Notes on <The World as Will and Representation - Volume I> - Fourth Book: The World as Will. Second Aspect
With the Attainment of Self-Knowledge, Affirmation and Denial of the Will-to-Live
§53
The last part of our discussion proclaims itself as the most serious, for it concerns the actions of men, the subject of direct interest to everyone, and one which can be foreign or indifferent to none. The part of our discussion which follows would, according to the ordinary method of expression, be called practical philosophy in contrast to the theoretical dealt with up to now. In my opinion, however, all philosophy is always theoretical, since it is essential to it always to maintain a purely contemplative attitude, whatever be the immediate object of investigation; to inquire, not to prescribe. Virtue is as little taught as is genius; indeed, the concept is just as unfruitful for it as it is for art, and in the case of both can be used only as an instrument. We should therefore be just as foolish to expect that our moral systems and ethics would create virtuous, noble, and holy men, as that our aesthetics would produce poets, painters, and musicians.
Just as in the three previous books the attempt has been made to achieve the same thing with the generality proper to philosophy, from different points of view, so in he present book man’s conduct will be considered in he same way.
The point of view given and the method of treatment announced suggest that in this ethical book no precepts, no doctrine of duty are to be expected; still less will there be set forth a universal moral principle, a universal recipe, so to speak, for producing all the virtues. Also we shall not speak of an “unconditioned ought”, since this involves a contradiction, as is explained in the Appendix; or of a “law for freedom,” which is in the same position. Generally we shall not speak of “ought” at all, for we speak in this way to children and to peoples still in their infancy, but not to those who have appropriated to themselves all the culture of a mature age. It is indeed a palpable contradiction to call the will free and yet to prescribe for it laws by which it is to will. “Ought to will!” The will determines itself, and therewith its action and its world also; for besides it there is nothing, and these are the will itself. Our philosophical attempts can go only so far as to interpret and explain man’s action, and the very different and even opposite maxims of which it is the living expression, according to their innermost nature and content.
The consideration that acquaints us with the inner nature of the world takes us beyond the phenomenon, is precisely the method that does not ask about the whence, whither, and why of the world, but always and everywhere about the what alone. Thus it is the method that considers things not according to any relation, not as becoming and passing away, in short not according to one of the four forms of the principle of sufficient reason. On the contrary, it is precisely what is still left over after we eliminate the whole of this method of consideration that follows the principle of sufficient reason; thus it is the inner nature of the world, always appearing the same in all relations, but itself never amenable to them, in other words the Ideas of the world, that forms the object of our method of philosophy. From such knowledge we get philosophy as well as art; in fact, we shall find in this book that we can also reach that disposition of mind which alone leads to true holiness and to salvation from the world.
§54
The first three books will, it is hoped, have produced the distinct and certain knowledge that the mirror of the will has appeared to it in the world as representation. In this mirror the will knows itself in increasing degrees of distinctness and completeness, the highest of which is man.
The will, considered purely in itself, is devoid of knowledge, and is only a blind, irresistible urge, as we see it appear in inorganic and vegetable nature and in their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life. Through the addition of the world as representation, developed for its service, the will obtains knowledge of its own will- ing and what it wills, namely that this is nothing but this world, life, precisely as it exists. We have therefore called the phenomenal world the mirror, the objectivity, of the will; and as what the will wills is always life, just because this is nothing but the presentation of that willing for the representation, it is immaterial and a mere pleonasm if, instead of simply saying “the will,” we say “the will-to-live.”
As the will is the thing-in-itself, the inner content, the essence of the world, but life, the visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the will, this world will accompany the will as inseparably as a body is accompanied by its shadow; and if will exists, then life, the world, will exist. It is true that we see the individual come into being and pass away; but the individual is only phenomenon, exists only for knowledge involved in the principle of sufficient reason. Birth and death belong equally to life, and hold the balance as mutual conditions of each other, or, if the expression be preferred, as poles of the whole phenomenon of life.
The whole of nature is the phenomenon, and also the fulfillment, of the will-to-live. The form of this phenomenon is time, space, and causality, and through these individuation, which requires that the individual must come into being and pass away. But this no more disturbs the will-to-live—the individual being only a particular example or specimen, so to speak, of the phenomenon of this will—than does the death of an individual injure the whole of nature. For it is not the individual that nature cares for, but only the species; and in all seriousness she urges the preservation of the species, since she provides for this so lavishly through the immense surplus of the seed and the great strength of the fructifying impulse. The individual, on the contrary, has no value for nature, and can have none, for infinite time, infinite space, and the infinite number of possible individuals therein are her kingdom. In this way, nature quite openly expresses the great truth that only the Ideas, not individuals, have reality proper, in other words are a complete objectivity of the will. Now man is nature herself, and indeed nature at the highest grade of her self-consciousness, but nature is only the objectified will-to-live.
