric teaching, they have communicated it only mythically. We find the direct presentation in the Vedas, the fruit of the highest human knowledge and wisdom, the kernel of which has finally come to us in the Upanishads as the greatest gift to the nineteenth century. It is expressed in various ways, but especially by the fact that all beings of the world, living and lifeless, are led past in succession in the presence of the novice, and that over each of them is pronounced the word which has become a formula, and as such has been called the Mahavakya: Tatoumes, or more correctly, tat tvam asi, which means "This art thou." [46] For the people, however, that great truth, in so far as it was possible for them to comprehend it with their limited mental capacity, was translated into the way of knowledge following the principle of sufficient reason. From its nature, this way of knowledge is indeed quite incapable of assimilating that truth purely and in itself; indeed it is even in direct contradiction with it; yet in the form of a myth, it received a substitute for it which was sufficient as a guide to conduct. For the myth makes intelligible the ethical significance of conduct through figurative description in the method of knowledge according to the principle of sufficient reason, which is eternally foreign to this significance. This is the object of religious teachings, since these are all the mythical garments of the truth which is inaccessible to the crude human intellect. In this sense, that myth might be called in Kant's language a postulate of practical reason (Vernunft), but, considered as such, it has the great advantage of containing absolutely no elements but those which lie before our eyes in the realm of reality, and thus of being able to support all its concepts with perceptions. What is here meant is the myth of the transmigration of souls. This teaches that all sufferings inflicted in life by man on other beings must be expiated in a following life in this world by precisely the same sufferings. It goes to the length of teaching that a person who kills only an animal, will be born as just such an animal at some point in endless time, and will suffer the same death. It teaches that wicked conduct entails a future life in suffering and despised creatures in this world; that a person is accordingly born again in lower castes, or as a woman, or as an animal, as a pariah or Chandala, as a leper, a crocodile, and so on. All the torments threatened by the myth are supported by it with perceptions from the world of reality, through suffering creatures that do not know how they have merited the punishment of their misery; and it does not need to call in the assistance of any other hell. On the other hand, it promises as reward rebirth in better and nobler forms, as Brahmans, sages, or saints. The highest reward awaiting the noblest deeds and most complete resignation, which comes also to the woman who in seven successive lives has voluntarily died on the funeral pile of her husband, and no less to the person whose pure mouth has never uttered a single lie-such a reward can be expressed by the myth only negatively in the language of this world, namely by the promise, so often occurring, of not being reborn any more: non adsumes iterum existentiam apparentem; [47] or as the Buddhists, admitting neither Vedas nor castes, express it: "You shall attain to Nirvana, in other words, to a state or condition in which there are not four things, namely birth, old age, disease, and death."

Never has a myth been, and never will one be, more closely associated with a philosophical truth accessible to so few, than this very ancient teaching of the noblest and oldest of peoples. Degenerate as this race may now be in many respects, this truth still prevails with it as the universal creed of the people, and it has a decided influence on life today, as it had four thousand years ago. Therefore Pythagoras and Plato grasped with admiration that non plus ultra of mythical expression, took it over from India or Egypt, revered it, applied it, and themselves believed it, to what extent we know not. We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. In India our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.

64.

From our description of eternal justice, which is not mythical but philosophical, we will now proceed to the kindred consideration of the ethical significance of conduct, and of conscience, which is merely the felt knowledge of that significance. Here, however, I wish first of all to draw attention to two characteristics of human nature which may help to make clear how the essential nature of that eternal justice and the unity and identity of the will in all its phenomena, on which that justice rests, are known to everyone, at least as an obscure feeling.

After a wicked deed has been done, it affords satisfaction not only to the injured party, who is often filled with a desire for revenge, but also to the completely indifferent spectator, to see that the person who caused pain to another suffers in turn exactly the same measure of pain; and this quite independently of the object (which we have demonstrated) of the State in punishing, which is the basis of criminal law. It seems to me that nothing is expressed here but consciousness of that eternal justice, which, however, is at once misunderstood and falsified by the unpurified mind. Such a mind, involved in the principium individuationis, commits an amphiboly of the concepts, and demands of the phenomenon what belongs only to the thing-in-itself. It does not see to what extent the offender and the offended are in themselves one, and that it is the same inner nature which, not recognizing itself in its own phenomenon, bears both the pain and the guilt. On the contrary, it longs to see again the pain in the same individual to whom the guilt belongs. A man might have a very high degree of wickedness, which yet might be found in many others, though not matched with other qualities such as are found in him, namely one who was far superior to others through unusual mental powers, and who, accordingly, inflicted unspeakable sufferings on millions of others -- a world conqueror, for instance. Most people would like to demand that such a man should at some time and in some place atone for all those sufferings by an equal amount of pain; for they do not recognize how the tormentor and tormented are in themselves one, and that it is the same will by which these latter exist I and live, which appears in the former, and precisely through him attains to the most distinct revelation of its inner nature. This will likewise suffers both in the oppressed and in the oppressor, and in the latter indeed all the more, in proportion as the consciousness has greater clearness and distinctness, and the will a greater vehemence. But Christian ethics testifies to the fact that the deeper knowledge, no longer involved in the principium individuationis, a knowledge from which all virtue and nobleness of mind proceed, no longer cherishes feelings demanding retaliation. Such ethics positively forbids all retaliation of evil for evil, and lets eternal justice rule in the province of the thing-in-itself which is different from that of the phenomenon ("Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." Rom. xii, 19).

A much more striking, but likewise much rarer, characteristic of human nature, which expresses that desire to draw eternal justice into the province of experience, i.e., of individuation, and at the same time indicates a felt consciousness that, as I put it above, the will-to-live acts out the great tragedy and comedy at its own expense, and that the same one will lives in all phenomena -- such a characteristic, I say, is the following. Sometimes we see a man so profoundly indignant at a great outrage, which he has experienced or perhaps only witnessed, that he deliberately and irretrievably stakes his own life in order to take vengeance on the perpetrator of that outrage. We see him search for years for some mighty oppressor, finally murder him, and then himself die on the scaffold, as he had foreseen. Indeed, often he did not attempt in any way to avoid this, since his life was of value to him only as a means for revenge. Such instances are found especially among the Spaniards. [48] Now if we carefully consider the spirit of that mania for retaliation, we find it to be very different from common revenge, which desires to mitigate suffering endured by the sight of suffering caused; indeed, we find that what it aims at deserves to be called not so much revenge as punishment. For in it there is really to be found the intention of an effect on the future through the example, and without any selfish aim either for the avenging individual, who perishes in the attempt, or for a society that secures its own safety through laws. This punishment is carried out by the individual, not by the State; nor is it in fulfilment of a law; on the contrary, it always concerns a deed which the State would not or could not punish, and whose punishment it condemns. It seems to me that the wrath which drives such a man so far beyond the limits of all self-love, springs from the deepest consciousness that he himself is the whole will-to-live that appears in all creatures through all periods of time, and that therefore the most distant future, like the present, belongs to him in the same way, and cannot be a matter of indifference to him. Affirming this will, he nevertheless desires that in the drama that presents its inner nature no such monstrous outrage shall ever appear again; and he wishes to frighten every future evildoer by the example of a revenge against which there is no wall of defence, as the fear of death does not deter the avenger. The will-to-live, though it still affirms itself here, no longer depends on the individual phenomenon, on the individual person, but embraces the Idea of man. It desires to keep the phenomenon of this Idea pure from such a monstrous and revolting outrage. It is a rare, significant, and even sublime trait of character by which the individual sacrifices himself, in that he strives to make himself the arm of eternal justice, whose true inner nature he still fails to recognize.

65.

In all the observations on human conduct hitherto made, we have been preparing for the final discussion, and have greatly facilitated the task of raising to abstract and philosophical clearness, and of demonstrating as a branch of our main idea, the real ethical significance of conduct which in life is described by the words good and bad, and is thus made perfectly intelligible.

First of all, however, I wish to trace back to their proper meaning these concepts of good and bad, which are treated by the philosophical writers of our times in a very odd way as simple concepts, that is, as concepts incapable of any analysis. I will do this so that the reader shall not remain involved in some hazy and obscure notion that they contain more than is actually the case, and that they state in and by themselves all that is here necessary. I am able to do this because in ethics I myself am as little disposed to take refuge behind the word good as I was earlier to hide behind the words beautiful and true, in order that, by an added "-ness," supposed nowadays to have a special [x] (solemnity), and hence to be of help in various cases, and by a solemn demeanour, I might persuade people that by uttering three such words I had done more than express three concepts which are very wide and abstract, which therefore contain nothing at all, and are of very different origin and significance. Who is there indeed, who has made himself acquainted with the writings of our times, and has not finally become sick of those three words, admirable as are the things to which they originally refer, after he has been made to see a thousand times how those least capable of thinking believe they need only utter these three words with open mouth and the air of infatuated sheep, in order to have spoken great wisdom?

The explanation of the concept true is already given in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, chap. V, §§ 29 seqq. The content of the concept beautiful received for the first time its proper explanation in the whole of our third book. We will now trace the meaning of the concept good; this can be done with very little trouble. This concept is essentially relative, and denotes the fitness or suitableness of an object to any definite effort of the will. Therefore everything agreeable to the will in anyone of its manifestations, and fulfilling the will's purpose, is thought of through the concept good, however different in other respects such things may be. We therefore speak of good eating, good roads, good weather, good weapons, good auguries, and so on; in short, we call everything good that is just as we want it to be. Hence a thing can be good to one person, and the very opposite to another. The concept of good is divided into two subspecies, that of the directly present satisfaction of the will in each case, and that of its merely indirect satisfaction concerning the future, in other words, the agreeable and the useful. The concept of the opposite, so long as we are speaking of beings without knowledge, is expressed by the word bad, more rarely and abstractly by the word evil, which therefore denotes everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case. Like all other beings that can come into relation with the will, persons who favour, promote, and befriend aims that happen to be desired are called good, with the same meaning, and always with the retention of the relative that is seen, for example, in the expression: "This is good for me, but not for you." Those, however, whose character induces them generally not to hinder another's efforts of will as such, but rather to promote them, and who are therefore consistently helpful, benevolent, friendly, and charitable, are called good, on account of this relation of their mode of conduct to the will of others in general. In the case of beings with knowledge (animals and human beings), the opposite concept is denoted in German, and has been for about a hundred years in French also, by a word different from that used in the case of beings without knowledge, namely bose, mechant (spiteful, malicious, unkind); whereas in almost all other languages this distinction does not occur. Malus, [x] , cattivo, bad, are used both of human beings and of inanimate things which are opposed to the aims of a definite individual will. Thus, having started entirely from the passive side of the good, the discussion could only later pass to the active side, and investigate the mode of conduct of the man called good, in reference no longer to others, but to himself. It could then specially set itself the task of explaining the purely objective esteem produced in others by such conduct, as well as the characteristic contentment with himself obviously engendered in the person, for he purchases this even with sacrifices of another kind. On the other hand, it could also explain the inner pain that accompanies the evil disposition, however many advantages it may bring to the man who cherishes it. Now from this sprang the ethical systems, both the philosophical and those supported by religious teachings. Both always attempt to associate happiness in some way with virtue, the former either by the principle of contradiction, or even by that of sufficient reason, and thus to make happiness either identical with, or the consequence of, virtue, always sophistically; but the latter by asserting the existence of worlds other than the one that can be known to experience. [49] On the other hand, from our discussion, the inner nature of virtue will show itself as a striving in quite the opposite direction to that of happiness, which is that of well-being and life.

It follows from the above remarks that the good is according to its concept, [x], [50] hence every good is essentially relative; for it has its essential nature only in its relation to a desiring will. Accordingly, absolute good is a contradiction; highest good, summum bonum, signifies the same thing, namely in reality a final satisfaction of the will, after which no fresh willing would occur; a last motive, the attainment of which would give the will an imperishable satisfaction. According to the discussion so far carried on in this fourth book, such a thing cannot be conceived. The will can just as little through some satisfaction cease to will always afresh, as time can end or begin; for the will there is no permanent fulfilment which completely and for ever satisfies its craving. It is the vessel of the Danaides; there is no highest good, no absolute good, for it, but always a temporary good only. However, if we wish to give an honorary, or so to speak an emeritus, position to an old expression that from custom we do not like entirely to discard, we may, metaphorically and figuratively, call the complete self-effacement and denial of the will, true will-lessness, which alone stills and silences for ever the craving of the will; which alone gives that contentment that cannot again be disturbed; which alone is world-redeeming; and which we shall now consider at the conclusion of our whole discussion; the absolute good, the summum bonum; and we may regard it as the only radical cure for the disease against which all other good things, such as all fulfilled wishes and all attained happiness, are only palliatives, anodynes. In this sense, the Greek [x] and also finis bonorum meet the case even better. So much for the words good and bad; now to the matter itself.

If a person is always inclined to do wrong the moment the inducement is there and no external power restrains him, we call him bad. In accordance with our explanation of wrong, this means that such a man not only affirms the will-to-live as it appears in his own body, but in this affirmation goes so far as to deny the will that appears in other individuals. This is shown by the fact that he demands their powers for the service of his own will, and tries to destroy their existence when they stand in the way of the efforts of his will. The ultimate source of this is a high degree of egoism, the nature of which has already been explained. Two different things are at once clear here; firstly, that in such a person an excessively vehement will-to-live, going far beyond the affirmation of his own body, expresses itself; and secondly, that this knowledge, devoted entirely to the principle of sufficient reason and involved in the principium individuationis, definitely confines itself to the complete difference, established by this latter principle, between his own person and all others. He therefore seeks only his own well-being, and is completely indifferent to that of all others. On the contrary, their existence is wholly foreign to him, separated from his by a wide gulf; indeed, he really regards them only as masks without any reality. And these two qualities are the fundamental elements of the bad character.

This great intensity of willing is in and by itself and directly a constant source of suffering, firstly because all willing as such springs from want, and hence from suffering. (Therefore, as will be remembered from the third book, the momentary silencing of all willing, which comes about whenever as pure will-less subject of knowing, the correlative of the Idea, we are devoted to aesthetic contemplation, is a principal element of pleasure in the beautiful.) Secondly because, through the causal connexion of things, most desires must remain unfulfilled, and the will is much more often crossed than satisfied. Consequently, much intense willing always entails much intense suffering. For all suffering is simply nothing but unfulfilled and thwarted willing, and even the pain of the body, when this is injured or destroyed, is as such possible only by the fact that the body is nothing but the will itself become object. Now, for the reason that much intense suffering is inseparable from much intense willing, the facial expression of very bad people already bears the stamp of inward suffering. Even when they have obtained every external happiness, they always look unhappy, whenever they are not transported by momentary exultation, or are not pretending. From this inward torment, absolutely and directly essential to them, there finally results even that delight at the suffering of another which has not sprung from egoism, but is disinterested; this is wickedness proper, and rises to the pitch of cruelty. For this the suffering of another is no longer a means for attaining the ends of its own will, but an end in itself. The following is a more detailed explanation of this phenomenon. Since man is phenomenon of the will illuminated by the clearest knowledge, he is always measuring and comparing the actual and felt satisfaction of his will with the merely possible satisfaction put before him by knowledge. From this springs envy; every privation is infinitely aggravated by the pleasure of others, and relieved by the knowledge that others also endure the same privation. The evils that are common to all and inseparable from human life do not trouble us much, just as little as do those that belong to the climate and to the whole country. The calling to mind of sufferings greater than our own stills their pain; the sight of another's sufferings alleviates our own. Now a person filled with an extremely intense pressure of will wants with burning eagerness to accumulate everything, in order to slake the thirst of egoism. As is inevitable, he is bound to see that all satisfaction is only apparent, and that the attained object never fulfils the promise held out by the desired object, namely the final appeasement of the excessive pressure of will. He sees that, with fulfilment, the wish changes only its form, and now torments under another form; indeed, when at last all wishes are exhausted, the pressure of will itself remains, even without any recognized motive, and makes itself known with terrible pain as a feeling of the most frightful desolation and emptiness. If from all this, which with ordinary degrees of willing is felt only in a smaller measure, and produces only the ordinary degree of dejection, there necessarily arise an excessive inner torment, an eternal unrest, an incurable pain in the case of a person who is the phenomenon of the will reaching to extreme wickedness, he then seeks indirectly the alleviation of which he is incapable directly, in other words, he tries to mitigate his own suffering by the sight of another's, and at the same time recognizes this as an expression of his power. The suffering of another becomes for him an end in itself; it is a spectacle over which he gloats; and so arises the phenomenon of cruelty proper, of bloodthirstiness, so often revealed by history in the Neros and Domitians, in the African Deys, in Robespierre and others.

The thirst for revenge is closely related to wickedness. It repays evil with evil, not from regard for the future, which is the character of punishment, but merely on account of what has happened and is past as such, and thus disinterestedly, not as means but as end, in order to gloat over the offender's affliction caused by the avenger himself. What distinguishes revenge from pure wickedness, and to some extent excuses it, is an appearance of right, in so far as the same act that is now revenge, if ordered by law, in other words, according to a previously determined and known rule and in a society that has sanctioned such a rule, would be punishment, and hence justice or right.

Besides the suffering described, and inseparable from wickedness, as having sprung from a single root, namely a very intense will, there is associated with wickedness another particular pain quite different from this. This pain is felt in the case of every bad action, whether it be mere injustice arising out of egoism, or pure wickedness; and according to the length of its duration it is called the sting of conscience or the pangs of conscience. Now he who remembers, and has present in his mind, the foregoing contents of this fourth book, especially the truth explained at its beginning, namely that life itself is always sure and certain to the will-to-live as its mere copy or mirror, and also the discussion on eternal justice, will find that, in accordance with those remarks, the sting of conscience can have no other meaning than the following; in other words, its content, expressed in the abstract, is as follows, in which two parts are distinguished, but again these entirely coincide, and must be thought of as wholly united.

However densely the veil of Maya envelops the mind of the bad person, in other words, however firmly involved he is in the principium individuationis, according to which he regards his person as absolutely different from every other and separated from it by a wide gulf, a knowledge to which he adheres with all his might, since it alone suits and supports his egoism, so that knowledge is almost always corrupted by the will, there is nevertheless roused in the innermost depths of his consciousness the secret presentiment that such an order of things is only phenomenon, but that, in themselves, things are quite different. He has a presentiment that, however much time and space separate him from other individuals and the innumerable miseries they suffer, indeed suffer through him; however much time and space present these as quite foreign to him, yet in themselves and apart from the representation and its forms, it is the one will-to-live appearing in them all which, failing to recognize itself here, turns its weapons against itself, and, by seeking increased well-being in one of its phenomena, imposes the greatest suffering on another. He dimly sees that he, the bad person, is precisely this whole will; that in consequence he is not only the tormentor but also the tormented, from whose suffering he is separated and kept free only by a delusive dream, whose form is space and time. But this dream vanishes, and he sees that in reality he must pay for the pleasure with the pain, and that all suffering which he knows only as possible actually concerns him as the will-to-live, since possibility and actuality, near and remote in time and space, are different only for the knowledge of the individual, only by means of the principium individuationis, and not in themselves. It is this truth which mythically, in other words, adapted to the principle of sufficient reason, is expressed by the transmigration of souls, and is thus translated into the form of the phenomenon. Nevertheless it has its purest expression, free from all admixture, precisely in that obscurely felt but inconsolable misery called the pangs of conscience. But this also springs from a second immediate knowledge closely associated with the first, namely knowledge of the strength with which the will-to-live affirms itself in the wicked individual, extending as it does far beyond his individual phenomenon to the complete denial of the same will as it appears in individuals foreign to him. Consequently, the wicked man's inward alarm at his own deed, which he tries to conceal from himself, contains that presentiment of the nothingness and mere delusiveness of the principium individuationis, and of the distinction established by this principle between him and others. At the same time it contains the knowledge of the vehemence of his own will, of the strength with which he has grasped life and attached himself firmly to it, this very life whose terrible side he sees before him in the misery of those he oppresses, and with which he is nevertheless so firmly entwined that, precisely in this way, the most terrible things come from himself as a means to the fuller affirmation of his own will. He recognizes himself as the concentrated phenomenon of the will-to-live; he feels to what degree he is given up to life, and therewith also to the innumerable sufferings essential to it, for it has infinite time and infinite space to abolish the distinction between possibility and actuality, and to change all the sufferings as yet merely known by him into those felt and experienced by him. The millions of years of constant rebirth certainly continue merely in conception, just as the whole of the past and future exists only in conception. Occupied time, the form of the phenomenon of the will, is only the present, and time for the individual is always new; he always finds himself as newly sprung into existence. For life is inseparable from the will-to-live, and its form is only the Now. Death (the repetition of the comparison must be excused) is like the setting of the sun, which is only apparently engulfed by the night, but actually, itself the source of all light, bums without intermission, brings new days to new worlds, and is always rising and always setting. Beginning and end concern only the individual by means of time, of the form of this phenomenon for the representation. Outside time lie only the will, Kant's thing-in-itself, and its adequate objectivity, namely Plato's Idea. Suicide, therefore, affords no escape; what everyone wills in his innermost being, that must he be; and what everyone is, is just what he wills. Therefore, besides the merely felt knowledge of the delusiveness and nothingness of the forms of the representation that separate individuals, it is the self-knowledge of one's own will and of its degree that gives conscience its sting. The course of life brings out the picture of the empirical character, whose original is the intelligible character, and the wicked person is horrified at this picture. It is immaterial whether the picture is produced in large characters, so that the world shares his horror, or in characters so small that he alone sees it; for it directly concerns him alone. The past would be a matter of indifference as mere phenomenon, and could not disturb or alarm the conscience, did not the character feel itself free from all time and incapable of alteration by it, so long as it does not deny itself. For this reason, things that happened long ago still continue to weigh heavily on the conscience. The prayer, "Lead me not into temptation" means "Let me not see who I am," In the strength with which the wicked person affirms life, and which is exhibited to him in the suffering he perpetrates on others, he estimates how far he is from the surrender and denial of that very will, from the only possible deliverance from the world and its miseries. He sees to what extent he belongs to the world, and how firmly he is bound to it. The known suffering of others has not been able to move him; he is given up to life and to felt or experienced suffering. It remains doubtful whether this will ever break and overcome the vehemence of his will.

This explanation of the significance and inner nature of the bad, which as mere feeling, i.e., not as distinct, abstract knowledge, is the content of the pangs of conscience, will gain even more clarity and completeness from a consideration of the good carried out in precisely the same way. This will consider the good as a quality of the human will, and finally of complete resignation and holiness that result from this quality, when it has reached the highest degree. For opposites always elucidate each other, and the day simultaneously reveals both itself and the night, as Spinoza has admirably said.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:32 pm

Part 6 of 8

66.

Morality without argumentation and reasoning, that is, mere moralizing, cannot have any effect, because it does not motivate. But a morality that does motivate can do so only by acting on self-love. Now what springs from this has no moral worth. From this it follows that no genuine virtue can be brought about through morality and abstract knowledge in general, but that such virtue must spring from the intuitive knowledge that recognizes in another's individuality the same inner nature as in one's own.

For virtue does indeed result from knowledge, but not from abstract knowledge communicable through words. If this were so, virtue could be taught, and by expressing here in the abstract its real nature and the knowledge at its foundation, we should have ethically improved everyone who comprehended this. But this is by no means the case. On the contrary, we are as little able to produce a virtuous person by ethical discourses or sermons as all the systems of aesthetics from Aristotle's downwards have ever been able to produce a poet. For the concept is unfruitful for the real inner nature of virtue, just as it is for art; and only in a wholly subordinate position can it serve as an instrument in elaborating and preserving what has been ascertained and inferred in other ways. Velle non discitur. [51] In fact, abstract dogmas are without influence on virtue, i.e., on goodness of disposition; false dogmas do not disturb it, and true ones hardly support it. Actually it would be a bad business if the principal thing in a man's life, his ethical worth that counts for eternity, depended on something whose attainment was so very much subject to chance as are dogmas, religious teachings, and philosophical arguments. For morality dogmas have merely the value that the man who is virtuous from another kind of knowledge shortly to be discussed has in them a scheme or formula. According to this, he renders to his own faculty of reason an account, for the most part only fictitious, of his non-egoistical actions, the nature of which it, in other words he himself, does not comprehend. With such an account he has been accustomed to rest content.

