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Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Introduction copyright © Eugene Thacker 2020

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ISBN: 9781913462031

Ebook ISBN: 9781913462048

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

A PHILOSOPHY IN RUINS, AN UNQUIET VOID

BY EUGENE THACKER

A NOTE ON THIS EDITION

1. ON THE VANITY AND SUFFERING OF LIFE

2. ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE VANITY OF EXISTENCE

3. ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE SUFFERING OF THE WORLD

4. ON DEATH AND ITS RELATION TO THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF OUR INNER NATURE

5. ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF OUR TRUE NATURE BY DEATH

6. ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE DENIAL OF THE WILL-TO-LIVE

7. ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE AFFIRMATION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL-TO-LIVE

8. ON SUICIDE

CHRONOLOGY — LIFE OF SCHOPENHAUER

FURTHER READING

Portrait photograph of Arthur Schopenhauer, 1859

INTRODUCTION

∼

A PHILOSOPHY IN RUINS, AN UNQUIET VOID

As soon as I began to think, I found myself at variance with the world.

∼ Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains

1. IN THIS COLONY

In the south of France lies the Mediterranean city of Toulon, where to this day there are ruins that once belonged to the infamous penal colony, the so-called “Bagne of Toulon.” Established in 1748 by King Louis XV, it was created to house the prisoners who had been sentenced to row in the galleys of the French navy, the ships of which had since been decommissioned. While prisoners continued to be confined to the galleys, the penal colony also housed prisoners in large, dry-docked prison ships, in newly-constructed makeshift halls, and in disused armories. As the prison’s population steadily grew, the already-deplorable conditions of the penal colony further declined. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Bagne of Toulon held over four thousand prisoners, organized into different classes according to their crimes and sentences. Shackled, malnourished, sickly, and abandoned to forced labor, the harrowing conditions of the Bagne of Toulon have become the stuff of myth, most famously depicted in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables.

It was this scene that a sixteen-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer witnessed first-hand as part of a European tour with his family — and here I should add something to this brief description. The penal colony in Toulon not only had a practical function; or rather, we should say it had two practical functions. One was the incarceration of the prisoners into a stratified, miniature city-within-a-city. But government officials also seemed to understand the moral, political, and even existential functions of allowing the colony to be seen and to be put on display. Thus, by the early nineteenth century, the Bagne of Toulon had also become a spectacle, a tourist destination for travelers passing through the south of France. Guided tours allowed visitors to see first-hand the dual horrors of a life of crime and a life of incarceration. Prisoners put on a display for viewers, staggering and shackled, a garish and unsettling theater of moral didacticism that seemed to evoke the lower circles of Dante’s Inferno or to look forward to the extremes of the Grand Guignol. And it was here that the wayward, brooding, teenaged Schopenhauer had a kind of epiphany.

To be sure, the Schopenhauers’ tour was not all gloom and doom. Young Schopenhauer witnessed a wide range of European culture and life, from regional festivals to religious ceremonies, from bustling cities to remote landscapes, a heady mix of languages, customs, cuisine, art, and the like; Amsterdam, London, Paris, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Le Havre, Geneva, the Alps, Vienna, Berlin — all the sights and sounds that European culture had to offer an educated, mercantile, bourgeois family. Schopenhauer’s travel diary from this period offers evidence of these varied experiences — though it is written in a balanced, almost detached tone. In London, for example, the performance of a ventriloquist one day will elicit the same detached response that a visit to Westminster Abbey will the next. Even a public hanging in London elicits no more intense a response than that of the ventriloquist (though Schopenhauer notes, almost clinically, that even during the “sad spectacle” of their deaths, as the rope is placed around the necks of the convicted, “their souls already appeared to be in the next world…”[1])

The one experience that does make an impact on Schopenhauer is the penal colony. Here Schopenhauer’s diary breaks its predictable formality and something else peaks through. In his 1804 diary, he reflects on the scene, noting the stratification of prisoners, the differences in their punishment, the types of labor performed, and so on. Those who have committed serious crimes “work in twos, chained together by their feet with heavy chains,” while the most severe criminals “are forged to the benches of the galley which they do not leave at all.” In disbelief Schopenhauer continues, his writing already becoming metaphorical: “I do not understand how, without more substantive nourishment and consumed by grief, they do not succumb to their heavy labor; for during their slavery they are treated entirely like beasts of burden.” He notes the architecture of the carceral surroundings, the “old condemned ships” which to Schopenhauer “seem to be the dirtiest, the most revolting place of sojourn imaginable.” Of existence in this place, he writes: “it is terrible to think that the life of these miserable galley slaves, if that is not an exaggerated word, is totally devoid of joy: and for those whose sufferings have no end even after twenty-five years, also totally devoid of hope.” Schopenhauer then begins to pose questions it is too tempting not to call “philosophical”: “And when finally, the moment arrives which one has longed for with desperate sighs for ten or twelve years: the end of slavery: what is to become of this person? They return to a world for which they have been dead for ten years.”[2]

Without really knowing it, Schopenhauer began to glean an insight from this haunting scene: the penal colony outside the penal colony. One escapes a prison of suffering only to enter another prison, and so on. It is manifest for the brooding teenager not in the minutiae of local politics, French history, or the punitive mechanics of the legal system, but in the contorted and stressed bodies of the prisoners, in their world-weary physiognomies: “can one imagine a more terrible sensation than that of those wretches, chained to a bench in the dark galley, from which nothing but death can sever them!” Remarkably, he then adds, with uncanny precision, “for some perhaps the sufferings are made worse by the inseparable company of the one chained to them by the same chain.” I can’t stand my neighbor. The entire experience is summed up in the diary’s most concise line: “the fate of these unfortunates seems to me far more terrible than a death sentence.”[3]

Though only dimly aware of it, in his travel diary the young Schopenhauer had written a parable, an allegory of suffering for which his philosophy would be known many years later. But let’s be clear: at this stage Schopenhauer is not yet the head-strong university student steeped in the sciences; nor is he yet the author of the ambitious tome The World as Will and Representation, with its multiple allusions to classical Indian and Buddhist philosophies as well as Kant and Plato; nor is he yet the failed university professor venomously at odds with “professional philosophy” in the academy and its “forgettable charlatanism” of intellectual fads; nor is he yet the “misanthropic sage of Frankfurt” of his last years, taking his daily walks, grumbling under his breath, resigned to a willful obscurity, living the life of a solitary (with the exception of his beloved dog, Atma). At this stage Schopenhauer is simply a drifting, unfocused, stubborn teenager half-heartedly passing the time, procrastinating the inevitable decision laid out for him by his parents: to go into the family business. But it is entirely possible the scene of the penal colony provoked a kind of existential dread in him. In letters to her son during this time, Schopenhauer’s mother Joanna, a bit exasperated, already worries about Arthur’s “brooding melancholy,” the kind of Weltzschmerz that is not only the stuff of German Romantic poetry but also young adult fiction.

Taking all this into account, what is fascinating about Schopenhauer’s narrative of the penal colony is how provocational — or better, invocational — it is. The experience, and his writing about it, seem almost like an invitation, a calling to a trade. To acknowledge suffering and to reflect on it. Even the scenes of the public execution in London, or the massive Roman funerary ruins in Nîmes, do not elicit this kind of reflection from him. Why? In short, these scenes are about death. The penal colony, by contrast, is about life. Death is, well, death. Schopenhauer grew up in an “Enlightened” household where Voltaire was read more than the Bible, and, while Schopenhauer does acknowledge the primordial fear of death that is part of living a human life, he is more affected by something else: not the fear of death, but the dread of life. Years prior to having read Meister Eckhart or the Upanishads, Schopenhauer seems to be taken with the deep correspondences between living and suffering. Years before the works of Plato and the Vedas articulate for him the idea of the illusory nature of all reality, it’s as if the theater of suffering at Toulon deliriously transforms the entire world outside of Toulon into a penal colony. So deeply does the theme of suffering take hold that it haunts him years afterwards. Almost ten years later, Schopenhauer is living in Berlin. In his notebooks he writes: “How can it really surprise us that this world is the realm of chance, error and folly that cripples wisdom?”[4]

I am, admittedly, making a big deal out of this. Nothing invites intellectual laziness more than the benefit of hindsight. But if we can consider this experience — and more importantly, the subsequent writing and reflection on the experience — as part of what makes Schopenhauer the kind of thinker he is, then it may explain comments like the following, made almost thirty years later in one of his last notebooks:

When I was seventeen, without any proper schooling, I was affected by the misery and wretchedness of life, as was the Buddha when in his youth he caught sight of sickness, old age, pain and death… the destiny of suffering is written all over human existence; it is deeply immersed in suffering, never escapes this and its continuation and termination are always tragic; here a certain deliberateness is unmistakable.[5]

On the one hand, it seems a bit self-aggrandizing to compare oneself to the Buddha. Then again, isn’t that the point of the parable, that in becoming aware of suffering we are all the Buddha? Unfortunately, not all of us glean insights from this. Instead, something else takes place. The struggle to live in relation to suffering, knowing that there is no suffering without living. The famous first sermon of the Buddha outlines the dense and complex concept of the Sanskrit term duḥkha: “Now this,” the sermon begins, “is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering…”[6] It’s clear from the Buddhist sutras that “suffering” is more than stubbing one’s toe or things not going your way. It is part of the texture of living, in and through time, bounded by mortality. Some of the early sutras further classify the forms of suffering — including the suffering of getting everything you want. Including the suffering of wanting to be rid of suffering.

But Schopenhauer was no Buddhist. He admitted so himself, in spite of his deep engagement with Buddhist ideas. The haunting image of the Bagne of Toulon resurfaces in his philosophy, and in quite unphilosophical ways:

Let us now add a consideration of the human race… Here too life by no means presents itself as a gift to be enjoyed, but as a task, a drudgery, to be worked through. According to this we see, on a large scale as well as on a small, universal need, restless exertion, constant pressure, endless strife, forced activity, with extreme exertion of all bodily and mental powers. Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual for their own sake; but many thousands fall a sacrifice to it. Now senseless delusion, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with one another; then the sweat and blood of the great multitude must flow, to carry through the ideas of individuals, or to atone for their shortcomings. In peace, industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from the ends of the earth, the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, some plotting and planning, others acting: the tumult is indescribable. But what is the ultimate aim of it all? To sustain ephemeral and harassed individuals through a short span of time, in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative painlessness… Seized by this, every living thing works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that has no value. But on closer examination, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind urge, an impulse wholly without ground and motive.[7]

Schopenhauer’s late work goes even further, trading in syllogism for outright indictment: “We can also regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. At all events the person who has fared tolerably well, becomes more clearly aware, the longer they live, that life on the whole is a disappointment, even a cheat, in other words, bears the character of a great mystification or even a fraud.”[8]

What could have happened to a person to incite them to make such seemingly unfounded and reckless statements? This is one of the enigmas of Schopenhauer. One looks at his life, and, while there are misfortunes — his father’s suicide, his failed career, failed relationships, money problems, chronic ailments — they are not of the order of anything exceptional. “Join the club,” we are apt to say. (Nietzsche, on the other hand, provides us with a plethora of pessimist-inducing life experiences — and yet he persisted in using exclamation marks up through his last writings…) In short, there is no single traumatic life event that would allow us to render Schopenhauer’s “pessimism” as conditional, and therefore to explain it away. There are only these scenes like the Bagne of Toulon, and the ensuing observation, reflection, and contemplation that follows them. They are moments when Schopenhauer is suddenly extracted, becoming the unwitting witness to the theater of suffering that is humanity.

In the spring of 1811, some seven years after the European tour, Schopenhauer — having recently committed himself to philosophy — was visiting his mother’s home in Weimar. One evening he had the opportunity to talk with the well-known poet Christoph Martin Wieland. Wieland, at nearly eighty years of age, had had plenty of time to reflect on his life, and confessed to feeling regret at having abandoned his studies in law for poetry and philosophy. He attempted to convince the younger Schopenhauer to steer clear of philosophy, which was both an impractical and unprofitable career. Unwavering, Schopenhauer replied: “Life is a troublesome affair; I have resolved to spend it reflecting on it.”[9]

2. THE DYSPHORIA OF LIFE

As harrowing as Schopenhauer’s early revelations are, they are also nothing more than observations, ruminations, comments; they are not yet a “philosophy.” But what is the philosophy adequate to the existential penal colony that Schopenhauer describes? Or better, we might ask: what would philosophy have to become, in order to comprehend something like the theater of suffering in Toulon? It is these sorts of questions that make Schopenhauer’s philosophy unique, for he is among those rare thinkers who seemed to sense both the affordances and the limitations of philosophy, the capacity for expanding human understanding as well as the capacity for appreciating the limits of human understanding, the allure of systematic thinking as well as the equal but more subterranean allure of a kind of thinking that almost lyrically crumbles beneath the gravity of its own inescapable hubris. For Schopenhauer, there is something inconsolable about human suffering — inclusive of the purported “consolations of philosophy,” that would presume to analyze, dissect, and classify it. Schopenhauer is in every way an anti-philosophical philosopher: someone who, on the one hand, hasn’t simply abandoned philosophy for the supposedly greener pastures of, say, poetry or mathematics, but on the other hand someone who works against philosophy, but remains in the “key” of philosophy (to use a music metaphor). Throughout his life Schopenhauer railed against the particular kind of professionalized, academic philosophy which held high the aspirations of systematicity, mastery, and totality (never short of humorous insults, Schopenhauer once dubbed himself Hegel’s “Anti-Christ”). This had the effect of largely marginalizing his philosophy, both during his life and after his death. In the Preface to one of his books he wrote: “Whoever takes up and seriously pursues a matter that does not lead to material advantage, ought not to count on the sympathy of their contemporaries.”[10]

Though his published works varied widely in content and form — his writings cover not only metaphysics but ethics, epistemology, logic, religious studies, and the sciences, as well as literary studies, comparative mythology, philology, psychology, and the occult — Schopenhauer’s thinking returns again and again to this central problem of human suffering, and the rift between self and world that determines that suffering. This theme emerges uniquely in his late writings, where for a variety of reasons, the seventy-year-old misanthrope abandoned the traditional strictures of academic philosophy, and turned instead to literary forms: the essay, the aphorism, the parable, the anecdote. At times his writing will incorporate elements of confessional, while at other times the writing will consist simply in quotations from other authors, and then the writing will suddenly digress into extended, cathartic, grumpy rants. In fact, if I were to characterize Schopenhauer’s thinking in a line, I would say his philosophy simultaneously expresses the building-up and the breaking-down of thought, the humility of being human — a philosophy of disintegration.

To appreciate these aspects of Schopenhauer’s late philosophy requires an appreciation of his philosophical trajectory as a whole. While it is impossible to do proper justice to that trajectory in an Introduction like this, we can gather some insights from his earlier works — in particular, what Schopenhauer himself viewed as his “chief work”: The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung; 1818/1819). One of those insights has to do with the kind of philosophy Schopenhauer proposes, an approach that was markedly different from the traditions of Western philosophy as they existed in Schopenhauer’s time. In the Preface to the first edition of The World as Will and Representation (hereafter WWR), Schopenhauer notes that there are two kinds of philosophy: those philosophies that present a “system of thought,” one that has “an architectonic connexion or coherence… in which one part always supports the other… in which the foundation-stone carries all the parts… and in which the pinnacle is upheld.” By contrast, Schopenhauer presents a philosophy that is not so much a system of thought, but instead a philosophy of “a single thought” (ein einziger Gedanke). While this kind of philosophy must be equally comprehensive and coherent, it can be split up into moveable parts, “of such a kind that every part supports the whole just as much as it is supported by the whole.”[11] The distinction is instructive, for it tells us a great deal about Schopenhauer as a philosopher and as a human being. Everything built can be un-built, every structure subject to both construction and destruction, every argument elicits a counter-argument, certitude haunted by uncertainty. In fact, Schopenhauer’s description reminds me of music more than anything else. In contrast to the architectural solidity of systematic thinking, which is hierarchical, cumulative, and based on parts subservient to a greater whole, Schopenhauer presents the single thought as a musical structure of themes and variations, consonance and dissonance. A reading of WWR bears this out. While it is definitely a book posing “big questions” offering a “theory of everything,” it is also very aware of its own precariousness as philosophy — indeed, of the precariousness of all philosophy. WWR is of course a work of philosophy, and employs concepts and arguments (some well-reasoned, some not-so-well-reasoned). But Schopenhauer’s writing also allows for variations on a theme, sometimes even to the point of an extreme structural dissonance, in which the entire work nearly disintegrates. In short, the key to appreciating Schopenhauer’s late work lies in his early work.

Now, the obvious question: what is this “single thought”? In the Preface to WWR Schopenhauer cautiously refrains from giving it to us (perhaps sensing that reducing his book to a single line would be the surest way to ensure that no one would actually read it — no one read it anyways…). In a notebook entry from 1817, while Schopenhauer was finishing WWR, one reads: “The whole of my philosophy can be condensed into one expression, namely: the world is the will’s knowledge of itself.”[12] This is, admittedly, a bit disappointing. To be fair, framing an eight-hundred-page book of speculative metaphysics as “a single thought” is to invite disappointment, if not impatience. We will return to this passage in a bit, as it contains terms that have a more technical meaning in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. I’d like to provide a variation on this. For me, the single thought of WWR is simply this: I do not live, I am lived. And WWR attempts to get at what it is that “lives” me — from the vantage point of one who is living. Not an easy task. Schopenhauer is asking us to temporarily invert cause and effect: it is not so much that I live, but that something “lives” me, something which, in a way, has nothing to do with evolutionary biology or molecular genetics, much less the “Tree of Life” or the divine fiat of Creation. This is not, as Schopenhauer adamantly states, a vitalism or a pantheism, much less theology. For the living being is simply one manifestation of the “that” that lives in this or that living being, that lives through this or that living being — but which is not itself living or existing… or even really an “it” at all.

Thus, another version of the single thought: I am at once a part of the world and apart from the world. Schopenhauer’s WWR begins from a perspective that marks nearly all of his writing: a fundamental estrangement between my indelibly contingent, self-centered, self-interested standpoint as a human being (and for Schopenhauer this applies equally to the whole species), and my minimal acknowledgement of a world “out there” that includes me, but that also exists and persists independent of my desires, fears, anxieties, and “likes.” The two perspectives are intertwined, for the distance between self and world that enables me to live a life at all (in addition to accumulating knowledge and affording instrumental relation to the world), is also the distance that creates the estrangement between self and world. I am a part of the world, in so far as everything about me is deeply enmeshed and to a great degree shaped by my environment. But the “burden of consciousness” (as Schopenhauer once called it) also means that I exist apart from the world; I can regard the world and even myself as an object for a subject — to analyze, to study, to control, to design.

One of Schopenhauer’s more tangible examples of this estrangement has to do with the body. Our bodies can be regarded as objects for us as subjects (for instance, in medicine… or wellness), but we also have a sense of being embodied that connects us to more abstract but no less impactful ideas of growth and aging, health and illness, mortality and death. We “have” a body, but we are bodies. And the two notions don’t always sit well together (e.g. the difference between someone asking, “how do you feel?” and a diagnostic test algorithmically linked to a prescription drug database). Furthermore, our bodies do a great deal without us thinking about it (we do not consciously tell our stomachs to digest… an example Schopenhauer uses that Nietzsche took note of, given the latter’s chronic ulcers). Even as hyper-self-conscious featherless bipeds we do not exist apart from our bodies; there is a sense in which we are nothing but bodies that are blindly impelled to live on, irrespective of whatever our existential doubts may be.

