The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2

To the First Book - First Half

On the Fundamental View of Idealism

All objective existence is conditioned by a knowing subject and exists only as representation within consciousness, making idealism the only philosophically honest starting point; matter and intellect are correlatives that together constitute the phenomenal world, with the thing-in-itself lying beyond both.

• The entire objective world exists only as phenomenon of the brain, meaning that its supposed absolute reality dissolves under philosophical scrutiny—a truth established progressively by Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant, and now foundational to all honest philosophy.
  • Descartes made subjective self-consciousness the only immediate certainty with cogito ergo sum; Berkeley went further by denying matter any existence outside representation; Kant showed that even space, time, and causality are forms supplied by the subject’s intellect.
  • “The world, from which I part at death, is, on the other hand, only my representation. The centre of gravity of existence falls back into the subject.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
• Realism is philosophically incoherent because any attempt to conceive of an objective world independent of all subjects merely reproduces a representation within a knowing mind, making the assumption self-defeating.
  • If we imaginatively remove all knowing beings from the world and then reintroduce one, the world ‘repeats itself inside that brain’—demonstrating that the supposedly independent world was already a representation.
  • Realism necessarily leads to materialism, and materialism is ’the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself,’ since the knower is required to posit matter at all.
• Matter and intellect are inseparable correlatives—matter is representation for an intellect, and intellect is that in whose representation alone matter exists—so neither can be the absolute first thing, and the origin of the world must be sought in what lies behind both.
  • Pure matter without form and quality, and the pure knowing subject without any object, are both abstractions never given in experience; they are the two static poles of the phenomenal world.
  • “The fundamental mistake of all systems is the failure to recognize that intellect and matter are correlatives, in other words, the one exists only for the other; both stand and fall together.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
• Kant’s transcendental idealism leaves the empirical reality of the world intact while showing that the conditions of all objective experience—space, time, causality—are functions of the knowing brain, not properties of things-in-themselves.
  • Kant proved space and time to be forms of intuition belonging to the subject; therefore no thing-in-itself can be spatial or temporal, and the things-in-themselves become wholly unknown quantities.
  • Idealism is not empirical idealism (denying the reality of external objects in experience) but transcendental idealism, which upholds empirical reality while denying that the empirically real is the ultimately real.
• Spiritualism (the assumption of an immaterial substance alongside matter) is a false safeguard against materialism; the true safeguard is idealism, which makes all matter dependent on the knowing subject rather than positing a second substance.
  • With idealism, what is proved is not the knower’s independence of matter (as spiritualism claims) but the dependence of all matter on the knower.
  • The dramatized dialogue between Subject and Matter concludes: ‘At bottom it is one entity that perceives itself and is perceived by itself’—the thing-in-itself underlying both will be revealed as will in the second book.

On the Doctrine of Knowledge of Perception or Knowledge of the Understanding

Perception of the objective world is not a passive reception of sense data but an active intellectual construction via the a priori law of causality applied to raw sensory material, so that the understanding—not the senses—is the true author of the empirical world we experience.

• The senses provide only raw sensation, not perception; it is the intellect (brain-function) that constructs the objective world by applying the law of causality to sense impressions, passing from effect to cause and projecting objects into space.
  • Locke separated secondary qualities (colour, sound, taste) as contributions of the subject; Kant extended this further, showing that even the primary qualities (extension, figure, solidity) are produced by brain-functions of space, time, and causality.
  • Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind proves indirectly the same point by demonstrating that sensations bear no resemblance to the perceived world, and that the five primary qualities Locke ascribed to things cannot be supplied by any sensation of the senses.
• In vision, the understanding’s transition from sensation to external cause is so rapid and unconscious that it creates the illusion of direct, immediate perception of objects ‘outside us,’ whereas in truth those objects exist only within the brain.
  • Euler noted that we seem to perceive things directly outside us, which is inexplicable on a merely sensory account; the explanation is that ‘outside’ is itself a spatial determination, and space is a brain-function—so the ‘outside’ resides inside the head.
  • The double image seen with diverging eyes, the inversion of the retinal image corrected by the understanding, and the five data by which distance is estimated—all demonstrate the intellectual nature of vision.
• Because perception is a brain-phenomenon, the quality of aesthetic enjoyment of natural beauty depends as much on the constitution of the perceiving brain as on the object, just as a fine copperplate print degrades with use.
  • The same landscape appears differently in different heads even when eyesight is equal, explaining the great variation in capacity for enjoying and reproducing natural beauty in art.
• Pain is felt ‘in the limb’ by the same mechanism by which we project objects ‘outside us’: both are brain-events that consciousness locates at the periphery by following the nerve to its terminus, as demonstrated by phantom limb pain.
  • Only parts whose nerves reach the brain are felt; ganglionic-system nerves produce only dull discomfort without precise localization.
  • “A man who has lost a limb still sometimes feels pain in it, because the nerves going to the brain still exist.” —Arthur Schopenhauer

On the Senses

The five senses are ranked by their distance from the will and their suitability for objective knowledge, with sight and hearing highest because their nerves are insensitive to pain and thus yield will-free data; the contrast between active sight (sense of the understanding) and passive hearing (sense of reason) explains music’s uniquely penetrating effect and the destructive impact of noise on intellectual work.

• Senses suited to objective perception must be indifferent to the will—neither pleasant nor painful in themselves—so that attention passes immediately to the cause rather than pausing at the sensation; this is why the retina and optic nerve feel no pain.
  • The higher senses (sight, hearing) have nerves insensitive to injury; pain is felt only in surrounding tissues, never in the sense-nerve itself—a design that enables purely objective data-gathering.
  • Smell and taste, the two lowest senses, always directly affect the will by being agreeable or disagreeable, making them more subjective than objective.
• Sight is an active sense (the sense of the understanding that perceives), while hearing is passive (the sense of reason that thinks), which is why noise destroys thought but visual complexity does not disturb reflection.
  • Sounds mechanically percuss the auditory nerve deep in the brain near the pons Varolii—an absolutely lethal spot from which all movement arises—causing the whole brain to vibrate and interrupting the flow of thought.
  • “Kant, Goethe, and Jean-Paul were highly sensitive to noise, as their biographies testify; Goethe bought a dilapidated house near his own merely to avoid enduring the noise of its repair.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
• Music’s uniquely deep and immediate effect on the mind results from the passive nature of hearing: sound vibrations set the brain-fibres themselves vibrating in sympathetic numerical ratios, bypassing the active filtering that sight performs.
  • By contrast, there can be nothing analogous to music for the eye, because vision is active not passive, which is why the colour-organ was a ’ludicrous error.’
• Smell is the sense of memory, uniquely capable of summoning the specific impression of past events and environments more directly than any other sense.
  • This characterization completes a taxonomy: sight = understanding, hearing = reason, smell = memory.

On Knowledge a Priori

The a priori forms of space, time, and causality are functions of the knowing subject—not properties of things-in-themselves—as demonstrated by the necessity and universality of geometrical and arithmetical truths, the necessary succession of cause and effect, and the impossibility of a first cause; the law of causality applies exhaustively within the world but cannot legitimately be extended to ask for a cause of the world itself.

• That space is subjectively conditioned is proven by the fact that geometric incompatibilities (like a right-angled equilateral triangle) are detected only in pure intuition, not by logical contradiction between concepts—showing that spatial knowledge is synthetic a priori, not analytic.
  • Kant’s watchword is cogito ergo est: just as I think certain relations (mathematical) in things, they must hold in all possible experience—this was the deeper discovery beyond Descartes’s cogito ergo sum.
  • The proposition of Giordano Bruno—‘An infinitely large body is necessarily immovable’—cannot rest on experience or contradiction but only on pure perception that movement requires space beyond the body.
• Arithmetic rests on the pure intuition of time because counting is possible only through succession, and succession is given only in the intuition of time—a dependence betrayed by the universal use of ’times’ (mal, fois) as the expression for multiplication.
  • Aristotle recognized the relationship between number and time, calling time ’the number of motion’ and questioning whether time could exist without the soul.
• The law of causality is a priori, not empirically derived: the proof is that empirical perception of an objective world is impossible without first applying causality to pass from sensation to its cause, so causality must precede and condition experience rather than being derived from it.
  • Maine de Biran’s claim that we abstract causality from the act of will followed by bodily movement is false: act of will and bodily action are simultaneous and identical, not a causal sequence—there is no causal relation perceived between them.
  • Eva Lauk, an Estonian girl born without arms and legs, attained correct judgment of the size and distance of visible objects as rapidly as her siblings—refuting the theory that causality is abstracted from the effort of muscular action on external things.
• The law of causality applies only to changes (states of matter), not to matter itself or to the world as a whole; extending it to demand a first cause or a cause of the world is an illegitimate overextension of an immanent principle, resulting in the cosmological proof’s self-defeating ‘parricide.’
  • Every change has its cause in another change immediately preceding it—this is the true and entire content of the law; a first cause is as impossible to conceive as a beginning of time or a limit of space.
  • The cosmological proof starts without justification by inferring a prior non-existence from the world’s existence, then commits parricide by halting the causal series at a ‘first cause,’ destroying the very principle it relies on.
• Cause and force (natural force) must be sharply distinguished: causes are prior changes that occasion effects, while forces of nature are the timeless, original powers by virtue of which matter acts at all—confusing the two (as Maine de Biran and even Kant do) produces persistent philosophical errors.
  • Matter is objectively apprehended causality itself—its entire nature consists in action generally—so that ‘actual’ (wirklich) and ‘material’ are interchangeable, both deriving from wirken (to act).
  • In the second book the forces of nature are shown to be identical with the will in ourselves, making will the ultimate ground of all causality.

To the First Book - Second Half

On the Intellect Devoid of Reason

Animals possess understanding (perceptual knowledge and immediate causal inference) but lack reason (abstract concepts), which confines their consciousness to an endless present without genuine memory, anticipation, or purpose, making their suffering far less than human suffering but also rendering them incapable of dissimulation or error on the human scale.

• Animals have understanding without reason: they correctly perceive causes and effects through several links but form no abstract concepts, so their ‘memory’ is purely perceptive—triggered by a present stimulus that revives the trace of an earlier perception—not a systematic, concept-ordered recollection.
  • Dog training and all animal learning depend entirely on this perceptive faculty of recollection and habit, which is as different from human education as perceiving is from thinking.
  • The most intelligent animals (elephant, higher mammals) sometimes display faint traces of reflection, always to our astonishment; the recorded legal inquest at Morpeth (1830) where an elephant killed a keeper who had offended it two years earlier exemplifies premeditation.
• Because animals live entirely in the present without concept-mediated anticipation or recollection, they suffer far less than humans: their sufferings are only physical and immediate, while human suffering extends across the remembered past and feared future and into the merely possible.
  • “Animals do not really feel even death; they can get to know it only when it appears, and then they already are no more.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
  • The total openness of animals—unable to conceal, purpose, or dissimulate—accounts for the pleasure humans take in animals, especially dogs: ’the dog is related to the man as a glass tumbler is to a metal one.’

On the Doctrine of Abstract Knowledge, or Knowledge of Reason

Reason is the faculty of abstract, concept-based knowledge expressed in language, which confers enormous advantages (memory, planning, generalization) but also exposes man uniquely to error, delusion, and the imposition of false motives, since abstract concepts can represent the impossible and the false as readily as the true.

• Concepts, unlike percepts, are immune to the instantaneous vanishing of impressions and the gradual fading of images, making them the indispensable medium for storing experience and guiding future action—but they achieve this only by sacrificing perceptual richness for universality.
  • Concepts cannot preserve what is perceived or felt but preserve only what is essential thereof in an entirely altered form—as flowers cannot be preserved but their essential oil can.
  • Words are the necessary sensible signs of concepts, individualizing them enough to enter time-bound consciousness; without language, reason is almost entirely potential rather than actual, as shown by deaf-mutes who have learned no language.
• The concept and the word to which it is tied are entirely distinct; language both enables rational thought and constrains it by forcing fluid ideas into rigid forms—a constraint partly overcome by learning multiple languages, especially the ancient ones.
  • Ancient languages (Greek and Latin) perform far better than modern ones in liberating thought from fixed forms because their great structural difference from modern languages forces the same idea to assume a very different form.
  • Burke correctly observed that words are understood without calling up pictures of perception, but wrongly concluded that words are used without any associated representation; the correct conclusion is that concepts are not perceptive images but abstractions of a different nature.
• The faculty of reason uniquely exposes humans to error and delusion on a vast scale, because abstract motives (ideas, doctrines, traditions) can impel people to actions utterly contrary to their animal nature—producing crusades, fanaticism, and every variety of human absurdity.
  • In 1818, seven thousand Chiliasts moved from Württemberg to Ararat because a new kingdom of God announced by Jung-Stilling was to appear there; a mother killed and roasted her child to cure her husband’s rheumatism with its fat—these are effects of abstract error acting as motive.
  • Real culture (knowledge and judgment together) reaches only a few; for the great majority, training by example, custom, and early-impressed concepts takes culture’s place, producing convictions as firm as if innate.
• Reason (abstract representations) and understanding (intuitive perception) are distinct faculties—a distinction already seen by Pico della Mirandola and Spinoza, but deliberately obscured by post-Kantian German philosophers who smuggled a fabricated ‘supersensuous cognition’ under the name of reason.
  • Spinoza correctly characterizes reason as the faculty for forming universal concepts (Ethics II, prop. 40, schol. 2); understanding is the intuitive faculty.
  • Post-Kantian philosophasters called the understanding reason, overlooked understanding proper entirely, and assigned its intuitive functions to sensibility—a ‘shameless audacity’ serving to introduce false metaphysics.

On the Relation of Knowledge of Perception to Abstract Knowledge

All abstract knowledge derives its content and validity from perceptual knowledge, which is the only immediate and genuinely concrete form of knowing; abstract concepts are like bank notes that must ultimately be redeemable in the gold of perception, and wisdom and genius are rooted in the quality of perceptual apprehension, not in learning or accumulated concepts.

• Every concept must ultimately be traceable back through intermediate stages to perceptions, which are its ‘ready money’; where this is impossible, the concept is a mere word without content, and all philosophizing that operates exclusively with wide abstractions (such as the Hegelian school) produces empty noise.
  • The concept ‘spirit’—analysed into thinking, willing, immaterial, simple, indestructible, spaceless being—remains indistinct because its elements cannot be verified by perceptions; ‘a thinking being without a brain is like a digesting being without a stomach.’
  • Proclus’s Institutio Theologica, constructing theology from abstractions like unum, bonum, producens while ignoring the perceptions from which those abstractions draw their only content, is the most glaring example of philosophizing as ‘mere idle display of words.’
• Original thinking is always done in perceptual images; imagination is a necessary instrument of thought, and all great minds agree with one another in detail because they all kept their gaze on the same thing—the world as actual perception—rather than on inherited conceptual frameworks.
  • Cervantes describing profound astonishment writes ‘Like a draped statue; for the wind moved his garments’—a detail born of direct perception, impossible to a writer who operates only with conventional abstract phrases.
  • Books communicate only secondary representations; the author who has thought without perceiving gives the reader nothing new, since what he has thought the reader could also have thought.
• Wisdom is intuitive, not propositional: it consists not in principles carried ready-made in the head but in the whole way in which the world presents itself to a person’s apprehension, which differs as radically between the wise and the foolish as an oil painting differs from a Chinese drawing without shade or perspective.
  • Superior perceptual knowledge shows itself on every occasion and is instantly felt (and detested) by others; it already appears in the root, in the perceiving apprehension, not in the abstract.
  • According to Helvetius, the original views of which a gifted individual is capable originate by the thirty-fifth year at the latest, because the highest energy of brain-activity and the freshness required for perceptual impression decline as the venous system comes to dominate around age forty-two.
• Excessive reading and scholarship actively harm original thinking by crowding out one’s own ideas with others’, creating a ‘fuga vacui’ of intellectual emptiness filled with borrowed opinions, and producing the characteristic dull, sheepish look of the over-learned scholar.
  • Incessant reading arbitrarily upsets the completeness of one’s own system of knowledge to make room for foreign ranges of ideas; Heraclitus said ‘multiscitia non dat intellectum’ (much learning does not give understanding).
  • Learning is like heavy armor: it makes the strong man invincible but crushes the weak man completely; the unlearned man of acuteness knows from one well-apprehended case what a scholar may fail to grasp from a thousand.

On the Theory of the Ludicrous

Laughter invariably arises from the sudden perception of an incongruity between an abstract concept and the concrete perceptual object subsumed under it; wit moves from the perceived to the concept while absurdity moves from concept to perception, and humour is the double counterpoint of irony—a subjective serious mood forced into coexistence with a discordant external world.

