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 » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:01 am

SUPPLEMENTS TO THE FOURTH BOOK.

Tous les hommes desirent uniquement de se dilivrer de la mort: ils ne savent pas se delivrer de la vie.

-- Lao-tse, Tao-te-king, ed. Stanislas Julien, p. 184.

["All men desire solely to free themselves from death; they do not know how to free themselves from life." -- Tr.]


SUPPLEMENTS TO THE FOURTH BOOK

CHAPTER XL: Preface


The supplements to this fourth book would be very considerable, were it not that two of their principal subjects specially in need of a supplement, the freedom of the will and the foundation of morality, were fully discussed by me in the form of a monograph, and offered to the public in the year 1841 under the title The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, on the occasion of prize-questions set by two Scandinavian Academies. Accordingly I assume on the part of my readers an acquaintance with the work just mentioned, just as unconditionally as in the case of the supplements to Book II I assumed an acquaintance with the work On the Will in Nature. In general, I make the demand that whoever wishes to make himself acquainted with my philosophy shall read every line of me. For I am not a prolific writer, a fabricator of compendiums, an earner of fees, a person who aims with his writings at the approbation and assent of a minister; in a word, one whose pen is under the influence of personal ends. I aspire to nothing but the truth, and I write as the ancients wrote with the sole object of preserving my thoughts, so that they may one day benefit those who know how to meditate on them and appreciate them. I have therefore written little, but this little with reflection and at long intervals; accordingly, I have also confined within the smallest possible limits the repetitions, sometimes unavoidable in philosophical works on account of continuity and sequence, from which no single philosopher is free, so that most of what I have to say is to be found only in one place. Therefore, whoever wants to learn from me and to understand me must not leave unread anything that I have written. Yet without this people can criticize and condemn me, as experience has shown; and for this also I further wish them much pleasure.

However, the space gained in this fourth book of supplements by the aforesaid elimination of two main subjects will be welcome. For as those explanations which are above all close to man's heart, and therefore form in every system, as ultimate results, the culminating point of its pyramid, are also concentrated in my last book, a larger space will gladly be granted to every more solid and positive proof, or to its more detailed discussion. Moreover, we have been able to introduce here a discussion which belongs to the doctrine of the "affirmation of the will-to-live," and which was left untouched in our fourth book itself, just as it has been entirely neglected by all philosophers before me. This is the inner significance and real nature of sexual love, which sometimes rises to the most intense passion, a subject the taking up of which in the ethical part of philosophy would not be paradoxical, if its importance had been recognized.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:06 am

Part 1 of 3

CHAPTER XLI: On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature [1]

Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as [x]. [2] Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing. It will therefore be quite in order for a special consideration of this subject to have its place here at the beginning of the last, most serious, and most important of our books.

The animal lives without any real knowledge of death; therefore the individual animal immediately enjoys the absolute imperishableness and immortality of the species, since it is conscious of itself only as endless. With man the terrifying certainty of death necessarily appeared along with the faculty of reason. But just as everywhere in nature a remedy, or at any rate a compensation, is given for every evil, so the same reflection that introduced the knowledge of death also assists us in obtaining metaphysical points of view. Such views console us concerning death, and the animal is neither in need of nor capable of them. All religions and philosophical systems are directed principally to this end, and are thus primarily the antidote to the certainty of death which reflecting reason produces from its own resources. The degree in which they attain this end is, however, very different, and one religion or philosophy will certainly enable man, far more than the others will, to look death calmly in the face. Brahmanism and Buddhism, which teach man to regard himself as Brahman, as the original being himself, to whom all arising and passing away are essentially foreign, will achieve much more in this respect than will those religions that represent man as being made out of nothing and as actually beginning at his birth the existence he has received from another. In keeping with this we find in India a confidence and a contempt for death of which we in Europe have no conception. It is indeed a ticklish business to force on man through early impression weak and untenable notions in this important respect, and thus to render him for ever incapable of adopting more correct and stable views. For example, to teach him that he came but recently from nothing, that consequently he has been nothing throughout an eternity, and yet for the future is to be imperishable and immortal, is just like teaching him that, although he is through and through the work of another, he shall nevertheless be responsible to all eternity for his commissions and omissions. Thus if with a mature mind and with the appearance of reflection the untenable nature of such doctrines forces itself on him, he has nothing better to put in their place; in fact, he is no longer capable of understanding anything better, and in this way is deprived of the consolation that nature had provided for him as compensation for the certainty of death. In consequence of such a development, we now (1844) see in England the Socialists among the demoralized and corrupted factory workers, and in Germany the young Hegelians among the demoralized and corrupted students, sink to the absolutely physical viewpoint. This leads to the result: edite, bibite, post mortem nulla voluptas, [3] and to this extent can be described as bestiality.

According, however, to all that has been taught about death, it cannot be denied that, at any rate in Europe, the opinion of men, often in fact even of the same individual, very frequently vacillates afresh between the conception of death as absolute annihilation and the assumption that we are, so to speak with skin and hair, immortal. Both are equally false, but we have not so much to find a correct mean as rather to gain the higher standpoint from which such views disappear of themselves.

With these considerations, I wish to start first of all from the entirely empirical viewpoint. Here we have primarily before us the undeniable fact that, according to natural consciousness, man not only fears death for his own person more than anything else, but also weeps violently over the death of his friends and relations. It is evident, indeed, that he does this not egoistically over his own loss, but out of sympathy for the great misfortune that has befallen them. He therefore censures as hard-hearted and unfeeling those who in such a case do not weep and show no grief. Parallel with this is the fact that, in its highest degrees, the thirst for revenge seeks the death of the adversary as the greatest evil that can be inflicted on him. Opinions change according to time and place, but the voice of nature remains always and everywhere the same, and is therefore to be heeded before everything else. Now here it seems clearly to assert that death is a great evil. In the language of nature, death signifies annihilation; and that death is a serious matter could already be inferred from the fact that, as everyone knows, life is no joke. Indeed we must not deserve anything better than these two.

The fear of death is, in fact, independent of all knowledge, for the animal has it, although it does not know death. Everything that is born already brings this fear into the world. Such fear of death, however, is a priori only the reverse side of the will-to-live, which indeed we all are. Therefore in every animal the fear of its own destruction, like the care for its maintenance, is inborn. Thus it is this fear of death, and not the mere avoidance of pain, that shows itself in the anxious care and caution with which the animal seeks to protect itself, and still more its brood, from everyone who might become dangerous. Why does the animal flee, tremble, and try to conceal itself? Because it is simply the will-to-live, but as such it is forfeit to death and would like to gain time. By nature man is just the same. The greatest of evils, the worst thing that can threaten anywhere, is death; the greatest anxiety is the anxiety of death. Nothing excites us so irresistibly to the most lively interest as does danger to the lives of others; nothing is more dreadful than an execution. Now the boundless attachment to life which appears here cannot have sprung from knowledge and reflection. To these, on the contrary, it appears foolish, for the objective value of life is very uncertain, and it remains at least doubtful whether existence is to be preferred to nonexistence; in fact, if experience and reflection have their say, nonexistence must certainly win. If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads. In Plato's Apology this is also the opinion of Socrates, and even the cheerful and amiable Voltaire cannot help saying: On aime la vie; mais le neant ne laisse pas d'avoir du bon: and again: Je ne sais pas ce que c'est que la vie eternelle, mais celle-ci est une mauvaise plaisantetie. [4] Moreover, in any case life must end soon, so that the few years which possibly we have still to exist vanish entirely before the endless time when we shall be no more. Accordingly, to reflection it appears even ludicrous for us to be so very anxious about this span of time, to tremble so much when our own life or another's is endangered, and to write tragedies whose terrible aspect has as its main theme merely the fear of death. Consequently, this powerful attachment to life is irrational and blind; it can be explained only from the fact that our whole being-in-itself is the will-to-live, to which life therefore must appear as the highest good, however embittered, short, and uncertain it may be; and that that will is originally and in itself without knowledge and blind. Knowledge, on the contrary, far from being the origin of that attachment to life, even opposes it, since it discloses life's worthlessness, and in this way combats the fear of death. When it is victorious, and man accordingly faces death courageously and calmly, this is honoured as great and noble. Therefore we then extol the triumph of knowledge over the blind will-to-live which is nevertheless the kernel of our own inner being. In the same way we despise him in whom knowledge is defeated in that conflict, who therefore clings unconditionally to life, struggles to the utmost against approaching death, and receives it with despair; [5] yet in him is expressed only the original inner being of our own self and of nature. Incidentally, it may here be asked how the boundless love of life and the endeavour to maintain it in every way as long as possible could be regarded as base and contemptible, and likewise considered by the followers of every religion as unworthy thereof, if life were the gift of the good gods to be acknowledged with thanks. How then could it appear great and noble to treat it with contempt? Meanwhile, these considerations confirm for us: (1) that the will-to-live is the innermost essence of man; (2) that in itself the will is without knowledge and blind; (3) that knowledge is an adventitious principle, originally foreign to the will; (4) that knowledge conflicts with the will, and our judgement applauds the triumph of knowledge over the will.

If what makes death seem so terrible to us were the thought of non-existence, we should necessarily think with equal horror of the time when as yet we did not exist. For it is irrefutably certain that non-existence after death cannot be different from non-existence before birth, and is therefore no more deplorable than that is. An entire infinity ran its course when we did not yet exist, but this in no way disturbs us. On the other hand, we find it hard, and even unendurable, that after the momentary intermezzo of an ephemeral existence, a second infinity should follow in which we shall exist no longer. Now could this thirst for existence possibly have arisen through our having tasted it and found it so very delightful? As was briefly set forth above, certainly not; the experience gained would far rather have been capable of causing an infinite longing for the lost paradise of non-existence. To the hope of immortality of the soul there is always added that of a "better world"; an indication that the present world is not worth much. Notwithstanding all this, the question of our state after death has certainly been discussed verbally and in books ten thousand times more often than that of our state before birth. Theoretically, however, the one is a problem just as near at hand and just as legitimate as the other; moreover, he who answered the one would likewise be fully enlightened about the other. We have fine declamations about how shocking it would be to think that the mind of man, which embraces the world and has so many excellent ideas, should sink with him into the grave; but we hear nothing about this mind having allowed a whole infinity of time to elapse before it arose with these its qualities, and how for just as long a time the world had to manage without it. Yet to knowledge uncorrupted by the will no question presents itself more naturally than this, namely: An infinite time has run its course before my birth; what was I throughout all that time? Metaphysically, the answer might perhaps be: "I was always I; that is, all who throughout that time said I, were just I." But let us turn away from this to our present entirely empirical point of view, and assume that I did not exist at all. But I can then console myself for the infinite time after my death when I shall not exist, with the infinite time when I did not as yet exist, as a quite customary and really very comfortable state. For the infinity a parte post [6] without me cannot be any more fearful than the infinity a parte ante [6] without me, since the two are not distinguished by anything except by the intervention of an ephemeral life-dream. All proofs of continued existence after death may also be applied just as well in partem ante, where they then demonstrate existence before life, in assuming which the Hindus and Buddhists therefore show themselves to be very consistent. Only Kant's ideality of time solves all these riddles; but we are not discussing this at the moment. But this much follows from what has been said, namely that to mourn for the time when we shall no longer exist is just as absurd as it would be to mourn for the time when we did not as yet exist; for it is all the same whether the time our existence does not fill is related to that which it does fill as future or as past.

But quite apart even from these considerations of time, it is in and by itself absurd to regard non-existence as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even consciousness. But this ceases with life, as well as in sleep and in a fainting fit; therefore the absence of consciousness is well known and familiar to us as a state containing no evil at all; in any case, its occurrence is a matter of a moment. Epicurus considered death from this point of view, and therefore said quite rightly: [x] (Death does not concern us), with the explanation that when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not (Diogenes Laertius, x, 27). To have lost what cannot be missed is obviously no evil; therefore we ought to be just as little disturbed by the fact that we shall not exist as by the fact that we did not exist. Accordingly, from the standpoint of knowledge, there appears to be absolutely no ground for fearing death; but consciousness consists in knowing, and thus for consciousness death is no evil. Moreover, it is not really this knowing part of our ego that fears death, but fuga mortis comes simply and solely from the blind will, with which every living thing is filled. But, as already mentioned, this fuga mortis is essential to it, just because it is the will-to-live, whose whole inner nature consists in a craving for life and existence. Knowledge is not originally inherent in it, but appears only in consequence of the will's objectification in animal individuals. Now if by means of knowledge the will beholds death as the end of the phenomenon with which it has identified itself, and to which it therefore sees itself limited, its whole nature struggles against this with all its might. We shall investigate later on whether it really has anything to fear from death, and shall then remember the real source of the fear of death which is indicated here with a proper distinction between the willing and knowing part of our true nature.

According to this, what makes death so terrible for us is not so much the end of life -- for this cannot seem to anyone specially worthy of regret -- as the destruction of the organism, really because this organism is the will itself manifested as body. But actually, we feel this destruction only in the evils of illness or of old age; on the other hand, for the subject, death itself consists merely in the moment when consciousness vanishes, since the activity of the brain ceases. The extension of the stoppage to all the other parts of the organism which follows this is really already an event after death. Therefore, in a subjective respect, death concerns only consciousness. Now from going to sleep everyone can, to some extent, judge what the vanishing of consciousness may be; and whoever has had a real fainting fit knows it even better. The transition here is not so gradual, nor is it brought about by dreams; but first of all, while we are still fully conscious, the power of sight disappears, and then immediately supervenes the deepest unconsciousness. As far as the accompanying sensation goes, it is anything but unpleasant; and undoubtedly just as sleep is the brother of death, so is the fainting fit its twin-brother. Violent death also cannot be painful, for, as a rule, even severe wounds are not felt at all till some time afterwards, and are often noticed only from their external symptoms. If they are rapidly fatal, consciousness will vanish before this discovery; if they result in death later, it is the same as with other illnesses. All who have lost consciousness in water, through charcoal fumes, or through hanging, also state, as is well known, that it happened without pain. And finally, even death through natural causes proper, death through old age, euthanasia, is a gradual vanishing and passing out of existence in an imperceptible manner. In old age, passions and desires, together with the susceptibility to their objects, are gradually extinguished; the emotions no longer find any excitement, for the power to make representations or mental pictures becomes weaker and weaker, and its images feebler. The impressions no longer stick to us, but pass away without a trace; the days roll by faster and faster; events lose their significance; everything grows pale. The old man, stricken in years, totters about or rests in a corner, now only a shadow, a ghost, of his former self. What still remains there for death to destroy? One day a slumber is his last, and his dreams are ---. They are the dreams that Hamlet asks about in the famous monologue. I believe that we dream them just now.

I have still to observe that, although the maintenance of the life-process has a metaphysical basis, it does not take place without resistance, and hence without effort. It is this to which the organism yields every evening, for which reason it then suspends the brain-function, and diminishes certain secretions, respiration, pulse, and the development of heat. From this it may be concluded that the entire cessation of the life-process must be a wonderful relief for its driving force. Perhaps this is partly responsible for the expression of sweet contentment on the faces of most of the dead. In general, the moment of dying may be similar to that of waking from a heavy nightmare.

So far, the result for us is that death cannot really be an evil, however much it is feared, but that it often appears even as a good thing, as something desired, as a friend. All who have encountered insuperable obstacles to their existence or to their efforts, who suffer from incurable disease or from inconsolable grief, have the return into the womb of nature as the last resource that is often open to them as a matter of course. Like everything else, they emerged from this womb for a short time, enticed by the hope of more favourable conditions of existence than those that have fallen to their lot, and from this the same path always remains open to them. That return is the cessio bonorum [7] of the living. Yet even here it is entered into only after a physical or moral conflict, so hard does everyone struggle against returning to the place from which he came forth so readily and willingly to an existence that has so many sorrows and so few joys to offer. To Yama, the god of death, the Hindus give two faces, one very fearful and terrible, one very cheerful and benevolent. This is already explained in part from the observations we have just made.

From the empirical standpoint, at which we are still placed, the following consideration is one which presents itself automatically, and therefore merits being defined accurately by elucidation, and thus kept within its limits. The sight of a corpse shows me that sensibility, irritability, blood circulation, reproduction, and so on in it have ceased. From this I conclude with certainty that that which previously actuated them, which was nevertheless something always unknown to me, now actuates them no longer, and so has departed from them. But if I now wished to add that this must have been just what I have known only as consciousness, and consequently as intelligence (soul), this would be a conclusion not merely unjustified, but obviously false. For consciousness has always shown itself to me not as the cause, but as a product and result of organic life, since it rose and sank in consequence thereof at the different periods of life, in health and sickness, in sleep, in a faint, in awaking, and so on. Thus it always appeared as the effect, never as a cause, of organic life, always showed itself as something arising and passing away and again arising, so long as the conditions for this still exist, but not apart from them. Indeed, I may also have seen that the complete derangement of consciousness, madness, far from dragging down with it and depressing the other forces, or even endangering life, greatly enhances these, especially irritability or muscular force, and lengthens rather than shortens life, if there are no other competing causes. Then I knew individuality as a quality or attribute of everything organic, and when this was a self-conscious organism, of consciousness also. But there exists no occasion for concluding now that individuality is inherent in that vanished principle which imparts life and is wholly unknown to me; the less so, as everywhere in nature I see each particular phenomenon to be the work of a universal force active in thousands of similar phenomena. But on the other hand there is just as little occasion for concluding that, because organized life has here ceased, the force that actuated it hitherto has also become nothing; just as little as there is to infer from the stopping of the spinning-wheel the death of the spinner. If, by finding its centre of gravity again, a pendulum finally comes to rest, and thus its individual apparent life has ceased, no one will suppose that gravitation is annihilated, but everyone sees that now as always it is active in innumerable phenomena. Of course, it might be objected to this comparison that even in the pendulum gravitation has not ceased to be active, but has merely given up manifesting its activity visibly. He who insists on this may think, instead, of an electrical body in which, after its discharge, electricity has really ceased to be active. I wished only to show by this that we directly attribute an eternity and ubiquity even to the lowest forces of nature; and the transitoriness of their fleeting phenomena does not for a moment confuse us with regard thereto. So much the less, therefore, should it occur to us to regard the cessation of life as the annihilation of the living principle, and thus death as the entire destruction of man. Because the strong arm that three thousand years ago bent the bow of Ulysses no longer exists, no reflective and well-regulated understanding will look upon the force that acted so energetically in it as entirely annihilated. Therefore, on further reflection, it will not be assumed that the force that bends the bow today, first began to exist with that arm. Much nearer to us is the idea that the force that formerly actuated a life now vanished is the same force that is active in the life now flourishing; indeed this thought is almost inevitable. However, we certainly know that, as was explained in the second book, only that is perishable which is involved in the causal chain; but merely the states and forms are so involved. Untouched, however, by the change of these, which is produced by causes, there remain matter on the one hand, and the natural forces on the other; for both are the presupposition of all those changes. But the principle that gives us life must first be conceived at any rate as a force of nature, until a profounder investigation may perhaps let us know what it is in itself. Thus, taken already as a force of nature, vital force remains entirely untouched by the change of forms and states, which the bond of cause and effect introduces and carries off again, and which alone are subject to arising and passing away, just as these processes lie before us in experience. To this extent, therefore, the imperishableness of our true inner nature could already be certainly demonstrated. But this, of course, will not satisfy the claims usually made on proofs of our continued existence after death, nor will it afford the consolation expected from such proofs. Yet it is always something, and whoever fears death as his absolute annihilation cannot afford to disdain the perfect certainty that the innermost principle of his life remains untouched by it. In fact, we might advance the paradox that that second thing which, like the forces of nature, remains untouched by the continuous change of states under the guidance of causality, i.e., matter, also assures us through its absolute permanence of an indestructibility; and by virtue of this, he who might be incapable of grasping any other could yet be confident of a certain imperishability. But it will be asked: "How is the permanence of mere dust, of crude matter, to be regarded as a continuance of our true inner nature?" Oh! do you know this dust then? Do you know what it is and what it can do? Learn to know it before you despise it. This matter, now lying there as dust and ashes, will soon form into crystals when dissolved in water; it will shine as metal; it will then emit electric sparks. By means of its galvanic tension it will manifest a force which, decomposing the strongest and firmest combinations, reduces earths to metals. It will, indeed of its own accord, form itself into plant and animal; and from its mysterious womb it will develop that life, about the loss of which you in your narrowness of mind are so nervous and anxious. Is it, then, so absolutely and entirely nothing to continue to exist as such matter? Indeed, I seriously assert that even this permanence of matter affords evidence of the indestructibility of our true inner being, although only as in an image and simile, or rather only as in a shadowy outline. To see this, we need only recall the discussion on matter given in chapter 24, the conclusion of which was that mere formless matter -- this basis of the world of experience, never perceived by itself alone, but assumed as always permanent -- is the immediate reflection, the visibility in general, of the thing-in-itself, that is, of the will. Therefore, what absolutely pertains to the will in itself holds good of matter under the conditions of experience, and it reproduces the true eternity of the will under the image of temporal imperishability. Because, as we have already said, nature does not lie, no view which has sprung from a purely objective comprehension of her, and has been logically thought out, can be absolutely and entirely false; in the worst case it is only very one-sided and imperfect. But such a view is unquestionably consistent materialism, for instance that of Epicurus, just as is the absolute idealism opposed to it, like that of Berkeley, and generally every fundamental view of philosophy which has come from a correct apercu and has been honestly worked out. Only they are all extremely one-sided interpretations, and therefore, in spite of their contrasts, are simultaneously true, each from a definite point of view, But as soon as we rise above this point, they appear to be true only relatively and conditionally. The highest standpoint alone, from which we survey them all and recognize them in their merely relative truth, and also beyond this in their falseness, can be that of absolute truth, in so far as such a truth is in general attainable. Accordingly, as was shown above, we see even in the really very crude, and therefore very old, fundamental view of materialism the indestructibility of our true inner being-in-itself still represented as by a mere shadow of it, namely through the imperishability of matter; just as in the already higher naturalism of an absolute physics we see it represented by the ubiquity and eternity of natural forces, among which vital force is at least to be reckoned. Hence even these crude fundamental views contain the assertion that the living being does not suffer any absolute annihilation through death, but continues to exist in and with the whole of nature.

The considerations which have brought us to this point, and with which the further discussions are connected, started from the remarkable fear of death which affects all living beings. But now we wish to alter the point of view, and to consider how, in contrast to individual beings, the whole of nature behaves with regard to death; yet here we still remain always on the ground and soil of the empirical.

We know, of course, of no higher gamble than that for life and death. We watch with the utmost attention, interest, and fear every decision concerning them; for in our view all in all is at stake. On the other hand, nature, which never lies, but is always frank and sincere, speaks quite differently on this theme, as Krishna does in the Bhagavadgita. Her statement is that the life or death of the individual is of absolutely no consequence. She expresses this by abandoning the life of every animal, and even of man, to the most insignificant accidents without coming to the rescue. Consider the insect on your path; a slight unconscious turning of your foot is decisive as to its life or death. Look at the wood-snail that has no means of flight, of defence, of practising deception, of concealment, a ready prey to all. Look at the fish carelessly playing in the still open net; at the frog prevented by its laziness from the flight that could save it; at the bird unaware of the falcon soaring above it; at the sheep eyed and examined from the thicket by the wolf. Endowed with little caution, all these go about guilelessly among the dangers which at every moment threaten their existence. Now, since nature abandons without reserve her organisms constructed with such inexpressible skill, not only to the predatory instinct of the stronger, but also to the blindest chance, the whim of every fool, and the mischievousness of every child, she expresses that the annihilation of these individuals is a matter of indifference to her, does her no harm, is of no significance at all, and that in these cases the effect is of no more consequence than is the cause. Nature states this very clearly, and she never lies; only she does not comment on her utterances, but rather expresses them in the laconic style of the oracle. Now if the universal mother carelessly sends forth her children without protection to a thousand threatening dangers, this can be only because she knows that, when they fall, they fall back into her womb, where they are safe and secure; therefore their fall is only a jest. With man she does not act otherwise than she does with the animals; hence her declaration extends also to him; the life or death of the individual is a matter of indifference to her. Consequently, they should be, in a certain sense, a matter of indifference to us; for in fact, we ourselves are nature. If only we saw deeply enough, we should certainly agree with nature, and regard life or death as indifferently as does she. Meanwhile, by means of reflection, we must attribute nature's careless and indifferent attitude concerning the life of individuals to the fact that the destruction of such a phenomenon does not in the least disturb its true and real inner being.

As we have just been considering, not only are life and death dependent on the most trifling accidents, but the existence of organic beings generally is also ephemeral; animal and plant arise today and tomorrow pass away; birth and death follow in quick succession, whereas to inorganic things, standing so very much lower, an incomparably longer duration is assured, but an infinitely long one only to absolutely formless matter, to which we attribute this even a priori. Now if we ponder over all this, I think the merely empirical, but objective and unprejudiced, comprehension of such an order of things must be followed as a matter of course by the thought that this order is only a superficial phenomenon, that such a constant arising and passing away cannot in any way touch the root of things, but can be only relative, indeed only apparent. The true inner being of everything, which, moreover, evades our glance everywhere and is thoroughly mysterious, is not affected by that arising and passing away, but rather continues to exist undisturbed thereby. Of course, we can neither perceive nor comprehend the way in which this happens, and must therefore think of it only generally as a kind of tour de passe-passe [8] that took place here. For whereas the most imperfect thing, the lowest, the inorganic, continues to exist unassailed, it is precisely the most perfect beings, namely living things with their infinitely complicated and inconceivably ingenious organizations, which were supposed always to arise afresh from the very bottom, and after a short span of time to become absolutely nothing, in order to make room once more for new ones like them coming into existence out of nothing. This is something so obviously absurd that it can never be the true order of things, but rather a mere veil concealing such an order, or more correctly a phenomenon conditioned by the constitution of our intellect. In fact, the entire existence and non-existence of these individual beings, in reference to which life and death are opposites. can be only relative. Hence the language of nature, in which it is given to us as something absolute, cannot be the true and ultimate expression of the quality and constitution of things and of the order of the world, but really only a patois du pays, [9] in other words, something merely relatively true, something self-styled, to be understood cum grano salis, or properly speaking, something conditioned by our intellect. I say that an immediate, intuitive conviction of the kind I have here tried to describe in words will force itself on everyone, of course only on everyone whose mind is not of the utterly common species. Such common minds are capable of knowing absolutely only the particular thing, simply and solely as such, and are strictly limited to knowledge of individuals, after the manner of the animal intellect. On the other hand, whoever, through an ability of an only somewhat higher power, even just begins to see in individual beings their universal, their Ideas, will also to a certain extent participate in that conviction, a conviction indeed that is immediate and therefore certain. Indeed, it is also only small, narrow minds that quite seriously fear death as their annihilation; those who are specially favoured with decided capacity are entirely remote from such terrors. Plato rightly founded the whole of philosophy on knowledge of the doctrine of Ideas, in other words, on the perception of the universal in the particular. But the conviction here described and arising directly out of the apprehension of nature must have been extremely lively in those sublime authors of the Upanishads of the Vedas, who can scarcely be conceived as mere human beings. For this conviction speaks to us so forcibly from an immense number of their utterances that we must ascribe this immediate illumination of their mind to the fact that, standing nearer to the origin of our race as regards time, these sages apprehended the inner essence of things more clearly and profoundly than the already enfeebled race, , [10] is capable of doing. But, of course, their comprehension was also assisted by the natural world of India, which is endowed with life in quite a different degree from that in which our northern world is. Thorough reflection, however, as carried through by Kant's great mind, also leads to just the same result by a different path; for it teaches us that our intellect, in which that rapidly changing phenomenal world exhibits itself, does not comprehend the true, ultimate essence of things, but merely its appearance or phenomenon; and indeed, as I add, because originally such an intellect is destined only to present motives to our will, in other words, to be serviceable to it in the pursuit of its paltry aims.

But let us continue still farther our objective and unprejudiced consideration of nature. If I kill an animal, be it a dog, a bird, a frog, or even only an insect, it is really inconceivable that this being, or rather the primary and original force by virtue of which such a marvellous phenomenon displayed itself only a moment before in its full energy and love of life, could through my wicked or thoughtless act have become nothing. Again, on the other hand, the millions of animals of every kind which come into existence at every moment in endless variety, full of force and drive, can never have been absolutely nothing before the act of their generation, and can never have arrived from nothing to an absolute beginning. If in this way I see one of these creatures withdraw from my sight without my ever knowing where it goes to, and another appear without my ever knowing where it comes from; moreover, if both still have the same form, the same inner nature, the same character, but not the same matter, which they nevertheless continue to throw off and renew during their existence; then of course the assumption that what vanishes and what appears in its place are one and the same thing, which has experienced only a slight change, a renewal of the form of its existence, and consequently that death is for the species what sleep is for the individual -- this assumption, I say, is so close at hand, that it is impossible for it not to occur to us, unless our minds, perverted in early youth by the impression of false i fundamental views, hurry it out of the way, even from afar, with superstitious fear. But the opposite assumption that an animal's birth is an arising out of nothing, and accordingly that its death is an absolute annihilation, and this with the further addition that man has also come into existence out of nothing, yet has an individual and endless future existence, and that indeed with consciousness, whereas the dog, the ape, and the elephant are annihilated by death -- is really something against which the sound mind must revolt, and must declare to be absurd. If, as is often enough repeated, the comparison of a system's result with the utterances of common sense is supposed to be a touchstone of its truth, I wish that the adherents of that fundamental view, handed down by Descartes to the pre-Kantian eclectics, and indeed still prevalent even now among the great majority of cultured people in Europe, would once apply this touchstone here.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:06 am

Part 2 of 3

The genuine symbol of nature is universally and everywhere the circle, because it is the schema or form of recurrence; in fact, this is the most general form in nature. She carries it through in everything from the course of the constellations down to the death and birth of organic beings. In this way alone, in the restless stream of time and its content, a continued existence, i.e., a nature, becomes possible.

In autumn we observe the tiny world of insects, and see how one prepares its bed, in order to sleep the long, benumbing winter-sleep; another spins a cocoon, in order to hibernate as a chrysalis, and to awake in spring rejuvenated and perfected; finally, how most of them, intending to rest in the arms of death, carefully arrange a suitable place for depositing their eggs, in order one day to come forth from these renewed. This is nature's great doctrine of immortality, which tries to make it clear to us that there is no radical difference between sleep and death, but that the one endangers existence just as little as the other. The care with which the insect prepares a cell, or hole, or nest, deposits therein its egg, together with food for the larva that will emerge from it in the following spring, and then calmly dies, is just like the care with which a person in the evening lays out his clothes and his breakfast ready for the following morning, and then calmly goes to bed; and at bottom it could not take place at all, unless the insect that dies in autumn were in itself and according to its true essence just as identical with the insect hatched in spring as the person who lies down to sleep is with the one who gets up.