Above all, we must clearly recognize that the form of the phenomenon of the will, and hence the form of life or of reality, is really only the present, not the future or the past. Future and past are only in the concept, exist only in the connexion and continuity of knowledge in so far as this follows the principle of sufficient reason. We have not to investigate the past before life or the future after death; rather have we to know the present as the only form in which the will manifests itself. It will not run away from the will, nor the will from it. Therefore whoever is satisfied with life as it is, whoever affirms it in every way, can confidently regard it as endless, and can banish the fear of death as a delusion. This delusion inspires him with the foolish dread that he can ever be deprived of the present, and deceives him about a time without a present in it. Life is certain to the will-to-live; the form of life is the endless present; it matters not how individuals, the phenomena of the Idea, arise and pass away in time, like fleeting dreams.
Only as phenomenon is the individual different from the other things of the world; as thing-in-itself, he is the will that appears in everything, and death does away with the illusion that separates his consciousness from that of the rest; this is future existence or immortality. His exemption from death, which belongs to him only as thing- in-itself, coincides for the phenomenon with the continued existence of the rest of the external world.
What we fear in death is in fact the extinction and end of the individual, which it openly proclaims itself to be, and as the individual is the will-to-live itself in a particular objectification, its whole nature struggles against death. A man who had assimilated firmly into his way of thinking the truths so far advanced, but at the same time had not come to know, through his own experience or through a deeper insight, that constant suffering is essential to all life; who found satisfaction in life and took perfect delight in it; who desired, in spite of calm deliberation, that the course of his life as he had hitherto experienced it should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence; and whose courage to face life was so great that, in return for life’s pleasures, he would willingly and gladly put up with all the hardships and miseries to which it is subject; such a man would stand “with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth,” and would have nothing to fear. Armed with the knowledge we confer on him, he would look with indifference at death hastening towards him on the wings of time. He would consider it as a false illusion, an impotent spectre, frightening to the weak but having no power over him who knows that he himself is that will of which the whole world is the objectification or copy, to which therefore life and also the present always remain certain and sure. The present is the only real form of the phenomenon of the will. Therefore no endless past or future in which he will not exist can frighten him, for he regards these as an empty mirage and the web of Maya.
just as hitherto the will willed it without knowledge and as a blind impulse. The opposite of this, the denial of the will shows itself when willing ends with that knowledge, since the particular phenomena known then no longer act as motives of willing, but the whole knowledge of the inner nature of the world that mirrors the will, knowledge that has grown up through apprehension of the Ideas, becomes the quieter of the will, and thus the will freely abolishes it- self.
§55
That the will as such is free, follows already from the fact that, according to our view, it is the thing-in-itself, the con- tent of all phenomena. The phenomenon, on the other hand, we recognize as absolutely subordinate to the principle of sufficient reason in its four forms. As we know that necessity is absolutely identical with consequent from a given ground, and that the two are convertible concepts, all that belongs to the phenomenon, in other words all that is object for the subject that knows as an individual, is on the one hand ground or reason, on the other consequent, and in this last capacity is determined with absolute necessity; thus it cannot be in any respect other than it is. he whole content of nature, the sum-total of her phenomena, is absolutely necessary, and the necessity of every part, every phenomenon, every event, can always be demonstrated, since it must be possible to find the ground or reason on which it depends as consequent. But on the other hand, this same world in all its phenomena is for us objectivity of the will. As the will itself is not phenomenon, not representation or object, but thing-in-itself, it is also not subordinate to the principle of sufficient reason, the form of all object. Thus it is not determined as consequent by a reason or ground, and so it knows no necessity; in other words, it is free. The concept of freedom is therefore really a negative one, since its con- tent is merely the denial of necessity, in other words, the denial of the relation of consequent to its ground according to the principle of sufficient reason.
It arises that any coarse and uncultured person, following his feelings, most vigorously defends complete freedom in individual actions, whereas the great thinkers of all ages, and the more profound religious teachings, have denied it. But the person who has come to see clearly that man’s whole inner nature is will, and that man himself is only phenomenon of this will, but that such phenomenon has the principle of sufficient reason as its necessary form, knowable even from the subject, and appearing in this case as the law of motivation. To such a person it seems contradictory to doubt the inevitability of he deed when the motive is presented to the given character. Kant demonstrated the coexistence of this necessity with the freedom of the will in itself, outside the phenomenon, for he established the difference between the intelligible and empirical character. I wholly support this distinction, for the former is the will as thing-in-itself, in so far as it appears in a definite individual in a definite degree, while the latter is this phenomenon itself as it manifests itself in the mode of action according to time, and in the physical structure according to space. The intellect can do nothing more here than clearly examine the nature of the motives from every point of view. It is unable to determine the will itself, for the will is wholly inaccessible to it, and, as we have seen, is for it inscrutable and impenetrable.
The maintenance of an empirical freedom of will, a liberum arbi- trium indifferentiae, is very closely connected with the assertion that places man’s inner nature in a soul that is originally a knowing, indeed really an abstract thinking entity, and only in consequence thereof a willing entity. Such a view, therefore, regarded the will as of a secondary nature, instead of knowledge. According to the whole of my fundamental view, all this is a reversal of the true relation. The will is first and original; knowledge is merely added to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of the will. Therefore every man is what he is through his will, and his character is original, for willing is the basis of his inner being. Through the knowledge added to it, he gets to know in the course of experience what he is; in other words, he be- comes acquainted with his character. Therefore he knows himself in consequence of, and in accordance with, the nature of his will, instead of willing in consequence of, and according to, his knowing, as in the old view.