• The origin of all laughter is the paradoxical subsumption of a real object under a concept that is in other respects heterogeneous to it; the greater and more unexpected the incongruity, the more violent the laughter.
  • The Gascon who wore his ‘whole wardrobe’ (one summer jacket) in winter yet claimed to be warm—the incongruity between the immense wardrobe implied by the concept and the freezing reality produces the laugh.
  • Unzelmann, forbidden to improvise, said to a horse that defecated on stage: ‘What are you doing? Don’t you know that we are forbidden to improvise?’—subsuming a bodily function under the theatrical prohibition produces an irresistibly ludicrous effect.
• Wit moves from perception to concept (finding an unexpected concept under which to subsume a perceived thing), while absurdity and folly move from concept to perception (applying a concept to a case that reality makes incongruous)—comedy requires the latter because it demands action.
  • Don Quixote’s actions are systematic illustrations of absurdity: he subsumes realities (windmills, peasant girls) under concepts drawn from romances of chivalry, yielding folly through misapplied concept.
  • Baron Münchhausen’s tales work by making the impossible plausible in the abstract (a priori) before the impossibility becomes visible when the particular case is concretely imagined (a posteriori).
• Laughter is pleasant because it represents the triumph of perceptual knowledge over abstract thought: perception is always ‘right’ and needs no external confirmation, while the concept has been caught failing to capture reality—hence the delightful moment.
  • The more capable of complete seriousness a person is—i.e., the more perfectly they believe their concept matches reality—the more heartily they can laugh when an incongruity demolishes that match.
• Humour is seriousness concealed behind a joke—the double counterpoint of irony—arising when a profound and serious subjective mood is involuntarily brought into coexistence with a discordant external world, and seeks reconciliation by thinking both through the same concepts, producing double incongruity.
  • Irony begins with a serious air and ends with a smile; humour reverses this—its masterpieces are found among the moderns (Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Heinrich Heine’s Romancero) while irony’s masterpieces are among the ancients.
  • The German misuse of ‘humorist’ to mean any clown represents the general mania for giving things more distinguished names than they deserve—’every public-house a hotel, every trouper’s stall a circus.’

On Logic in General

Logic, dialectic, and rhetoric form a unified technique of reason for solitary thought, dialogue, and public speech respectively; their rules have little practical use since they only render explicit what the mind already does naturally, but they possess theoretical interest and occasional utility in formal disputation.

• The laws of thought can be simplified to just two: the law of excluded middle (any predicate is either attributed or denied of any subject, never both) and the principle of sufficient reason (the attribution or denial must be determined by something other than the judgment itself).
  • The laws of identity and contradiction are corollaries of excluded middle; truth on the side of the object and knowledge on the side of the subject consist in agreement between the abstract representation and perceptual representation.
  • One truth can never overthrow another, since in the perceptible—the common foundation of all truths—no contradiction is possible; only error has something to fear from every truth.
• Induction is an inference from consequents to ground (modo ponente) that achieves only high probability, while epagoge (refutation by counterexample) is an inference from the absence of a necessary consequent that is perfectly certain—it is always easier to refute than to prove.
  • The oldest of all successions—day following night—refutes Hume’s claim that causality is merely habitual association of constantly conjoined events: no one regards day and night as cause and effect.

On the Science of Syllogisms

The three genuine syllogistic figures each express a distinct natural operation of the reasoning faculty—comparing predicates, comparing subjects, or comparing subject to predicate—with the middle term serving as mere measuring instrument rather than the essential characteristic, and the fourth figure being an artificial inversion with no natural thought-process behind it.

• Inference is essentially the comparison of two complete judgements (not merely three concepts), and the three syllogistic figures are the three natural ways such comparison can proceed: predicate of one with subject of the other (first figure), subject of both (second figure), predicate of both (third figure).
  • The standard description of syllogism as a relation of three concepts loses what is essential to judgements—quality, quantity, modality—and misidentifies the middle term as primary when it is merely a measuring instrument abandoned once used.
  • The voltaic pile is an apt image: the middle term at the center holds the two premisses together, but the conclusion (the spark) leaps between the two outer poles—the dissimilar concepts that are the actual object of comparison.
• The second figure (both premisses share a predicate as middle term) is the natural form for distinguishing two species, and requires opposite quality in the premisses; the third figure (both premisses share a subject as middle term) is the natural form for establishing the compatibility or separability of two predicates.
  • The second figure’s guiding principle: two subjects standing in opposite relationship to a predicate have a negative relation to each other—e.g., whales and fish differ because fishes have cold blood while whales do not.
  • Reducing second- and third-figure syllogisms to the first figure forces thought to express less than it knows (converting a universal into a particular), showing that first-figure reduction is not the only natural course of reasoning.

On Rhetoric

Eloquence works by conducting a stream of ideas into listeners’ minds with sufficient force to divert their existing thought-flow, and its chief practical rule is to give premisses first and withhold the conclusion, allowing conviction to arise within listeners as if self-generated rather than imposed.

• The fundamental rule of persuasion—violated by most speakers—is to advance premisses completely and from every angle while concealing the conclusion, so that the listener’s own reason draws the conclusion and experiences the resulting conviction as self-generated.
  • Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is the classical example: the conclusion (Caesar’s murderers are villains) is never stated, but the premisses make it irresistible.
  • Mixing true arguments with false ones is counterproductive: the false is detected and casts suspicion on the cogent truth advanced alongside it, giving opponents the appearance of having refuted the truth itself.

On the Doctrine of Science

Scientific knowledge requires four sequential operations—correct perceptual apprehension of data, formation of correct concepts, formation of correct judgments, and apt combination of judgments into premises—and only logic and mathematics are perfectly certain sciences because they derive from a priori forms; all other sciences are empirical and therefore only comparatively and precariously universal.

• Philosophy must not be classed with the special sciences because it does not pursue the principle of sufficient reason in its application to particular domains but takes that principle itself as its object; it is therefore related to all sciences as thorough-bass is to music—setting the tonal key within which each science operates.
  • Every science has also its special philosophy—philosophy of botany, of zoology, of history—comprising that science’s most universal results viewed from the highest possible standpoint; these intermediate philosophies supply philosophy proper with important data.
  • Empirical scientists pursuing their sciences purely without philosophical tendency are like a face without eyes; the philosopher is like a watchmaker who produces a meaningful whole from parts made by specialists.
• The correct highest classification of the sciences is by the form of the principle of sufficient reason prevailing in each: pure a priori sciences (geometry, arithmetic, logic) vs. empirical sciences organized under the law of causality in its three modes—causes, stimuli, and motives.
  • Mechanics, physics, and chemistry study causes in their universal form; botany, zoology, and pathology study stimuli; ethics, psychology, jurisprudence, and history study motives.
• The Germanization of scientific technical terms is a serious intellectual error with two major disadvantages: it forces scholars to learn every term twice (in both Latin/Greek and German), and it replaces sharp, sonorous, internationally recognized terms with clumsy, ambiguous German words that impoverish the conceptual precision of science.
  • ‘Stickstoff’ for azote (nitrogen), ‘Zeitwort’ for verb, anatomical terms like ‘Fruchthalter’ for uterus—all create confusion and parochialism; the ancient Latin and Greek terms were chosen by memorable originators and are easily retained across all European languages.
  • Loss of Latin as the universal scientific language also endangers the study of the ancients, and without study of the ancients, ‘coarseness, insipidity, and vulgarity will take possession of all literature.’

On the Method of Mathematics

The Euclidean controversy over the parallel postulate illustrates the superiority of direct intuitive certainty over logical proof: the axiom needs no proof because it is a synthetic a priori proposition guaranteed by pure spatial intuition, and no logical derivation can improve on what is immediately evident in perception.

• The parallel-postulate controversy is the self-refuting parody of the Euclidean method: the attempt to prove an immediately certain synthetic a priori truth by logic merely shows that logical proof cannot improve on the direct evidence of pure spatial intuition.
  • “Schiller’s ironic question—‘For years I have already made use of my nose for smelling: Then have I actually a right to it that can be demonstrated?’—captures the absurdity of demanding a logical proof for a geometrically self-evident truth.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
  • Mathematics has only indirect value in application to practical ends; in itself it neither enlarges the mind’s general powers nor is necessary for philosophical formation—a conclusion demonstrated by Sir W. Hamilton’s review essay and endorsed by Descartes himself.

On the Association of Ideas

The entry of any idea into consciousness requires a sufficient occasion—external (sense impression) or internal (another idea via association by ground/consequent, similarity, or simultaneity)—just as bodies require causes for motion; the type of associative bond predominating in a mind characterizes its intellectual worth, and ultimately the will drives the intellect’s associative activity in service of its own interests.

• No idea can enter consciousness without an occasion, as demonstrated by the vain effort to recall a forgotten thing without finding an associative thread on which it hangs—mnemonics exploits this necessity by providing artificial threads.
  • Association by ground and consequent predominates in thoughtful minds; association by similarity in witty and poetical minds; association by mere simultaneity of first apprehension in limited minds—this difference is characteristic of intellectual worth.
  • Waking consciousness refills each morning through the environment of the previous evening, which triggers a chain re-linking all that was thought then—the health of the mind depends on this continuity, while madness consists in great gaps in it.
• Consciousness resembles a body of water of some depth: the surface is distinct, consciously articulated ideas, but the mass is indistinct feelings, after-sensations, and the will’s disposition—most thinking occurs in those obscure depths, rising to the surface only as finished judgments, resolves, or sudden insights.
  • A letter bringing unexpected news throws ideas and motives into confusion; but on the third or fourth day, after unconscious rumination, the whole situation with its required action stands clearly before one—like nourishment being processed into bodily substance.

On the Essential Imperfections of the Intellect

The intellect is fundamentally limited by its temporal, one-dimensional form, which forces it to apprehend things only successively and fragmentarily, making human consciousness inherently scattered, forgetful, and prone to distortion by the will’s interference. These imperfections are not accidental but necessary consequences of the intellect’s origin as a biological tool serving the will’s ends.

• Because self-consciousness has time but not space as its form, the intellect can apprehend only one thing at a time in succession, like a telescope with an extremely narrow field of vision, making all human thought necessarily fragmentary and distracted.
  • After attending to one idea, the mind must give it up to grasp another, retaining only weakening traces—a good night’s sleep may cause the thought to be lost entirely unless tied to the will’s interest.
  • Prolonged rumination on one thing causes thinking to grow confused and dull, eventually producing complete stupor, so we must periodically abandon even our most important deliberations.
• Memory is not a receptacle but a mere faculty requiring constant practice and repetition to maintain, meaning that even a scholar’s knowledge exists only virtualiter as an acquired skill, not as simultaneously accessible content.
  • The relation between what a person knows potentially and what they know at any given moment is like that between the innumerable stars of the sky and the narrow field of a telescope.
  • This consideration requires us in our studies to strive after correct insight rather than an increase of learning, since quality of knowledge is more important than its quantity.
• The will distorts intellectual functioning whenever it has an interest in the outcome, with desire and hope making the barely possible seem probable, fear magnifying dangers, and every passion tinging the objects of knowledge with its color.
  • Every preconceived opinion, partiality, and emotional predilection of the will acts analogously to falsify knowledge, producing a systematic bias that the intellect cannot overcome from within.
  • “Bacon captured this precisely: ‘The intellect is not a dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and the affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called sciences as one would.’” —Francis Bacon
• We really possess only half a consciousness. With this we grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lightning.
• Individual differences in intellect are vast and constitute a natural aristocracy more consequential than any social hierarchy, ranging from near-imbecility to genius, with the difference manifesting chiefly in the rapidity, depth, and clearness of thinking.
  • Inferior minds are characterized not merely by false judgments but above all by the indistinctness of their whole thinking, comparable to seeing through a bad telescope where all outlines are confused.
  • Such minds compensate for conceptual weakness by clinging to abstract words like ’the Absolute,’ ’the Idea of the good,’ and ‘subject-object,’ which they deploy without genuine content.
  • “Goethe once said that when he read a page of Kant, he felt as if he were entering a bright room.” —Goethe
• The intellect’s imperfections are not accidental but necessary, since nature produced it solely as a tool to serve the individual will by providing knowledge of objects as motives for action, not to fathom the inner essence of things.
  • Unconsciousness is the original and natural condition of all things, with consciousness emerging as a late efflorescence in the ascending series of organisms, explaining why even human intellect retains strong traces of the animal’s limitation to the present.
  • The intellect also grows old with the brain and loses energy in later years, as all its functions depend on physiological conditions.
• The unity and continuity of consciousness cannot be explained by memory or the logical ego alone; it is the will—the permanent, unchangeable substrate—that holds all representations together as means to its ends and provides the single thread on which fragmentary knowledge is strung.
  • Without the will, the intellect would have no more unity of consciousness than a mirror in which things appear and disappear successively, for the will accompanies all ideas like a continuous ground-bass.
  • Kant’s proposition that ‘The I think must accompany all our representations’ is insufficient because the ‘I’ is itself a mystery whose ultimate ground is the will, not the intellect.

On the Practical Use of Our Reason and on Stoicism

Practical reason’s value lies in freeing conduct from domination by the immediately perceived present moment, allowing abstract concepts to guide action; this principle was taken to its systematic extreme in Cynicism and then Stoicism, which Schopenhauer interprets as a form of eudaemonism aimed at achieving the most painless life possible through mental discipline and rational equanimity.

• In practical life, unlike in theoretical knowledge, starting from abstract concepts rather than immediate perception is the mark of rational conduct, since it frees the agent from the tyranny of the perceptible present to which animals are unconditionally subject.
  • A small motive that acts immediately and closely can outweigh a much stronger motive acting from a distance, just as a small piece of iron brought close can perturb a magnetic needle held steady by the whole earth’s forces.
  • Every emotion arises from a representation acting so extremely near that it conceals everything else, making us temporarily incapable of considering anything different—the remedy is to regard the present in imagination as if it were past.
• Cynicism, originating from the insight that the pains caused by striving after pleasures exceed those of mere privation, chose the path of maximum renunciation—reducing all needs to a bare minimum—as the surest and shortest route to the ancient ethical goal of the happiest possible life.
  • Diogenes, Antisthenes, Crates, and their disciples renounced all possessions and conveniences once for all, accepted only what could be had almost for nothing in Athens or Corinth, and spent their time in cheerful idleness and frank conversation.
  • The Cynics resemble mendicant friars like Manzoni’s Capuchin Cristoforo in practical effect but differ in motivation: friars seek a transcendent goal, Cynics merely conclude it is easier to reduce desires than to satisfy them.
• Stoicism transformed Cynicism’s practice into theory, holding that it suffices to regard all goods as dispensable and held on loan from chance rather than actually dispensing with them, thereby achieving equanimity through conviction rather than material renunciation.
  • Epictetus taught that the wise man accepts wife and child but is always ready to let them go when fortune demands them back, since he knows they belong not to him but to chance.
  • In practice the Stoics became mere braggarts—eating and drinking at luxurious Roman tables while making faces and insisting they got nothing from the feast—and are related to the Cynics as well-fed Benedictines to Franciscans.
• The ultimate ground of Stoic ethics is the recognition that all suffering springs from an incongruity between desire and the course of the world, and since the world’s course is not in our power, wisdom consists in adapting willing to the course of things—the sole domain that is ours.
  • Stoicism amounts to a spiritual dietetics: just as we harden the body to wind and weather, we harden the mind to misfortune, danger, loss, and injustice, reaching not happiness but melancholy calm.
  • Unlike Indian, Christian, and Platonic ethics, Stoicism has no metaphysical or transcendent end but an entirely immanent one—the unassailable serenity of the sage—making it a particular species of eudaemonism.

On Man’s Need for Metaphysics

Man alone among animals is an animal metaphysicum because self-consciousness confronts him with death and the apparent contingency of existence, generating an ineradicable need for metaphysical explanation that is satisfied either by philosophy (authenticated from within) or by religion (authenticated from without through revelation), with both kinds serving legitimate but distinct functions.

• Human beings alone are astonished at their own existence because the emergence of reason in man allows the will-to-live for the first time to face itself consciously, simultaneously confronting death, finitude, and the question of why the world exists as it does.
  • The lower a man is intellectually, the less puzzling existence appears to him; philosophical wonder is conditioned by higher intelligence and especially by knowledge of death and suffering, which give the strongest impulse to metaphysical reflection.
  • Philosophical astonishment is at bottom dismayed and distressed, beginning in a minor chord, because it is not merely that the world exists, but that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, that constitutes the punctum pruriens of metaphysics.
• Two kinds of metaphysics exist in civilized nations: philosophy, which has its authentication in itself through reason and appeals to a small number capable of reflection; and religion, which has its authentication from outside through revelation and is adapted to the great majority capable only of faith.
  • Religions exploit the metaphysical need by implanting their dogmas in childhood, before the power of judgment has awakened, so that dogmas grow into a kind of second inborn intellect grafted onto the mind.
  • Philosophy’s second class of exploiters are university professors of philosophy who, unlike those who live for philosophy, generally serve as its opponents—suppressing, ignoring, and distorting genuine achievement to protect their guild’s prerogatives.
• Religion has an allegorical rather than a strictly literal truth: it conveys metaphysical content—truths about the thing-in-itself and the conditions of existence—in imagery and narrative accessible to those incapable of abstract thought, and its value depends on the richness of that allegorical content.
  • The contradictions and even absurdities within religious dogmas are not defects but stamps of the allegorical nature, signaling that religion deals with an order of things-in-themselves whose laws differ from those of the phenomenal world.
  • “Tertullian’s ‘Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est: certum est, quia impossibile’ captures in extremis the allegorical spirit: the impossibility marks it as pointing beyond the phenomenal order.” —Tertullian
  • By Schopenhauer’s standard Buddhism deserves pre-eminence among religions, and he notes with satisfaction that his philosophy—worked out independently before 1818 when little was known of Buddhism in Europe—agrees closely with it.
• The balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs down, is the clear knowledge that this world’s non-existence is just as possible as is its existence.
• The fundamental division between religions is not between monotheism, polytheism, and atheism, but between optimism and pessimism—whether existence is presented as self-justified or as something that ought not to be—and Christianity owed its historical triumph over Judaism and paganism to its pessimism.
  • Christianity’s confession that the human condition is exceedingly sorrowful and sinful, requiring redemption, answered a truth painfully felt by everyone and thus displaced the optimism of its rivals.
  • Interest in the gods’ existence among believers is instrumentally tied to the hope for immortality: if immortality were disproved, interest in the gods would vanish; if immortality could be guaranteed another way, the gods would become nearly indifferent.
• Physics, however advanced, can never constitute sufficient metaphysics because it always terminates in inexplicable natural forces and an infinite regress of causes, making the world an ultimately unintelligible labyrinth that demands a metaphysical supplement reaching the thing-in-itself.
  • Every physical explanation rests on forces of nature that remain as unknown quantities, like constants in an otherwise solved algebraic equation: ‘Physically everything and nothing is explainable.’
  • Advances in natural science do not approach metaphysics by a single step, just as extending a surface never produces cubic content; rather, such advances only make the need for metaphysics more urgently felt by undermining prevailing assumptions and sharpening the problem.
• Metaphysics must draw from empirical sources including inner experience, not from pure a priori concepts alone, yet can transcend experience by treating the whole of experience as a cryptograph to be deciphered—philosophy is the correct and universal interpretation of that cipher, confirmed when its key produces consistent agreement across all phenomena.
  • Kant’s assumption that metaphysics may not draw its principles from experience is a petitio principii: since metaphysical problems are given empirically, their solution may legitimately call on experience.
  • The decisive step Schopenhauer claims is using inner experience—the immediate awareness of willing—as the key that unlocks outer experience, showing the will as the thing-in-itself behind all phenomena, an approach he calls the ‘subterranean passage’ to the fortress that cannot be taken by outer assault.