Dogmas can of course have a powerful influence on conduct, on outward actions, and so can custom and example (the latter, because the ordinary man does not trust his judgement, of whose weakness he is conscious, but follows only his own or someone else's experience); but the disposition is not altered in this way. [52] All abstract knowledge gives only motives, but, as was shown above, motives can alter only the direction of the will, never the will itself. But all communicable knowledge can affect the will as motive only; therefore, however the will is guided by dogmas, what a person really and generally wills still always remains the same. He has obtained different ideas merely of the ways in which it is to be attained, and imaginary motives guide him like real ones. Thus, for instance, it is immaterial, as regards his ethical worth, whether he makes donations to the destitute, firmly persuaded that he will receive everything back tenfold in a future life, or spends the same sum on improving an estate that will bear interest, late certainly, but all the more secure and substantial. And the man who, for the sake of orthodoxy, commits the heretic to the flames, is just as much a murderer as the bandit who earns a reward by killing; indeed, as regards inner circumstances, so also is he who massacres the Turks in the Promised Land, if, like the burner of heretics, he really does it because he imagines he will thus earn a place in heaven. For these are anxious only about themselves, about their egoism, just like the bandit, from whom they differ only in the absurdity of their means. As we have already said, the will can be reached from outside only through motives; but these alter merely the way in which it manifests itself, never the will itself. Velle non discitur (Willing cannot be taught).

In the case of good deeds, however, the doer of which appeals to dogmas, we must always distinguish whether these dogmas are really the motive for them, or whether, as I said above, they are nothing more than the delusive account by which he tries to satisfy his own faculty of reason about a good deed that flows from quite a different source. He performs such a deed because he is good, but he does not understand how to explain it properly, since he is not a philosopher, and yet he would like to think something with regard to it. But the distinction is very hard to find, since it lies in the very depths of our inner nature. Therefore we can hardly ever pronounce a correct moral judgement on the actions of others, and rarely on our own. The deeds and ways of acting of the individual and of a nation can be very much modified by dogmas, example, and custom. In themselves, however, all deeds (opera operata) are merely empty figures, and only the disposition that leads to them gives them moral significance. But this disposition can be actually quite the same, in spite of a very different external phenomenon. With an equal degree of wickedness one person can die on the wheel, and another peacefully in the bosom of his family. It can be the same degree of wickedness that expresses itself in one nation in the crude characteristics of murder and cannibalism, and in another finely and delicately in miniature, in court intrigues, oppressions, and subtle machinations of every kind; the inner nature remains the same. It is conceivable that a perfect State, or even perhaps a complete dogma of rewards and punishments after death firmly believed in, might prevent every crime. Politically much would be gained in this way; morally, absolutely nothing; on the contrary, only the mirroring of the will through life would be checked.

Genuine goodness of disposition, disinterested virtue, and pure nobleness of mind, therefore, do not come from abstract knowledge; yet they do come from knowledge. But it is a direct and intuitive knowledge that cannot be reasoned away or arrived at by reasoning; a knowledge that, just because it is not abstract, cannot be communicated, but must dawn on each of us. It therefore finds its real and adequate expression not in words, but simply and solely in deeds, in conduct, in the course of a man's life. We who are here looking for the theory of virtue, and who thus have to express in abstract terms the inner nature of the knowledge lying at its foundation, shall nevertheless be unable to furnish that knowledge itself in this expression, but only the concept of that knowledge. We thus always start from conduct, in which alone it becomes visible, and refer to such conduct as its only adequate expression. We only interpret and explain this expression, in other words, express in the abstract what really takes place in it.

Now before we speak of the good proper, in contrast to the bad that has been described, we must touch on the mere negation of the bad as an intermediate stage; this is justice. We have adequately explained above what right and wrong are; therefore we can briefly say here that the man who voluntarily recognizes and accepts that merely moral boundary between wrong and right, even where no State or other authority guarantees it, and who consequently, according to our explanation, never in the affirmation of his own will goes to the length of denying the will that manifests itself in another individual, is just. Therefore, in order to increase his own well-being, he will not inflict suffering on others; that is to say, he will not commit any crime; he will respect the rights and property of everyone. We now see that for such a just man the principium individuationis is no longer an absolute partition as it is for the bad; that he does not, like the bad man, affirm merely his own phenomenon of will and deny all others; that others are not for him mere masks, whose inner nature is quite different from his. On the contrary, he shows by his way of acting that he again recognizes his own inner being, namely the will-to-live as thing-in-itself, in the phenomenon of another given to him merely as representation. Thus he finds himself again in that phenomenon up to a certain degree, namely that of doing no wrong, i.e., of not injuring. Now in precisely this degree he sees through the principium individuationis, the veil of Maya. To this extent he treats the inner being outside himself like his own; he does not injure it.

If we examine the innermost nature of this justice, there is to be found in it the intention not to go so far in the affirmation of one's own will as to deny the phenomena of will in others by compelling them to serve one's own will. We shall therefore want to provide for others just as much as we benefit from them. The highest degree of this justice of disposition, which, however, is always associated with goodness proper, the character of this last being no longer merely negative, extends so far that a person questions his right to inherited property, desires to support his body only by his own powers, mental and physical, feels every service rendered by others, every luxury, as a reproach, and finally resorts to voluntary poverty. Thus we see how Pascal would not allow the performance of any more services when he turned to asceticism, although he had servants enough. In spite of his constant bad health, he made his own bed, fetched his own food from the kitchen, and so on. (Vie de Pascal, by his Sister, p. 19.) Quite in keeping with this, it is reported that many Hindus, even rajas, with great wealth, use it merely to support and maintain their families, their courts, and their establishment of servants, and follow with strict scrupulousness the maxim of eating nothing but what they have sown and reaped with their own hands. Yet at the bottom of this there lies a certain misunderstanding, for just because the individual is rich and powerful, he is able to render such important services to the whole of human society that they counterbalance inherited wealth, for the security of which he is indebted to society. In reality, that excessive justice of such Hindus is more than justice, indeed actual renunciation, denial of the will-to-live, asceticism, about which we shall speak last of all. On the other hand, pure idleness and living through the exertions of others with inherited property, without achieving anything, can indeed be regarded as morally wrong, even though it must remain right according to positive laws.

We have found that voluntary justice has its innermost origin in a certain degree of seeing through the principium individuationis, while the unjust man remains entirely involved in this principle. This seeing through can take place not only in the degree required for justice, but also in the higher degree that urges a man to positive benevolence and well-doing, to philanthropy. Moreover, this can happen however strong and energetic the will that appears in such an individual may be in itself. Knowledge can always counterbalance it, can teach a man to resist the temptation to do wrong, and can even produce every degree of goodness, indeed of resignation. Therefore the good man is in no way to be regarded as an originally weaker phenomenon of will than the bad, but it is knowledge that masters in him the blind craving of will. Certainly there are individuals who merely seem to be good-natured on account of the weakness of the will that appears in them; but what they are soon shows it self in the fact that they are not capable of any considerable self-conquest, in order to perform a just or good deed.

Now if, as a rare exception, we come across a man who possesses a considerable income, but uses only a little of it for himself, and gives all the rest to persons in distress, whilst he himself forgoes many pleasures and comforts, and we try to make clear to ourselves the action of this man, we shall find, quite apart from the dogmas by which he himself will make his action intelligible to his faculty of reason, the simplest general expression and the essential character of his way of acting to be that he makes less distinction than is usually made between himself and others. This very distinction is in the eyes of many so great, that the suffering of another is a direct pleasure for the wicked, and a welcome means to their own wellbeing for the unjust. The merely just person is content not to cause it; and generally most people know and are acquainted with innumerable sufferings of others in their vicinity, but do not decide to alleviate them, because to do so they would have to undergo some privation. Thus a strong distinction seems to prevail in each of all these between his own ego and another's. On the other hand, to the noble person, whom we have in mind, this distinction is not so significant. The principium individuationis, the form of the phenomenon, no longer holds him so firmly in its grasp, but the suffering he sees in others touches him almost as closely as does his own. He therefore tries to strike a balance between the two, denies himself pleasures, undergoes privations, in order to alleviate another's suffering. He perceives that the distinction between himself and others, which to the wicked man is so great a gulf, belongs only to a fleeting, deceptive phenomenon. He recognizes immediately, and without reasons or arguments, that the in-itself of his own phenomenon is also that of others, namely that will-to-live which constitutes the inner nature of everything, and lives in all; in fact, he recognizes that this extends even to the animals and to the whole of nature; he will therefore not cause suffering even to an animal. [53]

He is now just as little able to let others starve, while he himself has enough and to spare, as anyone would one day be on short commons, in order on the following day to have more than he can enjoy. For the veil of Maya has become transparent for the person who performs works of love, and the deception of the principium individuationis has left him. Himself, his will, he recognizes in every creature, and hence in the sufferer also. He is free from the perversity with which the will-to-live, failing to recognize itself, here in one individual enjoys fleeting and delusive pleasures, and there in another individual suffers and starves in return for these. Thus this will inflicts misery and endures misery, not knowing that, like Thyestes, it is eagerly devouring its own flesh. Then it here laments its unmerited suffering, and there commits an outrage without the least fear of Nemesis, always merely because it fails to recognize itself in the phenomenon of another, and thus does not perceive eternal justice, involved as it is in the principium individuationis, and so generally in that kind of knowledge which is governed by the principle of sufficient reason. To be cured of this delusion and deception of Maya and to do works of love are one and the same thing; but the latter is the inevitable and infallible symptom of that knowledge.

The opposite of the sting of conscience, whose origin and significance were explained above, is the good conscience, the satisfaction we feel after every disinterested deed. It springs from the fact that such a deed, as arising from the direct recognition of our own inner being-in-itself in the phenomenon of another, again affords us the verification of this knowledge, of the knowledge that our true self exists not only in our own person, in this particular phenomenon, but in everything that lives. In this way, the heart feels itself enlarged, just as by egoism it feels contracted. For just as egoism concentrates our interest on the particular phenomenon of our own individuality, and then knowledge always presents us with the innumerable perils that continually threaten this phenomenon, whereby anxiety and care become the keynote of our disposition, so the knowledge that every living thing is just as much our own inner being-in-itself as is our own person, extends our interest to all that lives; and in this way the heart is enlarged. Thus through the reduced interest in our own self, the anxious care for that self is attacked and restricted at its root; hence the calm and confident serenity afforded by a virtuous disposition and a good conscience, and the more distinct appearance of this with every good deed, since this proves to ourselves the depth of that disposition. The egoist feels himself surrounded by strange and hostile phenomena, and all his hope rests on his own well-being. The good person lives in a world of friendly phenomena; the well-being of any of these is his own well-being. Therefore, although the knowledge of the lot of man generally does not make his disposition a cheerful one, the permanent knowledge of his own inner nature in everything that lives nevertheless gives him a certain uniformity and even serenity of disposition. For the interest extended over innumerable phenomena cannot cause such anxiety as that which is concentrated on one phenomenon. The accidents that concern the totality of individuals equalize themselves, while those that befall the individual entail good or bad fortune.

Therefore, although others have laid down moral principles which they gave out as precepts for virtue and laws necessarily to be observed, I cannot do this, as I have said already, because I have no "ought" or law to hold before the eternally free will. On the other hand, in reference to my discussion, what corresponds and is analogous to that undertaking is that purely theoretical truth, and the whole of my argument can be regarded as a mere elaboration thereof, namely that the will is the in-itself of every phenomenon, but itself as such is free from the forms of that phenomenon, and so from plurality. In reference to conduct, I do not know how this truth can be more worthily expressed than by the formula of the Veda already quoted: Tat tvam asi ("This art thou!"). Whoever is able to declare this to himself with clear knowledge and firm inward conviction about every creature with whom he comes in contact, is certain of all virtue and bliss, and is on the direct path to salvation.

Now before I go farther, and show, as the last item in my discussion, how love, whose origin and nature we know to be seeing through the principium individuationis, leads to salvation, that is, to the entire surrender of the will-to-live, Le., of all willing, and also how another path, less smooth yet more frequented, brings man to the same goal, a paradoxical sentence must first be here stated and explained. This is not because it is paradoxical, but because it is true, and is necessary for the completeness of the thought I have to express. It is this: "All love ([x], caritas) is compassion or sympathy."

67.

We have seen how, from seeing through the principium individuationis, in the lesser degree justice arises, and in the higher degree real goodness of disposition, a goodness that shows itself as pure, i.e., disinterested, affection towards others. Now where this becomes complete, the individuality and fate of others are treated entirely like one's own. It can never go farther, for no reason exists for preferring another's individuality to one's own. Yet the great number of the other individuals whose whole well-being or life is in danger can outweigh the regard for one's own particular well-being. In such a case, the character that has reached the highest goodness and perfect magnanimity will sacrifice its well-being and its life completely for the well-being of many others. So died Codrus, Leonidas, Regulus, Decius Mus, and Arnold von Winkelried; so does everyone die who voluntarily and consciously goes to certain death for his friends, or for his native land. And everyone also stands at this level who willingly takes suffering and death upon himself for the maintenance of what conduces and rightfully belongs to the welfare of all mankind, in other words, for universal, important truths, and for the eradication of great errors. So died Socrates and Giordano Bruno; and so did many a hero of truth meet his death at the stake at the hands of the priests.

Now with reference to the paradox above expressed, I must call to mind the fact that we previously found suffering to be essential to, and inseparable from, life as a whole, and that we saw how every desire springs from a need, a want, a suffering, and that every satisfaction is therefore only a pain removed, not a positive happiness brought. We saw that the joys certainly lie to the desire in stating that they are a positive good, but that in truth they are only of a negative nature, and only the end of an evil. Therefore, whatever goodness, affection, and magnanimity do for others is always only an alleviation of their sufferings; and consequently what can move them to good deeds and to works of affection is always only knowledge of the suffering of others, directly intelligible from one's own suffering, and put on a level therewith. It follows from this, however, that pure affection ([x]), caritas) is of its nature sympathy or compassion. The suffering alleviated by it, to which every unsatisfied desire belongs, may be great or small. We shall therefore have no hesitation in saying that the mere concept is as unfruitful for genuine virtue as it is for genuine art; that all true and pure affection is sympathy or compassion, and all love that is not sympathy is selfishness. All this will be in direct contradiction to Kant, who recognizes all true goodness and all virtue as such, only if they have resulted from abstract reflection, and in fact from the concept of duty and the categorical imperative, and who declares felt sympathy to be weakness, and by no means virtue. Selfishness is [x] , sympathy or compassion is [x] . Combinations of the two occur frequently; even genuine friendship is always a mixture of selfishness and sympathy. Selfishness lies in the pleasure in the presence of the friend, whose individuality corresponds to our own, and it almost invariably constitutes the greatest part; sympathy shows itself in a sincere participation in the friend's weal and woe, and in the disinterested sacrifices made for the latter. Even Spinoza says: Benevolentia nihil aliud est, quam cupiditas ex commiseratione orta [54] (Ethics, iii, pr. 27, cor. 3 schol.). As confirmation of our paradoxical sentence, it may be observed that the tone and words of the language and the caresses of pure love entirely coincide with the tone of sympathy or compassion. Incidentally, it may be observed also that sympathy and pure love are expressed in Italian by the same word, pieta.

This is also the place to discuss one of the most striking peculiarities of human nature, weeping, which, like laughter, belongs to the manifestations that distinguish man from the animal. Weeping is by no means a positive manifestation of pain, for it occurs where pains are least. In my opinion, we never weep directly over pain that is felt, but always only over its repetition in reflection. Thus we pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere mental picture or representation of it; we then find our own state so deserving of sympathy that, if another were the sufferer, we are firmly and sincerely convinced that we would be full of sympathy and love to help him. Now we ourselves are the object of our own sincere sympathy; with the most charitable disposition, we ourselves are most in need of help. We feel that we endure more than we could see another endure, and in this peculiarly involved frame of mind, in which the directly felt suffering comes to perception only in a doubly indirect way, pictured as the suffering of another and sympathized with as such, and then suddenly perceived again as directly our own; in such a frame of mind nature finds relief through that curious physical convulsion. Accordingly, weeping is sympathy with ourselves, or sympathy thrown back to its starting-point. It is therefore conditioned by the capacity for affection and sympathy, and by the imagination. Therefore people who are either hardhearted or without imagination do not readily weep; indeed weeping is always regarded as a sign of a certain degree of goodness of character, and it disarms anger. This is because it is felt that whoever is still able to weep must also necessarily be capable of affection, i.e., of sympathy towards others, for this enters in the way described into that mood that leads to weeping. The description which Petrarch gives of the rising of his own tears, naively and truly expressing his feeling, is entirely in accordance with the explanation that has been given:

I' vo pensando: e nel pensar m'assale
Una pieta si forte di me stesso,
Che mi conduce spesso
Ad alto lagrimar, ch' i' non soleva. [55]


What has been said is also confirmed by the fact that children who have been hurt generally cry only when they are pitied, and hence not on account of the pain, but on account of the conception of it. That we are moved to tears not by our own sufferings, but by those of others, happens in the following way; either in imagination we put ourselves vividly in the sufferer's place, or we see in his fate the lot of the whole of humanity, and consequently above all our own fate. Thus in a very roundabout way, we always weep about ourselves; we feel sympathy with ourselves. This seems also to be a main reason for the universal, and hence natural, weeping in cases of death. It is not the mourner's loss over which he weeps; he would be ashamed of such egoistical tears, instead of sometimes being ashamed of not weeping. In the first place, of course, he weeps over the fate of the deceased; yet he weeps also when for the deceased death was a desirable deliverance after long, grave, and incurable sufferings. In the main, therefore, he is seized with sympathy over the lot of the whole of mankind that is given over to finiteness. In consequence of this, every life, however ambitious and often rich in deeds, must become extinct and nothing. In this lot of mankind, however, the mourner sees first of all his own lot, and this the more, the more closely he was related to the deceased, and most of all therefore when the deceased was his father. Although to this father life was a misery through age and sickness, and through his helplessness a heavy burden to the son, the son nevertheless weeps bitterly over the death of his father for the reason already stated. [56]

68.

After this digression on the identity of pure love with sympathy, the turning back of sympathy on to our own individuality having as its symptom the phenomenon of weeping, I take up again the thread of our discussion of the ethical significance of conduct, to show how, from the same source from which all goodness, affection, virtue, and nobility of character spring, there ultimately arises also what I call denial of the will-to-live.

Just as previously we saw hatred and wickedness conditioned by egoism, and this depending on knowledge being entangled in the principium individuationis, so we found as the source and essence of justice, and, when carried farther to the highest degrees, of love and magnanimity, that penetration of the principium individuationis. This penetration alone, by abolishing the distinction between our own individuality and that of others, makes possible and explains perfect goodness of disposition, extending to the most disinterested love, and the most generous self-sacrifice for others.

Now, if seeing through the principium individuationis, if this direct knowledge of the identity of the will in all its phenomena, is present in a high degree of distinctness, it will at once show an influence on the will which goes still farther. If that veil of Maya, the principium individuationis, is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egoistical distinction between himself and the person of others, but takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as in his own, and thus is not only benevolent and charitable in the highest degree, but even ready to sacrifice his own individuality whenever several others can be saved thereby, then it follows automatically that such a man, recognizing in all beings his own true and innermost self, must also regard the endless sufferings of all that lives as his own, and thus take upon himself the pain of the whole world. No suffering is any longer strange or foreign to him. All the miseries of others, which he sees and is so seldom able to alleviate, all the miseries of which he has indirect knowledge, and even those he recognizes merely as possible, affect his mind just as do his own. It is no longer the changing weal and woe of his person that he has in view, as is the case with the man still involved in egoism, but, as he sees through the principium individuationis, everything lies equally near to him. He knows the whole, comprehends its inner nature, and finds it involved in a constant passing away, a vain striving, an inward conflict, and a continual suffering. Wherever he looks, he sees suffering humanity and the suffering animal world, and a world that passes away. Now all this lies just as near to him as only his own person lies to the egoist. Now how could he, with such knowledge of the world, affirm this very life through constant acts of will, and precisely in this way bind himself more and more firmly to it, press himself to it more and more closely? Thus, whoever is still involved in the principium individuationis, in egoism, knows only particular things and their relation to his own person, and these then become ever renewed motives of his willing. On the other hand, that knowledge of the whole, of the inner nature of the thing-in-itself, which has been described, becomes the quieter of all and every willing. The will now turns away from life; it shudders at the pleasures in which it recognizes the affirmation of life. Man attains to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true composure, and complete willlessness. At times, in the hard experience of our own sufferings or in the vividly recognized suffering of others, knowledge of the vanity and bitterness of life comes close to us who are still enveloped in the veil of Maya. We would like to deprive desires of their sting, close the entry to all suffering, purify and sanctify ourselves by complete and final resignation. But the illusion of the phenomenon soon ensnares us again, and its motives set the will in motion once more; we cannot tear ourselves free. The allurements of hope, the flattery of the present, the sweetness of pleasures, the well-being that falls to the lot of our person amid the lamentations of a suffering world governed by chance and error, all these draw us back to it, and rivet the bonds anew. Therefore Jesus says: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God." [57]

If we compare life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly, then the man entangled in delusion is comforted by the cool place on which he is just now standing, or which he sees near him, and sets out to run over the path. But the man who sees through the principium individuationis, and recognizes the true nature of things-in-themselves, and thus the whole, is no longer susceptible of such consolation; he sees himself in all places simultaneously, and withdraws. His will turns about; it no longer affirms its own inner nature, mirrored in the phenomenon, but denies it. The phenomenon by which this becomes manifest is the transition from virtue to asceticism. In other words, it is no longer enough for him to love others like himself, and to do as much for them as for himself, but there arises in him a strong aversion to the inner nature whose expression is his own phenomenon, to the will-to-live, the kernel and essence of that world recognized as full of misery. He therefore renounces precisely this inner nature, which appears in him and is expressed already by his body, and his action gives the lie to his phenomenon, and appears in open contradiction thereto. Essentially nothing but phenomenon of the will, he ceases to will anything, guards against attaching his will to anything, tries to establish firmly in himself the greatest indifference to all things. His body, healthy and strong, expresses the sexual impulse through the genitals, but he denies the will, and gives the lie to the body; he desires no sexual satisfaction on any condition. Voluntary and complete chastity is the first step in asceticism or the denial of the will-to-live. It thereby denies the affirmation of the will which goes beyond the individual life, and thus announces that the will, whose phenomenon is the body, ceases with the life of this body. Nature, always true and naive, asserts that, if this maxim became universal, the human race would die out; and after what was said in the second book about the connexion of all phenomena of will, I think I can assume that, with the highest phenomenon of will, the weaker reflection of it, namely the animal world, would also be abolished, just as the half-shades vanish with the full light of day. With the complete abolition of knowledge the rest of the world would of itself also vanish into nothing, for there can be no object without a subject. Here I would like to refer to a passage in the Veda where it says: "As in this world hungry children press round their mother, so do all beings await the holy oblation." (Asiatic Researches, Vol. viii; Colebrooke, On the Vedas, Epitome of the Sama Veda; idem, Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. i, p. 88.) [58] Sacrifice signifies resignation generally, and the rest of nature has to expect its salvation from man who is at the same time priest and sacrifice. In fact, it is worth mentioning as extremely remarkable that this thought has also been expressed by the admirable and immeasurably profound Angelus Silesius in the little poem entitled "Man brings all to God"; it runs:

"Man! all love you; great is the throng around you:
All flock to you that they may attain to God."


But an even greater mystic, Meister Eckhart, whose wonderful writings have at last (1857) become accessible to us through the edition of Franz Pfeiffer, says (p. 459) wholly in the sense here discussed: "I confirm this with Christ, for he says: 'I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things [men] unto me' (John xii, 32). So shall the good man draw all things up to God, to the source whence they first came. The masters certify to us that all creatures are made for the sake of man. This is proved in all creatures by the fact that one creature makes use of another; the ox makes use of the grass, the fish of the water, the bird of the air, the animals of the forest. Thus all creatures come to the profit of the good man. A good man bears to God one creature in the other." He means that because, in and with himself, man also saves the animals, he makes use of them in this life. It seems to me indeed that that difficult passage in the Bible, Rom. viii, 21-24, is to be interpreted in this sense.

