The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 3 of 3)

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Артур Шопенгауэр. The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 3 of 3)

Supplements To The Second Book

Chapter XXI. Retrospect and More General View

Chapter XXII.1 Objective View of the Intellect

Chapter XXIII.3On The Objectification Of The Will In Unconscious Nature

Chapter XXIV. On Matter

Chapter XXV. Transcendent Considerations Concerning The Will As Thing In Itself

Chapter XXVI.4 On Teleology

Chapter XXVII. On Instinct And Mechanical Tendency

Chapter XXVIII.6 Characterisation Of The Will To Live

Supplements to the Third Book

Chapter XXIX.9 On The Knowledge Of The Ideas

Chapter XXX.10 On The Pure Subject Of Knowledge

Chapter XXXI.11 On Genius

Chapter XXXII.14 On Madness

Chapter XXXIII.17 Isolated Remarks On Natural Beauty

Chapter XXXIV.18 On The Inner Nature Of Art

Chapter XXXV.19 On The Æsthetics Of Architecture

Chapter XXXVI.20 Isolated Remarks On The Æsthetics Of The Plastic And Pictorial Arts

Chapter XXXVII.21 On The Æsthetics Of Poetry

Chapter XXXVIII.23 On History

Chapter XXXIX.25 On The Metaphysics Of Music

Supplements to the Fourth Book

Chapter XL. Preface

Chapter XLI.27 On Death And Its Relation To The Indestructibility Of Our True Nature

Chapter XLII. The Life Of The Species

Chapter XLIII. On Heredity

Chapter XLIV. The Metaphysics Of The Love Of The Sexes

Chapter XLV.40 On The Assertion Of The Will To Live

Chapter XLVI.41 On The Vanity And Suffering Of Life

Chapter XLVII.43 On Ethics

Chapter XLVIII.44On The Doctrine Of The Denial Of The Will To Live

Chapter XLIX. The Way Of Salvation

Chapter L. Epiphilosophy

Appendix

Abstract

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

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If the intellect were not of a subordinate nature, as the two preceding chapters show, then everything which takes place without it, i. e., without intervention of the idea, such as reproduction, the development and maintenance of the organism, the healing of wounds, the restoration or vicarious supplementing of mutilated parts, the salutary crisis in diseases, the works of the mechanical skill of animals, and the performances of instinct would not be done so infinitely better and more perfectly than what takes place with the assistance of intellect, all conscious and intentional achievements of men, which compared with the former are mere bungling. In general nature signifies that which operates, acts, performs without the assistance of the intellect. Now, that this is really identical with what we find in ourselves as will is the general theme of this second book, and also of the essay, “Ueber den Willen in der Natur.” The possibility of this fundamental knowledge depends upon the fact that in us the will is directly lighted by the intellect, which here appears as self-consciousness; otherwise we could just as little arrive at a fuller knowledge of it within us as without us, and must for ever stop at inscrutable forces of nature. We have to abstract from the assistance of the intellect if we wish to comprehend the nature of the will in itself, and thereby, as far as is possible, penetrate to the inner being of nature.

On this account, it may be remarked in passing, my direct antipode among philosophers is Anaxagoras; for he assumed arbitrarily as that which is first and original, from which everything proceeds, a νους, an intelligence, a subject of ideas, and he is regarded as the first who promulgated such a view. According to him the world existed earlier in the mere idea than in itself; while according to me it is the unconscious will which constitutes the reality of things, and its development must have advanced very far before it finally attains, in the animal consciousness, to the idea and intelligence; so that, according to me, thought appears as the very last. However, according to the testimony of Aristotle (Metaph., i. 4), Anaxagoras himself did not know how to begin much with his νους, but merely set it up, and then left it standing like a painted saint at the entrance, without making use of it in his development of nature, except in cases of need, when he did not know how else to help himself. All physico-theology is a carrying out of the error opposed to the truth expressed at the beginning of this chapter – the error that the most perfect form of the origin of things is that which is brought about by means of an intellect. Therefore it draws a bolt against all deep exploration of nature.

