The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3)

Thus, though others have set up moral principles which they give out as prescriptions for virtue, and laws which it was necessary to follow, I, as has already been said, cannot do this because I have no “ought” or law to prescribe to the eternally free-will. Yet on the other hand, in the connection of my system, what to a certain extent corresponds and is analogous to that undertaking is the purely theoretical truth, of which my whole exposition may be regarded as merely an elaboration, that the will is the in-itself of every phenomenon but itself, as such, is free from the forms of the phenomenal, and consequently from multiplicity; a truth, which, with reference to action, I do not know how to express better than by the formula of the Vedas already quoted: “Tat twam asi!” (This thou art!) Whoever is able to say this to himself, with regard to every being with whom he comes in contact, with clear knowledge and firm inward conviction, is certain of all virtue and blessedness, and is on the direct road to salvation.

But before I go further, and, as the conclusion of my exposition, show how love, the origin and nature of which we recognised as the penetration of the principium individuationis, leads to salvation, to the entire surrender of the will to live, i. e., of all volition, and also how another path, less soft but more frequented, leads men to the same goal, a paradoxical proposition must first be stated and explained; not because it is paradoxical, but because it is true, and is necessary to the completeness of the thought I have present. It is this: “All love (αγαπη, caritas) is sympathy.”

§ 67. We have seen how justice proceeds from the penetration of the principium individuationis in a less degree, and how from its penetration in a higher degree there arises goodness of disposition proper, which shows itself as pure, i. e., disinterested love towards others. When now the latter becomes perfect, it places other individuals and their fate completely on a level with itself and its own fate. Further than this it cannot go, for there exists no reason for preferring the individuality of another to its own. Yet the number of other individuals whose whole happiness or life is in danger may outweigh the regard for one's own particular well-being. In such a case, the character that has attained to the highest goodness and perfect nobility will entirely sacrifice its own well-being, and even its life, for the well-being of many others. So died Codrus, and Leonidas, and Regulus, and Decius Mus, and Arnold von Winkelried; so dies every one who voluntarily and consciously faces certain death for his friends or his country. And they also stand on the same level who voluntarily submit to suffering and death for maintaining what conduces and rightly belongs to the welfare of all mankind; that is, for maintaining universal and important truths and destroying great errors. So died Socrates and Giordano Bruno, and so many a hero of the truth suffered death at the stake at the hands of the priests.

Now, however, I must remind the reader, with reference to the paradox stated above, that we found before that suffering is essential to life as a whole, and inseparable from it. And that we saw that every wish proceeds from a need, from a want, from suffering, and that therefore every satisfaction is only the removal of a pain, and brings no positive happiness; that the joys certainly lie to the wish, presenting themselves as a positive good, but in truth they have only a negative nature, and are only the end of an evil. Therefore what goodness, love, and nobleness do for others, is always merely an alleviation of their suffering, and consequently all that can influence them to good deeds and works of love, is simply the knowledge of the suffering of others, which is directly understood from their own suffering and placed on a level with it. But it follows from this that pure love (αγαπη, caritas) is in its nature sympathy; whether the suffering it mitigates, to which every unsatisfied wish belongs, be great or small. Therefore we shall have no hesitation, in direct contradiction to Kant, who will only recognise all true goodness and all virtue to be such, if it has proceeded from abstract reflection, and indeed from the conception of duty and of the categorical imperative, and explains felt sympathy as weakness, and by no means virtue, we shall have no hesitation, I say, in direct contradiction to Kant, in saying: the mere concept is for genuine virtue just as unfruitful as it is for genuine art: all true and pure love is sympathy, and all love which is not sympathy is selfishness. Ερος is selfishness, αγαπη is sympathy. Combinations of the two frequently occur. Indeed genuine friendship is always a mixture of selfishness and sympathy; the former lies in the pleasure experienced in the presence of the friend, whose individuality corresponds to our own, and this almost always constitutes the greatest part; sympathy shows itself in the sincere participation in his joy and grief, and the disinterested sacrifices made in respect of the latter. Thus Spinoza says: Benevolentia nihil aliud est, quam cupiditas ex commiseratione orta (Eth. iii. pr. 27, cor. 3, schol.) As a confirmation of our paradoxical proposition it may be observed that the tone and words of the language and caresses of pure love, entirely coincide with the tones of sympathy; and we may also remark in passing that in Italian sympathy and true love are denoted by the same word pietà.