For Schopenhauer this not only applies to autonomic bodily function but also to conscious embodied existence, in which the division separating “will” and “act” is never as separate as we might like to think. Even when I, as an embodied subject, decide to do something, and then consciously, willfully, do it, there is a great deal of porousness between will and act. But whether conscious or autonomic, for Schopenhauer the main point is that we continue living, thinking, bodying, self-ing, and so on. It’s as if something else is propelling it all forward, and for reasons that may forever remain occluded to us. Once more, the single thought: Schopenhauer’s great insight here is to analogize this example of the human body to all other living beings, and then to all existents. In the same way that I “will” an action and then act in my body (in a way that seems sequential but that is actually seamless), so is there a more general “will” that is manifest in all the varieties of beings that constitute the world, including “the world” itself. What applies to my body also applies to other human bodies, to animals and plants, to the inorganic world, to the elements themselves, to the planet, and even, in Schopenhauer’s more delirious moments, to the cosmos itself. My individual, tiny “will” is simply the manifestation of a vaster, non-human “Will” that wills everything that exists, to exist. (Yes, it gets “out there”; and no, Schopenhauer did not “chase the dragon,” though given how irritable he seems to have been, perhaps he should have.) A passage from WWR is worth quoting in full:

We recognize that same Will not only in those phenomena that are quite similar to our own, in human beings and animals, as its innermost nature, but continued reflection will lead us to recognize the force that shoots and vegetates in the plant, indeed the force by which the crystal is formed, the force that turns the magnet to the North Pole, the force whose shock we encounter from the contact of metals of different kinds, the force that appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, separation and union, and finally even gravitation, which acts so powerfully in all matter, pulling the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun; all these we recognize as different only in the phenomenon, but the same according to their inner nature… It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of human beings, and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of the manifestation, not the inner nature of what is manifested.[13]

If Schopenhauer’s philosophy is so preoccupied with the problem of suffering, it is because it emerges from a gulf between self and world that is at once philosophical and of the order of everyday experience. “Suffering” is this gulf between self and world — “a part” and “apart.” For Schopenhauer, this is where something tentatively called “philosophy” begins.

And so, at the risk of trying your patience, a third and last version of the single thought: I do not exist, so much as I am “existed” — and existed by something which forever recedes into the blind spot of my comprehension, a something that can only be negatively indexed: unhuman, impersonal, indifferent, and, strictly speaking, not-existent — but which also does not exist separately from all that exists. Already the single thought is not so single, or so simple. The issue is not simply to do with the supposed pinnacle of human consciousness, be it individual or collective, nor is it to do with the complex organic life of animals, plants, and ecosystems, nor is it to do with the equally complex inorganic life of geological strata, the morphology of climates, and the deep time of tectonic shifts — all these modes of knowledge production constitute what Schopenhauer calls “Representation” (Vorstellung, or literally, “picturing”). For Schopenhauer, once one strips away all the varieties of the profoundly human practice of picturing the world to ourselves, there is simply the blind and impersonal impulsion of “what is” (however we may analyze, divide, and categorize it). At this point physics cannot help but to become metaphysics. And it is this enigmatic, blind urge to exist that Schopenhauer refers to as “Will” (Wille) — which in living beings is more specifically manifest as the “Will-to-Live” (Wille zum Leben). But to be clear, by “Will” Schopenhauer does not mean an individual act of agency, but rather agency divested of any agent, divested of any person or people, indeed of any intention whatsoever. “The Will simply Wills” Schopenhauer states, and that, it appears, is that.

Or is it? To posit an intentionless, impersonal Will “behind” everything that exists (including the world as Representation, rendered back to us through human activity), is also to posit a fundamental rift between Will and Representation — a rift between the human and something we can only call non-human. It is to question the idea that everything that exists, exists for some reason, and more specifically, some reason in relation to ourselves as human beings (indeed, Schopenhauer’s first book was an extended philosophical analysis of the “Principle of Sufficient Reason” — and its blind spots). The world as Representation is a world filled with meaning and significance; it is a human world pictured by human activity, from religion to science to culture to economics. The world as Will — that shadowy “that” coursing through everything that exists — the world as Will is significant… but meaningless. Here one can sense the reasons for Schopenhauer’s deep interest in classical Indian, Buddhist, and Chinese philosophies, in addition to Western thinkers like Plato and Kant. Schopenhauer himself notes this repeatedly in his writings. Certainly Plato had long ago wondered about the illusory world as given to our senses, just as Kant had rigorously articulated the horizon between the world as it appears to us (phenomenon) and the notion of the world-in-itself that we can only index but never actually know (noumenon). But the rift between Will and Representation is also the rift between “conventional” and “absolute” reality in the Upanishads; it is also the rift between the cycle of birth, death, and suffering (samsara) and the cessation of suffering (nirvana) in early Buddhism; and it is also the inner tension in the classical Daoist view of the world as dynamic and ceaseless transformation.

Put mildly, Schopenhauer’s challenge in WWR is not just a technical one (e.g. articulating a concept of immanence without resorting to transcendent concepts… and then without even resorting to transcendental concepts; to formulate a “negative negation” rather than a “privative negation”), but his work also seeks to comprehend a certain anonymous quality for which the categories of “human” and “life” are mere refractions, an anonymous quality “behind” everything that exists, however it exists. For the largely anthropocentric, self-interested, auto-legitimizing business of philosophy (as Schopenhauer sees it), this is the main challenge. We could call it a critique of humanism, or call it an anti-humanism, or we could gloss the various theories of the non-human or post-human, but, strictly speaking, there is no point to Schopenhauer’s philosophy “for us” (and here it is completely fair that you would want to stop reading, if you haven’t already…). We are in the penal colony again.

If there is no outside of the penal colony, no paradisal afterlife, no promise of a utopia, if there’s not even a better tomorrow, then it seems that Schopenhauer has willfully philosophized himself into a corner. In spite of his conviction that his philosophy, “at its highest point, ends in a negation,” Schopenhauer also repeatedly described his thinking in redemptive terms. How could such a philosophy — which Schopenhauer himself analogized to ancient religions, which “end in mysticism and mysteries… in darkness and veiled obscurity” — how could such a philosophy be in any way relevant to us as human beings? The short answer is that it isn’t; Schopenhauer adamantly refuses any therapeutic functions to his writing. Yet, in the closing sections of WWR, Schopenhauer is drawn to the possibility of refusing or renouncing the Will-to-Live, which he refers to as the “denial of the Will-to-Live” (die Verneinung des Willens zum Leben). Truthfully, it’s hard to tell what Schopenhauer means by this; it’s quite possible even he didn’t know. The idea seems to stem from a straightforward insight: “Those will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who have recognized that they are already nothing now…”[14] If, from the perspective of the world as Representation (the world pictured by us and for us), our main existential concern is with mortality and the fear of death, when one shifts perspectives to the world as Will (blind, impersonal, indifferent, willing for no reason), a different concern emerges: death actually becomes a panacea, a return after my death to the “nothingness” before my birth. The concern now is with life, with having to live, with being impelled to live on. As conscious, reflective human beings (which for Schopenhauer is already assuming a lot), we live in the rift between the fear of death and dread of life. We become aware of our capacity to understand at the same time as we are aware of the fundamental limits of that capacity, a void without positive content in the heart of thinking. I’m succumbing to the allure of jargon here, but we might call this condition a transcendental miserabilism.[15] Thought thinking the futility of thought. (And if Schopenhauer described Kant’s philosophy as a “suicide of the understanding,” we can likewise describe Schopenhauer as a depressive Kantian…). It now becomes clear what Schopenhauer’s over-arching philosophical project is really about: philosophy as a practice of seeing through the shadow-play of the world, inclusive of the intensive hyperactivity of humanity and the extensive deep time of climates and planets, all the while remaining resigned to the notion that there is only this, and no other world. In a review of WWR a few years after its publication, the well-known writer and satirist Jean Paul gave one of the book’s only not-dismissive reviews, noting it contained a “desolate and bottomless depth — comparable to a melancholy lake in Norway, on which, because of its dark, encircling wall of steep cliffs, one never sees the sun, but — in its depth, only the bright, daytime sky…”[16]

Looking to the practices of ancient mystics, ascetics, and quietists, Schopenhauer ends WWR with eerie, unabashedly lyrical evocations of world-refusal, detachment, and equanimity: “The Will now turns away from life; it shudders at the pleasures in which it recognizes the affirmation of life. We attain to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true composure, and complete willlessness.”[17] This is not an advocation for suicide, individual or collective. One continues to live, to live in the world, to be apart and a part of the world. Impracticalities abound. We might imagine Schopenhauer replying, “of course they do.” But are we talking about a new way of thinking, or a new way of living — or both (or neither)? Schopenhauer would not — or could not — provide a “to do” list, a manual, a user’s guide. True, in his writings on ethics and morality he evokes forms of sympathy, empathy, and compassion (Mitlied) as possible basis for this refusal grown out of suffering, but these ideas are never developed. However, Schopenhauer does evoke a kind of counter-state to that of the Will, a weird detachment from the world while being in the world, a detachment from the world as both Will and Representation; it’s as if the cosmic indifference of the Will that Schopenhauer had outlined had emerged, like a silent black hole, from within the human subject. In these passages Schopenhauer waxes poetic about this strange, cosmic “Willlessness” (Willenlosigkeit):

We now look back calmly and with a smile on the phantasmagoria of this world which was once able to move and agonize even our minds, but now stands before us as indifferently as chess-pieces at the end of a game, or as fancy costumes cast off in the morning, the form and figure of which taunted and disquieted us in the carnival night.[18]

Put more succinctly: “No Will: no Representation: no world.”[19]

But, we might ask, doesn’t this leave us engulfed in a paradox, effectively making effort to cease effort, trying to not try, “willing willlessness”? Yes, Schopenhauer states, for “we must not imagine that, after the denial of the Will-to-Live has once appeared… such denial no longer wavers or falters, and that we can rest on it as on an inherited property.” It takes practice — or rather, it takes a practice, and “it must always be achieved by constant struggle.”[20] That struggle shows itself in WWR itself. To be honest, as a work of systematic philosophy, WWR fails. It begins with cautiously-argued, judiciously-managed concepts in the vein of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Each part fitting into a larger whole, the whole cumulatively developing over the course of the work, piece-by-piece, brick-by-brick. But by the final sections of WWR, we find Schopenhauer’s writing unraveling, unpredictably veering off here and there: a rant against German Idealist philosophy, a digression on the metaphysics of music, an indictment of the species-specific vanity of humans, technicalities concerning the Kantian ding-an-sich, random quotations from the Upanishads, obscure ruminations on Buddhist “nothingness.” At some point, this wavering, wandering, drifting quality of Schopenhauer’s philosophy becomes the norm — the book itself becomes nothing but thought cast adrift. As an example of systematic philosophy, WWR fails — but I would argue that it is a fascinating failure. Schopenhauer wouldn’t accept this until late in his life, but he did accept it. Schopenhauer’s WWR is engaging not because it builds up concepts, but because it breaks them down, or rather, it allows for the already-occurring, decompositional aspects of thought itself. Given the content of WWR, it’s as if Schopenhauer suddenly becomes aware of the tenuous status of WWR itself, in which everything built up must also break down, leaving behind remnants of half-formed thoughts, some still in their crystalline state. So, WWR is a failure of systematic philosophy — but a shimmering, architectonic failure, ruins overgrown with moss and lichen.

3. IN THE GRAVEYARD OF PHILOSOPHY (ON LATE STYLE)

All this allows the texts collected in this edition to come into sharper focus. The writings collected here are the writings of the later Schopenhauer; they are philosophy writing against philosophy, and they also inflect a life of disappointment and failure, a biography constantly at odds with the “Will-to-Live.” Fragmentary, eclectic, provocational, self-defeating: in almost every way the later Schopenhauer takes up the practice of working against systematic philosophy. Schopenhauer takes note of this, posing these later writings against the dominant trends of his time, namely, “the great soap-bubble of Fichte-Schelling-Hegel.”

But this is also a philosophy that can only come about after there’s nothing more to lose. By the mid-1840s, Schopenhauer’s life had amounted to little more than a string of disappointments: a failed attempt to secure a professorship at the University of Berlin in the 1830s (which infamously included the younger Schopenhauer purposefully scheduling his lectures at the same time as those of the elder-statesmen Hegel… legend has it that on the first day of class Hegel’s room was full, and no one attended Schopenhauer’s lecture — which he delivered anyway…); the already-estranged relationship with his mother Joanna, a successful author in her own right, grew more and more distant, even up to her death in 1838; a series of plans for projects also fell through (including German translations of Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, Gracían’s Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion); the poor sales and almost total lack of reception of WWR led to the remainder of the original 750 copies being pulped by the publisher; the early death of Schopenhauer’s sister Adele in 1849, herself an author, and perhaps Schopenhauer’s only confidant; and finally the death of Schopenhauer’s poodle Atma, also in 1849 (Schopenhauer owned a series of poodles throughout his life, all of them named “Atma”… when misbehaving, Schopenhauer would scold them, “You are not a dog, but a human — a human!”). As Schopenhauer relocated to Frankfurt, where he would spend the last thirty years of his life, he found himself in a deep depression, possibly attempting suicide — quite possibly haunted by the suicide of his father.

Ironically it was perhaps that same Will-to-Live that prompted Schopenhauer to approach his publisher Brockhaus for a second edition of WWR. What he proposed sounded both audacious and desperate: an entirely separate second volume, comprised of fifty essays, the result of nearly twenty-five years of reflection and writing, each essay corresponding to a section in the first, original edition of WWR. Given the meagre sales of the first edition, Schopenhauer offered to waive his author’s copies and even left it to the publisher whether or not to pay him royalties. More importantly, Schopenhauer noted to the publisher that the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (hereafter WWRII) was written in a new style — clear, lively, and intuitive. This new book would take up the tradition of the essay: a structured but fluid reflection on a given topic or topics, allowing lines of thought to diverge, converge, and run parallel to each other. The topics would range, as the titles indicate: from more scholarly essays, such as the Kantian reflection “On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself,” to provocational pieces, such as the anti-natalist screed “On the Metaphysics of the Sexes,” to odd but irresistible writings, such as “On the Theory of the Ludicrous.” In particular, the last section of the book would employ the essay form to experiment with the pessimistic tone for which Schopenhauer’s philosophy is now known, with titles such as “On the Vanity and Suffering of Life.” Instead of the denser, judiciously-argued, structure of WWR, the new book would be structured in a non-linear fashion, as each of the essays could also be read in whatever order the reader chose. In the Preface to WWRII, Schopenhauer describes this kind of philosophy as an organism, a kind of shape-shifting philosophy “in which no part is first and no part last, in which the whole gains in clearness from every part, and even the smallest part cannot be fully understood until the whole has been first understood.”[21]

A brief glance at the way these essays are structured reveals this turn in the late works. “On the Vanity and Suffering of Life” (Chapter One in this edition), is one of Schopenhauer’s most read short pieces. The German title Von der Nichtigkeit und dem Leiden des Lebens makes use of the term Nichtigkeit, which is here translated as “vanity” but may also mean “worthlessness,” “nothingness,” or “nullity.” The essay considers things from the anthropocentric point of view, the world as Representation, a world for us, pictured to us, by us as human beings. It abruptly opens in a decidedly minor key, almost in mid-sentence, as if the entire beginning of the essay had been accidentally excised: “Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, and erring; and, as if through a troubled dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness.”[22] There are reflections on the human experience of time, the history of philosophy and religions, the role of the sciences, and references to Voltaire, Kant, and Leibniz. And then there are the sudden intrusions of almost oracular one-liners, given without context, much less any proof: “Life presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great”; “Life is then given out as a gift, whereas it is evident that anyone would have declined it with thanks, had they looked at it and tested it beforehand”; and so on.[23] The bulk of the essay therefore wavers between different registers: reasoned exposition and spontaneous rant, the logical and the poetic, the argumentative and the aphoristic. And then, in the last few pages, the whole thing suddenly turns: a string of quotations from Heraclitus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Gracían, and so on. Schopenhauer’s own voice has dissipated into the background, leaving behind nothing but the voices of the dead.

“On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature” (Chapter Four) is in many ways the flipside to this, the world considered not as Representation but as Will, the blind, impersonal, impulse for existence. In contrast to the myriad of styles in the “On the Vanity” essay, Schopenhauer here gives us a single, extended, relentless flow of thought, whose main purpose is to shift our perspective from the fear of death (the world as Representation) to the dread of life (the world as Will). Admittedly, this is not necessarily an improvement in the generally forlorn state of humanity. But the shift is, for Schopenhauer, qualitatively different:

If what makes death seem so terrible to us were the thought of non-existence, we should necessarily think with equal horror of the time when as yet we did not exist. For it is irrefutably certain that non-existence after death cannot be different from non-existence before birth… An entire infinity ran its course when we did not yet exist, but this in no way disturbs us.[24]

Here and elsewhere in the essays Schopenhauer gives us a variant of the “principle of individuation” (principum individuationis), a term borrowed from Medieval metaphysics. It refers to the ways in which one existing thing is differentiated from another, but here it is rendered with greater existential weight, as the process by which we distinguish ourselves from the world that we are in, and of which we are also a part. Schopenhauer extends this general awareness to our concrete sense of mortality, in one of his many quasi-autobiographical portraits: “The old man, stricken in years, totters about or rests in a corner, now only a shadow, a ghost, of his former self… the moment of dying may be similar to that of waking from a heavy nightmare.”[25] The essay is also markedly different in structure and tone. Schopenhauer begins with a summary of conventional views on death and mortality, then (immodestly) summarizes his own philosophy, before the writing takes on weirdly divinatory qualities, closing with weird, headlong soliloquies infused with Goethe’s Faust, Greek tragedy, and the Upanishads: “… do you know this dust then? Do you know what it is and what it can do? Learn to know it before you despise it. This matter, now lying there as dust and ashes, will soon form into crystals when dissolved in water; it will shine as metal; it will then emit electric sparks.”[26] Or, in the more unadorned version: “Death is for the species what sleep is for the individual.”[27]

If the “On the Vanity” essay considers the world for us, and if the “On Death” essays considers the world in itself, then “On the Doctrine of the Denial of the Will-to-Live” (Chapter Six) attempts to offer a view that is neither the world for us nor quite the world in itself. On the face of it, the essay explores the cluster of ideas that animate the closing sections of WWR: “Willlessness” and the denial of the Will-to-Live. The theme of world-weariness (Weltzschmerz) and its attendant modes of refusal, resignation, and repudiation dominate the essay. Its central idea is stated early on: “Nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist.”[28] But, instead of elaborating on this in his own words, or through his philosophy, Schopenhauer offers passages from a wide range of religious texts, all revolving around this same idea. Really, this is hardly an essay at all. Most of it is quotations set within the main text, sutured together with the minimum of writing. At times it’s difficult to tell where one quotation ends and another begins, or where a quotation ends, and Schopenhauer’s writing begins. An exercise in comparative philosophy, the essay proceeds like a conventional textual exegesis. Except that there is not one, but many voices; not one, but many traditions. While he does stress the differences between, say Medieval Christian mystical theology (e.g. Meister Eckhart, the Theologia Germanica), classical Vedanta philosophy (Adi Shankara), the Quietist heresy (Madame de Guyon), and so on, there is also a sense in which Schopenhauer wants to see them all as saying the same thing (“No Will: No Representation: no world”). To this end he presents these wildly different texts in montage, as if they were one text, and his exegesis a treatment of that one text. In spite of its gloomy tone, a certain enthusiasm suffuses the essay. At one point, Schopenhauer can’t contain himself, pausing to note: “when my teaching reaches its highest point, it assumes a negative character, and so ends with a negation.”[29]

In these essays, Schopenhauer not only departs from the tradition of systematic philosophy, but he also develops new modes of writing adequate to the somber, subterranean, twilight forms of thinking he puts forth. As he grew older, Schopenhauer came to associate systematic philosophy with academic philosophy at the universities, with its Professorial Chairs, peer-reviewed criteria, and almost giddy fondness for intellectual fads. For Schopenhauer the result was a “cherished mediocrity” of “lofty words and low sentiments” where one constantly witnesses “the false and the bad held in general acceptance, indeed humbug and charlatanism in the highest admiration” (Schopenhauer’s nicknames for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel), and all of it “engrossed in the delusion of the moment.”[30] As for his own work, Schopenhauer is at once resigned and yet stridently unapologetic: “I long ago renounced the approbation of my contemporaries.”[31] Schopenhauer is never unsure of his ideas; quite the opposite. In his later works he both re-asserts his philosophy while at the same time mocking his own over-confidence. At one point he admires, almost satirically, how certain passages of his own work seem to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. In one of his late notebooks he writes: “Buddha, Eckhart and I teach essentially the same thing; Eckhart is shackled by his Christian mythology. In Buddhism the same ideas are to be found but not stunted by such mythology and hence simple and clear, in so far as any religion can be clear. With me there is complete clearness.”[32]

By the time he publishes WWRII, there is a sense that Schopenhauer has not only accepted this failure, but has leaned into it. The essays included in this book are not “essays” in the sense we mean today, polished and perfected emblems of an over-educated and hyper-cultural, linguistic economy. Rather, they are essays in the older sense of an experiment, an attempt, a “try” (essai) — the tradition of Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Chamfort — all authors from whom Schopenhauer learned. They lack the assurance — false assurance, Schopenhauer might say — of traditional philosophy, with its emphasis on mastery, totality, and an irrevocably human-centric view of philosophical “truth.” And yet every word and phrase and paragraph are intentionally composed, in an attempt to craft a style that is adequate to the stark and harrowing philosophy of futility Schopenhauer puts forth. This is writing that opts for the short form, for the part over the whole, for uncertainty over mastery, for a stylistic appreciation of irregularity over architectures of systematicity, for a poetics of the unfinished, the haphazard, the incomplete.