After these considerations, we now return to ourselves and our species; we then cast our glance forward far into the future, and try to picture to ourselves future generations with the millions of their individuals in the strange form of their customs and aspirations. But then we interpose with the question: Whence will all these come? Where are they now? Where is the abundant womb of that nothing which is pregnant with worlds, and which still conceals them, the corning generations? Would not the smiling and true answer to this be: Where else could they be but there where alone the real always was and will be, namely in the present and its content? -- hence with you, the deluded questioner, who in this mistaking of his own true nature is like the leaf on the tree. Fading in the autumn and about to fall, this leaf grieves over its own extinction, and will not be consoled by looking forward to the fresh green which will clothe the tree in spring, but says as a lament: "I am not these! These are quite different leaves!" Oh, foolish leaf! Whither do you want to go? And whence are the others supposed to come? Where is the nothing, the abyss of which you fear? Know your own inner being, precisely that which is so filled with the thirst for existence; recognize it once more in the inner, mysterious, sprouting force of the tree. This force is always one and the same in all the generations of leaves, and it remains untouched by arising and passing away. And now

Qualis foliorum generatio, talis et hominum. [11]


Whether the fly now buzzing round me goes to sleep in the evening and buzzes again the following morning, or whether it dies in the evening and in spring another fly buzzes which has emerged from its egg, this in itself is the same thing. But then the knowledge that presents these as two fundamentally different things is not unconditioned, but relative, a knowledge of the phenomenon, not of the thing-in-itself. In the morning the fly exists again; it also exists again in the spring. For the fly what distinguishes the winter from the night? In Burdach's Physiologie, Vol. I, § 275, we read: "Up till ten o'clock in the morning no Cercaria ephemera (one of the infusoria) is yet to be seen (in the infusion), and at twelve the whole water swarms with them. In the evening they die, and the next morning new ones come into existence again. It was thus observed for six days in succession by Nitzsch."

Thus everything lingers only for a moment, and hurries on to death. The plant and the insect die at the end of the summer, the animal and man after a few years; death reaps unweariedly. But despite all this, in fact as if this were not the case at all, everything is always there and in its place, just as if everything were imperishable. The plant always flourishes and blooms, the insect hums, animal and man are there in evergreen youth, and every summer we again have before us the cherries that have already been a thousand times enjoyed. Nations also exist as immortal individuals, though sometimes they change their names. Even their actions, what they do and suffer, are always the same, though history always pretends to relate something different; for it is like the kaleidoscope, that shows us a new configuration at every turn, whereas really we always have the same thing before our eyes. Therefore, what forces itself on us more irresistibly than the thought that that arising and passing away do not concern the real essence of things, but that this remains untouched by them, hence is imperishable, consequently that each and every thing that wills to exist actually does exist continuously and without end? Accordingly, at every given point of time all species of animals, from the gnat to the elephant, exist together complete. They have already renewed themselves many thousands of times, and withal have remained the same. They know nothing of others like them who have lived before them, or who will live after them; it is the species that always lives, and the individuals cheerfully exist in the consciousness of the imperishability of the species and their identity with it. The will-to-live manifests itself in an endless present, because this is the form of the life of the species, which therefore does not grow old, but remains always young. Death is for the species what sleep is for the individual, or winking for the eye; when the Indian gods appear in human form, they are recognized by their not winking. Just as at nightfall the world vanishes, yet does not for a moment cease to exist, so man and animal apparently pass away through death, yet their true inner being continues to exist just as undisturbed. Let us now picture to ourselves that alternation of birth and death in infinitely rapid vibrations, and we have before us the persistent and enduring objectification of the will, the permanent Ideas of beings, standing firm like the rainbow on the waterfall. This is temporal immortality. In consequence of this, in spite of thousands of years of death and decay, there is still nothing lost, no atom of matter, still less anything of the inner being exhibiting itself as nature. Accordingly we can at any moment cheerfully exclaim: "In spite of time, death, and decay, we are still all together!"

Perhaps an exception would have to be made of the man who should once have said from the bottom of his heart with regard to this game: "I no longer like it." But this is not yet the place to speak of that.

Attention, however, must indeed be drawn to the fact that the pangs of birth and the bitterness of death are the two constant conditions under which the will-to-live maintains itself in its objectification, in other words, our being-in-itself, untouched by the course of time and by the disappearance of generations, exists in an everlasting present, and enjoys the fruit of the affirmation of the will-to-live. This is analogous to our being able to remain awake during the day only on condition that we sleep every night; indeed, this is the commentary furnished by nature for an understanding of that difficult passage. For the suspension of the animal functions is sleep; that of the organic functions is death.

The substratum or filling out, the or material of the present, is really the same through all time. The impossibility of directly recognizing this identity is just time, a form and limitation of our intellect. The fact that by virtue of it, for example, the future event does not as yet exist, rests on a delusion of which we become aware when the event has come to pass. The essential form of our intellect produces such a delusion, and this is explained and justified from the fact that the intellect has come forth from the hands of nature by no means for the purpose of comprehending the inner being of things, but merely for the purpose of comprehending motives, and hence to serve an individual and temporal phenomenon of will. [*]

If we comprehend the observations that concern us here, we shall also understand the true meaning of the paradoxical doctrine of the Eleatics, that there is no arising and passing away at all, but that the whole stands firm and immovable: (Parmenides et Melissus ortum et interitum tollebant, quoniam nihil moveri putabant. Stobaeus, Eclogues, I, 21.) [12] In the same way light is also thrown here on the fine passage of Empedocles, which Plutarch has preserved for us in the book Adversus Coloten, c. 12:


Stulta, et prolixas non admittentia curas
Pectora: qui sperant, existere posse, quod ante
Non fuit, aut ullam rem pessum protinus ire;
Non animo prudens homo quod praesentiat ullus,
Dum vivunt [namque hoc vitai nomine signant], Sunt, et fortuna tum conflictantur utraque;
Ante ortum nihil est homo, nec post funera quidquam. [13]


The very remarkable passage in Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, which in its place is surprising, deserves just as much to be mentioned: Un chateau immense, au frontispice duquel on lisait: "Je n'appartiens a personne, et j'appartiens a tout le monde: vous y etiez avant que d'y entrer, vous y serez encore, quand vous en sortirez." [14]

Of course in that sense in which he arises out of nothing when he is begotten, man becomes nothing through death. But really to become so thoroughly acquainted with this nothing would be very interesting, for it requires only moderate discernment to see that this empirical nothing is by no means an absolute nothing, in other words, such as would be nothing in every sense. We are already led to this insight by the empirical observation that all the features and characteristics of the parents are found once again in their children, and have thus surmounted death. Of this, however, I shall speak in a special chapter.

There is no greater contrast than that between the ceaseless, irresistible flight of time carrying its whole content away with it, and the rigid immobility of what is actually existing, which is at all times one and the same; and if, from this point of view, we fix our really objective glance on the immediate events of life, the Nunc stans becomes clear and visible to us in the centre of the wheel of time. To the eye of a being who lived an incomparably longer life and took in at a single glance the human race in its whole duration, the constant alternation of birth and death would present itself merely as a continuous vibration. Accordingly, it would not occur to it at all to see in it a constantly new coming out of nothing and passing into nothing, but, just as to our glance the rapidly turning spark appears as a continuous circle, the rapidly vibrating spring as a permanent triangle, the vibrating cord as a spindle, so to its glance the species would appear as that which is and remains, birth and death as vibrations.

We shall have false notions about the indestructibility of our true nature through death, so long as we do not make up our minds to study it first of all in the animals, and claim for ourselves alone a class apart from them under the boastful name of immortality. But it is this presumption alone and the narrowness of view from which it proceeds, on account of which most people struggle so obstinately against recognizing the obvious truth that, essentially and in the main, we are the same as the animals; in fact that such people recoil at every hint of our relationship with these. Yet it is this denial of the truth which, more than anything else, bars to them the way to real knowledge of the indestructibility of our true nature. For if we seek anything on a wrong path, we have in so doing forsaken the right; and on the wrong path we shall never attain to anything in the end but belated disillusionment. Therefore, pursue truth straight away, not according to preconceived freaks and fancies, but guided by the hand of nature! First of all learn to recognize, when looking at every young animal, the never-ageing existence of the species, which, as a reflection of its own eternal youth, bestows on every new individual a temporal youth, and lets it step forth as new, as fresh, as if the world were of today. Ask yourself honestly whether the swallow of this year's spring is an entirely different one from the swallow of the first spring, and whether actually between the two the miracle of creation out of nothing has been renewed a million times, in order to work just as often into the hands of absolute annihilation. I know quite well that anyone would regard me as mad if I seriously assured him that the cat, playing just now in the yard, is still the same one that did the same jumps and tricks there three hundred years ago; but I also know that it is much more absurd to believe that the cat of today is through and through and fundamentally an entirely different one from that cat of three hundred years ago. We need only become sincerely and seriously engrossed in the contemplation of one of these higher vertebrates, in order to become distinctly conscious that this unfathomable inner being, taken as a whole as it exists, cannot possibly become nothing, and yet, on the other hand, we know its transitoriness. This rests on the fact that in this animal the eternity of its Idea (species) is distinctly marked in the finiteness of the individual. For in a certain sense it is of course true that in the individual we always have before us a different being, namely in the sense resting on the principle of sufficient reason, under which are also included time and space; these constitute the principium individuationis. But in another it is not true, namely in the sense in which reality belongs only to the permanent forms of things, to the Ideas, and which was so clearly evident to Plato that it became his fundamental thought, the centre of his philosophy; the comprehension of it became his criterion for the ability to philosophize generally.

Just as the spraying drops of the roaring waterfall change with lightning rapidity, while the rainbow, of which they are the supporter, remains immovably at rest, quite untouched by that restless change, so every Idea, i.e., every species of living beings remains entirely untouched by the constant change of its individuals. But it is the Idea or the species in which the will-to-live is really rooted and manifests itself; therefore the will is really concerned only in the continuance of the species. For example, the lions that are born and that die are like the drops of the waterfall; but leonitas, the Idea or form or shape of the lion, is like the unshaken and unmoved rainbow on the waterfall. Plato therefore attributed real and true being only to the Ideas, i.e., to the species; but to the individuals he attributed only a restless arising and passing away. From the deepest consciousness of his imperishable nature there also spring the confidence and serenity with which every animal and even every human individual move along light-heartedly amid a host of chances and hazards that may annihilate them at any moment, and moreover move straight on to death. Out of his eyes, however, there glances the peace of the species, which is unaffected and untouched by that destruction and extinction. Not even to man could this peace and calm be vouchsafed by uncertain and changing dogmas. As I have said, however, the sight of every animal teaches us that death is no obstacle to the kernel of life, the will in its manifestation. Yet what an unfathomable mystery lies in every animal! Look at the nearest one; look at your dog, and see how cheerfully and calmly he stands there! Many thousands of dogs have had to die before it was this dog's turn to live; but the death and extinction of those thousands have not affected the Idea of the dog. This Idea has not in the least been disturbed by all that dying. Therefore the dog stands there as fresh and endowed with original force as if this day were his first and none could be his last, and out of his eyes there shines the indestructible principle in him, the archaeus. Now what has died throughout those thousands of years? Not the dog; he stands -there before us intact and unscratched; merely his shadow, his image or copy in our manner of knowing, which is bound to time. Yet how can we ever believe that that passes away which exists for ever and ever, and fills all time? The matter is, of course, explainable empirically, namely according as death destroyed the individuals, generation brought forth new ones. This empirical explanation, however, is only an apparent explanation; it puts one riddle in place of the other. Although a metaphysical understanding of the matter is not to be had so cheaply, it is nevertheless the only true and satisfactory one.

In his subjective method, Kant brought to light the great though negative truth that time cannot belong to the thing-in-itself, because it lies preformed in our apprehension. Now death is the temporal end of the temporal phenomenon; but as soon as we take away time, there is no longer any end at all, and the word has lost all meaning. But here, on the objective path, I am now trying to show the positive aspect of the matter, namely that the thing-in-itself remains untouched by time and by that which is possible only through time, that is, by arising and passing away, and that the phenomena in time could not have even that restless, fleeting existence that stands next to nothingness, unless there were in them a kernel of eternity. It is true that eternity is a concept having no perception as its basis; for this reason, it is also of merely negative content, and thus implies a timeless existence. Time, however, is a mere image of eternity, , [15] as Plotinus has it; and in just the same way, our temporal existence is the mere image of our true inner being. This must lie in eternity, just because time is only the form of our knowing; but by virtue of this form alone we know our own existence and that of all things as transitory, finite, and subject to annihilation.

In the second book I have explained that the adequate objectivity of the will as thing-in-itself is the (Platonic) Idea at each of its grades. Similarly in the third book I have shown that the Ideas of beings have as their correlative the pure subject of knowing, consequently that the knowledge of them appears only by way of exception and temporarily under specially favourable conditions. For individual knowledge, on the other hand, and hence in time, the Idea exhibits itself under the form of the species, and this is the Idea drawn apart by entering into time. The species is therefore the most immediate objectification of the thing-in-itself, i.e., of the will-to-live. Accordingly, the innermost being of every animal and of man also lies in the species; thus the will-to-live, which is so powerfully active, has its root in the species, not really in the individual. On the other hand, immediate consciousness is to be found only in the individual; therefore it imagines itself to be different from the species, and thus fears death. The will-to-live manifests itself in reference to the individual as hunger and fear of death; in reference to the species, as sexual impulse and passionate care for the offspring. In agreement with this, we find nature, as being free from that delusion of the individual, just as careful for the maintenance of the species as she is indifferent to the destruction of the individuals; for her the latter are always only means, the former the end. Therefore, a glaring contrast appears between her niggardliness in the equipment of individuals and her lavishness when the species is at stake. From one individual often a hundred thousand seeds or more are obtained annually, for example, from trees, fish, crabs, termites, and many others. In the case of her niggardliness, on the other hand, only barely enough in the way of strength and organs is given to each to enable it with ceaseless exertion to maintain a bare living. If, therefore, an animal is crippled or weakened, it must, as a rule, die of starvation. And where an occasional economy was possible, through the circumstance that a part could be dispensed with in an emergency, it has been withheld, even out of order. Hence, for example, many caterpillars are without eyes; the poor animals grope about in the dark from leaf to leaf, and in the absence of antennae they do this by moving three quarters of their body to and fro in the air, till they come across an object. In this way they often miss their food that is to be found close at hand. But this happens in consequence of the lex parsimoniae naturae, to the expression of which, natura nihil facit supervacaneum, can still be added et nihil largitur, [16] The same tendency of nature shows itself also in the fact that the fitter an individual is for propagation by virtue of his age, the more powerfully does the vis naturae medicatrix [17] manifest itself in him. His wounds, therefore, heal easily, and he easily recovers from illnesses. This diminishes with the power of procreation, and sinks low after this power is extinguished; for in the eyes of nature the individual has now become worthless.

Now if we cast a glance at the scale of beings together with the gradation of consciousness that accompanies them, from the polyp to man, we see this wonderful pyramid kept in ceaseless oscillation certainly by the constant death of the individuals, yet enduring in the species throughout the endlessness of time by means of the bond of generation. Now, whereas, as was explained above, the objective, the species, manifests itself as indestructible, the subjective, consisting merely in the self-consciousness of these beings, seems to be of the shortest duration, and to be incessantly destroyed, in order just as often to come forth again out of nothing in an incomprehensible way. But a man must really be very short-sighted to allow himself to be deceived by this appearance, and not to understand that, although the form of temporal permanence belongs only to the objective, the subjective -- i.e., the will, living and appearing in everything, and with it the subject of knowing in which this exhibits itself -- must be no less indestructible. For the permanence of the objective, or the external, can indeed be only the phenomenal appearance of the indestructibility of the subjective, or the internal, since the former cannot possess anything that it had not received in fee from the latter; it cannot be essentially and originally something objective, a phenomenon, and then secondarily and accidentally something subjective, a thing-in-itself, something conscious of itself. For obviously, the former as phenomenon or appearance presupposes something that appears, just as being-for-another presupposes being-for-self, and object presupposes subject; but not conversely, since everywhere the root of things must lie in that which they are by themselves, hence in the subjective, not in the objective, not in that which they are only for others, not in the consciousness of another. Accordingly we found in the first book that the correct starting-point for philosophy is essentially and necessarily the subjective, Le., the idealistic, just as the opposite starting-point, proceeding from the objective, leads to materialism. Fundamentally, however, we are far more at one with the world than we usually think; its inner nature is our will, and its phenomenal appearance our representation. The difference between the continuance of the external world after his death and his own continuance after death would vanish for anyone who could bring this unity or identity of being to distinct consciousness; the two would present themselves to him as one and the same thing; in fact, he would laugh at the delusion that could separate them. For an understanding of the indestructibility of our true nature coincides with that of the identity of macrocosm and microcosm. Meanwhile we can elucidate what has here been said by a peculiar experiment that is to be carried out by means of the imagination, and might be called metaphysical. Let a person attempt to present vividly to his mind the time, not in any case very distant, when he will be dead. He then thinks himself away, and allows the world to go on existing; but soon, to his own astonishment, he will discover that nevertheless he still exists. For he imagined he made a mental representation of the world without himself; but the I or ego is in consciousness that which is immediate, by which the world is first brought about, and for which alone the world exists. This centre of all existence, this kernel of all reality, is to be abolished, and yet the world is to be allowed to go on existing; it is an idea that may, of course, be conceived in the abstract, but not realized. The endeavour to achieve this, the attempt to think the secondary without the primary, the conditioned without the condition, the supported without the supporter, fails every time, much in the same way as the attempt fails to conceive an equilateral right-angled triangle, or an arising and passing away of matter, and similar impossibilities. Instead of what was intended, the feeling here forces itself on us that the world is no less in us than we are in it, and that the source of all reality lies within ourselves. The result is really that the time when I shall not be will come objectively; but subjectively it can never come. Indeed, it might therefore be asked how far anyone in his heart actually believes in a thing that he cannot really conceive at all; or whether, since the deep consciousness of the indestructibility of our real inner nature is associated with that merely intellectual experiment that has, however, already been carried out more or less distinctly by everyone, whether, I say, our own death is not perhaps for us at bottom the most incredible thing in the world.

The deep conviction of the impossibility of our extermination by death, which, as the inevitable qualms of conscience at the approach of death also testify, everyone carries at the bottom of his heart, depends entirely on the consciousness of our original and eternal nature; therefore Spinoza expresses it thus: sentimus experimurque nos AETERNOS esse. [18] For a reasonable person can think of himself as imperishable only in so far as he thinks of himself as beginningless, as eternal, in fact as timeless. On the other hand, he who regards himself as having come out of nothing must also think that he becomes nothing again; for it is a monstrous idea that an infinity of time elapsed before he was, but that a second infinity has begun throughout which he will never cease to be. Actually the most solid ground for our imperishable nature is the old aphorism: Ex nihilo nihil fit, et in nihilum nihil potest reverti. [19] Therefore, Theophrastus Paracelsus (Works, Strasburg, 1603, Vol. II, p. 6) says very pertinently: "The soul in me has come from something, therefore it does not come to nothing; for it comes out of something." He states the true reason. But he who regards man's birth as his absolute beginning must regard death as his absolute end. For both are what they are in the same sense; consequently everyone can think of himself as immortal only in so far as he also thinks of himself as unborn, and in the same sense. What birth is, that also is death, according to its true nature and significance; it is the same line drawn in two directions. If the former is an actual arising out of nothing, the latter is also an actual annihilation. In truth, however, it is only by means of the eternity of our real inner nature that an imperishableness of it is conceivable; consequently such an imperishableness is not temporal. The assumption that man is created out of nothing necessarily leads to the assumption that death is his absolute end. In this respect, therefore, the Old Testament is quite consistent; for no doctrine of immortality is appropriate to a creation out of nothing. New Testament Christianity has such a doctrine, because it is Indian in spirit, and therefore, more than probably, Indian in origin, although only indirectly, through Egypt. Such a doctrine, however, is as little suited to the Jewish stem on which that Indian wisdom had to be grafted in the Holy Land as the freedom of the will is to the will's being created, or as

Humano capiti cervicem pcetor equinam
Jungere si velit. [20]


It is always bad if we are not allowed to be thoroughly original and to carve out of the whole wood. Brahmanism and Buddhism, on the other hand, quite consistently with a continued existence after death, have an existence before birth, and the purpose of this life is to atone for the guilt of that previous existence. The following passage from Colebrooke's History of Indian Philosophy in the Transactions of the Asiatic London Society, Vol. I, p. 577, shows also how clearly conscious they are of the necessary consistency in this: "Against the system of the Bhagavatas, which is but partially heretical, the objection upon which the chief stress is laid by Vyasa is, that the soul would not be eternal, if it were a production, and consequently had a beginning." Further, in Upham's Doctrine of Buddhism, p. 110, it is said: "The lot in hell of impious persons call'd Deitty is the most severe: these are they who, discrediting the evidence of Buddha, adhere to the heretical doctrine, that all living beings had their beginning in the mother's womb, and will have their end in death."

He who conceives his existence as merely accidental, must certainly be afraid of losing it through death. On the other hand he who sees, even only in a general way, that his existence rests on some original necessity, will not believe that this necessity, which has produced so wonderful a thing, is limited to such a brief span of time, but that it is active at all times. But whoever reflects that up till now, when he exists, an infinite time, and thus an infinity of changes, has run its course, but yet notwithstanding this he exists, will recognize his existence as a necessary one. Therefore the entire possibility of all states and conditions has exhausted itself already without being able to eliminate his existence. If ever he could not be, he would already not be now. For the infinity of the time that has already elapsed, with the exhausted possibility of its events in it, guarantees that what exists necessarily exists. Consequently, everyone has to conceive himself as a necessary being, in other words, as a being whose existence would follow from its true and exhaustive definition, if only we had this. Actually in this train of thought is to be found the only immanent proof of the imperishableness of our real inner nature, that is to say, the only proof that keeps within the sphere of empirical data. Existence must be inherent in this inner nature, since it shows itself to be independent of all states or conditions that can possibly be brought about through the causal chain; for these states have already done what they could, and yet our existence has remained just as unshaken thereby, as the ray of light is by the hurricane that it cuts through. If from its own resources time could bring us to a happy state, we should already have been there long ago; for an infinite time lies behind us. But likewise, if time could lead us to destruction, we should already long ago have ceased to exist. It follows from the fact that we now exist, if the matter is well considered, that we are bound to exist at all times. For we ourselves are the inner nature that time has taken up into itself, in order to fill up its void; therefore this inner nature fills the whole of time, present, past, and future, in the same way; and it is just as impossible for us to fall out of existence as it is for us to fall out of space. If we carefully consider this, it is inconceivable that what once exists in all the force of reality could ever become nothing, and then not exist throughout an infinite time. From this have arisen the Christian doctrine of the restoration of all things, the Hindu doctrine of the constantly renewed creation of the world by Brahma, together with similar dogmas of the Greek philosophers. The great mystery of our existence and non-existence, to explain which these and all kindred dogmas were devised, ultimately rests on the fact that the same thing that objectively constitutes an infinite course of time is subjectively a point, an indivisible, ever-present present-moment; but who comprehends it? It has been most clearly expounded by Kant in his immortal doctrine of the ideality of time and of the sole reality of the thing-in-itself. For it follows from this that what is really essential in things, in man, in the world, lies permanently and enduringly in the Nunc stans, firm and immovable; and that the change of phenomena and of events is a mere consequence of our apprehension of it by means of our perception-form of time. Accordingly, instead of saying to men: "Ye have arisen through birth, but are immortal," one should say: "Ye are not nothing," and teach them to understand this in the sense of the saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: (Quod enim est, erit semper. Stobaeus, Eclogues, I, 43, 6.) [21] Yet if this does not succeed, but the anxious heart breaks out into its old lament: "I see all beings arise out of nothing through birth, and again after a brief term return to nothing; even my existence, now in the present, will soon lie in the remote past, and I shall be nothing!" then the right answer is: "Do you not exist? Do you not possess the precious present, to which you children of time all aspire so eagerly, actually at this moment? And do you understand how you have attained to it? Do you know the paths which have led you to it, that you could see them barred to you by death? An existence of yourself after the destruction of your body is not possibly conceivable to you; but can it be more inconceivable to you than are your present existence and the way you have attained to it? Why should you doubt that the secret paths that stood open to you up to this present, will not also stand open to you to every future present?"

Therefore, if considerations of this kind are certainly calculated to awaken the conviction that there is something in us that death cannot destroy, this nevertheless happens only by our being raised to a point of view from which birth is not the beginning of our existence. It follows from this, however, that what is proved to be indestructible through death is not really the individual. Moreover, having arisen through generation and carrying within himself the qualities of the father and mother, this individual exhibits himself as a mere difference of the species, and as such can be only finite. Accordingly, just as the individual has no recollection of his existence before his birth, so can he have no recollection of his present existence after death. Everyone, however, places his I or ego in consciousness; therefore this seems to him to be tied to individuality. Moreover, with individuality there disappears all that which is peculiar to him, as to this, and which distinguishes him from others. Therefore his continued existence without individuality becomes for him indistinguishable from the continuance of all other beings, and he sees his I or ego become submerged. Now he who thus links his existence to the identity of consciousness, and therefore desires for this an endless existence after death, should bear in mind that in any case he can attain to this only at the price of just as endless a past before birth. For as he has no recollection of an existence before birth, and so his consciousness begins with birth, he must look upon his birth as an arising of his existence out of nothing. But then he purchases the endless time of his existence after death for just as long a time before birth; in this way the account is balanced without any profit to him. On the other hand, if the existence left untouched by death is different from that of individual consciousness, then it must be independent of birth just as it is of death. Accordingly, with reference to it, it must be equally true to say "I shall always be" and "I have always been," which then gives us two infinities for one. However, the greatest equivocation really lies in the word "I," as will be seen at once by anyone who calls to mind the contents of our second book and the separation there carried out of the willing part of our true inner nature from the knowing part. According as I understand this word, I can say: "Death is my entire end"; or else: "This my personal phenomenal appearance is just as infinitely small a part of my true inner nature as 1 am of the world." But the I or ego is the dark point in consciousness, just as on the retina the precise point of entry of the optic nerve is blind, the brain itself is wholly insensible, the body of the sun is dark, and the eye sees everything except itself. Our faculty of knowledge is directed entirely outwards in accordance with the fact that it is the product of a brain-function that has arisen for the purpose of mere self-maintenance, and hence for the search for nourishment and the seizing of prey. Therefore everyone knows of himself only as of this individual, just as it exhibits itself in external perception. If, on the other hand, he could bring to consciousness what he is besides and beyond this, he would willingly give up his individuality, smile at the tenacity of his attachment thereto, and say: "What does the loss of this individuality matter to me? for I carry within myself the possibility of innumerable individualities." He would see that, although there is not in store for him a continued existence of his individuality, it is nevertheless just as good as if he had such an existence, since he carries within himself a complete compensation for it. Besides this, however, it might also be taken into consideration that the individuality of most people is so wretched and worthless that they actually lose nothing in it, and that what in them may still have some value is the universal human element; but to this we can promise imperishableness. In fact, even the rigid unalterability and essential limitation of every individuality as such would, in the case of its endless duration, inevitably and necessarily produce ultimately such great weariness by its monotony, that we should prefer to become nothing, merely in order to be relieved of it. To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error for ever; for at bottom every individuality is really only a special error, a false step, something that it would be better should not be, in fact something from which it is the real purpose of life to bring us back. This also finds confirmation in the fact that most, indeed really all, people are so constituted that they could not be happy, no matter in what world they might be placed. Insofar as such a world would exclude want and hardship, they would become a prey to boredom, and insofar as this was prevented, they would fall into misery, vexation, and suffering. Thus, for a blissful condition of man, it would not be by any means sufficient for him to be transferred to a "better world"; on the contrary, it would also be necessary for a fundamental change to occur in man himself, and hence for him to be no longer what he is, but rather to become what he is not. For this, however, he must first of all cease to be what he is; as a preliminary, this requirement is fulfilled by death, and the moral necessity of this can from this point of view already be seen. To be transferred to another world and to change one's entire nature are at bottom one and the same thing. On this also ultimately rests that dependence of the objective on the subjective which is explained by the idealism of our first book; accordingly, here is to be found the point of contact between transcendental philosophy and ethics. If we bear this in mind, we shall find that the awakening from the dream of life is possible only through the disappearance along with it of its whole fundamental fabric as well; but this is its organ itself, the intellect together with its forms. With this the dream would go on spinning itself for ever, so firmly is it incorporated with that organ. That which really dreamt the dream is, however, still different from it, and alone remains over. On the other hand, the fear that with death everything might be over and finished may be compared to the case of a person who in a dream should think that there were mere dreams without a dreamer. But would it even be desirable for an individual consciousness to be kindled again, after it had once been ended by death, in order that it might continue for ever? For the most part, often in fact entirely, its content is nothing but a stream of paltry, earthly, poor ideas, and endless worries and anxieties; let these then be finally silenced! Therefore with true instinct the ancients put on their tombstones: Securitati perpetuae; or Bonae quieti. [22] But if even here, as has happened so often, we wanted continued existence of the individual consciousness, in order to connect with it a reward or punishment in the next world, then at bottom the aim would be merely the compatibility of virtue with egoism. But these two will never embrace; they are fundamentally opposed. On the other hand, the immediate conviction, which the sight of noble actions calls forth, is well founded, that the spirit of love enjoining one man to spare his enemies, and another, even at the risk of his life, to befriend a person never previously seen, can never pass away and become nothing.