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The difference of the whole manner of existence which the extremes of the gradation of intellectual capacity establish between man and man is so great that that between a king and a day labourer seems small in comparison. And here also, as in the case of the species of animals, a connection between the vehemence of the will and the height of the intellect can be shown. Genius is conditioned by a passionate temperament, and a phlegmatic genius is inconceivable: it seems as if an exceptionally vehement, thus a violently longing, will must be present if nature is to give an abnormally heightened intellect, as corresponding to it; while the merely physical account of this points to the greater energy with which the arteries of the head move the brain and increase its turgescence. Certainly, however, the quantity, quality, and form of the brain itself is the other and incomparably more rare condition of genius. On the other hand, phlegmatic persons are as a rule of very moderate mental power; and thus the northern, cold-blooded, and phlegmatic nations are in general noticeably inferior in mind to the southern vivacious and passionate peoples; although, as Bacon2 has most pertinently remarked, if once a man of a northern nation is highly gifted by nature, he can then reach a grade which no southern ever attains to. It is accordingly as perverse as it is common to take the great minds of different nations as the standard for comparing their mental powers: for that is just attempting to prove the rule by the exceptions. It is rather the great majority of each nation that one has to consider: for one swallow does not make a summer. We have further to remark here that that very passionateness which is a condition of genius, bound up with its vivid apprehension of things, produces in practical life, where the will comes into play, and especially in the case of sudden occurrences, so great an excitement of the emotions that it disturbs and confuses the intellect; while the phlegmatic man in such a case still retains the full use of his mental faculties, though they are much more limited, and then accomplishes much more with them than the greatest genius can achieve. Accordingly a passionate temperament is favourable to the original quality of the intellect, but a phlegmatic temperament to its use. Therefore genius proper is only for theoretical achievements, for which it can choose and await its time, which will just be the time at which the will is entirely at rest, and no waves disturb the clear mirror of the comprehension of the world. On the other hand, genius is ill adapted and unserviceable for practical life, and is therefore for the most part unfortunate. Goethe's “Tasso” is written from this point of view. As now genius proper depends upon the absolute strength of the intellect, which must be purchased by a correspondingly excessive vehemence of disposition, so, on the other hand, the great pre-eminence in practical life that makes generals and statesmen depends upon the relative strength of the intellect, thus upon the highest degree of it that can be attained without too great excitability of the emotions, and too great vehemence of character, and that therefore can hold its own even in the storm. Great firmness of will and constancy of mind, together with a capable and fine understanding, are here sufficient; and whatever goes beyond this acts detrimentally, for too great a development of the intelligence directly impedes firmness of character and resolution of will. Hence this kind of eminence is not so abnormal, and is a hundred times less rare than the former kind; and accordingly we see great generals and great ministers appear in every age, whenever the merely external conditions are favourable to their efficiency. Great poets and philosophers, on the other hand, leave centuries waiting for them; and yet humanity may be contented even with this rare appearance of them, for their works remain, and do not exist only for the present, like the achievements of those other men. It is also quite in keeping with the law of the parsimony of nature referred to above that it bestows great eminence of mind in general upon very few, and genius only as the rarest of all exceptions, while it equips the great mass of the human race with no more mental power than is required for the maintenance of the individual and the species. For the great, and through their very satisfaction, constantly increasing needs of the human race make it necessary that the great majority of men should pass their lives in occupations of a coarsely physical and entirely mechanical description. And what would be the use to them of an active mind, a glowing imagination, a subtle understanding, and a profoundly penetrating intellect? These would only make them useless and unhappy. Therefore nature has thus gone about the most costly of all her productions in the least extravagant manner. In order not to judge unfairly one ought also to settle definitely one's expectations of the mental achievements of men generally from this point of view, and to regard, for example, even learned men, since as a rule they have become so only by the force of outward circumstances, primarily as men whom nature really intended to be tillers of the soil; indeed even professors of philosophy ought to be estimated according to this standard, and then their achievements will be found to come up to all fair expectations. It is worth noticing that in the south, where the necessities of life press less severely upon the human race, and more leisure is allowed, the mental faculties even of the multitude also become more active and finer. It is physiologically noteworthy that the preponderance of the mass of the brain over that of the spinal cord and the nerves, which, according to Sömmerring's acute discovery, affords the true and closest measure of the degree of intelligence both of species of brutes and of individual men, at the same time increases the direct power of moving, the agility of the limbs; because, through the great inequality of the relation, the dependence of all motor nerves upon the brain becomes more decided; and besides this the cerebellum, which is the primary controller of movements, shares the qualitative perfection of the cerebrum; thus through both all voluntary movements gain greater facility, rapidity, and manageableness, and by the concentration of the starting-point of all activity that arises which Lichtenberg praises in Garrick: “that he appeared to be present in all the muscles of his body.” Hence clumsiness in the movement of the body indicates clumsiness in the movement of the thoughts, and will be regarded as a sign of stupidity both in individuals and nations, as much as sleepiness of the countenance and vacancy of the glance. Another symptom of the physiological state of the case referred to is the fact that many persons are obliged at once to stand still whenever their conversation with any one who is walking with them begins to gain some connection; because their brain, as soon as it has to link together a few thoughts, has no longer as much power over as is required to keep the limbs in motion by means of the motory nerves, so closely is everything measured with them.