Supplements to the Second Book

On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself

Kant rightly showed that objective knowledge through representation can never reach the thing-in-itself, but Schopenhauer argues this limitation is overcome in a single privileged case: the immediate inner awareness of willing, which is the least veiled manifestation of the thing-in-itself and therefore licenses interpreting all other phenomena as will.

• Knowledge is essentially representation—a physiological occurrence in an animal brain—making the idea that a picture in one brain can directly capture a thing entirely external to it deeply problematic, and establishing the fundamental gulf between the ideal and the real that Kant demonstrated.
  • Descartes first demonstrated this gulf clearly; Kant showed it most thoroughly; but the bold attempt by post-Kantian idealists to assert the absolute identity of ideal and real through so-called intellectual intuition was as absurd as it was calculated for the intellectual public’s credulity.
  • Hegel’s pseudo-philosophy, which occupied German attention for twenty-five years, rested on the inept expression of the problem as a relation between ‘being and thinking’ rather than between thing-in-itself and representation.
• Locke denied knowledge of things-in-themselves to the senses, and Kant denied it also to the understanding; both are right, because any representation, by being made objective in a foreign subject’s cognition, fundamentally changes its mode of existence and thus cannot capture the thing’s subjective being-in-itself.
  • The empirical inscrutability of even the simplest natural objects—the crystal, iron pyrites—despite perfect knowledge of their properties, is an a posteriori proof that what we know is only phenomena, not the thing-in-itself.
  • On the path of objective knowledge we can never penetrate beyond the representation; the subterranean passage is the recognition that we ourselves are among the realities we seek to know, and the will in self-consciousness is the thing-in-itself appearing most directly.
• The knowledge of willing in self-consciousness is the unique point where the thing-in-itself enters the phenomenon most immediately: it is not spatial, not a priori, not empty, but entirely a posteriori and more real than any other knowledge.
  • Kant’s doctrine that only a priori knowledge can extend beyond experience is refuted by the awareness of willing, which is a posteriori yet reaches the thing-in-itself because it is not mediated by the cognitive forms of space and causality that make objects merely phenomenal.
  • Even inner knowledge does not yield the thing-in-itself completely, since the form of time and the distinction of knower from known still remain; the will thus appears only in its successive individual acts, not in its full nature—but it appears far more directly than anything else.
• Since the will is the most immediate phenomenon of the thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer’s doctrine extends Kant’s demonstration of freedom/necessity compatibility from human action to all of nature: every phenomenon’s inner nature is will, modifying Kant’s unknowability thesis to hold that the thing-in-itself is not absolutely unknowable but only incompletely knowable.
  • Kant showed that one act can be explained both as causally necessary from character and circumstances, and as the expression of free will; Schopenhauer applies this same structure to all natural phenomena, not only human ones.
  • The question of what the will is entirely apart from its manifestation remains permanently unanswerable, since being-known contradicts being-in-itself; after the will abolishes itself as will (as discussed in the fourth book), it passes into what appears from the phenomenal side as empty nothingness—yet only relative nothingness.

On the Primacy of the Will in Self-Consciousness

Against the entire philosophical tradition that identified the human essence with the knowing consciousness, Schopenhauer systematically demonstrates through twelve classes of psychological and physiological evidence that the will is primary, original, and indestructible, while the intellect is secondary, conditioned, and perishable as a function of the brain.

• In self-consciousness the will is the known—the primary content—while the intellect is the knower, the secondary mirror; all striving, wishing, loving, and hating are modifications of willing, and the will functions as the self-luminous element while the intellect is the reflecting surface.
  • The plant analogy is apt: the root (will) is essential, perennial, and primary; the corona (intellect) is ostensible, derivative, and passes away without killing the root; the collum (the I) is their shared point of indifference.
  • The ‘miracle par excellence’—the point of departure of all philosophy—is the identity in self-consciousness of subject and object of knowing, which turns out on analysis to be the identity of will and intellect in the I.
• The most basic element of all animal consciousness—the foundation common to the polyp and to man—is not knowing but willing: the immediate awareness of longing and its satisfaction or frustration, which is what we presuppose with certainty in every creature we encounter.
  • We unhesitatingly attribute desire, aversion, fear, anger, joy, and sorrow to any animal however alien; we are far more hesitant about what it conceives or judges, because willing is the common ground while knowing varies enormously.
  • As the series of animals descends, the intellect degrades progressively while the will everywhere retains its identical nature—great attachment to life, egoism, care for species—showing the will as original and the intellect as an instrument of graduated complexity added to serve it.
• The will distorts intellect whenever the will has a stake in the outcome—through hope, fear, love, hatred, prejudice of rank or party—while the intellect has no corresponding power to disturb the will; this asymmetry proves the will’s primacy, confirming La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that self-love is cleverer than the cleverest man.
  • Hope makes us regard what we desire as probable; fear makes us regard what we dread as near; a hypothesis makes us lynx-eyed for confirmations and blind to refutations; all these are the will’s direct influence on the intellect, not the reverse.
  • Most tellingly, the intellect is sometimes mystified by the will: we discover what we really desired only when a plan succeeds and unexpected joy floods us, and we discover what we feared only when its removal brings sudden relief.
• The will, as the thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man; yet in itself it is without consciousness. For consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain.
• The intellect tires while the will is untiring: intellectual work produces exhaustion, requires sleep, and declines with age and brain deterioration, while the will persists unimpaired, becoming in old age even more inflexible and implacable despite the intellect’s decline.
  • Swift became mad, Kant childish, and Scott and Wordsworth dull in old age due to tyrannical overstraining of the intellect; Goethe remained clear to the end because as a man of the world he never pursued mental work with self-compulsion.
  • Infants, with scarcely a trace of intelligence, are already overflowing with will—storming and screaming without knowing what they will—while character traits emerging in childhood persist for life even as intellectual capacities develop and then decline.
• The complete independence of moral character from intellectual excellence—demonstrated by great wickedness coexisting with great genius (Bacon), and great goodness coexisting with feeble understanding—proves that these belong to entirely different sources: the will is the man proper, the intellect a mere tool.
  • When anyone performs a bad deed, friends universally try to shift blame from the will to the intellect—calling malice stupidity, mean tricks ’erratic courses,’ pleading even madness—because the will alone is the real self for which one is responsible.
  • Goodness of heart is a transcendent quality incommensurable with intellectual achievement: where present in high degree it transfigures even limited understanding and grotesque ugliness, while even the greatest intellect tainted with moral depravity remains blameworthy.
  • “Pope called Bacon ’the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.’” —Alexander Pope
• The identity of personal identity across time rests not on memory, which is fragmentary and perishable, but on the identical will and its unalterable character, as shown by the fact that we recognize persons by the unaltered expression of their glance even after decades, and feel ourselves inwardly the same from youth to old age.
  • Great age, illness, or brain injury can destroy memory without destroying personal identity; what persists is the character, the ruling passions, the fundamental tendency of will—while even morally significant actions may be forgotten by the intellect.
  • In the heart the man is to be found, not in the head; the expressions ‘heart’ and ‘head’ found across all languages embody the correct intuition that the will is the primary and essential element, the intellect the secondary and derived.
• Sleep conclusively demonstrates the intellect’s secondary, physiological nature: it interrupts entirely and requires a third of life for the brain’s nourishment, while the will continues uninterrupted as vital force, directing organic repair and maintenance—proving that knowing is an accident of the organism, not its essence.
  • A so-called soul that was originally a knowing being would feel on waking like a fish returned to water; instead we experience waking as an unwelcome return to the intellect’s duty, confirming that consciousness is a luxury of nature requiring constant biological subsidy.
  • Animals of considerable intelligence sleep soundly and long; Montaigne slept eight to nine hours; Descartes slept a great deal; Kant had to be forced by his servant to rise at a fixed hour—the more developed the brain-life, the greater the need for its suspension.

Objectification of the Will in the Animal Organism

What presents itself subjectively in self-consciousness as intellect is objectively the brain, and what presents itself as will is objectively the entire organism—the body being the will’s self-exhibition in the brain’s perception—with muscular irritability as the most direct objectification of will, and the nervous system as merely a secondary guidance apparatus serving the will’s purposes.

• The whole body is the will itself made visible through the brain’s perceptive functions; individual bodily actions and the will’s acts are not causally connected but are one and the same event apprehended under two different modes of knowledge—inner and outer.
  • The will is directly present as irritability throughout all muscular fibres of the body; nerve-stimulus from the brain gives this striving force a definite direction, but does not itself cause the contraction—irritability is the immediate phenomenon of the will, self-consciousness revealing as will what physiology calls a qualitas occulta.
  • When the motor nerve to a hand is severed, the will cannot move it not because the hand ceases to be the objectivity of will, but because the impression of the motive can no longer reach the muscle—the will is deprived only of its communication channel, not of its local presence.
• The brain is a merely secondary organ—a parasite nourished by the organism to manage its external relations—and requires sleep because its nutritive renewal cannot occur simultaneously with its intensive function of knowing, while the heart and vital functions carry on uninterrupted as direct expressions of the will.
  • Brainless abortions live, tortoises live for three weeks after decapitation, hens grow for ten months after cerebrum removal, demonstrating that the brain is not the condition of life itself but only of the organism’s conscious relation to the external world.
  • Cor primum vivens et ultimum moriens: the heart, as both vessel and muscle, is the true center and primum mobile of all life, simultaneously the first and last organ of the will’s expression.
• The blood is the will’s most immediate objectification as the primary fluid that originally creates and forms the organism, produces the vessels and muscles from itself, and continues to maintain all parts through nourishment—making the blood the foundation of organic life and the will its metaphysical substratum.
  • Muscles are, to a certain extent, only blood that has become congealed or crystallized through assimilation of fibrin; the same force that formed muscle from blood is the force that subsequently moves it as irritability—self-consciousness reveals this force as will.
  • “A somnambulist with high clairvoyance reported: ‘The force of my earthly life seems to me to have its origin in the blood. In this way the force is communicated through circulation in the veins by means of the nerves to the whole body, and the noblest part of this above itself to the brain.’” —somnambulist (reported by Justinus Kerner)
• Bichat’s distinction between organic life and animal life is the physiological counterpart of Schopenhauer’s distinction between will and intellect, with Bichat showing independently that the moral character—belonging to organic life—is unalterable by education, while the intellectual functions of animal life are modifiable through practice.
  • “Bichat: ‘The physical temperament and the moral character are not susceptible of change through education, which so prodigiously modifies the acts of animal life; for, as we have seen, both belong to organic life.’” —Xavier Bichat
  • Extreme anger can instantaneously render a dog’s saliva pernicious enough to produce hydrophobia in the bitten person, and can impart a quality to a mother’s milk that kills the nursing infant—proving that will and organism are genuinely one, not merely parallel.

Retrospect and More General Consideration

The entire second book’s argument is synthesized: everything that proceeds without intellect—generation, organic development, instinct, healing—turns out infinitely better than what proceeds with it, confirming that nature is the will operating without representation, and the intellect is a secondary derivative whose admission into philosophy has generated the fundamental error of all previous thought.

• That processes occurring without the intellect—embryonic development, healing of wounds, instinct, mechanical skill—are incomparably superior to conscious human achievements is the experiential proof that the intellect is secondary, and that the will-without-knowledge is the true productive ground of natural phenomena.
  • Nature signifies that which operates, urges, and creates without the intervention of the intellect; the chicken makes itself in the egg, then breaks through the shell and performs external actions under the name of will, with the brain as a lantern prepared in advance for the external world.
  • Schopenhauer’s direct antipode is Anaxagoras, who arbitrarily assumed an intelligence (nous) as the first and original thing; Aristotle noted that Anaxagoras set it up like a painted saint and then rarely used it, resorting to it only when he had no other explanation.
• All previous philosophy erred by treating the knowing consciousness—the intellect—as the essence of man (‘soul’), leading to intractable problems about immortality that dissolve once will and intellect are correctly distinguished: the will as metaphysical is indestructible, while the intellect as brain-function perishes with the body.
  • The assumption that the soul is absolutely simple, from which immateriality and immortality were inferred, was doubly mistaken: first because simplicity does not entail indestructibility in the only way we know destruction occurs; second because the intellect and will are not one simple substance but two fundamentally different things.
  • Man feels himself inwardly eternal and indestructible not because the intellect persists but because the will—which is metaphysical—is not subject to time; yet he cannot remember beyond birth or death because memory is an intellectual function tied to the brain.

Objective View of the Intellect

The objective (physiological) method of considering the intellect—starting from the animal organism rather than from consciousness—reveals the brain as the organ whose function produces the world as representation, and shows that the intellect evolved as a tool of the will to serve practical survival, making it fundamentally inadequate for grasping things-in-themselves.

• Two fundamentally opposed methods of considering the intellect—the subjective (Kantian) starting from consciousness and the objective (physiological) starting from organisms in external experience—must both be pursued and brought into agreement to achieve a complete philosophy of mind.
  • The subjective method, perfected by Kant, traces how the world is built up in consciousness from materials furnished by the senses and the understanding.
  • The objective method is primarily zoological, anatomical, and physiological, and pioneers include Cabanis (Des rapports du physique au moral), Bichat, and Gall; a philosophy like Kant’s that ignores this is one-sided and leaves an immense gulf between philosophical and physiological knowledge.
• The brain is nature’s final product and the objective correlate of consciousness: what is subjectively the world as representation is objectively the function of the brain, and what is being-in-itself everywhere—including in the brain itself—is will.
  • To-exist-for-another is to-be-represented; being-in-itself is to will; this is why purely objective inquiry never reaches the inner nature of things—every attempt to find the inner from outside turns it into an outer.
  • The birth-place of the world as representation is the point where the understanding makes the transition from sensation on the retina (a mere affection of the will) to the cause of that sensation, projecting it in space as an external object.
• Knowledge and individuation stand and fall together: because knowledge arises from the plurality of separate beings needing to apprehend one another, and because plurality itself depends on space and time (forms of knowledge), there can be no knowledge in the thing-in-itself, which Buddhism calls Prajna Paramita—that which is beyond all knowledge.
  • A single, solitary being would need no knowledge because there would be nothing different from itself to apprehend as object; knowledge is conditioned by difference and limitation.
  • All knowledge primarily concerns phenomena only, since it springs from a limitation by which it is rendered necessary to extend the limits.
• We are justified in asserting that the whole of the objective world, so boundless in space, so infinite in time, so unfathomable in its perfection, is really only a certain movement or affection of the pulpy mass in the skull.
• The intellect evolved under the law of parsimony (natura nihil agit frustra) strictly as a tool for comprehending motives in service of the individual will, and therefore is by nature practical rather than metaphysical—its forms reveal only relations between things, never their inner essence.
  • Nature equips animals with exactly the degree of intellect required by the complexity of their needs; more complicated organization brings more manifold needs requiring wider perception, driving progressive brain development across the animal series.
  • The ancient fundamental error of dogmatic philosophy was to construct ontology and cosmology from the complex of relations furnished by the intellect, mistaking the world as representation for the being-in-itself of things.
• Consciousness requires individuation and therefore cannot reach into the thing-in-itself: the self-knowing ego arises when the focus of brain-activity (Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception) recognizes itself as identical with the willing that is its basis, but this ego has only conditioned, apparently real existence—it is tertiary, presupposing the organism, which presupposes the will.
  • The will in itself is without consciousness; the secondary world of representation must be added for the will to become conscious of itself, just as light becomes visible only through the bodies that reflect it.
  • The knowing and conscious ego is related to the will as the image in the focus of a concave mirror is to that mirror itself—it has only conditioned and merely apparent reality, and its cessation cannot be regarded as the annihilation of that of which it is a condition.
• The degree of consciousness determines the degree of a being’s existence: the progressive separation of knowing from willing across the animal series—culminating in genius, where this separation is complete—is the single measure of intellectual perfection, with genius defined as the highest degree of the objectivity of knowledge.
  • Passion and vehemence of will are physiologically connected with enhanced intellect through energy of heart-beat and blood circulation; this explains why genius is conditioned by a passionate temperament, and why phlegmatic genius is inconceivable.
  • Genius is unqualified for practical life (illustrated by Goethe’s Tasso) because too great a development of intelligence stands in the way of firmness of character and resoluteness of will; great generals and statesmen require only relative, not absolute, intellectual strength.
• The physiological consideration of the intellect converges with Kant’s transcendental consideration: both show that the world as representation is not the being-in-itself of things, and the objective-genetic approach goes further by showing a priori why knowledge must be inadequate for fathoming true nature, while Kant showed only a posteriori from facts of consciousness that it is inadequate.
  • From the objective standpoint, the world as representation is primarily a physiological phenomenon—a brain function—so it is obvious that what goes on in this function cannot be regarded as the quality of things-in-themselves existing independently of it.
  • Kant discovered the subjectively conditioned nature of knowledge but too hastily assumed that nothing is given to us besides objective knowledge; he overlooked that our own inner being necessarily belongs to things-in-themselves, furnishing data for explaining the connection between phenomena and being-in-itself.