Even in Buddhism there is no lack of expressions of this matter; for example, when the Buddha, while still a Bodhisattva, has his horse saddled for the last time, for the flight from his father's house into the wilderness, he says to the horse in verse: "Long have you existed in life and in death, but now you shall cease to carry and to draw. Bear me away from here just this once, O Kantakana, and when I have attained the Law (have become Buddha), I shall not forget you." (Foe Koue Ki, trans. by Abel Remusat, p. 233.).
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:33 pm

Part 7 of 8

Asceticism shows itself further in voluntary and intentional poverty, which arises not only per accidens, since property is given away to alleviate the sufferings of others, but which is here an end in itself; it is to serve as a constant mortification of the will, so that satisfaction of desires, the sweets of life, may not again stir the will, of which self-knowledge has conceived a horror. He who has reached this point still always feels, as living body, as concrete phenomenon of will, the natural tendency to every kind of willing; but he deliberately suppresses it, since he compels himself to refrain from doing all that he would like to do, and on the other hand to do all that he would not like to do, even if this has no further purpose than that of serving to mortify the will. As he himself denies the will that appears in his own person, he will not resist when another does the same thing, in other words, inflicts wrong on him. Therefore, every suffering that comes to him from outside through chance or the wickedness of others is welcome to him; every injury, every ignominy, every outrage. He gladly accepts them as the opportunity for giving himself the certainty that he no longer affirms the will, but gladly sides with every enemy of the will's phenomenon that is his own person. He therefore endures such ignominy and suffering with inexhaustible patience and gentleness, returns good for all evil without ostentation, and allows the fire of anger to rise again within him as little as he does the fire of desires. Just as he mortifies the will itself, so does he mortify its visibility, its objectivity, the body. He nourishes it sparingly, lest its vigorous flourishing and thriving should animate afresh and excite more strongly the will, of which it is the mere expression and mirror. Thus he resorts to fasting, and even to self-castigation and self-torture, in order that, by constant privation and suffering, he may more and more break down and kill the will that he recognizes and abhors as the source of his own suffering existence and of the world's. Finally, if death comes, which breaks up the phenomenon of this will, the essence of such will having long since expired through free denial of itself except for the feeble residue which appears as the vitality of this body, then it is most welcome, and is cheerfully accepted as a longed-for deliverance. It is not merely the phenomenon, as in the case of others, that comes to an end with death, but the inner being itself that is abolished; this had a feeble existence merely in the phenomenon. [59] This last slender bond is now severed; for him who ends thus, the world has at the same time ended.

And what I have described here with feeble tongue, and only in general terms, is not some philosophical fable, invented by myself and only of today. No, it was the enviable life of so many saints and great souls among the Christians, and even more among the Hindus and Buddhists, and also among the believers of other religions. Different as were the dogmas that were impressed on their faculty of reason, the inner, direct, and intuitive knowledge from which alone all virtue and holiness can come is nevertheless expressed in precisely the same way in the conduct of life. For here also is seen the great distinction between intuitive and abstract knowledge, a distinction of such importance and of general application in the whole of our discussion, and one which hitherto has received too little notice. Between the two is a wide gulf; and, in regard to knowledge of the inner nature of the world, this gulf can be crossed only by philosophy. Intuitively, or in concreto, every man is really conscious of all philosophical truths; but to bring them into his abstract knowledge, into reflection, is the business of the philosopher, who neither ought to nor can do more than this.

Thus it may be that the inner nature of holiness, of self-renunciation, of mortification of one's own will, of asceticism, is here for the first time expressed in abstract terms and free from everything mythical, as denial of the will-to-live, which appears after the complete knowledge of its own inner being has become for it the quieter of all willing. On the other hand, it has been known directly and expressed in deed by all those saints and ascetics who, in spite of the same inner knowledge, used very different language according to the dogmas which their faculty of reason had accepted, and in consequence of which an Indian, a Christian, or a Lamaist saint must each give a very different account of his own conduct; but this is of no importance at all as regards the fact. A saint may be full of the most absurd superstition, or, on the other hand, may be a philosopher; it is all the same. His conduct alone is evidence that he is a saint; for, in a moral regard, it springs not from abstract knowledge, but from intuitively apprehended, immediate knowledge of the world and of its inner nature, and is expressed by him through some dogma only for the satisfaction of his faculty of reason. It is therefore just as little necessary for the saint to be a philosopher as for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a great sculptor to be himself a beautiful person. In general, it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses. To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy. I recall the passage from Bacon quoted in the first book.

But my description, given above, of the denial of the will-to-live, or of the conduct of a beautiful soul, of a resigned and voluntarily expiating saint, is only abstract and general, and therefore cold. As the knowledge from which results the denial of the will is intuitive and not abstract, it finds its complete expression not in abstract concepts, but only in the deed and in conduct. Therefore, in order to understand more fully what we express philosophically as denial of the will-to-live, we have to learn to know examples from experience and reality. Naturally we shall not come across them in daily experience: nam omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt, [60] as Spinoza admirably says. Therefore, unless we are made eyewitnesses by a specially favourable fate, we shall have to content ourselves with the biographies of such persons. Indian literature, as we see from the little that is so far known to us through translations, is very rich in descriptions of the lives of saints, penitents, Samanas, Sannyasis, and so on. Even the well-known Mythologie des Indous of Madame de Polier, although by no means praiseworthy in every respect, contains many excellent examples of this kind (especially in Vol. 2, chapter 13). Among Christians there is also no lack of examples affording us the illustrations that we have in mind. Let us see the biographies, often badly written, of those persons sometimes called saintly souls, sometimes pietists, quietists, pious enthusiasts, and so on. Collections of such biographies have been made at various times, such as Tersteegen's Leben heiliger Seelen, Reiz's Geschichte der Wiedergeborenen in our own day, a collection by Kanne which, with much that is bad, yet contains some good, especially the Leben der Beata Sturmin. To this category very properly belongs the life of St. Francis of Assisi, that true personification of asceticism and prototype of all mendicant friars. His life, described by his younger contemporary St. Bonaventure, also famous as a scholastic, has recently been republished: Vita S. Francisci a S. Bonaventura concinnata (Soest, 1847), shortly after the appearance in France of an accurate and detailed biography which utilizes all the sources: Histoire de S. Francois d'Assise, by Chavin de Mallan ( 1845). As an oriental parallel to these monastic writings, we have the book of Spence Hardy: Eastern Monachism, An Account of the Order of Mendicants founded by Gotama Budha (1850), which is very well worth reading. It shows us the same thing under a different cloak. We also see how immaterial it is whether it proceeds from a theistic or from an atheistic religion. But as a special and extremely full example and actual illustration of the conceptions I advance, I can particularly recommend the Autobiography of Madame de Guyon. To become acquainted with that great and beautiful soul, whose remembrance always fills me with reverence, and to do justice to the excellence of her disposition while making allowances for the superstition of her faculty of reason, must be gratifying to every person of the better sort, just as with common thinkers, in other words the majority, that book will always stand in bad repute. For everyone, always and everywhere, can appreciate only that which is to some extent analogous to him, and for which he has at any rate a feeble gift; this holds good of the ethical as well as of the intellectual. To a certain extent we might regard even the well-known French biography of Spinoza as a case in point, if we use as the key to it that excellent introduction to his very inadequate essay, De Emendatione Intellectus. At the same time, I can recommend this passage as the most effective means known to me of stilling the storm of the passions. Finally, even the great Goethe, Greek as he was, did not regard it as beneath his dignity to show us this most beautiful side of humanity in the elucidating mirror of the poetic art, since he presented to us in an idealized form the life of Fraulein Klettenberg in the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, and later, in his own biography, gave us also a historical account of it. Besides this, he twice narrated the life of St. Philip Neri. The history of the world will, and indeed must, always keep silence about the persons whose conduct is the best and only adequate illustration of this important point of our investigation. For the material of world-history is quite different therefrom, and indeed opposed to it; thus it is not the denial and giving up of the will-to-live, but its affirmation and manifestation in innumerable individuals in which its dissension with itself at the highest point of its objectification appears with perfect distinctness, and brings before our eyes, now the superior strength of the individual through his shrewdness, now the might of the many through their mass, now the ascendancy of chance personified as fate, always the vanity and futility of the whole striving and effort. But we do not follow here the thread of phenomena in time, but, as philosophers, try to investigate the ethical significance of actions, and take this as the only criterion of what is significant and important for us. No fear of the always permanent majority of vulgarity and shallowness will prevent us from acknowledging that the greatest, the most important, and the most significant phenomenon that the world can show is not the conqueror of the world, but the overcomer of the world, and so really nothing but the quiet and unobserved conduct in the life of such a man. On this man has dawned the knowledge in consequence of which he gives up and denies that will-to-live that fills everything, and strives and strains in all. The freedom of this will first appears here in him alone, and by it his actions now become the very opposite of the ordinary. For the philosopher, therefore, in this respect those accounts of the lives of saintly, self-denying persons, badly written as they generally are, and mixed up with superstition and nonsense, are through the importance of the material incomparably more instructive and important than even Plutarch and Livy.

Further, a more detailed and complete knowledge of what we express in abstraction and generality through our method of presentation as denial of the will-to-live, will be very greatly facilitated by a consideration of the ethical precepts given in this sense and by people who were full of this spirit. These will at the same time show how old our view is, however new its purely philosophical expression may be. In the first place, Christianity is nearest at hand, the ethics of which is entirely in the spirit we have mentioned, and leads not only to the highest degrees of charity and human kindness, but also to renunciation. The germ of this last side is certainly distinctly present in the writings of the Apostles, yet only later is it fully developed and explicitly expressed. We find commanded by the Apostles love for our neighbour as for ourselves, returning of hatred with love and good actions, patience, meekness, endurance of all possible affronts and injuries without resistance, moderation in eating and drinking for suppressing desire, resistance to the sexual impulse, even complete if possible for us. Here we see the first stages of asceticism or of real denial of the will; this last expression denotes what is called in the Gospels denying the self and taking of the cross upon oneself. (Matt. xvi, 24, 25; Mark viii, 34, 35; Luke ix, 23, 24; xiv, 26, 27, 33.) This tendency was soon developed more and more, and was the origin of penitents, anchorites, and monasticism, an origin that in itself was pure and holy, but, for this very reason, quite unsuitable to the great majority of people. Therefore what developed out of it could be only hypocrisy and infamy, for abusus optimi pessimus. [61] In more developed Christianity, we see that seed of asceticism unfold into full flower in the writings of the Christian saints and mystics. Besides the purest love, these preach also complete resignation, voluntary and absolute poverty, true composure, complete indifference to all worldly things, death to one's own will and regeneration in God, entire forgetting of one's own person and absorption in the contemplation of God. A complete description of this is to be found in Fenelon's Explication des maximes des Saints sur la vie interieure. But the spirit of this development of Christianity is certainly nowhere so perfectly and powerfully expressed as in the writings of the German mystics, e.g. those of Meister Eckhart, and the justly famous book Theologia Germanica. In the introduction to this last which Luther wrote, he says of it that, with the exception of the Bible and St. Augustine, he had learnt more from it of what God, Christ, and man are than from any other book. Yet only in the year 1851 did we acquire its genuine and unadulterated text in the Stuttgart edition of Pfeiffer. The precepts and doctrines given in it are the most perfect explanation, springing from deep inward conviction, of what I have described as the denial of the will-to-live. One has therefore to make a closer study of it before dogmatizing about it with Jewish-Protestant assurance. Tauler's Nachfolgung des armen Leben Christi, together with his Medulla Animae. are written in the same admirable spirit, although not quite equal in value to that work. In my opinion, the teachings of these genuine Christian mystics are related to those of the New Testament as alcohol is to wine; in other words, what becomes visible to us in the New Testament as if through a veil and mist, stands before us in the works of the mystics without cloak or disguise, in full clearness and distinctness. Finally, we might also regard the New Testament as the first initiation, the mystics as the second, [x]. [62]

But we find what we have called denial of the will-to-live still further developed, more variously expressed, and more vividly presented in the ancient works in the Sanskrit language than could be the case in the Christian Church and the Western world. That this important ethical view of life could attain here to a more far-reaching development and a more decided expression, is perhaps to be ascribed mainly to the fact that it was not restricted by an element quite foreign to it, as the Jewish doctrine of faith is in Christianity. The sublime founder of Christianity had necessarily to adapt and accommodate himself, partly consciously, partly, it may be, unconsciously, to this doctrine; and so Christianity is composed of two very heterogeneous elements. Of these I should like to call the purely ethical element preferably, indeed exclusively, the Christian, and to distinguish it from the Jewish dogmatism with which it is found. If, as has often been feared, and especially at the present time, that excellent and salutary religion should completely decline, then I would look for the reason for this simply in the fact that it does not consist of one simple element, but of two originally heterogeneous elements, brought into combination only by means of world events. In such a case, dissolution would necessarily result through the break-up of these elements, which arises from their different relationship and reaction to the advanced spirit of the times. Yet after this dissolution, the purely ethical part would still be bound always to remain intact, because it is indestructible. However imperfect our knowledge of Hindu literature still is, as we now find it most variously and powerfully expressed in the ethics of the Hindus, in the Vedas, Puranas, poetical works, myths, legends of their saints, in aphorisms, maxims, and rules of conduct, [63] we see that it ordains love of one's neighbour with complete denial of all self-love; love in general, not limited to the human race, but embracing all that lives; charitableness even to the giving away of one's hard-won daily earnings; boundless patience towards all offenders; return of all evil, however bad it may be, with goodness and love; voluntary and cheerful endurance of every insult and ignominy; abstinence from all animal food; perfect chastity and renunciation of all sensual pleasure for him who aspires to real holiness; the throwing away of all property; the forsaking of every dwelling-place and of all kinsfolk; deep unbroken solitude spent in silent contemplation with voluntary penance and terrible slow self-torture for the complete mortification of the will, ultimately going as far as voluntary death by starvation, or facing crocodiles, or jumping over the consecrated precipice in the Himalaya, or being buried alive, or flinging oneself under the wheels of the huge car that drives round with the images of the gods amid the singing, shouting, and dancing of bayaderes. These precepts, whose origin reaches back more than four thousand years, are still lived up to by individuals even to the utmost extreme, [64] degenerate as that race is in many respects. That which has remained in practice for so long in a nation embracing so many millions, while it imposes the heaviest sacrifices, cannot be an arbitrarily invented freak, but must have its foundation in the very nature of mankind. But besides this, we cannot sufficiently wonder at the harmony we find, when we read the life of a Christian penitent or saint and that of an Indian. In spite of such fundamentally different dogmas, customs, and circumstances, the endeavour and the inner life of both are absolutely the same; and it is also the same with the precepts for both. For example, Tauler speaks of the complete poverty which one should seek, and which consists in giving away and divesting oneself entirely of everything from which one might draw some comfort or worldly pleasure, clearly because all this always affords new nourishment to the will, whose complete mortification is intended. As the Indian counterpart of this, we see in the precepts of Fo that the Sannyasi, who is supposed to be without dwelling and entirely without property, is finally enjoined not to lie down too often under the same tree, lest he acquire a preference or inclination for it. The Christian mystics and the teachers of the Vedanta philosophy agree also in regarding all outward works and religious practices as superfluous for the man who has attained perfection. So much agreement, in spite of such different ages and races, is a practical proof that here is expressed not an eccentricity and craziness of the mind, as optimistic shallowness and dulness like to assert, but an essential side of human nature which appears rarely only because of its superior quality.

I have now mentioned the sources from which we can obtain a direct knowledge, drawn from life, of the phenomena in which the denial of the will-to-live exhibits itself. To a certain extent, this is the most important point of our whole discussion; yet I have explained it only quite generally, for it is better to refer to those who speak from direct experience, than to increase the size of this book unnecessarily by repeating more feebly what they say.

I wish to add only a little more to the general description of their state. We saw above that the wicked man, by the vehemence of his willing, suffers constant, consuming, inner torment, and finally that, when all the objects of willing are exhausted, he quenches the fiery thirst of his wilfulness by the sight of others' pain. On the other hand, the man in whom the denial of the will-to-live has dawned, however poor, cheerless, and full of privation his state may be when looked at from outside, is full of inner cheerfulness and true heavenly peace. It is not the restless and turbulent pressure of life, the jubilant delight that has keen suffering as its preceding or succeeding condition, such as constitute the conduct of the man attached to life, but it is an unshakable peace, a deep calm and inward serenity, a state that we cannot behold without the greatest longing, when it is brought before our eyes or imagination, since we at once recognize it as that which alone is right, infinitely outweighing everything else, at which our better spirit cries to us the great sapere aude. [65] We then feel that every fulfilment of our wishes won from the world is only like the alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he may starve again tomorrow. Resignation, on the other hand, is like the inherited estate; it frees its owner from all care and anxiety for ever.

It will be remembered from the third book that aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves. We are no longer the individual that knows in the interest of its constant willing, the correlative of the particular thing to which objects become motives, but the eternal subject of knowing purified of the will, the correlative of the Idea. And we know that these moments, when, delivered from the fierce pressure of the will, we emerge, as it were, from the heavy atmosphere of the earth, are the most blissful that we experience. From this we can infer how blessed must be the life of a man whose will is silenced not for a few moments, as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but for ever, indeed completely extinguished, except for the last glimmering spark that maintains the body and is extinguished with it. Such a man who, after many bitter struggles with his own nature, has at last completely conquered, is then left only as pure knowing being, as the undimmed mirror of the world. Nothing can distress or alarm him any more; nothing can any longer move him; for he has cut all the thousand threads of willing which hold us bound to the world, and which as craving, fear, envy, and anger drag us here and there in constant pain. He now looks back calmly and with a smile on the phantasmagoria of this world which was once able to move and agonize even his mind, but now stands before him as indifferently as chess-men at the end of a game, or as fancy dress cast off in the morning, the form and figure of which taunted and disquieted us on the carnival night. Life and its forms merely float before him as a fleeting phenomenon, as a light morning dream to one half-awake, through which reality already shines, and which can no longer deceive; and, like this morning dream, they too finally vanish without any violent transition. From these considerations we can learn to understand what Madame Guyon means when, towards the end of her Autobiography, she often expresses herself thus: "Everything is indifferent to me; I cannot will anything more; often I do not know whether I exist or not." In order to express how, after the dying-away of the will, the death of the body (which is indeed only the phenomenon of the will, and thus with the abolition of the will loses all meaning) can no longer have anything bitter, but is very welcome, I may be permitted to record here that holy penitent's own words, although they are not very elegantly turned: "Midi de la gloire; jour ou il n'y a plus de nuit; vie qui ne craint plus la mort, dans la mort meme: parceque la mort a vaincu la mort, et que celui qui a souffert la premiere mort, ne goutera plus la seconde mort." (Vie de Madame de Guion [Cologne, 1720], Vol. II, p. 13.) [66]

However, we must not imagine that, after the denial of the will-to-live has once appeared through knowledge that has become a quieter of the will, such denial no longer wavers or falters, and that we can rest on it as on an inherited property. On the contrary, it must always be achieved afresh by constant struggle. For as the body is the will itself only in the form of objectivity, or as phenomenon in the world as representation, that whole will-to-live exists potentially so long as the body lives, and is always striving to reach actuality and to bum afresh with all its intensity. We therefore find in the lives of saintly persons that peace and bliss we have described, only as the blossom resulting from the constant overcoming of the will; and we see the constant struggle with the will-to-live as the soil from which it shoots up; for on earth no one can have lasting peace. We therefore see the histories of the inner life of saints full of spiritual conflicts, temptations, and desertion from grace, in other words, from that kind of knowledge which, by rendering all motives ineffectual, as a universal quieter silences all willing, gives the deepest peace, and opens the gate to freedom. Therefore we see also those who have once attained to denial of the will, strive with all their might to keep to this path by self-imposed renunciations of every kind, by a penitent and hard way of life, and by looking for what is disagreeable to them; all this in order to suppress the will that is constantly springing up afresh. Finally, therefore, because they already know the value of salvation, their anxious care for the retention of the hard-won blessing, their scruples of conscience in the case of every innocent enjoyment or with every little excitement of their vanity; this is also the last thing to die, the most indestructible, the most active, and the most foolish of all man's inclinations. By the expression asceticism, which I have already used so often, I understand in the narrower sense this deliberate breaking of the will by refusing the agreeable and looking for the disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen way of life of penance and self-chastisement, for the constant mortification of the will.

Now, if we see this practised by persons who have already attained to denial of the will, in order that they may keep to it, then suffering in general, as it is inflicted by fate, is also a second way ([x])* of attaining to that denial. Indeed, we may assume that most men can reach it only in this way, and that it is the suffering personally felt, not the suffering merely known, which most frequently produces complete resignation, often only at the approach of death. For only in the case of a few is mere knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of the will, the knowledge namely that sees through the principium individuationis, first producing perfect goodness of disposition and universal love of mankind, and finally enabling them to recognize as their own all the sufferings of the world. Even in the case of the individual who approaches this point, the tolerable condition of his own person, the flattery of the moment, the allurement of hope, and the satisfaction of the will offering itself again and again, Le., the satisfaction of desire, are almost invariably a constant obstacle to the denial of the will, and a constant temptation to a renewed affirmation of it. For this reason, all those allurements have in this respect been personified as the devil. Therefore in most cases the will must be broken by the greatest personal suffering before its self-denial appears. We then see the man suddenly retire into himself, after he is brought to the verge of despair through all the stages of increasing affliction with the most violent resistance. We see him know himself and the world, change his whole nature, rise above himself and above all suffering, as if purified and sanctified by it, in inviolable peace, bliss, and sublimity, willingly renounce everything he formerly desired with the greatest vehemence, and gladly welcome death. It is the gleam of silver that suddenly appears from the purifying flame of suffering, the gleam of the denial of the will-to-live, of salvation. Occasionally we see even those who were very wicked purified to this degree by the deepest grief and sorrow; they have become different, and are completely converted. Therefore, their previous misdeeds no longer trouble their consciences, yet they gladly pay for such misdeeds with death, and willingly see the end of the phenomenon of that will that is now foreign to and abhorred by them. The great Goethe has given us a distinct and visible description of this denial of the will, brought about by great misfortune and by the despair of all deliverance, in his immortal masterpiece Faust, in the story of the sufferings of Gretchen. I know of no other description in poetry. It is a perfect specimen of the second path, which leads to the denial of the will not, like the first, through the mere knowledge of the suffering of a whole world which one acquires voluntarily, but through the excessive pain felt in one's own person. It is true that very many tragedies bring their violently willing heroes ultimately to this point of complete resignation, and then the will-to-live and its phenomenon usually end at the same time. But no description known to me brings to us the essential point of that conversion so distinctly and so free from everything extraneous as the one mentioned in Faust.

In real life we see those unfortunate persons who have to drink to the dregs the greatest measure of suffering, face a shameful, violent, and often painful death on the scaffold with complete mental vigour, after they are deprived of all hope; and very often we see them converted in this way. We should not, of course, assume that there is so great a difference between their character and that of most men as their fate seems to suggest; we have to ascribe the latter for the most part to circumstances; yet they are guilty and, to a considerable degree, bad. But we see many of them converted in the way mentioned, after the appearance of complete hopelessness. They now show actual goodness and purity of disposition, true abhorrence of committing any deed in the least degree wicked or uncharitable. They forgive their enemies, even those through whom they innocently suffered; and not merely in words and from a kind of hypocritical fear of the judges of the nether world, but in reality and with inward earnestness, and with no wish for revenge. Indeed, their suffering and dying in the end become agreeable to them, for the denial of the will-to-live has made its appearance. They often decline the deliverance offered them, and die willingly, peacefully, and blissfully. The last secret of life has revealed itself to them in the excess of pain, the secret, namely, that evil and wickedness, suffering and hatred, the tormented and the tormentor, different as they may appear to knowledge that follows the principle of sufficient reason, are in themselves one, phenomenon of the one will-to-live that objectifies its conflict with itself by means of the principium individuationis. They have learned to know both sides in full measure, the wickedness and the evil; and since they ultimately see the identity of the two, they reject them both at the same time; they deny the will-to-live. As we have said, it is a matter of complete indifference by what myths and dogmas they account to their faculty of reason for this intuitive and immediate knowledge, and for their conversion.