It results from this whole objective consideration of the intellect and its origin, that it is designed for the comprehension of those ends upon the attainment of which depends the individual life and its propagation, but by no means for deciphering the inner nature of things and of the world, which exists independently of the knower. What to the plant is the susceptibility to light, in consequence of which it guides its growth in the direction of it, that is, in kind, the knowledge of the brute, nay, even of man, although in degree it is increased in proportion as the needs of each of these beings demand. With them all apprehension remains a mere consciousness of their relations to other things, and is by no means intended to present again in the consciousness of the knower the peculiar, absolutely real nature of these things. Rather, as springing from the will, the intellect is also only designed for its service, thus for the apprehension of motives; it is adapted for this, and is therefore of a thoroughly practical tendency. This also holds good if we conceive the significance of life as ethical; for in this regard too we find man knowing only for the benefit of his conduct. Such a faculty of knowledge, existing exclusively for practical ends, will from its nature always comprehend only the relations of things to each other, but not the inner nature of them, as it is in itself. But to regard the complex of these relations as the absolute nature of the world as it is in itself, and the manner in which it necessarily exhibits itself in accordance with the laws predisposed in the brain as the eternal laws of the existence of all things, and then to construct ontology, cosmology, and theology in accordance with this view – this was really the old fundamental error, of which Kant's teaching has made an end. Here, then, our objective, and therefore for the most part physiological consideration of the intellect meets his transcendental consideration of it; nay, appears in a certain sense even as an a priori insight into it; for, from a point of view which we have taken up outside of it, our objective view enables us to know in its origin, and therefore as necessary, what that transcendental consideration, starting from facts of consciousness, presents only as a matter of fact. For it follows from our objective consideration of the intellect, that the world as idea, as it exists stretched out in space and time, and moves on regularly according to the strict law of causality, is primarily only a physiological phenomenon, a function of the brain, which brings it about, certainly upon the occasion of certain external stimuli, but yet in conformity with its own laws. Accordingly it is beforehand a matter of course, that what goes on in this function itself, and therefore through it and for it, must by no means be regarded as the nature of things in themselves, which exist independently of it and are entirely different from it, but primarily exhibits only the mode or manner of this function itself, which can always receive only a very subordinate modification through that which exists completely independently of it, and sets it in motion as a stimulus. As, then, Locke claimed for the organs of sense all that comes into our apprehension by means of the sensation, in order to deny that it belongs to things in themselves, so Kant, with the same intention, and pursuing the same path further, has proved all that makes perception proper possible, thus space, time, and causality, to be functions of the brain; although he has refrained from using this physiological expression, to which, however, our present method of investigation, coming from the opposite side, the side of the real, necessarily leads us. Kant arrived upon his analytical path at the result that what we know are mere phenomena. What this mysterious expression really means becomes clear from our objective and genetic investigation of the intellect. The phenomena are the motives for the aims of individual will as they exhibit themselves in the intellect which the will has produced for this purpose (which itself appears as a phenomenon objectively, as the brain), and which, when comprehended, as far as one can follow their concatenation, afford us in their connection the world which extends itself objectively in time and space, and which I call the world as idea. Moreover, from our point of view, the objectionable element vanishes which in the Kantian doctrine arises from the fact that, because the intellect knows merely phenomena instead of things as they are in themselves, nay, in consequence of this is led astray into paralogisms and unfounded hypostases by means of “sophistications, not of men but of the reason itself, from which even the wisest does not free himself, and if, perhaps indeed after much trouble, he avoids error, can