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

But the matter might be put in this way. One might say that materialism, as it has hitherto appeared, has only failed because it did not adequately know the matter out of which it thought to construct the world, and therefore was dealing, not with matter itself, but with a propertyless substitute for it. If, on the contrary, instead of this, it had taken the actual and empirically given matter (i. e., material substance, or rather substances), endowed as it is with all physical, chemical, electrical properties, and also with the power of spontaneously producing life out of itself, thus the true mater rerum, from the obscurity of whose womb all phenomena and forms come forth, to fall back into it some time again; from this, i. e., from matter fully comprehended and exhaustively known, a world might have been constructed of which materialism would not need to be ashamed. Quite true: only the trick would then consist in this, that the Quæsita had been placed in the Data, for professedly what was taken as given, and made the starting-point of the deduction, was mere matter, but really it included all the mysterious forces of nature which cling to it, or more correctly, by means of it become visible to us, much the same as if under the name of the dish we understand what lies upon it. For in fact, for our knowledge, matter is really merely the vehicle of the qualities and natural forces, which appear as its accidents, and just because I have traced these back to the will I call matter the mere visibility of the will. Stripped of all these qualities, matter remains behind as that which is without qualities, the caput mortuum of nature, out of which nothing can honestly be made. If, on the contrary, in the manner referred to, one leaves it all these properties, one is guilty of a concealed petitio principii, for one has assumed the Quæsita beforehand as Data. But what is accomplished with this will no longer be a proper materialism, but merely naturalism, i. e., an absolute system of physics, which, as was shown in chap. 17 already referred to, can never assume and fill the place of metaphysics, just because it only begins after so many assumptions, thus never undertakes to explain things from the foundation. Mere naturalism is therefore essentially based simply upon qualitates occultæ, which one can never get beyond except, as I have done, by calling in the aid of the subjective source of knowledge, which then certainly leads to the long and toilsome round-about path of metaphysics, for it presupposes the complete analysis of self-consciousness and of the intellect and will given in it. However, the starting from what is objective, at the foundation of which lies external perception, so distinct and comprehensible, is a path so natural and which presents itself of its own accord to man, that naturalism, and consequently, because this cannot satisfy as it is not exhaustive, materialism, are systems to which the speculative reason must necessarily have come, nay, must have come first of all. Therefore at the very beginning of the history of philosophy we meet naturalism, in the systems of the Ionic philosophers, and then materialism in the teaching of Leucippus and Democritus, and also later we see them ever appear anew from time to time.

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

Even the merely empirical consideration of nature recognises a constant transition from the simplest and most necessary manifestation of a universal force of nature up to the life and consciousness of man himself, through gentle gradations, and with only relative, and for the most part fluctuating, limits. Reflection, following this view, and penetrating somewhat more deeply into it, will soon be led to the conviction that in all these phenomena, the inner nature, that which manifests itself, that which appears, is one and the same, which comes forth ever more distinctly; and accordingly that what exhibits itself in a million forms of infinite diversity, and so carries on the most varied and the strangest play without beginning or end, this is one being which is so closely disguised behind all these masks that it does not even recognise itself, and therefore often treats itself roughly. Thus the great doctrine of the ἑν και παν early appeared both in the east and in the west, and, in spite of all contradiction, has asserted itself, or at least constantly revived. We, however, have now entered even deeper into the secret, since by what has already been said we have been led to the insight that when in any phenomenon a knowing consciousness is added to that inner being which lies at the foundation of all phenomena, a consciousness which when directed inwardly becomes self-consciousness, then that inner being presents itself to this self-consciousness as that which is so familiar and so mysterious, and is denoted by the word will. Accordingly we have called that universal fundamental nature of all phenomena the will, after that manifestation in which it unveils itself to us most fully; and by this word nothing is further from our intention than to denote an unknown x; but, on the contrary, we denote that which at least on one side is infinitely better known and more intimate than anything else.