The most complete answer to the question of the individual's continued existence after death is to be found in Kant's great doctrine of the ideality of time. Just here does this doctrine show itself to be specially fruitful and rich in important results, since it replaces dogmas, which lead to the absurd on the one path as on the other, by a wholly theoretical but well proved insight, and thus at once settles the most exciting of all metaphysical questions. To begin, to end, and to continue are concepts that derive their significance simply and solely from time; consequently they are valid only on the presupposition of time. But time has no absolute existence; it is not the mode and manner of the being-in-itself of things, but merely the form of our knowledge of the existence and inner being of ourselves and of all things; and for this reason such knowledge is very imperfect, and is limited to mere phenomena. Thus in reference to this knowledge alone do the concepts of ceasing and continuing find application, not in reference to that which manifests itself in them, namely the being-in-itself of things; applied to this, such concepts therefore no longer have any true meaning. For this is also seen in the fact that an answer to the question arising from those time-concepts becomes impossible, and every assertion of such an answer, whether on the one side or the other, is open to convincing objections. We might indeed assert that our being-in-itself continues after death, because it would be wrong to say that it was destroyed; but we might just as well assert that it is destroyed, because it would be wrong to say that it continues; at bottom, the one is just as true as the other. Accordingly, something like an antinomy could certainly be set up here, but it would rest on mere negations. In it one would deprive the subject of the judgement of two contradictorily opposite predicates, but only because the whole category of these predicates would not be applicable to that subject. But if one deprives it of those two predicates, not together but separately, it appears as if the contradictory opposite of the predicate, denied in each case, were thus proved of the subject of the judgement. This, however, is due to the fact that incommensurable quantities are here compared, inasmuch as the problem removes us to a scene that abolishes time, but yet asks about time-determinations. Consequently, it is equally false to attribute these to the subject and to deny them, which is equivalent to saying that the problem is transcendent. In this sense death remains a mystery.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:07 am

Part 3 of 3

On the other hand, adhering to that very distinction between phe nomenon and thing-in-itself, we can make the assertion that man as phenomenon is certainly perishable, yet his true inner being is not affected by this. Hence this true inner being is indestructible, although, on account of the elimination of the time-concepts which is connected with this, we cannot attribute continuance to it. Accordingly, we should be led here to the concept of an indestructibility that was nevertheless not a continuance. Now this concept is one which, obtained on the path of abstraction, may possibly be thought in the abstract; yet it cannot be supported by any perception; consequently, it cannot really become distinct. On the other hand, we must here keep in mind that we have not, like Kant, absolutely given up the ability to know the thing-in-itself; on the contrary, we know that it is to be looked for in the will. It is true that we have never asserted an absolute and exhaustive knowledge of the thing-in-itself; indeed, we have seen quite well that it is impossible to know anything according to what it may be absolutely in and by itself. For as soon as I know, I have a representation, a mental picture; but just because this representation is mine, it cannot be identical with what is known; on the contrary, it reproduces in an entirely different form that which is known by making it a being-for-others out of a being-for-self; hence it is still always to be regarded as the phenomenal appearance of this. However, therefore, a knowing consciousness may be constituted, there can always be for it only phenomena. This is not entirely obviated even by the fact that my own inner being is that which is known; for, in so far as it falls within my knowing consciousness, it is already a reflex of my inner being, something different from this inner being itself, and so already in a certain degree phenomenon. Thus, in so far as I am that which knows, I have even in my own inner being really only a phenomenon; on the other hand, in so far as I am directly this inner being itself, I am not that which knows. For it is sufficiently proved in the second book that knowledge is only a secondary property of our inner being, and is brought about through the animal nature of this. Strictly speaking, therefore, we know even our own will always only as phenomenon, and not according to what it may be absolutely in and by itself. But in that second book, as well as in my work On the Will in Nature, it is fully discussed and demonstrated that if, in order to penetrate into the essence of things, we leave what is given only indirectly and from outside, and stick to the only phenomenon into whose inner nature an immediate insight is accessible to us from within, we quite definitely find in this the will as the ultimate thing and the kernel of reality. In the will, therefore, we recognize the thing-in-itself in so far as it no longer has space, but time for its form; consequently, we really know it only in its most immediate manifestation, and thus with the reservation that this knowledge of it is still not exhaustive and entirely adequate. In this sense, therefore, we here retain the concept of the will as that of the thing-in-itself.

The concept of ceasing to be is certainly applicable to man as phenomenon in time, and empirical knowledge plainly presents death as the end of this temporal existence. The end of the person is just as real as was its beginning, and in just that sense in which we did not exist before birth, shall we no longer exist after death. But no more can be abolished through death than was produced through birth; and so that cannot be abolished by which birth first of all became possible. In this sense natus et denatus [23] is a fine expression. Now the whole of empirical knowledge affords us mere phenomena; thus only phenomena are affected by the temporal processes of arising and passing away, not that which appears, namely the being-in-itself. For this inner being the contrast, conditioned by the brain, between arising and passing away, does not exist at all; on the contrary, it has lost meaning and significance. This inner being, therefore, remains unaffected by the temporal end of a temporal phenomenon, and always retains that existence to which the concepts of beginning, end, and continuance are not applicable. But in so far as we can follow up this inner being, it is in every phenomenal being its will; so too in man. Consciousness, on the other hand, consists in knowledge; but this, as has been sufficiently demonstrated, belongs, as activity of the brain, and consequently as function of the organism, to the mere phenomenon, and therefore ends therewith. The will alone, of which the work or rather the copy was the body, is what is indestructible. The sharp distinction between will and knowledge, together with the former's primacy, a distinction that constitutes the fundamental characteristic of my philosophy, is therefore the only key to the contradiction that shows itself in many different ways, and always arises afresh in every consciousness, even the crudest. This contradiction is that death is our end, and yet we must be eternal and indestructible; hence it is the sentimus, experimurque nos aeternos esse of Spinoza. [24] All philosophers have made the mistake of placing that which is metaphysical, indestructible, and eternal in man in the intellect. It lies exclusively in the will, which is entirely different from the intellect, and alone is original. As was most thoroughly explained in the second book, the intellect is a secondary phenomenon, and is conditioned by the brain, and therefore begins and ends with this. The will alone is that which conditions, the kernel of the whole phenomenon; consequently, it is free from the forms of the phenomenon, one of which is time, and hence it is also indestructible. Accordingly, with death consciousness is certainly lost, but not what produced and maintained consciousness; life is extinguished, but with it not the principle of life which manifested itself in it. Therefore a sure and certain feeling says to everyone that there is in him something positively imperishable and indestructible. Even the freshness and vividness of recollections from earliest times, from early childhood, are evidence that something in us does not pass away with time, does not grow old, but endures unchanged. However, we were not able to see clearly what this imperishable element is. It is not consciousness any more than it is the body, on which consciousness obviously depends. On the contrary, it is that on which the body together with consciousness depends. It is, however, just that which, by entering into consciousness, exhibits itself as will. Of course, we cannot go beyond this most immediate phenomenal appearance of it, because we cannot go beyond consciousness. Therefore the question what that something may be in so far as it does not enter into consciousness, in other words, what it is absolutely in itself, remains unanswerable.

In the phenomenon, and by means of its forms time and space, as principium individuationis, it is thus evident that the human individual perishes, whereas the human race remains and continues to live. But in the being-in-itself of things which is free from these forms, the whole difference between the individual and the race is also abolished, and the two are immediately one. The entire will-to-live is in the individual, as it is in the race, and thus the continuance of the species is merely the image of the individual's indestructibility.

Now, since the infinitely important understanding of the indestructibility of our true nature by death rests entirely on the difference between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, I wish to put this very difference in the clearest light by elucidating it in the opposite of death, hence in the origin of animal beings, i.e., in generation. For this process, that is just as mysterious as death, places most directly before our eyes the fundamental contrast between phenomenon and the being-in-itself of things, i.e., between the world as representation and the world as will, and also shows us the entire heterogeneity of the laws of these two. The act of procreation thus presents itself to us in a twofold manner: firstly for self-consciousness, whose sole object is, as I have often shown, the will with all its affections; and secondly for the consciousness of other things, i.e., of the world of the representation, or the empirical reality of things. Now from the side of the will, and thus inwardly, subjectively, for self-consciousness, that act manifests itself as the most immediate and complete satisfaction of the will, i.e., as sensual pleasure. On the other hand, from the side of the representation, and thus outwardly, objectively, for the consciousness of other things, this act is just the woof of the most ingenious of all fabrics, the foundation of the inexpressibly complicated animal organism which then needs only development in order to become visible to our astonished eyes. This organism, whose infinite complication and perfection are known only to the student of anatomy, is not to be conceived and thought of, from the side of the representation, as other than a system, devised with the most carefully planned combination and carried out with the most consummate skill and precision, the most arduous work of the profoundest deliberation. Now from the side of the will, we know through self-consciousness that the production of the organism is the result of an act the very opposite of all reflection and deliberation, of an impetuous, blind craving, an exceedingly voluptuous sensation. This contrast is exactly akin to the infinite contrast, shown above, between the absolute facility with which nature produces her works, together with the correspondingly boundless carelessness with which she abandons such works to destruction -- and the incalculably ingenious and well-thought-out construction of these very works. To judge from these, it must have been infinitely difficult to make them, and therefore to provide for their maintenance with every conceivable care, whereas we have the very opposite before our eyes. Now if, by this naturally very unusual consideration, we have brought together in the sharpest manner the two heterogeneous sides of the world, and so to speak grasped them with one hand, we must now hold them firmly, in order to convince ourselves of the entire invalidity of the laws of the phenomenon, or of the world as representation, for that of the will, or of things-in-themselves. It will then become clearer to us that whereas, on the side of the representation, i.e., in the phenomenal world, there is exhibited to us first an arising out of nothing, then a complete annihilation of what has arisen, from that other side, or in itself, there lies before us an essence or entity, and when the concepts of arising and passing away are applied to it, they have absolutely no meaning. For by going back to the root, where, by means of self-consciousness, the phenomenon and the being-in-itself meet, we have just palpably apprehended, as it were, that the two are absolutely incommensurable. The whole mode of being of the one, together with all the fundamental laws of this being, signifies nothing, and less than nothing, in the other. I believe that this last consideration will be rightly understood only by a few, and that it will be unpleasant and even offensive to all who do not understand it. However, I shall never on this account omit anything that can serve to illustrate my fundamental idea.

At the beginning of this chapter I explained that the great attachment to life, or rather the fear of death, by no means springs from knowledge, for in that case it would be the result of the known value of life, but that that fear of death has its root directly in the will; it proceeds from the will's original and essential nature, in which that will is entirely without knowledge, and is therefore the blind will-to-live. Just as we are allured into life by the wholly illusory inclination for sensual pleasure, so are we firmly retained in life by the fear of death, certainly just as illusory. Both spring directly from the will that is in itself without knowledge. On the other hand, if man were a merely knowing being, death would necessarily be not only a matter of indifference, but even welcome to him. Now the consideration we have reached here teaches us that what is affected by death is merely the knowing consciousness; that the will, on the other hand, in so far as it is the thing-in-itself that lies at the root of every individual phenomenon, is free from everything that depends on determinations of time, and so is imperishable. Its striving for existence and manifestation, from which the world results, is always satisfied, for it is accompanied by this world just as the body is by the shadow, since the world is merely the visibility of the true inner nature of the will. Nevertheless, the will in us fears death, and this is because knowledge presents to this will its true nature merely in the individual phenomenon. From this there arises for the will the illusion that it perishes with this phenomenon, just as when the mirror is smashed my image in it seems to be destroyed at the same time. Therefore this fills the will with horror, because it is contrary to its original nature, which is a blind craving for existence. It follows from this that that in us which alone is capable of fearing death, and also alone fears it, namely the will, is not affected by it; and that, on the other hand, what is affected by it and actually perishes is that which, by its nature, is not capable of any fear, and generally of any desire or emotion, and is therefore indifferent to existence and nonexistence. I refer to the mere subject of knowledge, the intellect, the existence of which consists in its relation to the world of the representation, in other words the objective world; it is the correlative of this objective world, with whose existence its own existence is at bottom identical. Thus, although the individual consciousness does not survive death, that survives it which alone struggles against it, the will. From this is also explained the contradiction that, from the standpoint of knowledge, philosophers have at all times with cogent arguments shown death to be no evil; yet the fear of death remains impervious to them all, simply because it is rooted not in knowledge, but in the will alone. Just because the will alone, not the intellect, is the indestructible element, it follows that all religions and philosophies promise a reward in eternity only to the virtues of the will or heart, not to those of the intellect or head.

The following may also serve to illustrate this consideration. The will, which constitutes our being-in-itself, is of a simple nature; it merely wills and does not know. The subject of knowing, on the other hand, is a secondary phenomenon, arising out of the objectification of the will; it is the point of unity of the nervous system's sensibility, the focus, as it were, in which the rays of activity of all parts of the brain converge. Therefore with this brain the subject of knowing is bound to perish. In self-consciousness, as that which alone knows, the subject of knowing stands facing the will as a spectator, and although it has sprung from the will, it knows that will as something different from itself, something foreign to it, and thus only empirically, in time, piecemeal, in the successive agitations and acts of the will; only a posteriori and often very indirectly does it come to know the will's decisions. This is why our own inner being is a riddle to us, in other words, to our intellect, and why the individual regards himself as newly arisen and as perishable, although his inner being-in-itself is something timeless, and therefore eternal. Now just as the will does not know, so, conversely, the intellect, or the subject of knowledge, is simply and solely knowing, without ever willing. This can be proved even physically from the fact that, as already mentioned in the second book, the various emotions, according to Bichat, directly affect all parts of the organism and disturb their functions, with the exception of the brain as that which can be affected by them at most indirectly, in other words, in consequence of those very disturbances (De la vie et de la mort, art. 6, § 2). Yet it follows from this that the subject of knowing, by itself and as such, cannot take any part or interest in anything, but that the existence or non-existence of everything, in fact even of itself, is a matter of indifference to it. Now why should this indifferent being be immortal? It ends with the temporal phenomenon of the will, i.e., with the individual, just as it originated therewith. It is the lantern that after it has served its purpose is extinguished. The intellect, like the world of perception which exists in it alone, is mere phenomenon; but the finiteness of both does not affect that of which they are the phenomenal appearance. The intellect is the function of the cerebral nervous system; but this, like the rest of the body, is the objectivity of the will. The intellect, therefore, depends on the somatic life of the organism; but this organism itself depends on the will. Thus, in a certain sense, the organic body can be regarded as the link between the will and the intellect; although, properly speaking, the body is only the will itself spatially exhibiting itself in the perception of the intellect. Death and birth are the constant renewal and revival of the will's consciousness. In itself this will is endless and beginningless; it alone is, so to speak, the substance of existence (every such renewal, however, brings a new possibility of the denial of the will-to-live). Consciousness is the life of the subject of knowing, or of the brain, and death is its end. Therefore consciousness is finite, is always new, beginning each time at the beginning. The will alone is permanent; but permanence also concerns it alone, for it is the will-to-live. Nothing is of any consequence to the knowing subject by itself; yet the will and the knowing subject are united in the I or ego. In every animal being the will has achieved an intellect, and this is the light by which the will here pursues its ends. Incidentally, the fear of death may also be due partly to the fact that the individual will is so reluctant to separate itself from the intellect that has fallen to its lot through the course of nature, from its guide and guard, without which it knows that it is helpless and blind.

Finally, this explanation agrees also with that daily moral experience, teaching us that the will alone is real, while its objects, on the other hand, as conditioned by knowledge, are only phenomena, mere froth and vapour, like the wine provided by Mephistopheles in Auerbach's cellar; thus after every pleasure of the senses we say; "And yet it seemed as I were drinking wine." [25]

The terrors of death rest for the most part on the false illusion that then the I or ego vanishes, and the world remains. But rather is the opposite true, namely that the world vanishes; on the other hand, the innermost kernel of the ego endures, the bearer and producer of that subject in whose representation alone the world had its existence. With the brain the intellect perishes, and with the intellect the objective world, this intellect's mere representation. The fact that in other brains a similar world lives and moves, now as before, is a matter of indifference with reference to the intellect that is perishing. If, therefore, reality proper did not lie in the will, and if the moral existence were not that which extended beyond death, then, as the intellect and with it its world are extinguished, the true essence of things generally would be nothing more than an endless succession of short and troubled dreams without connexion among themselves; for the permanence of nature-without-knowledge consists merely in the time-representation of nature that knows. Therefore a world-spirit, dreaming without aim or purpose dreams that are often heavy and troubled, would then be all in all.

When an individual experiences the dread of death, we really have the strange, and even ludicrous, spectacle of the lord of the worlds, who fills everything with his true nature, and through whom alone everything that is has its existence, in despair and afraid of perishing, of sinking into the abyss of eternal nothingness; whereas, in truth, everything is full of him, and there is no place where he would not be, no being in whom he would not live, for existence does not support him, but he existence. Yet it is he who despairs in the individual who suffers the dread of death, since he is exposed to the illusion, produced by the principium individuationis, that his existence is limited to the being that is now dying. This illusion is part of the heavy dream into which he, as will-to-live, has fallen. However, we might say to the dying individual: "You are ceasing to be something which you would have done better never to become."

As long as no denial of that will has taken place, that of us which is left over by death is the seed and kernel of quite another existence, in which a new individual finds himself again so fresh and original, that he broods over himself in astonishment. Hence the enthusiastic, visionary, and dreamy disposition of noble youths at the time when this fresh consciousness has just been fully developed. What sleep is for the individual, death is for the will as thing-in-itself. It could not bear to continue throughout endless time the same actions and sufferings without true gain, if memory and individuality were left to it. It throws them off; this is Lethe; and through this sleep of death it reappears as a new being, refreshed and equipped with another intellect; "A new day beckons to a newer shore!" [26]

As the self-affirming will-to-live, man has the root of his existence in the species. Accordingly, death is the losing of one individuality and the receiving of another, and consequently a changing of the individuality under the exclusive guidance of his own will. For in this alone lies the eternal force which was able to produce his existence with his ego, yet, on account of the nature of this ego, is unable to maintain it in existence. For death is the dementi that the essence (essentia) of everyone receives in its claim to existence (existentia), the appearance of a contradiction lying in every individual existence:

for all things, from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed. [26]


Yet an infinite number of just such existences, each with its ego, stands within reach of the same force, that is, of the will, but these again will be just as perishable and transitory. Now as every ego has its separate consciousness, that infinite number of them, in respect of such an ego, is not different from a single one. From this point of view, it does not appear to me accidental that aevum, [x], signifies both the individual term of life and infinite time; thus it may be seen from this point, though indistinctly, that ultimately and in themselves both are the same. According to this it would really make no difference whether I existed only through my term of life or throughout an infinite time.

But of course we cannot obtain a notion of all that has been said above entirely without time-concepts; yet these should be excluded when we are dealing with the thing-in-itself. But it is one of the unalterable limitations of our intellect that it can never entirely cast off this first and most immediate form of all its representations, in order to operate without it. Therefore we naturally come here on a kind of metempsychosis, though with the important difference that this does not affect the whole , and hence the knowing being, but the will alone, whereby so many absurdities that accompany the doctrine of metempsychosis disappear; and with the consciousness that the form of time here appears only as an unavoidable accommodation to the limitation of our intellect. If we now call in the assistance of the fact, to be discussed in chapter 43, that the character, i.e., the will, is inherited from the father, whereas the intellect comes from the mother, then this agrees very well with our view that the will of man, in itself individual, separates itself in death from the intellect that was obtained from the mother at procreation, and receives a new intellect in accordance with its now modified nature under the guidance of the absolutely necessary course of the world which harmonizes with this nature. With this new intellect, the will would become a new being that would have no recollection of a previous existence; for the intellect, alone having the faculty of recollection, is the mortal part or the form, whereas the will is the eternal part, the substance. Accordingly, the word palingenesis is more correct than metempsychosis for describing this doctrine. These constant rebirths then constitute the succession of the life-dreams of a will in itself indestructible, until, instructed and improved by so much and such varied and successive knowledge in a constantly new form, it would abolish itself.

The proper and, so to speak, esoteric doctrine of Buddhism, as we have come to know it through the most recent researches, also agrees with this view, since it teaches not metempsychosis, but a peculiar palingenesis resting on a moral basis, and it expounds and explains this with great depth of thought. This may be seen from the exposition of the subject, well worth reading and considering, given in Spence Hardy's Manual of Buddhism, pp. 394-96 (with which are to be compared pp. 429, 440, and 445 of the same book). Confirmations of it are to be found in Taylor's Prabodha Chandro Daya, London, 1812, p. 35; also in Sangermano's Burmese Empire, p. 6, as well as in the Asiatic Researches, Vol. VI, p. 179, and Vol. IX, p. 256. The very useful German compendium of Buddhism by Koppen is also right on this point. Yet for the great mass of Buddhists this doctrine is too subtle; and so plain metempsychosis is preached to them as a comprehensible substitute.

Moreover, it must not be overlooked that even empirical grounds support a palingenesis of this kind. As a matter of fact, there does exist a connexion between the birth of the newly appearing beings and the death of those who are decrepit and worn out. It shows itself in the great fertility of the human race, arising as the result of devastating epidemics. When, in the fourteenth century, the Black Death had for the most part depopulated the Old World, a quite abnormal fertility appeared among the human race, and twin births were very frequent. Most remarkable also was the circumstance that none of the children born at this time acquired all their teeth; thus nature, exerting herself to the utmost, was niggardly in details. This is stated by F. Schnurrer in the Chronik der Seuchen (1825). Casper, Die wahrscheinliche Lebensdauer des Menschen (1835), also confirms the principle that, in a given population, the number of procreations has the most decided influence on the duration of life and on mortality, as it always keeps pace with the mortality; so that, everywhere and at all times, the births and deaths increase and decrease in equal ratio. This he places beyond doubt by accumulated evidence from many countries and their different provinces. And yet there cannot possibly be a physical causal connexion between my previous death and the fertility of a couple who are strangers to me, or vice versa. Here, then, the metaphysical appears undeniably and in an astonishing way as the immediate ground of explanation of the physical. Every new-born being comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a gift; but nothing is or can be freely given. Its fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn-out and decrepit existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed. Out of this seed the new existence arose; the two existences are one being. To show the bridge between the two would, of course, be the solution to a great riddle.

The great truth here expressed has never been entirely overlooked, although it could not be reduced to its precise and correct meaning. This becomes possible only through the doctrine of the primacy and metaphysical nature of the will and the secondary, merely organic, nature of the intellect. Thus we find the doctrine of metempsychosis, springing from the very earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always world-wide, as the belief of the great majority of mankind, in fact really as the doctrine of all religions, with the exception of Judaism and the two religions that have arisen from it. But, as already mentioned, we find this doctrine in its subtlest form, and coming nearest to the truth, in Buddhism. Accordingly, while Christians console themselves with the thought of meeting again in another world, in which they regain their complete personality and at once recognize one another, in those other religions the meeting is going on already, though incognito. Thus, in the round of births, and by virtue of metempsychosis or palingenesis, the persons who now stand in close connexion or contact with us will also be born simultaneously with us at the next birth, and will have the same, or analogous, relations and sentiments towards us as they now have, whether these are of a friendly or hostile nature. (See, for example, Spence Hardy's Manual of Buddhism, p. 162.) Of course, recognition is limited here to an obscure inkling, a reminiscence which is not to be brought to distinct consciousness, and which points to an infinite remoteness; with the exception, however, of the Buddha himself. He has the prerogative of distinctly knowing his own previous births and those of others; this is described in the Jatakas. But, in fact, if at favourable moments we look at the doings and dealings of men in real life in a purely objective way, the intuitive conviction is forced on us that they not only are and remain the same according to the (Platonic) Ideas, but also that the present generation, according to its real kernel, is precisely and substantially identical with every generation that previously existed. The question is only in what this kernel consists; the answer given to it by my teaching is well known. The above-mentioned intuitive conviction can be conceived as arising from the fact that the multiplying glasses, time and space, for a moment lose their effectiveness. With regard to the universal nature of the belief in metempsychosis, Obry rightly says in his excellent book Du Nirvana indien, p. 13: Cette vieille croyance a fait le tour du monde, et etait tellement repandue dans la haute antiquite, qu'un docte Anglican l'avait jugee sans pere, sans mere, et sans genealogie [27] (T. Burnet, in Beausobre, Histoire du Manicheisme, II, p. 391). Taught already in the Vedas, as in all the sacred books of India, metempsychosis is well known to be the kernel of Brahmanism and Buddhism. Accordingly it prevails even now in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, and thus among more than half of the human race, as the firmest of convictions, with an incredibly strong practical influence. It was also the belief of the Egyptians (Herodotus, ii, 123), from whom it was received with enthusiasm by Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato; the Pythagoreans in particular held firmly to it. That it was taught also in the mysteries of the Greeks follows undeniably from the ninth book of Plato's Laws (pp. 38 and 42, ed. Bip.). Nemesius even says (De natura hominum, c. 2): . (Communiter igitur omnes Graeci, qui animam immortalem statuerunt, eam de uno corpore in aliud transferri censuerunt.) [28] The Edda, particularly in the Voluspa, also teaches metempsychosis. No less was it the foundation of the religion of the Druids (Caesar, De Bello Gallico, vi. A. Pictet, Le Mystere des Bardes de l'ile de Bretagne, 1856). Even a Mohammedan sect in India, the Bohrahs, of whom Colebrooke gives a detailed account in the Asiatic Researches, Vol. VII, pp. 336 seqq., believe in metempsychosis, and accordingly abstain from all animal food. Among American Indians and Negro tribes, indeed even among the natives of Australia, traces of this belief are found, as appears from an exact description, given in The Times of 29 January 1841, of the execution of two Australian savages for arson and murder. It says: "The younger of the 2 prisoners met his end with a dogged and determinate spirit, as it appear'd of revenge; the only intelligible expression he made use of conveyed an impression that he would rise up 'a white fellow,' which, it was considered, strengthened his resolution." In a book by Ungewitter, Der Welttheil Australien (1853), it is related also that the Papuans of New Holland regarded the whites as their own relations who had returned to the world. As the result of all this, belief in metempsychosis presents itself as the natural conviction of man whenever he reflects at all in an unprejudiced way. Accordingly, it would actually be that which Kant falsely asserts of his three pretended Ideas of reason, namely a philosopheme natural to human reason, and resulting from the forms of that faculty; and where this belief is not found, it would only be supplanted by positive religious doctrines coming from a different source. I have also noticed that it is at once obvious to everyone who hears of it for the first time. Just see how seriously even Lessing defends it in the last seven paragraphs of his Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. Lichtenberg also says in his Selbstcharakteristik: "I cannot get rid of the idea that I had died before I was born." Even the exceedingly empirical Hume says in his sceptical essay on immortality, p. 23: "The metempsychosis is therefore the only system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to." [29] What opposes this belief, which is spread over the whole human race and is evident to the wise as well as to the vulgar, is Judaism, together with the two religions that have sprung from it, inasmuch as they teach man's creation out of nothing. He then ha~ the hard task of connecting this with the belief in an endless future existence a parte post. Of course, they have succeeded, with fire and sword, in driving that consoling, primitive belief of mankind out of Europe and of a part of Asia; for how long is still uncertain. The oldest Church history is evidence of precisely how difficult this was. Most of the heretics were attached to that primitive belief; for example, the Simonians, Basilidians, Valentinians, Marcionites, Gnostics, and Manichaeans. The Jews themselves have come to it to some extent, as is reported by Tertullian and Justin (in his dialogues). In the Talmud it is related that Abel's soul passed into the body of Seth, and then into that of Moses. Even the biblical passage, Matthew xvi, 13-15, takes on a rational meaning only when we understand it as spoken on the assumption of the dogma of metempsychosis. Luke, of course, who also has the passage (ix, 18-20), adds the words ; [30] he thus attributes to the Jews the assumption that an ancient prophet can thus rise again with skin and hair; but, as they know that he has already been in the grave for six or seven hundred years, and consequently has long since turned to dust, such rising again would be a palpable absurdity. However, in Christianity the doctrine of original sin, in other words of atonement for the sin of another individual, has taken the place of the transmigration of souls and of the expiation by means thereof of all the sins committed in a previous life. Thus both identify, and indeed with a moral tendency, the existing person with one who has existed previously; transmigration of souls does this directly, original sin indirectly.

Death is the great reprimand that the will-to-live, and more particularly the egoism essential thereto, receive through the course of nature; and it can be conceived as a punishment for our existence. [*] Death is the painful untying of the knot that generation with sensual pleasure had tied; it is the violent destruction, bursting in from outside, of the fundamental error of our true nature, the great disillusionment. At bottom, we are something that ought not to be; therefore we cease to be. Egoism really consists in man's restricting all reality to his own person, in that he imagines he lives in this alone, and not in others. Death teaches him something better, since it abolishes this person, so that man's true nature, that is his will, will henceforth live only in other individuals. His intellect, however, which itself belonged only to the phenomenon, i.e., to the world as representation, and was merely the form of the external world, also continues to exist in the condition of being representation, in other words, in the objective being, as such, of things, hence also only in the existence of what was hitherto the external world. Therefore, from this time forward, his whole ego lives only in what he had hitherto regarded as non-ego; for the difference between external and internal ceases. Here we recall that the better person is tile one who makes the least difference between himself and others, and does not regard them as absolutely non-ego; whereas to the bad person this difference is great, in fact absolute. I have discussed this at length in the essay On the Basis of Morality. The conclusion from the above remarks is that the degree in which death can be regarded as man's annihilation is in proportion to this difference. But if we start from the fact that the difference between outside me and inside me, as a spatial difference, is founded only in the phenomenon, not in the thing-in-itself, and so is not an absolutely real difference, then in the losing of our own individuality we shall see only the loss of a phenomenon, and thus only an apparent loss. However much reality that difference has in empirical consciousness, yet from the metaphysical standpoint the sentences "I perish, but the world endures," and "The world perishes, but I endure," are not really different at bottom.

But beyond all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I; to him, of course, who embraces it. During life, man's will is without freedom; on the basis of his unalterable character, his conduct takes place with necessity in the chain of motives. Now everyone carries in his memory very many things which he has done, about which he is not satisfied with himself. If he were to go on living, he would go on acting in the same way by virtue of the unalterability of his character. Accordingly, he must cease to be what he is, in order to be able to arise out of the germ of his true nature as a new and different being. Death, therefore, loosens those bonds; the will again becomes free, for freedom lies in the esse, not in the operari. Finditur nodus cordis, dissolvuntur omnes dubitationes, ejusque opera evanescunt, [31] is a very famous saying of the Veda often repeated by all Vedantists. [32] Dying is the moment of that liberation from the one-sidedness of an individuality which does not constitute the innermost kernel of our true being, but is rather to be thought of as a kind of aberration thereof. The true original freedom again enters at this moment which in the sense stated can be regarded as a restitutio in integrum. [33] The peace and composure on the countenance of most dead people seem to have their origin in this. As a rule, the death of every good person is peaceful and gentle; but to die willingly, to die gladly, to die cheerfully, is the prerogative of the resigned, of him who gives up and denies the will-to-live. For he alone wishes to die actually and not merely apparently, and consequently needs and desires no continuance of his person. He willingly gives up the existence that we know; what comes to him instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence in reference to that one is nothing. The Buddhist faith calls that existence Nirvana, that is to say, extinction. [34]

_______________

Notes:

1.This chapter refers to § 54 of volume 1.

2. "Preparation for death." [Tr.]

3. "Eat and drink, after death there is no more rejoicing." [Tr.]

4. "We like life, but all the same nothingness also has its good points.... I do not know what eternal life is, but this present life is a bad joke." [Tr.]

5. In gladiatoriis pugnis timidos et supplices, et, ut vivere liceat, obsecrantes etiam odisse solemus; fortes et animosos, et se acriter ipsos morti offerentes servare cupimus. Cicero, Pro Milone, c. 34.

["In gladiatorial conflicts we usually abhor and abominate the cowards who beg and implore us to let them live. On the other hand, we seek to preserve the lives of the brave, the courageous, and those who of their own free will impetuously face death." Tr.]

6. "After life"; "before life." [Tr.]

7. "Surrender of property." [Tr.]

8. "Conjuring trick." [Tr.]

9. "Provincial dialect." [Tr.]

10. "As mortals now are." [Tr.]

11. "As the leaves on the tree, so are the generations of human beings." [Iliad, vi, 146. Tr.]

* There is only one present, and this always exists: for it is the sole form of actual existence. We must arrive at the insight that the past is not in itself different from the present, but is so only in our apprehension. This has time as its form, by virtue of which alone the present shows itself as different from the past. To make this insight easier, let us imagine all the events and scenes of human life, good and bad, fortunate and unfortunate, delightful and dreadful, which are presented to us successively in the course of time and variety of places, in the most motley multifariousness and succession, as existing all at once and simultaneously and for ever, in the Nunc stans, whereas only apparently now this now that exists; then we shall understand what the objectification of the will-to-live really means. Our pleasure in genre pictures is also due mainly to their fixing the feeling scenes of life. The dogma of metempsychosis resulted from the feeling of the truth just expressed.