On the Objectification of the Will in Nature without Knowledge

The will that we know intimately in self-consciousness as the basis of our own being is the same force that operates blindly in plants, crystals, and the forces of inorganic nature—the world’s inner essence is will at every level—and this identification is not mere naming of an unknown but the most real knowledge available, tracing the foreign and unknown back to what is immediately familiar.

• The first step of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is recognizing the will as the prius of knowledge—not derived from knowledge but the original force that forms and maintains the animal body and carries out its unconscious and conscious functions; the scholastics already recognized this, expressed as ‘Voluntas potentia caeca est.’
  • Jul. Caes. Vaninus, in his Amphitheatrum, recorded that the scholastics held the will to be a blind power, showing this insight predates modern philosophy.
  • The second step—recognizing this same will in all forces of inorganic nature, including gravity—is reached by further reflection and is not mere renaming of an unknown, but tracing what is foreign and inaccessible back to what is known most accurately: our own inner being.
• Plant life makes visible, almost palpably, that the will can exist without knowledge: plants exhibit decided striving, adapting to circumstances and satisfying needs, yet entirely without knowledge—and because they lack knowledge, they display their organs of generation openly in innocence, whereas as soon as knowledge appears in the animal series, the genitals are concealed.
  • Anaxagoras and Empedocles taught that plants have motion by virtue of indwelling desire and attributed even pleasure and pain to them; Aristotle’s alternative—a mere ‘faculty of nourishing’—was a scholastic quiddity that replaced deeper inquiry with a verbal solution.
  • Treviranus described plant life as a form where external influences give rise only to feelings of inclination and aversion producing cravings, not objective perception—speaking from pure comprehension of nature without awareness of the metaphysical importance of his statement.
• The boundary between organic and inorganic is the sharpest in all nature—organic bodies persist through constant change of material with persistence of form, while inorganic bodies persist through stability of material—yet the will objectifies itself in inorganic forces (gravity, rigidity, chemical affinity) just as in living things, though this is less apparent.
  • In the crystal, a tendency toward life and a momentary movement of will appears, but since the fluid state is not enclosed in a skin with vessels to continue the movement, coagulation seizes it and leaves only the trace as crystal form.
  • Goethe’s Elective Affinities, as its title indicates (though Goethe was unaware of this), rests on the idea that the will manifesting in chemical elective affinity is the same will underlying human attraction, producing a complete analogy of laws.
• Self-preservation (omnis natura vult esse conservatrix sui) is the fundamental effort of will at every stage of its objectification: even in mechanics, the communicability of motion—the one secret mechanics cannot further explain—is a manifestation of the will’s impulse to preserve cohesion, showing itself as seeking (gravity) and fleeing (reception of motion).
  • A body pushed would be pulverized if it did not withdraw through flight to preserve cohesion; elastic bodies can be regarded as the more courageous, trying to repel the enemy rather than merely flee.
  • The moon’s capricious, irregular course—accelerated, retarded, approaching and receding from earth through changing gravitational combinations—has an obvious analogy to the influence of newly appearing motives on the will, making the force of gravitation directly recognizable as what we know in self-consciousness as will.
• Forces of nature are eternal and omnipresent—outside the chain of causes and effects—because they exist independently of time and space; this can be confirmed empirically by the powerlessness of time over natural forces, as demonstrated by perpetual planetary rotation, which reveals time itself as merely the form of our perception rather than something with objective real existence.
  • Mechanical explanations are preferred because they employ the fewest original inexplicable forces and contain much that is a priori knowable, but their application beyond demonstrably mechanical phenomena (such as chemical combination, light, heat, electricity) is entirely unjustified.
  • Light stands entirely unmoved in a strong gale while everything mechanical is bent and scattered—directly proclaiming it belongs to an order of things other than the mechanical; atomistic theories of light as molecular vibration are a revolting absurdity, a consequence of the French rejection of Kantian philosophy.
• The will has objectified itself on three independent animal populations of the earth’s surface (Old World, America, Australia), each with its own characteristic fauna showing parallel analogies but different species—demonstrating that nature has three times played through the scale of its objectification; America’s fauna shows the worse mammalian analogues (tapir for elephant, puma for lion) and, critically, no apes proper, explaining why America could not independently produce man.
  • The three original races of man—Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian—are found only in the Old World; America’s population is a modified Mongolian race that migrated from Asia, confirming that nature in America could not rise to independent production of man.
  • The matter of generatio aequivoca—spontaneous generation from putrefying organic material—is probable at low stages and for epizoa appearing under special disease conditions, since their life-conditions occur only exceptionally and cannot propagate through regular paths.

On Matter

Matter is the immediate visibility of the will—the point of connection between the world as will and the world as representation—being on the one hand the product of the intellect’s forms (causality objectified in space) and on the other hand the vehicle through which the will’s empirical qualities become perceptible, so that what objectively is matter, subjectively is will.

• Pure matter, the legitimate content of the concept ‘substance,’ is causality itself thought objectively and combined with space and time: it is not itself perceived but only thought as the permanent substratum of all phenomena, absolutely indifferent to which forces exhibit themselves in it, and necessarily conceived as without beginning or end in time.
  • Matter as such is not an object of perception but only of thinking—an abstraction from form and quality; it occurs in perception only in combination with form and quality as body, a quite definite mode of acting.
  • We can form a mental picture of space and time without matter, but matter once posited cannot be absolutely thought away or annihilated—it can only be pictured as moved into another space; to this extent it is connected with our faculty of knowledge as inseparably as space and time.
• Matter is the visibility of the will and the bond between the world as will and the world as representation: stripped of all empirical properties (which are manifestations of will), what remains is the thing-in-itself itself; conversely, when will becomes phenomenon by entering the intellect’s forms, it appears as matter supporting empirical properties that constitute its quality.
  • Plotinus and Giordano Bruno were right in their paradoxical statement that matter is not extended and hence incorporeal: space (giving extension) is the intellect’s form of intuition, and causality (giving activity and corporeality) is the form of understanding; stripped of these, matter is the will itself.
  • The scholastics’ formula ‘Materia appetit formam’ is vindicated from this standpoint: since matter is the mere visibility of will, the temporal origin of both inorganic forms and organic species is to be sought in matter, from which they burst forth.
• Materialism commits a petitio principii by treating matter as positively and unconditionally given—an absolute object independent of the knowing subject—and then dishonestly reducing all original forces and vital force to mechanical activity, producing a castle in the air built of atoms that have no existence in rerum natura.
  • Honest materialism (mere naturalism) would take actual empirically given matter with all its physical, chemical, and vital properties as given—the true mater rerum—but would then have committed a concealed petitio principii by smuggling the quaesita into the data.
  • Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets himself in his calculation: all objective knowledge is something apprehended and known, always indirect and secondary, and can never be the ultimate ground of explanation—philosophy necessarily requires as starting-point the absolutely immediate, which is only self-consciousness.

Transcendent Considerations on the Will as Thing-in-Itself

Because all action in the world proceeds with strict causal necessity while existence and essence are grounded in free will as thing-in-itself, the only escape from the intolerable view of the world as purposeless mechanical necessity is to recognize that freedom belongs entirely to the esse (being) while necessity belongs entirely to the operari (acting)—a resolution that simultaneously confirms the metaphysical unity of will underlying apparent plurality.

• All phenomena in the world occur with complete necessity under the law of causality—from a mote’s flight to the most deliberate human action—because the law of motivation is as strictly necessary as mechanical causality, differing only in the degree of susceptibility of beings; the world from this standpoint appears as a purposeless machine.
  • Man’s action results every time with strict necessity from two factors: his inborn and unalterable character, and the motives necessarily produced by the strictly determined course of the world—as proved in the essay On the Freedom of the Will.
  • Even assuming a first beginning (unjustified as that is) would change nothing essential: that first condition would irrevocably have determined all subsequent conditions in detail, down to the present moment, making the course of the world like that of a wound-up clock.
• The only escape from the revolting view of the world as purposeless necessity is recognizing that every being is on one hand phenomenon (necessarily determined) and on the other hand will as thing-in-itself (absolutely free), possessing aseity—self-grounded existence independent of anything else—because necessity belongs only to forms of the phenomenon (principle of sufficient reason), not to the thing-in-itself.
  • Freedom had to be transferred from the action to the existence: every being without exception acts with strict necessity, but exists and is what it is by virtue of its freedom—this is the riddle as old as the world, hitherto held upside down.
  • Transcendental freedom is compatible with empirical necessity exactly as transcendental ideality of phenomena is compatible with their empirical reality.
• Plurality, like necessity, belongs only to the phenomenon and not to the thing-in-itself: natura naturans is immediately present whole and undivided in each of its innumerable works—the smallest insect as in the largest organism—proving that space and time, the conditions of all plurality, are mere forms of our perception.
  • The incalculable ingenuity of structure associated with reckless prodigality in nature—millions of organisms produced for one to survive—is itself evidence that plurality has its root in the subject’s manner of knowledge: what costs nature nothing cannot be genuinely multiple in its inner being.
  • Everyone knows only one being quite immediately—his own will in self-consciousness—and knows everything else only mediately by analogy; this springs ultimately from the fact that there is really only one being, and the illusion of plurality (Maya) cannot penetrate into the inner simple consciousness.
• Consciousness becomes clearer the farther it reaches outwards because consciousness presupposes individuality, which belongs to the phenomenon conditioned by space and time; at the root-point of existence where difference of beings ceases—as radii of a sphere cease at the centre—distinct consciousness also ceases, appearing in sleep, death, and magnetic activity.
  • Immortality of the individual would be comparable to the flying off at a tangent of a point on the surface of a sphere; immortality by virtue of the eternity of the true inner being is comparable to the return of that point to the centre where eternity lies in profoundest peace.
  • In magnetic or magical influence—actio in distans toto genere different from physical influence—the will proceeds from the individual yet acts in its metaphysical capacity as omnipresent substratum of all nature; the human race can be figuratively represented as an animal compositum whose head portion (brain consciousness) isolates individuals while the unconscious vegetative part is their common life.

On Teleology

Teleological astonishment at organic nature’s appropriateness rests on the false assumption that what arises for the intellect on the path of representation was also brought about through the intellect; in truth, the will—operating without knowledge or conceived ends—produces directly what appears to us as purposive structure, making final causes valid as a guide to organic investigation without implying an external designing intelligence.

• Teleological astonishment is a category mistake: we assume that organic appropriateness, because it exists for the intellect, must also have come about through intellect, just as the savage marvels not at froth coming from a beer bottle but at how anyone put it in—we admire the intellect’s own work in decomposing the original metaphysical unity of the will into apparent purposive plurality.
  • The snowflake’s six equal radii are not measured beforehand by mathematics; it is the simple tendency of the will exhibiting itself for knowledge when knowledge supervenes—just as the will produces organic form without physiology, so it produces regular figure without mathematics.
  • Nature achieves without reflection and without conception of ends what appears deliberate and appropriate, because she acts without representation—which is entirely of secondary origin; our intellect first produces the plurality and variety of parts and their functions and is then struck with amazement at their perfect agreement.
• In organic nature, final causes (causae finales) are the indispensable clue to understanding because the will is the being-in-itself of every organism, and every part must serve the will that manifests there; apparent exceptions to suitability—such as male nipples, rudimentary organs in wrong sexes, eyes sealed under skin—are explained by the inner connection of phenomena through the unity of the will manifesting in them.
  • The anteater’s toothless jaw and long glutinous tongue have termite nests as their motive; the chicken’s horny egg-tooth has the hard shell as its motive; the laws of optics are the motive for the human eye—the final cause is a motive acting on a being by whom it is not known, marking the transition of the physical into the metaphysical.
  • Homology of vertebrate skeletons—every bone of the human hand finding its analogue in the whale’s fin, identical cranial bones in bird embryo and human foetus—rests on the unité de plan, the primary type of the higher animal world, the foundation on which teleology builds: what Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire called the anatomical element.
• The three great rejectors of teleology—Lucretius, Bacon, and Spinoza—all made the error of identifying teleology with physico-theology and speculative theism, fearing the theological use of final causes more than they respected the evidence of nature; Spinoza went so far as to deny organic appropriateness altogether, which is monstrous to anyone who has examined organic nature.
  • Spinoza’s denial rested on his argument that nature has no pre-fixed end and all final causes are merely human fictions; he was concerned only with barring the way to theism and rightly recognized the physico-theological proof as its strongest weapon, but denied the evidence of nature to do so.
  • Aristotle contrasts advantageously with all three: without prejudice or physico-theological preconceptions, studying nature honestly, he found everywhere appropriate activity and recommended final causes as the true principle of natural investigation—particularly in his books De Partibus Animalium, which constitute a comparative anatomy.
• The ideal of understanding is knowing simultaneously and separately both the efficient cause (causa efficiens) and the final cause (causa finalis), whose marvellous conspiracy reveals that both have their common origin in the will as thing-in-itself; such dual knowledge is rarely attainable because in organic nature the efficient cause is seldom known, and in inorganic nature the final cause remains problematical.
  • The louse of the Negro is black: final cause—its own safety; efficient cause—its nourishment is the Negro’s black rete Malpighi. The brilliant coloration of tropical birds: efficient cause—strong tropical light; final cause—the gorgeous uniform by which individuals of innumerable species recognize one another for mating.
  • External appropriateness in inorganic nature always remains ambiguous and withdraws into the background, since the will objectifying in inorganic nature appears only in universal forces without individual organisms where end and means are too widely separated for their relation to be clear.

On Instinct and Mechanical Tendency

Animal instinct and mechanical tendency—where creatures work with absolute certainty toward ends they cannot know—provide the clearest illustration that the will operates effectively without knowledge, thereby illuminating both organic formation and the insect colony as a magnified organism; the contrast between instinct and motivation is a difference of degree, not kind, reducible to the greater or lesser development of the cerebral system over the ganglionic.

• Instinct is a character set in motion only by a quite specially determined motive, producing always the same kind of action, whereas ordinary character can be set in motion by varied motives; this means instinct demands only minimal intellect to apprehend its one triggering motive, and therefore reaches its maximum in insects, whose ganglionic system predominates over the cerebral.
  • In insects, the ganglionic nerve-stem (analogous to the great sympathetic nerve, not the spinal cord) is developed to an exceedingly high degree while the brain is feeble, making their actions similar to those of somnambulists—directed from the sympathetic nerve rather than the brain.
  • The somnambulist who carries out a mesmerizer’s order in the waking state without remembering the order, acting as if compelled without knowing why, illuminates how the young spider feels it must spin its web without knowing or understanding its purpose.
• The insect colony (ant-hill, beehive) is a living picture of an organism explained and brought to light of knowledge: in both, each part’s vita propria is subordinated to the life of the whole, individuals are sacrificed to maintain the collective as a limb is removed to save the body, and the whole is the unconditional aim while individual existence is only conditionally willed.
  • Ants throw themselves into water to form a dam with their corpses for others; drones are stung to death when useless; the mother-ant bites off her own wings after impregnation as they would hinder her actual work of tending the new colony underground—exactly as the liver exists only to secrete bile.
  • Yet the insects’ will of the end as a whole is not guided by knowledge: caterpillars spin in leaves without knowing the purpose, but if the web is destroyed, they skilfully mend it—the instinct gives the universal rule, the intellect gives the particular application to circumstances.
• Both instincts and organic structure exhibit anticipation of the future without knowledge of it—animals provide for needs they do not yet feel and for offspring not yet existing, and the organism is equipped in advance with implements for aims not yet present—which could be called knowledge a priori if knowledge were the basis, but actually has its origin in the will as thing-in-itself, for which time has no significance.
  • The Bombex wasp pursues and kills in advance the enemies of its future eggs, which it has not yet laid and whose future enemies it cannot know—a case of the will reaching past present consciousness to future contingencies.
  • The healing power of nature—opening new vein or nerve connections to bypass interrupted ones, sharpening remaining senses when one is lost, and in incurable injury expediting death—is analogous to the reparative work of instinct when obstacles are placed before the animal’s mechanical tendency.

Characterization of the Will-to-Live

The will-to-live is not a consequence of any objective knowledge of life’s value but an unconditioned, groundless impulse that drives all beings—the clockwork within the puppet rather than strings pulling from without—whose characterization as such is proven by the grotesque disproportion between the immense effort expended by all living things and the meager, fleeting satisfaction obtained, showing life to be a business whose returns do not cover the cost.