In the Christian teaching we find the dogma of predestination in consequence of election and non-selection by grace, obviously springing from the view that man does not change, but his life and conduct, in other words his empirical character, are only the unfolding of the intelligible character, the development of decided and unalterable tendencies already recognizable in the child. Therefore his conduct is, so to speak, fixed and settled even at his birth, and remains essentially the same to the very end.
Repentance never results from the fact that the will has changed —this is impossible—but from a change of knowledge. I must still continue to will the essential and real element of what I have always willed; for I am myself this will, that lies outside time and change. Therefore I can never repent of what I have willed, though I can repent of what I have done, when, guided by false concepts, I did something different from what was in accordance with my will. Repentance is always corrected knowledge of the relation of the deed to the real intention.
The influence exerted by knowledge as the medium of motives, not indeed on the will itself, but on its manifestation in actions, is also the basis of the chief difference between the actions of men and those of animals, since the methods of cognition of the two are different. The animal has only knowledge of perception, but man through the faculty of reason has also abstract representations, concepts.
As a result of all this discussion on the freedom of the will and what relates to it, we find that, although the will in itself and apart from the phenomenon can be called free and even omnipotent, in its individual phenomena, illuminated by knowledge, and thus in persons and animals, it is determined by motives to which the character in each case regularly and necessarily always reacts in the same way. We see that, in virtue of the addition of abstract or rational knowledge, man has the advantage over the animal of an elective decision, which, however, simply makes him the scene of a conflict of motives, without withdrawing him from their control.
By virtue of the present arguments, the unalterable nature of the empirical character which is the mere un- folding of the intelligible character that resides outside time, and also the necessity with which actions result from its contact with motives. It might be inferred that for us to work at improving our character, or at resisting the power of evil tendencies, would be labour in vain.
Just as events always come about in accordance with fate, in other words, according to the endless concatenation of causes, so do our deeds always come about according to our intelligible character. But just as we do not know the former in advance, so also are we given no a priori insight into the latter; only a posteriori through experience do we come to know ourselves as we come to know others.
Besides the intelligible and empirical characters, we have still to mention a third which is different from these two, namely the acquired character. We obtain this only in life, through contact with the world, and it is this we speak of when anyone is praised as a person who has character, or censured as one without character. Although a man is always the same, he does not always understand himself, but often fails to recognize himself until he has acquired some degree of real self-knowledge. The acquired character, which, accordingly, is nothing but the most complete possible knowledge of our own individuality. Knowledge of our own mind and of our capabilities of every kind, and of their unalterable limits is the surest way to the attainment of the greatest possible contentment with ourselves. For it holds good of inner as of outer circumstances that there is no more effective consolation for us than the complete certainty of unalterable necessity.
§56
This freedom, this omnipotence, as the manifestation and copy of which the whole visible world, the phenomenon of this omnipotence, exists and progressively develops according to laws necessitated by the form of knowledge, can now express itself anew, and that indeed where, in its most perfect phenomenon, the completely adequate knowledge of its own inner nature has dawned on it. Thus either it will blindly without knowledge of itself or the the knowledge becomes for it a quieter, silencing and suppressing all willing. This is the affirmation and denial of the will-to-live already stated previously in general term.
We have long since recognized the striving, that constitutes the kernel and in-itself of everything, as the same thing that in us, where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullest consciousness, is called will. We call its hindrance through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering; its attainment of the goal, on the other hand, we call satisfaction, well-being, happiness. We then see these involved in constant suffering and without any lasting happiness. For all striving springs from want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction with one’s own state or condition, and is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied. No satisfaction, however, is lasting; on the contrary, it is always merely the starting-point of a fresh striving.
We wish to consider in human existence the inner and essential destiny of the will. Everyone will readily find the same thing once more in the life of the animal, only more feebly expressed in various degrees. He can also sufficiently convince himself in the suffering animal world how essentially all life is suffering.
§57
At every stage illuminated by knowledge, the will appears as individual. The human individual finds himself in endless space and time as finite, and consequently as a vanishing quantity compared with these. His real existence is only in the present, whose unimpeded flight into the past is a constant transition into death, a constant dying. His existence, even considered from the formal side alone, is a continual rushing of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. We have already seen in nature-without-knowledge her inner being as a constant striving without aim and without rest, and this stands out much more distinctly when we consider the animal or man. Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst. The basis of all willing, however, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it.
The life of the great majority is only a constant struggle for this same existence, with the certainty of ultimately losing it. What enables them to endure this wearisome battle is not so much the love of life as the fear of death, which nevertheless stands in the background as inevitable, and which may come on the scene at any moment.
Now it is at once well worth noting that, on the one hand, the sufferings and afflictions of life can easily grow to such an extent that even death, in the flight from which the whole of life consists, becomes desirable, and a man voluntarily hastens to it. Again, on the other hand, it is worth noting that, as soon as want and suffering give man a relaxation, boredom is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion and amusement. The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them in motion. When existence is assured to them, they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, “to kill time,” in other words, to escape from boredom.