Matthias Claudius was undoubtedly a witness to a change of mind of this sort, when he wrote the remarkable essay which appears in the Wandsbecker Bote (Pt. I, p. 115) under the title Bekehrungsgeschichte des ... ("History of the Conversion of ... ") which has the following ending: "Man's way of thinking can pass over from a point of the periphery to the opposite point, and back again to the previous point, if circumstances trace out for him the curved path to it. And these changes are not really anything great and interesting in man. But that remarkable, catholic, transcendental change, where the whole circle is irreparably tom up and all the laws of psychology become vain and empty, where the coat of skins is taken off, or at any rate turned inside out, and man's eyes are opened, is such that everyone who is conscious to some extent of the breath in his nostrils, forsakes father and mother, if he can hear and experience something certain about it."

The approach of death and hopelessness, however, are not absolutely necessary for such a purification through suffering. Even without them, the knowledge of the contradiction of the will-to-live with itself can, through great misfortune and suffering, violently force itself on us, and the vanity of all endeavour can be perceived. Hence men who have led a very adventurous life under the pressure of passions, men such as kings, heroes, or adventurers, have often been seen suddenly to change, resort to resignation and penance, and become hermits and monks. To this class belong all genuine accounts of conversion, for instance that of Raymond Lull, who had long wooed a beautiful woman, was at last admitted to her chamber, and was looking forward to the fulfilment of all his desires, when, opening her dress, she showed him her bosom terribly eaten away with cancer. From that moment, as if he had looked into hell, he was converted; leaving the court of the King of Majorca, he went into the wilderness to do penance. [67] This story of conversion is very similar to that of the Abbe de Rance which I have briefly related in chapter 48 of volume two. If we consider how, in both cases, the transition from the pleasure to the horror of life was the occasion, this gives us an explanation of the remarkable fact that it is the French nation, the most cheerful, merry, gay, sensual, and frivolous in Europe, in which by far the strictest of all monastic orders, namely the Trappist, arose, was re-established by Rance after its decline, and maintains itself even to the present day in all its purity and fearful strictness, in spite of revolutions, changes in the Church, and the encroachments of infidelity.

However, a knowledge of the above-mentioned kind of the nature of this existence may depart again simultaneously with its occasion, and the will-to-live, and with it the previous character, may reappear. Thus we see that the passionate Benvenuto Cellini was converted in such a way, once in prison and again during a serious illness, but relapsed into his old state after the suffering had disappeared. In general, the denial of the will by no means results from suffering with the necessity of effect from cause; on the contrary, the will remains free. For here is just the one and only point where its freedom enters directly into the phenomenon; hence the astonishment so strongly expressed by Asmus about the "transcendental change." For every case of suffering, a will can be conceived which surpasses it in intensity, and is unconquered by it. Therefore, Plato speaks in the Phaedo [116 E] of persons who, up to the moment of their execution, feast, carouse, drink, indulge in sexual pleasures, affirming life right up to the death. Shakespeare in Cardinal Beaufort [68] presents to us the fearful end of a wicked ruffian who dies full of despair, since no suffering or death can break his will that is vehement to the extreme point of wickedness.

The more intense the will, the more glaring the phenomenon of its conflict, and hence the greater the suffering. A world that was the phenomenon of an incomparably more intense will-to-live than the present one is, would exhibit so much the greater suffering; thus it would be a hell.

Since all suffering is a mortification and a call to resignation, it has potentially a sanctifying force. By this is explained the fact that great misfortune and deep sorrow in themselves inspire one with a certain awe. But the sufferer becomes wholly an object of reverence to us only when, surveying the course of his life as a chain of sorrows, or mourning a great and incurable pain, he does not really look at the concatenation of circumstances which plunged just his life into mourning; he does not stop at that particular great misfortune that befell him. For up till then, his knowledge still follows the principle of sufficient reason, and clings to the particular phenomenon; he still continues to will life, only not on the conditions that have happened to him. He is really worthy of reverence only when his glance has been raised from the particular to the universal, and when he regards his own suffering merely as an example of the whole and for him; for in an ethical respect he becomes inspired with genius, one case holds good for a thousand, so that the whole of life, conceived as essential suffering, then brings him to resignation. For this reason it is worthy of reverence when in Goethe's Torquato Tasso the princess speaks of how her own life and that of her relations have always been sad and cheerless, and here her regard is wholly towards the universal.

We always picture a very noble character to ourselves as having a certain trace of silent sadness that is anything but constant peevishness over daily annoyances (that would be an ignoble trait, and might lead us to fear a bad disposition). It is a consciousness that has resulted from knowledge of the vanity of all possessions and of the suffering of all life, not merely of one's own. Such knowledge, however, may first of all be awakened by suffering personally experienced, especially by a single great suffering, just as a single wish incapable of fulfilment brought Petrarch to that resigned sadness concerning the whole of life which appeals to us so pathetically in his works; for the Daphne he pursued had to vanish from his hands, in order to leave behind for him the immortal laurel instead of herself. If the will is to a certain extent broken by such a great and irrevocable denial of fate, then practically nothing more is desired, and the character shows itself as mild, sad, noble, and resigned. Finally, when grief no longer has any definite object, but is extended over the whole of life, it is then to a certain extent a self-communion, a withdrawal, a gradual disappearance of the will, the visibility of which, namely the body, is imperceptibly but inwardly undermined by it, so that the person feels a certain loosening of his bonds, a mild foretaste of the death that proclaims itself to be the dissolution of the body and of the will at the same time. A secret joy therefore accompanies this grief; and I believe it is this that the most melancholy of all nations has called "the joy of grief." Here, however, lies the danger of sentimentality, both in life itself and in its description in poetry; namely when a person is always mourning and wailing without standing up courageously and rising to resignation. In this way heaven and earth are both lost, and only a watery sentimentality is retained. Only when suffering assumes the form of pure knowledge, and then this knowledge, as a quieter of the will, produces true resignation, is it the path to salvation, and thus worthy of reverence. But in this respect, we feel on seeing any very unfortunate person a certain esteem akin to that which virtue and nobility of character force from us; at the same time, our own fortunate condition seems like a reproach. We cannot help but regard every suffering, both those felt by ourselves and those felt by others, as at least a possible advance towards virtue and holiness, and pleasures and worldly satisfactions, on the other hand, as a departure therefrom. This goes so far that every man who undergoes great bodily or mental suffering, indeed everyone who performs a physical labour demanding the greatest exertion in the sweat of his brow and with evident exhaustion, yet does all this with patience and without grumbling, appears, when we consider him with close attention, somewhat like a sick man who applies a painful cure. Willingly, and even with satisfaction, he endures the pain caused by the cure, since he knows that the more he suffers, the more is the substance of the disease destroyed; and thus the present pain is the measure of his cure.

It follows from all that has been said, that the denial of the will-to-live, which is the same as what is called complete resignation or holiness, always proceeds from that quieter of the will; and this is the knowledge of its inner conflict and its essential vanity, expressing themselves in the suffering of all that lives. The difference, that we have described as two paths, is whether that knowledge is called forth by suffering which is merely and simply known and freely appropriated by our seeing through the principium individuationis, or by suffering immediately felt by ourselves. True salvation, deliverance from life and suffering, cannot even be imagined without complete denial of the will. Till then, everyone is nothing but this will itself, whose phenomenon is an evanescent existence, an always vain and constantly frustrated striving, and the world full of suffering as we have described it. All belong to this irrevocably and in like manner. For we found previously that life is always certain to the will-to-live, and its sole actual form is the present from which they never escape, since birth and death rule in the phenomenon. The Indian myth expresses this by saying that "they are born again." The great ethical difference of characters means that the bad man is infinitely remote from attaining that knowledge, whose result is the denial of the will, and is therefore in truth actually abandoned to all the miseries which appear in life as possible. For even the present fortunate state of his person is only a phenomenon brought about by the principium individuationis, and the illusion of Maya, the happy dream of a beggar. The sufferings that in the vehemence and passion of his pressing will he inflicts on others are the measure of the sufferings, the experience of which in his own person cannot break his will and lead to final denial. On the other hand, all true and pure affection, and even all free justice, result from seeing through the principium individuationis; when this penetration occurs in all its force, it produces perfect sanctification and salvation, the phenomenon of which are the state of resignation previously described, the unshakable peace accompanying this, and the highest joy and delight in death. [69]

69.

Suicide, the arbitrary doing away with the individual phenomenon, differs most widely from the denial of the will-to-live, which is the only act of its freedom to appear in the phenomenon, and hence, as Asmus calls it, the transcendental change. The denial of the will has now been adequately discussed within the limits of our method of consideration. Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phenomenon of the will's strong affirmation. For denial has its essential nature in the fact that the pleasures of life, not its sorrows, are shunned. The suicide wills life, and is dissatisfied merely with the conditions on which it has come to him. Therefore he gives up by no means the will-to-live, but merely life, since he destroys the individual phenomenon. He wills life, wills the unchecked existence and affirmation of the body; but the combination of circumstances does not allow of these, and the result for him is great suffering. The will-to-live finds itself so hampered in this particular phenomenon, that it cannot develop and display its efforts. It therefore decides in accordance with its own inner nature, which lies outside the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, and to which every individual phenomenon is therefore indifferent, in that it remains itself untouched by all arising and passing away, and is the inner core of the life of all things. For that same firm, inner assurance, which enables all of us to live without the constant dread of death, the assurance that the will can never lack its phenomenon, supports the deed even in the case of suicide. Thus the will-to-live appears just as much in this suicide (Shiva) as in the ease and comfort of self-preservation (Vishnu), and the sensual pleasure of procreation (Brahma). This is the inner meaning of the unity of the Trimurti which every human being entirely is, although in time it raises now one, now another of its three heads. As the individual thing is related to the Idea, so is suicide to the denial of the will. The suicide denies merely the individual, not the species. We have already found that, since life is always certain to the will-to-live, and suffering is essential to life, suicide, or the arbitrary destruction of an individual phenomenon, is a quite futile and foolish act, for the thing-in-itself remains unaffected by it, just as the rainbow remains unmoved, however rapidly the drops may change which sustain it for the moment. But in addition to this, it is also the masterpiece of Maya as the most blatant expression of the contradiction of the will-to-live with itself. Just as we have recognized this contradiction in the lowest phenomena of the will in the constant struggle of all the manifestations of natural forces and of all organic individuals for matter, time, and space, and as we saw that conflict stand out more and more with terrible distinctness on the ascending grades of the will's objectification; so at last at the highest stage, the Idea of man, it reaches that degree where not only the individuals exhibiting the same Idea exterminate one another, but even the one individual declares war on itself. The vehemence with which it wills life and revolts against what hinders it, namely suffering, brings it to the point of destroying itself, so that the individual will by an act of will eliminates the body that is merely the will's own becoming visible, rather than that suffering should break the will. Just because the suicide cannot cease willing, he ceases to live; and the will affirms itself here even through the cessation of its own phenomenon, because it can no longer affirm itself otherwise. But as it was just the suffering it thus shunned which, as mortification of the will, could have led it to the denial of itself and to salvation, so in this respect the suicide is like a sick man who, after the beginning of a painful operation that could completely cure him, will not allow it to be completed, but prefers to retain his illness. Suffering approaches and, as such, offers the possibility of a denial of the will; but he rejects it by destroying the will's phenomenon, the body, so that the will may remain unbroken. This is the reason why almost all ethical systems, philosophical as well as religious, condemn suicide, though they themselves cannot state anything but strange and sophistical arguments for so doing. But if ever a man was kept from suicide by purely moral incentive, the innermost meaning of this self-conquest (whatever the concepts in which his faculty of reason may have clothed it) was as follows: "I do not want to avoid suffering, because it can help to put an end to the will-to-live, whose phenomenon is so full of misery, by so strengthening the knowledge of the real nature of the world now already dawning on me, that such knowledge may become the final quieter of the will, and release me for ever."

It is well known that, from time to time, cases repeatedly occur where suicide extends to the children; the father kills the children of whom he is very fond, and then himself. If we bear in mind that conscience, religion, and all traditional ideas teach him to recognize murder as the gravest crime, but yet in the hour of his own death he commits this, and indeed without his having any possible egoistical motive for it, then the deed can be explained only in the following way. The will of the individual again recognizes itself immediately in the children, although it is involved in the delusion of regarding the phenomenon as the being-in-itself. At the same time, he is deeply moved by the knowledge of the misery of all life; he imagines that with the phenomenon he abolishes the inner nature itself, and therefore wants to deliver from existence and its misery both himself and his children in whom he directly sees himself living again. It would be an error wholly analogous to this to suppose that one can reach the same end as is attained by voluntary chastity by frustrating the aims of nature in fecundation, or even by men, in consideration of the inevitable suffering of life, countenancing the death of the new-born child, instead of rather doing everything to ensure life to every being that is pressing into it. For if the will-to-live exists, it cannot, as that which alone is metaphysical or the thing-in-itself, be broken by any force, but that force can destroy only its phenomenon in such a place and at such a time. The will itself cannot be abolished by anything except knowledge. Therefore the only path to salvation is that the will should appear freely and without hindrance, in order that it can recognize or know its own inner nature in this phenomenon. Only in consequence of this knowledge can the will abolish itself, and thus end the suffering that is inseparable from its phenomenon. This, however, is not possible through physical force, such as the destruction of the seed or germ, the killing of the new-born child, or suicide. Nature leads the will to the light, just because only in the light can it find its salvation. Therefore the purposes of nature are to be promoted in every way, as soon as the will-to-live, that is her inner being, has determined itself.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:33 pm

Part 8 of 8

There appears to be a special kind of suicide, quite different from the ordinary, which has perhaps not yet been adequately verified. This is voluntarily chosen death by starvation at the highest degree of asceticism. Its manifestation, however, has always been accompanied, and thus rendered vague and obscure, by much religious fanaticism and even superstition. Yet it seems that the complete denial of the will can reach that degree where even the necessary will to maintain the vegetative life of the body, by the assimilation of nourishment, ceases to exist. This kind of suicide is so far from being the result of the will-to-live, that such a completely resigned ascetic ceases to live merely because he has completely ceased to will. No other death than that by starvation is here conceivable (unless it resulted from a special superstition), since the intention to cut short the agony would actually be a degree of affirmation of the will. The dogmas that satisfy the faculty of reason of such a penitent delude him with the idea that a being of a higher nature has ordered for him the fasting to which his inner tendency urges him. Old instances of this can be found in the Breslauer Sammlung von Natur- und Medicin-Geschichten, September 1719, p. 363 seq.; in Bayle's Nouvelles de la republique des lettres, February 1685, p. 189 seq.; in Zimmermann, Ueber die Einsamkeit, Vol. I, p. 182; in the Histoire de l'Academie des Sciences of 1764, an account by Houttuyn; the same account is repeated in the Sammlung fur praktische Aerzte, Vol. I, p. 69. Later reports are to be found in Hufeland's Journal fur praktische Heilkunde, Vol. X, p. 181, and Vol. XLVIII, p. 95; also in Nasse's Zeitschrift fur psychische Aerzte, 1819, Part III, p. 460; in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1809, Vol. V, p. 319. In the year 1833, all the papers reported that the English historian, Dr. Lingard, had died of voluntary starvation at Dover in January; according to later accounts it was not Lingard himself but a kinsman of his who died. But in these accounts the individuals are for the most part described as mad, and it is no longer possible to ascertain how far this may have been the case. But I will here give a more recent account of this kind, if only to ensure the preservation of one of the rare instances of the striking and extraordinary phenomenon of human nature just mentioned, which, at any rate, apparently belongs to where I should like to assign it, and could hardly be explained in any other way. This recent account is to be found in the Nurnberger Korrespondent of 29 July 1813, in the following words:

"It is reported from Bern that in a dense forest near Thurnen a small hut was discovered in which was lying the decomposed corpse of a man who had been dead for about a month. His clothes gave little information about his social position. Two very fine shirts lay beside him. The most important thing was a Bible, interleaved with blank pages, which had been partly written on by the deceased. In it he announced the day of his departure from home (but it did not mention where his home was). He then said that he was driven into the wilderness by the spirit of God to pray and fast. On his journey to that spot, he had already fasted for seven days, and had then eaten again. After settling down here, he began to fast again, and indeed fasted for as many days. Every day was now indicated by a stroke, of which there were five, after which the pilgrim had presumably died. There was also found a letter to a clergyman about a sermon that the deceased had heard him preach; but the address was missing." Between this voluntary death springing from,the extreme of asceticism and that resulting from despair there may be many different intermediate stages and combinations, which are indeed hard to explain; but human nature has depths, obscurities, and intricacies, whose elucidation and unfolding are of the very greatest difficulty.

70.

We might perhaps regard the whole of our discussion (now concluded) of what I call the denial of the will as inconsistent with the previous explanation of necessity, that appertains just as much to motivation as to every other form of the principle of sufficient reason. As a result of that necessity, motives, like all causes, are only occasional causes on which the character unfolds its nature, and reveals it with the necessity of a natural law. For this reason we positively denied freedom as liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. Yet far from suppressing this here, I call it to mind. In truth, real freedom, in other words, independence of the principle of sufficient reason, belongs to the will as thing-in-itself, not to its phenomenon, whose essential form is everywhere this principle of sufficient reason, the element of necessity. But the only case where that freedom can become immediately visible in the phenomenon is the one where it makes an end of what appears, and because the mere phenomenon, in so far as it is a link in the chain of causes, namely the living body, still continues to exist in time that contains only phenomena, the will, manifesting itself through this phenomenon, is then in contradiction with it, since it denies what the phenomenon expresses. In such a case the genitals, for example, as the visibility of the sexual impulse, are there and in health; but yet in the innermost consciousness no sexual satisfaction is desired. The whole body is the visible expression of the will-to-live, yet the motives corresponding to this will no longer act; indeed the dissolution of the body, the end of the individual, and thus the greatest suppression of the natural will, is welcome and desired. Now the contradiction between our assertions, on the one hand, of the necessity of the will's determinations through motives according to the character, and our assertions, on the other, of the possibility of the whole suppression of the will, whereby motives become powerless, is only the repetition in the reflection of philosophy of this real contradiction that arises from the direct encroachment of the freedom of the will-in-itself, knowing no necessity, on the necessity of its phenomenon. But the key to the reconciliation of these contradictions lies in the fact that the state in which the character is withdrawn from the power of motives does not proceed directly from the will, but from a changed form of knowledge. Thus, so long as the knowledge is only that which is involved in the principium individuationis, and which positively follows the principle of sufficient reason, the power of the motives is irresistible. But when the principium individuationis is seen through, when the Ideas, and indeed the inner nature of the thing-in-itself, are immediately recognized as the same will in all, and the result of this knowledge is a universal quieter of willing, then the individual motives become ineffective, because the kind of knowledge that corresponds to them is obscured and pushed into the background by knowledge of quite a different kind. Therefore the character can never partially change, but must, with the consistency of a law of nature, realize in the particular individual the will whose phenomenon it is in general and as a whole. But this whole, the character itself, can be entirely eliminated by the abovementioned change of knowledge. It is this elimination or suppression at which Asmus marvels, as said above, and which he describes as the "catholic, transcendental change." It is also that which in the Christian Church is very appropriately called new birth or regeneration, and the knowledge from which it springs, the effect of divine grace. Therefore, it is not a question of a change, but of an entire suppression of the character; and so it happens that, however different the characters that arrived at that suppression were before it, they nevertheless show after it a great similarity in their mode of conduct, although each speaks very differently according to his concepts and dogmas.

Therefore, in this sense, the old philosophical argument about the freedom of the will, constantly contested and constantly maintained, is not without ground, and the Church dogma of the effect of grace and the new birth is also not without meaning and significance. But now we unexpectedly see both coincide into one, and can understand in what sense the admirable Malebranche could say: "La liberte est un mystere"; [70] and he was right. For just what the Christian mystics call the effect of grace and the new birth, is for us the only direct expression of the freedom of the will. It appears only when the will, after arriving at the knowledge of its own inner nature, obtains from this a quieter, and is thus removed from the effect of motives which lies in the province of a different kind of knowledge, whose objects are only phenomena. The possibility of the freedom that thus manifests itself is man's greatest prerogative, which is for ever wanting in the animal, because the condition for it is the deliberation of the faculty of reason, enabling him to survey the whole of life independently of the impression of the present moment. The animal is without any possibility of freedom, as indeed it is without the possibility of a real, and hence deliberate, elective decision after a previous complete conflict of motives, which for this purpose would have to be abstract representations. Therefore the hungry wolf buries its teeth in the flesh of the deer with the same necessity with which the stone falls to the ground, without the possibility of the knowledge that it is the mauled as well as the mauler. Necessity is the kingdom of nature; freedom is the kingdom of grace.

Now since, as we have seen, that self-suppression of the will comes from knowledge, but all knowledge and insight as such are independent of free choice, that denial of willing, that entrance into freedom, is not to be forcibly arrived at by intention or design, but comes from the innermost relation of knowing and willing in man; hence it comes suddenly, as if flying in from without. Therefore, the Church calls it the effect of grace; but just as she still represents it as depending on the acceptance of grace, so too the effect of the quieter is ultimately an act of the freedom of the will. In consequence of such an effect of grace, man's whole inner nature is fundamentally changed and reversed, so that he no longer wills anything of all that he previously willed so intensely; thus a new man, so to speak, actually takes the place of the old. For this reason, the Church calls this consequence of the effect of grace new birth or regeneration. For what she calls the natural man, to whom she denies all capacity for good, is that very will-to-live that must be denied if salvation is to be attained from an existence like ours. Behind our existence lies something else that becomes accessible to us only by our shaking off the world.

Considering not the individuals according to the principle of sufficient reason, but the Idea of man in its unity, the Christian teaching symbolizes nature, the affirmation of the will-to-live, in Adam. His sin bequeathed to us, in other words, our unity with him in the Idea, which manifests itself in time through the bond of generation, causes us all to partake of suffering and eternal death. On the other hand, the Christian teaching symbolizes grace, the denial of the will, salvation, in the God become man. As he is free from all sinfulness, in other words, from all willing of life, he cannot, like us, have resulted from the most decided affirmation of the will; nor can he, like us, have a body that is through and through only concrete will, phenomenon of the will, but, born of a pure virgin, he has only a phantom body. This last is what was taught by the Docetae" certain Fathers of the Church, who in this respect are very consistent. It was taught especially by Apelles, against whom and his followers Tertullian revolted. But even Augustine comments on the passage, Rom. viii, 3, "God sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh," and says: "Non enim caro peccati erat, quae non de carnali delectatione nata erat: sed tamen inerat ei similitudo carnis peccati, quia mortalis caro erat" (Liber 83 Quaestionum, quo 66). [71] He also teaches in his work entitled Opus Imperfectum, i, 47, that original sin is sin and punishment at the same time. It is already to be found in new-born children, but shows itself only when they grow up. Nevertheless the origin of this sin is to be inferred from the will of the sinner. This sinner was Adam, but we all existed in him; Adam became miserable, and in him we have all become miserable. The doctrine of original sin (affirmation of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is really the great truth which constitutes the kernel of Christianity, while the rest is in the main only clothing and covering, or something accessory. Accordingly, we should interpret Jesus Christ always in the universal, as the symbol or personification of the denial of the will-to-live, but not in the individual, whether according to his mythical history in the Gospels, or according to the probably true history lying at the root thereof. For neither the one nor the other will easily satisfy us entirely. It is merely the vehicle of that first interpretation for the people, who always demand something founded on fact. That Christianity has recently forgotten its true significance, and has degenerated into shallow optimism, does not concern us here.