• The will-to-live is the most real thing we know—not an empty-sounding abstraction like ’the Absolute’ but the kernel of reality itself—as demonstrated by the rigid terror with which a death sentence is heard and the boundless rejoicing at escape from death, reactions grossly disproportionate to the objective value of a few more years of an often miserable existence.
  • Pantheism (including Spinoza’s and its German travesties) is inadequate: calling the inner nature of the world ‘God’ when this world consists of constantly needy creatures devouring one another in anxiety, passing into death after terrible afflictions, does not describe an ens perfectissimum but rather—as Aristotle said—a daemonic rather than divine nature.
  • Spinoza called his substance God only to preserve the word when he could not preserve the thing—just as Rousseau called the people ‘souverain’ throughout the Contrat social; and the would-be pantheists of Schopenhauer’s century set up God as datum rather than quaesitum, committing a petitio principii.
• From a purely objective standpoint, nature’s sole concern appears to be that none of her Platonic Ideas (permanent forms, species) should be lost—the individuals are fleeting like water in a stream, the species permanent like its eddies—yet this puzzling view is answered by the subjective insight that the inner essence of nature is will-to-live, a one-sided formulation.
  • The animal’s life is restless labor for nourishment and propagation, and the expenditure of ingenuity and energy is grotesquely out of proportion to the yield: the mole, surrounded by permanent night with embryo eyes merely to avoid light, digs its entire life for little more than alternating insect larvae and starvation.
  • Junghuhn’s account of an immense field of giant turtle skeletons in Java—turtles coming to lay eggs, seized by wild dogs that tear open their bellies while tigers pounce on the dogs—crystallizes the horrifying objectification of the will: for this, then, are these turtles born; for what offence must they suffer this agony?
• The will-to-live is an untiring mechanism, an irrational impulse without sufficient ground in the external world—people are not drawn from in front by life’s value but pushed from behind by blind urge—analogous to the planet that does not fall into the sun only because a forward-driving force prevents it, moving in permanent tension in motu non naturali sed violento.
  • The vital energy sustaining the love of life can be compared to a rope stretched above the puppet-show of the world: when it weakens, hypochondria and melancholy appear; when it breaks, suicide occurs—sometimes on the slightest or even merely imagined occasion, since the person picks a quarrel with himself to shoot himself dead.
  • The will-to-live does not appear in consequence of the world—the world appears in consequence of the will-to-live; it is not a conclusio ex praemissis but the premiss of all premisses, that from which philosophy has to start.

Supplements to the Third Book

On Knowledge of the Ideas

When the intellect gains enough strength to abandon the comprehension of mere relations (in service of the will) and apprehend the purely objective character of phenomena, it knows Platonic Ideas—the permanent species-forms expressing the complete character of the will at each stage of objectification—which are the adequate objectivity of the will and the object of genuine art, though still not the thing-in-itself.

• The intellect in its natural function knows only relations of things—primarily to the will as motives, secondarily to each other—but as many varied relations of an object are apprehended, its peculiar nature appears more distinctly; when the intellect gains ascendancy to abandon relations entirely and apprehend the purely objective nature of a phenomenon, it knows the Platonic Idea—the permanent species-form independent of temporal individual existence.
  • The Platonic Idea is species, not genus: species naturales exist, but genera logica are the work of human concept-formation; of manufactured articles there are no Ideas but only genera logica—as Aristotle reported that Platonists themselves held (Metaphysics, i, 9 and xiii, 5).
  • The Neo-Platonist Olympiodorus said that the Idea, in itself unextended, imparts form to matter but first assumes extension from it; thus Ideas still do not reveal the being-in-itself of things but only their objective character as phenomenon—they are not the thing-in-itself, as the inner essence is accessible only through self-consciousness as will.
• The individual is rooted in the species as time is rooted in eternity: every individual has duration in time only by being simultaneously in eternity; the Idea is really eternal while the empirical species has endless duration though its appearance on a planet may become extinct—and the names pass over into each other (Greek eidos, Latin species, kind).
  • The original and essential unity of an Idea is dispersed into plurality of individual things by sensuously conditioned perception, then partially restored through reflection as concept (universale)—describable in scholastic terms as universalia ante rem (Ideas), universalia post rem (concepts), with individual things between them.
  • The realism of the scholastics arose from confusion of Platonic Ideas—to which real existence can be attributed since they are also the species—with mere concepts, bringing about the triumphant opposition of Nominalism.

On the Pure Subject of Knowing

Aesthetic enjoyment consists in the complete suppression of the will from consciousness, leaving the pure subject of knowing—the eternal world-eye untouched by individual arising and passing—which apprehends the Platonic Ideas; this state of pure objectivity is the condition for all genuine art, explains why art objects delight more than reality, and reveals that all suffering proceeds from willing while pure knowledge is in itself painless and serene.

• Consciousness has two sides—consciousness of self (will) and consciousness of other things (perception)—in genuine antagonism: the more objective the consciousness, the less the will occupies it; pure objectivity of perception is reached when the consciousness of other things is raised to such a potential that consciousness of one’s own self vanishes, leaving the knowing subject as pure medium through which the object appears in the world as representation.
  • This state of pure objectivity is one that makes us feel positively happy, since all suffering proceeds from the will and all possibility of suffering is abolished simultaneously with the withdrawal of the will-side of consciousness—this is one of the two constituent elements of aesthetic enjoyment.
  • As soon as the will again obtains ascendancy, discomfort appears: corporeality (the organism as will) makes itself felt as bodily sensation, and the will on the intellectual path fills consciousness with desires, emotions, passions, and cares.
• The work of art greatly facilitates apprehension of Ideas not only because art presents things more clearly by emphasizing the essential, but because the perceived object lies entirely outside the province of things capable of reference to the will—it is nothing actual but a mere picture—so the absolute silence of the will required for purely objective apprehension is attained with greatest certainty.
  • The stranger or passing traveller feels the picturesque or poetical from objects unable to produce this effect on those who live among them: being out of all relation to the scene and its inhabitants, he perceives it purely objectively—which is why art shifts its scene to distant times and countries, and why the pleasure of travelling is partly due to this.
  • “The sight of the full moon has a beneficent, soothing, and exalting effect because the moon is an object of perception never of willing, moving eternally foreign to earthly life—at its sight the will with its cares vanishes from consciousness; ‘The stars not coveted by us / Delight us with their splendour.’” —Goethe
• In immediate perception, we normally know things only in their relations—never their absolute existence—but occasional enhancement of intuitive intelligence causes us to apprehend things no longer according to their relations but as they are in and by themselves, perceiving their absolute existence alongside their relative existence; this apprehension of Ideas is conditioned by purely internal physiological processes that purify brain activity.
  • The normal mind’s perception of relative existence only is illustrated by how any inclination or disinclination twists, colours, and distorts not merely judgement but even original perception: the scaffold, the surgeon’s instruments, the coach of loved ones departing each has a hideous physiognomy—while the rope-ladder for escape or the old woman carrying a love-letter look pleasant and agreeable.
  • The melancholy youth who misses a personal relation to the beautiful landscape he perceives actually demands something self-contradictory: the beauty rests precisely on the pure objectivity of perception, which would be abolished by the personal relation he painfully misses.

On Genius

Genius consists in an abnormal excess of intellect beyond what service of the will requires, enabling it to emancipate itself from the will and achieve purely objective, permanent knowledge of Platonic Ideas rather than mere relations of things; this excess explains both the extraordinary theoretical achievements of genius and the practical disadvantages, eccentricities, and sufferings inseparably connected with it.

• Talent and genius differ fundamentally in kind, not merely degree: talent consists in greater versatility and acuteness of discursive reasoning, while genius lies in the completeness and energy of perceptual knowledge—the genius perceives a world different from all others by looking more deeply, since it presents itself in his mind more objectively, more purely, and more distinctly than in the normal mind.
  • The normal intellect, strictly bound to the service of the will, becomes tired and inactive as soon as it is not spurred on by the will—it has not enough energy to apprehend the world purely objectively from its own elasticity without a purpose; genius consists in a surplus of brain-activity that exhibits itself without a purpose as a pure, distinct, objective picture.
  • If the normal person consists of two-thirds will and one-third intellect, the genius has two-thirds intellect and one-third will—an inversion analogous to the chemical contrast between acid and base, which also establishes the strongest affinity between them; yet in the human case the opposite is usually seen.
• All profound knowledge and all original thinking are rooted in perceptual apprehension—concepts are only abstractions from perception—and imagination is the indispensable instrument of genius because it allows the completion, arrangement, and repetition of significant pictures of life freed from the dominion of chance that governs actual sense experience.
  • The man without imagination is like the mussel fastened to its rock, compelled to wait for what chance brings it, nibbling at concepts and abstractions which are only shells and husks, not the kernel of knowledge; he will never achieve anything great unless in arithmetic and mathematics.
  • Always to see the universal in the particular is the fundamental characteristic of genius—whereas the normal man recognizes in the particular only the particular, the genius recognizes in it the Idea, the essential nature of the whole species; investigation of individual phenomena is the field of talent in modern sciences.
• The works of genius serve no useful purpose and this is their patent of nobility: uselessness is one of genius’s defining characteristics, because the genius uses his intellect contrary to its natural destiny—to comprehend the objective nature of things rather than their relations to the will—so that his mind belongs not to himself but to the whole of humanity.
  • The person of genius sacrifices personal welfare to the objective end and simply cannot do otherwise because there lies his seriousness; the mediocre person acts conversely, seeking personal ends, and therefore succeeds at most in appropriating as mannerisms what is external and accidental in genuine works.
  • Genius is its own reward, for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself: we should think not ‘How lucky he is to be admired by us’ but ‘How lucky he must have been in the immediate enjoyment of a mind, with the remaining traces of which centuries regale themselves.’
• Genius is conditioned by several rarely co-occurring anatomical and physiological qualities: an abnormal preponderance of sensibility over irritability and reproductive power in a male body; clear separation of the cerebral from the ganglionic system; abnormally large brain (particularly broad and lofty cerebrum preponderating over cerebellum) of extreme fineness—inherited from the mother—combined with a lively, passionate temperament manifesting as unusual cardiac energy—inherited from the father.
  • The post-mortem on Byron found white matter in unusually large proportion to grey, and brain weight of six pounds; Cuvier’s brain weighed five pounds; the normal weight is three—quantitative and qualitative constitution of brain substance is indispensable though not yet fully measurable.
  • Women can have remarkable talent but not genius because they always remain subjective; a phlegmatic genius is impossible because the passionate temperament from the father—energy of heart and blood circulation toward the head—is an indispensable condition, explaining why of two brothers only one has genius, often the elder, as with Kant.
• Every child is to a certain extent a genius and every genius to a certain extent a child, because in childhood the cerebral system predominates over the genital-reproductive system (which develops last), producing a surplus of knowledge over willing—the paradise of innocence, happiness, and eagerness to learn—which in genius is maintained abnormally throughout life as a perennial condition.
  • In the species of animals closest to man—the orang-utan—the same relation occurs strikingly: the young orang astonishes by its intelligence, penetration, and dexterity, but the adult is merely a gross, brutal, intractable animal, as its forehead recedes, lower facial parts enlarge, and muscular strength replaces cerebral activity.
  • Goethe observed: ‘Children do not keep their promise; young people very seldom, and if they do keep their word, the world does not keep its word with them’—meaning the world bestows its crowns on those who become instruments of its low aims, not on those whose youthful intellectual promise was genuine.

On Madness

Madness arises when the resistance of the will to allowing intolerable knowledge to come under examination of the intellect reaches such a degree that the operation of assimilating painful events into memory is not carried through, gaps are arbitrarily filled with invented content, and the continuous thread of memory is broken—making madness essentially the Lethe of unbearable suffering, the will’s last resource.

• Real soundness of mind consists in perfect recollection—not total retention, but a uniformly coherent memory that preserves characteristic and significant events as an unbroken thread; this is the criterion between sanity and insanity, as the mere suspicion of madness weakens testimony because the memory of a sane witness is treated as firm as present perception.
  • In the Lalita-Vistara (the life story of Buddha Sakyamuni), at the moment of his birth all the insane throughout the world ‘recovered their memory’—mentioned twice in the text, confirming that the ancient understanding also identified madness with broken memory.
  • Schopenhauer conjectures that madness occurs in most frequent proportion among actors, who daily learn new disconnected parts or brush up old ones entirely without connexion—in fact in contradiction with one another—striving every evening to forget themselves entirely to be a different person.
• Madness is produced when the will’s resistance to assimilating some intolerable knowledge is so powerful that painful events are suppressed entirely from the intellect, gaps in the memory are arbitrarily filled with invented content for the sake of necessary connexion, and the intellect gives up its nature to please the will—madness then becomes the last resource of tormented nature.
  • We are all already predisposed to this mechanism: we think reluctantly about things that powerfully wound our pride or interfere with our wishes, break away unconsciously from such examination, while pleasant affairs come to mind entirely of their own accord and cannot be driven away—the place where madness can break in is in this resistance of the will.
  • Madness produced by merely psychic causes can bring about through the violent inversion of the course of thought even a kind of paralysis of parts of the brain; if this is not soon removed it becomes permanent, explaining why madness is curable only at its beginning, not after a long time.

Isolated Remarks on Natural Beauty

The exceedingly delightful impression of beautiful natural scenery derives primarily from nature’s universal consistency and logical causality visible in every modification of light, shadow, and perspective—a brain-phenomenon uniquely free from all defect—which functions as a cathartic of the mind and induces the intellect’s most correct and harmonious activity.

• The beauty of a natural landscape produces harmonious satisfaction because it is the only complicated brain-phenomenon that is entirely regular, methodical, faultless, and perfect: every modification through position, foreshortening, perspective, and light distribution is unerringly given by the law of causality, confirming the Indian proverb ‘Every grain of rice casts its shadow,’ and this faultless phenomenon puts the brain in wholly normal action, purifying thinking.
  • A beautiful view is therefore a cathartic of the mind, just as music is of the feelings according to Aristotle; in its presence a person will think most correctly, as his thinking attempts to follow in consistency, connexion, and regularity the method of nature.
  • The sight of a mountain range puts us in a serious and even sublime mood partly because mountains are the only permanent line of the landscape, defying the deterioration and dissolution that sweep away everything else—including our ephemeral persons—though this does not appear in clear consciousness but as an obscure feeling forming the fundamental note of our mood.
• Every uncultivated spot left to nature herself is at once decorated in the most tasteful manner—testifying to the naivety with which the will-to-live objectifies itself where forms are determined only by soil, climate, and mysterious inner tendency rather than by external aims—which is the principle of English (originally Chinese) gardens: concealing art to let nature appear freely active.
  • French gardens mirror the subjective will of the possessor who has subdued nature into bearing tokens of her slavery—clipped hedges, trees cut into shapes, straight avenues—whereas English gardens are laid out in an objective spirit bringing the will of nature to its purest possible expression.

On the Inner Nature of Art

Art and philosophy share the same ultimate aim—revealing the true nature of existence—but art communicates through perception and fleeting images while philosophy alone can give permanent, universal knowledge through abstract concepts; the mark of genuine art is that it presents an inexhaustible Idea, never reducible to a distinct concept.

• Both art and philosophy address the fundamental question ‘What is life?’—art through perceptual images (painting, sculpture, music, poetry), philosophy through abstract concepts—but their answers differ in permanence: art gives fleeting, particular illuminations, while philosophy alone provides universal and lasting knowledge.
  • All arts speak the naive language of perception rather than the abstract language of reflection; their answers are like fragments or examples rather than universal rules.
  • Music answers the question of existence more profoundly than other arts, expressing the innermost nature of all life in a language directly intelligible yet untranslatable into reason.
  • Philosophy is to art as wine is to grapes: it promises to supply what art only yields afresh each time—clear, realized, abiding possession.
• A fundamental law of all fine arts is that the work must excite the imagination rather than leave it inactive—some portion of the final aesthetic effect must always be left for the beholder’s imagination to complete, which is why wax figures (giving both form and color) fail as art while painting and sculpture each withhold something.
  • “The secret of being boring is to say everything—art must always leave something over for the beholder to think.” —Voltaire
  • Wax figures produce no aesthetic effect because they leave nothing to the imagination, whereas sculpture gives form without color and painting gives color without full form, both requiring imaginative completion.
  • Works executed in a single stroke—sketches, improvised melodies, lyric poems—often surpass more deliberate works because they are pure products of inspiration without admixture of calculation.
• A work of art whose conception originated in a mere distinct concept—rather than in a perceived Idea—is always ungenuine; the mark of such failure is that the artist could have stated his entire intention in words before beginning, and what remains after reflection on the work can be fully brought to the distinctness of a concept.
  • Attempts to reduce a Shakespeare or Goethe poem to an abstract truth are as absurd as they are unworthy, since the poem’s power lies in what exceeds conceptual paraphrase.
  • Only that idea which was perceived before it was thought has suggestive and stimulating force when communicated, and thereby becomes immortal.
• The fine arts communicate Platonic Ideas—the adequate objectification of the will at various grades—and because Ideas are inexhaustible things of perception, art can only convey them through perception itself, never through abstract concepts; bungling in every art consists in playing arbitrarily with artistic means without understanding this end.
  • Bungling shows itself in supports that carry nothing, purposeless volutes, meaningless musical runs, and jingling rhymes with little meaning—all cases where means are deployed without knowledge of the end.
  • The concept is something completely determinable and exhaustible, communicable coldly by words; the Idea is inexhaustible and requires the path of perception for its communication.
• The mother of the useful arts is necessity and understanding; the mother of the fine arts is superfluity and genius—a kind of excess of the power of knowledge beyond what is required for the service of the will.
  • Genius is itself a kind of superfluity: an excess of knowing power that enables purely objective contemplation freed from the aims of the will.

On the Aesthetics of Architecture

The sole aesthetic theme of architecture is the conflict between support and load—the objectification of gravity and rigidity—and the beauty of ancient Greek architecture arises from this theme’s undisguised, rational expression, whereas Gothic architecture substitutes a fictitious conquest of gravity by rigidity and introduces arbitrary, subjective elements that undermine its claim to equal status.