12. Parmenides and Melissus denied arising and passing away, because they believed the universe to be immovable." [Tr.]

13. "Foolish and lacking far-sighted reflection are they Who imagine there could arise what had not already been, Or that it could pass away and become entirely nothing ... Never will such things occur to the sage, That so long as we live -- what is thus described as life -- Only for so long also are we subject to good and bad, And that before birth and after death we are nothing," [Tr.]

14. "An immense castle over the front entrance of which one read: 'I belong to no one, and I belong to all the world; you were in it before you entered it, and you will still be in it when you have gone out of it.''' [Tr.]

15. "Time is a copy or image of eternity." [Tr.]

16. "Nature does nothing in vain and creates nothing superfluous; ... and she gives away nothing." [Tr.]

17. "The healing power of nature." [Tr.]

18. "We feel and experience that we are eternal." [Tr.]

19. "Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing can again become nothing." [Tr.]

20. "If a painter wanted to join a human head to the neck of a horse." [Horace, Ars poetica, l. -- Tr.]

21. "For that which is must always be." [Tr.]

22. ''To eternal security; ... to good repose." [Tr.]

23. "Born and unborn." [Tr.]

24. "We feel and experience that we are eternal." [Tr.]

25. Goethe's Faust, Bayard Taylor's translation. [Tr.]

26. Goethe's Faust, Bayard Taylor's translation. [Tr.]

27. "This old belief has journeyed round the world, and was so widespread in ancient times that a learned follower of the Anglican Church judged it to be without father, without mother, without genealogy." [Tr.]

28. "Belief in a wandering from one body to another is common to all the Greeks, who declared that the soul was immortal." [Tr.]

29. This posthumous essay is found in the Essays On Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul by the late David Hume (Basel, 1799), sold by James Decker. Through this Basel reprint, those two works of one of England's greatest thinkers and authors have been saved from destruction, after they had been suppressed in their own country, in consequence of the stupid and utterly contemptible bigotry there prevailing, through the influence of a powerful and insolent clergy, to England's lasting discredit. They are entirely dispassionate, coldly rational investigations of the two subjects mentioned above.

30. "That one of the old prophets is risen again." [Tr.]

* Death says: You are the product of an act that ought not to have taken place; therefore, to wipe it out, you must die.

31. "[Whoever beholds the highest and profoundest], has his heart's knot cut, all his doubts are resolved, and his works come to nought." [Tr.]

32. Sankara, seu de theologumenis Vedanticorum, ed. F. H. H. Windischmann, p. 37; Oupnekhat, Vol. I, pp. 387 and 78; Colebrooke's Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. I, p. 363.

33. "Restoration to the former state." [Tr.]

34. The etymology of the word Nirvana is given in various ways. According to Colebrooke (Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. I, p. 566), it comes from va, "to blow" like the wind, with the prefixed negative nir; hence it signifies a lull or calm, but as adjective "extinguished." Obry, Du Nirvana indien, p. 3, says: Nirvanam en sanscrit signifie a la lettre extinction, telle que celle d'un feu. ("Nirvanam in Sanskrit literally means extinction, e.g., as of a fire." Tr.) According to the Asiatic Journal, Vol. XXIV, p. 735, it is really Neravana, from nera, "without," and vana, "life," and the meaning would be annihilatio. In Spence Hardy's Eastern Monachism, p. 295, Nirvana is derived from vana, "sinful desires," with the negative nir. I. J. Schmidt, in his translation of the History of the Eastern Mongolians, p. 307, says that the Sanskrit Nirvana is translated into Mongolian by a phrase meaning "departed from misery," "escaped from misery." According to the same scholar's lectures at the St. Petersburg Academy, Nirvana is the opposite of Samsara, which is the world of constant rebirths, of craving and desire, of the illusion of the senses, of changing and transient forms, of being born, growing old, becoming sick, and dying. In Burmese the word Nirvana, on the analogy of other Sanskrit words, is transformed into Nieban, and is translated by "complete vanishing." See Sangermano's Description of the Burmese Empire, transl. by Tandy, Rome 1833, § 27. In the first edition of 1819, I also wrote Nieban, because at that time we knew Buddhism only from inadequate accounts of the Burmese.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:08 am

CHAPTER XLII: Life of the Species

In the preceding chapter we called to mind that the (Platonic) Ideas of the different grades of beings, which are the adequate objectification of the will-to-live, present themselves in the individual's knowledge, bound to the form of time, as the species, in other words, as the successive and homogeneous individuals connected by the bond of generation, and that the species is therefore the Idea (, species) drawn out in time. Consequently, the true being-in-itself of every living thing lies primarily in its species; yet this species again has its existence only in the individuals. Although the will attains to self-consciousness only in the individual, and thus knows itself directly only as the individual, yet the deep-seated consciousness that it is really the species in which its true being objectifies itself appears in the fact that the affairs of the species as such, i.e., the relations of the sexes, the generation and nourishment of the offspring, are to the individual of incomparably greater importance and consequence than everything else. Hence heat or rut among the animals (an excellent description of the vehemence of which is found in Burdach's Physiologie, Vol. I, §§ 247, 257), and, in the case of man, the careful and capricious selection of the other individual for the satisfaction of the sexual impulse, which can rise to the height of passionate love, to whose fuller investigation I shall devote a special chapter; hence, finally, the excessive love of parents for their offspring.

In the supplements to the second book, the will was compared to the root of the tree, the intellect to its crown; and so inwardly or psychologically it is. But outwardly or physiologically, the genitals are the root, and the head is the crown. The nourishing part, it is true, is not the genitals, but the villi of the intestines; yet not the latter, but the former are the root, for through them the individual is connected with the species in which it is rooted. For physically the individual is a production of the species, metaphysically a more or less imperfect picture of the Idea that, in the form of time, exhibits itself as species. In agreement with the relation here expressed, the maximum vitality, and also the decrepitude, of the brain and of the genitals, are simultaneous and closely connected. The sexual impulse is to be regarded as the inner impulse of the tree (the species) on which the life of the individual thrives, just like a leaf which is nourished by the tree, and assists in nourishing it. That impulse is therefore very strong, and springs from the depths of our nature. To castrate an individual is to cut him off from the tree of the species on which he thrives, and to let him, thus severed, wither away; hence the degradation of his powers of mind and body. The service of the species, fertilization or impregnation, is followed in the case of every animal individual by momentary exhaustion and debility of all its powers, and in the case of most insects even by speedy death; for this reason Celsus said: Seminis emissio est partis animae jactura. [1] In the case of man, the extinction of the procreative power shows that the individual is approaching death; at every age excessive use of that power shortens life, whereas moderation enhances all the powers, especially muscular strength. For this reason abstemiousness and moderation were part of the training of Greek athletes. The same moderation lengthens the insect's life even to the following spring. All this indicates that the life of the individual is at bottom only something borrowed from the species, and that all vital force is, so to speak, force of the species checked by damming up. But this is to be explained from the fact that the metaphysical substratum of life reveals itself directly in the species, and only by means of this in the individual. Accordingly, in India the lingam with the yoni, as the symbol of the species and of its immortality, is revered, and, as the counterpoise of death, it is ascribed as an attribute to Shiva, the very divinity presiding over death.

However, without myth and symbol, the vehemence of the sexual impulse, the keen ardour and profound seriousness with which every animal, and man also, pursues the business of that impulse, are evidence that, through the function that serves it, the animal belongs to that in which its true inner being really and mainly lies, namely the species; whereas all the other functions and organs serve directly only the individual, whose existence is at bottom only secondary. In the vehemence of that impulse which is the concentration of the whole animal inner nature is further expressed the consciousness that the individual does not endure, and that everything therefore has to be staked on the maintenance of the species, as that in which the individual's true existence lies.

To illustrate what has been said, let us picture to ourselves an animal on heat and in the act of procreation. We see in it a seriousness and ardour never known at any other time. Now what occurs in it? Does it know that it must die, and that through its present business a new individual, though one wholly similar to it, will arise, in order to take its place? It knows nothing of all this, for it does not think; but it is as keenly concerned about the continuance of its species in time as if it did know it all. For it is conscious that it desires to live and exist, and it expresses the highest degree of this willing through the act of procreation; this is all that takes place in its consciousness. This is also quite sufficient for the continued existence of beings, just because the will is the radical, and knowledge the adventitious. For this reason, the will does not need to be guided throughout by knowledge; but as soon as it has made a decision in its primitive originality, this willing will automatically objectify itself in the world of the representation. Now if in such a way it is that definite animal form we have pictured to ourselves that wills life and existence, then it wills life and existence not in general, but in precisely this form. Therefore it is the sight of its form in the female of its species that stimulates the animal's will to procreation. Looked at from outside and under the form of time, this willing of the animal presents itself as such an animal form maintained throughout an infinite time by the ever-repeated replacement of one individual by another, and hence by the alternation of death and generation. Thus considered, death and generation appear to be the pulsation of that form (, species) enduring through all time. We can compare them to the forces of attraction and repulsion, through whose antagonism matter continues to exist. What is here demonstrated in the animal applies also to man; for although with him the act of procreation is accompanied by complete knowledge of its final cause, it is nevertheless not guided by this knowledge, but proceeds immediately from the will-to-live as its concentration. Accordingly, it is to be reckoned as one of the instinctive actions; for in procreation the animal is guided by knowledge of the end in view just as little as it is in mechanical instincts. In these also the will manifests itself, in the main, without the mediation of knowledge which, here as there, is concerned only with details. To a certain extent, generation is the most marvellous of the instincts, and its work the most astonishing.

From these considerations, it is clear why sexual desire bears a character very different from that of any other; it is not only the strongest of desires, but is even specifically of a more powerful kind than all the others are. It is everywhere tacitly assumed as necessary and inevitable, and is not, like other desires, a matter of taste and caprice. For it is the desire that constitutes even the very nature of man. In conflict with it, no motive is so strong as to be certain of victory. It is so very much the chief thing, that no other pleasures make up for the deprivation of its satisfaction; for its sake, moreover, animal and man undertake every peril and conflict. A very naive expression of this natural sentiment is the well-known inscription on the door of the fornix at Pompeii, adorned with the phallus: Heic habitat felicitas. [2] For those going in this was naive, for those coming out ironical, and in itself it was humorous. On the other hand, the excessive power of the procreative impulse is seriously and worthily expressed in the inscription that (according to Theon of Smyrna, De Musica, c. 47) Osiris had placed on the column erected by him to the eternal gods: "To Eros, the spirit, the heaven, the sun, the moon, the earth, the night, the day, and the father of all that is and is to be"; likewise in the beautiful apostrophe with which Lucretius opens his work:

Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
Alma Venus etc. [3]


In keeping with all this is the important role played by the sex-relation in the world of mankind, where it is really the invisible central point of all action and conduct, and peeps up everywhere, in spite of all the veils thrown over it. It is the cause of war and the aim and object of peace, the basis of the serious and the aim of the joke, the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to all hints and allusions, and the meaning of all secret signs and suggestions, all unexpressed proposals, and all stolen glances; it is the daily thought and desire of the young and often of the old as well, the hourly thought of the unchaste, and the constantly recurring reverie of the chaste even against their will, the ever ready material for a joke, only because the profoundest seriousness lies at its root. This, however, is the piquant element and the jest of the world, that the principal concern of all men is pursued secretly and ostensibly ignored as much as possible. Indeed, we see it take its seat at every moment as the real and hereditary lord of the world, out of the fulness of its own strength, on the ancestral throne, look down thence with scornful glances, and laugh at the arrangements made to subdue it, to imprison it, or at any rate to restrict it, and if possible to keep it concealed, or indeed so to master it that it appears only as an entirely subordinate and secondary concern of life. But all this agrees with the fact that the sexual impulse is the kernel of the will-to-live, and consequently the concentration of all willing; in the text, therefore, I have called the genitals the focus of the will. Indeed, it may be said that man is concrete sexual impulse, for his origin is an act of copulation, and the desire of his desires is an act of copulation, and this impulse alone perpetuates and holds together the whole of his phenomenal appearance. It is true that the will-to-live manifests itself primarily as an effort to maintain the individual; yet this is only a stage towards the effort to maintain the species. This latter effort must be more intense in proportion as the life of the species surpasses that of the individual in duration, extension, and value. The sexual impulse is therefore the most complete manifestation of the will-to-live, its most distinctly expressed type. The origin of individuals from this impulse, as well as its primacy over all other desires of the natural person, are both in complete agreement with this.

Yet another physiological observation is relevant here; it throws light on my fundamental doctrine expounded in the second book. The sexual impulse is the most vehement of cravings, the desire of desires, the concentration of all our willing. Accordingly, its satisfaction, corresponding exactly to the individual desire of anyone, thus to a desire directed to a definite individual, is the summit and crown of his happiness, the ultimate goal of his natural endeavours, with whose attainment everything seems to him to be attained, and with the missing of which everything seems to have been missed. In just the same way we find, as the physiological correlative of all this, in the objectified will, and thus in the human organism, the sperm or semen as the secretion of secretions, the quintessence of all humours, the final result of all organic functions, and in this we have one more proof of the fact that the body is only objectivity of the will, in other words the will itself under the form of the representation.

Connected with procreation is the maintenance of the offspring, and with the sexual impulse parental love; thus in these the life of the species is carried on. Accordingly, the animal's love for its offspring has, like the sexual impulse, a strength far surpassing that of the efforts which are directed merely towards itself as an individual. This shows itself in the fact that even the mildest animals are ready to undertake on behalf of their offspring the most unequal fight to the death; and with almost all species of animals, the mother encounters every danger for the protection of her young, in fact in many cases she even faces certain death. In the case of man, this instinctive parental love is guided and directed by the faculty of reason, in other words, by reflection; but sometimes it is also checked, and in the case of bad characters this can amount to its complete renunciation. We can therefore observe its effects most clearly in the case of the animals. In itself, however, this parental love is no less strong in man; here too in particular cases we see it entirely overcome self-love, and even go so far as a man's sacrificing his own life. Thus, for example, newspapers from France have just reported that at Cahors in the department of Lot, a father took his own life, in order that his son, whose name had been drawn for military service, should be the eldest son of a widow, and as such exempt from service (Galignani's Messenger, 22 June 1843). Since, however, animals are incapable of any reflection, the instinctive maternal affection in their case (the male is generally not conscious of his paternity) shows itself directly and genuinely, and hence with perfect distinctness and in all its strength. At bottom, it is the expression of the consciousness in the animal that its true inner being lies more immediately in the species than in the individual. Therefore, in case of necessity, the animal sacrifices its own life, so that the species may be maintained in the young. Here therefore, as well as in the sexual impulse, the will-to-live becomes to a certain extent transcendent, since its consciousness extends beyond the individual, in which it is inherent, to the species. To avoid expressing this second manifestation of the life of the species in a merely abstract way, and to bring it home to the reader in its magnitude and reality, I will mention a few examples of the extraordinary power of instinctive maternal love.

The sea-otter, when pursued, seizes her young one and dives with it; when she comes to the surface again to breathe, she covers it with her body and receives the hunter's harpoon, while it makes good its escape. A young whale is killed merely to decoy the mother, who hurries to it, and seldom forsakes it so long as it still lives, although she is hit by several harpoons. (Scoresby's Tagebuch einer Reise auf den Walfischfang, from the English by Kries, p. 196.) On Three Kings Island near New Zealand there are colossal seals called sea-elephants (Phoca proboscidea). Swimming round the island in a regular herd, they feed on fish, yet under the water they have certain terrible enemies, unknown to us, by which they are often severely wounded; hence their swimming together requires special tactics. The females bring forth their young on the shore; while they are suckling them, a business lasting from seven to eight weeks, all the males form a circle round them to prevent them, driven by hunger, from entering the sea; and when this is attempted, they prevent it by biting. Thus they all fast together for seven or eight weeks, and become thin, merely in order that the young may not enter the sea before they are able to swim well, and to observe the proper tactics that are then taught them by blows and bites (Freycinet, Voyage aux terres australes, 1826). Here we also see how parental love, like every strong exertion of the will (see chap. xix, 6) enhances the intelligence. Wild duck, whitethroats, and many other birds fly in front of the hunter's feet with loud cries, and flap about when he approaches their nest, as though their wings were injured, in order to distract his attention from their young to themselves. The lark tries to entice the dog away from her nest by exposing herself. In just the same way, hinds and does induce the hunter to pursue them, so that their young may not be attacked. Swallows have flown into burning houses in order to save their young or to perish with them. At Delft in a great fire, a stork allowed itself to be burnt in its nest rather than forsake its frail and delicate young that were still unable to fly. (Hadr. Junius, Descriptio Hollandiae.) Mountain-cocks and woodcocks allow themselves to be caught when brooding on the nest. Muscicapa tyrannus defends her nest with particular courage, and offers resistance even to eagles. An ant has been cut in two, and the front half has been seen to bring its pupae into safety. A bitch, whose litter had been surgically removed from her womb, crept up to them dying, caressed them, and began to whine furiously only when they were taken from her. (Burdach, Physiologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft, Vols. II and III.)

_______________

Notes:

1. "The ejaculation of sperm is the casting away of part of the soul." [Tr.]

2. "Here dwells happiness." [Tr.]

3. "Mother of Aeneas' race, delight and desire of gods and men, lovely and enchanting Venus." [Tr.]
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:10 am

CHAPTER XLIII: The Hereditary Nature of Qualities

The most ordinary everyday experience teaches that, with procreation, the combined seed of the parents transmits not only the characteristics of the species, but those of the individuals also, as regards the bodily (objective, external) qualities; and this has at all times been recognized:

Naturae sequitur semina quisque suae. [1]


Whether this holds good of mental (subjective, internal) qualities also, so that these too are transmitted from parents to children, is a question that has often been raised, and almost always answered in the affirmative. More difficult, however, is the problem whether it is possible to distinguish what belongs to the father and what to the mother, what is the mental and spiritual inheritance coming to us from each of our parents. If we throw light on this problem by means of our fundamental knowledge that the will is the true inner being, the kernel, the radical element in man, while the intellect is the secondary, the adventitious, the accident of that substance, then before questioning experience we shall assume it as at least probable that at procreation the father, as sexus potior and the procreative principle, imparts the basis, the radical element, of the new life, that is, the will, but the mother, as sexus sequior and the merely conceiving principle, the secondary element, the intellect. We shall therefore assume that man inherits his moral nature, his character, his inclinations, his heart, from the father, but the degree, quality, and tendency of his intelligence from the mother. This assumption finds its actual confirmation in experience, though this cannot be decided by a physical experiment on the table, but follows partly from careful and keen observation over many years, and partly from history.

Our own experience has the advantage of complete certainty and the greatest speciality, and this outweighs the disadvantage that attaches to it, arising from the fact that its sphere is limited, and its examples not generally known. I therefore refer everyone in the first instance to his own experience. Let him first of all consider himself, admit to himself his own inclinations and passions, his characteristic errors and weaknesses, his vices, as well as his good points and virtues, if he has any; then let him recall his father to mind, and he will not fail to notice all these characteristic traits in him also. On the other hand he will often find his mother of an entirely different character, and a moral agreement with her. will occur extremely rarely, and only through the exceptional accident of a similarity of character between the two parents. Let him make this examination, for example, with regard to quick temper or patience, avarice or extravagance, tendency to sensuality, intemperance, or gambling, callousness or kindness, honesty or duplicity, pride or affability, courage or cowardice, peaceableness or quarrelsomeness, conciliatory attitude or resentment, and so on. Then let him make the same investigation in all those whose character and parents have come to be accurately known to him. If he proceeds with attention, correct judgement, and sincerity, confirmation of our principle will not be wanting. Thus, for example, he will find the special tendency to tell lies, peculiar to many people, equally present in two brothers, because they have inherited it from the father; for this reason, the comedy The Liar and his Son is psychologically correct. But two inevitable limitations are here to be borne in mind, which only downright injustice could interpret as evasions. Firstly, pater semper incertus. [2] Only a decided bodily resemblance to the father removes this limitation; a superficial resemblance is not enough to do so; for there is an after-effect from earlier impregnation, by virtue of which the children of a second marriage sometimes still have a slight resemblance to the first husband, and those begotten in adultery a resemblance to the legitimate father. Such an aftereffect has been observed even more distinctly in the case of animals. The second limitation is that the father's moral character does indeed appear in the son, yet with the modification it has received through another and often very different intellect (the inheritance from the mother), whence a correction of the observation becomes necessary. In proportion to that difference, this modification may be important or unimportant, yet never so great that the fundamental traits of the father's character would not still always appear sufficiently easy to recognize even under such modification, somewhat like a person who had tried to disguise himself by an entirely strange kind of dress, wig, and beard. For example, if, by virtue of his inheritance from the mother, a person is preeminently endowed with the faculty of reason, and thus with the capacity for reflection and deliberation, then his passions, inherited from his father, will be partly restrained and partly concealed thereby; and accordingly they will attain only to methodical and systematic or secret manifestation. From this, then, will result a phenomenon very different from that of the father, who may possibly have had quite a limited intelligence. In just the same way the opposite can occur. On the other hand, the mother's inclinations and passions do not reappear in the children at all; indeed, we often see the very opposite of them.

The examples of history have the advantage over those of private life of being universally known; on the other hand they are, of course, impaired by the uncertainty and frequent falsification of all tradition, and also by the fact that, as a rule, they contain only the public, not the private life, and accordingly only the political actions, not the finer manifestations of the character. But I wish to support the truth put forward here by some examples from history. Those who have made a special study of history will no doubt be able to add a far greater number of cases just as striking.

It is well known that P. Decius Mus sacrificed his life for his country with heroic magnanimity, for, solemnly dedicating himself and the enemy to the infernal gods, he plunged with covered face into the army of the Latins. About forty years later, his son of the same name did exactly the same thing in the war against the Gauls. (Livy, viii, 6; x, 28.) Hence a positive proof of Horace's fortes creantur forti bus et bonis; [3] the converse of this is supplied by Shakespeare;

Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base.

-- Cymbeline, IV, 2.


Early Roman history presents us with whole families, whose members distinguished themselves in a long succession by self-sacrificing patriotism and bravery; such were the gens Fabia and the gens Fabricia. Alexander the Great, again, was, like his father Philip, fond of power and conquest. The pedigree of Nero, which Suetonius (c. 4 and 5) gives with a moral purpose at the beginning of his description of this monster, is well worth considering. The gens Claudia, which he is describing, flourished in Rome through six centuries and produced men of action who were nevertheless arrogant and cruel. From it sprang Tiberius, Caligula, and finally Nero. In his grandfather, and even more strongly in his father, all those atrocious qualities already show themselves which were able to obtain their full development only in Nero, partly because his high rank allowed them freer scope, and partly because he had in addition as his mother the irrational Bacchante, Agrippina, who was unable to endow him with any intellect for curbing his passions. Suetonius, therefore, relates wholly in our sense that at his birth praesagio fuit etiam Domitii, patris, vox, inter gratulationes amicorum, negantis, quidquam ex se et Agrippina, nisi detestabile et malo publico nasci potuisse. [4] On the other hand, Cimon was the son of Miltiades, Hannibal the son of Hamilcar, and the Scipios produced a whole family of heroes and noble defenders of their country. The son of Pope Alexander VI, however, was his hideous image Caesar Borgia. The son of the notorious Duke of Alba was just as cruel and wicked as his father. The malicious and unjust Philip IV of France, known specially for his cruel torture and execution of the Templars, had as his daughter Isabella, wife of Edward II of England. This woman rose against her husband, took him prisoner, and, after he had signed his abdication, since the attempt to kill him by ill-treatment proved unsuccessful, had him put to death in prison in a manner too horrible for me to mention here. Henry VIII of England, the bloodthirsty tyrant and defensor fidei, had by his first marriage a daughter, Queen Mary, distinguished equally for bigotry and cruelty, who from her numerous burnings of heretics won for herself the title of Bloody Mary. His daughter by his second marriage, namely Elizabeth, inherited an excellent understanding from her mother, Anne Boleyn, which ruled out bigotry, and curbed, yet did not eliminate, her father's character in her, so that this still shone through on occasion, and distinctly appeared in her cruel treatment of Mary of Scotland. Van Geuns, [5] after Marcus Donatus, speaks of a Scottish girl whose father had been burnt as a highwayman and cannibal when she was only a year old. Although she grew up among quite different people, there developed in her, with increasing age, the same craving for human flesh, and, caught in the act of satisfying this craving, she was buried alive. In the Freimutige of 13 July 1821 we read that in the department of Aube the police hunted for a girl, because she had murdered two children, whom she was to take to the foundling hospital, in order to keep the little money allowed for them. The police finally found the girl on the road to Paris, drowned near Romilly; and her own father gave himself up as her murderer. Finally, let me mention here a couple of cases from recent times, which accordingly have only the newspapers to vouch for them. In October 1836 a Count Belecznai was condemned to death in Hungary, because he had murdered an official, and severely wounded his own relations. His elder brother had previously been executed for parricide; and his father had likewise been a murderer. (Frankfurter Postzeitung, 26 October 1836.) A year later, the youngest brother of this count fired a pistol at, but missed, the steward of his estates in the very street in which the official had been murdered. (Frankfurter Journal, 16 September 1837.) In the Frankfurter Postzeitung of 19 November 1857, a despatch from Paris announces the condemnation to death of a very dangerous highway robber, Lemaire, and his companions, and adds: "The criminal tendency appears to be hereditary in his family and in those of his confederates, since several of their stock have died on the scaffold." It follows from a passage in the Laws of Plato that similar cases were known to the Greeks. (Stobaeus, Florilegium, Vol. II, p. 213.) The annals of crime will certainly have many similar pedigrees to show. The tendency to suicide is specially hereditary.

On the other hand, when we see the admirable Marcus Aurelius have the wicked Commodus for a son, this does not lead us astray, for we know that Diva Faustina was an uxor infamis. On the contrary, we remember this case in order to presume in analogous cases an analogous reason; for example, that Domitian was the full brother of Titus I can never believe, but rather that Vespasian also was a deceived husband.

Now as regards the second part of the principle set up, namely the inheritance of the intellect from the mother, this enjoys a far more general acceptance than does the first, which in itself is opposed by the liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, [6] but the separate conception of which is opposed by the simple and indivisible nature of the soul. The old and popular expression "mother wit" in itself testifies to the early recognition of this second truth that is based on the experience gained with both small and great intellectual endowments, namely that they are the ability and capacity of those whose mothers relatively distinguished themselves by their intelligence. On the other hand, that the father's intellectual qualities are not transmitted to the son is proved both by the fathers and by the sons of men who were distinguished by the most eminent abilities, since, as a rule, they were men of quite ordinary intelligence and without a trace of the father's mental gifts. But if for once an isolated exception to this frequently confirmed experience appears, such, for example, as that presented by Pitt and his father Lord Chatham, we are entitled, indeed obliged, to ascribe it to an accident, although, on account of the extreme rarity of great talents, such an accident is certainly one of the most extraordinary. But here the rule holds good that it is improbable that the improbable never happens. Moreover, great statesmen (as mentioned already in chapter 22) are such just as much through qualities of their character, and hence through the paternal inheritance, as through the superior qualities of their mind. On the other hand, among artists, poets, and philosophers, whose achievements alone are ascribed to genius proper, I know of no case analogous to this. It is true that Raphael's father was a painter, but not a great one; Mozart's father and also his son were musicians, but not great ones. However, we cannot help admiring how fate, which had allotted to those two men, each the greatest in his sphere, only a very short life, saw to it, by way of compensation so to speak, that they were already born in their workshop. In this way, without suffering the loss of time in youth which often occurs in the case of other men of genius, they received from childhood, through paternal example and instruction, the necessary introduction into the art to which they were exclusively destined. This secret and mysterious power, appearing to guide the life of the individual, has been the subject of special investigations on my part which I have recorded in the essay "On the apparent deliberateness in the fate of the individual" (Parerga, Vol. I). It is also to be noted here that there are certain scientific occupations which presuppose, of course, good, innate abilities, yet not really rare and extraordinary ones; the main requirements, on the contrary, are zealous effort, diligence, patience, early and good instruction, sustained study, and much practice. From this, and not from inheritance of the father's intellect, is to be explained the fact that, as the son always willingly follows the path prepared by his father, and almost all businesses are hereditary in certain families, individual families can show a succession of men of merit even in some branches of knowledge which require above all diligence and perseverance; such are the Scaligers, the Bernouillis, the Cassinis, the Herschels.

The number of proofs of the real inheritance of the intellect from the mother would be very much greater than it is, were it not that the character and disposition of the female sex are such that women rarely give public proof of their mental faculties; therefore these do not become historical, and thus do not come to the knowledge of posterity. Moreover, on account of the generally weaker nature of the female sex, these faculties themselves never reach in the woman the degree to which in favourable circumstances they subsequently rise in the son; but as for woman herself, we have to estimate her achievements more highly in this very connexion. Accordingly, for the present, only the following examples appear to me to be proofs of our truth. Joseph II was the son of Maria Theresa. Cardanus says in the third chapter of De vita propria; Mater mea fuit memoria et ingenio pollens. [7] In the first book of the Confessions, J. J. Rousseau says: La beaute de ma mere, son esprit, ses talents, -- elle en avait de trop brillans pour son etat, [8] and so on, and he then quotes a most delightful couplet by her. D'Alembert was the illegitimate son of Claudine de Tencin, a woman of superior intellect and the author of several works of fiction and similar writings which met with great approval in their day, and are said to be still readable. (See her biography in the Blatter fur literarische Unterhaltung, March 1845, Nos. 71-73). That Buffon's mother was a distinguished woman is seen from the following passage in the Voyage a Montbar, by Herault de Sechelles, quoted by Flourens in his Histoire des travaux de Buffon, p. 288: Buffon avait ce principe qu'en general les enfants tenaient de leur mere leurs qualites intellectuelles et morales: et lorsqu'il l'avait developpe dans la conversation, it en faisait sur-le-champ l'application a lui-meme, en faisant un eloge pompeux de sa mere, qui avail en effet, beaucoup d'esprit, des connaissances etendues, et une tete tres bien organisee. [9] That he mentions the moral qualities also is either an error made by the reporter, or is due to the fact that his mother accidentally had the same character that he and his father had. The contrary of this is presented by innumerable cases in which mother and son have opposite characters. Hence in Orestes and Hamlet the greatest dramatists could present mother and son in hostile conflict, in which the son appears as the moral representative and avenger of the father. On the other hand, the converse case, namely of the son appearing as the moral representative and avenger of the mother against the father, would be revolting, and at the same time almost ludicrous. This is due to the fact that between father and son there exists actual identity of being, which is the will, but between mother and son there exists mere identity of the intellect, and even this subject to certain conditions. Between mother and son there can exist the greatest moral contrast, between father and son only an intellectual. From this point of view the necessity of the Salic law should also be recognized, that woman cannot carryon the line. In his short autobiography Hume says: "Our mother was a woman of singular merit." Of Kant's mother it says in the most recent biography by F. W. Schubert that "according to her son's own judgement, she was a woman of great natural understanding. For those days, when there was so little opportunity for the education of girls, she was exceptionally well informed, and later continued by herself to look after her further education. . . . When out walking, she drew her son's attention to all kinds of natural phenomena, and tried to explain them through the power of God." What an intelligent, clever, and superior woman Goethe's mother was is now generally known. How' much she has been spoken of in literature, though his father has not been mentioned at all! Goethe himself describes him as a man of inferior abilities. Schiller's mother was susceptible to poetry; she herself made verses, a fragment of which is to be found in his biography by Schwab. Burger, that genuine poetic genius, to whom is due perhaps the first place among German poets after Goethe, for, compared with his ballads, those of Schiller seem cold and artificial, has furnished an account of his parents which is significant for us, and which his friend and physician Althof repeats in these words in his biography, published in 1798: "It is true that Burger's father had various kinds of knowledge, after the manner of study prevalent at the time, and that he was also a good and honest man. Nevertheless, he liked his quiet comfort and his pipe of tobacco so much that, as my friend used to say, he always first had to pull himself together, if he were to apply himself for a brief quarter of an hour to the instruction of his son. His wife was a woman of the most extraordinary mental gifts, which, however, were so little cultivated that she scarcely learnt to write legibly. Burger was of the opinion that, with proper culture, his mother would have become the most famous of her sex, although several times he expressed a marked dislike of different traits of her moral character. Yet he believed he had inherited some intellectual gifts from his mother, but from his father an agreement with his moral character." Sir Walter Scott's mother was a poetess, and was in touch with the fine intellects of her time, as we learn from the obituary notice of Sir Walter in the Globe of 24 September, 1832. That poems by her appeared in print in 1789 I find from an article entitled "Mother-wit," published by Brockhaus in the Blatter fur literarische Unterhaltung of 4 October 1841. This gives a long list of clever mothers of famous men, from which I will take only two. "Bacon's mother was a distinguished linguist, wrote and translated several works, and showed in each of them erudition, discernment, and taste. Boerhaave's mother distinguished herself by medical knowledge." On the other hand, Haller has preserved for us a strong proof of the inheritance of feeble-mindedness from mothers, for he states: E duabus patriciis sororibus, ob divitias maritos Metis, quum tamen fatuis essent proximae, novimus in nobilissimas gentes nunc a seculo retro ejus morbi manasse seminia, ut etiam in quarta generatione, quintave, omnium posterorum aliqui fatui supersint. (Elementa physiologiae, lib. XXIX, § 8.) [10] According to Esquirol, madness also is inherited more frequently from the mother than from the father. But if it is inherited from the father, I attribute this to the disposition of feeling, the effect of which gives rise to it.