This is also the place to explain one of the most striking peculiarities of human nature, weeping, which, like laughter, belongs to those qualities which distinguish man from the brutes. Weeping is by no means a direct expression of pain, for it occurs where there is very little pain. In my opinion, indeed, we never weep directly on account of the pain we experience, but always merely on account of its repetition in reflection. We pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere idea of it, and then find our own state so deserving of sympathy that we are firmly and sincerely convinced that if another were the sufferer, we would be full of sympathy, and love to relieve him. But now we ourselves are the object of our own sympathy; with the most benevolent disposition we are ourselves most in need of help; we feel that we suffer more than we could see another suffer; and in this very complex frame of mind, in which the directly felt suffering only comes to perception by a doubly circuitous route, imagined as the suffering of another, sympathised with as such, and then suddenly perceived again as directly our own, – in this complex frame of mind, I say, Nature relieves itself through that remarkable physical conflict. Weeping is accordingly sympathy with our own selves, or sympathy directed back on its source. It is therefore conditional upon the capacity for love and sympathy, and also upon imagination. Therefore men who are either hard-hearted or unimaginative do not weep easily, and weeping is even always regarded as a sign of a certain degree of goodness of character, and disarms anger, because it is felt that whoever can still weep, must necessarily always be capable of love, i. e., sympathy towards others, for this enters in the manner described into the disposition that leads to weeping. The description which Petrarch gives of the rising of his own tears, naïvely and truly expressing his feeling, entirely agrees with the explanation we have given —

“I vo pensando: e nel pensar m' assaleUna pietà si forte di me stesso,Che mi conduce spesso,Ad alto lagrimar, ch'i non soleva.”83

What has been said is also confirmed by the fact that children who have been hurt generally do not cry till some one commiserates them; thus not on account of the pain, but on account of the idea of it. When we are moved to tears, not through our own suffering but through that of another, this happens as follows. Either we vividly put ourselves in the place of the sufferer by imagination, or see in his fate the lot of humanity as a whole, and consequently, first of all, our own lot; and thus, in a very roundabout way, it is yet always about ourselves that we weep, sympathy with ourselves which we feel. This seems to be the principal reason of the universal, and thus natural, weeping in the case of death. The mourner does not weep for his loss; he would be ashamed of such egotistical tears, instead of which he is sometimes ashamed of not weeping. First of all he certainly weeps for the fate of the dead, but he also weeps when, after long, heavy, and incurable suffering, death was to this man a wished-for deliverance. Thus, principally, he is seized with sympathy for the lot of all mankind, which is necessarily finite, so that every life, however aspiring, and often rich in deeds, must be extinguished and become nothing. But in this lot of mankind the mourner sees first of all his own, and this all the more, the more closely he is related to him who has died, thus most of all if it is his father. Although to his father his life was misery through age and sickness, and though his helplessness was a heavy burden to his son, yet that son weeps bitterly over the death of his father for the reason which has been given.84

§ 68. After this digression about the identity of pure love and sympathy, the final return of which upon our own individuality has, as its symptom, the phenomenon of weeping, I now take up the thread of our discussion of the ethical significance of action, in order to show how, from the same source from which all goodness, love, virtue, and nobility of character spring, there finally arises that which I call the denial of the will to live.

We saw before that hatred and wickedness are conditioned by egoism, and egoism rests on the entanglement of knowledge in the principium individuationis. Thus we found that the penetration of that principium individuationis is the source and the nature of justice, and when it is carried further, even to its fullest extent, it is the source and nature of love and nobility of character. For this penetration alone, by abolishing the distinction between our own individuality and that of others, renders possible and explains perfect goodness of disposition, extending to disinterested love and the most generous self-sacrifice for others.

If, however, this penetration of the principium individuationis, this direct knowledge of the identity of will in all its manifestations, is present in a high degree of distinctness, it will at once show an influence upon the will which extends still further. If that veil of Mâyâ, the principium individuationis, is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egotistical distinction between his person and that of others, but takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as in his own, and therefore is not only benevolent in the highest degree, but even ready to sacrifice his own individuality whenever such a sacrifice will save a number of other persons, then it clearly follows that such a man, who recognises in all beings his own inmost and true self, must also regard the infinite suffering of all suffering beings as his own, and take on himself the pain of the whole world. No suffering is any longer strange to him. All the miseries of others which he sees and is so seldom able to alleviate, all the miseries he knows directly, and even those which he only knows as possible, work upon his mind like his own. It is no longer the changing joy and sorrow of his own person that he has in view, as is the case with him who is still involved in egoism; but, since he sees through the principium individuationis, all lies equally near him. He knows the whole, comprehends its nature, and finds that it consists in a constant passing away, vain striving, inward conflict, and continual suffering. He sees wherever he looks suffering humanity, the suffering brute creation, and a world that passes away. But all this now lies as near him as his own person lies to the egoist. Why should he now, with such knowledge of the world, assert this very life through constant acts of will, and thereby bind himself ever more closely to it, press it ever more firmly to himself? Thus he who is still involved in the principium individuationis, in egoism, only knows particular things and their relation to his own person, and these constantly become new motives of his volition. But, on the other hand, that knowledge of the whole, of the nature of the thing-in-itself which has been described, becomes a quieter of all and every volition. The will now turns away from life; it now shudders at the pleasures in which it recognises the assertion of life. Man now attains to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true indifference, and perfect will-lessness. If at times, in the hard experience of our own suffering, or in the vivid recognition of that of others, the knowledge of the vanity and bitterness of life draws nigh to us also who are still wrapt in the veil of Mâyâ, and we would like to destroy the sting of the desires, close the entrance against all suffering, and purify and sanctify ourselves by complete and final renunciation; yet the illusion of the phenomenon soon entangles us again, and its motives influence the will anew; we cannot tear ourselves free. The allurement of hope, the flattery of the present, the sweetness of pleasure, the well-being which falls to our lot, amid the lamentations of a suffering world governed by chance and error, draws us back to it and rivets our bonds anew. Therefore Jesus says: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