• Architecture’s sole and constant aesthetic theme is the conflict between support and load, and its fundamental law is that no load may be without sufficient support and no support without a suitable load; the column and entablature represent the purest execution of this theme because they completely separate the two forces, making their reciprocal relation perceptible.
  • In a plain wall, support and load are amalgamated—everything is both—so there is no aesthetic effect; this only appears through separation, and increases with the degree of separation.
  • Vault and pillar approach but do not equal the column and entablature, because in the vault every stone is simultaneously load and support, whereas the column appears as pure support and the entablature as pure load.
• The form and proportions of the column are determined entirely a priori from the structural purpose—adequate support to a given load—not derived by imitation from tree-trunks or the human figure as Vitruvius claimed; every slight disproportion in the column is felt immediately as disagreeable because all its dimensions are determined essentially by the end and means, just as musical harmony is determined by melody and key.
  • The tapering of the column from its first third upward and its slight swelling at that point (entasis) rest on the pressure of the load being greatest there, confirmed by recent measurements even in Doric columns at Paestum.
  • The thesis that tree-trunks or human forms were the prototype of the column is absurd: an accidentally borrowed form could not appeal so harmoniously, nor would slight disproportion be felt at once as a false note.
• Beautiful architecture follows the spirit of nature by doing nothing purposeless and attaining every end by the shortest and most natural path—openly displaying the end through the work itself—which gives it a grace analogous to the nimbleness of living creatures; tasteless architecture, by contrast, takes useless roundabout ways and delights in arbitrary methods, playing with means without understanding ends.
  • The beauty and grace of ancient earthenware vessels arises from this naive simplicity: if nature had wanted to fashion such things, she would have done so in these very forms.
  • This view contradicts Kant’s theory that the essence of everything beautiful consists in an apparent appropriateness without purpose.
• Gothic architecture—of Saracen origin, introduced to Europe by the Goths—is fundamentally inferior to ancient architecture because it substitutes a fictional conquest of gravity by rigidity for the actual, truthful conflict that ancient architecture displays; its mysterious character arises from the arbitrary having replaced the purely rational, creating the appearance of unknown secret ends.
  • In ancient architecture horizontal and vertical tendencies are equally displayed; Gothic architecture suppresses the horizontal line of load and lets vertical lines of support alone prevail through towers, buttresses, and spires, but this conquest of gravity is mere illusion.
  • Pleasure in Gothic works rests mainly on association of ideas and historical reminiscence—feeling foreign to art—rather than on the purely aesthetic theme of support and load.
  • The inside of Gothic churches is their brilliant side (the effect of the groined vault borne by crystalline pillars), while the outside carries most of the drawbacks; the reverse holds for ancient temples.
• Symmetry in architecture is not the aesthetic substance but a secondary requirement arising from the need for easy perceptibility and comprehensibility: a building must announce itself as a unity at a glance, and this requires that regular forms—cubes, cylinders, pyramids—and rational proportions of easily intelligible ratios (1:2, 2:3) be employed.
  • The law of the most perfect perceptibility comes in where structural purpose leaves something undetermined, since architecture has its existence primarily in spatial perception and appeals to our a priori faculty for space.
  • Architecture, like music, is not an imitative art, though both have often been falsely regarded as such.

Isolated Remarks on the Aesthetics of the Plastic and Pictorial Arts

Sculpture demands universal beauty and strength suited to the affirmation of will-to-live, while painting prioritizes expression, passion, and character suited to its denial; allegory is inadmissible in painting because it reduces art to a conceptual cipher, and genuine portraiture is the proper basis of historical painting because individual faces represent the inexhaustible unity of nature.

• Sculpture and painting have opposing aesthetic demands: sculpture requires beauty and physical strength of form (making emaciated figures repulsive), while painting permits ugliness and emaciation because expression, passion, and character predominate—this maps onto sculpture as the art of antiquity (affirming will-to-live) and painting as the art of Christian times (tending toward its denial).
  • An emaciated Christ or dying St. Jerome is suitable for painting (as in Domenichino’s masterpiece) but not for sculpture; Donatello’s marble figure of John the Baptist reduced to skin and bone has a repulsive effect despite its masterly execution.
  • The Greek sculptors’ superior sense of beauty arose from the sexual impulse separating itself from the will through the presence of an abnormally preponderating intellect, becoming an objective sense of beauty for the human form, as in Phidias, Praxiteles, and Scopas.
• Allegory is inadmissible in painting because it forces the work to function as a conceptual hieroglyph—demanding prior verbal knowledge to be intelligible—rather than speaking through direct perceptual apprehension of Ideas; great painting communicates immediately through what is seen, not through decoding symbols.
  • Caravaggio’s painting of the child Jesus treading on a serpent is meaningless to anyone who has not heard the relevant scripture—its meaning is purely conventional, not visually self-evident.
  • Luca Giordano’s allegory ‘Science freeing the Understanding from the Bonds of Ignorance’ at the Palazzo Riccardi illustrates the absurdity of allegory: the painting requires its label to convey any meaning at all.
• Laocoon does not cry out in the famous sculpture not merely because shrieking is unsuitable to the mute plastic arts (the primary aesthetic reason), but because the artist represented the snake bite as occurring in the side at the very moment of happening, which draws in the abdomen and physically prevents a cry—a secondary solution that makes the non-shrieking plausible.
  • Goethe correctly identified the secondary reason (the position of the bite making shrieking impossible) and explained it in his autobiography and in the Propylaea essay on Laocoon.
  • The primary reason conditioning Goethe’s observation is that shrieking is fundamentally unsuitable to representation in the mute arts; a pantomime performer standing with mouth wide open would produce only laughter from the audience.
• No artist can genuinely devise the physiognomical unity of a human face from imagination alone, because the principle of that unity is unknown to him; consequently, historical painting should be based on carefully selected and idealized portraits from living models, as great painters have always gladly done.
  • The original peculiarity of a human countenance—something so thoroughly original that it can belong only to a unity consisting of nothing but necessary parts—could only have arisen from the mysterious depths of inner nature, not from artistic invention.
  • A mere Madonna by Raphael hung unheeded for many years on the wall of a servants’ hall in Florence, showing how little direct effect plastic arts have compared with music and poetry, which travel unfailingly across nations.

On the Aesthetics of Poetry

Poetry is the art of bringing the imagination into play through words, with the goal of revealing Platonic Ideas of existence through the particular; its forms—from lyric to tragedy to comedy—differ in the balance of subjective and objective elements, and tragedy achieves the highest aesthetic effect by awakening in the spectator a turning away from the will-to-live toward resignation.

• Poetry is the art of bringing the imagination into play through words; its medium is the reader’s own imagination, which gives it a decisive advantage over plastic and pictorial arts because the imagination supplies details appropriate to each reader’s individuality—explaining why poetry exercises a stronger, deeper, and more universal effect than pictures or statues.
  • A Raphael Madonna hung unnoticed for years in a Florentine palace servants’ hall, while a beautiful melody or excellent poem travels unfailingly from nation to nation—demonstrating the comparative weakness of direct perceptual arts.
  • Whole peoples such as Mohammedans have lived without the plastic and pictorial arts, but no people is without music and poetry.
• Metre and rhyme act as both fetter and veil for the poet, permitting him to speak more boldly than otherwise, while their mysterious power over feeling stems from the fact that word-sound thereby gains a completeness and significance in itself—as a kind of music—so that the meaning appears as an unexpected gift that easily satisfies because no such demand was made of it.
  • Rhythm is a much nobler expedient than rhyme: metre has its essence in time as pure a priori intuition, whereas rhyme is a matter of empirical sensation; the ancients accordingly despised rhyme, which originated in the imperfect languages of barbarous times.
  • The idea is sought for the rhyme ten times more often than the rhyme for the idea; even trivial thoughts obtain through rhythm and rhyme a touch of importance, as plain faces attract the eye through elegant attire.
  • A happily rhymed verse excites the feeling as if the idea expressed already lay predestined in the language, and the poet had only to discover it.
• The distinction between classical and romantic poetry rests on the fact that classical poetry admits only purely human, actual, and natural motives, while romantic poetry also employs pretended, conventional, and imaginary motives—Christian mythology, chivalric honor, idealized veneration of women—which inevitably lead to ridiculous distortions of human relations, as seen even in the best romantic poets like Calderón.
  • Classical poetry has unconditional truth because it always remains true to nature; romantic poetry has only conditional truth, analogous to the relationship between Greek and Gothic architecture.
  • Shakespeare’s presentations of ancient Greek and Roman subjects avoid the characteristic emptiness of such works by presenting Englishmen of his own time under classical names, without hesitation.
• What gives to everything tragic, whatever the form in which it appears, the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them.
• Tragedy achieves the highest degree of the sublime by presenting the terrible side of life—the dominion of chance and error, the fall of the just, the triumph of the wicked—in such a way as to awaken in the spectator a turning away from the will-to-live itself and an intimation that life is a bad dream from which we must awake; this tragic spirit consists in resignation, and modern tragedy (especially Shakespeare) reaches this goal more fully than ancient tragedy.
  • Ancient tragic heroes display stoic submission to fate but not surrender of the will-to-live itself; modern tragedy—especially Shakespeare compared to Sophocles—shows the giving up of the whole will-to-live in a consciousness of the world’s worthlessness.
  • Fear and sympathy, in the stimulation of which Aristotle places tragedy’s aim, are not themselves the end but merely the means; the true tendency is to turn the will away from life.
  • The opera Norma, in the duet ‘Qual cor tradisti,’ achieves the genuinely tragic effect with particular purity and simplicity, clearly indicating through a sudden quietness in the music the conversion of the will.
• Comedy is the direct opposite of tragedy: where tragedy leads to resignation and denial of the will-to-live, comedy presents suffering and reverses as fleeting, resolving into joy and success, declaring that life on the whole is good and amusing—though it must hasten to drop the curtain at the moment of delight before we see what follows.
  • Tragedy as a rule ends so that nothing can follow; comedy must end before the consequences of its resolutions unfold.
  • The thoughtful observer of the burlesque side of life—the gestures and utterances that petty embarrassment and secret envy force on human forms—may be led to the conviction that such existence cannot itself be an end, and that these beings arrived at existence only by a wrong path.
• The great dramatic or epic poet is like fate itself—inexorable and the mirror of the human race—and must represent a preponderance of bad, wicked, and foolish characters with only rare exceptions of magnanimity; Shakespeare’s dramas are like a line with breadth, allowing scenes that do not advance the plot but deepen our knowledge of characters and nature, while French tragedy is like a line without breadth, moving with relentless efficiency but missing the larger purpose of presenting human nature.
  • In the whole of Homer no truly magnanimous character appears, and in the whole of Shakespeare only perhaps Cordelia and Coriolanus; Goethe’s works contain not even so much magnanimity as the single Marquis Posa.
  • Tragic heroes are best taken from royal persons not because rank gives dignity, but because misfortunes of the great are unconditionally terrible and beyond outside help, so the fall is greatest from a height.

On History

History is inferior to both art and science: unlike science it has no universal concepts under which to subordinate particulars, and unlike poetry it cannot reach the Platonic Ideas of human nature—yet history has genuine value as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, serving the same function for the species that memory and reason serve for the individual.

• History is not a science in the proper sense because it lacks the fundamental characteristic of science—the subordination of the particular under the universal by means of concepts—and instead merely coordinates particulars, knowing everything imperfectly and partially; unlike science, it can never predict from known universals what will occur in new particular cases.
  • Sciences speak of that which always is; history speaks of that which is only once, and then no more. Its most universal is in itself only something individual and particular—a long epoch or a principal event.
  • In history the most universal is the most certain (periods, kings, wars) while the particular is increasingly uncertain; thus history is the more interesting the more special it is, but also the less trustworthy—approximating to fiction.
• History is the direct opposite and counterpart of philosophy: history considers things from the most particular viewpoint and regards the particular as exclusively real, while philosophy considers things from the most universal viewpoint and has the universal as its express object; where history teaches that at each time something different has been, philosophy enables the insight that at all times exactly the same was, is, and will be.
  • The chapters of the history of nations are at bottom different only through names and dates; the really essential content is everywhere the same—history is like a kaleidoscope showing new configurations while always having the same thing before our eyes.
  • If we have read Herodotus, we have already studied enough history from a philosophical point of view, for everything which constitutes subsequent world history is already there.
• Hegel’s attempt to comprehend world history as a planned whole—to ‘construct it organically’—rests on crude shallow realism, treats the phenomenon as the being-in-itself of the world, and leads to a comfortable optimism about earthly happiness that is fundamentally contrary to the true spirit of both philosophy and religion (including Christianity, Brahmanism, and Buddhism), all of which teach the vanity of earthly existence.
  • Constructive histories ultimately end in a comfortable, substantial fat State with good justice, useful arts, and intellectual perfection—but the moral element, which alone matters, remains essentially unaltered and lies only in the individual as the tendency of his will.
  • Atheistic Buddhism is much more closely akin to Christianity than are optimistic Judaism and Islam, because the true spirit of Christianity is knowledge of the vanity of all earthly happiness and complete contempt for it.
• History’s genuine and irreplaceable value is that it functions as the rational self-consciousness of the human race—what reason is to the individual, history is to humanity—allowing nations and the species to understand their present by knowing their past, and to anticipate the future; writing is the indispensable condition for this faculty, just as language is for individual reason.
  • A nation which does not know its own history is like an animal restricted to the narrow present of perception—it cannot understand itself or anticipate the future.
  • Before monuments that have outlived their own knowledge—such as the Pyramids or the temples of Yucatan—we stand as senseless as an animal before human actions in which it participates without comprehension.
  • The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans built for thousands of years because through higher culture their horizon was broader; they aimed to speak to remote descendants, to restore to unity the consciousness of mankind interrupted by death.

On the Metaphysics of Music

Music differs from all other arts by expressing not Platonic Ideas (grades of the will’s objectification) but the will itself directly, making it the most powerful of arts; its specific physical basis—the rational and irrational proportions of vibrating strings that produce consonance and dissonance—corresponds precisely to the metaphysical opposition of will-satisfaction and will-frustration, so that melody is a constant succession of desire and satisfaction whose rhythmical and harmonious elements are constantly brought into discord and reconciliation.

• Music stands apart from all other arts because it does not exhibit Platonic Ideas (adequate objectifications of the will at different grades) but directly expresses the will itself, acting immediately on feelings and passions rather than through perceptual images of the world; consequently it is the most powerful of all arts and requires no text, action, or external subject matter.
  • The four voices of harmony—bass, tenor, alto, soprano—correspond to the four grades of existence: mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms; the rule that bass must remain at a much greater interval below the upper voices mirrors the fundamental disposition of nature placing a wide gulf between the organic and inorganic.
  • Music in opera shows its superiority by expressing the innermost soul of events and occurrences, of which the stage presents only the cloak and body; it remains completely indifferent to material—expressing the same passions whether Agamemnon or the dissensions of an ordinary family furnish the subject.
• The physical basis of music’s metaphysical power is the theory of vibration: consonance arises when two tones have a rational numerical relation (easily taken together in apprehension through regularly recurring coincidence), while dissonance arises from irrational relations (resisting apprehension); dissonance becomes the natural image of what resists the will, consonance the image of its satisfaction—making music a faithful portrait of all movements of the human heart.
  • Music never causes us actual suffering even in its most painful chords, and we like to hear in its language the secret history of our will and all its stirrings; for what it produces are only images or pictures of satisfaction and frustration, not actual pain and pleasure.
  • There are ultimately only two fundamental chords—the dissonant chord of the seventh and the harmonious triad—corresponding to the two fundamental states of the will: dissatisfaction and satisfaction; and only two general keys—major and minor—corresponding to serenity/vigor and sadness/anguish.
• Melody consists of two elements—a rhythmical (quantitative, time-based) and a harmonious (qualitative, pitch-based)—and its true nature is the constant discord and reconciliation of these two elements: the harmonious sequence wanders through the scale until reaching a harmonious stage, but this must coincide with favourable points in the rhythm, and complete satisfaction only arises when both demands are met simultaneously.
  • The effect of the suspension (a dissonance delaying the final consonance) is the analogue of the satisfaction of the will enhanced through delay; the complete cadence requires the preceding chord of the seventh because deeply felt satisfaction can follow only the most pressing desire.
  • Rhythm is in time what symmetry is in space—division into equal parts corresponding to one another—and this is the only genuine analogy between architecture and music, not any deeper identity of inner nature.
• Architecture and music are the two extreme and most heterogeneous arts—one existing purely in space without reference to time, the other in time without reference to space—yet they share the single analogy that symmetry arranges architecture as rhythm arranges music; the famous witticism ‘architecture is frozen music’ correctly identifies this formal analogy while wrongly implying equality of inner natures.
  • “Goethe originated the witticism, saying: ‘Among my papers I have found a sheet on which I call architecture a congealed music, and actually there is something in it; the mood arising from architecture approximates to the effect of music.’” —Goethe
  • It would be ridiculous to put the most limited and feeble of all the arts (architecture) on an equal footing in essential respects with the most extensive and effective (music); the analogy extends only to outer form.

Supplements to the Fourth Book

Preface

The preface to the Fourth Book’s supplements explains that two major subjects—freedom of the will and the foundation of morality—were treated separately in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, and demands that readers engage with all of Schopenhauer’s works together, since he writes not for fees or approval but to preserve thoughts for those capable of meditating on them.

• The supplements to the Fourth Book omit extended treatment of freedom of the will and the foundation of morality because these were fully addressed in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (1841), written for prize-questions set by two Scandinavian Academies; understanding Schopenhauer’s philosophy requires reading every line he has written.
  • Schopenhauer is not a prolific writer, fabricator of compendiums, or earner of fees; he aspires only to truth and writes as the ancients wrote—to preserve thoughts for those who know how to meditate on them.
  • The space gained by eliminating these two main subjects allows fuller and more positive treatment of the remaining material, including the inner significance of sexual love—a subject entirely neglected by all philosophers before him.