It is further an original and evangelical doctrine of Christianity, which Augustine, with the consent of the heads of the Church, defended against the platitudes of the Pelagians; and to purify this of errors and re-establish it was the principal aim of Luther's efforts, as is expressly declared in his book De Servo Arbitrio; namely the doctrine that the will is not free, but is originally subject to a propensity for evil. Therefore the works of the will are always sinful and imperfect, and can never satisfy justice; finally, these works can never save us, but faith alone can do this. Yet this faith itself does not originate from resolution and free will, but through the effect of grace without our participation, like something coming to us from outside. Not only the dogmas previously mentioned, but also this last genuinely evangelical dogma is among those that an ignorant and dull opinion at the present day rejects as absurd or conceals, since, in spite of Augustine and Luther, this opinion adheres to the Pelagian plain common sense, which is just what present-day rationalism is. It treats as antiquated precisely those profound dogmas that are peculiar and essential to Christianity in the narrowest sense. On the other hand, it clings to, and regards as the principal thing, only the dogma originating in and retained from Judaism, and connected with Christianity only in a historical way. [72] We, however, recognize in the above-mentioned doctrine the truth that is in complete agreement with our own investigations. Thus we see that genuine virtue and saintliness of disposition have their first origin not in deliberate free choice (works), but in knowledge (faith), precisely as we developed it also from our principal idea. If it were works, springing from motives and deliberate intention, that led to the blissful state, then, however we may turn it, virtue would always be only a prudent, methodical, far-seeing egoism. But the faith to which the Christian Church promises salvation is this: that as through the fall of the first man we all partake of sin, and are subject to death and perdition, we are also all saved through grace and by the divine mediator taking upon himself our awful guilt, and this indeed entirely without any merit of our own (of the person). For what can result from the intentional (motive-determined) action of the person, namely works, can never justify us, by its very nature, just because it is intentional action brought about by motives, and hence opus operatum. Thus in this faith it is implied first of all that our state is originally and essentially an incurable one, and that we need deliverance from it; then that we ourselves belong essentially to evil, and are so firmly bound to it that our works according to law and precept, i.e., according to motives, can never satisfy justice or save us, but salvation is to be gained only through faith, in other words, through a changed way of knowledge. This faith can come only through grace, and hence as from without. This means that salvation is something quite foreign to our person, and points to a denial and surrender of this very person being necessary for salvation. Works, the observance of the law as such, can never justify, because they are always an action from motives. Luther requires (in his book De Libertate Christiana) that, after faith has made its appearance, good works shall result from it entirely of themselves, as its symptoms, its fruits; certainly not as something which in itself pretends to merit, justification, or reward, but occurs quite arbitrarily and gratuitously. We also represented, as resulting from an ever clearer discernment of the principium individuationis, first of all merely free justice, then affection extending to the complete surrender of egoism, and finally resignation or denial of the will.

Here I have introduced these dogmas of Christian theology, in themselves foreign to philosophy, merely in order to show that the ethics which results from the whole of our discussion, and is in complete agreement and connexion with all its parts, although possibly new and unprecedented according to the expression, is by no means so in essence. On the contrary, this system of ethics fully agrees with the Christian dogmas proper, and, according to its essentials, was contained and present even in these very dogmas. It is also just as much in agreement with the doctrines and ethical precepts of the sacred books of India, which again are presented in quite different forms. At the same time, the calling to mind of the dogmas of the Christian Church served to explain and elucidate the apparent contradiction between the necessity of all the manifestations of the character with the presentation of motives (kingdom of nature) on the one hand, and the freedom of the will-in-itself to deny itself and to abolish the character, on the other, together with all the necessity of the motives which is based on this character (kingdom of grace).

71.

In now bringing to a conclusion the main points of ethics, and with these the whole development of that one idea the imparting of which was my object, I do not wish by any means to conceal an objection concerning this last part of the discussion. On the contrary, I want to show that this objection lies in the nature of the case, and that it is quite impossible to remedy it. This objection is that, after our observations have finally brought us to the point where we have before our eyes in perfect saintliness the denial and surrender of all willing, and thus a deliverance from a world whose whole existence presented itself to us as suffering, this now appears to us as a transition into empty nothingness.

On this I must first of all observe that the concept of nothing is essentially relative, and always refers to a definite something that it negates. This quality has been attributed (especially by Kant) merely to the nihil privativum indicated by - in contrast to +. This negative sign (-) from the opposite point of view might become +, and, in opposition to this nihil privativum, the nihil negativum has been set up, which would in every respect be nothing. For this purpose, the logical contradiction that does away with itself has been used as an example. But considered more closely, an absolute nothing~ a really proper nihil negativum, is not even conceivable, but everything of this kind, considered from a higher standpoint or subsumed under a wider concept, is always only a nihil privativum. Every nothing is thought of as such only in relation to something else; it presupposes this relation, and thus that other thing also. Even a logical contradiction is only a relative nothing; it is no thought of our faculty of reason; yet it is not on that account an absolute nothing. For it is a word-combination; it is an example of the unthinkable which is necessarily required in logic to demonstrate the laws of thought. Therefore, if for this purpose we look for such an example, we shall stick to the nonsense as the positive we are just looking for, and skip the sense as the negative. Thus every nihil negativum or absolute nothing, if subordinated to a higher concept, will appear as a mere nihil privativum or relative nothing, which can always change signs with what it negates, so that that would then be thought of as negation, but it itself as affirmation. This also agrees with the result of the difficult dialectical investigation on the conception of nothing which is given by Plato in the Sophist [258 D] (pp. 277-287, Bip.):

[x]
[x]
[x]

(Cum enim ostenderemus, ALTERlUS ipsius naturam esse, perque omnia entia divisam atque dispersam lNVICEM; tunc partem ejus oppositam ei, quod cujusque ens est, esse ipsum revera NON ENS asseruimus.) [73]


What is universally assumed as positive, what we call being, the negation of which is expressed by the concept nothing in its most general significance, is exactly the world as representation, which I have shown to be the objectivity, the mirror, of the will. We ourselves are also this will and this world, and to it belongs the representation in general as one aspect of it. The form of this representation is space and time; and so, for this point of view, everything that exists must be in some place and at some time. Then the concept, the material of philosophy, and finally the word, the sign of the concept, also belong to the representation. Denial, abolition, turning of the will are also abolition and disappearance of the world, of its mirror. If we no longer perceive the will in this mirror, we ask in vain in what direction it has turned, and then, because it no longer has any where and any when, we complain that it is lost in nothingness.

If a contrary point of view were possible for us, it would cause the signs to be changed, and would show what exists for us as nothing, and this nothing as that which exists. But so long as we ourselves are the will-to-live, this last, namely the nothing as that which exists, can be known and expressed by us only negatively, since the old saying of Empedocles, that like can be known only by like, deprives us here of all knowledge, just as, conversely, on it ultimately rests the possibility of all our actual knowledge, in other words, the world as representation, or the objectivity of the will; for the world is the self-knowledge of the will.

If, however, it should be absolutely insisted on that somehow a positive knowledge is to be acquired of what philosophy can express only negatively as denial of the will, nothing would be left but to refer to that state which is experienced by all who have attained to complete denial of the will, and which is denoted by the names ecstasy, rapture, illumination, union with God, and so on. But such a state cannot really be called knowledge, since it no longer has the form of subject and object; moreover, it is accessible only to one's own experience that cannot be further communicated.

We, however, who consistently occupy the standpoint of philosophy, must be satisfied here with negative knowledge, content to have reached the final landmark of the positive. If, therefore, we have recognized the inner nature of the world as will, and have seen in all its phenomena only the objectivity of the will; and if we have followed these from the unconscious impulse of obscure natural forces up to the most conscious action of man, we shall by no means evade the consequence that, with the free denial, the surrender, of the will, all those phenomena also are now abolished. That constant pressure and effort. without aim and without rest, at all grades of objectivity in which and through which the world exists; the multifarious forms succeeding one another in gradation; the whole phenomenon of the will; finally, the universal forms of this phenomenon, time and space, and also the last fundamental form of these, subject and object; all these are abolished with the will. No will: no representation, no world.

Before us there is certainly left only nothing; but that which struggles against this flowing away into nothing, namely our nature, is indeed just the will-to-live which we ourselves are, just as it is our world. That we abhor nothingness so much is simply another way of saying that we will life so much, and that we are nothing but this will and know nothing but it alone. But we now turn our glance from our own needy and perplexed nature to those who have overcome the world, in whom the will, having reached complete self-knowledge, has found itself again in everything, and then freely denied itself, and who then merely wait to see the last trace of the will vanish with the body that is animated by that trace. Then, instead of the restless pressure and effort; instead of the constant transition from desire to apprehension and from joy to sorrow; instead of the never-satisfied and never-dying hope that constitutes the life-dream of the man who wills, we see that peace that is higher than all reason, that ocean-like calmness of the spirit, that deep tranquillity, that unshakable confidence and serenity, whose mere reflection in the countenance, as depicted by Raphael and Correggio, is a complete and certain gospel. Only knowledge remains; the will has vanished. We then look with deep and painful yearning at that state, beside which the miserable and desperate nature of our own appears in the clearest light by the contrast. Yet this consideration is the only one that can permanently console us, when, on the one hand, we have recognized incurable suffering and endless misery as essential to the phenomenon of the will, to the world, and on the other see the world melt away with the abolished will, and retain before us only empty nothingness. In this way, therefore, by contemplating the life and conduct of saints, to meet with whom is of course rarely granted to us in our own experience, but who are brought to our notice by their recorded history, and, vouched for with the stamp of truth by art, we have to banish the dark impression of that nothingness, which as the final goal hovers behind all virtue and holiness, and which we fear as children fear darkness. We must not even evade it, as the Indians do, by myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahman, or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is -- nothing. **

_______________

Notes:

1. Cf. Book i, p. 30. [Tr.]

2. "It is nothing but a mere negation, united with an obscure notion." [Tr.]

3. From The Birds of Aristophanes. [Tr.]

4. "Nature is not grieved." [Tr.]

5. The following remark can also help the person for whom it is not too subtle to understand clearly that the individual is only the phenomenon, not the thing-in-itself. On the one hand, every individual is the subject of knowing, in other words, the supplementary condition of the possibility of the whole objective world, and, on the other, a particular phenomenon of the will, of that will which objectifies itself in each thing. But this double character of our inner being does not rest on a self-existent unity, otherwise it would be possible for us to be conscious of ourselves in ourselves and independently of the objects of knowing and willing. Now we simply cannot do this, but as soon as we enter into ourselves in order to attempt it, and wish for once to know ourselves fully by directing our knowledge inwards, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void; we find ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness of which a voice speaks. But the cause of this voice is not to be found in the globe, and since we want to comprehend ourselves, we grasp with a shudder nothing but a wavering and unstable phantom.

6. "What was? That which is. What will be? That which was." [Tr.]

7. Scholastici docuerunt quod aeternitas non sit temporis sine fine aut principio successio, sed NUNC STANS; i.e. idem nobis NUNC esse, quod erat NUNC Adamo: i.e. inter NUNC et TUNC nullam esse differentiam. Hobbes, Leviathan [Latin ed., 1841], c. 46.

("The scholastics taught that eternity is not a succession without beginning and end, but a permanent Now; in other words, that we possess the same Now which existed for Adam; that is to say, that there is no difference between the Now and the Then." [Tr.])

8. In Eckermann's Gesprache mit Goethe (second edition, Vol. I, p. 154), Goethe says: "Our spirit is a being of a quite indestructible nature; it acts continuously from eternity to eternity. It is similar to the sun which seems to set only to our earthly eyes, but which really never sets; it shines on incessantly." Goethe took the simile from me, not I from him. He undoubtedly uses it in this conversation of 1824 in consequence of a (possibly unconscious) reminiscence of the above passage, for it appears in the first edition, p. 401, in the same words as here, and also occurs there again on p. 528, and here at the end of § 65. The first edition was sent to him in December 1818, and in March 1819 he sent me in Naples, where I then was, a letter of congratulation through my sister. He had enclosed a piece of paper on which he had noted the numbers of some pages that had specially pleased him. So he had read my book.

9. In the Veda this is expressed by saying that, when a man dies, his visual faculty becomes one with the sun, his smell with the earth, his taste with water, his hearing with the air, his speech with fire, and so on (Oupnek'hat, Vol. I, pp. 249 seqq.); as also by the fact that, in a special ceremony, the dying person entrusts his senses and all his faculties one by one to his son, in whom they are then supposed to continue to live. (Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 82 seqq.)

10. From Goethe's Granzen der Menschheit. [Tr.]

11. Cf. chaps. 41-44 of volume 2.

12. Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, pp. 532-558; fifth edition, pp. 560-586; and Critique of Practical Reason, fourth edition, pp. 169-179; Rosenkranz's edition, pp. 224-231.

13. "The free decision of the will not influenced in any direction." [Tr.]

14. "For the word [x] (character) has its name from [x] (custom); for ethics has its name from being customary." [Tr.]

15. "The followers of Zeno declare figuratively that ethos is the source of life from which individual acts spring." [Tr.]

16. "Willing cannot be taught." [Epist. 81, 14. Tr.]

17. "Virtue can be taught." [Diogenes Laertius, VII, 91. Tr.]

18. "The final cause operates not according to its real being, but only according to its being as that is known." ([Tr.]

19. Descartes, Meditations, 4; Spinoza, Ethics, part II, props. 48 and 49, caet.

20. "It is not things that disturb men, but opinions about things." [Tr.]

21. "There are more things that terrify us than there are that oppress us, and we suffer more often in opinion than in reality." [The correct reference is to Seneca, Ep., 13, 4. Tr.)

22. "Indolent reason." which is quietened by the fact that everything is necessarily predetermined. [Tr.]

23. "Curbing with restraint the grudge nurtured within the breast." [Iliad, XVIII. 113. Tr.)

24. "He helps the mind best who once for all breaks the tormenting bonds that ensnare and entangle the heart." [Remedia Amoris, 293. Tr.]

25. "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." [Ecclesiastes, i, 18. Tr.]

26. "In what gloom of existence, in what great perils, this life is spent as long as it endures!" [Tr.]

27. "Peleus' son was wailing and lamenting, looking up to the broad heaven." [Iliad, xxi, 272. Tr.]

28. "I was the son of Zeus, of Kronos, and yet I endured unspeakable afflictions." [Odyssey, xi, 620. Tr.]

29. "Remember always to preserve equanimity when in adversity, and guard against overweening joy when in luck." [Odes II, iii, 1. Tr.]

30. "For so long as we lack what we desire, it seems to us to surpass everything in value; but when it is acquired, it at once appears like something different; and a similar longing always holds us fast, as we thirst and hanker after life." [Tr.]

31. "It is a pleasure to stand on the seashore when the tempestuous winds whip up the sea, and to behold the great toils another is enduring. Not that it pleases us to watch another being tormented, but that it is a joy to us to observe evils from which we ourselves are free." [De Rerum Natura, II. 1 seqq. -Tr.]

32. Hamlet, Act III, Sc. I. [Tr.]

33. Best of all possible worlds." [Tr.]

34. Cf. chap. 46 of volume 2.

35. "Those who have castrated themselves from all sin for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, are blessed; they abstain from the world." [Tr.]

36. "Zeus transformed himself into Eros, when he wished to create the world." [Tr.]

37. Cf. chap. 45 of volume 2.

38. "War of all against all." [Tr.]

39. Therefore the establishment of the natural right to property does not require the assumption of two grounds of right side by side with each other, namely that based on detention with that based on formation, but the latter is always sufficient. But the name formation is not really suitable, for the expenditure of effort on a thing need not always be a fashioning ot shaping of it.

40. The further explanation of the doctrine of right here laid down will be found in my essay On the Basis of Morality, § 17, pp. 221-230 of the first edition (pp. 216-226 of the second).

41. "The object of the State is that men may live well, that is, pleasantly and happily." [Tr.]

42. "Universal welfare must be the first law." [Cicero, De Legibus, iii. Tr.]

43. "No sensible person punishes because a wrong has been done, but in order that a wrong may not be done." [Tr.]

44. Cf. chap. 47 of volume 2.

45. "Do you think that crimes ascend to the gods on wings, and then someone has to record them there on the tablet of Jove, and that Jove looks at them and pronounces judgement on men? The whole of heaven would not be great enough to contain the sins of men, were Jove to record them all, nor would he to review them and assign to each his punishment. No! the punishment is already here, if only you will see it," [Tr.]

46. Oupnek'hat, Vol. I, pp. 60 seqq.

47. "You will not again assume phenomenal existence." [Tr.]

48. That Spanish bishop, who in the last war simultaneously poisoned himself and the French generals at his table, is an instance of this; as also are various facts of that war. Examples are also found in Montaigne, Book 2, chap. 12.

49. Incidentally, it should be observed that what gives every positive religious doctrine its great strength, the essential point by which it takes firm possession of souls, is wholly its ethical side; though not directly as such, but as it appears firmly united and interwoven with the rest of the mythical dogma that is characteristic of every religious teaching, and as explicable only through this. So much is this the case that, although the ethical significance of actions cannot possibly be explained in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, but every myth follows this principle, believers nevertheless consider the ethical significance of conduct and its myth to be quite inseparable, indeed as positively one, and regard every attack on the myth as an attack on right and virtue. This reaches such lengths that, in monotheistic nations, atheism or godlessness has become the synonym for absence of all morality. To priests such confusions of concepts are welcome, and only in consequence of them could that fearful monster, fanaticism, arise and govern not merely single individuals who are exceedingly perverse and wicked, but whole nations, and finally embody itself in the West as the Inquisition, a thing that, to the honour of mankind, has happened only once in its history. According to the latest and most authentic reports, in Madrid alone (whilst in the rest of Spain there were also many such ecclesiastical dens of murderers) the Inquisition in three hundred years put three hundred thousand human beings to a painful death at the stake, on account of matters of faith. All fanatics and zealots should be at once reminded of this whenever they want to make themselves heard.

50. "Something belonging to the relative." [Tr.]

51. "Willing cannot be taught." [Tr.]

52. The Church would say they are mere opera operata, that are of no avail unless grace gives the faith leading to regeneration; but of this later on.

53. Man's right over the life and power of animals rests on the fact that, since with the enhanced clearness of consciousness suffering increases in like measure, the pain that the animal suffers through death or work is still not so great as that which man would suffer through merely being deprived of the animal's flesh or strength. Therefore in the affirmation of his own existence, man can go so far as to deny the existence of the animal. In this way, the will-to-live as a whole endures less suffering than if the opposite course were adopted. At the same time, this determines the extent to which man may, without wrong, make use of the powers of animals. This limit, however, is often exceeded, especially in the case of beasts of burden, and of hounds used in hunting. The activities of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals are therefore directed especially against these. In my opinion, that right does not extend to vivisection, particularly of the higher animals. On the other hand, the insect does not suffer through its death as much as man suffers through its sting. The Hindus do not see this.

54. "Benevolence is nothing but a desire sprung from compassion." [Tr.]

55. "As I wander deep in thought, so strong a sympathy with myself comes over me, that I must often weep aloud, a thing I am otherwise not accustomed to do." [Tr.]

56. Cf. chap. 47 of volume 2. It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that the whole of the ethics given in outline in §§ 61-67 has received a more detailed and complete description in my essay On the Basis of Morality.

57. Matthew xix, 24. [Tr.]

58. The passage is taken from the Chandogya Upanishad, V, 24, 5, and in literal translation is: "Just as hungry children here sit round their mother, so do all beings sit round the agnihotram" (the fire-sacrifice offered by the knower of Brahman). [Tr.]

59. This idea is expressed by a fine simile in the ancient Sanskrit philosophical work Sankhya Karika: "Yet the soul remains for a time clothed with the body, just as the potter's wheel continues to spin after the pot has been finished, in consequence of the impulse previously given to it. Only when the inspired soul separates itself from the body and nature ceases for it, does its complete salvation take place." Colebrooke, "On the Philosophy of the Hindus": Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. I, p. 259. Also in the Sankhya Carica by Horace Wilson, § 67, p. 184.

60. "For all that is excellent and eminent is as difficult as it is rare." [Ethics, v, prop. 42 schol. Tr.]

61. "The worst is the abuse of the best." [Tr.]

62. "Small and great mysteries" [the former celebrated by the Athenians in March, the latter in October. Tr.].

63. See, for example, Oupnek'hat, studio Anquetil du Perron, Vol. II. Nos. 138, 144, 145, 146; Mythologie des Indous, by Madame de Polier, Vol. II, chaps. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17; Asiatisches Magazin, by Klaproth, in the first volume; Ueber die Fo-Religion, also Bhaguat-Geeta oder Gesprache zwischen Kreeshna und Arjoon; in the second volume, 'Moha-Mudgava; then Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Manu, from the Sanskrit by Sir William Jones (German by Huttner, 1797); especially the sixth and twelfth chapters. Finally, many passages in the Asiatic Researches. (In the last forty years Indian literature has grown so much in Europe, that if I now wished to complete this note to the first edition, it would fill several pages.)

64. At the procession of Jagganath in June 1840, eleven Hindus threw themselves under the car, and were instantly killed. (Letter from an East Indian landowner in The Times of 30 December, 1840.)

65. "Bring yourself to be reasonable!" [Tr.]

66. "The noonday of glory; a day no longer followed by night; a life that no longer fears death, even in death itself, because death has overcome death, and because whoever has suffered the first death will no longer feel the second." [Tr.]

* On [x] cf. Stobaeus, Florilegium, Vol. II, p. 374. [Footnotes indicated by an asterisk represent additions made by Schopenhauer in his interleaved copy of the third edition of 1859. He died in 1860, and so there are very few of these. Tr.]

67. Brucker, Hist. Philos., Tom. IV, pars I, p. 10.

68. Henry VI, Part II, Act 3, Scene 3.

69. Cf. chap. 48 of volume 2.

70. "Freedom is a mystery." [Tr.]

71. "For it was not a sinful flesh, as it was not born of carnal desire; but yet the form of sinful flesh was in it, because it was a mortal flesh." [Tr.]

72. How much this is the case is seen from the fact that all the contradictions and inconceivable mysteries contained in the Christian dogmatics and consistently systematized by Augustine, which have led precisely to the opposite Pelagian insipidity, vanish, as soon as we abstract from the fundamental Jewish dogma, and recognize that man is not the work of another, but of his own will. Then all is at once clear and correct; then there is no need of a freedom in the operari, for it lies in the esse; and here also lies the sin as original sin. The effect of grace, however, is our own. With the present-day rationalistic view, on the other hand, many doctrines of the Augustinian dogmatics, established in the New Testament, appear absolutely untenable and even revolting, for example predestination. Accordingly, what is really Christian is then rejected, and a return is made to crude Judaism. But the miscalculation or primary defect of Christian dogmatics lies where it is never sought, namely in what is withdrawn from all investigation as settled and certain. Take this away, and the whole of dogmatics is rational; for that dogma ruins theology, as it does all the other sciences. Thus, if we study the Augustinian theology in the books De Civitate Dei (especially in the fourteenth book), we experience something analogous to the case when we try to make a body stand, whose centre of gravity falls outside it; however we may turn and place it, it always topples over again. So also here, in spite of all the efforts and sophisms of Augustine, the guilt of the world and its misery always fall back on God, who made everything and everything that is in everything, and who also knew how things would turn out. I have already shown in my essay On the Freedom of the Will (chap. 4, pp. 66-68 of the first edition) that Augustine himself was aware of the difficulty, and was puzzled by it. In the same way, the contradiction between the goodness of God and the misery of the world, as also that between the freedom of the will and the foreknowledge of God, is the inexhaustible theme of a controversy, lasting nearly a hundred years, between the Cartesians, Malebranche, Leibniz, Bayle, Clarke, Arnauld, and many others. The only dogma fixed for the disputants is the existence of God together with his attributes, and they all incessantly turn in a circle, since they try to bring these things into harmony, in other words, to solve an arithmetical sum which never comes right, but the remainder of which appears now in one place, now in another, after it has been concealed elsewhere. But it does not 'occur to anyone that the source of the dilemma is to be looked for in the fundamental assumption, although it palpably obtrudes itself. Bayle alone shows that he notices this.

73. "It is the nature of being different, of which we have demonstrated that it exists and is dispersed piecemeal over all being in mutual relationship, and since we opposed to being every single particle of this nature, we have ventured to assert that precisely this is in truth non-being." [Tr.]

** This is also the Prajna-Paramita of the Buddhists, the "beyond all knowledge," in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist. See I. J. Schmidt, Ueber das Mahajana und Pradschna-Paramita.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

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Part 1 of 7

APPENDIX: CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY

C'est le privilege du vrai genie, et surtout du genie qui ouvre une carriere, de faire impunement de grandes fautes.

-- Voltaire [Siecle de Louis XIV, ch. 32]

["It is the privilege of true genius, and especially of the genius who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity." Tr.]