Let us now call to mind a truth, the fullest and most thorough proof of which will be found in my prize essay on the freedom of the will – the truth that on account of the absolutely universal validity of the law of causality, the conduct or the action of all existences in this world is always strictly necessitated by the causes which in each case call it forth. And in this respect it makes no difference whether such an action has been occasioned by causes in the strictest sense of the word, or by stimuli, or finally by motives, for these differences refer only to the grade of the susceptibility of the different kinds of existences. On this point we must entertain no illusion: the law of causality knows no exception; but everything, from the movement of a mote in a sunbeam to the most deeply considered action of man, is subject to it with equal strictness. Therefore, in the whole course of the world, neither could a mote in a sunbeam describe any other line in its flight than it has described, nor a man act any other way than he has acted; and no truth is more certain than this, that all that happens, be it small or great, happens with absolute necessity. Consequently, at every given moment of time, the whole condition of all things is firmly and accurately determined by the condition which has just preceded it, and so is it with the stream of time back to infinity and on to infinity. Thus the course of the world is like that of a clock after it has been put together and wound up; thus from this incontestable point of view it is a mere machine, the aim of which we cannot see. Even if, quite without justification, nay, at bottom, in spite of all conceivability and its conformity to law, one should assume a first beginning, nothing would thereby be essentially changed. For the arbitrarily assumed first condition of things would at its origin have irrevocably determined and fixed, both as a whole and down to the smallest detail, the state immediately following it; this state, again, would have determined the one succeeding it, and so on per secula seculorum, for the chain of causality, with its absolute strictness – this brazen bond of necessity and fate – introduces every phenomenon irrevocably and unalterably, just as it is. The difference merely amounts to this, that in the case of the one assumption we would have before us a piece of clockwork which had once been wound up, but in the case of the other a perpetual motion; the necessity of the course, on the other hand, would remain the same. In the prize essay already referred to I have irrefutably proved that the action of man can make no exception here, for I showed how it constantly proceeds with strict necessity from two factors – his character and the motives which come to him. The character is inborn and unalterable; the motives are introduced with necessity under the guidance of causality by the strictly determined course of the world.

Accordingly then, from one point of view, which we certainly cannot abandon, because it is established by the objective laws of the world, which are a priori valid, the world, with all that is in it, appears as an aimless, and therefore incomprehensible, play of an eternal necessity, an inscrutable and inexorable Αναγκη. Now, what is objectionable, nay, revolting, in this inevitable and irrefutable view of the world cannot be thoroughly done away with by any assumption except this, that as in one aspect every being in the world is a phenomenon, and necessarily determined by the laws of the phenomenon, in another aspect it is in itself will, and indeed absolutely free will, for necessity only arises through the forms which belong entirely to the phenomenon, through the principle of sufficient reason in its different modes. Such a will, then, must be self-dependent, for, as free, i. e., as a thing in itself, and therefore not subject to the principle of sufficient reason, it cannot depend upon another in its being and nature any more than in its conduct and action. By this assumption alone will as much freedom be supposed as is needed to counterbalance the inevitable strict necessity which governs the course of the world. Accordingly one has really only the choice either of seeing that the world is a mere machine which runs on of necessity, or of recognising a free will as its inner being whose manifestation is not directly the action but primarily the existence and nature of things. This freedom is therefore transcendental, and consists with empirical necessity, in the same way as the transcendental ideality of phenomena consists with their empirical reality. That only under this assumption the action of a man, in spite of the necessity with which it proceeds from his character and the motives, is yet his own I have shown in my prize essay on the freedom of the will; with this, however, self-dependency is attributed to his nature. The same relation holds good of all things in the world. The strictest necessity, carried out honestly with rigid consistency, and the most perfect freedom, rising to omnipotence, had to appear at once and together in philosophy; but, without doing violence to truth, this could only take place by placing the whole necessity in the acting and doing (Operari), and the whole freedom in the being and nature (Esse). Thereby a riddle is solved which is as old as the world, simply because it has hitherto always been held upside down and the freedom persistently sought in the Operari, the necessity in the Esse. I, on the contrary, say: Every being without exception acts with strict necessity, but it exists and is what it is by virtue of its freedom. Thus with me freedom and necessity are to be met with neither more nor less than in any earlier system; although now one and now the other must be conspicuous according as one takes offence that will is attributed to processes of nature which hitherto were explained from necessity, or that the same strict necessity is recognised in motivation as in mechanical causality. The two have merely changed places: freedom has been transferred to the Esse, and necessity limited to the Operari.