yet never get quit of the illusion which unceasingly torments and mocks him” – because of all this, I say, the appearance arises that our intellect is intentionally designed to lead us into errors. For the objective view of the intellect given here, which contains a genesis of it, makes it conceivable that, being exclusively intended for practical ends, it is merely the medium of motives, and therefore fulfils its end by an accurate presentation of these, and that if we undertake to discover the nature of things in themselves, from the manifold phenomena which here exhibit themselves objectively to us, and their laws, we do this at our own peril and on our own responsibility. We have recognised that the original inner force of nature, without knowledge and working in the dark, which, if it has worked its way up to self-consciousness, reveals itself to this as will, attains to this grade only by the production of an animal brain and of knowledge, as its function, whereupon the phenomenon of the world of perception arises in this brain. But to explain this mere brain phenomenon, with the conformity to law which is invariably connected with its functions, as the objective inner nature of the world and the things in it, which is independent of the brain, existing before and after it, is clearly a spring which nothing warrants us in making. From this mundus phœnomenon, however, from this perception which arises under such a variety of conditions, all our conceptions are drawn. They have all their content from it, or even only in relation to it. Therefore, as Kant says, they are only for immanent, not for transcendental, use; that is to say, these conceptions of ours, this first material of thought, and consequently still more the judgments which result from their combination, are unfitted for the task of thinking the nature of things in themselves, and the true connection of the world and existence; indeed, to undertake this is analogous to expressing the stereometrical content of a body in square inches. For our intellect, originally only intended to present to an individual will its paltry aims, comprehends accordingly mere relations of things, and does not penetrate to their inner being, to their real nature. It is therefore a merely superficial force, clings to the surface of things, and apprehends mere species transitivas, not the true being of things. From this it arises that we cannot understand and comprehend any single thing, even the simplest and smallest, through and through, but something remains entirely inexplicable to us in each of them. Just because the intellect is a product of nature, and is therefore only intended for its ends, the Christian mystics have very aptly called it “the light of nature,” and driven it back within its limits; for nature is the object to which alone it is the subject. The thought from which the Critique of Pure Reason has sprung really lies already at the foundation of this expression. That we cannot comprehend the world on the direct path, i. e., through the uncritical, direct application of the intellect and its data, but when we reflect upon it become ever more deeply involved in insoluble mysteries, points to the fact that the intellect, thus knowledge itself, is secondary, a mere product, brought about by the development of the inner being of the world, which consequently till then preceded it, and it at last appeared as a breaking through to the light out of the obscure depths of the unconscious striving the nature of which exhibits itself as will to the self-consciousness which now at once arises. That which preceded knowledge as its condition, whereby it first became possible, thus its own basis, cannot be directly comprehended by it; as the eye cannot see itself. It is rather the relations of one existence to another, exhibiting themselves upon the surface of things, which alone are its affair, and are so only by means of the apparatus of the intellect, its forms, space, time, and causality. Just because the world has made itself without the assistance of knowledge, its whole being does not enter into knowledge, but knowledge presupposes the existence of the world; on which account the origin of the world does not lie within its sphere. It is accordingly limited to the relations between the things which lie before it, and is thus sufficient for the individual will, for the service of which alone it appeared. For the intellect is, as has been shown, conditioned by nature, lies in it, belongs to it, and cannot therefore place itself over against it as something quite foreign to it, in order thus to take up into itself its whole nature, absolutely, objectively, and thoroughly. It can, if fortune favours it, understand all that is in nature, but not nature itself, at least not directly.

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