[1] It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a clear and complete exposition of its value. For the faults are something particular and finite, which can therefore be taken in fully at a glance. On the other hand, the very stamp that genius impresses on its works is that their excellence is unfathomable and inexhaustible, and therefore they do not become obsolete, but are the instructors of many succeeding centuries. The perfected masterpiece of a truly great mind will always have a profound and vigorous effect on the whole human race, so much so that it is impossible to calculate to what distant centuries and countries its enlightening influence may reach. This is always the case, since, however accomplished and rich the age might be in which the masterpiece itself arose, genius always rises like a palm-tree above the soil in which it is rooted.

A far-reaching, deep, and widespread effect of this kind cannot, however, take place suddenly, on account of the great difference between the genius and ordinary mankind. The knowledge this one man in a lifetime drew directly from life and the world, won, and presented to others as acquired and finished, cannot at once become the property of mankind, since men have not so much strength to receive as the genius has to give. But even after a successful struggle with unworthy opponents, who contest the life of what is immortal at its very birth, and would like to nip in the bud the salvation of mankind (like the serpent in Hercules' cradle), that knowledge must first wander through the circuitous paths of innumerable false interpretations and distorted applications; it must overcome the attempts to unite it with old errors, and thus live in conflict, until a new and unprejudiced generation grows up to meet it. Even in youth this generation gradually receives some of the contents of that source from a thousand different channels, assimilates it by degrees, and thus shares in the benefit that was to flow from that great mind to mankind. So slow is the advance in the education of the human race, that feeble, and at the same time refractory, pupil of genius. Thus the whole strength and importance of Kant's teaching will become evident only in the course of time, when the spirit of the age, itself gradually reformed and altered in the most important and essential respect by the influence of that teaching, furnishes living evidence of the power of that giant mind. However, I will certainly not take upon myself the thankless role of Calchas and Cassandra by presumptuously anticipating the spirit of the age. Only I may be allowed, in agreement with what has been said, to regard Kant's works as still very new, whereas many at the present day look upon them as already antiquated. Indeed, they have discarded them as settled and done with, or, as they put it, have left them behind. Others, emboldened by this, ignore them altogether, and with brazen effrontery continue to philosophize about God and the soul on the assumptions of the old realistic dogmatism and its scholastic philosophy. This is as if we wished to introduce into modern chemistry the theories of the alchemists. Kant's works, however, do not need my feeble eulogy, but will themselves externally extol their master, and will always live on earth, though perhaps not in the letter, yet in the spirit.

But, of course, if we look back at the first result of his doctrines, and the efforts and events in the sphere of philosophy during the period that has since elapsed, we see the corroboration of a very depressing saying of Goethe: "Just a!! the water displaced by a ship immediately flows in again behind it, so, when eminent minds have pushed error on one side and made room for themselves, it naturally closes in behind them again very rapidly." (Poetry and Truth, Pt. 3, [Book 15], p. 521.) This period, however, has been only an episode that is to be reckoned as part of the above-mentioned fate of all new and great knowledge, an episode now unmistakably near its end, since the bubble so steadily blown out is at last bursting. People generally are beginning to be conscious that real and serious philosophy still stands where Kant left it. In any case, I cannot see that anything has been done in philosophy between him and me; I therefore take my departure direct from him.

What I have in view in this Appendix to my work is really only a vindication of the teaching I have set forth in it, in so far as in many points it does not agree with the Kantian philosophy, but actually contradicts it. Yet a discussion thereof is necessary, for evidently my line of thought, different as its content is from the Kantian, is completely under its influence, and necessarily presupposes and starts from it; and I confess that, next to the impression of the world of perception, I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato. But I can justify the disagreements with Kant that are nevertheless to be found in my work, only by accusing him of error in the same points, and exposing mistakes he made. In this Appendix I must therefore deal with Kant in a thoroughly polemical manner, and seriously and with every effort; for only thus can the error that clings to Kant's teaching be burnished away, and the truth of that teaching shine all the more brightly, and endure more positively. Therefore it must not be expected that my sincere and deep reverence for Kant will also extend to his weaknesses and mistakes, and hence that I should expose them only with the most cautious indulgence, for thus my language would of necessity become feeble and flat through circumlocutions. Towards a living person such indulgence is needed, since human frailty cannot endure even the most just refutation of an error, unless it is tempered by soothing and flattery, and hardly even then; and a teacher of the ages and benefactor of mankind deserves at least that his human frailty shall also be treated with indulgence, so that he may not be caused any pain. But the man who is dead has cast this weakness aside; his merit stands firm; time will purify it more and more of all overestimation and detraction. His mistakes must be separated from it, rendered harmless, and then given over to oblivion. Therefore in the polemic I am about to institute against Kant, I have only his mistakes and weaknesses in view. I face them with hostility, and wage a relentless war of extermination upon them, always mindful not to conceal them with indulgence, but rather to place them in the brightest light, the more surely to reduce them to nought. For the reasons above-mentioned, I am not aware here of either injustice or ingratitude to Kant. But in order that, even in the eyes of others, every appearance of malignancy may be removed, I will first of all bring out clearly my deeply-felt veneration for and gratitude to Kant by stating briefly what in my eyes appears to be his principal merit. I will do this from so general a standpoint that it will not be necessary for me to touch on those points in which I must later contradict him.

***

Kant's greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect, and that on this account they cannot be known according to what they may be in themselves. He was led on to this path by Locke (see Prolegomena to every Metaphysic, § 13, note 2). Locke had shown that the secondary qualities of things, such as sound, odour, colour, hardness, softness, smoothness, and the like, founded on the affections of the senses, do not belong to the objective body, the thing-in-itself. To this, on the contrary, he attributed only the primary qualities, i.e., those that presuppose merely space and impenetrability, and so extension, shape, solidity, number, mobility. But this Lockean distinction, which was easy to find, and keeps only to the surface of things, was, so to speak, merely a youthful prelude to the Kantian. Thus, starting from an incomparably higher standpoint, Kant explains all that Locke had admitted as qualitates primariae, that is, as qualities of the thing-in-itself, as also belonging merely to its phenomenon in our faculty of perception or apprehension, and this just because the conditions of this faculty, namely space, time, and causality, are known by us a priori. Thus Locke had abstracted from the thing-in-itself the share that the sense-organs have in its phenomenon; but Kant further abstracted the share of the brain-functions (although not under this name). In this way the distinction between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself obtained an infinitely greater significance, and a very much deeper meaning. For this purpose he had to take in hand the great separation of our a priori from our a posteriori knowledge, which before him had never been made with proper precision and completeness or with clear and conscious knowledge. Accordingly, this then became the principal subject of his profound investigations. We wish here to observe at once that Kant's philosophy has a threefold relation to that of his predecessors; firstly, as we have seen, a relation to Locke's philosophy, confirming and extending it; secondly, a relation to Hume's, correcting and employing it, a relation that we find most distinctly expressed in the preface to the Prolegomena (that finest and most comprehensible of all Kant's principal works, which is far too little read, for it immensely facilitates the study of his philosophy); thirdly, a decidedly polemical and destructive relation to the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff. We should know all three doctrines before proceeding to the study of the Kantian philosophy. Now if, in accordance with the above, the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, and hence the doctrine of the complete diversity of the ideal from the real, is the fundamental characteristic of the Kantian philosophy, then the assertion of the absolute identity of these two, which appeared soon afterwards, affords a melancholy proof of the saying of Goethe previously quoted. This is all the more the case, inasmuch as that identity rested on nothing but the vapouring of intellectual intuition. Accordingly, it was only a return to the crudeness of the common view, masked under the imposing impression of an air of importance, under bombast and nonsense. It became the worthy starting-point of the even grosser nonsense of the ponderous and witless Hegel. Now as Kant's separation of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, arrived at in the manner previously explained, far surpassed in the profundity and thoughtfulness of its argument all that had ever existed, it was infinitely important in its results. For in it he propounded, quite originally and in an entirely new way, the same truth, found from a new aspect and on a new path, which Plato untiringly repeats, and generally expresses in his language as follows. This world that appears to the senses has no true being, but only a ceaseless becoming; it is, and it also is not; and its comprehension is not so much a knowledge as an illusion. This is what he expresses in a myth at the beginning of the seventh book of the Republic, the most important passage in all his works, which has been mentioned already in the third book of the present work. He says that men, firmly chained in a dark cave, see neither the genuine original light nor actual things, but only the inadequate light of the fire in the cave, and the shadows of actual things passing by the fire behind their backs. Yet they imagine that the shadows are the reality, and that determining the succession of these shadows is true wisdom. The same truth, though presented quite differently, is also a principal teaching of the Vedas and Puranas, namely the doctrine of Maya, by which is understood nothing but what Kant calls the phenomenon as opposed to the thing-in-itself. For the work of Maya is stated to be precisely this visible world in which we are, a magic effect called into being, an unstable and inconstant illusion without substance, comparable to the optical illusion and the dream, a veil enveloping human consciousness, a something of which it is equally false and equally true to say that it is and that it is not. Now Kant not only expressed the same doctrine in an entirely new and original way, but made of it a proved and incontestable truth through the most calm and dispassionate presentation. Plato and the Indians, on the other hand, had based their contentions merely on a universal perception of the world; they produced them as the direct utterance of their consciousness, and presented them mythically and poetically rather than philosophically and distinctly. In this respect they are related to Kant as are the Pythagoreans Hicetas, Philolaus, and Aristarchus, who asserted the motion of the earth round the stationary sun, to Copernicus. Such clear knowledge and calm, deliberate presentation of this dreamlike quality of the whole world is really the basis of the whole Kantian philosophy; it is its soul and its greatest merit. He achieved it by taking to pieces the whole machinery of our cognitive faculty, by means of which the phantasmagoria of the objective world is brought about, and presenting it piecemeal with marvellous insight and ability. All previous Western philosophy, appearing unspeakably clumsy when compared with the Kantian, had failed to recognize that truth, and had therefore in reality always spoken as if in a dream. Kant first suddenly wakened it from this dream; therefore the last sleepers (Mendelssohn) called him the all-pulverizer. He showed that the laws which rule with inviolable necessity in existence, i.e., in experience generally, are not to be applied to deduce and explain existence itself; that their validity is therefore only relative, in other words, begins only after existence, the world of experience generally, is already settled and established; that in consequence these laws cannot be our guiding line when we come to the explanation of the existence of the world and of ourselves. All previous Western philosophers had imagined that these laws, according to which all phenomena are connected to one another, and all of which -- time and space as well as causality and inference -- I comprehend under the expression the principle of sufficient reason, were absolute laws conditioned by nothing at all, aeternae veritates; that the world itself existed only in consequence of and in conformity with them; and that under their guidance the whole riddle of the world must therefore be capable of solution. The assumptions made for this purpose, which Kant criticizes under the name of the Ideas of reason (Vernunft), really served only to raise the mere phenomenon, the work of Maya, the shadow-world of Plato, to the one highest reality, to put it in the place of the innermost and true essence of things, and thus to render the real knowledge thereof impossible, in a word, to send the dreamers still more soundly to sleep. Kant showed that those laws, and consequently the world itself, are conditioned by the subject's manner of knowing. From this it followed that, however far one might investigate and infer under the guidance of these laws, in the principal matter, Le., in knowledge of the inner nature of the world in itself and outside the representation, no step forward was made, but one moved merely like a squirrel in his wheel. We therefore compare all the dogmatists to people who imagine that, if only they go straight forward long enough, they will come to the end of the world; but Kant had then circumnavigated the globe, and had shown that, because it is round, we cannot get out of it by horizontal movement, but that by perpendicular movement it is perhaps not impossible to do so. It can also be said that Kant's teaching gives the insight that the beginning and end of the world are to be sought not without us, but rather within.

Now all this rests on the fundamental distinction between dogmatic and critical or transcendental philosophy. He who wishes to be clear about this, and to realize it by means of an example, can do so quite briefly if he reads, as a specimen of dogmatic philosophy, an essay by Leibniz, entitled De Rerum Originatione Radicali, printed for the first time in the edition of Leibniz's philosophical works by Erdmann, vol. i, p. 147. Here the origin and excellent nature of the world are demonstrated a priori so thoroughly in the realistic-dogmatic manner with the aid of the ontological and cosmological proofs, and on the ground of the veritates aeternae. It is admitted once, by the way, that experience shows the very opposite of the excellence of the world here demonstrated, whereupon experience is then told that it does not understand anything about it, and ought to hold its tongue when philosophy has spoken a priori. With Kant the critical philosophy appeared as the opponent of this entire method. It makes its problem just those veritates aeternae that serve as the foundation of every such dogmatic structure, investigates their origin, and then finds this to be in man's head. Here they spring from the forms properly belonging to it, which it carries in itself for the purpose of perceiving and apprehending an objective world. Thus here in the brain is the quarry furnishing the material for that proud, dogmatic structure. Now because the critical philosophy, in order to reach this result, had to go beyond the veritates aeternae, on which all the previous dogmatism was based, so as to make these truths themselves the subject of investigation, it became transcendental philosophy. From this it follows also that the objective world as we know it does not belong to the true being of things-in-themselves, but is its mere phenomenon, conditioned by those very forms that lie a priori in the human intellect (i.e., the brain); hence the world cannot contain anything but phenomena.

It is true that Kant did not arrive at the knowledge that the phenomenon is the world as representation and that the thing-in-itself is the will. He showed, however, that the phenomenal world is conditioned just as much by the subject as by the object, and by isolating the most universal forms of its phenomenon, i.e., of the representation, he demonstrated that we know these forms and survey them according to their whole constitutional nature not only by starting from the object, but just as well by starting from the subject, since they are really the limit between object and subject and are common to both. He concluded that, by pursuing this limit, we do not penetrate into the inner nature of the object or the subject, and consequently that we never know the essential nature of the world, namely the thing-in-itself.

He did not deduce the thing-in-itself in the right way, as I shall soon show, but by means of an inconsistency; and he had to pay the penalty for this in the frequent and irresistible attacks on this principal part of his teaching. He did not recognize the thing-in-itself directly in the will, but made a great and original step towards this knowledge, since he demonstrated the undeniable moral significance of human conduct to be quite different from, and not dependent on, the laws of the phenomenon, to be not even capable of explanation according to them, but to be something directly touching the thing-in-itself. This is the second main point of view for assessing his merit.

We can regard as the third point the complete overthrow of the scholastic philosophy. By this term I propose to denote generally the whole period beginning with Augustine, the Church Father, and ending just before Kant. For the chief characteristic of scholasticism is indeed that which is very correctly stated by Tennemann, namely the guardianship of the prevailing national religion over philosophy, for which there was in reality nothing left but to prove and embellish the principal dogmas religion prescribed for it. The scholastics proper down to Suarez confess this openly and without reserve; the succeeding philosophers do so more unconsciously, or at any rate not avowedly. It is held that the scholastic philosophy extends only to about a hundred years before Descartes, and that with him there begins an entirely new epoch of free investigation, independent of all positive theological doctrine. Such an investigation, however, cannot in fact be attributed to Descartes and his successors, [2] but only an appearance of it, and in any case only an attempt at it. Descartes was an extremely great man, and, if we take into consideration the age in which he lived, he achieved very much. But if we set this consideration aside, and measure him according to the emancipation of thought from all fetters and to the beginning of a new period of impartial and original investigation with which he has been credited, we are obliged to find that, with his scepticism still lacking in true earnestness, and thus abating and passing away so quickly and so completely, he has the appearance of wishing to discard all at once all the fetters of the early implanted opinions belonging to his age and nation; but he does this only apparently and for a moment, in order at once to assume them again, and hold them all the more firmly; and it is just the same with all his successors down to Kant. Goethe's verses are therefore very applicable to a free and independent thinker of this kind:

"Saving thy gracious presence, he to me
A long-legged grasshopper appears to be,
That springing flies, and flying springs,
And in the grass the same old ditty sings." [3]


Kant had reasons for looking as if he too had only this in view. But the pretended leap that was allowed, because it was known that it leads back to the grass, this time became a flight; and now those who stand below are able only to follow him with their eyes, and no longer to catch him again.

Kant therefore ventured to demonstrate by his teaching the impossibility of our being able to prove all those dogmas that were alleged to have been proved. Speculative theology and the rational psychology connected with it received from him their death-blow. They have since vanished from German philosophy, and we must not let ourselves be misled by the fact that the word is retained here and there after the thing has been given up, or that some miserable professor of philosophy has the fear of his master in view and leaves truth to look after itself. Only he who has observed the pernicious influence of those conceptions on natural science, as well as on philosophy, in all the writers, even the best, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can estimate the magnitude of this merit of Kant's. The change of tone and of the metaphysical background that has appeared in German works on natural science since Kant is remarkable; before him things were the same as they still are in England. This merit of Kant is connected with the fact that the unreflecting pursuit of the laws of the phenomenon, the enhancement of these to eternal truths, and the raising of the fleeting phenomenon to the real inner being of the world, in short, realism, not disturbed in its delusion by any reflection, had been wholly prevalent in all preceding philosophy of ancient, medieval, and modem times. Berkeley, who like Malebranche before him had recognized its one-sidedness and indeed its falseness, was unable to overthrow it, since his attack was confined to one point. It was therefore reserved for Kant to help the fundamental idealistic view to obtain the ascendancy in Europe, at any rate in philosophy, a view which prevails in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, and is in essence even that of religion. Thus before Kant we were in time; now time is in us, and so on.

Ethics was also treated by that realistic philosophy according to the laws of the phenomenon, which it regarded as absolute and holding good even of the thing-in-itself. Therefore ethics was based now on a doctrine of perfect happiness, now on the will of the Creator, and finally on the notion of perfection. In and by itself, such a concept is entirely empty and void of content, for it denotes a mere relation that acquires significance only from the things to which it is applied. "To be perfect" means nothing more than "to correspond to some concept presupposed and given," a concept which must therefore be first framed, and without which the perfection is an unknown abstract quantity and consequently means nothing at all when expressed alone. Now if we want to make the concept "mankind" into a tacit assumption, and accordingly to set it up as a moral principle for aspiring to human perfection, then in this case we merely say: "Men ought to be as they ought to be," and we are just as wise as we were before. In fact, "perfect" is very nearly a mere synonym of "numerically complete," since it signifies that, in a given case or individual, all the predicates that lie in the concept of its species appear in support of it, and hence are actually present. Therefore, the concept of "perfection," if used absolutely and in the abstract, is a word devoid of idea, and so also is all talk: about the "most perfect of all beings," and the like. All this is a mere idle display of words. Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century this concept of perfection and imperfection had become current coin; indeed, it was the hinge on which almost all questions of morality and even of theology turned. It was on everyone's lips, so that ultimately it became a real nuisance. We see even the best authors of the time, Lessing for example, entangled most deplorably in perfections and imperfections and wrestling with them. Here any thinking man was bound to feel, vaguely at any rate, that this concept is without any positive content, since, like an algebraical symbol, it indicates a mere relation in abstracto. Kant, as we have already said, entirely separated the undeniable, great ethical significance of actions from the phenomenon and its laws, and showed that the former directly concerned the thing-in-itself, the innermost nature of the world, whereas the latter, i.e., time and space, and all that fills them and is arranged in them according to the causal law, are to be regarded as an unstable and insubstantial dream.

The little I have said, which by no means exhausts the subject, may be sufficient evidence of my recognition of Kant's great merits, a recognition recorded here for my own satisfaction, and because justice demanded that those merits should be recalled to the mind of everyone who wishes to follow me in the unsparing exposure of his mistakes, to which I now turn.

***

That Kant's great achievements were bound to be accompanied by great errors is easy to understand on merely historical grounds. For although he effected the greatest revolution in philosophy, and did away with scholasticism, which in the above-mentioned wider sense had lasted for fourteen hundred years, in order really to begin an entirely new third world-epoch in philosophy, the immediate result of his appearance was, however, in practice only negative, not positive. For, since he did not set up a completely new system to which his followers could have adhered only for a period, all observed indeed that something very great had happened, but no one rightly knew what. They certainly saw that all previous philosophy had been a fruitless dreaming, from which the new age awakened; but they did not know what they ought to adhere to now. A great void, a great lack, had occurred; the universal attention even of the general public was attracted. Induced by this, but not urged by inner inclination and feeling of power (which express themselves even at the most unfavourable moment, as in the case of Spinoza), people without any conspicuous talent made many different, feeble, absurd, and sometimes insane attempts, to which the public, now interested, gave its attention, and with great patience, such as is found only in Germany, long lent its ear.

The same thing must once have happened in nature, when a great revolution altered the whole surface of the earth, sea and land changed places, and the scene was levelled for a new creation. It was then a long time before nature could produce a new series of lasting forms, each in harmony with itself and with the rest. Strange and monstrous organisms appeared which did not harmonize with themselves or with one another, and could not last. But it is just the remains of these, still in existence, which have brought down to us the memorial of that wavering and tentative procedure of nature forming herself anew. Now since a crisis quite similar to this and an age of monstrous abortions were produced by Kant, as we all know, it may be concluded that his merit was not complete, but was burdened with great defects, and must have been negative and one-sided. These defects we will now investigate.

***

First of all, we will clearly present to ourselves and examine the fundamental idea in which lie the plan and purpose of the whole Critique of Pure Reason. Kant took up the point of view of his predecessors, the dogmatic philosophers, and accordingly started with them from the following assumptions. (1) Metaphysics is the science of that which lies beyond the possibility of all experience. (2) Such a thing can never be found according to fundamental principles that are themselves first drawn from experience (Prolegomena, § 1); but only what we know prior to, and hence independently of, experience can reach farther than possible experience. (3) In our reason (Vernunft), some fundamental principles of the kind are actually to be found; they are comprehended under the name of knowledge from pure reason. So far Kant agrees with his predecessors, but now he parts company from them. They say: "These fundamental principles, or knowledge from pure reason, are expressions of the absolute possibility of things, aeternae veritates, sources of ontology; they stand above the world-order, just as with the ancients fate stood above the gods." Kant says that they are mere forms of our intellect, laws, not of the existence of things, but of our representations of them; therefore they are valid merely for our apprehension of things, and accordingly cannot extend beyond the possibility of experience, which is what was aimed at according to the first assumption. For it is precisely the a priori nature of these forms of knowledge, since it can rest only on their subjective origin, that cuts us off for ever from knowledge of the being-in-itself of things, and confines us to a world of mere phenomena, so that we cannot know things as they may be in themselves, even a posteriori, not to mention a priori. Accordingly, metaphysics is impossible, and in its place we have criticism of pure reason. In face of the old dogmatism, Kant is here wholly triumphant; hence all dogmatic attempts that have since appeared, have had to pursue courses quite different from the earlier ones. I shall now go on to the justification of my attempt in accordance with the expressed intention of the present criticism. Thus, with a more careful examination of the above argumentation, we shall have to confess that its first fundamental assumption is a petitio principii; [4] it lies in the proposition (clearly laid down especially in Prolegomena, § 1): "The source of metaphysics cannot be empirical at all; its fundamental principles and concepts can never be taken from experience, either inner or outer." Yet nothing at all is advanced to establish this cardinal assertion except the etymological argument from the word metaphysics. In truth, however, the matter stands thus: The world and our own existence present themselves to us necessarily as' a riddle. It is now assumed, without more ado, that the solution of this riddle cannot result from a thorough understanding of the world itself, but must be looked for in something quite different from the world (for this is the meaning of "beyond the possibility of all experience"); and that everything of which we can in any way have immediate knowledge (for this is the meaning of possible experience, inner as well as outer) must be excluded from that solution. On the contrary, this solution must be sought only in what we can arrive at merely indirectly, namely by means of inferences from universal principles a priori. After the principal source of all knowledge had thus been excluded, and the direct path to truth closed, it is not surprising that the dogmatic attempts failed, and that Kant was able to demonstrate the necessity of this failure. For it had been assumed beforehand that metaphysics and knowledge a priori were identical; yet for this it would have been necessary first to demonstrate that the material for solving the riddle of the world cannot possibly be contained in the world itself, but is to be sought only outside it, in something we can reach only under the guidance of those forms of which we are a priori conscious. But so long as this is not proved, we have no ground for shutting ourselves off from the richest of all sources of knowledge, inner and outer experience, in the case of the most important and most difficult of all problems, in order to operate with empty forms alone. Therefore, I say that the solution to the riddle of the world must come from an understanding of the world itself; and hence that the task of metaphysics is not to pass over experience in which the world exists, but to understand it thoroughly, since inner and outer experience are certainly the principal source of all knowledge. I say, therefore, that the solution to the riddle of the world is possible only through the proper connexion of outer with inner experience, carried out at the right point, and by the combination, thus effected, of these two very heterogeneous sources of knowledge. Yet this is so only within certain limits inseparable from our finite nature, consequently so that we arrive at a correct understanding of the world itself without reaching an explanation of its existence which is conclusive and does away with all further problems. Consequently, est quadam prodire tenus, [5] and my path lies midway between the doctrine of omniscience of the earlier dogmatism and the despair of the Kantian Critique. But the important truths discovered by Kant, by which the previous metaphysical systems were overthrown, have furnished my system with data and material. Compare what I have said about my method in chapter 17 of volume two. So much for Kant's fundamental idea; we will now consider the argument and its detail.