Now absolutely every human life continues to flow on between willing and attainment. Of its nature the wish is pain; attainment quickly beget satiety. The goal was only apparent; possession takes away its charm. The wish, the need, appears again on the scene under a new form; if it does not, then dreariness, emptiness, and boredom follow, the struggle against which is just as painful as is that against want. The ceaseless efforts to banish suffering achieve nothing more than a change in its form. This is essentially want, lack, care for the maintenance of life. If it cannot find entry in any other shape, it comes in the sad, grey garment of weariness, satiety, and boredom, against which many different attempts are made.
§58
All satisfaction, or happiness, is really and essentially always negative only, and never positive. It is not a gratification which comes to us originally and of itself, but it must always be the satisfaction of a wish. For desire is the precedent condition of every pleasure; but with the satisfaction, the desire and therefore the pleasure cease, and satisfaction can never be more than deliverance from a pain, from a want.
In art, especially in poetry, that true mirror of the real nature of the world and of life, we also find evidence of the fact that all happiness is only of a negative, not a positive nature, and that for this reason it cannot be lasting satisfaction and gratification, but always delivers us only from a pain or want that must be followed either by a new pain or by languor, empty longing, and boredom. Every epic or dramatic poem can always present to us only a strife, an effort, and a struggle for happiness, never enduring and complete happiness itself.
Descriptive poem, depicting the beauty of nature, or, pure and will-free knowing is the only pure happiness which is not preceded either by suffering or need, but it cannot fill the whole of life, but only moments of it. Music is similars, in the melodies we recognize the universally expressed, innermost story of the will conscious of itself.
All that these remarks are intended to make clear, namely the impossibility of attaining lasting satisfaction and the negative nature of all happiness, finds its explanation in what is shown at the end of the second book, namely that the will, whose objectification is human life like every phenomenon, is a striving without aim or end.
It is really incredible how meaningless and insignificant when seen from without, and how dull and senseless when felt from within, is the course of life of the great majority of men. It is weary longing and worrying, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts. Every individual, every human apparition and its course of life, is only one more short dream of the endless spirit of nature, of the persistent will-to-live, is only one more fleeting form, playfully sketched by it on its infinite page, space and time; it is allowed to exist for a short while that is infinitesimal compared with these, and is then effaced, to make new room.
The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy.
§59
Now if we have so far convinced ourselves a priori by the most universal of all considerations, by investigation of the first, elementary features of human life, that such a life, by its whole tendency and disposition, is not capable of any true bliss or happiness, but is essentially suffering in many forms and a tragic state in every way, we might now awaken this conviction much more vividly within us, if we turned to more definite instances.
The essential purport of the world-famous monologue in Hamlet is, in condensed form, that our state is so wretched that complete non-existence would be decidedly preferable to it. Now if suicide actually offered this, so that the alternative “to be or not to be” lay before us in the full sense of the words, it could b chosen unconditionally as a highly desirable termination. There is something in us, however, which tells us that this is not so, that this is not the end of things, that death is not an absolute annihilation.
While the Old Testament made the world and man the work of a God, the New saw itself compelled to represent that God as becoming man, in order to teach that holiness and salvation from the misery of this world can come only from the world itself. It is and remains the will of man on which everything depends for him.
§60
W have now completed the two discussions whose insertion was necessary; namely that about the freedom of the will in itself simultaneously with the necessity of its phenomenon; and that about its fate in the world that reflects its inner nature, on the knowledge of which it has to affirm or deny itself. We can now bring to greater clearness this affirmation and denial, which above we expressed and stated only in general term.
The affirmation of the will is the persistent willing itself, undisturbed by any knowledge, as it fills the life of man in general. For the body of man is already the objectivity of the will, as it appears at this grade and in this individual; and thus his willing that develops in time is the paraphrase of the body, the elucidation of the meaning of the whole and of its parts. The fundamental theme of all the many different acts of will is the satisfaction of the needs inseparable from the body’s existence in health; they have their expression in it, and can be reduced to the maintenance of the individual and the propagation of the race.
Religious teaching regards every individual, on the one hand, as identical with Adam, with the representative of the affirmation of life, and to this extent as fallen into sin (original sin), suffering, and death. On the other hand, knowledge of the Idea also shows it every individual as identical with the Savior, with the representative of the denial of the will-to-live, and to this extent as partaking of his self-sacrifice, redeemed by his merit, and rescued from the bonds of sin and death, i.e., of the world.
§61
We recall from the second book that in the whole of nature, at all grades of the will’s objectification, there was necessarily a constant struggle between the individuals of every species, and that precisely in this way was expressed an inner antagonism of the will-to-live with itself. At the highest grade of objectification, this phenomenon, like everything else, will manifest itself in enhanced distinctness, and can be further unravelled. For this purpose we will first of all trace to its source egoism as the starting-point of all conflict.