And here we might say a word about late style in Schopenhauer. Often “late style” is regarded as the pinnacle of a life’s work. It is concise without being verbose, simple without being simplistic, complex without being complicated. While some interpretations regard the idea of late style as associated with works of mastery and the cult of genius in the arts, late style in fact does exactly the opposite, “transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering”:

The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth… In this way, late works are relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document… It is as if, confronted with the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and abdicate in favor of reality.[33]

Though age, experience, and the tragicomedy of living are certainly a part of it, late style need not be the works of “the old” or those in the final stages of life’s journey. True, there is often a confrontation with mortality, a certain peremptory gulf between biology and culture, life and art. But this need not happen “at the end.” Rather, late style is a mode, in which “the artist who is fully in command of their medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which they are a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.”[34] Late style “involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against…”[35] And, while Schopenhauer’s late works do indeed come near the end of his long life, we also see the indicators of them early on: a certain antagonism vis-à-vis the human condition and human vanity in general; a tendency towards misanthropy and a skepticism regarding the legacy of Enlightenment humanism; a disparaging spite towards intellectual trends and professional writers in general. “Lateness” can come early. And there is a sense with Schopenhauer that “old age” can come at any age, a curmudgeonly skepticism, philosophy as a form of metaphysical grumpiness. Schopenhauer’s “late style” is less about late works and more about last works, whatever works happened to be last, what has been left over… what remains, after one’s life has abandoned one’s writing, after one’s remains.

This turn towards late style is most concretely reflected in Schopenhauer’s last book, a two-volume, nine-hundred-page compendium of “miscellaneous philosophy” with the cumbersome title Parerga and Paralipomena, published in 1851. The Greek term Parerga (“Appendices” or “Addenda”) conventionally refers to work that is secondary, subordinate, or of adjacent interest to a main work, while the term Paralipomena (“Omissions”) refers to work either edited out from a final version or work that, for whatever reason, never made it into the main work. While it does not roll off the sales rep’s tongue with great ease, the title itself is indicative: a major work that is at the same time a minor work. Schopenhauer attempted to sway his old publisher Brockhaus, pitching it to them as “a philosophy for the world,” written in a clear and accessible style and addressing a range of popular themes. Moreover, Schopenhauer noted, by reaching out to a broader audience, his philosophy could bypass what he sarcastically called “the guild-professors of philosophy.” But based on the poor reception of his previous works, Brockhaus declined, even when Schopenhauer offered the whole book to them gratis. Fortunately, another publisher was found through Julius Frauenstädt, a younger philosopher and one of the few followers of Schopenhauer at the time. The latter suggested the Berlin publisher A.W. Hayn, and Schopenhauer agreed, but on several conditions: that he retain rights for the publication of further editions; that 750 copies be printed, and in German type (not Latin); that he have final say on the proofs; and that upon publication he receive ten bound copies printed on high-quality paper. For this Schopenhauer waved any honorarium. These conditions he asked Frauenstädt, as his agent, to read aloud to the publisher “in a thundering voice,” pronouncing: these are the terms, I will not deviate from them (for tolerating eccentricities like this Schopenhauer would later name Frauenstädt his literary executor).

Parerga and Paralipomena (hereafter PP) is a strange and unwieldy book. It does contain several substantial chapters on philosophy, such as “Sketch of the History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real” and “Fragments for the History of Philosophy” (which concludes with the humorously self-aggrandizing section “Some Observations on My Own Philosophy”). But PP also contains chapters on spiritualism and the occult, pantheism and natural science, Sanskrit literature, and stray observations on archaeology, mythology, linguistics, and psychology. There is the chapter “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,” which, at around two hundred pages, is really a book-within-a-book, a “eudaemonism” or a guide for living well, in spite of the fact that this may be the worst of all possible worlds. But this is counter-balanced by scandalous chapters such as “On Women,” an unfortunate, unforgiveable, and confused piece that is sometimes a critique of gender norms and sometimes outright misogyny. It is in every way an ugly piece of writing. A chapter like this should be paired with “On Philosophy at the Universities,” a forty-page, vitriolic tirade against the archetype of the know-it-all, male philosophy professor (Schopenhauer advocates abolishing philosophy in the university… except for a course on logic). If we add to these his provocational essay “Metaphysics of the Sexes,” with its anti-natalist denunciation of children both born and unborn, then we have misanthropy complete. Indeed, much of PP is indictment masquerading as philosophy: a chapter attacking authors for their pretentiousness and materialism, then a chapter attacking readers for their pretentiousness and idealism. A chapter railing against the myopia of scientists, and then a chapter railing against megalomania of priests. Again, ugly writing. But that is Schopenhauer. Even in his properly “philosophical” works there are always those moments in which the elevated tone of philosophy suddenly sinks into the morass of “ugly feelings.” Yet some chapters, though written nearly two hundred years ago, are still resonant today: anyone who has ever lived next to noisy neighbors will sympathize with “On Din and Noise.”

In the midst of this Bosch-like landscape of philosophical odds and ends there are chapters that take up the main themes of his philosophy in WWR, but which express them in a new key. We saw earlier that the essays in WWRII were already barely essays in the usual sense, breaking away from the kind of systematic philosophy that Schopenhauer both admired and detested. Now, in PP, we see writing that continues this shift towards late style, an abandonment of systematic philosophy in favor of an anti-philosophy of remnants and remains: aphorisms, anecdotes, parables, indictments, fragments, essays-in-miniature, rants, digressions, and even the odd joke (with Schopenhauer all jokes are odd, and not very funny). Many of the chapters in PP contain the title “Additional Remarks on…” and in a sense Schopenhauer moves towards a philosophy that is in fact nothing but additional remarks, supplements, addenda, a kind of extended philosophical coda. Chapters Two and Three in this volume take up the “pessimistic” themes of suffering and human species self-interest in WWR, but now parse them out into shorter chunks, some of them only a few lines. The same can be said of Chapters Five, Seven, and Eight. These are mere assemblies of ideas that can be read in any order, as if Schopenhauer had actually written out an entire single essay, and then simply excerpted the best parts. In addition, these exercises in the short form also contain a wide range of sentiments, for which the tag “pessimism” is much too narrow. True, much of the writing in late Schopenhauer deploys his stark and sardonic prose to paint a grim picture:

Work, worry, toil, and trouble are certainly the lot of almost all throughout their lives. But if all desires were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how then would people occupy their lives and spend their time? Suppose the human race were removed to a Utopia where everything grew automatically and pigeons flew about ready roasted… then people would die of boredom or hang themselves; or else they would fight, throttle, and murder one another and so cause themselves more suffering than is now laid upon them by nature. Thus for such a race, no other scene, no other existence, is suitable.[36]

But then, in another section, he will write this: “The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic which produce no effect if we stand close to them, but which must be viewed at a distance if we are to find them beautiful.”[37] And then, in another section, this: “In consequence of all this, life may certainly be regarded as a dream and death as an awakening.”[38] In using the short form, Schopenhauer found an expressive means of allowing a philosophical form adequate to his philosophical content, a philosophy at once conclusive and inconclusive, a philosophy of lapses and lacunae, of fissures and fractures, a philosophy of uncertainty and metaphysical suspicion that perpetually threatens to crumble into ranting digressions or a half-Kantian mea culpa. If we are to use the term “pessimism” then, it must be done in a way that reminds us how Schopenhauer architects a building-up and breaking-down of thought. Not just a philosophy of pessimism (that would be simply academic), but also a pessimism of philosophy, one inhabited by an anti-philosophy of misanthropic splendor, a speculative metaphysics of ugly feelings, a poetics of disintegration.

4. OUR EXISTENTIAL FOOTPRINT

One of the ironies of Schopenhauer’s life is that the recognition he sought for so long did finally come to him; though it did so in the final years of his life, when he no longer cared one way or another. One of his last notebook entries reads: “When one has spent such a long life in insignificance, neglect and disdain, they then come at the end with the beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets, and imagine that there is something.”[39]

Yet, in spite of its heft and unwieldly organization, the publication of Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851 did manage to find a broader readership outside of the cloistered confines of academic philosophy. A radical departure in structure and style, Schopenhauer put everything into it, writing to his editor: “I think that after this I will have nothing more to write, because I will be on guard against bringing forth weak children of old age, who indict their father and detract from his fame.”[40] After its publication Schopenhauer noted the sense of “a heavy burden lifted,” proclaiming in another letter “I see my mission to the world completed.”[41] Reviews within Germany were generally positive; the looming fin-de-siècle seemed ripe for Schopenhauer’s brooding philosophy. In 1852 (on April 1st no less) Schopenhauer received his first substantial recognition outside of Germany, an anonymous review published in the radical British journal The Westminster Review (where novelist Mary Ann Evans, known as George Eliot, served as the Reviews editor). Another review, also in a British journal, was also positive — though the reviewer assumed Schopenhauer was already dead, a pre-emptive posthumous designation Schopenhauer enjoyed. The anonymous reviewer of The Westminster Review would shortly thereafter publish a long article, entitled “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy.” The reviewer, John Oxenford, provided one of the first synoptic overviews of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, dubbing it an “ultra-pessimism” that stood in stark contrast to the currents of German Idealism, Neo-Kantianism, and the Young Hegelians. Oxenford described an obscure, reclusive, “misanthropic sage of Frankfurt,” a “mysterious being… working for something like forty years to subvert the whole system of German philosophy which has been raised by university professors,” describing Schopenhauer’s books as “terribly logical and unflinching in the pursuit of consequences.”[42]

The Oxenford review was translated into German by the British author Helen Zimmern and re-published in a German newspaper. It seemed to take. Schopenhauer’s ideas began to be included in surveys of German philosophy, a new generation of young philosophers (including Frauenstädt) sought to take up the cause, publishing reviews and articles, and, sensing a burgeoning market, publishers released new editions of Schopenhauer’s works, including overlooked books such as On the Will in Nature and On Vision and Colors. A Frankfurt priest even published an anti-Schopenhauer pamphlet, warning parishioners against the dangers of atheism, while Leipzig University held an essay contest on Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In his letters Schopenhauer often shows irritation at this flurry of activity, especially when it was hastily produced, inaccurate, or driven by an opportunistic “mania for publishing.” This especially included those reviews and articles that praised his work. In 1854 Richard Wagner, enthralled by reading The World as Will and Representation, sent Schopenhauer a privately-printed and signed copy of Der Ring der Niebelung. Schopenhauer, more drawn to Mozart or Rossini, marked up the copy with his characteristic sarcasm and irascible wit. Later he sent a reply to Wagner, suggesting the latter quit writing music and stick to poetry instead.

Everyone gets what they want. While Schopenhauer was pleased to learn that many of his admirers were not professional philosophers, some seemed to go a bit too far. Awkwardly, Schopenhauer sat for a portrait painting. The painting was then sold to a wealthy German landowner so obsessed with Schopenhauer that he built a chapel to house the painting, complete with an altar to display his books. Letters to Schopenhauer poured in from strangers asking for advice on how to live (to one Schopenhauer replied, “Go walking daily, quickly for two hours, that will help you more than all baths and it costs nothing”; to another he advised, “Sleep is the source of all health and energy, even of the intellectual sort… I sleep 7, often 8 hours, sometimes 9”[43]). Young impressionable students sought out first editions of his books, bought pet poodles (and named them “Atma”), made pilgrimages to Frankfurt to catch a glimpse of the “misanthropic sage.” In the midst of all this it must have been strangely reassuring that the children still teased the grumpy old man as they always had when he took his daily walks (calling out to his poodle: “young Schopenhauer!”). One evening, in the spring of 1860, Schopenhauer found it difficult to walk home, suffering from a shortness of breath. Eventually he would cut short his daily walks. Brief bouts of illness followed. In September he suffered a dizzy spell and a fall. On the morning of 21 September 1860, Schopenhauer was found dead, seated in his sofa, as if he had fallen asleep. The philosopher who wrote that “sleep is for the individual what death is for the species” had finally achieved the denial of the Will.

But with Schopenhauer things are never that simple. This is, after all, the person who wrote: “I can bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body; but the idea of philosophy-professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder.”[44] And, while the philosophy professors continued to avoid Schopenhauer, a new generation of German philosophers took up Schopenhauer’s ideas and developed them in new and strange directions. After a failed career in the military, Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann became enthralled by Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and in a string of publications sought to promote his work. The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), Hartmann’s massive tome of syncretic, theory-of-everything philosophy, sought to extend Schopenhauer’s ideas into the sciences, resulting in a fascinating physics of pessimism, a geology of collapse, a misanthropic biology. A different tone was taken by the poet and philosopher Philipp Mainländer, who proposed an even darker and stranger view of the Will than Schopenhauer, a pervasive “Will-to-Death” that was itself the result of the suicide of God. The world is, Mainländer asserted, the cadaver of God. In 1876, after receiving final proofs of his ambitious work The Philosophy of Redemption, Mainländer committed suicide, hanging himself by stepping up onto the author’s copies of his book. And I would be remiss to discuss the influence of Schopenhauer without discussing Nietzsche, whose writings can be seen, in a way, as a continued attempt to shake off the shadow of Schopenhauer. In his early book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche attempted to redress Schopenhauer’s ethic of refusal by arguing for a “Dionysian pessimism,” one that would both accept the world as suffering and — in spite of or because of this — would also welcome it and affirm it, joyously and with exclamation marks (!). This dilemma would go on to preoccupy Nietzsche until his final works and mental collapse in 1899.

In fact, what one finds following Schopenhauer’s death is a plethora of philosophical studies which are both deeply indebted to Schopenhauer’s work while departing from it in significant ways. In the early 1880s, Julius Bahnsen attempted what one could only call an unholy synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel in The Contradiction in the Knowledge and the Being of the World. Working from within the male-dominated world of academic philosophy, Agnes Taubert helped shaped the intellectual currents of nineteenth-century German philosophy, publishing Pessimism and its Opponents (1873), a critical overview of the “pessimist controversy” that followed in Schopenhauer’s wake. This was echoed by Olga Plümacher, whose books such as Pessimism in the Past and Present (1883) extended Schopenhauer’s aesthetics and ethics to develop an entire theory of affective pessimism. Outside of the German context, the reluctant prophet of fin-de-siècle Parisian decadence J.-K. Huysmans would give Schopenhauer’s philosophy a central place in his provocational 1884 novel Against the Grain. In the States, author Edgar Saltus spearheaded a New York-based decadent movement fueled both by Schopenhauer and Eastern philosophies, encapsulated in his now-forgotten study The Philosophy of Disenchantment (1885; a book that concludes with the chapter “Is Life an Affliction?”). Paul Deussen, a friend of Nietzsche as a student and of Vivekananda as an adult, was prompted by his reading of Schopenhauer to write about classical Indian philosophy (including his classic study The System of Vedanta). He would go on to found the Schopenhauer Society (Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft) in the early twentieth century.

While Schopenhauer’s work would never acquire the posthumous popularity that, say, Nietzsche’s work had, between the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one does find irregular but noteworthy references to his work: Charles Baudelaire, Leo Tolstoy, Machado de Assis, Guy de Maupassant, Joseph Conrad, August Strindberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, not to mention a long list of composers, taken by the central role of music in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics: Brahms, Dvořák, Mahler, Schönberg, Prokofiev. One finds the revenant of Schopenhauer in the book The Tragic Sense of Life (1912) by Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, with its discussion of the burdensome “disease of consciousness,” as in the book On the Tragic (1941), a philosophical parable of human extinction by the Norwegian author and alpinist Peter Wessel Zapffe. Schopenhauer is there is in the 1904 book The World as Consciousness and Nothing by Czech author, vagrant, and iconoclast Ladislav Klíma, as well as in The Iceland (1934), the stark and disengaged late writings of Japanese poet Sakutarō Hagiwara.

But discussions of “influence” are tricky. Of course, there are books, journal articles, and conferences that are evidence of a significant body of scholarship on Schopenhauer (the work of Friedrick Beiser, Urs App, and Christopher Janaway is exemplary in this regard). But if we consider the broader influence of his ideas and sentiments, then the list becomes excessively long, allowing us to potentially include everything from Japanese cosmic horror manga to Norwegian black ambient music. Perhaps what we can say is that many of the questions Schopenhauer raises can also be seen in contemporary culture’s oblique relationship to this strange thing called “philosophy.” For instance, the past few decades have brought with them both attempts to revisit pessimism, a pessimism that is a counterpoint to the often-obligatory optimism seen in contemporary, globalized media, politics, and culture. A number of public intellectuals have even promoted pessimism as the solution to the age-old problem of happiness. This “pop pessimism” ranges widely, from conservative arguments for pessimism as a form of anti-idealistic, practical realism, to the rantings of scandal-for-its-own-sake doomsday prophets, to cringe-worthy philosopher-cum-gurus who apply the balm of pessimistic consolation as the newest form of self-help.[45] But the problem with these approaches is that, while they nod to Schopenhauer’s work, they are also driven by the desire to render Schopenhauer’s philosophy into a solution for whatever problem they have identified as the crux of what is wrong with humanity. A more practical and less pretentious variant of this is given in the annals of popular psychology, with its references to the possibly helpful effects of “depressive realist” or “defensive pessimist” attitudes. Whether pessimism be regarded as practical or provocational, whether it be taken as lifestyle or therapy, there is something unresolved in Schopenhauer’s writing that mitigates against facile solutionism. These are, as Schopenhauer would himself note, authors more interested in their careers than in their philosophy.

But are not all authors like this in some way, even neglected Schopenhauer, lecturing to an empty classroom? Indeed, the question of how to think with Schopenhauer’s work is raised by the work itself, given its often melancholic ambiance of futility and resignation. More engaging are those responses that attempt to preserve this unresolved aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, while also placing it in a different context. This is the case, for example, in the work of South African analytical philosopher David Benatar, who, for some time has addressed the philosophical, ethical, and political implications surrounding natalism and anti-natalism. In books such as Better Never to Have Been (2006), Benatar departs significantly from Schopenhauer’s discussion concerning the preference for non-existence over existence, and the measured and deliberate presentation of his ideas allows the complex and still controversial questions over the ethics of having children to be a contemporary issue. In a quite different vein, Thomas Ligotti’s book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) also highlights many of the questions raised by Schopenhauer and post-Schopenhauer thinkers. Ligotti, known to most readers as an author of horror fiction in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft, writes a non-fiction book that is, at the same time, a logical extension of the conceptual density and linguistic innovation of fictional books such as Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986). The result is “philosophy” but with attention to the way that a language and imagery describing the limits of thought also allows us to appreciate the existential dilemmas nascent in Schopenhauer’s philosophy — the dilemma of misanthropy, the human being that is also opposed to “being.”