***

Kant's style bears throughout the stamp of a superior mind, a genuine, strong individuality, and a quite extraordinary power of thought. Its characteristic quality can perhaps be appropriately described as a brilliant dryness, on the strength of which he was able to grasp concepts firmly and pick them out with great certainty, and then toss them about with the greatest freedom, to the reader's astonishment. I find the same brilliant dryness again in the style of Aristotle, though that is much simpler. Nevertheless, Kant's exposition is often indistinct, indefinite, inadequate, and occasionally obscure. This obscurity is certainly to be excused in part by the difficulty of the subject and the depth of the ideas. Yet whoever is himself clear to the bottom, and knows quite distinctly what he thinks and wants, will never write indistinctly, never set up wavering and indefinite concepts, or pick up from foreign languages extremely difficult and complicated expressions to denote such concepts, in order to continue using such expressions afterwards, as Kant took words and formulas from earlier, even scholastic, philosophy. These he combined with one another for his own purpose, as for example, "transcendental synthetic unity of apperception," and in general "unity of synthesis," which he always uses where "union" or "combination" would be quite sufficient by itself. Moreover, such a man will not always be explaining anew what has already been explained once, as Kant does, for example, with the understanding, the categories, experience, and other main concepts. Generally, such a man will not incessantly repeat himself, and yet, in every new presentation of an idea that has already occurred a hundred times, leave it again in precisely the same obscure passages. On the contrary, he will express his meaning once distinctly, thoroughly, and exhaustively, and leave it at that. Quo enim melius rem aliquam concipimus, eo magis determinati sumus ad eam unico modo exprimendam, [6] says Descartes in his fifth letter. But the greatest disadvantage of Kant's occasionally obscure exposition is that it acted as exemplar vitus imitabile; [7] in fact it was misinterpreted as a pernicious authorization. The public had been forced to see that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make vigorous use of this privilege; Schelling at least equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity. Meanwhile, Jean Paul wrote in vain his fine paragraph, "Higher appreciation of philosophical madness in the professor's chair, and of poetical madness in the theatre" (Aesthetische Nachschule); for in vain had Goethe already said:

"They prate and teach, and no one interferes;
All from the fellowship of fools are shrinking.
Man usually believes, if only words he hears,
That also with them goes material for thinking." [8]


But let us return to Kant. We cannot help admitting that he entirely lacks grand, classical simplicity, naivete, ingenuite, candeur. His philosophy has no analogy with Greek architecture which presents large, simple proportions, revealing themselves at once to the glance; on the contrary, it reminds us very strongly of the Gothic style of architecture. For an entirely individual characteristic of Kant's mind is a peculiar liking for symmetry that loves a variegated multiplicity, in order to arrange this, and to repeat this arrangement in subordinate forms, and so on indefinitely, precisely as in Gothic churches. In fact, he sometimes carries this to the point of trifling, and then, in deference to this tendency, goes so far as to do open violence to truth, and treats it as nature was treated by old-fashioned gardeners, whose works are symmetrical avenues, squares and triangles, trees shaped like pyramids and spheres, and hedges in regular and sinuous curves. I will illustrate this with facts.

After discussing space and time isolated from everything else, and then disposing of the whole of this world of perception, filling space and time, in which we live and are, with the meaningless words "the empirical content of perception is given to us," he immediately arrives in one jump at the logical basis of his whole philosophy, namely the table of judgements. From this table he deduces an exact dozen of categories, symmetrically displayed under four titles. These later become the fearful Procrustean bed on to which he violently forces all things in the world and everything that occurs in man, shrinking from no violence and disdaining no sophism in order merely to be able to repeat everywhere the symmetry of that table. The first thing that he symmetrically deduces from it is the pure physiological table of universal principles of natural science, namely the axioms of intuition, anticipations of perception, analogies of experience, and postulates of empirical thought in general. Of these fundamental principles the first two are simple; but each of the last two symmetrically sends out three shoots. The mere categories were what he calls concepts, but these fundamental principles of natural science are judgements. In consequence of his highest guiding line to all wisdom, namely symmetry, the series is now to prove itself fruitful in the inferences or syllogisms; and this indeed they do again symmetrically and rhythmically. For as, by applying the categories to sensibility, experience together with its a priori principles sprang up for the understanding, so by applying the syllogisms to the categories, a task performed by reason (Vernunft) according to its alleged principle of looking for the unconditioned, the Ideas of reason arise. This takes place as follows: The three categories of relation give to syllogisms the three only possible kinds of major premisses, and accordingly syllogisms also are divided into three kinds, each of which is to be regarded as an egg from which the faculty of reason hatches an Idea; from the categorical kind of syllogism, the Idea of the soul; from the hypothetical, the Idea of the world; and from the disjunctive, the Idea of God. In the middle one, namely the Idea of the world, the symmetry of the table of categories is once more repeated, since its four titles produce four theses, each of which has its antithesis as a symmetrical pendant.

We express our admiration for the really extremely acute combination that produced this elegant structure, but later on we shall thoroughly examine its foundations and its parts. First, however, we must make the following remarks.

***

It is astonishing how Kant, without further reflection, pursues his way, following his symmetry, arranging everything according to it, without ever considering by itself one of the subjects thus dealt with. I will explain myself in more detail. After taking intuitive knowledge into consideration merely in mathematics, he entirely neglects the rest of knowledge of perception in which the world lies before us, and sticks solely to abstract thinking. Such thinking, however, receives the whole of its meaning and value only from the world of perception, which is infinitely more significant, more universal, and more substantial than is the abstract part of our knowledge. In fact, and this is a main point, he has nowhere clearly distinguished knowledge of perception from abstract knowledge, and in this way, as we shall see later, he becomes implicated in inextricable contradictions with himself. After disposing of the whole world of the senses with the meaningless "it is given," he now, as we have said, makes the logical table of judgements the foundation-stone of his structure. But here again he does not reflect for a moment on what really lies before him. These forms of judgements are indeed words and word-combinations. Yet first of all it should have been asked what these directly denote; it would be found that they are concepts. Then the next question would be about the nature of concepts. From the answer to it we should have seen what relation these have to the representations of perception in which the world exists, for perception and reflection would have been separated. It would then have been necessary to examine not merely how pure and only formal intuition a priori, but also how its content, namely empirical perception, enters consciousness. But then it would have been seen what share the understanding has in this, and so also in general what the understanding is, and, on the other hand, what reason (Vernunft) really is, the critique of which was being written. It is very remarkable that he does not once properly and adequately define the latter, but only occasionally, and as required by the context in each case, gives incomplete and inaccurate explanations of it, in entire contradiction to the rule of Descartes already quoted. [9] For example, on p. 11 (V, 24) of the Critique of Pure Reason, it is the faculty of the principles a priori; again on p. 299 (V, 356) he says that reason is the faculty of the principles, and that it is opposed to the understanding, which is the faculty of rules! Now one would think that there must be a vast difference between principles and rules, for it entitles us to assume a particular faculty of knowledge for each of them. But this great distinction is said to lie merely in the fact that what is known a priori through pure intuition or perception, or through the forms of the understanding, is a rule, and only what results a priori from mere concepts is a principle. We shall return later to this arbitrary and inadmissible distinction when dealing with the Dialectic. On p. 330 (V, 386) reason is the faculty of inference; mere judging (p. 69; V, 94) he often declares to be the business of the understanding. Now by this he really says that judging is the business of the understanding, so long as the ground of the judgement is empirical, transcendental, or metalogical (On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, §§ 31,32, 33); but if it is logical, and the syllogism consists in this, then a quite special, and much more important, faculty of knowledge, namely of reason, is here at work. Indeed, what is more, on p. 303 (V, 360) it is explained that the immediate inferences from a proposition are still a matter of the understanding, and that only those where a mediating concept is used would be carried out by our faculty of reason. The example quoted is that from the proposition "All men are mortal," the inference "Some mortals are men" is drawn by the mere understanding; on the other hand: "All scholars are mortal" is an inference demanding a quite different and far more important faculty, that of reason. How was it possible for a great thinker to produce anything like this? On p. 553 (V. 581) reason is all of a sudden the constant condition of all arbitrary actions. On p. 614 (V, 642) it consists in our being able to give an account of our assertions; on pp. 643, 644 (V, 671, 672) it consists in the fact that it unites the concepts of the understanding into Ideas, just as the understanding unites the manifold of objects into concepts. On p. 646 (V, 674) it is nothing but the faculty of deriving the particular from the general.

The understanding is also being constantly explained afresh. It is explained in seven passages of the Critique of Pure Reason: thus, on p. 51 (V, 75) it is the faculty of producing representations themselves; on p. 69 (V, 94) it is the faculty of judging, i.e., of thinking, i.e., of knowing through concepts; on p. 137 of the fifth edition, [10] it is the faculty of knowledge in general; on p. 132 (V, 171) it is the faculty of rules, but on p. 158 (V, 197) he says that "It is not only the faculty of rules, but the source of fundamental principles (Grundsatze) according to which everything is under rules"; and yet previously it was opposed to reason, because reason alone was the faculty of principles (Principien). On p. 160 (V, 199) the understanding is the faculty of concepts; but on p. 302 (V, 359) it is the faculty of the unity of phenomena by means of rules.

Against such really confused and groundless utterances on the question (although they come from Kant) I shall have no need to defend the explanations I have advanced of these two faculties of knowledge, for such explanations are fixed, precise, definite, simple, and always agree with the use of language in all nations and all ages. I have quoted them merely as proofs of my reproach that Kant pursues his symmetrical, logical system without reflecting sufficiently on the subject with which he thus deals.

Now, as I have said above, if Kant had seriously investigated to what extent two such different faculties of knowledge, one of which is the distinctive characteristic of mankind, come to be known, and what reason and understanding mean according to the use of language in all nations and by all philosophers, then he would never have divided reason into theoretical and practical without any further authority than the intellectus theoreticus and practicus of the scholastics, who use the terms in an entirely different sense, and he would never have made practical reason the source of virtuous conduct. In the same way, Kant should really have investigated what a concept is in general, before separating so carefully concepts of the understanding (by which he understands partly his categories, partly all common concepts) and concepts of reason (his so-called Ideas), and making them both the material of his philosophy, which for the most part deals only with the validity, application, and origin of all these concepts. But this very necessary investigation, unfortunately, has also been omitted, and this has greatly contributed to the terrible confusion of intuitive and abstract knowledge which I shall shortly demonstrate. The same want of adequate reflection with which he passed over such questions as: What is perception? What is reflection? What is concept? What is reason? What is understanding? caused him also to pass over the following investigations just as absolutely necessary, namely: What do I call the object which I distinguish from the representation? What is existence? What is object? What is subject? What are truth, illusion, error? But he pursues, without reflecting or looking about him, his logical schema and his symmetry. The table of judgements shall and must be the key to all wisdom.

***
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Fri Feb 02, 2018 8:45 pm

Part 2 of 7

I have mentioned it above as Kant's principal merit that he distinguished the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, declared this whole visible world to be phenomenon, and therefore denied to its laws all validity beyond the phenomenon. It is certainly remarkable that he did not trace that merely relative existence of the phenomenon from the simple, undeniable truth which lay so near to him, namely "No object without a subject," in order thus, at the very root, to show that the object, because it always exists only in relation to a subject, is dependent thereon, is conditioned thereby, and is therefore mere phenomenon that does not exist in itself, does not exist unconditionally. Berkeley, to whose merit Kant does not do justice, had already made that important proposition the foundation-stone of his philosophy, and had thus created an immortal reputation for himself. Yet even he did not draw the proper conclusions from that proposition, and so was in part misunderstood, and in part insufficiently attended to. In my first edition, I explained Kant's avoidance of this Berkeleian principle as resulting from a visible fear of decided idealism, whereas, on the other hand, I found this distinctly expressed in many passages of the Critique of Pure Reason, and accordingly accused Kant of contradicting himself. And this reproach was well founded, in so far as the Critique of Pure Reason was at that time known to me only in its second edition, or in the five subsequent editions printed from it. Now when later I read Kant's principal work in the first edition, which had already become scarce, I saw, to my great joy, all those contradictions disappear. I found that, although Kant does not use the formula "No object without subject," he nevertheless, with just as much emphasis as do Berkeley and I, declares the external world lying before us in space and time to be mere representation of the subject that knows it. Thus, for example, he says there (p. 383) without reserve: "If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must cease to exist, as it is nothing but the phenomenon in the sensibility of our subject, and a species of its representations." However, the whole passage from p. 348 to p. 392, in which Kant expounds his decided idealism with great beauty and clarity, was suppressed by him in the second edition. On the other hand, he introduced a number of remarks that controverted it. In this way, the text of the Critique of Pure Reason, as it was in circulation from the year 1787 to 1838, became disfigured and spoilt; it was a self-contradictory book, whose sense therefore could not be thoroughly clear and comprehensible to anyone. In a letter [11] to Professor Rosenkranz, I discussed this in detail, as well as my conjectures regarding the grounds and the weaknesses that could have induced Kant to disfigure his immortal work in such a way. The main passage of this letter was included by Rosenkranz in his preface to the second volume of the edition of Kant's collected works edited by him, to which therefore I refer. In consequence of my representations, Professor Rosenkranz was induced in 1838 to restore the Critique of Pure Reason to its original form, for in the second volume, just mentioned, he had it printed according to the first edition of 1781. In this way he rendered an inestimable service to philosophy; indeed he has possibly rescued from destruction the most important work of German literature; and for this we must always be grateful to him. But let no one imagine he knows the Critique of Pure Reason, and has a clear conception of Kant's teaching, if he has read only the second or one of the subsequent editions. This is absolutely impossible; for he has read only a mutilated, spoilt, and, to a certain extent ungenuine text. It is my duty to state this here emphatically, as a warning to everyone.

However, the way in which Kant introduces the thing-in-itself stands in undeniable contradiction to the fundamental, emphatic, and idealistic view so clearly expressed in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Without doubt this is mainly why, in the second edition, he suppressed the principal idealistic passage previously referred to, and declared himself directly opposed to Berkeley's idealism. By doing this, however, he only introduced inconsistencies into his work, without being able to remedy its main defect. It is well known that this defect is the introduction of the thing-in-itself in the way he chose, whose inadmissibility was demonstrated in detail by G. E. Schulze in Aenesidemus, and which was soon recognized as the untenable point of his system. The matter can be made clear in a very few words. Kant bases the assumption of the thing-in-itself, although concealed under many different turns of expression, on a conclusion according to the law of causality, namely that empirical perception, or more correctly sensation in our organs of sense from which it proceeds, must have an external cause. Now, according to his own correct discovery, the law of causality is known to us a priori, and consequently is a function of our intellect, and so is of subjective origin. Moreover, sensation itself, to which we here apply the law of causality, is undeniably subjective; and finally, even space, in which, by means of this application, we place the cause of the sensation as object, is a form of our intellect given a priori, and is consequently subjective. Therefore the whole of empirical perception remains throughout on a subjective foundation, as a mere occurrence in us, and nothing entirely different from and independent of it can be brought in as a thing-in-itself, or shown to be a necessary assumption. Empirical perception actually is and remains our mere representation; it is the world as representation. We can arrive at its being-in-itself only on the entirely different path I have followed, by means of the addition of self-consciousness, which proclaims the will as the in-itself of our own phenomenon. But then the thing-in-itself becomes something toto genere different from the representation and its elements, as I have explained.

The great defect of the Kantian system in this point, which, as I have said, was soon demonstrated, is an illustration of the beautiful Indian proverb: "No lotus without a stem." Here the stem is the faulty deduction of the thing-in-itself, though only the method of deduction, not the recognition of a thing-in-itself belonging to the given phenomenon. But in this last way Fichte misunderstood it, and this was possible only because he was concerned not with truth, but with making a sensation for the furtherance of his personal ends. Accordingly, he was foolhardy and thoughtless enough altogether to deny the thing-in-itself, and to set up a system in which not the merely formal part of the representation, as with Kant, but also the material, namely its whole content, was ostensibly deduced a priori from the subject. He quite correctly reckoned here on the public's lack of judgement and stupidity, for they accepted wretched sophisms, mere hocus-pocus, and senseless twaddle as proofs, so that he succeeded in turning the public's attention from Kant to himself, and in giving to German philosophy the direction in which it was afterwards carried farther by Schelling, finally reaching its goal in the senseless sham wisdom of Hegel.

I now return to Kant's great mistake, already touched on above, namely that he did not properly separate knowledge of perception from abstract knowledge; from this there arose a terrible confusion which we have now to consider more closely. If he had sharply separated representations of perception from concepts thought merely in abstracto, he would have kept these two apart, and would have known with which of the two he had to deal in each case. Unfortunately this was not the case, although the reproach for this has not yet become known, and is therefore perhaps unexpected. His "object of experience," of which he is constantly speaking, the proper subject of the categories, is not the representation of perception, nor is it the abstract concept; it is different from both, and yet is both at the same time, and is an utter absurdity and impossibility. For, incredible as it seems, he lacked the good sense or the good will to come to an understanding with himself about this, and to explain clearly to others whether his "object of experience, i.e., of the knowledge brought about by the application of the categories," is the representation of perception in space and time (my first class of representations), or merely the abstract concept. Strange as it is, there is constantly running through his mind something between the two, and so there comes about the unfortunate confusion that I must now bring to light. For this purpose I shall have to go over the whole elementary theory in general.

***

The Transcendental Aesthetic is a work of such merit that it alone would be sufficient to immortalize the name of Kant. Its proofs have such a complete power of conviction that I number its propositions among the incontestable truths. They are also undoubtedly among those that are richest in results, and are therefore to be regarded as that rarest thing in the world, a real and great discovery in metaphysics. The fact, which he strictly demonstrates, that we are a priori conscious of a part of our knowledge, admits of no other explanation at all except that this constitutes the forms of our intellect; indeed this is not so much an explanation as merely the distinct expression of the fact itself. For a priori means nothing but "not gained on the path of experience, and hence not come into us from without." Now that which is present in the intellect yet has not come from without, is just that which originally belongs to the intellect itself, namely its own nature. If that which is thus present in the intellect itself consists in the mode and manner in which all its objects must present themselves to it, then this is equivalent to saying that what is thus present is the intellect's forms of knowing, in other words, the mode and manner, settled once for all, in which it fulfils this its function. Accordingly, "knowledge a priori" and "the intellect's own forms" are fundamentally only two expressions for the same thing, and so are, to a certain extent, synonyms.

Therefore, I knew of nothing to take away from the theories of the Transcendental Aesthetic, but only of something to add to them. Kant did not pursue his thought to the very end, especially in not rejecting the whole of the Euclidean method of demonstration, even after he had said on p. 87 (V, 120) that all geometrical knowledge has direct evidence from perception. It is most remarkable that even one of his opponents, in fact the cleverest of them, G. E. Schulze (Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, ii, 241), draws the conclusion that an entirely different treatment of geometry from what is actually in use would result from Kant's teaching. He thus imagines that he is bringing an apagogical argument against Kant, but as a matter of fact, without knowing it, he is beginning a war against the Euclidean method. I refer to § 15 in the first book of the present work.

After the detailed discussion of the universal forms of all perception, given in the Transcendental Aesthetic, we necessarily expect to receive some explanation of its content, of the way in which empirical perception enters our consciousness, of how knowledge of this whole world, for us so real and so important, originates in us. But about this the whole of Kant's teaching really contains nothing but the oft-repeated meaningless expression: "The empirical part of perception is given from without." Therefore, here also from the pure forms of intuition, Kant arrives with one jump at thinking, at the Transcendental Logic. At the very beginning of the Transcendental Logic (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 50; V, 74), where Kant cannot help touching on the material content of empirical perception, he takes the first false step, he commits the [x]. "Our knowledge," he says, "has two sources, receptivity of impressions and spontaneity of concepts: the former is the capacity of receiving representations; the latter is the capacity for knowing an object through these representations. Through the first an object is given to us, through the second it is thought." This is false, for according to this the impression, for which alone we have mere receptivity, which therefore comes from without and alone is really "given," would be already a representation, in fact even an object. But it is nothing more than a mere sensation in the sense-organ, and only by the application of the understanding (i.e., of the law of causality), and of the forms of perception, of space and time, does our intellect convert this mere sensation into a representation. This representation now exists as object in space and time, and cannot be distinguished from the latter (the object) except in so far as we ask about the thing-in-itself; in other respects it is identical with the object. I have discussed this point in detail in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 21. But with this the business of the understanding and of knowledge of perception is finished, and for this no concepts and no thinking are needed in addition; therefore the animal also has these representations. If concepts are added, if thinking is added, to which spontaneity can certainly be attributed, then knowledge of perception is entirely abandoned, and a completely different class of representations, namely non-perceptible, abstract concepts, enters consciousness. This is the activity of reason (Vernunft), which nevertheless has the whole content of its thinking only from the perception that precedes this thinking, and from the comparison of this with other perceptions and concepts. But in this way Kant brings thinking into perception, and lays the foundation for the terrible confusion of intuitive and abstract knowledge which I am here engaged in condemning. He allows perception, taken by itself, to be without understanding, purely sensuous, and thus entirely passive, and only through thinking (category of the understanding) does he allow an object to be apprehended; thus he brings thinking into perception. But then again, the object of thinking is an individual, real object; in this way, thinking loses its essential character of universality and abstraction, and, instead of universal concepts, receives as its object individual things; thus he again brings perception into thinking. From this springs the terrible confusion referred to, and the consequences of this first false step extend over the whole of his theory of knowledge. Through the whole of this, the utter confusion of the representation of perception with the abstract representation tends to a cross between the two, which he describes as the object of knowledge through the understanding and its categories, and this knowledge he calls experience. It is difficult to believe that, in the case of this object of the understanding, Kant pictured to himself something quite definite and really distinct. I shall now prove this by the tremendous contradiction, running through the whole of the Transcendental Logic, which is the real source of the obscurity that envelops it.

Thus in the Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 67-69 (V, 92-94); pp. 89, 90 (V, 122, 123); further, V, 135, 139, 153, he repeats and insists that the understanding is no faculty of perception, that its knowledge is not intuitive but discursive; that the understanding is the faculty of judging (p. 69: V, 94), and a judgement is indirect knowledge, representation of a representation (p. 68: V, 93); that the understanding is the faculty of thinking, and thinking is knowledge through concepts (p. 69: V, 94); that the categories of the understanding are by no means the conditions under which objects are given in perception (p. 89: V, 122), and perception in no way requires the functions of thinking (p. 91: V, 123); that our understanding can only think, not perceive (V, pp. 135, 139). Further, in the Prolegomena, § 20, he says that perception, intuition, perceptio belongs merely to the senses; that judgement belongs only to the understanding; and in § 22, that the business of the senses is to perceive, that of the understanding to think, i.e., to judge. Finally, in the Critique of Practical Reason, fourth edition, p. 247 (Rosenkranz's edition, p. 281) he says that the understanding is discursive, its representations are thoughts, not perceptions. All this is in Kant's own words.

From this it follows that this world of perception would exist for us even if we had no understanding at all, that it comes into our head in an entirely inexplicable way; this he frequently indicates by his curious expression that perception is given, without ever explaining this indefinite and metaphorical expression any further.