If we compare life to a course or path through which we must unceasingly run – a path of red-hot coals, with a few cool places here and there; then he who is entangled in delusion is consoled by the cool places, on which he now stands, or which he sees near him, and sets out to run through the course. But he who sees through the principium individuationis, and recognises the real nature of the thing-in-itself, and thus the whole, is no longer susceptible of such consolation; he sees himself in all places at once, and withdraws. His will turns round, no longer asserts its own nature, which is reflected in the phenomenon, but denies it. The phenomenon by which this change is marked, is the transition from virtue to asceticism. That is to say, it no longer suffices for such a man to love others as himself, and to do as much for them as for himself; but there arises within him a horror of the nature of which his own phenomenal existence is an expression, the will to live, the kernel and inner nature of that world which is recognised as full of misery. He therefore disowns this nature which appears in him, and is already expressed through his body, and his action gives the lie to his phenomenal existence, and appears in open contradiction to it. Essentially nothing else but a manifestation of will, he ceases to will anything, guards against attaching his will to anything, and seeks to confirm in himself the greatest indifference to everything. His body, healthy and strong, expresses through the genitals, the sexual impulse; but he denies the will and gives the lie to the body; he desires no sensual gratification under any condition. Voluntary and complete chastity is the first step in asceticism or the denial of the will to live. It thereby denies the assertion of the will which extends beyond the individual life, and gives the assurance that with the life of this body, the will, whose manifestation it is, ceases. Nature, always true and naïve, declares that if this maxim became universal, the human race would die out; and I think I may assume, in accordance with what was said in the Second Book about the connection of all manifestations of will, that with its highest manifestation, the weaker reflection of it would also pass away, as the twilight vanishes along with the full light. With the entire abolition of knowledge, the rest of the world would of itself vanish into nothing; for without a subject there is no object. I should like here to refer to a passage in the Vedas, where it is said: “As in this world hungry infants press round their mother; so do all beings await the holy oblation.” (Asiatic Researches, vol. viii.; Colebrooke, On the Vedas, Abstract of the Sama-Veda; also in Colebrooke's Miscellaneous Essays, vol. i. p. 79.) Sacrifice means resignation generally, and the rest of nature must look for its salvation to man who is at once the priest and the sacrifice. Indeed it deserves to be noticed as very remarkable, that this thought has also been expressed by the admirable and unfathomably profound Angelus Silesius, in the little poem entitled, “Man brings all to God;” it runs, “Man! all loves thee; around thee great is the throng. All things flee to thee that they may attain to God.” But a yet greater mystic, Meister Eckhard, whose wonderful writings are at last accessible (1857) through the edition of Franz Pfeiffer, says the same thing (p. 459) quite in the sense explained here: “I bear witness to the saying of Christ. I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things unto me (John xii. 32). So shall the good man draw all things up to God, to the source whence they first came. The Masters certify to us that all creatures are made for the sake of man. This is proved in all created things, by the fact that the one makes the use of the other; the ox makes use of the grass, the fish of the water, the bird of the air, the wild beast of the forest. Thus, all created things become of use to the good man. A good man brings to God the one created thing in the other.” He means to say, that man makes use of the brutes in this life because, in and with himself, he saves them also. It also seems to me that that difficult passage in the Bible, Rom. viii. 21-24, must be interpreted in this sense.