From our principle, it seems to follow that sons of the same mother have equal mental powers, and that if one were highly gifted, the other would of necessity be so also. Occasionally this is the case; for example, we have the Carracci, Joseph and Michael Haydn, Bernard and Andreas Romberg, George and Frederick Cuvier. I would also add the brothers Schlegel, were it not that the younger, namely Friedrich, had made himself unworthy of the honour of being mentioned along with his admirable, blameless, and highly distinguished brother, August Wilhelm, by the disgraceful obscurantism displayed by him in the last quarter of his life conjointly with Adam Muller. For obscurantism is a sin, perhaps not against the Holy Spirit, but certainly against the human. Therefore we ought never to forgive it, but always and everywhere implacably hold it against the person who has made himself guilty of it, and take every opportunity of showing our contempt for him, as long as he lives, and even after he is dead. Just as often, however, the above conclusion does not follow; for example, Kant's brother was quite an ordinary person. To explain this, I recall what was said in chapter 31 on the physiological conditions of genius. Not only an extraordinarily developed brain formed absolutely for the purpose (the mother's share) is required, but also a very energetic heart action to animate it, that is to say, subjectively a passionate will, a lively temperament; this is the inheritance from the father. But this very quality is at its height only during the father's most vigorous years, and the mother ages even more rapidly. Accordingly, the highly gifted sons will, as a rule, be the eldest, begotten in the full vigour of both parents; thus Kant's brother was eleven years younger than he. Even in the case of two distinguished brothers, the elder will as a rule be the superior. Yet not only the age, but every temporary ebb of the vital forces, or other disturbance of health in the parents at the time of procreation is capable of curtailing the share of one or the other parent, and of preventing the appearance of an eminent man of talent, a phenomenon that is for this very reason so exceedingly rare. Incidentally, in the case of twins, the absence of all the differences just mentioned is the cause of the quasi-identity of their nature.

If isolated cases should be found where a highly gifted son had had no mentally distinguished mother, this might be explained from the fact that this mother herself had had a phlegmatic father. For this reason, her unusually developed brain had not been properly excited by the corresponding energy of the blood circulation, a requirement I have already discussed in chapter 31. Nevertheless, her extremely perfect nervous and cerebral system had been transmitted to the son. But in his case there had been in addition a lively and passionate father with energetic heart action, whereby the other somatic condition of great mental power first appeared in him. Perhaps this was Byron's case, as we do not find the good mental qualities of his mother mentioned anywhere. The same explanation may also be applied to the case where the mother of a son of genius, herself distinguished for mental gifts, had not had a clever mother, since the latter's father had been a man of phlegmatic nature.

The discordant, changeable, and uncertain element in the character of most people may possibly be traceable to the fact that the individual has not a simple origin, but obtains the will from the father and the intellect from the mother. The more heterogeneous and unsuited to each other the parents, the greater will that disharmony, that inner variance be. While some excel through their heart and others through their head, there are still others whose superiority is to be found merely in a certain harmony and unity of the whole inner nature. This results from the fact that with them heart and head are so thoroughly suited to each other that they mutually support and bring one another into prominence. This leads us to suppose that their parents were specially suited to, and in harmony with, each other.

As regards the physiological aspect of the theory expounded, I wish only to mention that Burdach, who erroneously assumes that the same psychic quality can be inherited now from the father, now from the mother, nevertheless adds (Physioiogie ais Erfahrungs-wissenschaft, Vol. I, § 306): "On the whole, the male element has more influence in determining the irritable life, but the female element more influence on sensibility." What Linnaeus says in the Systema naturae, Vol. I, p. 8, is also to the point: Mater prolifera promit, ante generationem, vivum compendium MEDULLARE novi animalis, suique simillimi, carinam Malpighianam dictum, tanquam plumulam vegetabilium: hoc ex genitura COR adsociat ramificandum in corpus. Punctum enim saliens ovi incubantis avis ostendit primum cor micans, cerebrumque cum medulla: corculum hoc, cessans a frigore, excitatur calido halitu, premitque bulla aerea, sensim dilatata, liquores, secundum canales fluxiles. Punctum vitalitatis itaque in viventibus est tanquam a prima creatione continuata medullaris vitae ramificatio, cum ovum sit GEMMA MEDULLARIS MATRIS a primordio viva, licet non sua ante proprium COR PATERNUM. [11]

We now connect the conviction, thus gained, of the inheritance of the character from the father and of the intellect from the mother with our previous consideration of the wide gulf placed by nature between one person and another in a moral as well as an intellectual regard. We also connect this conviction with our knowledge of the complete unalterability both of character and of mental faculties, and we are then led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be reached not so much from outside as from within, not so much by theory and instruction as rather by the path of generation. Plato had something of the kind in mind when, in the fifth book of his Republic, he explained his strange plan for increasing and improving his warrior caste. If we could castrate all scoundrels and stick all stupid geese in a convent, and give men of noble character a whole harem, and procure men, and indeed thorough men, for all girls of intellect and understanding, then a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of Pericles. However, without entering into such Utopian plans, it might be taken into consideration that if, as, unless I am mistaken, was actually the case with some ancient races, castration were the severest punishment after death, the world would be relieved of whole pedigrees of scoundrels, all the more certainly since it is well known that most crimes are committed between the ages of twenty and thirty. [*] In the same way it might be considered whether, as regards results, it would not be more advantageous to provide dowries to the public to be distributed on certain occasions not, as is now the custom, to girls ostensibly the most virtuous, but to the cleverest and most intelligent, especially as it is very difficult to judge of virtue, for only God, as they say, sees the heart. The opportunities for displaying a noble character are rare and a matter of chance; moreover, the virtue of many a girl is powerfully supported by her ugliness. But those who are themselves gifted with understanding can judge of it with great certainty after some investigation. The following is another practical application. In many countries, even in South Germany, the bad practice prevails of women carrying loads, often very considerable ones, on their heads. This must have a detrimental effect on the brain, whereby in the female sex of the nation this organ gradually deteriorates; and as from the female sex the male receives his brain, the whole nation becomes more and more stupid; in many cases this is not necessary at all. Accordingly, by abolishing this practice, the nation's quantum of intelligence as a whole would be increased, and this would positively be the greatest increase of the national wealth.

But if we now leave such practical applications to others, and return to our own special standpoint, the ethico-metaphysical, then, by connecting the contents of chapter 41 with those of the present chapter, the following result will present itself, which, in spite of all its transcendence, has an immediate empirical support. It is the same character, the same individually determined will, that lives in all the descendants of a stock from the remote ancestor down to the present descendant. But in each of these a different intellect is given to it, and thus a different grade and a different kind of knowledge. In this way life is now presented to it, in each of these, from a different aspect and in a different light; it obtains a new fundamental view of life, a new instruction. As the intellect is extinguished with the individual, it is true that that will cannot directly supplement the insight of the one course of life by that of the other. But in consequence of each new fundamental view of life, such as only a renewed personality can impart to the will, its willing itself receives a different tendency, and so in this way experiences a modification; and, what is the main point, the will in this new modification has either to affirm life anew, or to deny it. In such a way the arrangement of nature, which springs from the necessity of two sexes for procreation, that is, the arrangement of the ever-changing connexion of a will with an intellect, becomes the basis of a method of salvation. For by virtue of this arrangement, life constantly presents new aspects to the will (of which life is the copy and mirror), turns round without intermission, so to speak, before its glance, allows different and ever different modes of perception to try their effect on it, in order that on each of these it may decide for affirmation or for denial, both of which are constantly open to it; only that, when once denial is resorted to, the entire phenomenon ceases for it with death. Now according to this, it is just the constant renewal and complete change of the intellect which, as imparting a new world-view, holds open to the same will the path of salvation; but it is the intellect that comes from the mother. Therefore, here may be the real reason why all nations (with very few and doubtful exceptions) abhor and forbid the marriage of brother and sister, and even why sexual love does not arise at all between brother and sister, unless in extremely rare exceptions due to an unnatural perversity of the instincts and impulses, if not to the illegitimacy of one of them. For from a marriage of brother and sister nothing could result but always the same will with the same intellect, just as the two exist already united in both parents; thus the result would be the hopeless repetition of the already existing phenomenon.

Now if in the particular case, and close at hand, we contemplate the incredibly great, and so obvious, difference of characters; if we find one so good and benevolent, another so wicked and indeed merciless, and again behold one who is just, honest, and sincere, and another who is completely false as a sneak, a swindler, a traitor, or an incorrigible scoundrel, then there is opened before us an abysmal depth in our contemplation, since we ponder in vain when reflecting on the origin of such a difference. Hindus and Buddhists solve the problem by saying that "it is the consequence of the deeds of the preceding course of life." This solution is indeed the oldest as well as the most comprehensible, and has come from the wisest of mankind; yet it merely pushes the question farther back; nevertheless a more satisfactory solution will hardly be found. From the stand point of my whole teaching, it remains for me to say that here, where we are speaking of the will as thing-in-itself, the principle of sufficient reason, as the mere form of the phenomenon, no longer finds any application, but with this principle all why and whence vanish. Absolute freedom consists simply in there being something not at all subject to the principle of sufficient reason as the principle of all necessity; such a freedom, therefore, belongs only to the thing-in-itself; but this is precisely the will. Accordingly, in its phenomenon, and consequently in the operari, [12] the will is subject to necessity; but in the esse, [12] where it has determined itself as thing-in-itself, it is free. Therefore, as soon as we come to this, as happens here, all explanation by means of reasons and consequents ceases, and there is nothing left for us but to say that the true freedom of the will here manifests itself. This freedom belongs to the will in so far as it is thing-in-itself, which, however, precisely as such, is groundless, in other words knows no why. But on this account all understanding here ceases, because all our understanding rests on the principle of sufficient reason, since it consists in the mere application of this principle.

_______________

Notes:

1. "Each is guided by the talents with which nature has endowed him." Propertius IV, 8, 20 (not Catullus as cited by Schopenhauer). [Tr.]

2. "The father is always uncertain." [Tr.]

3. "From the brave and the good are the brave descended." Horace, Odes, iv, 4, 29. [Tr.]

4. "A prophecy was also the utterance of his father Domitius who assured the friends on their congratulating him that from him and Agrippina only something detestable and tending to the general ruin could be born." [Tr.]

5. Disputatio de corporum habitudine, animae, hujusque virium indice. Harderov., 1789, § 9.

6. "The will's free determination not influenced in any direction." [Tr.]

7. "My mother was distinguished for her memory and for her intellect." [Tr.]

8. "The beauty of my mother, her mind, and her gifts, -- they were all too brilliant for her social position." [Tr.]

9. "Buffon upheld this principle that children generally inherit their intellectual and moral qualities from their mother. And when he had developed this theme in conversation, he at once applied it to himself and indulged in fulsome praise of his mother who, in fact, had great intellect, extensive knowledge, and a very well organized mind." [Tr.]

10. "From two aristocratic sisters, who on account of their wealth had obtained husbands, although they were almost imbeciles, the seeds of this malady have, as we know, penetrated for a century into the most distinguished families, so that even in the fourth or fifth generation some of their descendants are imbeciles." [Tr.]

11. "A fertile mother before procreation brings forth from the medulla a living compendium of the new animal which is absolutely like her, and is called carina Malpighiana, similar to the plumula (plumule) of plants. After generation the heart attaches itself to this, in order to spread it out into the body. For the salient point in the egg which the bird hatches, shows at the beginning a palpitating heart, and the brain together with the medulla. This small heart stops under the influence of cold, is stimulated to movement by warm breath, and presses the fluids along the ducts by means of a vesicle that gradually expands. The point of vitality in living beings is, so to speak, a marrowy ramification of life continued from the first generation; for the egg is a marrowy gemma in the mother, which from the very first lives, although it has no life of its own before a heart of its own originating from the father." [Tr.]

* In his Vermischte Schriften (Gottingen, 1801, Vol. II, p. 477) Lichtenberg says: "In England it has been proposed to castrate thieves. The proposal is not bad; the punishment is very severe; it makes men contemptible, and yet leaves them still fit for trades; and if stealing is hereditary, it is then not transmitted by birth. Courage also ceases, and as the sexual impulse so frequently leads to theft, this cause also disappears. The remark that women would all the more eagerly prevent their husbands from stealing is merely mischievous, for as things are at present, they risk losing them altogether."

12. "Acting," "being," The will is free to be this or that phenomenon, but once it has assumed phenomenal form, its acting is necessitated. [Tr.]
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:16 am

Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER XLIV: The Metaphysics of Sexual Love

Ye wise men, highly and deeply learned,
Who think it out and know,
How, when, and where do all things pair?
Why do they love and kiss?
Ye lofty sages, tell me why!
What happened to me then?
Find out and tell me where, how, when,
And why this happened to me.

-- Burger


This chapter is the last of four, and their varied and mutual references to one another, by virtue of which they form to a certain extent a subordinate whole, will be recognized by the attentive reader without its being necessary for me to interrupt my discussion by recalling and referring to them.

We are accustomed to see the poets mainly concerned with describing sexual love. As a rule, this is the principal theme of all dramatic works, tragedies as well as comedies, romantic as well as classical, Indian as well as European. It is no less the material of by far the greater part of lyric, and likewise of epic poetry, especially if we are ready to class with the latter the enormous piles of romances that have been produced every year for centuries in all the civilized countries of Europe, as regularly as the fruits of the earth. As regards the main contents of all these works, they are nothing but many-sided, brief, or lengthy descriptions of the passion we are discussing. The most successful descriptive accounts of this passion, such, for example, as Romeo and Juliet, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Werther, have gained immortal fame. Yet when La Rochefoucauld imagines it is the same with passionate love as with ghosts, of which all speak, but no one has seen; and when Lichtenberg disputes and denies the reality and naturalness of that passion in his essay Uber die Macht der Liebe, they are greatly mistaken. For it is impossible that anything foreign to, and inconsistent with, human nature, and thus a merely imaginary caricature, could at all times be untiringly described and presented by poetic genius, and accepted by mankind with unaltered interest; since nothing artistically beautiful can be without truth:

Rien n'est beau que le vrai; le vrai seul est aimable. [1]

-- Boileau [Epitres, ix, 23]


But it is certainly confirmed by experience, though not by everyday experience, that that which occurs, as a rule, only as a lively yet still controllable inclination, can, in certain circumstances, grow to be a passion exceeding every other in intensity. It then sets aside all considerations, and overcomes all obstacles with incredible force and persistence, so that for its satisfaction life is risked without hesitation; indeed, when that satisfaction is denied, life is given as the price. Werthers and Jacopo Ortis exist not merely in works of fiction, but every year can show us at least half a dozen of them in Europe: sed ignotis perierunt mortibus illi: [2] for their sorrows find no other chroniclers than writers of official records and newspaper reporters. Yet readers of the police court reports in English and French daily papers will testify to the correctness of my statement. But even greater is the number of those brought to the madhouse by the same passion. Finally, every year provides us with one or two cases of the common suicide of two lovers thwarted by external circumstances. But it is inexplicable to me why those who are certain of mutual love and expect to find supreme bliss in its enjoyment, do not withdraw from every connexion by the most extreme steps, and endure every discomfort, rather than give up with their lives a happiness that for them is greater than any other they can conceive. However, as regards the lower degrees and slight attacks of that passion, everyone has them daily before his eyes, and, so long as he is not old, often in his heart also.

Therefore, after what has here been recalled, we cannot doubt either the reality or the importance of the matter, and so, instead of wondering why a philosopher for once makes this constant theme of all the poets his own, we should be surprised that a matter that generally plays so important a part in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as a raw and untreated material. It is Plato who has been most concerned with it, especially in the Banquet and the Phaedrus; yet what he says about it is confined to the sphere of myths, fables, and jokes, and for the most part concerns only the Greek love of boys. The little that Rousseau says about our theme in the Discours sur l'inegalite (p. 96, ed. Bip.) is false and inadequate. Kant's discussion of the subject in the third section of the essay On the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (pp. 435 seq. of Rosenkranz's edition) is very superficial and without special knowledge; thus it also is partly incorrect. Finally, Platner's treatment of the subject in his Anthropologie, §§ 1347 seq., will be found dull and shallow by everyone. Spinoza's definition, on the other hand, deserves to be mentioned for the sake of amusement, on account of its excessive naivety: Amor est titillatio, concomitante idea causae externae (Ethics, IV, Prop. 44, dem.). [3] Accordingly, I have no predecessors either to make use of or to refute; the subject has forced itself on me objectively, and has become connected of its own accord with my consideration of the world. Moreover, least of all can I hope for approval from those who are themselves ruled by this same passion, and who accordingly try to express the excess of their feelings in the most sublime and ethereal figures of speech. To them my view will appear too physical, too material, however metaphysical, indeed transcendent, it may be at bottom. Meanwhile they may reflect that, if the object which today inspires them to write madrigals and sonnets had been born eighteen years earlier, it would have won scarcely a glance from them.

For all amorousness is rooted in the sexual impulse alone, is in fact absolutely only a more closely determined, specialized, and indeed, in the strictest sense, individualized sexual impulse, however ethereally it may deport itself. Now, keeping this in mind, we consider the important role played by sexual love in all its degrees and nuances, not merely in theatrical performances and works of fiction, but also in the world of reality. Next to the love of life, it shows itself here as the strongest and most active of all motives, and incessantly lays claim to half the powers and thoughts of the younger portion of mankind. It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort; it has an unfavourable influence on the most important affairs, interrupts every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while even the greatest minds. It does not hesitate to ! intrude with its trash, and to interfere with the negotiations of statesmen and the investigations of the learned. It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts. Every day it brews and hatches the worst and most perplexing quarrels and disputes, destroys the most valuable relationships, and breaks the strongest bonds. It demands the sacrifice sometimes of life or health, sometimes of wealth, position, and happiness. Indeed, it robs of all conscience those who were previously honourable and upright, and makes traitors of those who have hitherto been loyal and faithful. Accordingly, it appears on the whole as a malevolent demon, striving to pervert, to confuse, and to overthrow everything. If we consider all this, we are induced to exclaim: Why all this noise and fuss? Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish, and exertion? It is merely a question of every Jack finding his Jill. [4] Why should such a trifle play so important a role, and constantly introduce disturbance and confusion into the well-regulated life of man? To the earnest investigator, however, the spirit of truth gradually reveals the answer. It is no trifle that is here in question; on the contrary, the importance of the matter is perfectly in keeping with the earnestness and ardour of the effort. The ultimate aim of all love-affairs, whether played in sock or in buskin, is actually more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation. The dramatis personae who will appear when we have retired from the scene are determined, according to their existence and their disposition, by these very frivolous love-affairs. Just as the being, the existentia, of these future persons is absolutely conditioned by our sexual impulse in general, so is their true nature, their essentia, by the individual selection in the satisfaction of this impulse, i.e., by sexual love; and by this it is in every respect irrevocably fixed. This is the key to the problem; we shall become more accurately acquainted with it in its application when we go through the degrees of amorousness from the most casual inclination up to the most intense passion. Then we shall recognize that the variety of these degrees springs from the degree of individualization of the choice.

The collected love-affairs of the present generation, taken together, are accordingly the human race's serious meditatio compositionis generationis futurae, e qua iterum pendent innumerae generationes. [5] This high importance of the matter is not a question of individual weal and woe, as in all other matters, but of the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come; therefore the will of the individual appears at an enhanced power as the will of the species. It is this high importance on which the pathetic and sublime elements of love-affairs, the transcendent element of their ecstasies and pains, rest. For thousands of years poets have never wearied of presenting these in innumerable examples, for no theme can equal this in interest. As it concerns the weal and woe of the species, it is related to all the rest, which concern only the weal of the individual. as a solid body is to a surface. This is the reason why it is so hard to impart interest to a drama without love-affairs; on the other hand, this theme is never worn out even by daily use.

That which makes itself known to the individual consciousness as sexual impulse in general, and without direction to a definite individual of the other sex, is in itself, and apart from the phenomenon, simply the will-to-live. But what appears in consciousness as sexual impulse, directed to a definite individual, is in itself the will-to-live as a precisely determined individual. Now in this case the sexual impulse, though in itself a subjective need, knows how to assume very skilfully the mask of an objective admiration, and thus to deceive consciousness; for nature requires this stratagem in order to attain her ends. But in every case of being in love, however objective and touched with the sublime that admiration may appear to be, what alone is aimed at is the generation of an individual of a definite disposition. This is confirmed first of all by the fact that the essential thing is not perhaps mutual affection, but possession, in other words, physical enjoyment. The certainty of the former, therefore, cannot in any way console us for the want of the latter; on the contrary, in such a situation many a man has shot himself. On the other hand, when those who are deeply in love cannot obtain mutual affection, they are easily satisfied with possession, Le., with physical enjoyment. This is proved by all forced marriages, and likewise by a woman's favour, so often purchased, in spite of her dislike, with large presents or other sacrifices, and also by cases of rape. The true end of the whole love-story, though the parties concerned are unaware of it, is that this particular child may be begotten; the method and manner by which this end is attained is of secondary importance. However loudly those persons of a lofty and sentimental soul, especially those in love, may raise an outcry over the gross realism of my view, they are nevertheless mistaken. For is not the precise determination of the individualities of the next generation a much higher and worthier aim than those exuberant feelings and immaterial soap-bubbles of theirs? Indeed, of earthly aims can there be one that is more important and greater? It alone corresponds to the depth with which we feel passionate love, to the seriousness with which it appears, and to the importance attached by it even to the trifling details of its sphere and occasion. Only in so far as this end is assumed to be the true one do the intricacies and difficulties, the endless exertions and annoyances, encountered for the attainment of the beloved object, appear appropriate to the matter. For it is the future generation in the whole of its individual definiteness which is pressing into existence by means of these efforts and exertions. In fact, it is itself already astir in that far-sighted, definite, and capricious selection for the satisfaction of the sexual impulse which is called love. The growing attachment of two lovers is in itself in reality the will-to-live of the new individual, an individual they can and want to produce. Its new life, indeed, is already kindled in the meeting of their longing glances, and it announces itself as a future individuality, harmonious and well constituted. They feel the longing for an actual union and fusion into a single being, in order then to go on living only as this being; and this longing receives its fulfilment in the child they produce. In the child the qualities transmitted by both parents continue to live, fused and united into one being. Conversely, the mutual, decided, and persistent dislike between a man and a girl is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself. Therefore a deeper meaning lies in the fact that, although Calderon calls the atrocious Semiramis the daughter of the air, yet he introduces her as the daughter of a rape followed by the murder of the husband.

But what ultimately draws two individuals of different sex exclusively to each other with such power is the will-to-live which manifests itself in the whole species, and here anticipates, in the individual that these two can produce, an objectification of its true nature corresponding to its aims. Hence this individual will have the will or character from the father, the intellect from the mother, and the corporization from both. But the form will depend more on the father, the size more on the mother, in accordance with the law which comes I to light in the breeding of hybrids among animals, and rests mainly on the fact that the size of the foetus must conform to that of the uterus. The quite special and individual passion of two lovers is just as inexplicable as is the quite special individuality of any person, which is exclusively peculiar to him; indeed at bottom the two are one and the same; the latter is explicite what the former was implicite. The moment when the parents begin to love each other -- to fancy each other, as a very apposite English expression has it -- is actually to be regarded as the very first formation of a new individual, and the true punctum saliens of its life; and, as I have said, in the meeting and fixation of their longing glances there arises the first germ of the new being, which of course, like all germs, is often crushed out. To a certain extent this new individual is a new (Platonic) Idea; and, just as all the Ideas strive to enter into the phenomenon with the greatest vehemence, avidly seizing for this purpose the matter which the law of causality divides among them all, so does this particular Idea of a human individuality strive with the greatest eagerness and vehemence for its realization in the phenomenon. This eagerness and vehemence is precisely the two future parents' passion for each other. It has innumerable degrees, the two extremes of which at any rate may be described as ' and ; [6] but essentially it is everywhere the same. On the other hand, it will be the more powerful in degree the more individualized it is, in other words, the more the beloved individual is exclusively suited, by virtue of all his or her parts and qualities, to satisfy the desire of the lover and the need established through his or her own individuality. The point here in question will become clear to us in the further course of our discussion. Primarily and essentially, the amorous inclination is directed to health, strength, and beauty, and consequently to youth as well, since the will strives first of all to exhibit the specific character of the human species as the basis of all individuality; ordinary flirtation () does not go much farther. Connected with these, then, are the more special demands which we shall investigate in detail later, and with which the passion rises, where they see satisfaction before them. The highest degrees of this passion, however, spring from that suitability of the two individualities to each other. By virtue of this, the will, i.e., the character, of the father and the intellect of the mother bring about in their union precisely that individual for which the will-to-live in general, exhibiting itself in the whole species, feels a longing. This longing is in keeping with the magnitude of the will, and therefore exceeds the measure of a mortal heart; in just the same way, its motives lie beyond the sphere of the individual intellect. This, therefore, is the soul of a true and great passion. Now the more perfect the mutual suitability to each other of two individuals in each of the many different respects to be considered later, the stronger will their mutual passion prove to be. As there are no two individuals exactly alike, one particular woman must correspond most perfectly to each particular man -- always with regard to what is to be produced. Really passionate love is as rare as is the accident of these two meeting. Since, however, the possibility of such a love is present in everyone, the descriptions of it in the works of the poets are intelligible to us. Just because the passion of being in love really turns on what is to be produced and on its qualities, and because the kernel of this passion lies in this, a friendship without any admixture of sexual love can exist between two young and comely persons of different sex by virtue of the harmony of their disposition, their character, and their mental tendency; in fact, as regards sexual love, there may even exist between them a certain aversion. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that a child produced by them would have unharmonious bodily or mental qualities; in short, the child's existence and nature would not be in keeping with the aims of the will-to-live as it exhibits itself in the species. In the opposite case, in spite of difference of disposition, character, and mental tendency, and of the dislike and even hostility resulting therefrom, sexual love can nevertheless arise and exist; if it then blinds us to all that, and leads to marriage, such a marriage will be very unhappy.