Now all that has been quoted is contradicted most flagrantly by all the rest of his doctrine of the understanding, of its categories, and of the possibility of experience, as he explains this in the Transcendental Logic. Thus in the Critique of Pure Reason, p. 79 (V, 105) the understanding through its categories brings unity into the manifold of perception, and the pure concepts of the understanding refer a priori to objects of perception. On p. 94 (V, 126) he says that "the categories are the condition of experience, whether of perception or of thinking that is met with in it." In V, 127, [12] the understanding is the originator of experience. In V, 128,12 the categories determine the perception of the objects. In V, p. 130, [13] all that we represent to ourselves as combined in the object (which is of course something perceptible and not an abstraction), has been combined by an act of the understanding. In V, p. 135, [14] the understanding is explained anew as the faculty of combining a priori, and bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception. According to all ordinary use of language, however, apperception is not the thinking of a concept, but perception. In V, p. 136, [14] we find even a supreme principle of the possibility of all perception in relation to the understanding. In V, p. 143, [15] it is given even as a heading that all sensuous perception is conditioned by the categories. At the very same place, the logical function of the judgements also brings the manifold of given perceptions under an apperception in general, and the manifold of a given perception stands necessarily under the categories. In V, p. 144, [15] unity comes into perception by means of the categories through the understanding. In V, p. 145, [15] the thinking of the understanding is very strangely explained by saying that the understanding synthetizes, combines, and arranges the manifold of perception. In V, p. 161, [15] experience is possible only through the categories, and consists in the connexion of perceptions (Wahrnehmungen) which, however, are just intuitions (Anschauungen). In V, p. 159, [15] the categories are a priori knowledge of the objects of perception in general. Moreover, here and in V, pp. 163 and 165, [15] one of Kant's main doctrines is expressed, namely that the understanding first of all makes nature possible, since it prescribes for her laws a priori, and nature accommodates herself to the constitution of the understanding, and so on. Now nature is certainly perceptible and not an abstraction; accordingly, the understanding would have to be a faculty of perception. In V, p. 168 [15] it is said that the concepts of the understanding are the principles of the possibility of experience, and this is the determining of phenomena in space and time generally, phenomena which, however, certainly exist in perception. Finally, pp. 189-211 (V, 232-265) there is the long proof (whose incorrectness is shown in detail in my essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 23), that the objective succession and also the coexistence of the objects of experience are not sensuously apprehended, but are brought into nature only through the understanding, and that nature herself first becomes possible in this way. But it is certain that nature, the sequence of events, and the coexistence of states, is something purely perceptible, and not something merely thought in the abstract.

I invite everyone who shares my respect for Kant to reconcile these contradictions, and to show that, in his doctrine of the object of experience and of the way in which this object is determined by the activity of the understanding and its twelve functions, Kant conceived something quite distinct and definite. I am convinced that the contradiction I have pointed out, which extends through the whole Transcendental Logic, is the real reason for the great obscurity of its language. In fact, Kant was vaguely aware of the contradiction, inwardly struggled with it, but yet would not or could not bring it to clear consciousness. He therefore wrapped it in mystery for himself and for others, and avoided it by all kinds of subterfuges. Possibly from this it can also be inferred why he made from the faculty of knowledge so strange and complicated a machine, with so many wheels, such as the twelve categories, the transcendental synthesis of imagination, of the inner sense, of the transcendental unity of apperception, also the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, and so on. And notwithstanding this great apparatus, not even an attempt is made to explain the perception of the external world, which is after all the main thing in our knowledge, but this pressing claim is very miserably rejected always by the same meaningless metaphorical expression: "Empirical perception is given to us." On p. 145 [16] of the fifth edition, we learn further that perception is given through the object; consequently, the object must be something different from perception.

Now if we endeavour to examine Kant's innermost meaning, which he himself does not distinctly express, we find that actually such an object different from perception, which, however, is by no means a concept, is for him the proper object for the understanding; indeed that it really must be by the strange assumption of such an object, incapable of representation, that perception first becomes experience. I believe that an old, deep-rooted prejudice in Kant, dead to all investigation, is the ultimate reason for the assumption of such an absolute object that is an object in itself, i.e., one without a subject. It is certainly not the perceived object, but through the concept it is added to perception by thought as something corresponding to perception; and now perception is experience, and has value and truth that it consequently receives only through the relation to a concept (in diametrical opposition to our exposition, according to which the concept obtains value and truth only from perception). It is then the proper function of the categories to add by thought on to perception this object that is not capable of direct representation. "The object is given only through perception, and it is afterwards thought in accordance with the category" (Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, p. 399). This becomes particularly clear from a passage, p. 125 [17] of the fifth edition: "It is now asked whether concepts a priori do not also come first as conditions under which alone something is, although not perceived, yet conceived as object in general," a question he answers in the affirmative. Here the source of the error and the confusion that surrounds it are clearly seen. For the object as such exists always only for and in perception; now perception may be brought about through the senses, or, in the absence of the object, through the power of imagination. What is thought, on the other hand, is always a universal, non-perceptible concept, which can at all events be the concept of an object in general. Only indirectly, however, by means of concepts, is thinking related to objects, and these objects themselves always are and remain perceptible. For our thinking does not help to impart reality to perceptions; this they have in so far as they are capable of it (empirical reality) through themselves; but our thinking does serve to comprehend and embrace the common element and the results of perceptions, in order to be able to preserve them and manipulate them more easily. Kant, however, ascribes the objects themselves to thinking, in order thus to make experience and the objective world dependent on the understanding, yet without letting the understanding be a faculty of perception. In this connexion, he certainly distinguishes perceiving from thinking, but he makes particular things the object sometimes of perception and sometimes of thinking. But actually they are only the object of perception; our empirical perception is at once objective, just because it comes from the causal nexus. Things, and not representations different from them, are directly its object. Individual things as such are perceived in the understanding and through the senses; the one-sided impression on these is at once completed by the power of the imagination. On the other hand, as soon as we pass over to thinking, we leave individual things, and have to do with universal concepts without perceptibility, although afterwards we apply the results of our thinking to individual things. If we stick to this, the inadmissibility is apparent of the assumption that the perception of things obtains reality and becomes experience only through the thought of these very things applying the twelve categories. On the contrary, in perception itself empirical reality, and consequently experience, is already given; but perception can also come about only by the application of knowledge of the causal nexus, the sole function of the understanding, to the sensation of the senses. Accordingly, perception is really intellectual, and this is just what Kant denies.

Besides the passage quoted, Kant's assumption here criticized is also found expressed with admirable clearness in the Critique of Judgement, § 36, at the very beginning; likewise in the Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science, in the note to the first explanation of "Phenomenology." But with a naivety which Kant ventured on least of all in connexion with this doubtful point, it is found most distinctly laid down in the book of a Kantian, namely, Kiesewetter's Grundriss einer allgemeinen Logik, third edition, Part I, p. 434 of the explanation, and Part II, § § 52 and 53 of the explanation; likewise in Tieftrunk's Denklehre in rein Deutschem Gewande (1825). There it is clearly seen how the disciples of every thinker, who do not think for themselves, become the magnifying mirror of his mistakes. Having once decided on his doctrine of the categories, Kant always trod warily when expounding it; the disciples, on the contrary, are quite bold, and thus expose its falseness.

In accordance with what has been said, the object of the categories with Kant is not exactly the thing-in-itself, but yet is very closely akin to it. It is the object-in-itself, an object requiring no subject, an individual thing, and yet not in time and space, because not perceptible; it is object of thinking, and yet not abstract concept. Accordingly, Kant makes a triple distinction: (1) the representation; (2) the object of the representation; (3) the thing-in-itself. The first is the concern of sensibility, which for him includes, simultaneously with sensation, also the pure forms of perception, namely space and time. The second is the concern of the understanding, that adds it in thought through its twelve categories. The third lies beyond all possibility of knowledge. (As proof of this, see pp. 108 and 109 of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.) The distinction between the representation and the object of the representation is, however, unfounded. Berkeley had already demonstrated this, and it follows from the whole of my discussion in the first book, especially from Chapter I of the supplements; in fact it follows from Kant's own wholly idealistic point of view in the first edition. But if we did not wish to reckon the object of the representation as belonging to the representation, and to identify it therewith, we should have to attribute it to the thing-in-itself; in the end this depends on the sense we attach to the word object. However, this much is certain, that, when we reflect clearly, nothing can be found except representation and thing-in-itself. The unwarranted introduction of that hybrid, the object of the representation, is the source of Kant's errors. Yet, when this is removed, the doctrine of the categories as concepts a priori also falls to the ground; for they contribute nothing to perception, and are not supposed to hold good of the thing-in-itself, but by means of them we conceive only those "objects of the representations," and thus convert representation into experience. For every empirical perception is already experience; but every perception that starts from sensation is empirical. By means of its sole function (namely a priori knowledge of the law of causality), the understanding refers this sensation to its cause. In this way the cause presents itself in space and time (forms of pure intuition or perception) as object of experience, material object, enduring in space through all time, but yet as such always remaining representation, just like space and time themselves. If we wish to go beyond this representation, we arrive at the question as to the thing-in-itself, the answer to which is the theme of my whole work, as of all metaphysics in general. Kant's error, here discussed, is connected with the mistake of his which we previously condemned, namely that he gives no theory of the origin of empirical perception, but, without more ado, treats it as given, identifying it with the mere sensation to which he adds only the forms of intuition or perception, namely space and time, comprehending both under the name of sensibility. But still there does not arise any objective representation from these materials. On the contrary, this positively demands a relation of the sensation to its cause, and hence the application of the law of causality, and thus understanding. For without this, the sensation still remains always subjective, and does not put an object into space, even when space is given with it. But according to Kant, the understanding could not be applied to perception; it was supposed merely to think, in order to remain within the Transcendental Logic. With this again is connected another of Kant's mistakes, namely that he left it to me to furnish the only valid proof of the rightly recognized a priori nature of the law of causality, in other words, the proof from the possibility of objective, empirical perception itself. Instead of this, he gives an obviously false proof, as I have shown in my essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 23. From the above, it is clear that Kant's "object of the representation" (2) is made up of what he has stolen partly from the representation (1) and partly from the thing-in-itself (3). If experience actually came about only by our understanding applying twelve different functions, in order to think through just as many concepts a priori the objects that were previously merely perceived, then every real thing as such would have to have a number of determinations, which, being given a priori, just like space and time, could not possibly be thought away, but would belong quite essentially to the existence of the thing, and yet could not be deduced from the properties of space and time. But only a single determination of this kind is to be found, that of causality. On this rests materiality, for the essence of matter consists in action, and it is through and through causality. (See Vol. 2, chap. 4.) But it is materiality alone that distinguishes the real thing from the picture of the imagination, that picture then being only representation. For matter, as permanent, gives the thing permanence through all time according to its matter, while the forms change in conformity with causality. Everything else in the thing is either determinations of space or of time, or its empirical properties, all of which relate to its activity, and are thus fuller determinations of causality. Causality, however, already enters as a condition into empirical perception, and this is accordingly a concern of the understanding, which makes perception possible, but, apart from the law of causality, contributes nothing to experience and its possibility. What fills the old ontologies, apart from what is stated here, is nothing more than relations of things to one another, or to our reflection, and is a scrambled-up hotch-potch.

The style and language of the doctrine of the categories afford an indication of its groundlessness. What a difference in this respect between the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic! In the former, what clearness, definiteness, certainty, firm conviction, openly expressed and infallibly communicated! All is full of light, no dark lurking-places are left; Kant knows what he wants, and knows he is right. In the latter, on the other hand, all is obscure, confused, indefinite, wavering, uncertain; the language is cautious and uneasy, full of excuses and appeals to what is coming, or even to what is withheld. The entire second and third sections of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding are completely changed in the second edition, because they did not satisfy Kant himself, and have become quite different from those in the first edition, although no clearer. We actually see Kant in conflict with the truth, in order to carry out the hypothesis that he has once settled. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, all his propositions are actually demonstrated and proved from undeniable facts of consciousness; in the Transcendental Analytic, on the other hand, when we consider it closely, we find mere assertions that so it is and so it must be. Therefore here, as everywhere, the style bears the stamp of the thinking from which it has arisen, for style is the physiognomy of the mind. Moreover it is to be noted that, whenever Kant wishes to give an example for the purpose of fuller discussion, he almost always takes for this purpose the category of causality, and then what is said turns out to be correct; precisely because the law of causality is the real, but also the only, form of the understanding, and the remaining eleven categories are merely blind windows. The deduction of the categories is simpler and plainer in the first edition than in the second. He endeavours to explain how, according to the perception given by sensibility, the understanding brings about experience by means of thinking the categories. In this connexion, the expressions recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension, transcendental unity of apperception, are repeated ad nauseam, and yet no clarity is reached. It is very remarkable, however, that in this explanation he does not once touch on what must occur to everyone first of all, the relation of the sensation to its external cause. If he did not wish to admit this relation, he should have expressly denied it, but he does not do even this. He therefore furtively manoeuvres round it, and all the Kantians have stealthily evaded it in precisely the same way. The secret motive for this is that he reserves the causal nexus under the name "ground of the phenomenon" for his false deduction of the thing-in-itself, and then that, through the relation to the cause, perception would become intellectual, a thing which he dare not admit. Moreover, he seems to have been afraid that, if the causal nexus were allowed to hold good between sensation and object, the latter would at once become the thing-in-itself, and would introduce Locke's empiricism. But the difficulty is removed by reflection constantly reminding us that the law of causality is of subjective origin, just as is the sensation itself; moreover our own body, in so far as it appears in space, already belongs to representations. But Kant was prevented from admitting this by his fear of Berkeleian idealism.

"The combination of the manifold of perception" is repeatedly stated to be the essential operation of the understanding by means of its twelve categories. Yet this is never properly explained, nor is it shown what this manifold of perception is before the combination by the understanding. Now time and space, the latter in all its three dimensions, are continua, i.e., all their parts are originally not separated but combined. But they are the universal forms of our perception; hence everything that exhibits itself (is given) in them also appears originally as continuum, in other words, its parts already appear as combined, and require no additional combination of the manifold. If, however, we wish to interpret that combination of the manifold of perception by saying that I refer the different sense-impressions of an object only to this one, thus, for example, when perceiving a bell, I recognize that what affects my eye as yellow, my hands as smooth and hard, my ear as emitting sounds, is yet only one and the same body, then this is rather a consequence of the knowledge a priori of the causal nexus (of this actual and sole function of the understanding). By virtue of this knowledge, all those different impressions on my different organs of sense nevertheless lead me only to a common cause of them, namely the constitution of the body that stands before me, so that my understanding, in spite of the variety and plurality of the effects, still apprehends the unity of the cause as a single object exhibiting itself in just this way in perception. In the fine recapitulation of his teaching which Kant gives in the Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 719-726 (V, 747-754), he explains the categories, possibly more clearly than anywhere else, as "the mere rule of the synthesis of what perception or observation may give a posteriori." It seems that something is present in his mind to the effect that in the construction of the triangle the angles furnish the rule for the composition of the lines; at any rate, by this picture we can best explain to ourselves what he says about the function of the categories. The preface to the Metaphysical Rudiments of Natural Science contains a long note, also furnishing an explanation of the categories, and stating that they "differ in no respect from the formal acts of the understanding in judging," except that in the latter, subject and predicate can at all events change places. Then in the same passage the judgement in general is defined as "an act through which the given representations first become knowledge of an object." According to this, as the animals do not judge, they too must necessarily have no knowledge whatever of objects. Generally, according to Kant, there are only concepts of objects, no perceptions. On the other hand, I say that objects exist primarily only for perception, and that concepts are always abstractions from this perception. Therefore abstract thinking must be conducted exactly according to the world present in perception, for only the relation to this world gives content to the concepts, and we cannot assume for the concepts any other a priori determined form than the faculty for reflection in general. The essential nature of this faculty is the formation of concepts, i.e., of abstract non-perceptible representations, and this constitutes the sole function of our faculty of reason, as I have shown in the first book. Accordingly, I demand that we throwaway eleven of the categories, and retain only that of causality, but that we see that its activity is indeed the condition of empirical perception, this being therefore not merely sensuous but intellectual, and that the object thus perceived, the object of experience, is one with the representation from which only the thing-in-itself can still be distinguished.

After repeated study of the Critique of Pure Reason at different periods of my life, a conviction has forced itself on me with regard to the origin of the Transcendental Logic, and I mention it here as being very useful for its understanding. The sole discovery, based on objective apprehension and the highest human thought, is the apercu that time and space are known by us a priori. Gratified by this lucky find, Kant wanted to pursue this vein still farther, and his love for architectonic symmetry gave him the clue. Just as he had found a pure intuition or perception a priori attributed as a condition to empirical perception, so he imagined that certain pure concepts, as presupposition in our faculty of knowledge, would also lie at the root of the empirically acquired concepts. He imagined that empirical, actual thinking would be possible first of all through a pure thinking a priori, which would have no objects at all in itself, but would have to take them from perception. Thus he thought that, just as the Transcendental Aesthetic establishes an a priori basis for mathematics, so must there also be such a basis for logic, and so the former then received a symmetrical pendant in a Transcendental Logic. From now on, Kant was no longer unprejudiced; he was no longer in a condition of pure investigation and observation of what is present in consciousness, but was guided by an assumption and pursued a purpose, that of finding what he presupposed, in order to add to the Transcendental Aesthetic, so fortunately discovered, a Transcendental Logic analogous to it, and thus symmetrically corresponding to it, as a second storey. For this he hit upon the table of judgements, from which he formed as well as he could the table of categories, as the doctrine of twelve pure concepts a priori which were to be the condition of our thinking those very things whose perception is conditioned a priori by the two forms of sensibility. Thus a pure understanding corresponded symmetrically to a pure sensibility. After this, there occurred to him yet another consideration that offered him a means of increasing the plausibility of the thing, by assuming the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding. But precisely in this way is his method of procedure, to him unconscious, most clearly betrayed. Thus, since he aimed at finding for every empirical function of the faculty of knowledge an analogous a priori function, he remarked that, between our empirical perceiving and our empirical thinking, carried out in abstract non-perceptible concepts, a connexion very frequently, though not always, takes place, since every now and then we attempt to go back from abstract thinking to perceiving. We attempt this, however, merely in order really to convince ourselves that our abstract thinking has not strayed far from the safe ground of perception, and has possibly become somewhat high-flown or even a mere idle display of words, much in the same way as, when walking in the dark, we stretch out our hand every now and then to the wall that guides us. We then go back to perception only tentatively and for the moment, by calling up in imagination a perception corresponding to the concept that occupies us at the moment, a perception which yet can never be quite adequate to the concept, but is a mere representative of it for the time being. I have already undertaken the necessary discussion of this in my essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 28. Kant calls a fleeting phantasm of this kind a schema in contrast to the perfected picture of the imagination. He says that it is, so to speak, a monogram of the imagination, and asserts that, just as such a schema stands midway between our abstract thinking of empirically acquired concepts and our clear perception occurring through the senses, so also do there exist a priori similar schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding between the faculty of perception a priori of pure sensibility and the faculty of thinking a priori of the pure understanding (hence the categories). He describes these schemata one by one as monograms of the pure imagination a priori, and assigns each of them to the category corresponding to it, in the strange "Chapter on the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding," which is well known for its great obscurity, since no one has ever been able to make anything out of it. But its obscurity is cleared up if we consider it from the point of view here given; but here more than anywhere else do the intentional nature of Kant's method of procedure and the resolve, arrived at beforehand, to find what would correspond to the analogy, and what might assist the architectonic symmetry, clearly come to light. In fact, this is the case to such a degree that the thing borders on the comical. For, by assuming schemata of the pure (void of content) concepts a priori of the understanding (categories) analogous to the empirical schemata (or representatives of our actual concepts through the imagination), he overlooks the fact that the purpose of such schemata is here entirely wanting. For the purpose of the schemata in the case of empirical (actual) thinking is related solely to the material content of such concepts. For, since these concepts are drawn from empirical perception, we assist ourselves and see where we are, in the case of abstract thinking, by casting now and then a fleeting, retrospective glance at perception from which the concepts are taken, in order to assure ourselves that our thinking still has real content. This, however, necessarily presupposes that the concepts which occupy us have sprung from perception; and it is a mere glance back at their material content, in fact a mere remedy for our weakness. But with concepts a priori, which still have no content at all, obviously this is of necessity omitted; for these have not sprung from perception, but come to it from within, in order first to receive a content from it. Therefore they have as yet nothing on which they could look back. I discuss this point at length, because it is precisely this that throws light on the mysterious method of the Kantian philosophizing. This accordingly consists in the fact that, after the happy discovery of the two forms of intuition or perception a priori, Kant attempts, under the guidance of analogy, to demonstrate for every determination of our empirical knowledge an analogue a priori, and this finally extends in the schemata even to a merely psychological fact. Here the apparent depth of thought and the difficulty of the discussion merely serve to conceal from the reader the fact that its content remains an entirely undemonstrable and merely arbitrary assumption. But whoever finally penetrates the meaning of such an exposition is easily induced to regard this laboriously acquired comprehension as a conviction of the truth of the matter. On the other hand, if Kant had here maintained an unprejudiced and purely observant attitude, as with the discovery of the intuitions or perceptions a priori, he could not but have found that what is added to the pure intuition or perception of space and time, when an empirical perception comes from it, is the sensation on the one hand, and knowledge of causality on the other. This converts the mere sensation into objective empirical perception; yet it is not on this account borrowed and learnt from sensation, but exists a priori, and is just the form and function of the pure understanding. It is also, however, its sole form and function, yet one so rich in results that all our empirical knowledge rests on it. If, as has often been said, the refutation of an error is complete only by our demonstrating psychologically the way in which it originated, then I believe I have achieved this in what I have said above with regard to Kant's doctrine of the categories and of their schemata.

***

After Kant had introduced such great mistakes into the first simple outlines of a theory of the representation-faculty, he took into his head a variety of very complicated assumptions. In connexion with these, we have first of all the synthetic unity of apperception, a very strange thing very strangely described. "The I think must be able to accompany all my representations." Must be able: this is a problematical-apodictic enunciation, or, in plain English, a proposition taking away with one hand what it gives with the other. And what is the meaning of this proposition balanced on a point? That all representing is thinking? Not so: that indeed would be terrible, for then there would be nothing but abstract concepts, or at any rate a pure perception free from reflection and from will, like that of the beautiful, the deepest comprehension of the true essence of things, in other words, of their Platonic Ideas. Then again, the animals would be bound either to think, or not even to have representations. Or is the proposition supposed to mean: No object without subject? This would be very badly expressed by it, and would come too late. If we summarize Kant's utterances, we shall find that what he understands by the synthetic unity of apperception is, so to speak, the extensionless centre of the sphere of all our representations, whose radii converge on it. It is what I call the subject of knowing, the correlative of all representations, and is at the same time what I have described and discussed at length in chapter 22 of the second volume as the focus on which the rays of the brain's activity converge. To that chapter I therefore refer, so as not to repeat myself.

***

That I reject the whole doctrine of the categories, and number it among the groundless assumptions with which Kant burdened the theory of knowledge, follows from the criticism of it given above. In the same way it follows from the demonstration of the contradictions in the Transcendental Logic which had their ground in the confusion of knowledge from perception with abstract knowledge; further, from the demonstration of the want of a distinct and definite conception of the nature of the understanding and of the faculty of reason. Instead of this we found in Kant's works only incoherent, inconsistent, inadequate, and incorrect expressions about those two faculties of the mind. Finally, it results from the explanations that I myself have given in the first book and its supplements, and in even greater detail in the essay On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § § 21, 26, and 34, about the same faculties of the mind. These explanations are very definite and distinct, and clearly result from a consideration of the nature of our knowledge; moreover, they fully agree with the conceptions of those two faculties of knowledge that appear in the language and writings of all ages and all nations, but were not brought to distinct expression. Their defence against the very different Kantian description has for the most part been already given with the exposure of the errors of that description. Now, as the table of judgements, which Kant makes the basis of his theory of thinking and indeed of his whole philosophy, is yet correct in itself and as a whole, it is still incumbent on me to demonstrate how these universal forms of all judgements arise in our faculty of knowledge, and to make them agree with my description of it. In this discussion I shall always associate with the concepts understanding and reason (Vernunft) the sense given to them in my explanation, with which therefore I assume the reader to be familiar.
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