In Buddhism also, there is no lack of expressions of this truth. For example, when Buddha, still as Bodisatwa, has his horse saddled for the last time, for his flight into the wilderness from his father's house, he says these lines to the horse: “Long hast thou existed in life and in death, but now thou shalt cease from carrying and drawing. Bear me but this once more, O Kantakana, away from here, and when I have attained to the Law (have become Buddha) I will not forget thee” (Foe Koue Ki, trad. p. Abel Rémusat, p. 233).

Asceticism then shows itself further in voluntary and intentional poverty, which not only arises per accidens, because the possessions are given away to mitigate the sufferings of others, but is here an end in itself, is meant to serve as a constant mortification of will, so that the satisfaction of the wishes, the sweet of life, shall not again arouse the will, against which self-knowledge has conceived a horror. He who has attained to this point, still always feels, as a living body, as concrete manifestation of will, the natural disposition for every kind of volition; but he intentionally suppresses it, for he compels himself to refrain from doing all that he would like to do, and to do all that he would like not to do, even if this has no further end than that of serving as a mortification of will. Since he himself denies the will which appears in his own person, he will not resist if another does the same, i. e., inflicts wrongs upon him. Therefore every suffering coming to him from without, through chance or the wickedness of others, is welcome to him, every injury, ignominy, and insult; he receives them gladly as the opportunity of learning with certainty that he no longer asserts the will, but gladly sides with every enemy of the manifestation of will which is his own person. Therefore he bears such ignominy and suffering with inexhaustible patience and meekness, returns good for evil without ostentation, and allows the fire of anger to rise within him just as little as that of the desires. And he mortifies not only the will itself, but also its visible form, its objectivity, the body. He nourishes it sparingly, lest its excessive vigour and prosperity should animate and excite more strongly the will, of which it is merely the expression and the mirror. So he practises fasting, and even resorts to chastisement and self-inflicted torture, in order that, by constant privation and suffering, he may more and more break down and destroy the will, which he recognises and abhors as the source of his own suffering existence and that of the world. If at last death comes, which puts an end to this manifestation of that will, whose existence here has long since perished through free-denial of itself, with the exception of the weak residue of it which appears as the life of this body; it is most welcome, and is gladly received as a longed-for deliverance. Here it is not, as in the case of others, merely the manifestation which ends with death; but the inner nature itself is abolished, which here existed only in the manifestation, and that in a very weak degree;85 this last slight bond is now broken. For him who thus ends, the world has ended also.

And what I have here described with feeble tongue and only in general terms, is no philosophical fable, invented by myself, and only of to-day; no, it was the enviable life of so many saints and beautiful souls among Christians, and still more among Hindus and Buddhists, and also among the believers of other religions. However different were the dogmas impressed on their reason, the same inward, direct, intuitive knowledge, from which alone all virtue and holiness proceed, expressed itself in precisely the same way in the conduct of life. For here also the great distinction between intuitive and abstract knowledge shows itself; a distinction which is of such importance and universal application in our whole investigation, and which has hitherto been too little attended to. There is a wide gulf between the two, which can only be crossed by the aid of philosophy, as regards the knowledge of the nature of the world. Intuitively or in concreto, every man is really conscious of all philosophical truths, but to bring them to abstract knowledge, to reflection, is the work of philosophy, which neither ought nor is able to do more than this.

Thus it may be that the inner nature of holiness, self-renunciation, mortification of our own will, asceticism, is here for the first time expressed abstractly, and free from all mythical elements, as denial of the will to live, appearing after the complete knowledge of its own nature has become a quieter of all volition. On the other hand, it has been known directly and realised in practice by saints and ascetics, who had all the same inward knowledge, though they used very different language with regard to it, according to the dogmas which their reason had accepted, and in consequence of which an Indian, a Christian, or a Lama saint must each give a very different account of his conduct, which is, however, of no importance as regards the fact. A saint may be full of the absurdest superstition, or, on the contrary, he may be a philosopher, it is all the same. His conduct alone certifies that he is a saint, for, in a moral regard, it proceeds from knowledge of the world and its nature, which is not abstractly but intuitively and directly apprehended, and is only expressed by him in any dogma for the satisfaction of his reason. It is therefore just as little needful that a saint should be a philosopher as that a philosopher should be a saint; just as it is not necessary that a perfectly beautiful man should be a great sculptor, or that a great sculptor should himself be a beautiful man. In general, it is a strange demand upon a moralist that he should teach no other virtue than that which he himself possesses. To repeat the whole nature of the world abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts, and thus to store up, as it were, a reflected image of it in permanent concepts always at the command of the reason; this and nothing else is philosophy. I refer the reader to the passage quoted from Bacon in the First Book.