Now to the more thorough investigation of the matter. Egoism is so deep-rooted a quality of all individuality in general that, in order to rouse the activity of an individual being, egotistical ends are the only ones on which we can count with certainty. It is true that the species has a prior, closer, and greater claim to the individual than has the perishable individuality itself. Yet when the individual is to be active, and even to make sacrifices for the sake of the continuance and constitution of the species, the importance of the matter cannot be made so comprehensible to his intellect, calculated as this is merely for individual ends, that its effect would be in accordance with the matter. Therefore in such a case, nature can attain her end only by implanting in the individual a certain delusion, and by virtue of this, that which in truth is merely a good thing for the species seems to him to be a good thing for himself, so that he serves the species, whereas he is under the delusion that he is serving himself. In this process a mere chimera, which vanishes immediately afterwards, floats before him, and, as motive, takes the place of a reality. This delusion is instinct. In the great majority of cases, instinct is to be regarded as the sense of the species which presents to the will what is useful to it. Since, however, the will has here become individual, it must be deceived in such a way that it perceives through the sense of the individual what the sense of the species presents to it. Thus it imagines it is pursuing individual ends, whereas in truth it is pursuing merely general ends (taking this word in the most literal sense). We observe the external phenomenon of instinct best in animals, where its role is most important; but only in ourselves can we become acquainted with the internal process, as with everything internal. Now it is supposed of course that man has hardly any instinct at all, at any rate only the instinct by which the new-born baby seeks and seizes its mother's breast. But we have in fact a very definite, distinct, and indeed complicated instinct, namely that to select the other individual for sexual satisfaction, a selection that is so fine, so serious, and so capricious. The beauty or ugliness of the other individual has absolutely nothing to do with this satisfaction in itself, that is to say, in so far as this satisfaction is a sensual pleasure resting on the individual's pressing need. Therefore the regard for this beauty or ugliness which is nevertheless pursued with such ardour, together with the careful selection that springs therefrom, evidently refers not to the chooser himself, although he imagines it does so, but to the true end and purpose, namely that which is to be produced; for this is to receive the type of the species as purely and correctly as possible. Thus through a thousand physical accidents and moral misfortunes there arises a very great variety of deteriorations of the human form; yet its true type in all its parts is always reestablished. This takes place under the guidance of that sense of beauty which generally directs the sexual impulse, and without which this impulse sinks to the level of a disgusting need. Accordingly, in the first place, everyone will decidedly prefer and ardently desire the most beautiful individuals; in other words, those in whom the character of the species is most purely and strongly marked. But in the second place he will specially desire in the other individual those perfections that he himself lacks; in fact, he will even find beautiful those imperfections that are the opposite of his own. Hence, for example, short men look for tall women, persons with fair hair like those with dark, and so on. The delusive ecstasy that seizes a man at the sight of a woman whose beauty is suited to him, and pictures to him a union with her as the highest good, is just the sense of the species. Recognizing the distinctly expressed stamp of the species, this sense would like to perpetuate the species with this man. The maintenance of the type of the species rests on this decided inclination to beauty; hence it acts with such great power. Later on, we shall specially examine the considerations that it follows. Therefore, what here guides man is really an instinct directed to what is best for the species, whereas man himself imagines he is seeking merely a heightening of his own pleasure. In fact, we have in this an instructive explanation of the inner nature of all instinct, which, as here, almost always sets the individual in motion for the good of the species. For obviously the care with which an insect hunts for a particular flower, or fruit, or dung, or meat, or, like the ichneumon, for the larva of another insect, in order to lay its eggs only there, and to attain this does not shrink from trouble or danger, is very analogous to the care with which a man specially selects for sexual satisfaction a woman with qualities that appeal to him individually. He strives after her so eagerly that, to attain this end, he often, in defiance of all reason, sacrifices his own happiness in life by a foolish marriage, by love-affairs that cost him his fortune, his honour, and his life, even by crimes, such as adultery or rape; all merely in order to serve the species in the most appropriate way, in accordance with the will of nature that is everywhere supreme, although at the expense of the individual. Thus instinct is everywhere an action as if in accordance with the conception of an end or purpose, and yet entirely without such a conception. Nature implants it, wherever the acting individual would be incapable of understanding the end, or unwilling to pursue it. Therefore, as a rule, instinct is given only to the animals, especially indeed to the lowest of them, as having the least understanding; but almost only in the case here considered is it given also to man, who, it is true, might understand the end, but would not pursue it with the necessary ardour, that is to say, even at the cost of his individual welfare. Here then, as in the case of all instinct, truth assumes the form of delusion, in order to act on the will. It is a voluptuous delusion which leads a man to believe that he will find a greater pleasure in the arms of a woman whose beauty appeals to him than in those of any other, or which, exclusively directed to a particular individual, firmly convinces him that her possession will afford him boundless happiness. Accordingly, he imagines he is making efforts and sacrifices for his own enjoyment, whereas he is doing so merely for the maintenance of the regular and correct type of the species; or there is to attain to existence a quite special and definite individuality that can come only from these parents. The character of instinct is here so completely present, namely an action as though in accordance with the conception of an end and yet entirely without such a conception, that whoever is urged by that delusion often abhors and would like to prevent the end, procreation, which alone guides it; this is the case with almost all illicit love-affairs. According to the character of the matter expounded, everyone who is in love will experience an extraordinary disillusionment after the pleasure he finally attains; and he will be astonished that what was desired with such longing achieves nothing more than what every other sexual satisfaction achieves, so that he does not see himself very much benefited by it. That desire was related to all his other desires as the species is to the individual, hence as the infinite to something finite. On the other hand, the satisfaction is really for the benefit only of the species, and so does not enter into the consciousness of the individual, who, inspired by the will of the species, here served with every kind of sacrifice a purpose that was not his own at all. Therefore, after the consummation of the great work, everyone who is in love finds himself duped; for the delusion by means of which the individual was the dupe of the species has disappeared. Accordingly, Plato says very pertinently: (Voluptas omnium maxime vaniloqua), Philebus [65 c] 319. [7]

All this throws light once more on the instincts and mechanical tendencies of animals. These are also undoubtedly involved in a kind of delusion that deceives them with the prospect of their own pleasure, whereas they work so laboriously and with self-denial for the species. Thus the bird builds its nest; the insect looks for the only suitable place for its eggs, or even hunts for prey which, unsuitable for its own consumption, must be laid beside the eggs as food for the future larvae; the bee, the wasp, the ant attend to the work of their ingenious structures, and their highly complicated economy. They are all undoubtedly guided by a delusion that conceals the service of the species under the mask of an egotistical end. This is probably the only way to obtain a clear idea of the inner or subjective process lying at the root of the manifestations of instinct. But outwardly or objectively, we find in the case of those animals that are largely governed by instinct, especially of insects, a preponderance of the ganglionic system, i.e., the subjective nervous system, over the objective or cerebral system. From this it is to be concluded that they are urged not so much by an objective, correct apprehension, as by subjective representations which stimulate the desire, and result from the influence of the ganglionic system on the brain, and that accordingly they are urged by a certain delusion; and this will be the physiological process in the case of all instinct. By way of illustration, I mention as another example of instinct in man, though a weaker one, the capricious appetite of pregnant women. This seems to spring from the fact that the nourishment of the embryo sometimes requires a special or definite modification of the blood flowing to it; whereupon the food that produces such a modification at once presents itself to the pregnant woman as an object of ardent longing; thus a delusion arises. Accordingly, woman has one more instinct than has man; and in her the ganglionic system is much more developed. In the case of man, the great preponderance of the brain explains why he has fewer instincts than have animals, and why even these few can easily be led astray. Thus the sense of beauty, which instinctively guides selection for sexual satisfaction, is led astray when it degenerates into a tendency to pederasty. This is analogous to the bluebottle (Musca vomitoria) which, instead of laying its eggs, in accordance with its instinct, in tainted meat, lays them in the blossom of the Arum dracunculus, being led astray by the corpse-like smell of that plant.

That an instinct, directed absolutely to what is to be produced, underlies all sexual love, will obtain complete certainty from more detailed analysis; we cannot therefore omit this. First of all, it is not out of place to mention here that by nature man is inclined to inconstancy in love, woman to constancy. The man's love diminishes perceptibly from the moment it has obtained satisfaction; almost every other woman charms him more than the one he already possesses; he longs for variety. On the other hand, the woman's love increases from that very moment. This is a consequence of nature's aim, which is directed to the maintenance, and thus the greatest possible increase, of the species. The man can easily beget over a hundred children in a year, if there are that number of women available; on the other hand, no matter with how many men, the woman could bring into the world only one child in a year (apart from twin births). The man, therefore, always looks around for other women; the woman, on the contrary, cleaves firmly to the one man; for nature urges her, instinctively and without reflection, to retain the nourisher and supporter of the future offspring. Accordingly, conjugal fidelity for the man is artificial, for the woman natural; and so adultery on the part of the woman is much less pardonable than on the part of the man, both objectively on account of the consequences, and subjectively on account of its being unnatural.

However, to be thorough and to gain full conviction that pleasure in the other sex, however objective it may seem, is yet merely disguised instinct, i.e., sense of the species, striving to maintain its type, we must investigate more fully the very considerations that guide us in this pleasure. We must enter into their details, strange as such details to be mentioned here may appear to be in a philosophical work. These considerations are divided into those directly concerning the type of the species, i.e., beauty, those directed to psychic qualities, and finally the merely relative ones, which arise from the requisite correction or neutralization by each other of the one-sided qualities and abnormalities of the two individuals. We will go over them one by one.

Age is the primary consideration that guides our choice and inclination. On the whole, we accept it as the age from the years when menstruation begins to those when it ceases; but we give a decided preference to the period between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. Outside those years no woman can attract us; an old woman, that is to say a woman who no longer menstruates, excites our aversion. Youth without beauty always has attraction; beauty without youth has none. Here the purpose that unconsciously guides us is clearly the possibility of procreation in general. Therefore every individual loses attraction for the opposite sex to the extent that he or she is removed from the fittest period for procreation or conception. The second consideration is health; acute diseases disturb us only temporarily, chronic diseases, or even cachexia, repel us, because they are transmitted to the child. The third consideration is the skeleton or bony structure, because it is the foundation of the type of the species. Next to age and disease, nothing repels us so much as a deformed figure; even the most beautiful face cannot make up for it; whereas even the ugliest face, when accompanied by a straight stature, is preferred without question. Further, we feel most strongly every want of proportion in the skeleton; for example, a stunted, dumpy, short-legged figure, and many such; also a limping gait, where this is not the result of an external accident. On the other hand, a strikingly fine stature can make up for every defect; it enchants us. Here also we see the great value that all attach to smallness of the feet; this rests on their being an essential characteristic of the species, since no animal has so small a tarsus and metatarsus taken together as man has; and this is associated with his walking upright; he is a plantigrade. Accordingly, Jesus ben Sirach also says (Ecclus. xxvi, 23, according to the revised translation by Kraus): "Golden columns on a silver base, and beautiful feet on well-set heels." [8] The teeth are also important to us, because they are essential to nourishment, and are above all hereditary. The fourth consideration is a certain fulness of flesh, a predominance of the vegetative function, of plasticity, since this promises abundant nourishment for the foetus; hence great leanness repels us strongly. A full female bosom exerts an exceptional charm on the male, because, being directly connected with the woman's functions of propagation, it promises the new-born child abundant nourishment. On the other hand, excessively fat women excite our repugnance, because this condition points to atrophy of the uterus, and thus to barrenness; this is known not by the head, but by instinct. The last consideration is beauty of the face. Here the parts of the bones are considered first; hence we look principally for a beautiful nose, and a short, turned-up nose mars everything. A slight downward or upward curvature of the nose has decided the happiness in life of innumerable girls, and rightly, for the type of the species is at stake. A mouth small because of small maxillae is very essential as a specific characteristic of the human countenance, in contrast to the muzzles of animals. A receding chin, cut away as it were, is particularly repugnant, because mentum prominulum [9] is an exclusive characteristic of our species. Finally, there is the regard for beautiful eyes and forehead; this is associated with psychic qualities, especially those of the intellect which are inherited from the mother.

The unconscious considerations observed, on the other hand, by the inclination and tendency of women, we naturally cannot state so precisely. On the whole, the following may be asserted. They prefer the ages from thirty to thirty-five, and regard these as superior to the age of youths, who really offer the height of human beauty. The reason is that they are guided not by taste but by instinct, which recognizes in the age aforesaid the acme of procreative power. In general they are less concerned with beauty, especially of the face; it is as if they alone took it upon themselves to give this to the child. They are won mainly by a man's strength, and the courage connected with it; for these promise the production of strong children, and at the same time a courageous protector for them. Every bodily defect in the man, every variation from the type, can be eliminated, as regards the child, by the woman in reproduction through the fact that she herself is faultless in these respects, or even exceeds in the opposite direction. Only those qualities of the man are excluded from them which are peculiar to his sex, and which the mother, therefore, cannot give to the child. Such are the male structure of the skeleton, broad shoulders, narrow hips, straight legs, muscular strength, courage, beard, and so on. The result is that women often love ugly men, but never an unmanly man, because they cannot neutralize his defects.

The second kind of considerations underlying sexual love are those that concern psychic qualities. Here we shall find that the woman is generally attracted by the man's qualities of heart or character, as being those which are inherited from the father. The woman is won especially by firmness of will, resoluteness, and courage, perhaps also by honesty and kindness of heart. Intellectual merits, on the other hand, do not exercise any direct and instinctive power over her, just because they are not inherited from the father. With women want of understanding does not matter; in fact, extraordinary mental power, or even genius, as something abnormal, might have an unfavourable effect. Hence we often see an ugly, stupid, and coarse fellow get the better of a cultured, clever, and amiable man when dealing with women. Marriages from love are occasionally contracted between natures widely different intellectually; for example, the man is rough, powerful, and narrow-minded, the woman tenderly sensitive, delicately thoughtful, cultured, aesthetic, and so on; or he is even a genius and learned, whereas she is a silly goose:

Sic visum Veneri; cui placet impares
Formas atque animos sub juga aenea
Saevo mittere cum joco. [10]


The reason is that quite different considerations from those of the intellect predominate here, namely those of instinct. What is looked for in marriage is not intellectual entertainment, but the procreation of children; it is an alliance of hearts, not of heads. It is a vain and ridiculous pretence when women assert that they have fallen in love with a man's mind, or it is the overstraining of a degenerate nature. On the other hand, in their instinctive love, men are not determined by the woman's qualities of character; hence so many Socrateses have found their Xanthippes, for example Shakespeare, Albrecht Durer, Byron, and others. But the qualities of intellect do have an influence here, because they are inherited from the mother; yet their influence is easily outweighed by that of physical beauty, which, as something that concerns more essential points, has a more direct effect. Nevertheless, from the feeling or experience of that influence, it happens that mothers have their daughters taught the fine arts, languages, and so forth, to make them attractive to men. In this they try to assist the intellect by artificial means, just as they do the hips and bust, should the occasion arise. It should be noted that here we always speak only of the wholly immediate, instinctive attraction, from which alone springs the condition of being in love proper. That a woman of understanding and culture values understanding and intellect in a man, that from rational reflection a man tests and takes his bride's character into account, has nothing to do with the matter with which we are dealing. Such things are the basis of a rational choice in marriage, but not of the passionate love that is our theme.

So far, I have taken into account only the absolute considerations, that is to say, those that apply to everyone. I now come to the relative considerations, which are individual, because what is intended with them is a rectification of the type of the species already defectively presented, a correction of the divergences from the type which are already borne in the chooser's own person, and hence a return to the pure presentation of the type. Therefore, everyone loves what he himself lacks. Starting from the individual constitution, and directed thereto, the choice resting on such relative considerations is much more definite, decided, and exclusive than is that which proceeds merely from absolute considerations. Therefore, as a rule, the origin of really passionate love is to be found in these relative considerations, and only that of the ordinary and slighter inclination in absolute considerations. Accordingly, it is not usual for precisely regular and perfect beauties to kindle great passions. For such a truly passionate inclination to arise, something is required that can be expressed only by a chemical metaphor; thus two persons must neutralize each other, just as an acid and an alkali do to make a neutral salt. The conditions required for this are in essence the following. In the first place, all sexuality is partiality. This partiality or one-sidedness is more decidedly expressed and present in a higher degree in one individual than in another. Therefore in every individual it can be better supplemented and neutralized by one individual of the opposite sex than by another, since every individual requires a one-sidedness, individually the opposite of his or her own, to supplement the type of mankind in the new individual to be produced, to whose constitution everything always tends. Physiologists know that manliness and womanliness admit of innumerable degrees. Through these the former sinks down to the repulsive gynander and hypospadaeus, and the latter rises to the graceful androgyne. Complete hermaphroditism can be reached from both sides, and at this point there are individuals who, holding the exact mean between the two sexes, cannot be attributed to either, and are consequently unfit for propagation. Accordingly, the neutralization, here under discussion, of the two individualities by each other requires that the particular degree of his manliness shall correspond exactly to the particular degree of her womanliness, so that the one-sidedness of each exactly cancels that of the other. Accordingly, the most manly man will look for the most womanly woman, and vice versa; and in just the same way will every individual look for the one corresponding to him or her in degree of sexuality. How far the required relation occurs between two individuals is instinctively felt by them, and, together with the other relative considerations, lies at the root of the higher degrees of being in love. Therefore, while the lovers speak pathetically of the harmony of their souls, the core of the matter is often the agreement, here pointed out, with regard to the being that is to be produced and to its perfection. Moreover, such agreement is obviously of much more importance than is the harmony of their souls; not long after the wedding this harmony often resolves itself into a howling discord. Here come in the further relative considerations, resting on the fact that everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child to be produced. The weaker a man is in regard to muscular strength, the more will he look for robust women; and the woman on her part will do just the same. Now, as a lesser degree of muscular strength in the woman is natural and regular, woman will, as a rule, give the preference to stronger men. Further, size is an important consideration. Short men have a decided inclination for tall women, and vice versa; indeed in a short man the preference for tall women will be the more passionate, according as he himself was begotten by a tall father, and has remained short only through the influence of his mother, because he has inherited from the father the vascular system and its energy that is able to supply a large body with blood. On the other hand, if his father and grandfather were short, that inclination will be less decided. At the root of a tall woman's aversion to tall men is nature's intention to avoid too tall a race, lest with the strength to be imparted by this woman, the race should prove to be too weak to live long. But if such a woman chooses a tall husband, perhaps for the sake of being more presentable in society, then, as a rule, the offspring will atone for the folly. Further, the consideration as regards complexion is very definite. Blondes prefer absolutely dark persons or brunettes, but only rarely do the latter prefer the former. The reason for this is that fair hair and blue eyes constitute a variation, almost an abnormality, analogous to white mice, or at least to white horses. In no other quarter of the globe, not even in the vicinity of the poles, are they indigenous, but only in Europe; and they have obviously come from Scandinavia. Incidentally, I here express my opinion that a white colour in the skin is not natural to man, but that by nature he has a black or brown skin, just as had our forefathers the Hindus; consequently, a white human being has never sprung originally from the womb of nature, and therefore there is no white race, however much this is talked about, but every white human being is bleached. Driven into the north, which is strange and foreign to him, and in which he exists only like exotic plants, and like these requires a hothouse in winter, man became white in the course of thousands of years. The gypsies, an Indian race that immigrated about four centuries ago, show the transition from the complexion of the Hindus to our own. [11] Therefore in sexual love, nature strives to return to dark hair and brown eyes as the archetype; but the white colour of the skin has become a second nature, though not so that the brown of the Hindus would repel us. Finally, each individual also seeks in the particular parts of the body the corrective of his own defects and deviations, and does this the more decidedly, the more important is the part. Therefore pug-nosed individuals have an inexpressible liking for hawk-like noses, for parrot-faces; it is just the same as regards all the other parts. Persons with excessively slim, long bodies and limbs can find beauty even in a stumpy and exceedingly short body. Considerations of temperament rule in an analogous manner; each will prefer the opposite of his own, yet only to the extent that his is a decided one. He who is himself very perfect in some respect does not, of course, seek out and love the imperfection in that very respect, but he is more easily reconciled to it than are others, because he himself ensures the children against great imperfection in this particular instance. For example, one who is himself very white will not be repelled by a yellowish complexion; but one who has this colour will find a dazzling white divinely beautiful. The rare case in which a man falls in love with a decidedly ugly woman occurs when, besides the above-discussed exact harmony of the degree of sexuality, the whole of her abnormalities are precisely the opposite to, and thus the corrective of, his own. It is then usual for the infatuation to reach a high degree.

The profound seriousness with which we scrutinize and consider each part of the woman's body, and with which she on her part does the same, the critical scrupulousness with which we examine a woman who begins to please us, the capricious nature of our choice, the close attention with which the bridegroom observes the bride, the care he takes not to be deceived in any part, and the great value he attaches to every excess or deficiency in the essential parts; all this is quite in keeping with the importance of the end. For the new being to be produced will have to bear a similar part throughout its whole life. For example, if the woman is but slightly crooked or uneven, this can easily impart a hump to her son; and so with everything else. Of course, consciousness of all this does not exist; on the contrary, everyone imagines he makes that difficult selection only in the interest of his own sensual pleasure (which at bottom cannot be interested in this at all). But he makes it exactly as conforms, under the presupposition of his own corporization, to the interest of the species, and the secret task is to maintain the type of the species as purely as possible. Without knowing it, the individual here acts by order of something higher, the species; hence the importance he attaches to things that might, indeed would of necessity, be to him as such a matter of indifference. There is something quite peculiar to be found in the deep, unconscious seriousness with which two young people of opposite sex regard each other when they meet for the first time,. the searching and penetrating glance they cast at each other, the careful inspection all the features and parts of their respective persons have to undergo. This scrutiny and examination is the meditation of the genius of the species concerning the individual possible through these two, and the combination of its qualities. The degree of their mutual pleasure in and longing for each other proves to be in accordance with the result of this meditation. After this longing has reached a significant degree, it can be suddenly extinguished again by the discovery of something that had previously remained unobserved. In all who are capable of procreation, therefore, the genius of the species meditates thus concerning the race to come. The constitution of this race is the great work with which Cupid is occupied, incessantly active, speculating, and pondering. Compared with the importance of his great business concerning the species and all the generations to come, the affairs of individuals in all their ephemeral totality are very insignificant; hence he is always ready to sacrifice these arbitrarily. For he is related to them as an immortal is to mortals, and his interests are related to theirs as the infinite to the finite. Therefore, conscious of managing affairs of a higher order than all those that concern only individual weal and woe, he pursues them with sublime and undisturbed calm amid the tumult of war, in the turmoil of business life, or during the raging of a plague; and follows them even into the seclusion of the cloister.
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:16 am

Part 2 of 2

In the foregoing discussion, we have seen that the intensity of the state of being in love increases with its individualization, since we showed how the physical constitution of two individuals can be such that, for the purpose of restoring the type of the species as far as possible, the one individual is quite specially and completely the complement of the other, who therefore desires it exclusively. Even in this case there comes about a considerable passion; and this at once gains a nobler and more sublime appearance from the very fact that it is directed to an individual object and to this alone, and thus appears, so to speak, at the special order of the species. For the opposite reason, mere sexual impulse is base and ignoble, because it is directed to all without individualization, and strives to maintain the species merely as regards quantity, with little consideration for quality. But individualization and with it the intensity of being in love can reach so high a degree that without their satisfaction all the good things of the world and even life itself lose their value. It is then a desire that exceeds in intensity every other; hence it makes a person ready for any sacrifice, and, if its fulfilment remains for ever denied, can lead to madness or suicide. Besides the considerations we have previously set forth, there must at the root of such excessive passion be also other unconscious considerations that we do not have before our eyes. We must therefore assume that not only the corporization, but also the will of the man and the intellect of the woman are specially suited to each other. In consequence of this, one particular individual can be produced by them alone, and its existence is intended by the genius of the species for reasons inaccessible to us, since they lie in the inner nature of the thing-in-itself. Or, to speak more precisely, the will-to-live desires to objectify itself here in a quite particular individual that can be produced only by this father together with this mother. This metaphysical desire of the will-in-itself has primarily no other sphere of action in the series of beings than the hearts of the future parents. These, accordingly, are seized with this intense desire, and then imagine they are desiring on their own account what has merely for the moment a purely metaphysical end, in other words, an end that lies outside the series of actually existing things. Therefore it is the intense desire of the future individual to enter into existence, an individual that has here first become possible. This longing proceeds from the primary source of all beings, and exhibits itself in the phenomenon as the exalted passion of the future parents for each other, which pays little regard to everything outside itself. Indeed it exhibits itself as a delusion which is unique, by virtue of which such a man in love would give up all the good things of the world for cohabitation with this woman; and yet this does not actually achieve for him more than does any other cohabitation. That it is, however, this cohabitation alone that is kept in view, is seen from the fact that even this exalted passion, like every other, is extinguished in the enjoyment -- to the great astonishment of those involved in it. The passion is extinguished also when, through the woman's eventual barrenness (which, according to Hufeland, may arise from nineteen accidental constitutional defects), the real metaphysical purpose is frustrated, just as happens daily in millions of seeds trampled under foot. Yet in these seeds the same metaphysical life-principle strives for existence, and there is no other consolation for this than the fact that an infinity of space, time, and matter, and consequently an inexhaustible opportunity for return, stand open to the will-to-live.

The view here expounded must have been present in the mind of Theophrastus Paracelsus, though only in a fleeting form. He did not deal with this theme, and my whole train of thought was foreign to him; but in quite a different context, and in his desultory manner, he wrote the following remarkable words: Hi sunt, quos Deus copulavit, ut eam quae juit Uriae et David; quamvis ex diametro (sic enim sibi humana mens persuadebat) cum justo et legitimo matrimonio pugnaret hoc.... sed propter Salomonem, QUI ALIUNDE NASCI NON POTUIT nisi ex Bathseba, conjuncto David semine, quamvis meretrice, conjunxit eos Deus (De Vita Longa, I, 5). [12]

The longing of love, the , that the poets of all ages are for ever concerned to express in innumerable forms, a subject which they do not exhaust, in fact to which they cannot do justice; this longing that closely associates the notion of an endless bliss with the possession of a definite woman, and an unutterable pain with the thought that this possession is not attainable; this longing and this pain of love cannot draw their material from the needs of an ephemeral individual. On the contrary, they are the sighs of the spirit of the species, which sees here, to be won or lost, an irreplaceable means to its ends, and therefore groans deeply. The species alone has infinite life, and is therefore capable of infinite desire, infinite satisfaction, and infinite sufferings. But these are here imprisoned in the narrow breast of a mortal; no wonder, therefore, when such a breast seems ready to burst, and can find no expression for the intimation of infinite rapture or infinite pain with which it is filled. This, then, affords the material for all erotic poetry of the sublime kind, which accordingly rises into transcendent metaphors that soar above all that is earthly. This is the theme of Petrarch, the material for the Saint-Preuxs, Werthers, and Jacopo Ortis, who apart from this could not be understood or explained. For that infinite appreciation of the beloved cannot rest on some spiritual excellences, or in general on her objective, actual qualities, because for this purpose she is often not well enough known to the lover; this was the case with Petrarch. The spirit of the species alone is able to see at a glance what value she has for it, for its ends. As a rule, great passions arise at the first glance:

Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight?

-- Shakespeare, As You Like It, III, 5.


A passage in the romance Guzman de Alfarache, by Mateo Aleman, which has been famous for two hundred and fifty years, is noteworthy in this respect: No es necesario, para que uno ame, que pase distancia de tiempo, que siga discurso, ni haga eleccion, sino que con aquella primera y sola vista, concurran juntamente cierta correspondencia o consonancia, o lo que aca solemos vulgarmente decir, una CONFRONTACION DE SANGRE, a que por particular influxo suelen mover las estrellas. (In order that one may love, it is not necessary that much time should pass, that he should set to work with deliberation and make a choice, but merely that, at that first and only glance, a certain correspondence and consonance should be encountered on both sides, or what we are accustomed to call in ordinary life a sympathy of the blood, and a special influence of the stars usually prompts one to this.) (Part II, Bk. iii, c. 5.) Accordingly, the loss of the beloved through a rival or by death is also for the passionate lover a pain exceeding all others, just because it is of a transcendent nature, in that it not merely affects him as an individual, but attacks him in his essentia aeterna, in the life of the species, into whose special will and service he was summoned. Therefore jealousy is so tormenting and terrible, and the giving up of the beloved is the greatest of all sacrifices. A hero is ashamed of all lamentations except those of love, because in these it is not he but the species that wails. In Calderon's Zenobia the Great, there is in the second act a scene between Zenobia and Decius in which the latter says:

Cielos; luego tu me quieres?
Perdiera den mil victorias,
Volvierame, etc. [13]


Here honour, which hitherto outweighed every interest, is driven from the field, as soon as sexual love, i.e., the interest of the species, comes into play, and sees a decided advantage before it. For this is infinitely superior to any interest of mere individuals, however important it be. Therefore honour, duty, and loyalty yield to this alone, after they have withstood every other temptation, even the threat of death. In just the same way we find in private life that in no point is conscientiousness so rare as in this. It is sometimes set aside here even by persons who are otherwise honest and just, and adultery is committed recklessly when passionate love, in other words the interest of the species, has taken possession of them. It seems as if they believed themselves to be conscious of a higher right than can ever be conferred by the interests of individuals, just because they act in the interest of the species. In this connexion Chamfort's remarks are noteworthy: Quand un homme et une femme ont l'un pour l'autre une passion violente, il me semble toujours que, quelques soient les obstacles qui les separent, un mari, des parens etc., les deux amans sont l'un a l'autre, DE PAR LA NATURE, qu'ils s'appartiennent de DROIT DIVIN, malgre les lois et les conventions humaines. [14] Whoever is inclined to be incensed at this should be referred to the remarkable indulgence shown in the Gospel by the Saviour to the woman taken in adultery, since he assumes at the same time the same guilt in all those present. From this point of view, the greatest part of the Decameron appears as mere mocking and jeering on the part of the genius of the species at the rights and interests of individuals which are trampled under foot by it. When differences of rank and similar circumstances oppose the union of passionate lovers, they are set aside with the same ease, and are treated as nothing by the genius of the species. Pursuing its ends that belong to generations without number, this genius blows away such human laws and scruples like chaff. For the same deep-lying reason, every danger is willingly encountered, and even the otherwise fainthearted become courageous, when the ends of passionate love are at stake. In plays and novels, we see with ready sympathy young persons, asserting their love-affairs, i.e., the interest of the species, gain the victory over their elders, who are mindful only of the welfare of individuals. For the efforts of the lovers appear to us to be so much more important, sublime, and therefore right than anything that could be opposed to them, just as the species is more important than the individual. Thus the fundamental theme of almost all comedies is the appearance of the genius of the species with its aims. These run counter to the personal interests of the individuals who are presented in the comedy, and threaten to undermine their happiness. As a rule, the genius of the species achieves its object; and, as this is in accordance with poetic justice, it satisfies the spectator, because he feels that the aims of the species take precedence of all those of individuals. Therefore at the conclusion he quite confidently leaves the lovers crowned with victory, since he shares with them the delusion that they have established their own happiness, whereas they have rather sacrificed it to the welfare of the species, in opposition to the will and foresight of their elders. In isolated, abnormal comedies, the attempt has been made to reverse the matter, and to bring about the happiness of the individuals at the expense of the aims of the species; but the spectator feels the pain suffered by the genius of the species, and is not consoled by the advantage thereby assured to the individuals. A couple of very well known little pieces occur to me as examples of this kind, namely La Reine de seize ans and Le Mariage de raison. Since the aims of the species are frustrated in tragedies with love-affairs, the lovers, who were the tools of the species, generally perish at the same time, as for example, in Romeo and Juliet, Tancred, Don Carlos, Wallenstein, The Bride of Messina, and many others.

A person's being in love often furnishes comic, and sometimes even tragic, phenomena, both because, taken possession of by the spirit of the species, he is now ruled by it, and no longer belongs to himself; in this way his conduct becomes inappropriate to the individual. In the higher degrees of being in love, his thoughts are given such a poetical and sublime touch, even a transcendent and hyperphysical tendency, by virtue of which he appears wholly to lose sight of his real, very physical aim. What gives this to his thoughts is ultimately the fact that he is now inspired by the spirit of the species, whose affairs are infinitely more important than all those that concern mere individuals, in order to establish under the special directions of this spirit the entire existence of an indefinitely long posterity with this individually and precisely determined nature, a nature that it can obtain simply and solely from him as father and from his beloved as mother. Otherwise this posterity, as such, never comes to existence, whereas the objectification of the will-to-live expressly demands this existence. It is the feeling of acting in affairs of such transcendent importance that raises the lover so far above everything earthly, indeed even above himself, and gives to his very physical desires such a hyperphysical clothing that love becomes a poetical episode even in the life of the most prosaic person; in this latter case, the matter sometimes assumes a comic aspect. That mandate of the will, objectifying itself in the species, exhibits itself in the lover's consciousness under the mask of the anticipation of an infinite bliss which he is to find in the union with this female individual. In the highest degree of being in love this chimera becomes so radiant that, if it cannot be attained, life itself loses all charm, and appears so cheerless, flat, and unpalatable, that disgust at it overcomes even the dread of death, so that it is sometimes voluntarily cut short. The will of such a person has been caught up in the whirlpool of the will of the species, or that will of the species has obtained so great an ascendancy over the individual will that if such a person cannot be effective in the first capacity, he disdains to be so in the last. Here the individual is too weak a vessel to be capable of enduring the infinite longing of the will of the species which is concentrated on a definite object. Therefore in this case the issue is suicide, sometimes the double suicide of the two lovers, unless, to save life, nature should allow madness to intervene, which then envelops with its veil the consciousness of that hopeless state. No year passes without prov ing by several cases of all these kinds the reality of what has been set forth.

