Action

Fourth Book. The World As Will. Second Aspect. The Assertion And Denial Of The Will To Live, When Self-Consciousness Has Been Attained. Tempore quo cognitio simul advenit, amor e medio supersurrexit.—Oupnek’hat, Studio Anquetil Duperron, vol. ii. p. 216.

This Book is the most serious for it relates to the action of men.

The nature of man relates everything else to action, that in every systematic investigation he will always treat the part that has to do with action as the result or outcome of the whole work, so far, at least, as it interests him, and will therefore give his most serious attention to this part, even if to no other. In this respect the following part of our work would, in ordinary language, be called practical philosophy, in opposition to the theoretical, which has occupied us hitherto. But, in my opinion, all philosophy is theoretical, because it is essential to it that it should retain a purely contemplative attitude, and should investigate, not prescribe. To become, on the contrary, practical, to guide conduct, to transform character, are old claims, which with fuller insight it ought finally to give up. For here, where 351 the worth or worthlessness of an existence, where salvation or damnation are in question, the dead conceptions of philosophy do not decide the matter, but the inmost nature of man himself, the Dæmon that guides him and that has not chosen him, but been chosen by him, as Plato would say; his intelligible character, as Kant expresses himself. Virtue cannot be taught any more than genius; indeed, for it the concept is just as unfruitful as it is in art, and in both cases can only be used as an instrument. It would, [350] therefore, be just as absurd to expect that our moral systems and ethics will produce virtuous, noble, and holy men, as that our æsthetics will produce poets, painters, and musicians. Philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what is given. It can only bring to distinct abstract knowledge of the reason the nature of the world which in the concrete, that is, as feeling, expresses itself comprehensibly to every one. This, however, it does in every possible reference and from every point of view. Now, as this attempt has been made from other points of view in the three preceding books with the generality that is proper to philosophy, in this book the action of men will be considered in the same way; and this side of the world might, indeed, be considered the most important of all, not only subjectively, as I remarked above, but also objectively. In considering it I shall faithfully adhere to the method I have hitherto followed, and shall support myself by presupposing all that has already been advanced. There is, indeed, just one thought which forms the content of this whole work. I have endeavoured to work it out in all other spheres, and I shall now do so with regard to human action. I shall then have done all that is in my power to communicate it as fully as possible. The given point of view, and the method of treatment announced, are themselves sufficient to indicate that in this ethical book no precepts, no doctrine of duty must be looked for; still less will a general moral principle be given, an universal receipt, as it were, for the production of all the virtues. 352 The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) Neither shall we talk of an “absolute ought,” for this contains a contradiction, as is explained in the Appendix; nor yet of a “law of freedom,” which is in the same position. In general, we shall not speak at all of “ought,” for this is how one speaks to children and to nations still in their childhood, but not to those who have appropriated all the culture of a full-grown age.[351] It is a palpable contradiction to call the will free, and yet to prescribe laws for it according to which it ought to will. “Ought to will!”—wooden iron! But it follows from the point of view of our system that the will is not only free, but almighty. From it proceeds not only its action, but also its world; and as the will is, so does its action and its world become. Both are the self- knowledge of the will and nothing more. The will determines itself, and at the same time both its action and its world; for besides it there is nothing, and these are the will itself. Only thus is the will truly autonomous, and from every other point of view it is heteronomous. Our philosophical endeavours can only extend to exhibiting and explaining the action of men in its inner nature and content, the various and even opposite maxims, whose living expression it is. This we shall do in connection with the preceding portion of our work, and in precisely the same way as we have hitherto explained the other phenomena of the world, and have sought to bring their inmost nature to distinct abstract knowledge. Our philosophy will maintain the same immanency in the case of action, as in all that we have hitherto considered. Notwithstanding Kant’s great doctrine, it will not attempt to use the forms of the phenomenon, the universal expression of which is the principle of sufficient reason, as a leaping-pole to jump over the phenomenon itself, which alone gives meaning to these forms, and land in the boundless sphere of empty fictions. But this actual world of experience, in which we are, and which is in us, remains both the material and the limits of our consideration: a world which is so rich in content that even the most searching investigation of which the human mind is capable could not 353 exhaust it. Since then the real world of experience will never fail to afford material and reality to our ethical investigations, any more than to those we have already conducted, nothing will be less needful than to take refuge in negative conceptions void of [352] content, and then somehow or other make even ourselves believe that we are saying something when we speak with lifted eyebrows of “absolutes,” “infinites,” “supersensibles,” and whatever other mere negations of this sort there may be (ø≈¥μΩ μ√ƒπ, ∑ ƒø ƒ∑¬ √ƒμ¡∑√μ…¬ øΩøº±, ºμƒ± ±º≈¥¡±¬ μ¿πΩø𱬗nihil est, nisi negationis nomen, cum obscura notione.—Jul. or. 5), instead of which it would be shorter to say at once cloud-cuckoo-town (Ωμ∆μªø∫ø∫∫≈≥π±): we shall not require to serve up covered empty dishes of this kind. Finally, we shall not in this book, any more than in those which have preceded it, narrate histories and give them out as philosophy. For we are of opinion that whoever supposes that the inner nature of the world can in any way, however plausibly disguised, be historically comprehended, is infinitely far from a philosophical knowledge of the world. Yet this is what is supposed whenever a “becoming,” or a “having become,” or an “about to become” enters into a theory of the nature of the world, whenever an earlier or a later has the least place in it; and in this way a beginning and an end of the world, and the path it pursues between them, is, either openly or disguisedly, both sought for and found, and the individual who philosophises even recognises his own position on that path. Such historical philosophising in most cases produces a cosmogony which admits of many varieties, or else a system of emanations, a doctrine of successive disengagements from one being; or, finally, driven in despair from fruitless efforts upon these paths to the last path of all, it takes refuge in the converse doctrine of a constant becoming, springing up, arising, coming to light out of darkness, out of the hidden ground source or groundlessness, or whatever other nonsense of this sort there may be, which is most shortly disposed of with the remark that at the present moment a whole eternity, i.e., an endless time, has already passed, so that everything that can or ought to become must have already done so. For all such historical philosophy, whatever airs it may give itself, regards time just as if Kant had never lived, as a quality of the thing-in-itself, and thus stops at that which Kant calls the phenomenon in opposition to the thing-in-itself; which Plato calls the becoming and never being, in opposition to the being and never becoming; and which, finally, is called in the Indian philosophy the web of Mâya. It is just the knowledge which belongs to the principle of sufficient reason, with which no one can penetrate to the inner nature of things, but endlessly pursues phenomena, moving without end or aim, like a squirrel in its wheel, till, tired out at last, he stops at some point or other arbitrarily chosen, and now desires to extort respect for it from others also. The genuine philosophical consideration of the world, i.e., the consideration that affords us a knowledge of its inner nature, and so leads us beyond the phenomenon, is precisely that method which does not concern itself with the whence, the whither, and the why of the world, but always and everywhere demands only the what; the method which considers things not according to any relation, not as becoming and passing away, in short, not according to one of the four forms of the principle of sufficient reason; but, on the contrary, just that which remains when all that belongs to the form of knowledge proper to that principle has been abstracted, the inner nature of the world, which always appears unchanged in all the relations, but is itself never subject to them, and has the Ideas of the world as its object or material. From such knowledge as this proceeds philosophy, like art, and also, as we shall see in this book, that disposition of mind which alone leads to true holiness and to deliverance from the world.