In short, Determinism stands firm. For fifteen hundred years men have wearied themselves in vain to shake it, influenced by certain crotchets, which are well known, but dare scarcely yet be called by their name. Yet in accordance with it the world becomes a mere puppet-show, drawn by wires (motives), without it being even possible to understand for whose amusement. If the piece has a plan, then fate is the director; if it has none, then blind necessity. There is no other deliverance from this absurdity than the knowledge that the being and nature of all things is the manifestation of a really free will, which knows itself in them; for their doing and acting cannot be delivered from necessity. To save freedom from fate and chance, it had to be transferred from the action to the existence.

As now necessity only affects the phenomenon, not the thing in itself, i. e., the true nature of the world, so also does multiplicity. This is sufficiently explained in § 25 of the first volume. I have only to add here one remark in confirmation and illustration of this truth.

Every one knows only one being quite immediately – his own will in self-consciousness. Everything else he knows only indirectly, and then judges it by analogy with this; a process which he carries further in proportion to the grade of his reflective powers. Even this ultimately springs from the fact that there really is only one being; the illusion of multiplicity (Maja), which proceeds from the forms of external, objective comprehension, could not penetrate to inner, simple consciousness; therefore this always finds before it only one being.

If we consider the perfection of the works of nature, which can never be sufficiently admired, and which even in the lowest and smallest organisms, for example, in the fertilising parts of plants or in the internal construction of insects, is carried out with as infinite care and unwearied labour as if each work of nature had been its only one, upon which it was therefore able to expend all its art and power; if we yet find this repeated an infinite number of times in each one of innumerable individuals of every kind, and not less carefully worked out in that one whose dwelling-place is the most lonely, neglected spot, to which, till then, no eye had penetrated; if we now follow the combination of the parts of every organism as far as we can, and yet never come upon one part which is quite simple, and therefore ultimate, not to speak of one which is inorganic; if, finally, we lose ourselves in calculating the design of all those parts of the organism for the maintenance of the whole by virtue of which every living thing is complete in and for itself; if we consider at the same time that each of these masterpieces, itself of short duration, has already been produced anew an innumerable number of times, and yet every example of a species, every insect, every flower, every leaf, still appears just as carefully perfected as was the first of its kind; thus that nature by no means wearies and begins to bungle, but, with equally patient master-hand, perfects the last like the first: then we become conscious, first of all, that all human art is completely different, not merely in degree, but in kind, from the works of nature; and, next, that the working force, the natura naturans, in each of its innumerable works, in the least as in the greatest, in the last as in the first, is immediately present whole and undivided, from which it follows that, as such and in itself, it knows nothing of space and time. If we further reflect that the production of these hyperboles of all works of art costs nature absolutely nothing, so that, with inconceivable prodigality, she creates millions of organisms which never attain to maturity, and without sparing exposes every living thing to a thousand accidents, yet, on the other hand, if favoured by chance or directed by human purpose, readily affords millions of examples of a species of which hitherto there was only one, so that millions cost her no more than one; this also leads us to see that the multiplicity of things has its root in the nature of the knowledge of the subject, but is foreign to the thing in itself, i. e., to the inner primary force which shows itself in things; that consequently space and time, upon which the possibility of all multiplicity depends, are mere forms of our perception; nay, that even that whole inconceivable ingenuity of structure associated with the reckless prodigality of the works upon which it has been expended ultimately springs simply from the way in which things are apprehended by us; for when the simple and indivisible original effort of the will exhibits itself as object in our cerebral knowledge, it must appear as an ingenious combination of separate parts, as means and ends of each other, accomplished with wonderful completeness.