While a list of fiction authors ventriloquizing Schopenhauer would require more patience than I have at the moment, we might add the oddly inspiring essay by Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer. It focuses on an often-overlooked aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, his eudaemonism, that is, the focus on the practical, ethical aspects of how to live, given that life is not worth living. For Houellebecq, Schopenhauer’s philosophy evokes “a majesty of desolation and horror that elicits a dumbfoundedness, a definitive realization, a lightning-like crystallization of scattered feelings registered by the experience of living.”[46] Perhaps it is this pervasive, unsettling quality that we also find in the trenches of the culture wars, where — contra the self-aggrandizing solutionism of pop pessimism — one sees more nuanced critiques of optimism, be it in terms of dismantling “the injunction to be happy,” the ambivalence of “cruel optimism,” or in the subterranean evocations of “gender abolitionism” and “afro-pessimism.”[47] “Humanism,” Schopenhauer once noted, “bears within itself optimism and to this extent is false, one-sided and superficial.”[48]

Much of this, however, remains at the scale of human affairs and human concerns — the world as Representation. What about the world as Will, the blind, impersonal striving for existence, for no reason and without any meaning, other than the texture of culture and myth we as human beings dutifully drape over the world? I’m reminded of the Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji, who, in his 1935 book Climate and Culture suggested a very Schopenhauer-esque idea: that what we call “climate” is neither a thing-in-itself “out there” nor simply a subjective feeling “in here,” but rather the rift between them. Or, more accurately, that void or “nothingness” between self and world is also what unites them. While Watsuji’s work is deeply indebted to Heidegger, it is telling that he wrote his graduate thesis on Schopenhauer.[49] In the phenomenon of “coldness,” Watsuji notes, we are already “out in the cold” as it were, in the sense that we can never fully separate a prior experience from the elaborate human and cultural apparatus of the conditions for that experience (including both its available and invalidated meanings) — and yet so deeply ingrained is the notion of being here now, in and as this body, that we also can never fully let go of the idea that there is always a something-extra in “coldness” that is never exhausted by the apparatus of meaning.[50] Schopenhauer: “My body and my Will are one.” What Watsuji’s work brings out is the blind spot in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, one that Schopenhauer himself always acknowledged as irrevocable. There is no perspective from the world as Will, there is no “being on the side of” the Will. It already “is” in and through us, and it is precisely because of this that we are occluded from it, the world without us always immediately recuperated into the world for us. Perhaps Watsuji understood no other issue makes this so apparent as that of climate.

Today we are perhaps in a new kind of estrangement, one different from previous eras. On the one hand, the intensive human world of social media and its echo-chamber effects of the world consistently and persistently prototyped in our own image. On the other hand, the extensive, non-human world of climate, weather, and the elements, scaled above and below that of the human being — from “our place in the universe” to the paradoxical non-reality of elementary particles. The autonomous proliferation of emerging infectious diseases, themselves inseparable from the swarming of technologies of transportation, communication, and information. Below us, the microbes. Above us, algorithms. And even this is inflected back to us through a planetary meshwork of sensors, databases, and smart technologies which again picture the world back to us (“our” planet, a planet in need, an ecosystem in danger, a species needing saving). In a sense, the world “out there” and the world “in here” intersect in our ability to technologically modify the weather, the climate, and even the sun’s rays, culminating in the emerging worldview of “geoengineering” and its dark doppelgänger, “collapsology.”[51] Perhaps what Schopenhauer is outlining in these ideas of the world as Representation and Will is a strange kind of monism, co-existing but incommensurate realities, the gulf separating self and world that is the same time the that which connects them. And what if the current mania for discussing the “posthuman” or the “Anthropocene” is nothing but a symptom of this rift between self and world, human and non-human?

The big questions return. What if, in their informatic cold rationalism, all that our technologies reveal to us is a world that is indifferent to our presence? Schopenhauer again: “The world exists as we can see for ourselves, only I would like to know who has gotten anything out of it.”[52] Our very languages fail us. Caught between fanaticism and cataclysm, the planet goes on “planeting,” the Will blindly goes on Will-ing; it is the “-ing” that plods on. In this sense, it is possible that the direction in which Schopenhauer’s philosophy points today may not be the arcana of speculative philosophy, but the suggestions given by the physical sciences. If metaphysics is at its most metaphysical when it is physics (or astrophysics, or xenophysics), then perhaps the Earth viewed through geology, paleontology, or even astrobiology is at its most unearthly. For instance, the “Rare Earth hypothesis” proposes that the exact conditions for the emergence of biological life as we know it are so vast that “life” — both on this planet and beyond it — is an improbability.[53] One is tempted to say, an accident. Or, more neutrally, an incident. Ushering in evidence from a range of fields, including astrobiology, biocomplexity, and paleontology, the Rare Earth hypothesis details how very specific and narrow-range are the physical conditions that must exist for the development of complex life (from multicellular organisms to human intelligence). Everything from planetary systems with stable orbits and central stars, to “galactic habitable zones” resulting from specific plate tectonic shifts, to precise atmospheric conditions and steady-state biochemical cycling — the list of conditions goes on. All these must be met in order for complex life to emerge. Life is not normal. And when it does exist, it is volatile and short-lived. A more refined version of the hypothesis is that, while simple lifeforms (microbes) may be common in the universe, the development of complex life is rare.[54] Some research even goes so far as to conclude that the universe is actually hostile to complex life. As its melodramatic title indicates, the “Medea hypothesis” suggests that complex life is not only improbable but, when it exists, it is fundamentally unsustainable, comprised mainly of cycles of evolutionary development and catastrophe — that life, taken as a whole, is suicidal.[55] A strange example of personification run amok, the Medea hypothesis is not without a touch of irony: scientists cite as the main evidence microbial-triggered mass extinctions of complex organisms which, as a result, return the Earth to its originary, microbial state.

This and other like-minded scientific work is undoubtedly an influence on the emergent research on the “Blind Life hypothesis,” which begins from the premise that biological life is a “blindly self-perpetuating phenomenon” governed only by a strange “teleology without purpose.”[56] No doubt science research like this has had an impact on the fringes of the cultural landscape, where one finds the strangely pro-active Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which proposes anti-natalism and a phased extinction of the human race, in order to preserve the planet’s biodiversity (the movement has formally been in existence for thirty years). The possible flipside of this is another movement calling itself Too Tired for Suicide, whose manifesto begins: “The only legacy of humanity will be to have created the conditions for its own futility.” And at the furthest reaches there is the “Polyhedron Conspiracy,” about which information is nearly impossible to find, except for confused and vague speculations on ancient aliens, malevolent viruses, and astrobiological prophecies. Reading all this research (scientific and not-so-scientific) one gets an eerie sense of Schopenhauer’s Will-to-Live, blind impersonal striving that only incidentally flares up in the brief flash known as humanity, before dissipating back into nothingness. In fact, although Schopenhauer was writing just prior to the era of evolutionary biology, there is a sense in which the idea of the Will-to-Live provides a radically unhuman framework for appreciating microbial life, bio-informatic assemblages, and complex adaptive systems. One thinks of the ancient and pervasive presence of microbes both “out there” in the natural world as well as “in here” in our own bodies. The enigma of viruses, themselves remarkably simple and yet unclassifiable, miniscule assemblies of genetic fragments packed in a protein shell, able to bring entire civilizations to a halt, prompting us to question the presumed human provenance over “life itself.” In fact, Schopenhauer’s book On the Will in Nature (1836) is largely devoted to a weird biology, describing the many instances in the sciences that give evidence to this de-anthropomorphic incarnation of the Will in geological, plant, and animal life, life indifferent to human life, “human” life incidental to “life itself.” At once harrowing and yet strangely filled with reverence.

All of which returns us to where we began, in the penal colony. I mentioned that Schopenhauer’s account of the experience stands out from his other entries, but this is only part of the story. Following their time in the south of France, the Schopenhauer family then traveled to Switzerland, where young Schopenhauer made several excursions to the Swiss Alps. The rivers, lakes, forests, and of course vast mountain ranges made a deep impact on Schopenhauer. His travel diary notes the scaling-effect of the natural landscape, rendering miniscule the limited perspective of a single human being. It would be some years before Schopenhauer would study Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime, and thus have at his disposal a philosophical vocabulary for the experience. But already one notices an attempt to comprehend this strange effect of scale. A few years after the European tour, Schopenhauer writes the following poem in his notebook: “Farewell high mountain and down-reaching vale / On many a glorious day did I look up in awe, / Many a time did you observe me roam alone, / Deserted and of aspect grave I now to others turn.”[57] It’s a bit of juvenilia that derives much from German Romanticism, but the last line is interesting. Once he sees the world scaled-up from the perspective of the minutiae of human-centered interests, he cannot go back. Another entry reads: “The misery of life never appears in a clearer light than when a thinking person has quite plainly seen with horror its hazards and uncertainties and the total darkness in which they live…”[58] And then this: “Philosophy is a high mountain road which is reached only by a steep path covered with sharp stones and prickly thorns. It is an isolated road and becomes ever more desolate, the higher we ascend.”[59] Again, Romanticism. But also, an awareness of the irrevocable estrangement that philosophical reflection produces. One is no longer of the world, and yet still in it. “Deep down in the human being there lies the confident belief that something outside us is conscious of itself as we are…”[60] What this is remains opaque but “vividly presented,” Schopenhauer notes, “together with boundless infinity… a terrible thought.”[61] Perhaps what these early attempts illustrate is less youthful awe before sublime nature, but instead a glimpse into something not human, something that, in that same instant, is itself instantly brought within the ambit of the human scale, the anthropocentric scale of bodies, affects, language, concepts, cultures, and so on. A tourist destination. A snippet of amateur poetry. But the effect of the unhuman shift in scale sticks with him. Perhaps what Schopenhauer tries — and fails — to comprehend here is less Nature with a capital “N” and more an ambivalent fascination with a place without people, a world without us as human beings and our voracious capacity for humanizing everything in sight, a momentary and fleeting phenomenon of unpeopling — an impersonal sublime.

Near the end of his life, still reflecting on these early experiences, Schopenhauer wrote the following, which deserves to be quoted in full:

As soon as I began to think, I found myself at variance with the world. When I was young, I was often very worried about this, for I imagined that the majority would be in the right… Then, after every fresh conflict, the world lost more, and I gained more. After I had already reached my fortieth year, it appeared to me that that I had won my case in the last instance, and I found myself more highly placed than I had ever dared to presume; but for me the world became empty and desolate. Throughout my whole life I have felt terribly lonely, and have always sighed from the depths of my heart: “Now give me a human being!” But alas in vain. I have remained in solitude; but I can honestly and sincerely say that it has not been my fault, for I have not turned away, have not shunned, anyone who in their heart and mind was a human being. I have found none but miserable wretches of limited intelligence, bad heart and mean disposition.[62]

Most philosophers are trying to convince you; but Schopenhauer is there when you’re already convinced. There is a religious or mythical dimension to his philosophy, but a religion without a Church, a mythos without gods, a “leap” that is not followed by faith — only the Great Doubt of existents suspicious of their own existence. Schopenhauer doesn’t tell you what you don’t know; he confirms what you already know.

If we picture to ourselves roughly as far as we can the sum total of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind on which the sun shines in its course, we shall admit that it would have been much better if it had been just as impossible for the sun to produce the phenomenon of life on earth as on the moon, and the surface of the earth, like that of the moon, had still been in a crystalline state.[63]

NOTES

1. Quoted in David Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 73.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 49.

4. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Berg, 1988), p. 43.

5. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 4, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Berg, 1988), p. 119.

6. “The First Discourse,” In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pāli Canon, ed. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Wisdom Publications, 2005), p. 76.

7. The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Dover, 1966), p. 357.

8. Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 299.

9. Quoted in Rudiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers (Wiedenfeld & Nicholson, 1990), p. 105, modified.

10. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Dover, 1969), p. xviii.

11. Ibid., p. xii.

12. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 1, p. 512.

13. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, §21, pp. 109–10, modified.

14. The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p. 609, modified.

15. See Nick Land, “Critique of Transcendental Miserabilism,” Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic/Sequence, 2011), pp. 623–28.

16. Quoted in Cartwright, p. 392.

17. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, §68, p. 379, modified.

18. Ibid., pp. 390–91.

19. Ibid., p. 411.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. xii. The Preface to the second edition also outlined three prerequisites for reading Schopenhauer’s book: Plato, Kant, and, if you’re really serious, the Upanishads.

22. The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p. 573.

23. Ibid., pp. 573, 579.

24. Ibid., p. 466.

25. Ibid., p. 573.

26. Ibid., p. 472.

27. Ibid., p. 476.

28. Ibid., p. 605.

29. Ibid., p. 612.

30. Ibid., p. xx.

31. Ibid., p. xxi.

32. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 4, p. 387.

33. Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (University of California Press, 2002), p. 564.

34. Edward Said, “Thoughts on Late Style,” London Review of Books, vol. 26, no. 15 (5 August 2004). Retrieved at http://lrb.co.uk.

35. Said, On Late Style (Vintage, 2007), pp. 30–31.

36. Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2, p. 293.

37. Ibid., p. 285.

38. Ibid., p. 272.

39. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 4, p. 517.

40. Letter to Brockhaus, 26 June 1850. Cited in Cartwright, p. 518.

41. Letter to Frauenstädt 23 October 1850. Cited in Cartwright, p. 524.

42. See “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy,” The Westminster Review (January and April 1853), pp. 388–407. Upon reading the review, Schopenhauer apparently accepted the description of “sage” but rejected that of “misanthrope.”

43. Cited in Cartwright, pp. 544, 545.

44. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 4, p. 393. The notebook is titled “Senilia.”

45. See Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism (Oxford University Press, 2010), John Gray’s Straw Dogs (FSG, 2002), and Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy (Vintage, 2000). I cannot recommend any of these books, and regret having wasted time reading them, just so I could include this endnote.

46. Michel Houellebecq, En présence de Schopenhauer (L’Herne, 2017), p. 61, translation mine.

47. See Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010), Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020). My guess is that each of these authors, whose work I respect, would be very wary of a connection between their work and that of Schopenhauer.

48. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 4, p. 370.

49. Watsuji’s thesis is titled “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism & the Theory of Salvation.” It was actually his back-up thesis when his original Nietzsche thesis was rejected by his teachers.

50. Tetsuro Watsuji, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (Japanese Government Printing Bureau, 1961), pp. 3ff. This edition was later reprinted as Climate and Culture (Greenwood Publishing, 1988).

51. See Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times (Polity, 2020), as well as Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin, 2011).

52. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 4, p. 394.

53. See Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (Copernicus, 2000). See also Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Stuart Ross Taylor, Destiny or Chance: Our Solar System and Its Place in the Cosmos (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

54. See Ward and Brownlee’s follow-up book, with the low-stakes title, The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World (Holt, 2004).

55. See Ward, The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Princeton University Press, 2015).

56. A general summary is given in William Dyer and Francis Morgan’s forthcoming book, Blind Life: Living Without Purpose in an Improbable Universe (Springer, 2021).

57. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 1, p. 14.

58. Ibid., p. 10.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., p. 8.

61. Ibid.

62. Manuscript Remains, Vol. 4, p. 501. Schopenhauer titles the notebook (in Ancient Greek) “About Myself.”

63. Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2, p. 299.

A NOTE ON THIS EDITION

The selections in this edition were originally published in the following: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, trans. E.F.J. Payne, Dover, 1966 [1958], and Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2, trans. E.F.J. Payne, Oxford University Press, 1974. Thanks are due to the publishers for permission to reprint. These and accompanying Schopenhauer translations in English are the result of the endeavor of translator and editor E.F.J. Payne, produced in consultation with Arthur Hübscher (whose work continues to be a reference for Schopenhauer scholarship).

My aim as editor has been to produce a streamlined, readable edition of Schopenhauer’s later writings. There are a few challenges in doing this. The first is that, in the original versions of Schopenhauer’s books, quotations in other languages (Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and English) are given in the original. Sometimes Schopenhauer provided translations for them, sometimes not. Sometimes a quotation in ancient Greek is followed by its Latin translation, which is in turn followed by a German translation. There are also passages of Romanized Sanskrit and Chinese terms. All of this puts Schopenhauer’s ideas in dialogue with a wide range of texts, as well as giving his writing a more international character. However, the experience for the multilingual reader of Schopenhauer’s day must have been somewhat delirious, a bit like a Tower of Babel contemplating its own ruin. It’s hard to say whether this eclecticism was intentional on Schopenhauer’s part. Needless to say, it is impossible to replicate this experience unless one is fortunate enough to be able to fluently read several languages. Thus, for the present edition, I have chosen to replace all non-English quotations with English translations for greater readability.

The second challenge has to do with the references to the many quotations. Sometimes Schopenhauer provides the reference in the main text, while at other times he provides it in a footnote — and then there are instances in which he doesn’t provide any reference at all. Again, my aim has been to preserve this eclecticism in the original texts, filling out references as needed. In some cases this entailed consulting fascimiles of the original editions of Schopenhauer’s books. Where appropriate, I have included notes by conferring with the Hübscher Sämtliche Werke edition, as well as the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer.

Lastly, I have made minor changes to Payne’s English so that it accords to standards of twenty-first century English. I have also left certain words or phrases in other languages as is, either because they have usage in English (e.g. par excellence) or because they are common terms in philosophy (e.g. a priori).

Schopenhauer’s original notes are indicated by [S]. All other notes are my own.

ON THE SUFFERING OF THE WORLD

1. ON THE VANITY AND SUFFERING OF LIFE

Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, and erring; and, as if through a troubled dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness. Yet till then its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart. In this connexion, let us now consider what as a rule comes to people in satisfactions of any kind; it is often nothing more than the bare maintenance of this very existence, extorted daily with unremitting effort and constant care in conflict with misery and want, and with death in prospect. Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated, or recognized as an illusion. The grounds for this lie deep in the very nature of things. Accordingly, the lives of most people prove troubled and short. The comparatively happy are often only apparently so, or else, like those of long life, they are rare exceptions; the possibility of these still had to be left, as decoybirds. Life presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly, happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable. With its misfortunes, small, greater, and great, occurring hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly; with its deluded hopes and accidents bringing all calculations to nought, life bears so clearly the stamp of something which ought to disgust us, that it is difficult to conceive how anyone could fail to recognize this, and be persuaded that life is here to be thankfully enjoyed, and that human beings exists in order to be happy. On the contrary, that continual deception and disillusionment, as well as the general nature of life, present themselves as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing whatever is worth our exertions, our efforts, and our struggles, that all good things are empty and fleeting, that the world on all sides is bankrupt, and that life is a business that does not cover the costs; so that our will may turn away from it.

The way in which this vanity of all objects of the will makes itself known and comprehensible to the intellect that is rooted in the individual, is primarily time. It is the form by whose means that vanity of things appears as their transitoriness, since by virtue of this all our pleasures and enjoyments come to nought in our hands, and afterwards we ask in astonishment where they have remained. Hence that vanity itself is the only objective element of time, in other words, that which corresponds to it in the inner nature of things, and so that of which it is the expression. For this reason, time is the a priori necessary form of all our perceptions; everything must present itself in time, even we ourselves. Consequently, our life is primarily like a payment made to us in nothing but copper coins, for which we must then give a receipt; the coins are the days, and the receipt is death. For in the end time proclaims the judgement of nature on the worth of all beings that appear in it, since it destroys them:

And justly so: for all things, from the Void

Called forth, deserve to be destroyed:

’Twere better, then, were nought created.[1]

Thus, old age and death, to which every life necessarily hurries, are a sentence of condemnation on the will-to-live which comes from the hands of nature itself. It states that this will is a striving that is bound to frustrate itself. “What you have willed,” it says, “ends thus: will something better.” Therefore the instruction afforded to everyone by their life consists on the whole in the fact that the objects of one’s desires constantly delude, totter, and fall; that in consequence they bring more misery than joy, until at last even the whole foundation on which they all stand collapses, since one’s life itself is destroyed. Thus one obtains the final confirmation that all striving and willing was a perversity, a path of error:

Then old age and experience, hand in hand,

Lead him to death, and make him understand,

After a search so painful and so long,

That all his life he has been in the wrong.[2]

But I wish to go into the matter in more detail, for it is these views in which I have met with most contradiction. First of all, I have to confirm by the following remarks the proof given in the text of the negative nature of all satisfaction, and hence of all pleasure and happiness, in opposition to the positive nature of pain.