We have called time and space the principium individuationis, because only through them and in them is plurality of the homogeneous possible. The will is present, whole and undivided in the plurality, and perceives around it the innumerably repeated image of its own inner being; but this inner nature itself and hence what is actually real, it finds immediately only in its inner self. Therefore everyone wants everything for himself, wants to possess everything and would like to destroy whatever opposes him. Individual is the bearer of the knowing subject, and this knowing subject is the bearer of the world. Every knowing individual is therefore in truth, and finds himself as, the whole will-to-live, or as the in-itself of the world itself, and also as the complementary condition of the world as representation, consequently as a microcosm to be valued equally with the macrocosm. Nature herself, always and everywhere truthful, gives him, originally and independently of all reflection, this knowledge with simplicity and immediate certainty. Now from the two necessary determinations we have mentioned is explained the fact that every individual, completely vanishing and reduced to nothing in a boundless world, nevertheless makes himself the centre of the world, and considers his own existence and well-being before everything else. In fact, from the natural standpoint, he is ready for this to sacrifice everything else; he is ready to annihilate the world, in order to maintain his own self, that drop in the ocean, a little longer. This disposition is egoism, which is essential to everything in nature. But it is precisely through egoism that the will’s inner conflict with itself attains to such fearful revelation; for this egoism has its continuance and being in that opposition of the microcosm and macrocosm, or in the fact that the objectification of the will has for its form the principium individuationis, and thus the will manifests itself in innumerable individuals in the same way. We see not only how everyone tries to snatch from another what he himself wants, but how one often even destroys another’s whole happiness or life, in order to increase by an insignificant amount his own well-being. This is the highest expression of egoism, the phenomena of which in this respect are surpassed only by those of real wickedness that seeks, quite disinterestedly, the pain and injury of others without any advantage to itself.
A principal source of the suffering that we found above to be essential and inevitable to all life, is, when it actually appears in a definite form, that Eris, the strife of all individuals, the expression of the contradiction with which the will-to-live is affected in its inner self, and which attains visibility through the principium indi- viduationis.
§62
It has already been explained that the first and simplest affirmation of the will-to-live is only affirmation of one’s own body, in other words, manifestation of the will through acts in time, in so far as the body, in its form and suitability, exhibits the same will spatially, and no farther. His affirmation shows itself as maintenance and preservation of the body by means of the application of its own powers. With it is directly connected the satisfaction of the sexual impulse; indeed, this belongs to it in so far as the genitals belong to the body. Hence voluntary renunciation of the satisfaction of that impulse, such renunciation being set at work by no motive at all, is already a degree of denial of the will-to-live; it is a voluntary self-suppression of it on the appearance of knowledge acting as a quieter. Accordingly, such denial of one’s own body exhibits itself as a contradiction by the will of its own phenomenon. The breaking through the boundary of another’s affirmation of will has at all times been distinctly recognized, and its concept has been denoted by the word wrong. As regards the doing of wrong generally, it occurs either through violence or through cunning; it is immaterial as regards what is morally essential.
Right and wrong are merely moral determinations, i.e., such as have validity with regard to the consideration of human conduct as such, and in reference to the inner significance of this conduct in itself. This announces itself directly in consciousness by the fact that, on the one hand, the wrongdoing is accompanied by an inner pain, and this is the merely felt consciousness of the wrongdoer of the excessive strength of will-affirmation in himself which reaches the degree of denial of another’s phenomenon of will, as also the fact that, as phenomenon, he is different from the sufferer of wrong, but is yet in himself identical with him. On the other hand, the sufferer of wrong is painfully aware of the denial of his will, as it is expressed through his body and its natural wants, for whose satisfaction nature refers him to the powers of this body. At the same time he is also aware that, without doing wrong, he could ward off that denial by every means, unless he lacked the power. This purely moral significance is the only one which right and wrong have for men as men, not as citizens of the State, this is called natural right. The pure doctrine of right is therefore a chapter of morality, and is directly related merely to doing, not to suffering; for the former alone is manifestation of the will, and only this is considered by ethics.
To diminish the suffering spread over all, as well as to distribute it as uniformly as possible, the best and only means was to spare all men the pain of suffering wrong by all men’s renouncing the pleasure to be obtained from doing wrong. This means is the State contract or the law.
…Skipped 344-350 since not too interested in political philosophy right now.
63
We have learnt to recognize temporal justice, which has its seat in the State, as requiting or punishing, and have seen that this becomes justice with regard only to the future. For without such regard, all punishing and requital of an outrage would remain without justification, would indeed be a mere addition of a second evil to that which had happened, without sense or significance.
But it is quite different with eternal justice, which has been previously mentioned, and which rules not the State but the world; this is not dependent on human institutions, not subject to chance and deception. The concept of retaliation implies time, therefore eternal justice cannot be a retributive justice, and hence cannot, like that, admit respite and reprieve, and require time in order to succeed, balancing the evil deed against the evil consequence only by means of time. Here the punishment must be so linked with the offense that the two are one.
The phenomenon, the objectivity of the one will-to-live, is the world in all the plurality of its parts and forms. Existence itself, and the kind of existence, in the totality as well as in every part, is only from the will. The will is free; it is almighty. The will appears in everything, precisely as it determines itself in itself and outside time. The world is only the mirror of this willing; and all finiteness, all suffering, all miseries that it contains, belong to the expression of what the will wills, are as they are because the will so wills. Only this world itself—no other—can bear the responsibility for its existence and its nature; for how could anyone else have assumed this responsibility? If we want to know what human beings, morally considered, are worth as a whole and in general, let us consider their fate as a whole and in general.