The unity of that will, here referred to, which lies beyond the phenomenon, and in which we have recognised the inner nature of the phenomenal world, is a metaphysical unity, and consequently transcends the knowledge of it, i. e., does not depend upon the functions of our intellect, and therefore can not really be comprehended by it. Hence it arises that it opens to the consideration an abyss so profound that it admits of no thoroughly clear and systematically connected insight, but grants us only isolated glances, which enable us to recognise this unity in this and that relation of things, now in the subjective, now in the objective sphere, whereby, however, new problems are again raised, all of which I will not engage to solve, but rather appeal here to the words est quadam prodire tenus, more concerned to set up nothing false or arbitrarily invented than to give a thorough account of all; – at the risk of giving here only a fragmentary exposition.

If we call up to our minds and distinctly go through in thought the exceedingly acute theory of the origin of the planetary system, first put forth by Kant and later by Laplace, a theory of which it is scarcely possible to doubt the correctness, we see the lowest, crudest, and blindest forces of nature bound to the most rigid conformity to law, by means of their conflict for one and the same given matter, and the accidental results brought about by this produce the framework of the world, thus of the designedly prepared future dwelling-place of innumerable living beings, as a system of order and harmony, at which we are the more astonished the more distinctly and accurately we come to understand it. For example, if we see that every planet, with its present velocity, can only maintain itself exactly where it actually has its place, because if it were brought nearer to the sun it would necessarily fall into it, or if placed further from it would necessarily fly away from it; how, conversely, if we take the place as given, it can only remain there with its present velocity and no other, because if it went faster it would necessarily fly away from the sun, and if it went slower it would necessarily fall into it; that thus only one definite place is suitable to each definite velocity of a planet; and if we now see this solved by the fact that the same physical, necessary, and blindly acting cause which appointed it its place, at the same time and just by doing so, imparted to it exactly the only velocity suitable for this place, in consequence of the law of nature that a revolving body increases its velocity in proportion as its revolution becomes smaller; and, moreover, if finally we understand how endless permanence is assured to the whole system, by the fact that all the mutual disturbances of the course of the planets which unavoidably enter, must adjust themselves in time; how then it is just the irrationality of the periods of revolution of Jupiter and Saturn to each other that prevents their respective perturbations from repeating themselves at one place, whereby they would become dangerous, and brings it about that, appearing seldom and always at a different place, they must sublate themselves again, like dissonances in music which are again resolved into harmony. By means of such considerations we recognise a design and perfection, such as could only have been brought about by the freest absolute will directed by the most penetrating understanding and the most acute calculation. And yet, under the guidance of that cosmogony of Laplace, so well thought out and so accurately calculated, we cannot prevent ourselves from seeing that perfectly blind forces of nature, acting according to unalterable natural laws, through their conflict and aimless play among themselves, could produce nothing else but this very framework of the world, which is equal to the work of an extraordinarily enhanced power of combination. Instead now, after the manner of Anaxagoras, of dragging in the aid of an intelligence known to us only from animal nature, and adapted only to its aims, an intelligence which, coming from without, cunningly made use of the existing forces of nature and their laws in order to carry out its ends, which are foreign to these, – we recognise in these lowest forces of nature themselves that same, one will, which indeed first manifests itself in them, and already in this manifestation striving after its goal, through its original laws themselves works towards its final end, to which therefore all that happens according to blind laws of nature must minister and correspond. And this indeed cannot be otherwise, because everything material is nothing but just the phenomenal appearance, the visibility, the objectivity of the will to live which is one. Thus even the lowest forces of nature themselves are animated by that same will, which afterwards, in the individual beings provided with intelligence, marvels at its own work, as the somnambulist wonders in the morning at what he has done in his sleep; or, more accurately, which is astonished at its own form which it beholds in the mirror. This unity which is here proved of the accidental with the intentional, of the necessary with the free, on account of which the blindest chances, which, however, rest upon universal laws of nature, are as it were the keys upon which the world-spirit plays its melodies so full of significance, – this unity, I say, is, as has already been remarked, an abyss in the investigation into which even philosophy can throw no full light, but only a glimmer.