But the description I have given above of the denial of the will to live, of the conduct of a beautiful soul, of a resigned and voluntarily expiating saint, is merely abstract and general, and therefore cold. As the knowledge from which the denial of the will proceeds is intuitive and not abstract, it finds its most perfect expression, not in abstract conceptions, but in deeds and conduct. Therefore, in order to understand fully what we philosophically express as denial of the will to live, one must come to know examples of it in experience and actual life. Certainly they are not to be met with in daily experience: Nam omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt, Spinoza admirably says. Therefore, unless by a specially happy fate we are made eye-witnesses, we have to content ourselves with descriptions of the lives of such men. Indian literature, as we see from the little that we as yet know through translations, is very rich in descriptions of the lives of saints, penitents, Samanas or ascetics, Sannyâsis or mendicants, and whatever else they may be called. Even the well-known “Mythologie des Indous, par Mad. de Polier,” though by no means to be commended in every respect, contains many excellent examples of this kind (especially in ch. 13, vol. ii.) Among Christians also there is no lack of examples which afford us the illustrations we desire. See the biographies, for the most part badly written, of those persons who are sometimes called saintly souls, sometimes pietists, quietists, devout enthusiasts, and so forth. Collections of such biographies have been made at various times, such as Tersteegen's “Leben heiliger Seelen,” Reiz's “Geschichte der Wiedergeborennen,” in our own day, a collection by Kanne, which, with much that is bad, yet contains some good, and especially the “Leben der Beata Sturmin.” To this category very properly belongs the life of St. Francis of Assisi, that true personification of the ascetic, and prototype of all mendicant friars. His life, described by his younger contemporary, St. Bonaventura, also famous as a scholastic, has recently been republished. “Vita S. Francisci a S. Bonaventura concinnata” (Soest, 1847), though shortly before a painstaking and detailed biography, making use of all sources of information, appeared in France, “Histoire de S. François d'Assise, par Chavin de Mallan” (1845). As an Oriental parallel of these monastic writings we have the very valuable work of Spence Hardy, “Eastern Monachism; an Account of the Order of Mendicants founded by Gotama Budha” (1850). It shows us the same thing in another dress. We also see what a matter of indifference it is whether it proceeds from a theistical or an atheistical religion. But as a special and exceedingly full example and practical illustration of the conceptions I have established, I can thoroughly recommend the “Autobiography of Madame de Guion.” To become acquainted with this great and beautiful soul, the very thought of whom always fills me with reverence, and to do justice to the excellence of her disposition while making allowance for the superstition of her reason, must be just as delightful to every man of the better sort as with vulgar thinkers, i. e., the majority, that book will always stand in bad repute. For it is the case with regard to everything, that each man can only prize that which to a certain extent is analogous to him and for which he has at least a slight inclination. This holds good of ethical concerns as well as of intellectual. We might to a certain extent regard the well-known French biography of Spinoza as a case in point, if we used as a key to it that noble introduction to his very insufficient essay, “De Emendatione Intellectus,” a passage which I can also recommend as the most effectual means I know of stilling the storm of the passions. Finally, even the great Goethe, Greek as he is, did not think it below his dignity to show us this most beautiful side of humanity in the magic mirror of poetic art, for he represented the life of Fräulein Klettenberg in an idealised form in his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” and later, in his own biography, gave us also an historical account of it. Besides this, he twice told the story of the life of St. Philippo Neri. The history of the world, will, and indeed must, keep silence about the men whose conduct is the best and only adequate illustration of this important point of our investigation, for the material of the history of the world is quite different, and indeed opposed to this. It is not the denial of the will to live, but its assertion and its manifestation in innumerable individuals in which its conflict with itself at the highest grade of its objectification appears with perfect distinctness, and brings before our eyes, now the ascendancy of the individual through prudence, now the might of the many through their mass, now the might of chance personified as fate, always the vanity and emptiness of the whole effort. We, however, do not follow here the course of phenomena in time, but, as philosophers, we seek to investigate the ethical significance of action, and take this as the only criterion of what for us is significant and important. Thus we will not be withheld by any fear of the constant numerical superiority of vulgarity and dulness from acknowledging that the greatest, most important, and most significant phenomenon that the world can show is not the conqueror of the world, but the subduer of it; is nothing but the quiet, unobserved life of a man who has attained to the knowledge in consequence of which he surrenders and denies that will to live which fills everything and strives and strains in all, and which first gains freedom here in him alone, so that his conduct becomes the exact opposite of that of other men. In this respect, therefore, for the philosopher, these accounts of the lives of holy, self-denying men, badly as they are generally written, and mixed as they are with superstition and nonsense, are, because of the significance of the material, immeasurably more instructive and important than even Plutarch and Livy.