According to the true nature of things, everyone has all the sufferings of the world as his own; indeed, he has to look upon all merely possible sufferings as actual for him, so long as he is the firm and constant will-to-live, in other words, affirms life with all his strength. For the knowledge that sees through the principium individuationis, a happy life in time, given by chance or won from it by shrewdness, amid the sufferings of innumerable others, is only a beggar’s dream, in which he is a king, but from which he must awake, in order to realize that only a fleeting illusion had separated him from the suffering of his life. Eternal justice is withdrawn from the view that is involved in knowledge following the principle of sufficient reason, in the principium individuationis; such a view altogether misses it, unless it vindicates it in some way by fictions. It sees the wicked man, after misdeeds and cruelties of every kind, live a life of pleasure, and quit the world undisturbed. It sees the oppressed person drag out to the end a life full of suffering without the appearance of an avenger or vindicator. But eternal justice will be grasped and comprehended only by the man who rises above that knowledge which proceeds on the guiding line of the principle of sufficient reason and is bound to individual things, who recognizes the Ideas, who sees through the principium individuationis, and who is aware that the forms of the phenomenon do not apply to the thing-in-itself.
§64
From our description of eternal justice, we will now proceed to the kindred consideration of the ethical significance of conduct, and of conscience, which is merely the felt knowledge of that significance.
Christian ethics testifies to the fact that the deeper knowledge, no longer involved in the principium individuationis, a knowledge from which all virtue and nobleness of mind proceed, no longer cherishes feelings demanding retaliation. Such ethics positively forbids all re- taliation of evil for evil, and lets eternal justice rule in the province of the thing-in-itself which is different from that of the phenomenon (“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Rom. xii, 19 )
A much more striking, but likewise much rarer, characteristic of human nature, which expresses that desire to draw eternal justice into the province of experience, of individuation is that sometimes we see a man so profoundly indignant at a great outrage, which he has experienced or perhaps only witnessed, that he deliberately and irretrievably stakes his own life in order to take vengeance on the perpetrator of that outrage. The will-to-live, though it still affirms itself here, no longer depends on the individual phenomenon, on the individual person, but embraces the Idea of man. It desires to keep the phenomenon of this Idea pure from such a monstrous and revolting outrage. It is rare, significant, and even sublime trait of character by which the individual sacrifices himself, in that he strives to make himself the arm of eternal justice, whose true inner nature he still fails to recognize.
§65
In all the observations on human conduct hitherto made, we have been preparing for the final discussion, and have greatly facilitated the task of raising to abstract and philosophical clearness, and of demonstrating as a branch of our main idea, the real ethical significance of conduct which in life is described by the words good and bad, and is thus made perfectly intelligible.
The concept of good is essentially relative and denotes the fitness of suitableness of an object to any definite effort of the will. Therefore everything agreeable to the will in any one of its manifestations, and fulfilling the will’s purpose, is thought of through the concept good, however different in other respects such things may be. We call everything good that is just as we want it to be. The concept of the opposite, so long as we are speaking of beings with- out knowledge, is expressed by the word bad, more rarely and abstractly by the word evil, which therefore denotes everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case. Every good is essentially relative; for it has its essential nature only in its relation to a desiring will. Accordingly, absolute good is a contradiction; highest good, summum bonum, signifies the same thing, namely in reality a final satisfaction of the will, after which no fresh willing would occur; a last motive, the attainment of which would give the will an imperishable satisfaction. According to the discussion so far carried on in this fourth book, such a thing cannot be conceived.
If a person is always inclined to do wrong the moment the inducement is there and no external power restrains him, we call him bad. In accordance with our explanation of wrong, this means that such a man not only affirms the will-to-live as it appears in his own body, but in this affirmation goes so far as to deny the will that appears in other individuals. The ultimate source of this is a high degree of egoism. Now a person filled with an extremely intense pressure of will wants with burning eagerness to accumulate everything, in order to slake the thirst of egoism. As is inevitable, he is bound to see that all satisfaction is only apparent, and that the attained object never fulfills the promise held out by the desired object, namely the final appeasement of the excessive pressure of will. He sees that, with fulfillment, the wish changes only its form, and now torments under another form; indeed, when at last all wishes are exhausted, the pressure of will itself remains, even without any recognized motive, and makes itself known with terrible pain as a feeling of the most frightful desolation and emptiness.
The thirst for revenge is closely related to wickedness. It repays evil with evil, not from regard for the future, which is the character of punishment, but merely on account of what has happened and is past as such, and thus disinterestedly, not as means but as end, in order to gloat over the offender’s affliction caused by the avenger himself.
§66
Morality without argumentation and reasoning, that is, mere moralizing, cannot have any effect, because it does not motivate. But a morality that does motivate can do so only by acting on self-love. Now what springs from this has no moral worth. From this it follows that no genuine virtue can be brought about through morality and abstract knowledge in general, but that such virtue must spring from the intuitive knowledge that recognizes in another’s individuality the same inner nature as in one’s own. For virtue does indeed result from knowledge, but not from abstract knowledge communicable through word. Virtue cannot be taught. We are as little able to produce a virtuous person by ethical discourses or sermons as all the systems of aesthetics from Aristotle’s downwards have ever been able to produce a poet. For the concept is unfruitful for the real inner nature of virtue, just as it is for art. All abstract knowledge gives only motives, but, as was shown above, motives can alter only the direction of the will, never the will itself. But all communicable knowledge can affect the will as motive only; therefore, however the will is guided by dogmas, what a person really and generally wills still always remains the same.