But I now turn to a subjective consideration belonging to this place, to which, however, I am able to give still less distinctness than to the objective consideration which has just been set forth; for I shall only be able to express it by images and similes. Why is our consciousness brighter and more distinct the further it extends towards without, so that its greatest clearness lies in sense perception, which already half belongs to things outside us, – and, on the other hand, grows dimmer as we go in, and leads, if followed to its inmost recesses, to a darkness in which all knowledge ceases? Because, I say, consciousness presupposes individuality; but this belongs to the mere phenomenon, for it is conditioned by the forms of the phenomenon, space and time, as multiplicity of the similar. Our inner nature, on the other hand, has its root in that which is no longer phenomenon, but thing in itself, to which, therefore, the forms of the phenomenon do not extend; and thus the chief conditions of individuality are wanting, and with these the distinctness of consciousness falls off. In this root of existence the difference of beings ceases, like that of the radii of a sphere in the centre; and as in the sphere the surface is produced by the radii ending and breaking off, so consciousness is only possible where the true inner being runs out into the phenomenon, through whose forms the separate individuality becomes possible upon which consciousness depends, which is just on that account confined to phenomena. Therefore all that is distinct and thoroughly comprehensible in our consciousness always lies without upon this surface of the sphere. Whenever, on the contrary, we withdraw entirely from this, consciousness forsakes us, – in sleep, in death, to a certain extent also in magnetic or magic influences; for these all lead through the centre. But just because distinct consciousness, being confined to the surface of the sphere, is not directed towards the centre, it recognises other individuals certainly as of the same kind, but not as identical, which yet in themselves they are. Immortality of the individual might be compared to a point of the surface flying off at a tangent. But immortality, by virtue of the eternal nature of the inner being of the whole phenomenon, may be compared to the return of that point, on the radius, to the centre, of which the whole surface is just the extension. The will as the thing in itself is whole and undivided in every being, as the centre is an integral part of every radius; while the peripherical end of this radius is in the most rapid revolution, with the surface, which represents time and its content, the other end, at the centre, which represents eternity, remains in the profoundest peace, because the centre is the point of which the rising half is not different from the sinking. Therefore in the Bhagavad-gita it is said: “Haud distributum animantibus, et quasi distributum tamen insidens, animantiumque sustentaculum id cognoscendum, edax et rursus genitale” (Lect. 13, 16 vers. Schlegel). Certainly we fall here into mystical and figurative language, but it is the only language in which anything can be said on this entirely transcendent theme. So this simile also may pass. The human race may be imagined as an animal compositum, a form of life of which many polypi, especially those which swim, such as Veretillum, Funiculina, and others, afford examples. As in these the head isolates each individual animal, and the lower part, with the common stomach, combines them all in the unity of one life process, so the brain with its consciousness isolates the human individual, while the unconscious part, the vegetative life with its ganglion system, into which in sleep the brain-consciousness disappears, like a lotus which nightly sinks in the flood, is a common life of all, by means of which in exceptional cases they can even communicate, as, for example, occurs when dreams communicate themselves directly, the thoughts of the mesmeriser pass into the somnambulist, and finally also in the magnetic or generally magical influence proceeding from intentional willing. Such an influence, if it occurs, is toto genere different from every other on account of the influxus physicus which takes place, for it is really an actio in distans which the will, certainly proceeding from the individual, yet performs in its metaphysical quality as the omnipresent substratum of the whole of nature. One might also say that as in the generatio æquivoca there sometimes and as an exception appears a weak residue of the original creative power of the will, which in the existing forms of nature has already done its work and is extinguished, so there may be, exceptionally, acting in these magical influences, as it were, a surplus of its original omnipotence, which completes its work and spends itself in the construction and maintenance of the organisms. I have spoken fully of this magical property of the will in “The Will in Nature,” and I gladly omit here discussions which have to appeal to uncertain facts, which yet cannot be altogether ignored or denied.