We feel pain, but not painlessness; care, but not freedom from care; fear, but not safety and security. We feel the desire as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it has been satisfied, it is like the mouthful of food which has been taken, and which ceases to exist for our feelings the moment it is swallowed. We painfully feel the loss of pleasures and enjoyments, as soon as they fail to appear; but when pains cease even after being present for a long time, their absence is not directly felt, but at most they are thought of intentionally by means of reflection. For only pain and want can be felt positively; and therefore they proclaim themselves; well-being, on the contrary, is merely negative. Therefore, we do not become conscious of the three greatest blessings of life as such, namely health, youth, and freedom, as long as we possess them, but only after we have lost them; for they too are negations. We notice that certain days of our life were happy only after they have made room for unhappy ones. In proportion as enjoyments and pleasures increase, susceptibility to them decreases; that to which we are accustomed is no longer felt as a pleasure. But in precisely this way is the susceptibility to suffering increased; for the cessation of that to which we are accustomed is felt painfully. Thus the measure of what is necessary increases through possession, and thereby the capacity to feel pain. The hours pass the more quickly the more pleasantly they are spent, and the more slowly the more painfully they are spent, since pain, not pleasure, is the positive thing, whose presence makes itself felt. In just the same way we become conscious of time when we are bored, not when we are amused. Both cases prove that our existence is happiest when we perceive it least; from this it follows that it would be better not to have it. Great and animated delight can be positively conceived only as the consequence of great misery that has preceded it; for nothing can be added to a state of permanent contentment except some amusement or even the satisfaction of vanity. Therefore, all poets are obliged to bring their heroes into anxious and painful situations, in order to be able to liberate them therefrom again. Accordingly, dramas and epics generally describe only fighting, suffering, tormented individuals, and every work of fiction is a peepshow in which we observe the spasms and convulsions of the agonized human heart. Sir Walter Scott has naively set forth this aesthetic necessity in the “Conclusion” to his novel Old Mortality. Voltaire, so highly favoured by nature and good fortune, also says, entirely in agreement with the truth I have demonstrated: “Happiness is only a dream, and pain is real… I have experienced this for eighty years. I know of nothing better than to resign myself to this and to say that flies are born to be eaten by spiders, and human beings to be devoured by trouble and affliction.”[3]

Before we state so confidently that life is desirable or merits our gratitude, let us for once calmly compare the sum of the pleasures which are in any way possible, and which a person can enjoy in their life, with the sum of the sufferings which are in any way possible, and can come to them in life. I do not think it will be difficult to strike the balance. In the long run, however, it is quite superfluous to dispute whether there is more good or evil in the world; for the mere existence of evil decides the matter, since evil can never be wiped off, and consequently can never be balanced, by the good that exists along with or after it.

A thousand pleasures do not compensate for one pain.[4]

Petrarch

For that thousands had lived in happiness and joy would never do away with the anguish and death-agony of one individual; and just as little does my present well-being undo my previous sufferings. Therefore, were the evil in the world even a hundred times less than it is, its mere existence would still be sufficient to establish a truth that may be expressed in various ways, although always only somewhat indirectly, namely that we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world; that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; that it is something which at bottom ought not to be, and so on. Byron’s expression of the matter is exceedingly fine:

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

Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be

The skies, which rain their plagues on men like dew —

Disease, death, bondage — all the woes we see —

And worse, the woes we see not — which throb through

The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.[5]

If the world and life were an end in themselves, and accordingly were to require theoretically no justification, and practically no compensation or amends, but existed, perhaps as represented by Spinoza and present-day Spinozists, as the single manifestation of a God who, for amusement, or even to mirror itself, undertook such a self-evolution, and consequently its existence needed neither to be justified by reasons nor redeemed by results, then the sufferings and troubles of life would not indeed have to be fully compensated by the pleasures and well-being in it. For, as I have said, this is impossible, because my present pain is never abolished by future pleasures, since the latter fill up their time just as the former fills its own. On the contrary, there would have to be no sufferings at all, and of necessity there would also not be death, or else it would have no terrors for us. Only thus would life pay for itself.

Now since our state or condition is rather something that it were better should not be, everything that surrounds us bears the traces of this — just as in hell everything smells of sulphur — since everything is always imperfect and deceptive, everything agreeable is mixed with something disagreeable, every enjoyment is always only half an enjoyment, every gratification introduces its own disturbance, every relief new worries and troubles, every expedient for our daily and hourly needs leaves us in the lurch at every moment, and denies its service. The step on to which we tread so often gives way under us; in fact, misfortunes and accidents great and small are the element of our life, and in a word, we are like Phineus, all of whose food was contaminated and rendered unfit to eat by the Harpies. All that we lay hold on resists us, because it has a will of its own which must be overcome. Two remedies for this are tried; firstly prudence, foresight, cunning; it does not teach us fully, is not sufficient, and comes to nought. Secondly, stoical equanimity, seeking to disarm every misfortune by preparedness for all and contempt for everything; in practice, this becomes cynical renunciation which prefers to reject once for all every means of help and every alleviation. It makes us dogs, like Diogenes in his tub. The truth is that we ought to be wretched, and are so. The chief source of the most serious evils affecting humanity is human beings; homo homini lupus.[6] The person who keeps this last fact clearly in view beholds the world as a hell, surpassing that of Dante by the fact that one person must be the devil of another. For this purpose, of course, one is more fitted than another, indeed an archfiend is more fitted than all the rest, and appears in the form of a conqueror; who sets several hundred thousand people, facing one another, and exclaims to them: “To suffer and die is your destiny; now shoot one another with musket and cannon!” and they do so. In general, however, the conduct of people towards one another is characterized as a rule by injustice, extreme unfairness, hardness, and even cruelty; an opposite course of conduct appears only by way of exception. The necessity for the State and for legislation rests on this fact, and not on your shifts and evasions. But in all cases not lying within the reach of the law, we see at once a lack of consideration for one’s fellow beings which is peculiar to human beings, and springs from their boundless egoism, and sometimes even from wickedness. How human beings deal with themselves is seen, for example, in slavery in America, the ultimate object of which is sugar and coffee. However, we need not go so far; to enter at the age of five a cotton-spinning or other factory, and from then on to sit there every day first ten, then twelve, and finally fourteen hours, and perform the same mechanical work, is to purchase dearly the pleasure of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and many more millions have an analogous fate.

We others, however, can be made perfectly miserable by trifling incidents, but perfectly happy by nothing in the world. Whatever we may say, the happiest moment of the happy person is that of falling asleep, just as the unhappiest moment of the unhappy person is that of awakening. An indirect but certain proof of the fact that people feel unhappy, and consequently are so, is also abundantly afforded by the terrible envy that dwells in all. In all the circumstances of life, on the occasion of every superiority or advantage, of whatever kind it be, this envy is roused and cannot contain its poison. Because people feel unhappy, they cannot bear the sight of one who is supposed to be happy. Whoever feels happy for the moment would at once like to make all around them happy, and says:

May everyone here be happy in my joy.[7]

If life in itself were a precious blessing, and decidedly preferable to non-existence, the exit from it would not need to be guarded by such fearful watchmen as death and its terrors. But who would go on living life as it is, if death were less terrible? And who could bear even the mere thought of death, if life were a pleasure? But the former still always has the good point of being the end of life, and we console ourselves with death in regard to the sufferings of life, and with the sufferings of life in regard to death. The truth is that the two belong to each other inseparably, since they constitute a deviation from the right path, and a return to this is as difficult as it is desirable.

If the world were not something that, practically expressed, ought not to be, it would also not be theoretically a problem. On the contrary, its existence would either require no explanation at all, since it would be so entirely self-evident that astonishment at it and enquiry about it could not arise in any mind; or its purpose would present itself unmistakably. But instead of this it is indeed an insoluble problem, since even the most perfect philosophy will always contain an unexplained element, like an insoluble precipitate or the remainder that is always left behind by the irrational proportion of two quantities. Therefore, if anyone ventures to raise the question why there is not nothing at all rather than this world, then the world cannot be justified from itself; no ground, no final cause of its existence can be found in itself; it cannot be demonstrated that it exists for its own sake, in other words, for its own advantage. In pursuance of my teaching, this can, of course, be explained from the fact that the principle of the world’s existence is expressly a groundless one, namely a blind will-to-live, which, as thing-in-itself, cannot be subject to the principle of sufficient reason or ground; for this principle is merely the form of phenomena, and through it alone every why is justified. But this is also in keeping with the nature and constitution of the world, for only a blind, not a seeing, will could put itself in the position in which we find ourselves. On the contrary, a seeing will would soon have made the calculation that the business does not cover the costs, since such a mighty effort and struggle with the exertion of all one’s strength, under constant care, anxiety, and want, and with the inevitable destruction of every individual life, finds no compensation in the ephemeral existence itself, which is obtained by such effort, and comes to nothing in our hands. Therefore, the explanation of the world from the “intellect” of Anaxagoras, in other words, from a will guided by knowledge, necessarily demands for its extenuation optimism, which is then set up and maintained in spite of the loudly crying evidence of a whole world full of misery. Life is then given out as a gift, whereas it is evident that anyone would have declined it with thanks, had they looked at it and tested it beforehand; just as Lessing admired the understanding of his son. Because this son had absolutely declined to come into the world, he had to be dragged forcibly into life by means of forceps; but hardly was he in it, when he again hurried away from it. On the other hand, it is well said that life should be, from one end to the other, only a lesson, to which, however, anyone could reply: “For this reason, I wish I had been left in the peace of the all-sufficient nothing, where I should have had no need either of lessons or of anything else.” But if it were added that one day a person was to give an account of every hour of their life, they would rather be justified in first asking for an account as to why they were taken away from that peace and quiet and put into a position so precarious, obscure, anxious, and painful. To this, then, false fundamental views lead. Far from bearing the character of a gift, human existence has entirely the character of a contracted debt. The calling in of this debt appears in the shape of the urgent needs, tormenting desires, and endless misery brought about through that existence. As a rule, the whole lifetime is used for paying off this debt, yet in this way only the interest is cleared off. Repayment of the capital takes place through death. And when was this debt contracted? At the begetting.

Accordingly, if human beings are regarded as beings whose existence is a punishment and an atonement, then they are already seen in a more correct light. The myth of the Fall (although probably, like the whole of Judaism, borrowed from the Zend Avesta: Bundahishn[8]), is the only thing in the Old Testament to which I can concede a metaphysical, although only allegorical, truth; indeed it is this alone that reconciles me to the Old Testament. Thus our existence resembles nothing but the consequence of a false step and a guilty desire. New Testament Christianity, the ethical spirit of which is that of Brahmanism and Buddhism, and which is therefore very foreign to the otherwise optimistic spirit of the Old Testament, has also, extremely wisely, started from that very myth; in fact, without this, it would not have found one single point of connexion with Judaism. If we wish to measure the degree of guilt with which our existence itself is burdened, let us look at the suffering connected with it. Every great pain, whether bodily or mental, states what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it. That Christianity also looks at our existence in this light is proved by a passage from Luther’s Commentary on Galatians, Chapter 3: “In our bodies and circumstances, however, we are all subject to the devil and are strangers in this world, of which he is prince and lord. Hence everything is under his rule, the bread we eat, the beverages we drink, the clothes we use, even the air and everything by which we live in the flesh.” An outcry has been raised about the melancholy and cheerless nature of my philosophy; but this is to be found merely in the fact that, instead of inventing a future hell as the equivalent of sins, I have shown that where guilt is to be found, there is already in the world something akin to hell; but the person who is inclined to deny this can easily experience it.

This world is the battleground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths. Then in this world the capacity to feel pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in human beings, a degree that is the higher, the more intelligent the person. To this world the attempt has been made to adapt the system of optimism, and to demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring. However, an optimist tells me to open my eyes and look at the world and see how beautiful it is in the sunshine, with its mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals, and so on. But is the world, then, a peepshow? These things are certainly beautiful to behold, but to be them is something quite different. A teleologist then comes along and speaks to me in glowing terms about the wise arrangement by virtue of which care is taken that the planets do not run their heads against one another; that land and sea are not mixed up into pulp, but are held apart in a delightful way; also that everything is neither rigid in continual frost nor roasted with heat; likewise that, in consequence of the obliquity of the ecliptic, there is not an eternal spring in which nothing could reach maturity, and so forth. But this and everything like it are indeed mere necessary conditions. If there is to be a world at all, if its planets are to exist at least as long as is needed for the ray of light from a remote fixed star to reach them, and are not, like Lessing’s son, to depart again immediately after birth, then of course it could not be constructed so unskillfully that its very framework would threaten to collapse. But if we proceed to the results of the applauded work, if we consider the players who act on the stage so durably constructed, and then see how with sensibility pain makes its appearance, and increases in proportion as that sensibility develops into intelligence, and then how, keeping pace with this, desire and suffering come out ever more strongly, and increase, till at last human life affords no other material than that for tragedies and comedies, then whoever is not a hypocrite will hardly be disposed to break out into hallelujahs. The real but disguised origin of these latter has moreover been exposed, mercilessly but with triumphant truth, by David Hume in his Natural History of Religion, Sections 6, 7, 8, and 13. He also explains without reserve in the tenth and eleventh books of his Dialogues on Natural Religion, with arguments very convincing yet quite different from mine, the miserable nature of this world and the untenableness of all optimism; here at the same time he attacks optimism at its source. Both these works of Hume are as well worth reading as they are at the present time unknown in Germany, where, on the other hand, incredible pleasure is found patriotically in the most repulsive drivel of native, boastful mediocrities, who are lauded to the skies as great individuals. Nevertheless, Hamann translated those dialogues; Kant looked through the translation, and late in life wished to induce Hamann’s son to publish them, because the translation by Platner did not satisfy him (see Kant’s biography by F.W. Schubert, pp. 81 and 165). There is more to be learnt from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher taken together.

Again, the founder of systematic optimism is Leibniz, whose services to philosophy I have no wish to deny, although I could never succeed in really thinking myself into the monadology, preestablished harmony, and the identity of indiscernibles. His New Essays on the Understanding are, however, merely an excerpt with a detailed yet weak criticism, with a view to correction, of Locke’s work that is justly world-famous. He here opposes Locke with just as little success as he opposes Newton in his Essay on the Causes of Celestial Motion directed against the system of gravitation. The Critique of Pure Reason is very specially directed against this Leibniz–Wolffian philosophy and has a polemical, indeed a destructive, relation to it, just as to Locke and Hume it has a relation of continuation and of further development. That the professors of philosophy are everywhere engaged at the present time in setting Leibniz on his feet again with his humbug, in fact in glorifying him, and, on the other hand, in disparaging and setting aside Kant as much as possible, has its good reason in the saying “first live…”[9] The Critique of Pure Reason does not permit of one’s giving out Jewish mythology as philosophy, or speaking summarily of the “soul” as a given reality, as a well-known and well-accredited person, without giving some account of how one has arrived at this concept, and what justification one has for using it scientifically. But “first live, then philosophize!”[10] Down with Kant, long live our Leibniz! Therefore, to return to Leibniz, I cannot assign to the Theodicy, that methodical and broad development of optimism, in such a capacity, any other merit than that it later gave rise to the immortal Candide of the great Voltaire. In this way, of course, Leibniz’s oft-repeated and lame excuse for the evil of the world, namely that the bad sometimes produces the good, obtained proof that for him was unexpected. Even by the name of his hero, Voltaire indicated that it needed only sincerity to recognize the opposite of optimism. Actually optimism cuts so strange a figure on this scene of sin, suffering, and death, that we should be forced to regard it as irony if we did not have an adequate explanation of its origin in its secret source (namely hypocritical flattery with an offensive confidence in its success), a source so delightfully disclosed by Hume, as previously mentioned.

But against the palpably sophistical proofs of Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds, we may even oppose seriously and honestly the proof that it is the worst of all possible worlds. For possible means not what we may picture in our imagination, but what can actually exist and last. Now this world is arranged as it had to be if it were to be capable of continuing with great difficulty to exist; if it were a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so, this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds. For not only if the planets ran their heads against one another, but also if any one of the actually occurring perturbations of their course continued to increase, instead of being gradually balanced again by the others, the world would soon come to an end. Astronomers know on what accidental circumstances — in most cases on the irrational relation to one another of the periods of revolution — all this depends. They have carefully calculated that it will always go on well, and consequently that the world can also last and go on. Although Newton was of the opposite opinion, we will hope that the astronomers have not miscalculated, and consequently that the mechanical perpetual motion realized in such a planetary system will also not, like the rest, ultimately come to a standstill. Again, powerful forces of nature dwell under the firm crust of the planet. As soon as some accident affords these free play, they must necessarily destroy that crust with everything living on it. This has occurred at least three times on our planet, and will probably occur even more frequently. The earthquake of Lisbon, of Haiti, the destruction of Pompeii are only small, playful hints at the possibility. An insignificant alteration of the atmosphere, not even chemically demonstrable, causes cholera, yellow fever, black death, and so on, which carry off millions of people; a somewhat greater alteration would extinguish all life. A very moderate increase of heat would dry up all rivers and springs. The animals have received barely enough in the way of organs and strength to enable them with the greatest exertion to procure sustenance for their own lives and food for their offspring. Therefore, if an animal loses a limb, or even only the complete use of it, it is in most cases bound to perish. Powerful as are the weapons of understanding and reason possessed by the human race, nine-tenths of humanity live in constant conflict with want, always balancing themselves with difficulty and effort on the brink of destruction. Thus throughout, for the continuance of the whole as well as for that of every individual being, the conditions are sparingly and scantily given, and nothing beyond these. Therefore the individual life is a ceaseless struggle for existence itself, while at every step it is threatened with destruction. Just because this threat is so often carried out, provision had to be made, by the incredibly great surplus of seed, that the destruction of individuals should not bring about that of the races, since about these alone is nature seriously concerned. Consequently, the world is as bad as it can possibly be, if it is to exist at all. Q.E.D. The fossils of entirely different kinds of animal species which formerly inhabited the planet afford us, as proof of our calculation, records of worlds whose continuance was no longer possible, and which were in consequence somewhat worse than the worst of possible worlds.

At bottom, optimism is the unwarranted self-praise of the real author of the world, namely of the will-to-live which complacently mirrors itself in its work. Accordingly, optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and humanity’s happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes they have the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to their lot, they believe that they suffer an injustice, in fact that they miss the whole point of existence; whereas it is far more correct to regard work, privation, misery, and suffering, crowned by death, as the aim and object of our life (as is done by Brahmanism and Buddhism, and also by genuine Christianity), since it is these that lead to the denial of the will-to-live. In the New Testament, the world is presented as a vale of tears, life as a process of purification, and the symbol of Christianity is an instrument of torture. Therefore, when Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and Pope appeared with optimism, the general offence caused by it was due mainly to the fact that optimism is irreconcilable with Christianity. This is stated and explained by Voltaire in the preface to his excellent poem The Disaster in Lisbon, which also is expressly directed against optimism. This great individual, whom I so gladly commend in the face of the slanders of mercenary German ink-slingers, is placed decidedly higher than Rousseau by the insight to which he attained in three respects, and which testifies to the greater depth of his thinking: (1) insight into the preponderating magnitude of the evil and misery of existence with which one is deeply penetrated; (2) insight into the strict necessitation of the acts of will; (3) insight into the truth of Locke’s principle that what thinks may possibly be also material. Rousseau, on the other hand, disputes all this by declamations in his Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, the superficial philosophy of a Protestant pastor. In this very spirit he also attacks, in the interests of optimism, Voltaire’s fine poem just mentioned. This he does with distorted, shallow, and logically false reasoning in his long letter to Voltaire of 18 August 1756, which was devoted simply to this purpose. Indeed, the fundamental characteristic and first false step of Rousseau’s whole philosophy is that he puts in the place of the Christian doctrine of original sin and of the original depravity of the human race an original goodness and unlimited perfectibility thereof, which had been led astray merely by civilization and its consequences; and on this he then establishes his optimism and humanism.

Just as in Candide Voltaire in his facetious manner wages war on optimism, so has Byron done the same, in his serious and tragic way, in his immortal masterpiece Cain, and for this reason he too has been glorified by the invectives of the obscurantist Friedrich Schlegel. If in conclusion, to confirm my view, I wished to record the sayings of great minds of all ages in this sense, which is opposed to optimism, there would be no end to the citations: for almost every one of them has expressed in strong terms their knowledge of the world’s misery. Hence at the end of this chapter a few statements of this kind may find a place, not to confirm, but merely to embellish it.

First of all, let me mention here that, remote as the Greeks were from the Christian and lofty Asiatic worldview, and although they were decidedly at the standpoint of the affirmation of the will, they were nevertheless deeply affected by the wretchedness of existence. The invention of tragedy, which belongs to them, is already evidence of this. Another proof of it is given by the custom of the Thracians, first mentioned by Herodotus (V, ch. 4), and often referred to later, of welcoming the new-born child with lamentation, and recounting all the evils that face it, and, on the other hand, of burying the dead with mirth and merriment, because they have escaped from so many great sufferings. This runs as follows in a fine verse preserved for us by Plutarch (How a Youth Should Study Poetry):

Pity those who are born, because they face so many evils;

but the dead are to be accompanied with mirth and blessings, because they have escaped from so many sufferings.[11]

It is to be attributed not to historical relationship, but to the moral identity of the matter, that the Mexicans welcomed the new-born child with the words: “My child, you are born to endure; therefore endure, suffer, and keep silence.” And in pursuance of the same feeling, Swift (as Sir Walter Scott relates in his Life of Swift) early adopted the custom of celebrating his birthday, not as a time of joy, but of sadness, and of reading on that day the passage from the Bible where Job laments and curses the day on which it was said in the house of his father that a child is born.