Not only, however, does the unsatisfied passion of being in love sometimes have a tragic issue, but even the satisfied passion leads more often to unhappiness than to happiness. For its demands often clash so much with the personal welfare of the man or woman concerned as to undermine it, since they are incompatible with his or her other circumstances, and upset the plan of life built on these. In fact, love is often in contradiction not only with external circumstances, but even with the lover's own individuality, since it casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything, misjudges everything, and binds himself for ever to the object of his passion. He is so completely infatuated by that delusion, which vanishes as soon as the will of the species is satisfied, and leaves behind a detested partner for life. Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends, and cannot conceive how they could have made such a choice. For this reason the ancients represented love as blind. In fact, a man in love may even clearly recognize and bitterly feel in his bride the intolerable faults of temperament and character which promise him a life of misery, and yet not be frightened away:

I ask not, I care not, If guilt's in thy heart;
I know that I love thee,
Whatever thou art. [15]


For ultimately he seeks not his interest, but that of a third person who has yet to come into existence, although he is involved in the delusion that what he seeks is his own interest. But it is precisely this not seeking one's own interest, everywhere the stamp of greatness, which gives even to passionate love a touch of the sublime, and makes it a worthy subject of poetry. Finally, sexual love is compatible even with the most extreme hatred towards its object; hence Plato compared it to the love of the wolf for the sheep. Therefore, the case appears when a passionate lover is unable to meet with a favourable response under any condition, in spite of all his efforts and entreaties:

I love and hate her.

-- Shakespeare, Cymbeline, III, 5.


The hatred that is then kindled towards the beloved sometimes goes so far that the lover murders her and then commits suicide. A few instances of this kind usually happen every year; they will be found in the English and French newspapers. Goethe's verse is therefore quite correct:

By all love ever rejected! By hell-fire hot and unsparing!
I wish I knew something worse, that I might use it for swearing! [16]


It is really no hyperbole when a lover describes as cruelty the coldness of the beloved, and the delight of her vanity in gloating over his sufferings. For he is under the influence of an impulse akin to the instinct of insects, which compels him to pursue his purpose unconditionally, in spite of all the arguments of his faculty of reason, and to set aside everything else; he cannot give it up. Not one but many a Petrarch has there been, who has had to drag through life the unsatisfied ardour of love, like a fetter, like an iron weight tied to his foot, and has breathed out his sighs in solitary woods; but only in the one Petrarch did there dwell at the same time the gift of poetry, so that Goethe's fine verse holds good of him.

And when in his torment man was dumb,
A god gave me the power to say how I suffer.


In fact, the genius of the species generally wages war with the guardian geniuses of individuals; it is their pursuer and enemy, always ready ruthlessly to destroy personal happiness in order to carry out its ends; indeed, the welfare of whole nations has sometimes been sacrificed to its whims. Shakespeare gives us an example of this in Henry VI, Part III, act III, scenes 2 and 3. All this rests on the fact that the species, as that in which the root of our true nature lies, has a closer and prior right to us than has the individual; hence its affairs take precedence. From a feeling of this, the ancients personified the genius of the species in Cupid, a malevolent, cruel, and therefore ill-reputed god, in spite of his childish appearance, a capricious, despotic demon, yet lord of gods and men:

Tu, deorum hominumque tyranne, Amor! [17]


A deadly dart, blindness, and wings are his attributes. These last signify changeableness; this appears, as a rule, only with the disillusionment that is the consequence of satisfaction.

Thus, because the passion rested on a delusion that presented as valuable for the individual what is of value only for the species, the deception is bound to vanish after the end of the species has been attained. The spirit of the species, which had taken possession of the individual, sets him free again. Forsaken by this spirit, the individual falls back into his original narrowness and neediness, and sees with surprise that, after so high, heroic, and infinite an effort, nothing has resulted for his pleasure but what is afforded by any sexual satisfaction. Contrary to expectation, he finds himself no happier than before; he notices that he has been the dupe of the will of the species. As a rule, therefore, a Theseus made happy will forsake his Ariadne. If Petrarch's passion had been satisfied, his song would have been silenced from that moment, just as is that of the bird, as soon as the eggs are laid.

Incidentally, it may here be remarked that, however much my metaphysics of love may displease the very persons who are ensnared in this passion, yet if rational considerations in general could avail anything against it, the fundamental truth I reveal would, more than anything else, necessarily enable one to overcome it. But the saying of the old comedian will, no doubt, remain true: Quae res in se neque consilium, neque modum habet ullum, eam consilio regere non potes. [18]

Marriages from love are contracted in the interest of the species, not of individuals. It is true that the persons concerned imagine they are advancing their own happiness; but their actual aim is one that is foreign to themselves, since it lies in the production of an individual that is possible only through them. Brought together by this aim, they ought then to get on with each other as well as possible. However, the two persons, brought together by that instinctive delusion that is the essence of passionate love, will in other respects be very often of quite different natures. This comes to light when the delusion vanishes, as it necessarily must. Accordingly, marriages contracted from love prove as a rule unhappy, for through them the coming generation is provided for at the expense of the present. Quien se casa por amores, ha de vivir con dolores (He who marries for love has to live in sorrow) says the Spanish proverb. The opposite is the case with marriages contracted from convenience, often in accordance with the parents' choice. Here the governing considerations, be they of whatever kind they may, are at any rate real, and cannot vanish of themselves. Through them the happiness of the present generation is provided for, but of course to the detriment of the coming generation, yet the former happiness remains problematical. The man, having his eye on money instead of on the satisfaction of his inclination in the case of his marriage, lives more in the individual than in the species. This is directly opposed to the truth; hence it appears contrary to nature, and excites a certain contempt. A girl who rejects the proposal of a wealthy and not old man, against her parents' advice, in order to choose, setting aside all considerations of convenience, according to her instinctive inclination, sacrifices her individual welfare to that of the species. But on this very account, we cannot withhold a certain approbation; for she has preferred what is more important, and has acted in the spirit of nature (more precisely of the species), whereas the parents advised her in the spirit of individual egoism. In consequence of all this, it seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly. Often this must be the case, for that convenience and passionate love should go hand in hand is the rarest stroke of good fortune. The wretched physical, moral, or intellectual state of most people may have its cause partly in the fact that marriages are usually contracted not from pure choice and inclination, but from all kinds of external considerations and according to accidental circumstances. But if inclination is, to a certain extent, taken into consideration along with convenience, this is, so to speak, a compromise with the genius of the species. It is well known that happy marriages are rare, just because it is of the essence of marriage that the principal aim is not the present, but the coming generation. However, let it be added for the consolation of tender and loving natures that passionate sexual love is sometimes associated with a feeling of an entirely different origin, namely real friendship based on harmony of disposition, which nevertheless often appears only when sexual love proper is extinguished in its satisfaction. That friendship will then often spring from the fact that the supplementary and corresponding physical, moral, and intellectual qualities of the two individuals, from which arose the sexual love with regard to the child to be produced, are also related to one another with reference to the individuals themselves, in a supplementary manner as opposite qualities of temperament and mental gifts, and thereby form the basis of a harmony of dispositions.

The whole metaphysics of love here discussed is closely connected with my metaphysics in general, and the light which it reflects on this may be summarized as follows.

We have seen that, in the satisfaction of the sexual impulse, the careful selection that rises through innumerable degrees up to passionate love rests on the extremely serious interest taken by man in the personal constitution of the coming generation. Now this exceedingly remarkable interest confirms two truths set forth in the preceding chapters: (1) The indestructibility of man's true being-in-itself, which continues to live in that coming generation. For that interest, so lively and eager, and not springing from reflection and intention, but from the innermost impulse and urge of our true nature, could not be present so indelibly, and exercise so great a power over man, if he were absolutely perishable, and were merely followed in time by a race actually and entirely different from him. (2) That his true being-in-itself lies rather in the species than in the individual. For that interest in the special constitution of the species, which forms the root of all love-affairs from the passing inclination up to the most serious passion, is for everyone really the most important matter, whose success or failure touches him most acutely; hence it is called preeminently the affair of the heart. Moreover, when this interest has expressed itself strongly and decidedly, every interest that concerns merely one's own person is thought less of, and is necessarily sacrificed to it. In this way, therefore, man shows that the species is nearer to him than the individual, and that he lives more immediately in the former than in the latter. Why, then, does the man in love hang with complete abandon on the eyes of his chosen one, and is ready to make every sacrifice for her? Because it is his immortal part that longs for her; it is always the mortal part alone that longs for everything else. That eager or even ardent longing, directed to a particular woman, is therefore an immediate pledge of the indestructibility of the kernel of our true nature, and of its continued existence in the species. But to regard this continued existence as something trifling and insufficient is a mistake, which arises from the fact that, by the continued life of the species, we understand nothing more than the future existence of beings similar to, but in no respect identical with, ourselves; and this again because, starting from knowledge directed outwards, we take into consideration only the external form of the species, as we apprehend this in perception, and not its inner nature. But it is precisely this inner nature that is the basis of our own consciousness as its kernel, and so is even more immediate than this itself is, and, as thing-in-itself, free from the principium individuationis, is really the same identical thing in all individuals, whether they exist side by side or one after another. Now this is the will-to-live, and hence precisely that which has so pressing and urgent a desire for life and continuance. Accordingly, this remains immune from, and unaffected by, death. But there is also the fact that it cannot attain to a better state or condition than its present one; consequently, with life, the constant suffering and dying of individuals are certain to it. To free it from this is reserved for the denial of the will-to-live; through this denial, the individual will tears itself away from the stem of the species, and gives up that existence in it. We lack concepts for what the will now is; indeed, we lack all data for such concepts. We can only describe it as that which is free to be or not to be the will-to-live. For the latter case, Buddhism describes it by the word Nirvana, whose etymology was given in a note at the end of chapter 41. It is the point that remains for ever inaccessible to all human knowledge precisely as such.

If, from the standpoint of this last consideration, we now contemplate the bustle and turmoil of life, we see everyone concerned with its cares and troubles, exerting all his strength to satisfy infinite needs and to ward off suffering in many forms, yet without daring to hope for anything else in place of it except just the preservation of this tormented existence for a short span of time. In between, however, we see in the midst of the tumult the glances of two lovers meet longingly: yet why so secretly, nervously, and furtively? Because these lovers are the traitors who secretly strive to perpetuate the whole trouble and toil that would otherwise rapidly come to an end. Such an end they try to frustrate, as others like them have frustrated it previously. But this consideration already encroaches on the following chapter.

APPENDIX TO THE PRECEDING CHAPTER

[x]

-- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 354 [19]


On page 541 I casually mentioned pederasty, describing it as a misguided instinct. This seemed to me sufficient when I was working on the second edition. Further reflection on this aberration has since enabled me to discover a remarkable problem, and its solution also. This presupposes the preceding chapter, but also throws light on it, and therefore helps to supplement and support the fundamental view there expounded.

Considered in itself, pederasty appears ,to be a monstrosity, not merely contrary to nature, but in the highest degree repulsive and abominable; it seems an act to which only a thoroughly perverse, distorted, and degenerate nature could at any time descend, and which would be repeated in quite isolated cases at most. But if we turn to experience, we find the opposite; we see this vice fully in vogue and frequently practised at all times and in all countries of the world, in spite of its detestable nature. We all know that it was generally widespread among the Greeks and Romans, and was publicly admitted and practised unabashed. All the authors of antiquity give more than abundant proof of this. In particular, the poets one and all are full of this topic; not even the respectable Virgil is an exception (Eclogue 2). It is ascribed even to the poets of remote antiquity, to Orpheus (who was tom to pieces for it by the Maenads), to Thamyris, and even to the gods themselves. The philosophers also speak much more of this love than of the love of women; in particular, Plato seems to know of hardly any other, and likewise the Stoics, who mention it as worthy of the sage. (Stobaeus, Eclog. eth., bk. II, c. 7.) In the Symposium, Plato even mentions to the credit of Socrates, as an unexampled act of heroism, that he scorned Alcibiades who offered himself to him for the purpose. In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates speaks of pederasty as a thing blameless and even praiseworthy. (Stobaeus, Florilegium, Vol. I, p. 57.) Likewise in the Memorabilia (Bk. I, cap. 3, § 8), where Socrates warns of the dangers of love, he speaks so exclusively of love of boys that one would imagine there were no women at all. Even Aristotle (Politics, ii, 9) speaks of pederasty as of a usual thing, without censuring it. He mentions that it was held in public esteem by the Celts, that the Cretans and their laws countenanced it as a means against overpopulation, and he recounts (c. 10) the male love-affair of Philolaus the legislator, and so on. Even Cicero says: Apud Graecos opprobrio fuit adolescentibus, si amatores non haberent. [20] Here in general there is no need of proofs for well-informed readers; they can recall them by the hundred, for with the ancients everything is full of it. But even among less cultured peoples, particularly the Gauls, the vice was very much in vogue. If we turn to Asia, we see all the countries of that continent permeated with the vice from the earliest times down to the present day, and likewise with no special attempt to conceal it; Hindus and Chinese, no less than the peoples of Islam, whose poets also we find much more concerned with love of boys than with love of women; for example in Sadi's Gulistan the book "On Love" speaks exclusively of the former. Even to the Hebrews this vice was not unknown, for the Old and New Testaments mention it as punishable. Finally, in Christian Europe religion, legislation, and public opinion have had to oppose it with all their force. In the Middle Ages it was everywhere a capital offence; in France it was punishable even in the sixteenth century by burning at the stake, and in England, even up to about 1830, the death penalty for it was rigorously carried out; the punishment now is deportation for life. Such strong measures therefore were needed to put a stop to the vice; indeed, they were remarkably successful, yet they did not by any means succeed in exterminating it. On the contrary, it slinks around at all times and in all places, in all countries and among all classes, under the veil of the deepest secrecy; and it often comes to light where least expected. Even in earlier centuries it was no different, in spite of all the death penalties. The mentions of and allusions to it in the works of all those times are evidence of this. If we realize all this, and think it over carefully, we see pederasty appearing at all times and in all countries in a way very far removed from that which we had at first presupposed, when we considered it merely in itself, and hence a priori. Thus the universal nature and persistent ineradicability of the thing show that it arises in some way from human nature itself; since for this reason alone could it inevitably appear always and everywhere, as a proof of the saying:

Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret. [21]


Therefore we cannot possibly escape this conclusion if we intend to proceed openly and honestly. To overlook these facts and to rest content with reviling and rebuking the vice would of course be easy; this, however, is not my way of settling problems, but, faithful even here to my innate disposition to investigate truth everywhere and to get to the bottom of things, I first of all acknowledge the phenomenon that presents itself for explanation, together with the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from it. Now that something so thoroughly contrary to nature, indeed going against nature in a matter of the greatest importance and concern to her, should arise from nature herself is such an unheard-of paradox, that its explanation confronts us as a difficult problem. However, I shall now solve it by discovering the secret of nature which lies at its root.

As a starting-point, let me make use of a passage in Aristotle's Politics, vii, 16. Here he first of all explains that people who are too young produce inferior, feeble, defective, and undersized children; and further that the same thing applies to the offspring of those who are too old. ",a ~e (Nam, ut juniorum, ita et grandiorum natu foetus inchoatis atque imperfectis corporibus mentibusque nascuntur: eorum vero qui senio confecti sunt, suboles infirma et imbecilla est). [22] Now what Aristotle states as the rule for the individual is laid down by Stobaeus as a law for the community at the end of his exposition of the Peripatetic philosophy (Stobaeus, Ecl. eth., bk. ii, c. 7 in fine): (oportet, corporum roboris et perfectionis causa, nec juniores justo, nec seniores matrimonio jungi, quia circa utramque aetatem proles fieret imbecillis et imperfecta). [28] Aristotle, therefore, lays down that a man who is fifty-four years of age should not have any more children, though he may still continue cohabitation for the sake of his health or for any other reason. He does not say how this is to be carried into effect, but he is obviously of the opinion that children conceived when their parents are of such an age should be disposed of by abortion, for he had recommended this a few lines previously. Now nature on her part cannot dispute the fact that forms the basis of Aristotle's precept, nor can she eliminate it. For, in consequence of her principle that natura non facit saltus, she could not suddenly stop a man's secretion of semen, but here, as in every case of mortification and decay, a gradual deterioration had to precede it. But procreation during this deterioration would bring into the world human beings who would be weak, dull, sickly, wretched, and short-lived. In fact, only too often this does happen; children conceived by elderly parents frequently die off at an early age; in any case, they never reach a great age. They are more or less frail, sickly, feeble, and their offspring are similarly constituted. What is said here about procreation during the years of decline applies just as much to procreation at an immature age. But there is nothing so dear to the heart of nature as the maintenance and preservation of the species and of its genuine type. The means to this end are strong and vigorous individuals of sound constitution; nature desires these alone. In fact, at bottom she regards and treats individuals only as means, and the species alone as the end (as was shown in chapter 41). Accordingly, in consequence of nature's own laws and aims, we here see her in a critical situation and actually in great straits. As a result of her essential condition, she could not possibly count on a high-handed expedient, depending on the arbitrary will of some person, such as that suggested by Aristotle; and just as little could she rely on men's being taught by experience to recognize the disadvantages of too early or too late procreation, and accordingly curbing their desires as a result of cold and rational deliberation. Therefore, in so important a matter, nature could not risk either of these expedients. There was then nothing left for her but to choose the lesser of two evils. But for this purpose she had to make use here in her own interests of her favourite instrument, instinct. As was shown in the preceding chapter, this everywhere guides and directs so important a business as procreation, and creates such strange illusions. But this could happen here only by her misdirecting the instinct (lui donna le change). Thus nature knows only the physical, not the moral; in fact, there is even a decided antagonism between her and morality. Her sole aim is the preservation of the individual, and especially of the species, in the greatest possible perfection. Now it is true that pederasty is detrimental to those youths who have been seduced into practising it, yet not so much so that it would not be the lesser of two evils. Nature accordingly chooses this, in order to avoid by a wide margin the far greater evil, depravation of the species, and so to avert a lasting and growing misfortune.

As a result of this prudence on nature's part, a tendency to pederasty gradually and almost imperceptibly appears at about the age stated by Aristotle. This tendency becomes more and more definite and decided in proportion as the ability to beget strong and healthy children grows less and less; this is how nature arranges things. It should be noted, however, that it is still a very long way from the first appearance of this tendency to the vice itself. It is true that if, as in ancient Greece and Rome, or in Asia at all times, this tendency is not checked, it can easily lead to the vice through encouragement by example; the result then is that it becomes very widespread. In Europe, on the other hand, it is opposed by such powerful motives of religion, morality, law, and honour, that almost everyone shrinks at the mere thought of it, and we may assume accordingly that out of some three hundred who feel the tendency, hardly more than one will be so feeble and crazy as to give way to it. This is all the more certain, as this tendency appears only at that age when the blood has cooled down and the sexual impulse in general has declined. On the other hand, the tendency finds such strong opponents in mature reason, in the caution and discretion gained through experience, and in steadiness and firmness exercised in many different ways, that only a thoroughly depraved nature will succumb to it.

Meanwhile, nature's object here is attained by the fact that this tendency entails an indifference towards women; and this increases more and more, turns into aversion, and finally grows into loathing and disgust. Nature here achieves her real purpose with the greater certainty, the more the procreative power decreases in the man, the more decided its unnatural tendency becomes. In keeping with this, we find that pederasty is usually a vice of old men. Only those who have brought matters to a public scandal are caught in the act. To the really manly age it is something foreign, strange, and even incomprehensible. If there happens to be an exception to this, I think that it can only be the result of an accidental and premature depravation of the procreative power, which could produce only inferior offspring; and to prevent this, nature diverts this power. Therefore, the young pederasts who unfortunately are not uncommon in large cities always direct their hints and proposals to elderly gentlemen, never to those of a vigorous and robust age, or to young men. Even among the Greeks, where custom and example may at times have involved an exception to this rule, we usually find the lover expressly represented by authors as elderly, especially by philosophers, in particular by Plato and Aristotle. In this connexion a passage from Plutarch's Liber Amatorius, c. 5, is specially worth noting: (Puerorum amor, qui, quum tarde in vita et intempestive, quasi spurius et occultus, exstitisset, germanum et natu majorem amorem expellit.) [24] Even among the gods we find only the elderly, like Zeus and Hercules, attended by male paramours, not Mars, Apollo, Bacchus or Mercury. Moreover in the East, shortage of women resulting from polygamy may at times give rise to forced exceptions to this rule. This can also happen in colonies still new and therefore without women, such as California and others. In keeping with this is also the fact that both immature sperm and that depraved through age can produce only feeble, inferior, and unhappy offspring; and, as in old age, so too in youth an erotic tendency of such a kind often exists between youths. But it is only extremely rarely that this leads to the actual vice, since it is opposed not only by the motives above-mentioned, but also by innocence, chastity, purity, scruples of conscience, and the bashfulness of youth.

The result of this discussion is that, whereas the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all-important and of the greatest concern to her, it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils. Thus it is a phenomenon of the dying, and again of the immature, procreative force, both of which threaten the species with danger; and although they should both cease on moral grounds, yet these could not be relied on; for in her activities, nature generally does not take the truly moral into account. Accordingly, in consequence of her own laws, nature was hard pressed, and resorted to a makeshift, a stratagem, by a perversion of the instinct. In fact, it might be said that she built herself an asses' bridge, in order, as explained above, to escape from the greater of two evils. Thus she has in view the important object of preventing miserable and wretched offspring which might gradually deprave the whole species; and, as we have seen, she has no scruples in the choice of means. The spirit in which she goes to work here is the same as that in which she urges wasps to sting their young to death, as mentioned above in chapter 27. For in both cases she resorts to what is bad in order to avoid what is worse; thus she leads the sexual impulse astray, in order to frustrate its most pernicious consequences.

In this discussion, my intention has primarily been to solve the striking problem stated at the beginning, and then to confirm my theory discussed at length in the preceding chapter. This theory states that, in all sexual love, instinct holds the reins, and creates illusions, since for nature the interest of the species takes precedence over all others. This holds good even in the case of the disgusting depravity of the sexual impulse which we are considering; for even here, as the ultimate reason, the aims and ends of the species are the result, although in this case they are of a merely negative kind, since nature follows a prophylactic course. Therefore this discussion throws light on the whole of my metaphysics of sexual love; but a truth hitherto concealed has through it been brought to light. In spite of its strangeness, it still sheds new light on the inner essence, the spirit, and the workings of nature. Accordingly, there was here no question of moral admonition against the vice, but of a proper understanding of the essential nature of the matter. For the rest, the true, ultimate, and profoundly metaphysical reason for the objectionable nature of pederasty is that, whereas in it the will-to-live affirms itself, the effect of that affirmation, which holds open the path to salvation, and hence the resumption of life, is completely cut off. Finally, by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour, for they are very disconcerted by the ever-increasing publicization of my philosophy which they so carefully concealed. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty.

_______________

Notes:

1. "Nothing is beautiful but truth; truth alone is agreeable." [Tr.]

2. "Yet there was no knowledge of the death which they died." [Horace, Sat. i, 3, 108. Tr.]

3. "Love is a titillation accompanied by the notion of an external cause."

4. I have not dared to express myself precisely here; the patient and gracious reader must therefore translate the phrase into Aristophanic language.

5. "Meditation on the composition of the future generation on which in their turn innumerable generations depend." [Tr.]

6. "Vulgar and celestial love." [Tr.]

7. "For nothing is so boastful as cupidity." [Tr.]

8. The above is taken from Deussen's translation. A translation of the quotation as given by Schopenhauer is: "A woman with straight figure and beautiful feet is like golden columns on silver chairs." [Tr.]

9. "Prominent chin." [Tr.]

10. "And thus has Venus willed it; with cruel jest she often loves to send uncongenial forms and spirits under the brazen yoke." [Horace, Odes, i, 33, 10. Tr.]

11. The fuller discussion of this is found in Parerga, Vol. II, § 92 of the first edition.

12. "It is those whom God has joined together, as, for example, David and the wife of Uriah; although this relationship (so at least the mind of man persuaded itself) is diametrically opposed to a just and legitimate marriage. But for Solomon's sake, who could not be born from parents other than Bathseba and the seed of David, although in adultery, God joined these two together." [Tr.]

13. "Heaven! then you love me? For this I would give up a hundred thousand victories, I would turn back," etc.

14. "When a man and a woman have a very strong passion for each other, it always seems to me that, whatever obstacles there may be that separate them, such as husband or parents, the two lovers belong to each other by nature and by divine right, in spite of laws and human conventions." [Tr.]

15. Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies. [Tr.]

16. Goethe's Faust, Bayard Taylor's translation. [Tr.]

17. "Eros, tyrant of gods and men!" [Euripides, Andromeda, fragm. Tr.]

18. "What is not endowed either with reason or moderation cannot possibly be ruled by reason." [Terence, Eunuchus, 57-8. Tr.]

19. "Do you make bold so shamelessly to utter such a word, and think to escape punishment? 'I have escaped, for truth bears me witness.'" [Tr.]

20. "Among the Greeks it was regarded as disgraceful for youths not to have lovers." [Tr.]

21. "Expel nature with a pitchfork, she still comes back." [Horace, Epist. i, 10, 24. Tr.]

22. "For children of people too old as well as too young leave much to be desired in both a physical and mental regard, and children of those in advanced years are weaklings." [Tr.]

23. "But to obtain strong and perfect bodies, marriages should not be contracted either by those too young or by those too old, for the offspring of people of these ages leave much to be desired, and in the end only weaklings are born." [Tr.]

24. "The love for boys appears late in life and untimely as a spurious and sombre affection, and then expels the genuine and original love." [Tr.]
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:17 am

CHAPTER XLV: On the Affirmation of the Will-to-Live [1]

If the will-to-live exhibited itself merely as an impulse to self-preservation, that would be only an affirmation of the individual phenomenon for the span of time of its natural duration. The cares and troubles of such a life would not be great, and consequently existence would prove easy and cheerful. Since, on the contrary, the will wills life absolutely and for all time, it exhibits itself at the same time as sexual impulse which has an endless series of generations in view. This impulse does away with that unconcern, cheerfulness, and innocence that would accompany a merely individual existence, since it brings into consciousness unrest, uneasiness, and melancholy, and into the course of life misfortunes, cares and misery. On the other hand, if it is voluntarily suppressed, as we see in rare exceptions, then this is the turning of the will, which changes its course. It is then absorbed in, and does not go beyond, the individual; but this can happen only through his doing a painful violence to himself. If this has taken place, that unconcern and cheerfulness of the merely individual existence are restored to consciousness, and indeed raised to a higher power. On the other hand, tied up with the satisfaction of that strongest of all impulses and desires is the origin of a new existence, and hence the carrying out of life afresh with all its burdens, cares, wants, and pains, in another individual, it is true; yet if the two, who are different in the phenomenon, were such absolutely and in themselves, where then would eternal justice be found? Life presents itself as a problem, a task to be worked out, and in general therefore as a constant struggle against want and affliction. Accordingly everyone tries to get through with it and come off as well as he can; he disposes of life as he does of a compulsory service that he is in duty bound to carry out. But who has contracted this debt? His begetter, in the enjoyment of sensual pleasure. Therefore, because the one has enjoyed this pleasure, the other must live, suffer, and die. However, we know and look back to the fact that the difference of the homogeneous is conditioned by space and time, which I have called in this sense the principium individuationis,' otherwise eternal justice would be irretrievably lost. Paternal love, by virtue of which the father is ready to do, to suffer, and to take a risk more for his child than for himself, and at the same time recognizes this as his obligation, is due to the very fact that the begetter recognizes himself once more in the begotten.

The life of a man, with its endless care, want, and suffering, is to be regarded as the explanation and paraphrase of the act of procreation, of the decided affirmation of the will-to-live. Further, it is also due to this that he owes nature the debt of death, and thinks of this debt with uneasiness. Is not this evidence of the fact that our existence involves guilt? But we certainly always exist on periodical payment of the toll, birth and death, and we enjoy successively all the sorrows and joys of life, so that none can escape us. This is just the fruit of the affirmation of the will-to-live. Thus the fear of death, which holds us firmly to life in spite of all its miseries, is really illusory; but just as illusory is the impulse that has enticed us into it. This enticement itself can be objectively perceived in the reciprocal longing glances of two lovers; they are the purest expression of the will-to-live in its affirmation. How gentle and tender it is here! It wills well-being, and quiet enjoyment, and mild pleasures for itself, for others, for all. This is the theme of Anacreon. Thus by allurement and flattery it works its way into life; but when it is in life, then misery introduces crime, and crime misery; horror and desolation fill the scene. This is the theme of Aeschylus.

But the act by which the will affirms itself and man comes into existence is one of which all in their heart of hearts are ashamed, and which therefore they carefully conceal; in fact, if they are caught in the act, they are as alarmed as if they had been detected in a crime. It is an action of which, on cool reflection, we think often with repugnance, and in an exalted mood with disgust. Considerations going more closely into the matter in this sense are afforded by Montaigne in the fifth chapter of his third book under the marginal heading Ce que c'est que l'amour. A peculiar sadness and remorse follows close on it; yet these are felt most after the consummation of the act for the first time, and generally they are the more distinct, the nobler the character. Hence even the pagan Pliny says: Homini tantum primi coitus poenitentia; augurium scilicet vitae, a poenitenda origine (Historia Naturalis, X, 83). [2] On the other hand, in Goethe's Faust what do devil and witches practise and sing on their Sabbath? Lewdness and obscene jokes. In the very same work (in the admirable Paralipomena to Faust) what does Satan incarnate preach before the assembled multitude? Lewdness and obscene talk, nothing more. But the human race continues to exist simply and solely by means of the constant practice of such an act as this. Now if optimism were right, if our existence were to be gratefully acknowledged as the gift of the highest goodness guided by wisdom, and accordingly if it were in itself praiseworthy, commendable, and delightful, then certainly the act that perpetuates it would necessarily bear quite a different complexion. If, on the other hand, this existence is a kind of false step or wrong path, if it is the work of an originally blind will, the luckiest development of which is that it comes to itself in order to abolish itself, then the act perpetuating that existence must appear precisely as in fact it does.

With regard to the first fundamental truth of my teaching, the remark merits a place here that the above-mentioned shame over the business of procreation extends even to the parts that serve it, although, like all the other parts, they are given us by nature. Once again, this is a striking proof of the fact that not merely man's actions, but even his body, are to be regarded as the phenomenon, the objectification, of his will, and as its work. For he could not be ashamed of a thing that existed without his will.

The act of procreation is further related to the world as the solution is to the riddle. Thus the world is wide in space and old in time, and has an inexhaustible multiplicity of forms. Yet all this is only the phenomenon of the will-to-live; and the concentration, the focus of this will is the act of generation. Hence in this act the inner nature of the world most distinctly expresses itself. In this respect it is even worth noting that the act itself is also positively called "the will" in the very significant German phrase: Er verlangte von ihr, sie sollte ihm zu Willen sein. [3] Therefore that act, as the most distinct expression of the will, is the kernel, the compendium, the quintessence of the world. Hence we obtain through it a light as to the true nature and tendency of the world; it is the solution to the riddle. Accordingly, it is understood by the "tree of knowledge"; for, after acquaintance with it, everyone begins to see life in its true light, as Byron also says:

The tree of knowledge has been pluck'd -- all's known.

-- Don Juan, I, 128.


No less in keeping with this quality is the fact that it is the great , [4] the public secret which must never be distinctly mentioned anywhere, but is always and everywhere understood to be the main thing as a matter of course, and is therefore always present in the minds of all. For this reason, even the slightest allusion to it is instantly understood. The principal role played in the world by this act and by what is connected with it, because everywhere love-intrigues are pursued on the one hand, and assumed on the other, is quite in keeping with the importance of this punctum saliens of the world-egg. What is amusing is to be found only in the constant concealment of the main thing.