Genuine goodness of disposition, disinterested virtue, and pure nobleness of mind, therefore, do not come from abstract knowledge; yet they do come from knowledge. But it is a direct and intuitive knowledge that cannot be reasoned away or arrived at by reasoning; a knowledge that, just because it is not abstract, cannot be communicated, but must dawn on each of us. It therefore finds its real and adequate expression not in words, but simply and solely in deeds, in conduct, in the course of a man’s life. We who are here looking for the theory of virtue, and who thus have to express in abstract terms the inner nature of the knowledge lying at its foun- dation, shall nevertheless be unable to furnish that knowledge itself in this expression, but only the concept of that knowledge.
The man who voluntarily recognizes and accepts that merely moral boundary between wrong and right, even where no State or other authority guarantees it, and who consequently, according to our explanation, never in the affirmation of his own will goes to the length of denying the will that manifests itself in another individual, is just. Therefore, in order to increase his own well-being, he will not inflict suffering on others; that is to say, he will not commit any crime; he will respect the rights and property of everyone. The good man is in no way to be regarded as an originally weaker phenomenon of will than the bad, but it is knowledge that masters in him the blind craving of will.
The noble man makes less distinction than is usual made between himself and others. He recognizes immediately, and without reasons or arguments, that the in-itself of his own phenomenon is also that of others, namely that will-to-live which constitutes the inner nature of everything, and lives in all; in fact, he recognizes that this extends even to the animals and to the whole of nature; he will therefore not cause suffering even to an animal.
The egoist feels himself surrounded by strange and hostile phenomena, and all his hope rests on his own well-being. The good person lives in a world of friendly phenomena; the well-being of any of these is his own well-being.
Therefore, although others have laid down moral principles which they gave out as precepts for virtue and laws necessarily to be ob- served, I cannot do this, as I have said already, because I have no “ought” or law to hold before the eternally free will. On the other hand, in reference to my discussion, what corresponds and is analogous to that undertaking is that purely theoretical truth, and the whole of my argument can be regarded as a mere elaboration thereof, namely that the will is the in-itself of every phenomenon, but itself as such is free from the forms of that phenomenon, and so from plurality.
Before we show the last item, that is how love, whose origin and nature we know to be seeing through the principium individuationis, leads to salvation, the entire surrender of the will-to-live. We’ll explain: “All love is compassion or sympathy.”
§67
We have seen how, from seeing through the principium individuationis, in the lesser degree justice arises, and in the higher degree real goodness of disposition, a goodness that shows itself as pure, i.e., disinterested, affection towards others. ow where this becomes complete, the individuality and fate of others are treated entirely like one’s own.
Now with reference to the paradox above expressed, I must call to mind the fact that we previously found suffering to be essential to, and inseparable from, life as a whole, and that we saw how every desire springs from a need, a want, a suffering, and that every satisfaction is therefore only a pain removed, not a positive happiness brought. We saw that the joys certainly lie to the desire in stating that they are a positive good, but that in truth they are only of a negative nature, and only the end of an evil.
This is also the place to discuss one of the most striking peculiarities of human nature, weeping, which, like laughter, belongs to the manifestations that distinguish man from the animal. Weeping is by no means a positive manifestation of pain, for it occurs where pains are least. In my opinion, we never weep directly over pain that is felt, but always only over its repetition in reflection. Thus we pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere mental picture or representation of it; we then find our own state so de- serving of sympathy that, if another were the sufferer, we are firmly and sincerely convinced that we would be full of sympathy and love to help him. Now we ourselves are the object of our own sincere sympathy; with the most charitable disposition.
§68
After this digression on the identity of pure love with sympathy, the turning back of sympathy on to our own individuality having as its symptom the phenomenon of weeping, I take up again the thread of our discussion of the ethical significance of conduct, to show how, from the same source from which all goodness, affection, virtue, and nobility of character spring, there ultimately arises also what I call denial of the will-to-live.
If that veil of Maya, the principium individuationis, is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egoistical distinction between himself and the person of others, but takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as in his own, and thus is not only benevolent and charitable in the highest degree, but even ready to sacrifice his own individuality whenever several others can be saved thereby, then it follows automatically that such a man, recognizing in all beings his own true and innermost self, must also regard the endless sufferings of all that lives as his own, and thus take upon himself the pain of the whole world.
Thus it may be that the inner nature of holiness, of self-renunciation, of mortification of one’s own will, of asceticism, is here for the first time expressed in abstract terms and free from everything mythical, as denial of the will-to-live, which appears after the complete knowledge of its own inner being has become for it the quieter of all willing. On the other hand, it has been known directly and expressed in deed by all those saints and ascetics who, in spite of the same inner knowledge, used very different language according to the dogmas which their faculty of reason had accepted.