Well known and too long to copy out is the passage in the Apology of Socrates, where Plato represents this wisest of mortals as saying that, even if death deprived us of consciousness forever, it would be a wonderful gain, for a deep, dreamless sleep is to be preferred to any day, even of the happiest life.

A saying of Heraclitus ran:

Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death.[12] (Etymologicum magnum, under the heading “life,” as well as Eustathius, On the Iliad I, p. 31)[13]

The fine lines of Theognis are well known:

Not to be born at all would be the best thing for the human being, never to behold the sun’s scorching rays; but if one is born, then one is to press as quickly as possible to the portals of Hades, and rest there under the earth.[14]

In Oedipus at Colonus (line 1225) Sophocles has the following abbreviation of this:

Never to be born is far best; yet if a person lives, the next best thing is for them to return as quickly as possible to the place from which they came.

Euripides says:

All the life of a human being is full of misery, and there is no end to affliction and despair.

Hippolytus, 189

And Homer already said:

Of all that breathes and creeps on earth there is no more wretched being than a human being.

Iliad XVII, 446

Even Pliny says: “Therefore may everyone acknowledge first of all, as a means for saving their soul, the view that, of all the good things meted out to human beings by nature, none is more valuable than a timely death” (Natural History, 28.2).

Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the old King Henry IV the words:

O heaven! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

… how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,

The happiest youth, — viewing his progress through

What perils past, what crosses to ensue, —

Would shut the book and sit him down and die.[15]

Finally, Byron:

Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,

Count o’er thy days from anguish free,

And know, whatever thou hast been,

’Tis something better not to be.[16]

Balthasar Gracián also brings before our eyes the misery of our existence in the darkest colours in Criticon, Part l, Crisis 5, at the beginning, and Crisis 7 at the end, where he presents life in detail as a tragic farce.

But no one has treated this subject so thoroughly and exhaustively as Leopardi in our own day. He is entirely imbued and penetrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence. He presents it on every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such a wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, has a diverting and stimulating effect.

NOTES

1. Goethe, Faust I, 1339–41, trans. Bayard Taylor.

2. John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” (c. 1674).

3. Letter to the Marquis de Florian, 16 March 1774.

4. Il Canzoniere, Sonnet 231.

5. Childe Harold, IV, 126.

6. “Man is a wolf to man.” A Latin proverb, cited by Plautus and utilized later on by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes.

7. Claude Adrien Helvétius, De L’Esprit (On the Mind) (1758), Discourse III, ch. 12.

8. A reference to the Avesta, a collection of Zoroastrian religious texts. The Bundahishn (“Primal Creation”) is a work of Zoroastrian cosmology.

9. Primum vivere.

10. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari.

11. Section 36F. The quote is from Euripides’ tragedy Cresphontes.

12. Fragment B48.

13. The Etymologicum magnum is a Greek lexical reference book.

14. Elegies, 425–28.

15. Henry iv Part ii, Act 3, Scene 1.

16. “Euthanasia,” 33–36.

2. ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE VANITY OF EXISTENCE

This vanity finds its expression in the whole form of existence; in the infinite nature of time and space as opposed to the finite nature of the individual in both; in the transitory and passing present moment as reality’s sole mode of existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constant becoming without being; in constant desire without satisfaction; in the constant interruption of efforts and aspirations which constitutes the course of life until such obstruction is overcome. Time and the fleeting nature of all things-therein, and by means thereof, are merely the form wherein is revealed to the will-to-live, which as the thing-in-itself is imperishable, the vanity of that striving. Time is that by virtue whereof at every moment all things in our hands come to nought and thereby lose all true value.

What has been, no longer is; it as little exists as that which has never been. But everything that is, is the next moment already regarded as having been. And so the most insignificant present has over the most significant past the advantage of reality, whereby the former is related to the latter as something to nothing.

To their astonishment, all of a sudden one exists after countless thousands of years of non-existence and, after a short time, must again pass into a non-existence just as long. The heart says that this can never be right, and from considerations of this kind there must dawn even on the crude and uncultured mind a presentiment of the ideality of time. But this, together with the ideality of space, is the key to all true metaphysics because it makes way for an order of things quite different from that which is found in nature. This is why Kant is so great.

Of every event in our life, only for one moment can it be said that it is; forever afterwards we must say that it was. Every evening we are poorer by a day. Perhaps the sight of this ebbing away of our brief span of time would drive us mad if in the very depths of our being we were not secretly conscious that the inexhaustible spring of eternity belongs to us so that from it we are forever able to renew the period of life.

On considerations such as the foregoing, we can certainly base the theory that to enjoy the present moment and to make this the object of our life is the greatest wisdom because the present alone is real, everything else being only the play of thought. But we could just as well call it the greatest folly; for that which in the next moment no longer exists, and vanishes as completely as a dream, is never worth a serious effort.

Our existence has no foundation to support it except the ever-fleeting and vanishing present; and so constant motion is essentially its form, without any possibility of that rest for which we are always longing. We resemble a person running downhill who would inevitably fall if they tried to stop, and who keeps on their legs only by continuing to run; or we are like a stick balanced on a fingertip; or the planet that would fall into its sun if it ceased to hurry forward irresistibly. Thus restlessness is the original form of existence.

In such a world where there is no stability of any kind, no lasting state is possible but everything is involved in restless rotation and change, where everyone hurries along and keeps erect on a tightrope by always advancing and moving, happiness is not even conceivable. It cannot dwell where Plato’s “constant becoming and never being” is the only thing that occurs. In the first place, no one is happy, but everyone throughout life strives for an alleged happiness that is rarely attained, and even then, only to disappoint them. As a rule, everyone ultimately reaches port with masts and rigging gone; but then it is immaterial whether they were happy or unhappy in a life which consisted merely of a fleeting vanishing present and is now over and finished.

However, it must be a matter of surprise to us to see how, in the human and animal worlds, that exceedingly great, varied, and restless motion is produced and kept up by two simple tendencies, hunger and the sexual impulse, aided a little perhaps by boredom, and how these are able to act as the First Mover for such a complicated machine that sets in motion the manycoloured puppet show.

Now if we consider the matter more closely, we first of all see the existence of the inorganic attacked at every moment and finally obliterated by chemical forces. On the other hand, the existence of the organic is rendered possible only through the constant change of matter which requires a continuous flow and consequently assistance from without. Thus in itself, organic life already resembles the stick which is balanced on the hand and must always be in motion; and it is, therefore a constant need, an ever-recurring want, and an endless trouble. Yet only by means of this organic life is consciousness possible. All this is accordingly finite existence whose opposite would be conceivable as infinite, as exposed to no attack from without, or as requiring no help from without, and therefore as ever remaining unchanged, in eternal rest and calm, neither coming into being nor passing away, without change, without time, without multiplicity and diversity, the negative knowledge of which is the keynote of Plato’s philosophy. Such an existence must be that to which the denial of the will-to-live opens the way.

The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic which produce no effect if we stand close to them, but which must be viewed at a distance if we are to find them beautiful. Therefore, to obtain something that was eagerly desired is equivalent to finding out how empty and insubstantial it was, and if we are always living in expectation of better things, we often repent at the same time and long for the past. On the other hand, the present is accepted only for the time being, is set at nought, and looked upon merely as the path to the goal. Thus when at the end of their lives most people look back, they will find that they have lived throughout provisionally; they will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life, precisely that in the expectation of which they lived. And so the course of a person’s life is, as a rule, such that, having been duped by hope, they dance into the arms of death.

In addition, there is the insatiability of the individual will by virtue whereof every satisfaction creates a fresh desire and its craving, eternally insatiable, goes on forever. At bottom, however, it is due to the fact that, taken in itself, the will is lord of the worlds to whom everything belongs; and so no part could give it satisfaction, but only the whole which, however, is endless. Meanwhile, it must awaken our sympathy when we consider how very little this lord of the world obtains in its individual phenomenon; usually only just enough to maintain the individual body. Hence the profound woe and misery of the individual.

In the present period of intellectual impotence which is distinguished by its veneration for every species of inferiority and describes itself most appropriately by the homemade phrase “Nowness,”[1] as cacophonous as it is pretentious, as its Now were the Now par excellence, the Now for whose production alone all previous Nows have existed — in such a period even the pantheists have the effrontery to say that life is, as they put it, an “end in itself.” If this existence of ours were the final aim and object of the world, it would be the silliest that had ever been laid down, whether by ourselves or anyone else.

Life presents itself primarily as a task, namely that of gaining a livelihood, de gagner sa vie.[2] When this problem is solved, what has been gained is a burden, and there comes the second problem of how to dispose of what we have got in order to ward off boredom. Like a bird of prey on the watch, this evil pounces on every life that has been made secure. The first problem, therefore, is to acquire something and the second is to prevent it from making itself felt after it has been acquired, otherwise it is a burden.

If we attempt to take in at a glance the whole world of humanity, we see everywhere a restless struggle, a vast contest for life and existence, with the fullest exertion of bodily and mental powers, in face of dangers and evils of very kind which threaten and strike at any moment. If we then consider the reward for all this, namely existence and life itself, we find some intervals of painless existence which are at once attacked by boredom and rapidly brought to an end by a new affliction.

Behind need and want is to be found at once boredom, which attacks even the more intelligent animals. This is a consequence of the fact that life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion. But as soon as this comes to a standstill, the utter barrenness and emptiness of existence become apparent.

That human existence must be a kind of error, is sufficiently clear from the simple observation that a human being is a concretion of needs and wants. Their satisfaction is hard to attain and yet affords them nothing but a painless state in which they are still abandoned to boredom. This, then, is a positive proof that, in itself, existence has no value; for boredom is just that feeling of its emptiness. Thus if life, in the craving for which our very essence and existence consist, had a positive value and in itself a real intrinsic worth, there could not possibly be any boredom. On the contrary, mere existence in itself would necessarily fill our hearts and satisfy us. Now we take no delight in our existence except in striving for something when the distance and obstacles make us think that the goal will be satisfactory, an allusion that vanishes when it is reached; or else in a purely intellectual occupation where we really step out of life in order to contemplate it from without, like spectators in the boxes. Even sensual pleasure itself consists in a constant striving and ceases as soon as its goal is attained. Now whenever we are not striving for something or are not intellectually occupied, but are thrown back on existence itself, its worthlessness and vanity are brought home to us; and this is what is meant by boredom. Even our inherent and ineradicable tendency to run after what is strange and extraordinary shows how glad we are to see an interruption in the natural course of things which is so tedious. Even the pomp and splendour of the great in their luxury and entertainments are at bottom really nothing but a vain attempt to go beyond the essential wretchedness of our existence. For after all, what are precious stones, pearls, feathers, red velvet, many candles, dancers, the putting on and off of masks, and so on? No one has ever felt entirely happy in the present, for they would have been intoxicated.

The most perfect phenomenon of the will-to-live, which manifests itself in the exceedingly genius and complex mechanism of the human organism, must crumble to dust, and thus its whole essence and efforts are in the end obviously given over to annihilation. All this is the naïve utterance of nature, always true and sincere, that the whole striving of that will is essentially empty and vain. If we are something valuable in itself, something that could be unconditioned and absolute, it would not have non-existence as its goal. The feeling of this also underlies Goethe’s fine song:

High upon the ancient tower

Stands the hero’s noble spirit.[3]

The necessity of death can be inferred primarily from the fact that a human being is a mere phenomenon, not a thing-in-itself and thus not that which truly is. If it was, it could not perish. But that the thing-initself at the root of phenomena of this kind can manifest itself only in them, is a consequence of its nature.

What a difference there is between our beginning and our end! The former in the frenzy of desire and the ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction of all the organs and the musty odour of corpses. The path from birth to death is always downhill as regards well-being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully dreaming childhood, light-hearted youth, toilsome manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it not look exactly as if existence were a false step whose consequences gradually become more and more obvious?

We shall have the most accurate view of life if we regard it as a desengaño, a disillusionment; everything points to this clearly enough.

Our life is of a microscopical nature; it is an indivisible point that we see drawn apart by the two powerful lenses of space and time and thus, very considerably magnified.

Time is a contrivance in our brain for giving the utterly futile existence of things and ourselves a semblance of reality by means of continuance and duration.

How foolish it is to regret and deplore the fact that in the past we let slip the opportunity for some pleasure or good fortune! For what more would we have now? Just the shrivelled-up mummy of a memory. But it is the same with everything that has actually fallen to our lot. Accordingly, the form of time itself is precisely the means well calculated to bring home to us the vanity of all earthly pleasures.

Our existence and that of all animals is not something standing fast and remaining firm, at any rate temporally; on the contrary it is a mere fleeting existence which continues only through constant fluctuation and change and is comparable to a whirlpool. It is true that the form of the body has a precarious existence for a while, but only on condition that matter constantly changes, the old being evacuated and the new assimilated. Accordingly, the principal business of all those beings is to procure at all times matter that is suitable for this influx. At the same time, they are conscious that such an existence as theirs can be maintained only for a while in the aforesaid manner and so with the approach of death, they endeavour to carry it forward to another being that will take their place. This striving appears in self-consciousness in the form of sexual impulse and manifests itself, in the consciousness of other things and thus in objective intuitive perception, in the form of genital organs. We can compare this impulse to the thread of a pearl necklace where those rapidly succeeding individuals would correspond to the pearls. If in our imagination we accelerate this succession and always see in the whole series as well as in the individuals only the form permanent, but the substance or matter constantly changing, we then become aware that we have only a quasi-existence. This interpretation is also the basis of Plato’s doctrine of Ideas that alone exist and of the shadowlike nature of the things that correspond to them.

That we are mere phenomena as distinct from things-inthemselves, is illustrated and exemplified by the fact that the sine qua non of our existence is the constant excretion and accretion of matter, as nourishment the need for which is always recurring. For in this respect, we resemble phenomena which are brought about through smoke, flame, or a jet of water and which fade away or stop as soon as the supply fails.

It can also be said that the will-to-live manifests itself simply in phenomena that become absolutely nothing. But this nothing together with the phenomena remains within the will-to-live and rests on its ground. This is, of course, obscure and not easy to understand.

If, from contemplating the course of the world on a large scale and especially from considering the rapid succession of generations of people and their ephemeral mock-existence, we turn and look at human life in detail, as presented say by the comedy, then the impression this makes is like that of a drop of water, seen through a microscope and teeming with infusoria, or that of an otherwise visible little heap of cheese-mites whose strenuous activity and strife make us laugh. For, as in the narrowest space, so too the briefest span of time, great and serious activity produces a comic effect.

NOTES

1. Jetztzeit.

2. “To make a living.”

3. “Ghost Greeting,” 1–2.

3. ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE SUFFERING OF THE WORLD

If suffering is not the first and immediate object of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient and inappropriate thing in the world. For it is absurd to assume that the infinite pain, which everywhere abounds in the world and springs from the want and misery essential to life, would be purposeless and purely accidental Our susceptibility to pain is wellnigh infinite; but that to pleasure has narrow limits. It is true that each separate piece of misfortune seems to be an exception, but misfortune in general is the rule.

Just as a brook forms no eddy so long as it meets with no obstructions, so human nature, as well as animal, is such that we do not really notice and perceive all that go on in accordance with our will. If we were to notice it, then the reason for this would inevitably be that it didn’t go according to our will, but must have met with some obstacle. On the other hand, everything that obstructs, crosses, or opposes our will, and thus everything unpleasant and painful, is felt by us immediately, at once, and very plainly. Just as we do not feel the health of our whole body, but only the small spot where the shoe pinches, so we do not think of all our affairs that are going on perfectly well, but only of some insignificant trifle that annoys us. On this rests the negative nature of well-being and happiness, as opposed to the positive nature of pain, a point that I have often stressed.

Accordingly, I know of no greater absurdity than that of most metaphysical systems which declare evil to be something negative;[1] whereas it is precisely that which is positive and makes itself felt. On the other hand, that which is good, in other words, all happiness and satisfaction, is negative that is the mere elimination of a desire and the ending of a pain.

In agreement with this is the fact that, as a rule we find pleasures far below, but pains far beyond our expectation.

Whoever wants summarily to test the assertion that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain, or at any rate that the two balance each other, should compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of that other.

The most effective consolation in any misfortune or suffering is to look at others who are even more unfortunate than we; and this everyone can do. But what then is the result for the whole of humanity?

We are like lambs playing in the field, while the butcher eyes them and selects first one and then another; for in our good days we do not know what calamity fate at this very moment has in store for us, sickness, persecution, impoverishment, mutilation, loss of sight, madness, death, and so on.

History shows us the life of nations and can find nothing to relate except wars and insurrections; the years of peace appear here and there only as short pauses, as intervals between the acts. And in the same way, the life of the individual is a perpetual struggle, not merely metaphorically with want and boredom but actually with others. Everywhere one finds an opponent, lives in constant conflict, and dies weapon in hand.

Not a little is contributed to the torment of our existence by the fact that time is always pressing on us, never lets us draw breath, and is behind every one of us like a taskmaster with a whip. Only those who have been handed over to boredom are not pressed and plagued by time.

However, just as our body would inevitably burst if the pressure of the atmosphere were removed from it, so if the pressure of want, hardship, disappointment, and the frustration of effort were removed from the lives of people, their arrogance would rise, though not to bursting-point, yet to manifestations of the most unbridled folly and even madness. At all times, everyone indeed needs a certain amount of care, anxiety, pain, or trouble, just as a ship requires ballast in order to proceed on a straight and steady course.

Work worry, toil, and trouble are certainly the lot of almost all throughout their lives. But if all desires were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how then would people occupy their lives and spend their time? Suppose the human race were removed to Utopia where everything grew automatically and pigeons flew about ready roasted; where everyone at once found their sweetheart and had no difficulty in keeping them; then people would die of boredom or hang themselves; or else they would fight, throttle, and murder one another and so cause themselves more suffering than is now laid upon them by nature. Thus for such a race, no other scene, no other existence, is suitable.

On account of the negative nature of well-being and pleasure as distinct from the positive nature of pain, a fact to which I just now drew the reader’s attention, the happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures, but by the absence of sorrow and suffering, of that which is positive. But then the lot of animal appears to be more bearable than that of human beings. We will consider the two somewhat more closely.

However varied the forms in which humanity’s happiness and un-happiness appear and impel them to pursuit or escape, the material basis of all this is nevertheless physical pleasure or pain. This basis is very restricted, namely health, nourishment, protection from wet and cold, and sexual satisfaction, or else the want of these things. Consequently, in real physical pleasure the human being has no more than the animal, except in so far as its more highly developed nervous system enhances susceptibility to every pleasure but also to every pain as well. But how very much stronger are the motions stirred in it than those aroused in the animal! How incomparably more deeply and powerfully are its feelings excited! And ultimately only to arrive at the same result, namely health, nourishment, clothing, and so on.

This arises primarily from the act that, with human beings, everything is powerfully enhanced by its thinking of the absent and the future, whereby anxiety, fear, and hope really come into existence for the first time. But then these press much more heavily on it than can the present reality of pleasures or pains, to which the animal is confined. Thus the animal lacks reflection, that condenser of pleasures and pains which, therefore, cannot be accumulated as happiness in the case of human beings by means of memory and foresight. On the contrary, with the animal the suffering of the present moment always remains, even when this again recurs innumerable times, merely the suffering of the present moment as on the first occasion, and cannot be accumulated. Hence the inevitable tranquility and placidity of animals. On the other hand, by means of reflection and everything connected therewith, there is developed in human beings from those same elements of pleasure and pain, which they have in common with the animal, an enhancement of susceptibility to happiness and unhappiness, which is capable of leading to momentary, and sometimes fatal, ecstasy or else to the depths of despair and suicide. More closely considered, things seem to take the following course. In order to heighten its pleasure, the human being deliberately increases its needs, which were originally only a little more difficult to satisfy than those of the animal; hence luxury, delicacies, tobacco, opium, alcoholic liquors, pomp, display, and all that goes with this. Then in addition, in consequence of reflection, there is open to human beings alone a source of pleasure, and of pain as well a source that gives them an excessive amount of trouble, in fact almost more than is given by all the others. I refer to ambition and the cling of honour and shame, in plain words what a person thinks of other people’s opinion of them. Now in a thousand different and often strange forms this becomes the goal of almost all efforts that go beyond physical pleasure or pain. It is true that the human certainly has over the animal the advantage of really intellectual pleasures which admit of many degrees from the most ingenuous trifling or conversation, up to the highest achievements of the mind. But as a counterweight to this on the side of suffering, boredom appears in human beings which is unknown to the animal, at any rate in the natural state, but which slightly attacks the most intelligent only if they are domesticated, whereas with human beings it becomes a real scourge. We see it in that host of miserable wretches who have always been concerned over filling their purses but never their heads, and for whom their very wealth now becomes a punishment by delivering them into the hands of tormenting boredom. To escape from this, they now rush about in all directions and travel here, there, and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive at a place, than they anxiously inquire about its amusements and clubs, just as does a poor person about their sources of assistance; for, of course, want and boredom are the two poles of human life. Finally, I have to mention that, in the case of human beings, there is associated with sexual satisfaction an obstinate selection, peculiar to them alone, which rises sometimes to a more or less passionate love and to which I have devoted a lengthy chapter in the second volume of my chief work[2]. In this way, it becomes for people a source of much suffering and little pleasure.