On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature

Death destroys only the individual intellect—a secondary, conditioned phenomenon—while the will, as thing-in-itself that is free from time’s forms, is genuinely indestructible; the species persists as the temporal manifestation of the will’s eternity, and the boundary between arising and passing away is ultimately only apparent, conditioned by the intellect’s time-bound form of apprehension.

• The fear of death is not derived from knowledge or rational reflection on life’s value—reflection would more likely yield indifference or preference for non-existence—but springs directly from the will-to-live itself as its blind, a priori reverse side; knowledge actually opposes attachment to life, and when knowledge triumphs we honor it as great and noble.
  • If what made death terrible were the thought of non-existence, we should feel equal horror at the infinity of time before our birth, which in no way disturbs us; yet we find it hard to contemplate the infinity after death—showing the fear is not rational.
  • Epicurus rightly said that death does not concern us: when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not; non-existence is an evil that presupposes existence and consciousness, both of which cease with death.
• The cessation of life’s principle in the dying organism no more implies the annihilation of that principle than the stopping of a spinning-wheel implies the death of the spinner; the forces of nature—including the vital force—persist untouched by the change of forms and states that causality introduces and carries away, and even matter’s absolute permanence provides at minimum an image of indestructibility.
  • The force that three thousand years ago bent the bow of Ulysses—though the arm no longer exists—is not thereby annihilated; much nearer is the idea that the force formerly actuating a vanished life is the same force active in the life now flourishing.
  • Even crude materialism—Epicurus’s view—preserves something of the indestructibility of our inner nature through the imperishability of matter, though only as a shadow: matter lying as dust will form crystals, shine as metal, emit sparks, and form itself into plant and animal.
• Nature’s indifference to the destruction of individual organisms—abandoning them without protection to predation, blindest chance, and children’s mischief—signals that what is destroyed in death is not what is essential; the constant arising and passing away of organisms is only a superficial phenomenon, and the true inner being of things is untouched by it.
  • Nature expresses that the annihilation of individual organisms does her no harm and is of no significance—that in these cases the effect is of no more consequence than the cause—and she never lies.
  • The autumn insect preparing its bed for winter sleep, or a cocoon for spring metamorphosis, embodies nature’s great doctrine of immortality: death differs from sleep only as the winter differs from the night, for the fly and for the species.
• The species is the Platonic Idea drawn out in time, and it is the species—not the individual—in which the will-to-live is truly rooted; the individual’s death is therefore for the species what sleep is for the individual, and the perpetual succession of individual births and deaths is the temporal expression of what is in itself eternally present.
  • Just as the spray of a waterfall changes with lightning rapidity while the rainbow on which they are the support remains immovably at rest, every Idea (species) remains entirely untouched by the constant change of its individuals—leonitas, the Idea of the lion, endures while individual lions are like the drops.
  • Nations too exist as immortal individuals though they sometimes change their names; what history relates as always different is in fact the kaleidoscope showing the same thing in different configurations.
• 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.
• What is genuinely indestructible through death is the will—the thing-in-itself, free from all time-determinations—while what perishes is precisely the intellect (the subject of knowing), which is a secondary phenomenon arising from the objectification of the will and conditioned by the brain; therefore the intellect is rightly mortal, and no continuation of individual consciousness is to be expected.
  • All philosophers have made the mistake of placing the metaphysical, indestructible, and eternal element in man in the intellect; it lies exclusively in the will, which alone is original and free from time.
  • The intellect is the lantern that after it has served its purpose is extinguished; the will alone is permanent, for it is the will-to-live and permanence concerns it alone.
  • “Spinoza expressed the deep consciousness of indestructibility correctly: ‘We feel and experience that we are eternal’—but this eternity is not temporal continuance, belonging to the will as thing-in-itself, not to the individual consciousness.” —Spinoza
• Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of time provides the most complete philosophical answer to the question of continued existence after death: time cannot belong to the thing-in-itself, and therefore ceasing and continuing—which derive their significance solely from time—have no application to what is essential in things; death is thus an end only for the temporal phenomenon, not for what appears in it.
  • What is really essential in things, in man, in the world, lies permanently in the Nunc stans (the enduring present moment), and the change of phenomena is a mere consequence of our perception-form of time; Plotinus called time ‘a mere image of eternity.’
  • It is equally false to attribute temporal continuance to the thing-in-itself after death and to deny it: the problem is transcendent, placing us in a scene that abolishes time while asking time-determinations.
• The universal historical belief in metempsychosis or palingenesis—held by Brahmanism, Buddhism, Greek mystery cults, Pythagoreans, Druids, and found even among Australian aboriginals and American Indians—reflects a natural conviction arising from unprejudiced contemplation of existence; properly understood, it is palingenesis (renewal of the will in a new individual with a new intellect) rather than metempsychosis (transfer of the same soul), corresponding exactly to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics.
  • Buddhism, in its esoteric form, teaches not metempsychosis but a peculiar palingenesis resting on a moral basis, with great depth of thought; for the great mass of Buddhists, plain metempsychosis is preached as a comprehensible substitute.
  • There exists an empirical support for palingenesis: after the Black Death depopulated the Old World in the 14th century, an abnormal fertility appeared among humans with frequent twin births, though the children acquired fewer teeth—a correlation impossible to explain by physical causation alone.
• Death is ultimately the great opportunity to cease being what one is: the will in the individual, constrained by an unalterable character and the necessity of motives, can become free only by ceasing in its present individual form; death loosens those bonds and allows the will to arise afresh as a new being with a new intellect, which is what gives most of the dead the expression of sweet contentment on their faces.
  • To desire immortality for the individual is really to want to perpetuate an error; at bottom every individuality is really a special error, a false step, something from which life’s purpose is to bring us back.
  • Death is the great reprimand that the will-to-live receives through the course of nature, the violent destruction of the fundamental error of our true nature; egoism, restricting all reality to one’s own person, is abolished when that person ceases and the will lives only in other individuals.

Life of the Species

The individual’s true inner being lies not in itself but in its species, and the sexual impulse—as the concentration of all willing—is therefore the most powerful of all drives because through it the will-to-live maintains its objectification across time; parental love has analogous force as the second manifestation of the life of the species extending beyond the individual.

• The individual’s true inner being lies primarily in the species, not in itself; the will attains self-consciousness only in the individual but recognizes its real being in the species through the incomparable importance it attaches to sexual relations, generation, and care for offspring—which override all other concerns.
  • Physiologically: the genitals are the root of the organism (connecting the individual to the species in which it is rooted) while the head is the crown; castration cuts the individual from the tree of the species, causing withering of mind and body.
  • The vital force is at bottom force of the species checked by damming up; this is why excessive use of procreative power shortens life while moderation enhances all powers, especially muscular strength—as recognized in Greek athletic training.
• The sexual impulse is the most complete manifestation of the will-to-live—the desire of desires, the concentration of all willing—and bears a character specifically more powerful than all other desires because it constitutes the very nature of man: his origin is an act of copulation, the desire of his desires is an act of copulation, and this impulse alone perpetuates and holds together the whole of his phenomenal appearance.
  • The inscription on the door of the fornix at Pompeii—‘Heic habitat felicitas’ (Here dwells happiness)—naively expresses the natural sentiment; Lucretius opens his work with an apostrophe to Venus as the genetrix of Aeneas’s race and the pleasure of men and gods.
  • The sex relation is the invisible central point of all action and conduct in the world of mankind, peeping up everywhere despite all the veils thrown over it—the cause of war and aim of peace, the basis of serious matters and the aim of jokes, the inexhaustible source of wit.
• Parental love—particularly maternal love—is the second manifestation of the life of the species, reaching a strength far surpassing efforts directed merely toward the individual, because in it the will-to-live becomes transcendent: the animal’s consciousness extends beyond its individual to the species, and it sacrifices its own life for the maintenance of its young.
  • A stork at Delft allowed itself to be burnt in its nest rather than forsake its young unable to fly; a bitch whose litter had been surgically removed crept to them dying and caressed them; male sea-elephants fast together for seven to eight weeks to prevent females from entering the sea before the young can swim.
  • In France a father took his own life so that his son, whose name had been drawn for military service, would be the eldest son of a widow and exempt from service—parental love overcoming self-love entirely.

The Hereditary Nature of Qualities

Character and will are inherited from the father while intellect is inherited from the mother, making the moral nature of individuals traceable paternally and the degree and quality of intelligence maternally; this division explains both the constancy of character across generations and the rarity of genius, and suggests that a real improvement of the human race would require attending to the conditions of procreation rather than external instruction.

• Since the will is the true inner being and kernel of man while the intellect is secondary and adventitious, it follows a priori that the father as the procreative principle transmits the will (character, moral nature, inclinations, virtues and vices) while the mother as the merely conceiving principle transmits the intellect (degree, quality, and tendency of intelligence); this division is confirmed by careful observation and by historical examples.
  • Everyone who examines their own inclinations—quick temper or patience, avarice or extravagance, tendency to sensuality, honesty or duplicity, courage or cowardice—and then recalls their father, will find these characteristic traits in him also; moral agreement with the mother is extremely rare.
  • Historical examples confirm paternal inheritance of character: P. Decius Mus sacrificed his life for Rome in battle, and about forty years later his son of the same name did exactly the same; Caesar Borgia was the hideous image of his father Pope Alexander VI; the Claudian gens produced Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero through six centuries of arrogance and cruelty.
• The intellect is inherited from the mother, as attested by the common expression ‘mother wit,’ by the ordinary intelligence of fathers of distinguished men, and by historical cases including: Joseph II (son of Maria Theresa), D’Alembert (illegitimate son of Claudine de Tencin), Buffon (who explicitly stated this principle and applied it to himself), Goethe (whose mother’s brilliance is universally known while his father was of inferior abilities), and Kant (whose mother was a woman of great natural understanding).
  • “Buffon held as a principle that children generally receive their intellectual and moral qualities from their mother, and applied it to himself by giving a pompous eulogy of his mother, ‘who had indeed much intelligence, wide knowledge, and a very well organized head.’” —Buffon
  • The rarity of genius is explained by the requirement of simultaneously: an extraordinarily developed brain from the mother and a very energetic heart action (passionate will, lively temperament) from the father at the height of his vigor—conditions that rarely coincide.
• The two-part theory of inheritance—will from father, intellect from mother—carries a deeper metaphysical implication: the constant renewal and complete change of the intellect (coming from the mother) imparts a new world-view to the same will (coming from the father), holding open to it the path of salvation by allowing it to decide anew for affirmation or denial of life; this is why incest between brother and sister is universally abhorred, for it would produce only the same will with the same intellect, the hopeless repetition of an already existing phenomenon.
  • In every descendant of a stock, from the remote ancestor to the present, it is the same character (the same individually determined will) that lives; but in each a different intellect is given to it, presenting life from a different aspect and imparting a new fundamental view.
  • A real improvement of the human race might be reached not from outside through theory and instruction but from within through the path of generation; Plato had something of this kind in mind in the fifth book of the Republic with his plan for increasing and improving the warrior caste.

The Metaphysics of Sexual Love

Sexual love, however ethereal it appears, is entirely rooted in the sexual impulse and serves the species’ interest in determining the composition of the next generation; the intense passion lovers feel is the will-to-live of the future individual pressing toward existence, operating through instinctive delusion that deceives individuals into believing they pursue their own happiness.

• Sexual love is not a trifle but the most important business of life because what is decided by individual love-affairs is nothing less than the composition of the next generation—the existentia of future persons is conditioned by the sexual impulse in general, and their essentia by each individual’s selection within it.
  • The collected love-affairs of the present generation constitute ’the human race’s serious meditation on the composition of the future generation, on which innumerable future generations depend.’
  • Because sexual love concerns the weal of the species rather than the individual, it is related to all other concerns as a solid body is to a surface—which is why drama without love-affairs cannot hold interest.
• What appears in consciousness as love for a specific individual is in itself the will-to-live striving to objectify itself as a precisely determined new individual—sexual love is therefore an instinct operating under the mask of subjective admiration, deceiving the lover into serving the species while believing he serves himself.
  • The certainty of mutual affection cannot console a passionate lover denied physical possession, whereas possession often satisfies even without mutual affection—proving that the true aim is procreation, not the lover’s personal feeling.
  • The moment two people begin to love each other is ‘actually to be regarded as the very first formation of a new individual, and the true punctum saliens of its life.’
  • After consummation, the lover finds himself ’the dupe of the species’: the delusion vanishes because it existed solely to achieve procreation.
• The specific considerations guiding sexual attraction—age, health, skeletal structure, flesh, facial features—are not aesthetic preferences of the individual but expressions of nature’s instinct for maintaining the type of the species, operating entirely without the chooser’s conscious awareness.
  • Youth is preferred because it indicates procreative capacity; skeleton matters because it is the foundation of the species-type; fullness of flesh promises nourishment for the foetus; beauty of face reflects hereditary qualities including intellect from the mother.
  • Women prefer men aged thirty to thirty-five, are won by strength and courage rather than beauty, because instinct recognizes in that age the acme of procreative power and in those qualities protection for offspring.
• Beyond absolute considerations of beauty and health, individuals are guided by relative considerations—each unconsciously seeks in a partner the opposite of their own deficiencies and abnormalities, so that the resulting child corrects the partiality of either parent and restores the pure type of the species.
  • Short men seek tall women, blondes prefer dark-haired partners, pug-nosed individuals are attracted to hawk-like noses—all because nature strives through complementarity to produce the most complete human type.
  • Really passionate love arises from this complementarity of relative considerations, not merely from absolute beauty; the two individuals must ’neutralize each other, just as an acid and an alkali do to make a neutral salt.’
  • A man may love a woman whose character is repugnant to him in every other respect because ’the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual’ that he shuts his eyes to all her repulsive qualities.
• 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.
• The highest degrees of passionate love arise when both the corporization and the will of the father and intellect of the mother are uniquely suited to produce a specific individual that can come only from these two parents—this metaphysical demand of the will-in-itself manifests as apparently infinite longing and, if frustrated, leads to madness or suicide.
  • The spirit of the species, as something with infinite life and infinite capacity for desire and suffering, is here imprisoned in the narrow breast of a mortal—which explains why love poetry reaches for transcendent metaphors.
  • Great passions arise at first sight because ’the genius of the species meditates concerning the race to come’ in the instant two individuals of opposite sex meet.
  • “Theophrastus Paracelsus expressed a related insight: that God joined David and Bathsheba so that Solomon, who could be born from no other union, might come into existence.” —Theophrastus Paracelsus
• The genius of the species wages constant war with the guardian geniuses of individuals, sacrificing personal happiness, honour, duty, and even social order to its ends—which is why love is represented by Cupid as a malevolent, blind, tyrannical demon, and why marriages from love tend toward unhappiness while those from convenience tend toward a different kind of inadequacy.
  • Honour, duty, and loyalty yield to sexual passion because the interest of the species is infinitely superior to the interests of individuals; Calderón’s Decius abandons a hundred victories for love, and history confirms that adultery is committed even by the otherwise conscientious.
  • Marriages contracted from love are made in the interest of the species at the expense of the individuals: ‘Quien se casa por amores, ha de vivir con dolores.’
  • When the delusion of love vanishes after consummation, the individual finds himself no happier than before, the partner now possibly detested—explaining why ‘a Theseus made happy will forsake his Ariadne.’
• The metaphysics of sexual love confirms two fundamental truths of Schopenhauer’s system: the indestructibility of the will-in-itself (evidenced by the passionate interest in future generations) and the primacy of the species over the individual (evidenced by the readiness to sacrifice everything for love), with salvation available only through the denial of the will-to-live.
  • The intense, non-reflective interest in the constitution of the coming generation could not exist if man were absolutely perishable; it proves that ‘his true being-in-itself lies rather in the species than in the individual.’
  • The will-to-live that has affirmed itself in the species can be freed only through denial of the will; ’to free it from this is reserved for the denial of the will-to-live, through which the individual will tears itself away from the stem of the species.’
• Pederasty, though repugnant in itself, arises from nature’s own mechanism: as procreative power deteriorates in old age (or is immature in youth), nature misdirects the instinct toward sterile outlets to prevent the worse evil of weak and defective offspring, making this perversion an indirect instrument of the species’ self-preservation.
  • Aristotle observed that men over fifty-four beget inferior children; nature, unable to stop semen production abruptly, gradually diverts the impulse away from procreation by introducing an aversion to women and attraction to males—nature ’leads the sexual impulse astray, in order to frustrate its most pernicious consequences.’
  • The vice’s universality across all times and cultures—Greece, Rome, Asia, the Middle Ages despite capital punishment—proves it ‘arises in some way from human nature itself,’ and only those of thoroughly depraved nature succumb despite the tendency.

On the Affirmation of the Will-to-Live

The will-to-live affirms itself primarily through the sexual impulse, which extends individual existence into an endless series of generations burdened by suffering; the act of procreation is therefore the concentrated expression of the will and the key to understanding the world’s nature, while the possibility of denial through knowledge constitutes the only turning point toward salvation.