But see now how the young, innocent human intellect is startled at the enormity, when that great secret of the world first becomes known to it! The reason for this is that, on the long path that the will, originally without knowledge, had to traverse before it rose to intellect, especially to human, rational intellect, it became such a stranger to itself; and so it no longer knows its origin, that poenitenda origo, and from the standpoint of pure, hence innocent, knowledge is horrified thereat.

Now, as the focus of the will, that is to say, its concentration and highest expression, are the sexual impulse and its satisfaction, it is expressed very significantly and naively in the symbolical language of nature by the fact that individualized will, hence man and the animal, makes its entry into the world through the portal of the sexual organs.

The affirmation of the will-to-live, which accordingly has its centre in the act of generation, is inevitable and bound to happen in the case of the animal. For the will that is the natura naturans first of all arrives at reflection in man. To arrive at reflection means not merely to know for the momentary need and necessity of the individual will, for its service in the urgent present moment -- as is the case with the animal according to its completeness and its needs which go hand in hand -- but to have reached a greater breadth of knowledge, by virtue of a distinct recollection of the past, of an approximate anticipation of the future, and, in this way, of a comprehensive survey of the individual life, of one's own, of another, indeed of existence generally. Actually, the life of every animal species throughout the thousands of years of its existence is to a certain extent like a single moment; for it is mere consciousness of the present without that of the past and of the future, and consequently without that of death. In this sense it is to be regarded as a steady and enduring moment, a nunc stans. Incidentally, we here see most distinctly that in general the form of life, or of the phenomenon of the will with consciousness, is primarily and immediately only the present. Past and future are added only in the case of man, and indeed only in the concept; they are known in abstracto, and are possibly illustrated by pictures of the imagination. Hence, after the will-to-live, i.e., the inner being of nature, has run through the whole series of animals in restless striving towards complete objectification and complete enjoyment -- and this often happens at various intervals of successive animal series arising anew on the same planet -- it ultimately arrives at reflection in the being endowed with the faculty of reason, namely man. Here the matter now begins to be grave-and critical for him; the question forces itself on him whence is all this and for what purpose, and principally whether the trouble and misery of his life and effort are really repaid by the profit. Le jeu vaut-il bien la chandelle? [5] Accordingly, here is the point where, in the light of distinct knowledge, he decides for the affirmation or denial of the will-to-live, although he can as a rule bring the latter to consciousness only in a mythical cloak. Consequently, we have no ground for assuming that an even more highly developed objectification of the will is reached anywhere, for it has already reached its turning-point here.

_______________

Notes:

1. This chapter refers to § 60 of volume 1.

2. "Only man feels remorse after the first copulation; a course characteristic of life, that we feel remorse for our origin." [Tr.]

3. "He expected her to be willing to serve him." [Tr.]

4. "Unspeakable." [Tr.]

5. "Is the game worth the candle?" [Tr.]
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Re: The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenh

Postby admin » Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:22 am

CHAPTER XLVI: On the Vanity and Suffering of Life [1]

Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, and erring; and, as if through a troubled dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness. Yet till then its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart. In this connexion, let us now consider what as a rule comes to man in satisfactions of any kind; it is often nothing more than the bare maintenance of this very existence, extorted daily with unremitting effort and constant care in conflict with misery and want, and with death in prospect. Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated, or recognized as an illusion. The grounds for this lie deep in the very nature of things. Accordingly, the lives of most people prove troubled and short. The comparatively happy are often only apparently so, or else, like those of long life, they are rare exceptions; the possibility of these still had to be left, as decoy-birds. Life presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly, happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable. With its misfortunes, small, greater, and great, occurring hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly; with its deluded hopes and accidents bringing all calculations to nought, life bears so clearly the stamp of something which ought to disgust us, that it is difficult to conceive how anyone could fail to recognize this, and be persuaded that life is here to be thankfully enjoyed, and that man exists in order to be happy. On the contrary, that continual deception and disillusionment, as well as the general nature of life, present themselves as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing whatever is worth our exertions, our efforts, and our struggles, that all good things are empty and fleeting, that the world on all sides is bankrupt, and that life is a business that does not cover the costs; so that our will may turn away from it.

The way in which this vanity of all objects of the will makes itself known and comprehensible to the intellect that is rooted in the individual, is primarily time. It is the form by whose means that vanity of things appears as their transitoriness, since by virtue of this all our pleasures and enjoyments come to nought in our hands, and afterwards we ask in astonishment where they have remained. Hence that vanity itself is the only objective element of time, in other words, that which corresponds to it in the inner nature of things, and so that of which it is the expression. For this reason, time is the a priori necessary form of all our perceptions; everything must present itself in time, even we ourselves. Consequently, our life is primarily like a payment made to us in nothing but copper coins, for which we must then give a receipt; the coins are the days, and the receipt is death. For in the end time proclaims the judgement of nature on the worth of all beings that appear in it, since it destroys them:

And justly so: for all things, from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed:
'Twere better, then, were naught created. [2]


Thus old age and death, to which every life necessarily hurries, are a sentence of condemnation on the will-to-live which comes from the hands of nature herself. It states that this will is a striving that is bound to frustrate itself. "What you have willed," it says, "ends thus: will something better." Therefore the instruction afforded to everyone by his life consists on the whole in the fact that the objects of his desires constantly delude, totter, and fall; that in consequence they bring more misery than joy, until at last even the whole foundation on which they all stand collapses, since his life itself is destroyed. Thus he obtains the final confirmation that all his striving and willing was a perversity, a path of error:

Then old age and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.


But I wish to go into the matter in more detail, for it is these views in which I have met with most contradiction. First of all, I have to confirm by the following remarks the proof given in the text of the negative nature of all satisfaction, and hence of all pleasure and happiness, in opposition to the positive nature of pain.

We feel pain, but not painlessness; care, but not freedom from care; fear, but not safety and security. We feel the desire as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it has been satisfied, it is like the mouthful of food which has been taken, and which ceases to exist for our feelings the moment it is swallowed. We painfully feel the loss of pleasures and enjoyments, as soon as they fail to appear; but when pains cease even after being present for a long time, their absence is not directly felt, but at most they are thought of intentionally by means of reflection. For only pain and want can be felt positively; and therefore they proclaim themselves; well-being, on the contrary, is merely negative. Therefore, we do not become conscious of the three greatest blessings of life as such, namely health, youth, and freedom, as long as we possess them, but only after we have lost them; for they too are negations. We notice that certain days of our life were happy only after they have made room for unhappy ones. In proportion as enjoyments and pleasures increase, susceptibility to them decreases; that to which we are accustomed is no longer felt as a pleasure. But in precisely this way is the susceptibility to suffering increased; for the cessation of that to which we are accustomed is felt painfully. Thus the measure of what is necessary increases through possession, and thereby the capacity to feel pain. The hours pass the more quickly the more pleasantly they are spent, and the more slowly the more painfully they are spent, since pain, not pleasure, is the positive thing, whose presence makes itself felt. In just the same way we become conscious of time when we are bored, not when we are amused. Both cases prove that our existence is happiest when we perceive it least; from this it follows that it would be better not to have it. Great and animated delight can be positively conceived only as the consequence of great misery that has preceded it; for nothing can be added to a state of permanent contentment except some amusement or even the satisfaction of vanity. Therefore, all poets are obliged to bring their heroes into anxious and painful situations, in order to be able to liberate them therefrom again. Accordingly dramas and epics generally describe only fighting, suffering, tormented men and women, and every work of fiction is a peep-show in which we observe the spasms and convulsions of the agonized human heart. Sir Walter Scott has naively set forth this aesthetic necessity in the "Conclusion" to his novel Old Mortality. Voltaire, so highly favoured by nature and good fortune, also says, entirely in agreement with the truth I have demonstrated: Le bonheur n'est qu'un reve, et la douleur est reelle; and he adds: il y a quatre-vingts ans que je l'eprouve. Je n'y sais autre chose que me resigner, et me dire que les mouches sont nees pour etre mangees par les araignees, et les hommes pour etre devores par les chagrins. [3]

Before we state so confidently that life is desirable or merits our gratitude, let us for once calmly compare the sum of the pleasures which are in any way possible, and which a man can enjoy in his life, with the sum of the sufferings which are in any way possible, and can come to him in his life. I do not think it will be difficult to strike the balance. In the long run, however, it is quite superfluous to dispute whether there is more good or evil in the world; for the mere existence of evil decides the matter, since evil can never be wiped off, and consequently can never be balanced, by the good that exists along with or after it.

Mille piacer' non vagliono un tormento. [4]


For that thousands had lived in happiness and joy would never do away with the anguish and death-agony of one individual; and just as little does my present well-being undo my previous sufferings. Therefore, were the evil in the world even a hundred times less than it is, its mere existence would still be sufficient to establish a truth that may be expressed in various ways, although always only somewhat indirectly, namely that we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world; that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; that it is something which at bottom ought not to be, and so on. Byron's expression of the matter is exceedingly fine [Childe Harold, iv, 126]:

Our life is a false nature, -- 'tis not in
The harmony of things, this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies, which rain their plagues on men like dew --
Disease, death, bondage -- all the woes we see --
And worse, the woes we see not -- which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.


If the world and life were an end in themselves, and accordingly were to require theoretically no justification, and practically no compensation or amends, but existed, perhaps as represented by Spinoza and present-day Spinozists, as the single manifestation of a God who, animi causa, or even to mirror himself, undertook such an evolution of himself, and consequently its existence needed neither to be justified by reasons nor redeemed by results -- then the sufferings and troubles of life would not indeed have to be fully compensated by the pleasures and well-being in it. For, as I have said, this is impossible, because my present pain is never abolished by future pleasures, since the latter fill up their time just as the former fills its own. On the contrary, there would have to be no sufferings at all, and of necessity there would also not be death, or else it would have no terrors for us. Only thus would life pay for itself.

Now since our state or condition is rather something that it were better should not be, everything that surrounds us bears the traces of this -- just as in hell everything smells of sulphur -- since everything is always imperfect and deceptive, everything agreeable is mixed with something disagreeable, every enjoyment is always only half an enjoyment, every gratification introduces its own disturbance, every relief new worries and troubles, every expedient for our daily and hourly needs leaves us in the lurch at every moment, and denies its service. The step on to which we tread so often gives way under us; in fact, misfortunes and accidents great and small are the element of our life, and in a word, we are like Phineus, all of whose food was contaminated and rendered unfit to eat by the Harpies. All that we lay hold on resists us, because it has a will of its own which must be overcome. Two remedies for this are tried; firstly , i.e., prudence, foresight, cunning; it does not teach us fully, is not sufficient, and comes to nought. Secondly, stoical equanimity, seeking to disarm every misfortune by preparedness for all and contempt for everything; in practice, this becomes cynical renunciation which prefers to reject once for all every means of help and every alleviation. It makes us dogs, like Diogenes in his tub. The truth is that we ought to be wretched, and are so. The chief source of the most serious evils affecting man is man himself; homo homini lupus. [5] He who keeps this last fact clearly in view beholds the world as a hell, surpassing that of Dante by the fact that one man must be the devil of another. For this purpose, of course, one is more fitted than another, indeed an archfiend is more fitted than all the rest, and appears in the form of a conqueror; he sets several hundred thousand men, facing one another, and exclaims to them: "To suffer and die is your destiny; now shoot one another with musket and cannon!" and they do so. In general, however, the conduct of men towards one another is characterized as a rule by injustice, extreme unfairness, hardness, and even cruelty; an opposite course of conduct appears only by way of exception. The necessity for the State and for legislation rests on this fact, and not on your shifts and evasions. But in all cases not lying within the reach of the law, we see at once a lack of consideration for his like which is peculiar to man, and springs from his boundless egoism, and sometimes even from wickedness. How man deals with man is seen, for example, in Negro slavery, the ultimate object of which is sugar and coffee. However, we need not go so far; to enter at the age of five a cotton-spinning or other factory, and from then on to sit there every day first ten, then twelve, and finally fourteen hours, and perform the same mechanical work, is to purchase dearly the pleasure of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and many more millions have an analogous fate.

We others, however, can be made perfectly miserable by trifling incidents, but perfectly happy by nothing in the world. Whatever we may say, the happiest moment of the happy man is that of his falling asleep, just as the unhappiest moment of the unhappy man is that of his awaking. An indirect but certain proof of the fact that people feel unhappy, and consequently are so, is also abundantly afforded by the terrible envy that dwells in all. In all the circumstances of life, on the occasion of every superiority or advantage, of whatever kind it be, this envy is roused and cannot contain its poison. Because people feel unhappy, they cannot bear the sight of one who is supposed to be happy. Whoever feels happy for the moment would at once like to make all around him happy, and says:

Que tout le monde ici soit heureux de ma joie. [6]


If life in itself were a precious blessing, and decidedly preferable to non-existence, the exit from it would not need to be guarded by such fearful watchmen as death and its terrors. But who would go on living life as it is, if death were less terrible? And who could bear even the mere thought of death, if life were a pleasure? But the former still always has the good point of being the end of life, and we console ourselves with death in regard to the sufferings of life, and with the sufferings of life in regard to death. The truth is that the two belong to each other inseparably, since they constitute a deviation from the right path, and a return to this is as difficult as it is desirable.

If the world were not something that, practically expressed, ought not to be, it would also not be theoretically a problem. On the contrary, its existence would either require no explanation at all, since it would be so entirely self-evident that astonishment at it and enquiry about it could not arise in any mind; or its purpose would present itself unmistakably. But instead of this it is indeed an insoluble problem, since even the most perfect philosophy will always contain an unexplained element, like an insoluble precipitate or the remainder that is always left behind by the irrational proportion of two quantities. Therefore, if anyone ventures to raise the question why there is not nothing at all rather than this world, then the world cannot be justified from itself; no ground, no final cause of its existence can be found in itself; it cannot be demonstrated that it exists for its own sake, in other words, for its own advantage. In pursuance of my teaching, this can, of course, be explained from the fact that the principle of the world's existence is expressly a groundless one, namely a blind will-to-live, which, as thing-in-itself, cannot be subject to the principle of sufficient reason or ground; for this principle is merely the form of phenomena, and through it alone every why is justified. But this is also in keeping with the nature and constitution of the world, for only a blind, not a seeing, will could put itself in the position in which we find ourselves. On the contrary, a seeing will would soon have made the calculation that the business does not cover the costs, since such a mighty effort and struggle with the exertion of all one's strength, under constant care, anxiety, and want, and with the inevitable destruction of every individual life, finds no compensation in the ephemeral existence itself, which is obtained by such effort, and comes to nothing in our hands. Therefore, the explanation of the world from the of Anaxagoras, in other words, from a will guided by knowledge, necessarily demands for its extenuation optimism, which is then set up and maintained in spite of the loudly crying evidence of a whole world full of misery. Life is then given out as a gift, whereas it is evident that anyone would have declined it with thanks, had he looked at it and tested it beforehand; just as Lessing admired the understanding of his son. Because this son had absolutely declined to come into the world, he had to be dragged forcibly into life by means of forceps; but hardly was he in it, when he again hurried away from it. On the other hand, it is well said that life should be, from one end to the other, only a lesson, to which, however, anyone could reply: "For this reason, I wish I had been left in the peace of the all-sufficient nothing, where I should have had no need either of lessons or of anything else." But if it were added that one day he was to give an account of every hour of his life, he would rather be justified in first himself asking for an account as to why he was taken away from that peace and quiet and put into a position so precarious, obscure, anxious, and painful. To this, then, false fundamental views lead. Far from bearing the character of a gift, human existence has entirely the character of a contracted debt. The calling in of this debt appears in the shape of the urgent needs, tormenting desires, and endless misery brought about through that existence. As a rule, the whole lifetime is used for paying off this debt, yet in this way only the interest is cleared off. Repayment of the capital takes place through death. And when was this debt contracted? At the begetting.

Accordingly, if man is regarded as a being whose existence is a punishment and an atonement, then he is already seen in a more correct light. The myth of the Fall of man (although probably, like the whole of Judaism, borrowed from the Zend Avesta: Bundahish, 15), is the only thing in the Old Testament to which I can concede a metaphysical, although only allegorical, truth; indeed it is this alone that reconciles me to the Old Testament. Thus our existence resembles nothing but the consequence of a false step and a guilty desire. New Testament Christianity, the ethical spirit of which is that of Brahmanism and Buddhism, and which is therefore very foreign to the otherwise optimistic spirit of the Old Testament, has also, extremely wisely, started from that very myth; in fact, without this, it would not have found one single point of connexion with Judaism. If we wish to measure the degree of guilt with which our existence itself is burdened, let us look at the suffering connected with it. Every great pain, whether bodily or mental, states what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it. That Christianity also looks at our existence in this light is proved by a passage from Luther's Commentary on Galatians, ch. 3, which I have before me only in Latin: Sumus autem nos omnes corporibus et rebus subjecti Diabolo, et hospites sumus in mundo, cujus ipse princeps et Deus est. Ideo panis quem edimus, potus quem bibimus, vestes quibus utimur, imo aer et totum quo vivimus in carne, sub ipsius imperio est. [7] An outcry has been raised about the melancholy and cheerless nature of my philosophy; but this is to be found merely in the fact that, instead of inventing a future hell as the equivalent of sins, I have shown that where guilt is to be found, there is already in the world something akin to hell; but he who is inclined to deny this can easily experience it.

This world is the battle-ground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths. Then in this world the capacity to feel pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree that is the higher, the more intelligent the man. To this world the attempt has been made to adapt the system of optimism, and to demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring. However, an optimist tells me to open my eyes and look at the world and see how beautiful it is in the sunshine, with its mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals, and so on. But is the world, then, a peep-show? These things are certainly beautiful to behold, but to be them is something quite different. A teleologist then comes along and speaks to me in glowing terms about the wise arrangement by virtue of which care is taken that the planets do not run their heads against one another; that land and sea are not mixed up into pulp, but are held apart in a delightful way; also that everything is neither rigid in continual frost nor roasted with heat; likewise that, in consequence of the obliquity of the ecliptic, there is not an eternal spring in which nothing could reach maturity, and so forth. But this and everything like it are indeed mere conditiones sine quibus non. If there is to be a world at all, if its planets are to exist at least as long as is needed for the ray of light from a remote fixed star to reach them, and are not, like Lessing's son, to depart again immediately after birth, then of course it could not be constructed so unskilfully that its very framework would threaten to collapse. But if we proceed to the results of the applauded work, if we consider the players who act on the stage so durably constructed, and then see how with sensibility pain makes its appearance, and increases in proportion as that sensibility develops into intelligence, and then how, keeping pace with this, desire and suffering come out ever more strongly, and increase, till at last human life affords no other material than that for tragedies and comedies, then whoever is not a hypocrite will hardly be disposed to break out into hallelujahs. The real but disguised origin of these latter has moreover been exposed, mercilessly but with triumphant truth, by David Hume in his Natural History of Religion, Sees. 6, 7, 8, and 13. He also explains without reserve in the tenth and eleventh books of his Dialogues on Natural Religion, with arguments very convincing yet quite different from mine, the miserable nature of this world and the untenableness of all optimism; here at the same time he attacks optimism at its source. Both these works of Hume are as well worth reading as they are at the present time unknown in Germany, where, on the other hand, incredible pleasure is found patriotically in the most repulsive drivel of native, boastful mediocrities, who are lauded to the skies as great men. Nevertheless, Hamann translated those dialogues; Kant looked through the translation, and late in life wished to induce Hamann's son to publish them, because the translation by Platner did not satisfy him (see Kant's biography by F. W. Schubert, pp. 81 and 165). There is more to be learnt from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher taken together.

Again, the founder of systematic optimism is Leibniz, whose services to philosophy I have no wish to deny, although I could never succeed in really thinking myself into the monadology, pre-established harmony, and identitas indiscernibilium. [8] His Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement are, however, merely an excerpt with a detailed yet weak criticism, with a view to correction, of Locke's work that is justly world-famous. He here opposes Locke with just as little success as he opposes Newton in his Tentamen de Motuum Coelestium Causis directed against the system of gravitation. The Critique of Pure Reason is very specially directed against this Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy and has a polemical, indeed a destructive, relation to it, just as to Locke and Hume it has a relation of continuation and of further development. That the professors of philosophy are everywhere engaged at the present time in setting Leibniz on his feet again with his humbug, in fact in glorifying him, and, on the other hand, in disparaging and setting aside Kant as much as possible, has its good reason in the primum vivere. [9] The Critique of Pure Reason does not permit of one's giving out Jewish mythology as philosophy, or speaking summarily of the "soul" as a given reality, as a well known and well accredited person, without giving some account of how one has arrived at this concept, and what justification one has for using it scientifically. But primum vivere, deinde philosophari! [9] Down with Kant, vivat our Leibniz! Therefore, to return to Leibniz, I cannot assign to the Theodicee, that methodical and broad development of optimism, in such a capacity, any other merit than that it later gave rise to the immortal Candide of the great Voltaire. In this way, of course, Leibniz's oft-repeated and lame excuse for the evil of the world, namely that the bad sometimes produces the good, obtained proof that for him was unexpected. Even by the name of his hero, Voltaire indicated that it needed only sincerity to recognize the opposite of optimism. Actually optimism cuts so strange a figure on this scene of sin, suffering, and death, that we should be forced to regard it as irony if we did not have an adequate explanation of its origin in its secret source (namely hypocritical flattery with an offensive confidence in its success), a source so delightfully disclosed by Hume, as previously mentioned.

But against the palpably sophistical proofs of Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds, we may even oppose seriously and honestly the proof that it is the worst of all possible worlds. For possible means not what we may picture in our imagination, but what can actually exist and last. Now this world is arranged as it had to be if it were to be capable of continuing with great difficulty to exist; if it were a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds. For not only if the planets ran their heads against one another, but also if anyone of the actually occurring perturbations of their course continued to increase, instead of being gradually balanced again by the others, the world would soon come to an end. Astronomers know on what accidental circumstances -- in most cases on the irrational relation to one another of the periods of revolution -- all this depends. They have carefully calculated that it will always go on well, and consequently that the world can also last and go on. Although Newton was of the opposite opinion, we will hope that the astronomers have not miscalculated, and consequently that the mechanical perpetual motion realized in such a planetary system will also not, like the rest, ultimately come to a standstill. Again, powerful forces of nature dwell under the firm crust of the planet. As soon as some accident affords these free play, they must necessarily destroy that crust with everything living on it. This has occurred at least three times on our planet, and will probably occur even more frequently. The earthquake of Lisbon, of Haiti, the destruction of Pompeii are only small, playful hints at the possibility. An insignificant alteration of the atmosphere, not even chemically demonstrable, causes cholera, yellow fever, black death, and so on, which carry off millions of people; a somewhat greater alteration would extinguish all life. A very moderate increase of heat would dry up all rivers and springs. The animals have received barely enough in the way of organs and strength to enable them with the greatest exertion to procure sustenance for their own lives and food for their offspring. Therefore, if an animal loses a limb, or even only the complete use of it, it is in most cases bound to perish. Powerful as are the weapons of understanding and reason possessed by the human race, nine-tenths of mankind live in constant conflict with want, always balancing themselves with difficulty and effort on the brink of destruction. Thus throughout, for the continuance of the whole as well as for that of every individual being, the conditions are sparingly and scantily given, and nothing beyond these. Therefore the individual life is a ceaseless struggle for existence itself, while at every step it is threatened with destruction. Just because this threat is so often carried out, provision had to be made, by the incredibly great surplus of seed, that the destruction of individuals should not bring about that of the races, since about these alone is nature seriously concerned. Consequently, the world is as bad as it can possibly be, if it is to exist at all. Q.E.D. The fossils of entirely different kinds of animal species which formerly inhabited the planet afford us, as proof of our calculation, records of worlds whose continuance was no longer possible, and which were in consequence somewhat worse than the worst of possible worlds.

At bottom, optimism is the unwarranted self-praise of the real author of the world, namely of the will-to-live which complacently mirrors itself in its work. Accordingly optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence; whereas it is far more correct to regard work, privation, misery, and suffering, crowned by death, as the aim and object of our life (as is done by Brahmanism and Buddhism, and also by genuine Christianity), since it is these that lead to the denial of the will-to-live. In the New Testament, the world is presented as a vale of tears, life as a process of purification, and the symbol of Christianity is an instrument of torture. Therefore, when Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and Pope appeared with optimism, the general offence caused by it was due mainly to the fact that optimism is irreconcilable with Christianity. This is stated and explained by Voltaire in the preface to his excellent poem Le Desastre de Lisbonne, which also is expressly directed against optimism. This great man, whom I so gladly commend in the face of the slanders of mercenary German ink-slingers, is placed decidedly higher than Rousseau by the insight to which he attained in three respects, and which testifies to the greater depth of his thinking: (1) insight into the preponderating magnitude of the evil and misery of existence with which he is deeply penetrated; (2) insight into the strict necessitation of the acts of will; (3) insight into the truth of Locke's principle that what thinks may possibly be also material. Rousseau, on the other hand, disputes all this by declamations in his Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard, the superficial philosophy of a Protestant pastor. In this very spirit he also attacks, in the interests of optimism, Voltaire's fine poem just mentioned. This he does with distorted, shallow, and logically false reasoning in his long letter to Voltaire of 18 August 1756, which was devoted simply to this purpose. Indeed, the fundamental characteristic and [10] of Rousseau's whole philosophy is that he puts in the place of the Christian doctrine of original sin and of the original depravity of the human race an original goodness and unlimited perfectibility thereof, which had been led astray merely by civilization and its consequences; and on this he then establishes his optimism and humanism.

Just as in Candide Voltaire in his facetious manner wages war on optimism, so has Byron done the same, in his serious and tragic way, in his immortal masterpiece Cain, and for this reason he too has been glorified by the invectives of the obscurantist Friedrich Schlegel. If in conclusion, to confirm my view, I wished to record the sayings of great minds of all ages in this sense, which is opposed to optimism, there would be no end to the citations: for almost everyone of them has expressed in strong terms his knowledge of the world's misery. Hence at the end of this chapter a few statements of this kind may find a place, not to confirm, but merely to embellish it.

First of all, let me mention here that, remote as the Greeks were from the Christian and lofty Asiatic world-view, and although they were decidedly at the standpoint of the affirmation of the will, they were nevertheless deeply affected by the wretchedness of existence. The invention of tragedy, which belongs to them, is already evidence of this. Another proof of it is given by the custom of the Thracians, first mentioned by Herodotus (v, 4), and often referred to later, of welcoming the new-born child with lamentation, and recounting all the evils that face it, and, on the other hand, of burying the dead with mirth and merriment, because they have escaped from so many great sufferings. This runs as follows in a fine verse preserved for us by Plutarch (De audiend. poet., in fine):

Lugere genitum, tanta qui intrarit mala:
At morte si quis finiisset miserias,
Rune laude amicos atque laetitia exsequi. [11]


It is to be attributed not to historical relationship, but to the moral identity of the matter, that the Mexicans welcomed the new-born child with the words: "My child, you are born to endure; therefore endure, suffer, and keep silence." And in pursuance of the same feeling, Swift (as Sir Walter Scott relates in his Life of Swift) early adopted the custom of celebrating his birthday, not as a time of joy, but of sadness, and of reading on that day the passage from the Bible where Job laments and curses the day on which it was said in the house of his father that a man-child is born.

Well known and too long to copy out is the passage in the Apology of Socrates, where Plato represents this wisest of mortals as saying that, even if death deprived us of consciousness for ever, it would be a wonderful gain, for a deep, dreamless sleep is to be preferred to any day, even of the happiest life.

A saying of Heraclitus ran:

Vitae nomen quidem est vita, opus autem mors. Etymologicum
magnum, s.v. ; also Eustathius ad Iliad., i, p. 31. [12]


The fine lines of Theognis are well known:

Optima sors homini natum non esse, nec unquam
Adspexisse diem, flammiferumque jubar.
Altera jam genitum demitti protinus Orco,
Et pressum multa mergere corpus humo. [13]


In Oedipus Colonus (1225) Sophocles has the following abbreviation of this:

Natum non esse sortes vincit alias omnes: proxima autem est, ubi
quis in lucem editus fuerit, eodem redire, unde venit, quam ocissime. [14]


Euripides says:

Omnis hominum vita est plena dolore, Nec datur laborum remissio. Hippolytus, 189. [15]


And Homer already said:

Nom enim quidquam alicubi est calamitosius homine omnium,
quotquot super terram spirantque et moventur. Iliad, xvii, 446. [16]


Even Pliny says:

Quapropter hoc primum quisque in remediis animi sui habeat, ex
omnibus bonis, quae homini natura tribuit, nullum melius esse tempestiva morte. (Hist. Nat. 28. 2.) [17]


Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the old King Henry IV the words:

O heaven! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
. . . how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, -- viewing his progress through
What perils past, what crosses to ensue, --
Would shut the book and sit him down and die.


Finally, Byron [Euthanasia]:

Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be.


Balthasar Gracian also brings before our eyes the misery of our existence in the darkest colours in the Criticon, Parte 1, Crisi 5, at the beginning, and Crisi 7 at the end, where he presents life in detail as a tragic farce.

But no one has treated this subject so thoroughly and exhaustively as Leopardi in our own day. He is entirely imbued and penetrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence. He presents it on every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such a wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, has a diverting and stimulating effect.

_______________

Notes:

1. This chapter refers to §§ 56-59 of volume 1. Compare with it also chapters 11 and 12 of volume 2 of the Parerga and Paralipomena.

2. From Bayard Taylor's translation of Goethe's Faust. [Tr.]

3. "Happiness is only a dream, and pain is real. . . . I have experienced this for eighty years. I know of nothing better than to resign myself to this and to say that flies are born to be eaten by spiders, and men to be devoured by trouble and affliction." [Tr.]

4. "A thousand pleasures do not compensate for one pain." [Tr.] -- Petrarch.

5. "Man is a wolf for man." [Tr.]

6. "May everyone here be happy in my joy." [Tr.]

7. "In our bodies and circumstances, however, we are all subject to the devil and are strangers in this world, of which he is prince and lord. Hence everything is under his rule, the bread we eat, the beverage we drink, the clothes we use, even the air and everything by which we live in the flesh." [Tr.]

8. The principle of Leibniz, according to which two indistinguishable things are identical. [Tr.]

9. "First live, then philosophize!" [Tr.]

10. "First false step." [Tr.]

11. "Pity him who is born, because he faces so many evils; but the dead are to be accompanied with mirth and blessings, because they have escaped from so many sufferings." [Tr.]

12. "Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death." [Tr.]

13. "Not to be born at all would be the best thing for man, never to behold the sun's scorching rays; but if one is born, then one is to press as quickly as possible to the portals of Hades, and rest there under the earth." [Tr.]

14. "Never to be born is far best; yet if a man lives, the next best thing is for him to return as quickly as possible to the place from which he came." [Tr.]

15. "All the life of man is full of misery, and there is no end to affliction and despair." [Tr.]

16. "Of all that breathes and creeps on earth there is no more wretched being than man." [Tr.]

17. "Therefore may everyone acknowledge first of all, as a means for saving his soul, the view that, of all the good things meted out to man by nature, none is more valuable than a timely death." [Tr.]
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