Meanwhile, it is remarkable how, through the addition of thought which the animal lacks, so lofty and vast a structure of human happiness and unhappiness is raised on the same narrow basis of joys and sorrows which the animal also has. With reference to this, a person’s feelings are exposed to such violent motions, passions, and shocks, that their stamp can be read in the permanent lines on their face; and yet in the end and in reality, it is only a question of the same things which even the animal obtains, and indeed with incomparably less expenditure of emotion and distress. But through all this the measure of pain increases in human beings much more than that of pleasure and is now in a special way very greatly enhanced by the fact that death is actually known to them. On the other hand, the animal runs away from death merely instinctively, without really knowing it and thus without ever actually coming face to face with it, as does the person who always has before them this prospect. And so, although only a few animals die a natural death, most of them get only just enough time to propagate their species and then, if not earlier, become the prey of some other animal. On the other hand, the human being, alone in their species, has managed to make the so-called natural death the rule to which there are, however, important exceptions. Yet in spite of all this, the animals still have the advantage, for the reasons I have just given. Moreover, the human being reaches their really natural term of life just as rarely as do the animals because their unnatural way of living, their struggles and passions, and the degeneration of the race resulting therefrom rarely enable them to succeed in this.

Animals are much more satisfied than we by mere existence; the plant is wholly satisfied, the human being according to the degree of their dullness. Consequently, the animal’s life contains less suffering, but also less pleasure, than human beings. This is due primarily to the fact that it remains free from care and anxiety, together with their torment, on the one hand, but is also without real hope, on the other. And so it does not participate in that anticipation of a joyful future through ideas together with the delightful phantasmagoria, that source of most of our joys and pleasures, which accompanies those ideas and is given in addition by the imagination; consequently in this sense it is without hope. It is both of these because its consciousness is restricted to what is intuitively perceived and so to the present moment. Thus only in reference to objects that already exist at this moment in intuitive perception does the animal have an extremely short fear and hope; whereas the human being’s consciousness has an intellectual horizon that embraces the whole of life and even goes beyond this. But in consequence of this, animals, when compared with us, seem to be really wise in one respect, namely in their calm and undisturbed enjoyment of the present moment. The animal is the embodiment of the present; the obvious peace of mind which it thus shares frequently puts us to shame with our often restless and dissatisfied state that comes from thoughts and cares. And even those pleasures of hope and anticipation we have just been discussing are not to be had for nothing. Thus what a person enjoys in advance, through hoping and expecting a satisfaction afterwards, detracts from the actual enjoyment of this, since the thing itself then satisfies them by so much the less. The animal, on the other hand, remains free from such pleasure in advance, as well as from that deduction of pleasure, and therefore enjoys the real and present thing itself, whole and undiminished. In the same way, evils press on the animal merely with their own actual weight, whereas for us they are often increased tenfold by fear and foresight, the dread of evil.

It is just this complete absorption in the present moment peculiar to animals, which contributes so much to the pleasure we derive from our domestic pets. They are the present moment personified and, to a certain extent, make us feel the value of every unburdened and unclouded hour, whereas with our thoughts we usually pass it over and leave it unheeded. But the abovementioned capacity of animals to be more satisfied than we by mere existence is abused by egotistic and heartless people, and is often exploited to such an extent that they allow animals absolutely nothing but bare existence. For example, the bird that is organized to roam through half the world, is confined to a cubic foot of space where it slowly pines to death and cries; for

Ill is the humour of the bird in a cage;

It sings not for pleasure, but only from rage.

and the highly intelligent dog, our truest and most faithful friend, is put on a chain by us! Never do I see such a dog without feelings of the deepest sympathy for it and of profound indignation against its master. I think with satisfaction of a case, reported some years ago in The Times, where Lord — kept a large dog on a chain. One day as he was walking through the yard, he took it into his head to go and pat the dog, whereupon the animal tore his arm open from top to bottom, and quite right too! What he meant by this was: “You are not my master, but my devil who makes a hell of my brief existence!” May this happen to all who chain up dogs.

If the result of the foregoing remarks is that the enhanced power of knowledge renders the life of the human being more woe-begone than that of the animal, we can reduce this to a universal law and thereby obtain a much wider view.

In itself, knowledge is always painless. Pain concerns the will alone and consists in checking, hindering, or thwarting this; yet an additional requirement is that this checking be accompanied by knowledge. Thus just as light illuminates space only when objects exist to reflect it; just as a tone requires resonance, and sound generally becomes audible at a distance only through waves of the vibrating air that break on hard bodies so that its effect is strikingly feeble on isolated mountain tops and a song in the open produces little effect; so also in the same way must the checking of the will, in order to be felt as pain, be accompanied by knowledge which in itself, however, is a stranger to all pain.

Thus physical pain is already conditioned by nerves and their connection with the brain; and so an injury to a limb is not felt if its nerves leading to the brain are severed, or when the brain loses its powers through chloroform. For the very same reason, we consider that, as soon as consciousness is distinguished when a person is dying, all subsequent convulsions are painless. It follows as a matter of course that mental pain is conditioned by knowledge; and that it increases with the degree of knowledge can easily be seen, and moreover in the above remarks as also in my chief work, Volume I, § 56.[3] We can, therefore, figuratively express the whole relationship by saying that the will is the string, its thwarting or checking the vibration thereof, knowledge the sounding-board, and pain the tone.

Now according to this, only that which is inorganic and also the plant are incapable of feeling pain, however often the will may be checked in both. On the other hand, every animal, even an infusorian, feels pain because knowledge, however imperfect, is the true characteristic of animal existence. As knowledge rises on the animal scale, so too does susceptibility to pain. It is therefore still extremely small in the case of the lowest animals; thus, for example, insects still go on eating when the back part of the body is nearly torn off and hangs by a mere thread of gut. But even in the highest animals, because of an absence of concepts and thought, pain is nothing like that which is suffered by human beings. Even the susceptibility to pain could reach its highest point only when, by virtue of our faculty of reason and its reflectiveness, there exists also the possibility of denying the will. For without that possibility, such susceptibility would have been purposeless cruelty.

In early youth we sit before the imploding course of our life like children at the theatre before the curtain is raised, who sit there in happy and excited expectation of the things that are to come. It is a blessing that we do not know what will actually come. For to the human being who knows, the children may at times appear to be like innocent delinquents who are condemned not to death, it is true, but to life, and have not yet grasped the purport of their existence. Nevertheless everyone wants to reach old age and thus to a state of life, whereof it may be said: ‘It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.’

If we picture to ourselves roughly as far as we can the sum total of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind on which the sun shines in its course, we shall admit that it would have been much better if it had been just as impossible for the sun to produce the phenomenon of life on earth, as on the moon, and the surface of the earth, like that of the moon, had still been in a crystalline state.

We can also regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. At all events even the person who has fared tolerably well, becomes more clearly aware, the longer they live, that life on the whole is a disappointment, nay a cheat,[4] in other words bears the character of a great mystification or even a fraud. When two people who were friends in their youth meet again after the separation of a long time, the feeling uppermost in their minds when they see each other, in that it recalls old times, is one of complete disappointment with the whole of life. In former years under the rosy sunrise of their youth, life seemed to them so fair in prospect; it made so many promises and has kept so few. So definitely uppermost is this feeling when they meet that they do not even deem it necessary to express it in words, but both tacitly assume it and proceed to talk on that basis.

Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like a spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if they remain seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished.

We should be driven crazy if we contemplated the lavish and excessive arrangements, the countless flaming fixed stars in infinite space which have nothing to do but illuminate worlds, such being the scene of misery and desolation and, in the luckiest case, yielding nothing but boredom — at any rate to judge from the specimen with which we are familiar.

No one is to be greatly envied, but many thousands are to be greatly pitied. Life is a task to be worked off; in this sense “one who has finished with the business of life”[5] is a fine expression.

Let us for a moment imagine that the act of procreation were not a necessity or accompanied by intense pleasure, but a matter of pure rational deliberation; could then the human race really continue to exist? Would not everyone rather feel so much sympathy for the coming generation that they would prefer to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate would not like to assume in cold blood the responsibility of imposing on it such a burden?

The world is just a hell and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand, and the devils on the other.

I suppose I shall have to be told again that my philosophy is cheerless and comfortless simply because I tell the truth, whereas people want to hear that the Lord has made all things very well. Go to your church and leave us philosophers in peace! At any rate do not demand that they should cut their doctrines according to your pattern! This is done by knaves and philosophasters from whom you can order whatever doctrine you like.[6]

Brahma produces the world through a kind of original sin, but itself remains in it to atone for this until it has redeemed itself. This is quite a good idea! In Buddhism the world comes into being in consequence of an inexplicable disturbance (after a long period of calm) in the crystal clearness of the blessed and penitentially obtained state of Nirvana and hence through a kind of fatality which, however, is to be understood ultimately in a moral sense; although the matter has its exact analogue and corresponding picture in physics in the inexplicable arising of a primordial nebula, whence a sun is formed. Accordingly, in consequence of moral lapses, it also gradually becomes physically worse and worse until it assumes its present sorry state. An excellent idea! To the Greeks the world and the gods were the work of an unfathomable necessity; this is fairly reasonable in so far as it satisfies us for the time being. Ormuzd lives in conflict with Ahriman; this seems not unreasonable. But that a God Jehovah creates this world of misery and affliction out of inclination and sheer wantonness, and then applauds himself with “and it was good,”[7] this is something intolerable. And so in this respect, we see the religion of the Jews occupy the lowest place among the dogmas of the civilized world, which is wholly in keeping with the fact that it is also the only religion that has absolutely no doctrine of immortality, nor has it even a trace thereof. (See vol. I of this work, pages 125–26.[8])

Even if Leibniz’s demonstration were correct, that of all possible worlds this is nevertheless always the best, we should still not have a Theodicy. For the Creator has created indeed not merely the world, but also the possibility itself; accordingly it should have been arranged with a view to admitting of a better world.

But generally, such a view of the world as the successful work of an all-wise, all-benevolent, and moreover, almighty Being is too fragrantly contradicted by the misery and wretchedness that fill the world on the one hand, and by the obvious imperfection and even burlesque distortion of the most perfect of its phenomena on the other; I refer to the human phenomenon. Here is to be found a dissonance that can never be resolved. On the other hand, these very instances will agree with, and serve as proof of, our argument if we look upon the world as the work of our own guilt and consequently as something that it were better never to have been. Whereas on first assumption human beings become a bitter indictment against the Creator and provide material for sarcasm, they appear on the second as a denunciation of our own true nature and will, which is calculated to humble us. For they lead us to the view that we, as the offering of dissolute fathers, have come into the world already burdened with guilt and that, only because we have to be continually working off this debt, does our existence prove to be so wretched and have death as its finale. Nothing is more certain than that, speaking generally, it is the great sin of the world which produces the many and great sufferings of the world; and here I refer not to the physically empirical connection, but to the metaphysical. According to this view, it is only the story of the Fall that reconciles me to the Old Testament. In fact, in my eyes, it is the only metaphysical truth that appears in the book, although it is clothed in allegory. For nothing does our existence bear so close a resemblance as to the consequence of a false step and guilty lust. I cannot refrain from recommending to the thoughtful reader a popular, but exceedingly profound, dissertation on this subject by Claudius which brings to light the essentially pessimistic spirit of Christianity and appears in the fourth part of the The Wandsbecker Messenger with the title “Cursed be the ground for thy sake.”

To have always in hand a sure compass for guiding us in life and enabling us always to view this in the right light without ever going astray, nothing is more suitable than to accustom ourselves to regard this world as a place of penance and hence a penal colony, so to speak, a penitentiary, as it was called even by the oldest philosophers (according to Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, III, ch. 3, p. 399). Among the Christian Fathers Origen expressed it thus with commendable boldness. (See Augustine, The City of God, XI, ch. 23.) This view of the world also finds its theoretical and objective justification not merely in my philosophy, but in the wisdom of all ages in Brahmanism, Buddhism,[9] Empedocles, and Pythagoras. Cicero also mentions (Philosophical Fragments, vol. XII, p. 316, Bipont edition.) that it was taught by ancient sages and at the initiation into the Mysteries, “that, on account of definite mistakes made in a previous life, we are born to pay the penalty.” Vanini, whom it was easier to burn than to refute, gives the strongest expression to this by saying: “Humanity is so full of many great afflictions that, if it were not repugnant to the Christian religion, I would venture to assert that, if there are demons, they are cast into human bodies and pay the penalties for their sins” (On the Admirable Secrets of Nature, Dialogue 50, p. 353). But even in genuine Christianity, which is properly understood, our existence is regarded as the consequence of a guilt, a false step. If we have acquired that habit, we shall adjust our expectations from life to suit the occasion and accordingly no longer regard as unexpected and as normal its troubles, vexations, sufferings, worries, and misery, great and small. On the contrary; we shall find such things to be quite in order, well knowing that here everyone is punished for their existence and indeed each in their own way.[10] For one of the evils of a penitentiary is also the society we meet there. What this is like will be known by anyone who is worthy of a better society without my telling them. A fine nature, as well as a genius, may sometimes feel in this world like a noble state prisoner in the galleys among common criminals; and they, like the criminal, will therefore attempt to isolate themselves. Generally speaking, however, the above-mentioned way of looking at things will enable us to regard without surprise and certainly without indignation the so-called imperfections, that is, the wretched and contemptible nature of most people both morally an intellectually, which is accordingly stamped on their faces. For we shall always remember where we are and consequently look on everyone primarily as a being who exists only as a result of sinfulness and whose life is the atonement for the guilt of birth. It is just this that Christianity calls the sinful nature of humanity. It is, therefore, the basis of the beings whom we meet in this world as our fellows. Moreover, in consequence of the constitution of the world, they are almost all, more or less, in a state of suffering and dissatisfaction which is not calculated to make them more sympathetic and amiable. Finally, there is the fact that, in almost all cases, their intellect is barely sufficient for the service of their will. Accordingly, we have to regulate our claims on the society of this world. Whoever keeps firmly to this point of view might call the social impulse a pernicious tendency.

In fact, the conviction that the world and thus also humanity is something that really ought not to be, is calculated to fill us with forbearance towards one another; for what can we expect from beings in such a predicament? In fact from this point of view it might occur to us that the really proper address between one person and another should be, instead of Sir, Monsieur, and so on, Leidensgefährte, socci malorum, compagnon de misères, my fellow-sufferer. However strange this may sound, it accords with the facts, puts the other person in the most correct light, and reminds us of that most necessary thing, tolerance, patience, forbearance, and love of one’s neighbour, which everyone needs and each of us, therefore, owes to another.

The characteristic of the things of this world and especially of the world of human beings is not exactly imperfection, as has often been said, but rather distortion, in everything, in what is moral, intellectual or physical.

The excuse sometimes made for many a vice, namely “that it is natural,” is by no means adequate, but the proper rejoinder should be: “just because it is bad, it is natural; and just because it is natural it is bad.” To understand this right, we must have grasped the meaning of the doctrine of original sin.

When judging a human being, we should always keep to the point of view that the basis of such is something that ought not to be at all, something sinful, perverse, and absurd, that which has been understood as original sin, that on account of which one is doomed to die. This fundamentally bad nature is indeed characterized by the fact that no one can bear to be closely scrutinized. What can we expect from such a being? If, therefore, we start from this fact, we shall judge people more indulgently; we shall not be surprised when the devils lurking in them bestir themselves and peep out and we shall be better able to appreciate any good point that has nevertheless been found in them, whether this be a consequence of intellect or of anything else. In the second place, we should also be mindful of a person’s position and remember that life is essentially a condition of want, distress, and often misery, where everyone has to fight and struggle for existence and therefore cannot always put on a pleasant face. If, on the contrary, the human being were that which all optimistic religions and philosophies would like to make it, namely the work or even the incarnation of a God, in fact a being that in every sense ought to be and to be as it is, what a totally different effect would inevitably be produced by the first sight, the closer acquaintance, and the continued intercourse with every human being from that which is now produced!

Pardon’s the word to all (Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act V, Scene 5). We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own follies, failings, and vices. For they are just the failings of humanity to which we also belong; accordingly, we have in ourselves all its failings, and so those at which we are just now indignant merely because they do not appear in us at this particular moment. Thus they are not on the surface, but lie deep down within us and will come up and show themselves on the first occasion, just as we see them in others; although one failing is conspicuous in one person and another in another, and the sum total of all bad qualities is undoubtedly very much greater in one person than in another. For the difference in individualities is incalculably great.

NOTES

1. Leibniz is particularly strong on this point and endeavours (Theodicy, § 153) to strengthen his case by palpable and pitiable sophism. [S]

2. A reference to Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation.

3. The World as Will and Representation.

4. In the original German edition this phrase, as well as “disappointment” in the phrase below, are both in English.

5. Defunctus.

6. To put professors of philosophy out of countenance with their orthodox optimism is as easy as it is agreeable. [S]

7. Genesis 1:31 (NIV).

8. The World as Will and Representation.

9. Nothing can be more conducive to patience in life and to a placid endurance of humanity and evils than Buddhist reminder of this kind: “This is Samsara, the world of lust and craving and thus or birth, disease, old age, and death; it is a world that ought not to be. And this is here the population of Samsara. Therefore what better things can you expect?” l would like to prescribe that everyone repeat this four times a day, fully conscious of what they are saying. [S]

10. The correct standard for judging any person is to remember that they are really a being who should not exist at all, but who is atoning for their existence through many different forms of suffering and through death. What can we expect from such a being? We atone for our birth first by living and secondly by dying. This is also allegorized by original sin. [S]

4. ON DEATH AND ITS RELATION TO THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF OUR INNER NATURE

Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as the “preparation for death.” Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing. It will therefore be quite in order for a special consideration of this subject to have its place here at the beginning of the last, most serious, and most important of our books.

The animal lives without any real knowledge of death; therefore the individual animal immediately enjoys the absolute imperishableness and immortality of the species, since it is conscious of itself only as endless. With humanity the terrifying certainty of death necessarily appeared along with the faculty of reason. But just as everywhere in nature a remedy, or at any rate a compensation, is given for every evil, so the same reflection that introduced the knowledge of death also assists us in obtaining metaphysical points of view. Such views console us concerning death, and the animal is neither in need of nor capable of them. All religions and philosophical systems are directed principally to this end, and are thus primarily the antidote to the certainty of death which reflecting reason produces from its own resources. The degree in which they attain this end is, however, very different, and one religion or philosophy will certainly enable humanity, far more than the others will, to look death calmly in the face. Brahmanism and Buddhism, which teach human beings to regard themselves as Brahman, as the original being, to whom all arising and passing away are essentially foreign, will achieve much more in this respect than will those religions that represent humanity as being made out of nothing and as actually beginning at birth the existence one has received from another. In keeping with this we find in India a confidence and a contempt for death of which we in Europe have no conception. It is indeed a ticklish business to force on humanity through early impression weak and untenable notions in this important respect, and thus to render them forever incapable of adopting more correct and stable views. For example, to teach a person that they came but recently from nothing, that consequently they have been nothing throughout an eternity, and yet for the future is to be imperishable and immortal, is just like teaching them that, although they are through and through the work of another, they shall nevertheless be responsible to all eternity for their commissions and omissions. Thus if with a mature mind and with the appearance of reflection the untenable nature of such doctrines forces itself on a person, they have nothing better to put in their place; in fact, they are no longer capable of understanding anything better, and in this way are deprived of the consolation that nature had provided as compensation for the certainty of death. In consequence of such a development, we now (1844) see in England the Socialists among the demoralized and corrupted factory workers, and in Germany the Young Hegelians among the demoralized and corrupted students, sink to the absolutely physical viewpoint. This leads to the result: “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,”[1] and to this extent can be described as bestiality.