• If the will willed only self-preservation, life would be relatively easy; but because it wills life absolutely and for all time through the sexual impulse, it introduces suffering, misery, and guilt into existence—every new life born is a repetition of the will’s affirmation at the expense of a new individual condemned to suffering and death.
  • 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.’
  • Paternal love—the father’s readiness to suffer for his child—exists because the begetter ‘recognizes himself once more in the begotten,’ confirming that the difference of individuals is conditioned by the principium individuationis, not by any real distinction in the underlying will.
• The act of procreation is universally felt to be shameful and concealed precisely because it is the most concentrated expression of the will-to-live—it is the world’s open secret and the key to its riddle, experienced by every newly initiated intellect with horror because knowledge has become estranged from the blind will that produced it.
  • In German the act of cohabitation is literally called ’the will’ (Er verlangte von ihr, sie sollte ihm zu Willen sein), signifying that this act is ’the most distinct expression of the will, the kernel, the compendium, the quintessence of the world.’
  • “The tree of knowledge in Genesis corresponds to this insight: ‘after acquaintance with it, everyone begins to see life in its true light.’” —Byron
• The will-to-live, after traversing the entire animal series, arrives at reflection in rational man—the only being capable of surveying his whole life, anticipating death, and thereby choosing to affirm or deny the will, making humanity the unique turning point at which the will can abolish itself.
  • Every animal species exists in a ‘steady and enduring moment, a nunc stans,’ with no consciousness of past or future and thus no consciousness of death; man alone genuinely faces mortality and can thereby be moved to denial.
  • The question that forces itself on the rational being—‘Le jeu vaut-il bien la chandelle?’—is the point where, ‘in the light of distinct knowledge, he decides for the affirmation or denial of the will-to-live.’

On the Vanity and Suffering of Life

Human existence is characterized by pervasive suffering, deception, and vanity because the will-to-live is a striving that inevitably frustrates itself; pleasure is negative and fleeting while pain is positive and real, making optimism not merely false but pernicious, and making pessimism the only honest reckoning with the world.

• The primary form through which the vanity of all things reveals itself is time: because all pleasures vanish and leave nothing behind, while pain is felt positively and immediately, our existence is constituted so that well-being is negative (merely the absence of pain) while suffering is positive—making it better, on balance, not to exist.
  • We do not become conscious of the three greatest blessings of life—health, youth, and freedom—while we possess them, but only after losing them; they are negations, not positive goods.
  • “Voltaire, ‘so highly favoured by nature and good fortune,’ concluded: ‘Happiness is only a dream, and pain is real; I have experienced this for eighty years. I know nothing better than to resign myself and say that flies are born to be eaten by spiders, and men to be devoured by sorrows.’” —Voltaire
• The evil in the world can never be balanced by the good that exists alongside it, because each person’s suffering is absolute for them—a thousand happy lives do not cancel one person’s death-agony—and therefore the world’s non-existence would be preferable to its existence.
  • “Byron captures the condition: ‘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.’” —Byron
  • Leibniz’s optimism—that this is the best of all possible worlds—can be countered by proving it is actually the worst: a world only barely capable of continuing to exist, since any further deterioration would cause its collapse.
• Optimism is not merely intellectually false but morally pernicious because it presents life as desirable and happiness as its aim, causing people to feel unjustly deprived when suffering comes, whereas Brahmanism, Buddhism, and genuine Christianity correctly treat work, privation, and suffering crowned by death as the true purpose of existence, pointing toward denial of the will.
  • The myth of the Fall of man contains ’the only thing in the Old Testament to which I can concede a metaphysical, though only allegorical, truth’: that our existence resembles the consequence of a guilty desire and false step.
  • Since Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and Pope introduced optimism, ’the general offence caused by it was due mainly to the fact that optimism is irreconcilable with Christianity’—a point Voltaire explicitly made against Leibniz.
• The consensus of the greatest minds across all ages—Greek tragedy, Thracian custom, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer, Pliny, Shakespeare, Swift, Byron, Leopardi—confirms that existence is a burden and non-existence preferable, lending historical weight to Schopenhauer’s pessimism beyond mere philosophical argument.
  • The Thracians welcomed the new-born with lamentation and buried the dead with joy, because the dead had escaped so many great sufferings; the Mexicans greeted newborns with ‘My child, you are born to endure; therefore endure, suffer, and keep silence.’
  • Swift adopted the custom of treating his birthday as a day of sadness, reading on that day the passage where Job curses the day a man-child is born.

On Ethics

Schopenhauer’s philosophy uniquely grounds morality by deriving it from the metaphysical identity of all willing beings rather than from duty or theistic command; moral virtues spring from the will’s recognition of itself in all phenomena, while the failure of both theism and pantheism to adequately ground ethics is traced to their inability to honestly account for the evil and suffering in the world.

• Moral investigations are more important than physical ones because they concern the thing-in-itself (the will) directly, while physical truths remain within the sphere of representation; only Schopenhauer’s philosophy adequately grounds ethics by making man his own work through his own will, so that his deeds are truly attributable to him.
  • As long as man has another origin than his own will, ‘all his guilt falls back on to this origin or originator. For operari sequitur esse.’
  • Since Socrates, philosophy has tried to connect the force producing the world with moral order; theism achieved this childishly, pantheism destroyed ethics, and Spinoza even declared the difference between good and evil to be merely conventional.
• All genuine virtue proceeds from the immediate intuitive knowledge of the metaphysical identity of all beings, which sees through the principium individuationis—the most fundamental error is treating others as ’not-I,’ while justice and benevolence translate this metaphysical insight into action.
  • The teaching of metempsychosis (‘One day you will be born again as the man whom you now injure’) and the Brahman formula Tat tvam asi (‘This thou art’) are practically identical expressions of the same metaphysical truth.
  • Even a feeble intellect suffices to see through the principium individuationis; the will’s opposition prevents this penetration from arising in most people, so that ‘ultimately all guilt falls back on to the will.’
• Weeping arises from sympathy with oneself—the objective consideration of one’s own plight contrasted with a former or ideal state—as confirmed by Ulysses weeping at Demodocus’s song, Hippolytus lamenting his fate, and the anecdote of a client who burst into tears upon hearing his own legal case presented.
  • Ulysses ’never represented as weeping in spite of his many sufferings’ finally wept when hearing his heroic deeds sung by the bard Demodocus, because the remembrance of his brilliant past contrasted with present wretchedness forced him to sympathy for himself.
  • “Euripides has Hippolytus say: ‘Alas, if only I could stand outside myself and weep for the evils I suffer.’” —Euripides
• Moral repentance is possible despite the unalterable character because before the deed the inclination or passion prevented the intellect from clearly presenting the opposing motives; after the deed those motives become effective, revealing that the act was not truly in accord with the full will—repentance is thus a sign of relative weakness of intellect overpowered by will.
  • Passion, distinguished from emotion by being absolute in mastery over the will, eliminates the counter-motives before the act; once the act is committed and the passion extinguished, justice, sympathy, and former friendship ‘raise their voice, and say all that they would have said earlier had they been allowed to have their say.’
  • The Scottish ballad ‘Edward, Edward!’ offers a unique presentation of this process, translated by Herder.
• Schopenhauer’s theory of punishment holds that the criminal is punished not as an individual but as the subject in which a deed is punished to deter its recurrence; capital punishment is absolutely necessary to protect life, the measure of punishment must correspond to the magnitude of injury prevented, and real moral reform is impossible given the unalterable character.
  • The penitentiary system errs by trying to achieve two incompatible ends simultaneously—deterrence (an evil) and education (a benefit)—and its severest punishments have no deterrent effect because their suffering is hidden from those it is meant to deter.
  • Game, unlike manufactured objects, is not subject to morally valid possession because it has not been worked upon; this explains why poaching does not result in the permanent social stigma that theft does, even when legally punished as severely.
• The State’s sole legitimate purpose is protection—outward protection against other nations, inward protection of citizens against one another, and protection against the protector itself through separation of legislature, judiciary, and executive—and the right of property arises only through labor applied to things, not through mere possession or conquest.
  • “U.S. ex-president Quincy Adams confirmed the labor-theory of property by questioning Native American claims to vast hunting grounds: ‘What is the right of a huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey?’” —Quincy Adams
  • Monarchy’s value lies in placing one individual so far above all desire and fear that his egoism is ’neutralized,’ making genuine public-interest governance possible—the king must be hereditary so that his family’s welfare is absolutely identical with the State’s.

On the Doctrine of the Denial of the Will-to-Live

The denial of the will-to-live—salvation from the suffering inherent in existence—is the common innermost teaching of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and genuine Christianity; this denial proceeds through moral virtue, asceticism, and mysticism, and is confirmed by the remarkable cross-cultural agreement of quietists, mystics, and ascetics whose lived experience transcends all doctrinal differences.

• Human existence is itself guilt—man is not culpa omni carens regardless of moral conduct, because operari sequitur esse, and what we are (will-affirming beings) necessarily issues in sinful action; salvation therefore requires not moral improvement but a complete transformation of nature, the ’new birth’ or denial of the will-to-live.
  • As Calderón expressed it, ‘Man’s greatest offence is that he was born’—existence itself carries guilt, which is why works cannot justify, as Paul, Augustine, and Luther all taught.
  • Original sin in Christianity functions as myth for the truth that man’s very origin is the act of his free will and hence identical with the Fall; Augustine taught that only Adam before the Fall had free will, after which humanity is ‘involved in the necessity of sin.’
• The moral virtues—justice and philanthropy—are not the ultimate end but a necessary intermediate step toward denial of the will, because they arise from seeing through the principium individuationis and recognizing the metaphysical identity of all beings; they lead to renunciation by making the just man bear the full weight of life’s suffering without deflecting it onto others.
  • The Vedanta teaching that after complete resignation ’the morality or immorality of previous conduct becomes a matter of indifference’ agrees with Luther’s doctrine that works do not save, but only faith through grace—without which Christianity would require endless punishment and Brahmanism endless rebirths.
  • Asceticism in the strictest sense—voluntary poverty, fasting, mortification of the flesh—is ‘rejected by many as superfluous, and perhaps rightly so,’ since justice itself is ’the hairy garment that causes its owner constant hardship.’
• The remarkable cross-cultural and cross-temporal agreement among Christian quietists, Hindu mystics, Buddhist teachers, and Sufi poets—despite their complete ignorance of one another—proves that they speak from actual inner experience rather than theoretical doctrine, and that any philosophy inconsistent with this agreement is necessarily false.
  • Madame de Guyon’s Torrens contains in elaborate form what the Oupnekhat (Upanishad) states briefly in identical figures of speech, yet she could not have known the text in 1680—proving the experience is universal, not derivative.
  • “Meister Eckhart reported that his spiritual daughter, after her conversion, cried to him jubilantly: ‘Sir, rejoice with me, I have become God!’” —Meister Eckhart’s spiritual daughter
  • Quietism, asceticism, and mysticism stand in the closest connexion: ‘whoever professes one of them is gradually led to the acceptance of the others, even against his intention.’
• Genuine Christianity is fundamentally ascetic—its central teaching is celibacy as the first step in denial of the will—and Protestantism, by eliminating this ascetic kernel, has degenerated into shallow optimism and rationalism, while Catholicism, though more faithful to the spirit of the New Testament, has been disgracefully abused in practice.
  • “Augustine stated clearly: ‘Would that all wished to abstain from all sexual intercourse! The city of God would be completed more quickly, and the end of the world accelerated.’” —Augustine
  • The Shakers of North America, founded 1774 by Ann Lee, with six thousand members practising strict celibacy confirmed even by hostile English and American visitors, demonstrate that the ascetic tendency can fully survive within Protestantism when taken seriously.
  • By eliminating asceticism and celibacy, ‘Protestantism has already given up the innermost kernel of Christianity, and to this extent is to be regarded as a breaking away from it.’
• Philosophy’s highest point necessarily ends in negation—it can say what is denied and given up in denial of the will, but what is gained in its place must be described as ’nothing,’ which may be only a relative nothing from our standpoint, since the mystics approach positively what philosophy can only reach negatively.
  • Buddhism honestly describes the goal as Nirvana—the negation of this world—while if ‘Nirvana is defined as nothing, this means only that Samsara contains no single element that could serve to define or construct Nirvana.’
  • The philosopher begins from what is common to all and proceeds by argument; the mystic begins from inner positive experience and can only assert what cannot be communicated—therefore philosophy ‘should beware of falling into the way of the mystics’ and must remain cosmology, not theology.

The Road to Salvation

The inborn error that we exist to be happy is the source of all disillusionment; suffering, rather than moral action alone, is the primary road to salvation because it destroys the will’s attachment to life—the purpose of existence is revealed not in happiness but in the gradual turning of the will away from life through the repeated experience that all earthly striving is vanity.

• The universal inborn error—that we exist to be happy—causes all disillusionment, perplexity, and suffering to appear as injustice or failure; when this error is corrected, suffering appears instead as purposive, as the instrument by which the will is turned from life toward salvation.
  • The peculiar effect of tragedy rests ‘ultimately on the fact that it shakes that inborn error, since it furnishes a vivid illustration of the frustration of human effort and of the vanity of this whole existence in a great and striking example.’
  • Seneca’s conclusion—‘you will then have your good when you understand that the happiest are the most miserable’—appears to indicate the influence of Christianity, pointing to the same inversion.
• Suffering is the principal road to salvation for the majority of mankind because it works to destroy the will’s attachment to life, functioning as a ‘process of purification’—which is why the cross, an instrument of suffering not of action, is the symbol of Christianity, and why ‘we have to hope for our salvation rather from what we suffer than from what we do.’
  • The Preacher rightly says: ‘Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better’ (Ecclesiastes vii, 3).
  • “Lamartine apostrophizes pain: ‘There is in thee, without combat, / A DIVINE VIRTUE IN PLACE OF MY VIRTUE, / That thou art not the death of the soul, but its life, / That thine arm, in striking, heals and quickens.’” —Lamartine
• Death is the real aim of life—the résumé that at one stroke confirms what life taught piecemeal, that all striving was vain—and therefore it should be regarded not with terror but as a kind of apotheosis, since the dying person’s retrospect on the completed course of life acts on the whole will as a motive, potentially redirecting it toward denial.
  • Just as the fruit achieves in one stroke what gradual vegetation achieved piecemeal, ‘so is life with its obstacles, deluded hopes, frustrated plans, and constant suffering related to death, which at one stroke destroys all that the person has willed, and thus crowns the instruction given him by life.’
  • The euthanasia of the will occurs in old age when the sexual impulse—the focus of willing—is extinguished first, and selfishness is replaced by love for children; if instead avarice or ambition fills the gap, ’the purpose of existence is missed.’
• The Protestant view that the purpose of life lies solely in moral virtue fails empirically because genuine morality is vanishingly rare; the truer view is that life is a process of purification through suffering, where the accumulated weight of pain and disillusionment—more often than direct moral insight—turns the will away from itself.
  • The Vedanta formula—‘The knot of the heart is cut, all doubts are dissolved, and his works perish’—agrees with Luther’s doctrine that works do not save, since after the arrival of complete resignation, ’the morality or immorality of previous conduct becomes a matter of indifference.’
  • Fate and the course of things ’take care of us better than we ourselves do, since they frustrate on all sides our arrangements for a Utopian existence’—the collision of individual will aiming at chimerical happiness with fate aiming at its destruction gives life its ‘strange and ambiguous character.’

Epiphilosophy

Schopenhauer’s philosophy is deliberately immanent and analytic—it explains the world from within experience rather than deriving it from an assumed absolute—and is distinguished from pantheism and Spinozism by starting from the will as the one thoroughly known thing-in-itself, honestly acknowledging evil, and leaving room beyond the world for the denial of the will, a space no other philosophy has opened.

• Schopenhauer’s philosophy is intentionally immanent and limited: it does not explain existence from ultimate grounds or transcendent entities, but interprets what is given in experience from within, proceeding analytically from self-consciousness (the will as thing-in-itself) outward to the world as representation—the reverse of the synthetic-descending method of the Pantheists.
  • Questions such as ‘Whence has this will sprung?’ or ‘What fatality placed it in the dilemma of appearing as a world of suffering?’ cannot be answered, not merely because our intellect is limited, but possibly because these relations ‘are not only relatively but absolutely inscrutable’ and do not enter into the form of knowledge in general.
  • The principle of sufficient reason applies only to the phenomenon; all ‘whence’ and ‘why’ rest on this principle alone, and it ‘is no longer an aeterna veritas, but merely the form, i.e., the function, of our intellect.’
• Schopenhauer’s philosophy shares with pantheism the doctrine of the essential unity of all things (the hen kai pan) but differs fundamentally in identifying the one as will—the most immediately known thing—rather than an unknown x called God or Substance, and in treating the world not as a divine theophany but as the will’s phenomenal appearance ripe for denial.
  • Against Spinoza specifically: ‘My teaching is related to Spinozism as the New Testament is to the Old’—Spinoza retains the moral character of Jehovah in his Deus sive Natura, applauding creation as excellent, whereas for Schopenhauer the will ‘is, so to speak, the crucified Saviour, or else the crucified thief, according as it is decided.’
  • Only Schopenhauer’s system avoids the ‘incurable disease ever breaking out anew’ in optimistic philosophies—the problem of the origin of evil—because with him the origin of evil and the origin of the world have the same answer: the blind affirmation of the will.
• Philosophy is related to religion as a straight line to curves running near it—religions convey the same fundamental truths (the guilt of existence, the need for salvation through denial of the will) sensu allegorico in mythical garb necessary for the great majority, while philosophy conveys those truths sensu proprio in abstract concepts for the rare few capable of thinking.
  • The Trinity can be interpreted in Schopenhauer’s terms: the Holy Ghost is the denial of the will-to-live; the Son is the individual in whom this exhibits itself; the Father is the will that affirms life and produces the phenomenal world—’the ability of the will to affirm or deny is the only true freedom.’
  • Christianity, Brahmanism, and Buddhism all teach that the need for salvation from suffering and its attainability through denial of the will is ‘beyond all comparison the most important truth there can be’; this is ’the most universally recognized fundamental truth in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia, today as much as three thousand years ago.’