However, we must not imagine that, after the denial of the will-to-live has once appeared through knowledge that has become a quieter of the will, such denial no longer wavers or falters, and that we can rest on it as on an inherited property. On the contrary, it must always be achieved afresh by constant struggle. For as the body is the will itself only in the form of objectivity, or as phenomenon in the world as representation, that whole will-to-live exists potentially so long as the body lives, and is always striving to reach actuality and to burn afresh with all its intensity. By the expression asceticism, which I have already used so often, I understand in the narrower sense this deliberate breaking of the will by refusing the agreeable and looking for the disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen way of life of penance and self-chastisement, for the constant mortification of the will.
It follows from all that has been said, that the denial of the will-to-live, which is the same as what is called complete resignation or holiness, always proceeds from that quieter of the will; and this is the knowledge of its inner conflict and its essential vanity, expressing themselves in the suffering of all that lives. The difference, that we have described as two paths, is whether that knowledge is called forth by suffering which is merely and simply known and freely appropriated by our seeing through the principium individuationis, or by suffering immediately felt by ourselves. True salvation, deliverance from life and suffering, cannot even be imagined without complete denial of the will.
§69
Suicide, the arbitrary doing away with the individual phenomenon, differs most widely from the denial of the will- to-live, which is the only act of its freedom to appear in the phenomenon, and hence, as Asmus calls it, the transcendental change. Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phenomenon of the will’s strong affirmation. For denial has its essential nature in the fact that the pleasures of life, not its sorrows, are shunned. The suicide wills life, and is dissatisfied merely with the conditions on which it has come to him. Therefore he gives up by no means the will-to-live, but merely life, since he destroys the individual phenomenon.
The only path to salvation is that the will should appear freely and without hindrance, in order that it can recognize or know its own inner nature in this phenomenon. The abolishment of the will is not possible through physical force, such as the destruction of the seed or germ, the killing of the new-born child, or suicide. Nature leads the will to the light, just because only in the light can it find its salvation.
§70
We might perhaps regard the whole of our discussion (now concluded) of what I call the denial of the will as inconsistent with the previous explanation of necessity, that appertains just as much to motivation as to every other form of the principle of sufficient reason. As a result of that necessity, motives, like all causes, are only occasional causes on which the character unfolds its nature, and reveals it with the necessity of a natural law.
When the principium individuationis is seen through, when the Ideas, and indeed the inner nature of the thing-in-itself, are immediately recognized as the same will in all, and the result of this knowledge is a universal quieter of willing, then the individual motives become ineffective, because the kind of knowledge that corresponds to them is obscured and pushed into the background by knowledge of quite a different kind. The character itself can be entirely eliminated by the above- mentioned change of knowledge. It is also that which in the Christian Church is very appropriately called new birth or regeneration, and the knowledge from which it springs, the effect of divine grace.
Considering not the individuals according to the principle of sufficient reason, but the Idea of man in its unity, the Christian teaching symbolize nature, the affirmation of the will- to- live, in Adam. His sin bequeathed to us, in other words, our unity with him in the Idea, which manifests itself in time through the bond of generation, causes us all to partake of suffering and eternal death. On the other hand, the Christian teaching symbolize grace, the denial of the will, salvation, in the God become man. As he is free from all sinfulness, in other words, from all willing of life, he cannot, like us, have resulted from the most decided affirmation of the will; nor can he, like us, have a body that is through and through only concrete will, phenomenon of the will, but, born of a pure virgin, he has only a phantom body (This is not accepted in orthodox Christian teaching).
Dogma of Christianity that will is not free and has a propensity for evil, so the works of the will are always sinful and cannot satisfy justice and faith alone can save us, and the faith itself is the effect of grace without participation. We see that the dogma agrees with our own investigations here, that the genuine virtue does not originate from deliberate free choice (works), but in knowledge (faith).
§71
The objection is that after our observations have finally brought us to the point where we have before our eyes in perfect saintliness the denial and surrender of all willing, and thus a deliverance from a world whose whole existence presented itself to us as suffering, this now appears to us as a transition into empty nothingness.
On this I must first of all observe that the concept of nothing is essentially relative, and always refers to a definite something that it negates. What is universally assumed as positive, what we call being, the negation of which is expressed by the concept nothing in its most general significance, is exactly the world as representation, which I have shown to be the objectivity, the mirror, of the will. If we no longer perceive the will in this mirror, we ask in vain in what direction it has turned, because it no longer has any where and when, we complain that it is lost in nothingness.
We, however, who consistently occupy the standpoint of philosophy, must be satisfied here with negative knowledge, content to have reached the final landmark of the positive. If, therefore, we have recognized the inner nature of the world as will, and have seen in all its phenomena only the objectivity of the will; and if we have followed these from the unconscious impulse of obscure natural forces up to the most conscious action of man, we shall by no means evade the consequence that, with the free denial, the surrender, of the will, all those phenomena also are now abolished. Before us there is certainly left only nothing; but that which struggles against this flowing away into nothing, namely our nature, is indeed jus the will-to-live which we ourselves are, just as it is our world. That we abhor nothingness so much is simply another way of saying that we will life so much, ad that we are nothing but this will and know nothing but it alone. We freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is nothing.