According, however, to all that has been taught about death, it cannot be denied that, at any rate in Europe, the opinion of people, often in fact even of the same individual, very frequently vacillates afresh between the conception of death as absolute annihilation and the assumption that we are, so to speak with skin and hair, immortal. Both are equally false, but we have not so much to find a correct mean as rather to gain the higher standpoint from which such views disappear of themselves.

With these considerations, I wish to start first of all from the entirely empirical viewpoint. Here we have primarily before us the undeniable fact that, according to natural consciousness, human beings not only fear death for their own person more than anything else, but also weep violently over the death of friends and relations. It is evident, indeed, that they do this not egoistically over their own loss, but out of sympathy for the great misfortune that has befallen them. The human being therefore censures as hard-hearted and unfeeling those who in such a case do not weep and show no grief. Parallel with this is the fact that, in its highest degrees, the thirst for revenge seeks the death of the adversary as the greatest evil that can be inflicted. Opinions change according to time and place, but the voice of nature remains always and everywhere the same, and is therefore to be heeded before everything else. Now here it seems clearly to assert that death is a great evil. In the language of nature, death signifies annihilation; and that death is a serious matter could already be inferred from the fact that, as everyone knows, life is no joke. Indeed, we must not deserve anything better than these two.

The fear of death is, in fact, independent of all knowledge, for the animal has it, although it does not know death. Everything that is born already brings this fear into the world. Such fear of death, however, is a priori only the reverse side of the will-to-live, which indeed we all are. Therefore, in every animal the fear of its own destruction, like the care for its maintenance, is inborn. Thus, it is this fear of death, and not the mere avoidance of pain, that shows itself in the anxious care and caution with which the animal seeks to protect itself, and still more its brood, from everyone who might become dangerous. Why does the animal flee, tremble, and try to conceal itself? Because it is simply the will-to-live, but as such it is forfeit to death and would like to gain time. By nature human beings are just the same. The greatest of evils, the worst thing that can threaten anywhere, is death; the greatest anxiety is the anxiety of death. Nothing excites us so irresistibly to the liveliest interest as does danger to the lives of others; nothing is more dreadful than an execution. Now the boundless attachment to life which appears here cannot have sprung from knowledge and reflection. To these, on the contrary, it appears foolish, for the objective value of life is very uncertain, and it remains at least doubtful whether existence is to be preferred to nonexistence; in fact, if experience and reflection have their say, nonexistence must certainly win. If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads. In Plato’s Apology this is also the opinion of Socrates, and even the cheerful and amiable Voltaire cannot help saying: “We like life, but all the same nothingness also has its good points” and again: “I do not know what eternal life is, but this present life is a bad joke.”[2] Moreover, in any case life must end soon, so that the few years which possibly we have still to exist vanish entirely before the endless time when we shall be no more. Accordingly, to reflection it appears even ludicrous for us to be so very anxious about this span of time, to tremble so much when our own life or another’s is endangered, and to write tragedies whose terrible aspect has as its main theme merely the fear of death. Consequently, this powerful attachment to life is irrational and blind; it can be explained only from the fact that our whole being-in-itself is the will-to-live, to which life therefore must appear as the highest good, however embittered, short, and uncertain it may be; and that that will is originally and in itself without knowledge and blind. Knowledge, on the contrary, far from being the origin of that attachment to life, even opposes it, since it discloses life’s worthlessness, and in this way combats the fear of death. When it is victorious, and the human being accordingly faces death courageously and calmly, this is honoured as great and noble. Therefore we then extol the triumph of knowledge over the blind will-to-live which is nevertheless the kernel of our own inner being. In the same way we despise the person in whom knowledge is defeated in that conflict, who therefore clings unconditionally to life, struggles to the utmost against approaching death, and receives it with despair;[3] yet in them is expressed only the original inner being of our own self and of nature. Incidentally, it may here be asked how the boundless love of life and the endeavour to maintain it in every way as long as possible could be regarded as base and contemptible, and likewise considered by the followers of every religion as unworthy thereof, if life were the gift of the good gods to be acknowledged with thanks. How then could it appear great and noble to treat it with contempt? Meanwhile, these considerations confirm for us: (1) that the will-to-live is the innermost essence of humanity; (2) that in itself the will is without knowledge and blind; (3) that knowledge is an adventitious principle, originally foreign to the will; (4) that knowledge conflicts with the will, and our judgement applauds the triumph of knowledge over the will.

If what makes death seem so terrible to us were the thought of non-existence, we should necessarily think with equal horror of the time when as yet we did not exist. For it is irrefutably certain that non-existence after death cannot be different from non-existence before birth, and is therefore no more deplorable than that is. An entire infinity ran its course when we did not yet exist, but this in no way disturbs us. On the other hand, we find it hard, and even unendurable, that after the momentary intermezzo of an ephemeral existence, a second infinity should follow in which we shall exist no longer. Now could this thirst for existence possibly have arisen through our having tasted it and found it so very delightful? As was briefly set forth above, certainly not; the experience gained would far rather have been capable of causing an infinite longing for the lost paradise of non-existence. To the hope of immortality of the soul there is always added that of a “better world”; an indication that the present world is not worth much. Notwithstanding all this, the question of our state after death has certainly been discussed verbally and in books ten thousand times more often than that of our state before birth. Theoretically, however, the one is a problem just as near at hand and just as legitimate as the other; moreover, the person who answered the one would likewise be fully enlightened about the other. We have fine declamations about how shocking it would be to think that the mind of human beings, which embraces the world and has so many excellent ideas, should sink with them into the grave; but we hear nothing about this mind having allowed a whole infinity of time to elapse before it arose with these its qualities, and how for just as long a time the world had to manage without it. Yet to knowledge uncorrupted by the will no question presents itself more naturally than this, namely: An infinite time has run its course before my birth; what was I throughout all that time? Metaphysically, the answer might perhaps be: “I was always I; that is, all who throughout that time said I, were just I.” But let us turn away from this to our present entirely empirical point of view, and assume that I did not exist at all. But I can then console myself for the infinite time after my death when I shall not exist, with the infinite time when I did not as yet exist, as a quite customary and really very comfortable state. For the infinity after life[4] without me cannot be any more fearful than the infinity before life[5] without me, since the two are not distinguished by anything except by the intervention of an ephemeral life-dream. All proofs of continued existence after death may also be applied just as well to the part prior,[6] where they then demonstrate existence before life, in assuming which the Hindus and Buddhists therefore show themselves to be very consistent. Only Kant’s ideality of time solves all these riddles; but we are not discussing this at the moment. But this much follows from what has been said, namely that to mourn for the time when we shall no longer exist is just as absurd as it would be to mourn for the time when we did not as yet exist; for it is all the same whether the time our existence does not fill is related to that which it does fill as future or as past.

But quite apart even from these considerations of time, it is in and by itself absurd to regard non-existence as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even consciousness. But this ceases with life, as well as in sleep and in a fainting fit; therefore the absence of consciousness is well known and familiar to us as a state containing no evil at all; in any case, its occurrence is a matter of a moment. Epicurus considered death from this point of view, and therefore said quite rightly: “death does not concern us,” with the explanation that when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not (Diogenes Laertius, X, 27). To have lost what cannot be missed is obviously no evil; therefore we ought to be just as little disturbed by the fact that we shall not exist as by the fact that we did not exist. Accordingly, from the standpoint of knowledge, there appears to be absolutely no ground for fearing death; but consciousness consists in knowing, and thus for consciousness death is no evil. Moreover, it is not really this knowing part of our ego that fears death, but the flight from death comes simply and solely from the blind will, with which every living thing is filled. But, as already mentioned, this flight from death is essential to it, just because it is the will-to-live, whose whole inner nature consists in a craving for life and existence. Knowledge is not originally inherent in it, but appears only in consequence of the will’s objectification in animal individuals. Now if, by means of knowledge, the will beholds death as the end of the phenomenon with which it has identified itself, and to which it therefore sees itself limited, its whole nature struggles against this with all its might. We shall investigate later on whether it really has anything to fear from death, and shall then remember the real source of the fear of death which is indicated here with a proper distinction between the willing and knowing part of our true nature.

According to this, what makes death so terrible for us is not so much the end of life — for this cannot seem to anyone specially worthy of regret — as the destruction of the organism, really because this organism is the will itself manifested as body. But actually, we feel this destruction only in the evils of illness or of old age; on the other hand, for the subject, death itself consists merely in the moment when consciousness vanishes, since the activity of the brain ceases. The extension of the stoppage to all the other parts of the organism which follows this is really already an event after death. Therefore, in a subjective respect, death concerns only consciousness. Now from going to sleep everyone can, to some extent, judge what the vanishing of consciousness may be; and whoever has had a real fainting fit knows it even better. The transition here is not so gradual, nor is it brought about by dreams; but first of all, while we are still fully conscious, the power of sight disappears, and then immediately supervenes the deepest unconsciousness. As far as the accompanying sensation goes, it is anything but unpleasant; and undoubtedly just as sleep is the brother of death, so is the fainting fit its twin-brother. Violent death also cannot be painful, for, as a rule, even severe wounds are not felt at all till some time afterwards, and are often noticed only from their external symptoms. If they are rapidly fatal, consciousness will vanish before this discovery; if they result in death later, it is the same as with other illnesses. All who have lost consciousness in water, through charcoal fumes, or through hanging, also state, as is well known, that it happened without pain. And finally, even death through natural causes proper, death through old age, euthanasia, is a gradual vanishing and passing out of existence in an imperceptible manner. In old age, passions and desires, together with the susceptibility to their objects, are gradually extinguished; the emotions no longer find any excitement, for the power to make representations or mental pictures becomes weaker and weaker, and its images feebler. The impressions no longer stick to us, but pass away without a trace; the days roll by faster and faster; events lose their significance; everything glows pale. The old man, stricken in years, totters about or rests in a corner, now only a shadow, a ghost, of his former self. What still remains there for death to destroy? One day a slumber is his last, and his dreams are… They are the dreams that Hamlet asks about in the famous monologue. I believe that we dream them just now.

I have still to observe that, although the maintenance of the life process has a metaphysical basis, it does not take place without resistance, and hence without eff ort. It is this to which the organism yields every evening, for which reason it then suspends the brainfunction, and diminishes certain secretions, respiration, pulse, and the development of heat. From this it may be concluded that the entire cessation of the life-process must be a wonderful relief for its driving force. Perhaps this is partly responsible for the expression of sweet contentment on the faces of most of the dead. In general, the moment of dying may be similar to that of waking from a heavy nightmare.

So far, the result for us is that death cannot really be an evil, how ever much it is feared, but that it often appears even as a good thing, as something desired, as a friend. All who have encountered insuperable obstacles to their existence or to their efforts, who suffer from incurable diseases or from inconsolable grief, have the return into the womb of nature as the last resource that is often open to them as a matter of course. Like everything else, they emerged from this womb for a short time, enticed by the hope of more favourable conditions of existence than those that have fallen to their lot, and from this the same path always remains open to them. That return is the surrender of property of the living. Yet even here it is entered into only after a physical or moral conflict, so hard does everyone struggle against returning to the place from which they came forth so readily and willingly to an existence that has so many sorrows and so few joys to offer. To Yama, the god of death, the Hindus give two faces, one very fearful and terrible, one very cheerful and benevolent. This is already explained in part from the observations we have just made.

From the empirical standpoint, at which we are still placed, the following consideration is one which presents itself automatically, and therefore merits being defined accurately by elucidation, and thus kept within its limits. The sight of a corpse shows me that sensibility, irritability, blood circulation, reproduction, and so on in it have ceased. From this I conclude with certainty that that which previously actuated them, which was nevertheless something always unknown to me, now actuates them no longer, and so has departed from them. But if I now wished to add that this must have been just what I have known only as consciousness, and consequently as intelligence (soul), this would be a conclusion not merely unjustified, but obviously false. For consciousness has always shown itself to me not as the cause, but as a product and result of organic life, since it rose and sank in consequence thereof at the different periods of life, in health and sickness, in sleep, in a faint, in awaking, and so on. Thus it always appeared as the effect, never as a cause, of organic life, always showed itself as something arising and passing away and again arising, so long as the conditions for this still exist, but not apart from them. Indeed, I may also have seen that the complete derangement of consciousness, madness, far from dragging down with it and depressing the other forces, or even endangering life, greatly enhances these, especially irritability or muscular force, and lengthens rather than shortens life, if there are no other competing causes. Then I knew individuality as a quality or attribute of everything organic, and when this was a self-conscious organism, of consciousness also. But there exists no occasion for concluding now that individuality is inherent in that vanished principle which imparts life and is wholly unknown to me; the less so, as everywhere in nature I see each particular phenomenon to be the work of a universal force active in thousands of similar phenomena. But on the other hand there is just as little occasion for concluding that, because organized life has here ceased, the force that actuated it hitherto has also become nothing; just as little as there is to infer from the stop ping of the spinning-wheel the death of the spinner. If, by finding its centre of gravity again, a pendulum finally comes to rest, and thus its individual apparent life has ceased, no one will suppose that gravitation is annihilated, but everyone sees that now as always it is active in innumerable phenomena. Of course, it might be objected to this comparison that even in the pendulum gravitation has not ceased to be active, but has merely given up manifesting its activity visibly. The person who insists on this may think, instead, of an electrical body in which, after its discharge, electricity has really ceased to be active. I wished only to show by this that we directly attribute an eternity and ubiquity even to the lowest forces of nature; and the transitoriness of their fleeting phenomena does not for a moment confuse us with regard thereto. So much the less, therefore, should it occur to us to regard the cessation of life as the annihilation of the living principle, and thus death as the entire destruction of the human race. Because the strong arm that three thousand years ago bent the bow of Ulysses no longer exists, no reflective and well-regulated understanding will look upon the force that acted so energetically in it as entirely annihilated. Therefore, on further reflection, it will not be assumed that the force that bends the bow today, first began to exist with that arm. Much nearer to us is the idea that the force that formerly actuated a life now vanished is the same force that is active in the life now flourishing; indeed this thought is almost inevitable. However, we certainly know that, as was explained in the second book[7], only that is perishable which is involved in the causal chain; but merely the states and forms are so involved. Untouched, however, by the change of these, which is produced by causes, there remains matter on the one hand, and the natural forces on the other; for both are the presupposition of all those changes. But the principle that gives us life must first be conceived at any rate as a force of nature, until a profounder investigation may perhaps let us know what it is in itself. Thus, taken already as a force of nature, vital force remains entirely untouched by the change of forms and states, which the bond of cause and effect introduces and carries off again, and which alone are subject to arising and passing away, just as these processes lie before us in experience. To this extent, therefore, the imperishability of our true inner nature could already be certainly demonstrated. But this, of course, will not satisfy the claims usually made on proofs of our continued existence after death, nor will it afford the consolation expected from such proofs. Yet it is always something, and whoever fears death as absolute annihilation cannot afford to disdain the perfect certainty that the innermost principle of one’s life remains untouched by it. In fact, we might advance the paradox that that second thing which, like the forces of nature, remains untouched by the continuous change of states under the guidance of causality, i.e., matter, also assures us through its absolute permanence of an indestructibility; and by virtue of this, those who might be incapable of grasping any other could yet be confident of a certain imperishability. But it will be asked: “How is the permanence of mere dust, of crude matter, to be regarded as a continuance of our true inner nature?” Oh! do you know this dust then? Do you know what it is and what it can do? Learn to know it before you despise it. This matter, now lying there as dust and ashes, will soon form into crystals when dissolved in water; it will shine as metal; it will then emit electric sparks. By means of its galvanic tension it will manifest a force which, decomposing the strongest and firmest combinations, reduces earths to metals. It will, indeed of its own accord, form itself into plant and animal; and from its mysterious womb it will develop that life, about the loss of which you in your narrowness of mind are so nervous and anxious. Is it, then, so absolutely and entirely nothing to continue to exist as such matter? Indeed, I seriously assert that even this permanence of matter affords evidence of the indestructibility of our true inner being, although only as in an image and simile, or rather only as in a shadowy outline. To see this, we need only recall the discussion on matter given in chapter 24[8], the conclusion of which was that mere formless matter — this basis of the world of experience, never perceived by itself alone, but assumed as always permanent — is the immediate reflection, the visibility in general, of the thing-in-itself, that is, of the will. There fore, what absolutely pertains to the will in itself holds good of matter under the conditions of experience, and it reproduces the true eternity of the will under the image of temporal imperishability. Because, as we have already said, nature does not lie, no view which has sprung from a purely objective comprehension of it, and has been logically thought out, can be absolutely and entirely false; in the worst case it is only very one-sided and imperfect. But such a view is unquestionably consistent materialism, for instance that of Epicurus, just as is the absolute idealism opposed to it, like that of Berkeley, and generally every fundamental view of philosophy which has come from a correct aperçu and has been honestly worked out. Only they are all extremely one-sided interpretations, and therefore, in spite of their contrasts, are simultaneously true, each from a definite point of view, But as soon as we rise above this point, they appear to be true only relatively and conditionally. The highest standpoint alone, from which we survey them all and recognize them in their merely relative truth, and also beyond this in their falseness, can be that of absolute truth, in so far as such a truth is in general attainable. Accordingly, as was shown above, we see even in the really very crude, and therefore very old fundamental view of materialism the indestructibility of our true inner being-in-itself still represented as by a mere shadow of it, namely through the imperishability of matter; just as in the already higher naturalism of an absolute physics we see it represented by the ubiquity and eternity of natural forces, among which vital force is at least to be reckoned. Hence even these crude fundamental views contain the assertion that the living being does not suffer any absolute annihilation through death, but continues to exist in and with the whole of nature.

The considerations which have brought us to this point, and with which the further discussions are connected, started from the remarkable fear of death which affects all living beings. But now we wish to alter the point of view, and to consider how, in contrast to individual beings, the whole of nature behaves with regard to death; yet here we still remain always on the ground and soil of the empirical.

We know, of course, of no higher gamble than that for life and death. We watch with the utmost attention, interest, and fear every decision concerning them; for in our view all in all is at stake. On the other hand, nature, which never lies, but is always frank and sincere, speaks quite differently on this theme, as Krishna does in the Bhagavad Gita. Its statement is that the life or death of the individual is of absolutely no consequence. Nature expresses this by abandoning the life of every animal, and even of the human race, to the most insignificant accidents without coming to the rescue. Consider the insect on your path; a slight unconscious turning of your foot is decisive as to its life or death. Look at the wood-snail that has no means of flight, of defence, of practising deception, of concealment, a ready prey to all. Look at the fish carelessly playing in the still open net; at the frog prevented by its laziness from the flight that could save it; at the bird unaware of the falcon soaring above it; at the sheep eyed and examined from the thicket by the wolf. Endowed with little caution, all these go about guilelessly among the dangers which at every moment threaten their existence. Now, since nature abandons without reserve organisms constructed with such inexpressible skill, not only to the predatory instinct of the stronger, but also to the blindest chance, the whim of every fool, and the mischievousness of every child, it expresses that the annihilation of these individuals is a matter of indifference, does it no harm, is of no significance at all, and that in these cases the effect is of no more consequence than is the cause. Nature states this very clearly, and never lies; only it does not comment on its utterances, but rather expresses them in the laconic style of the oracle. Now if the universal mother carelessly sends forth children without protection to a thousand threatening dangers, this can be only because she knows that, when they fall, they fall back into the womb, where they are safe and secure; therefore their fall is only a jest. With human beings nature does not act otherwise than it does with the animals; hence its declaration extends also to humanity; the life or death of the individual is a matter of indifference. Consequently, they should be, in a certain sense, a matter of indifference to us; for in fact, we ourselves are nature. If only we saw deeply enough, we should certainly agree with nature, and regard life or death as indifferently as it does. Meanwhile, by means of reflection, we must attribute nature’s careless and indifferent attitude concerning the life of individuals to the fact that the destruction of such a phenomenon does not in the least disturb its true and real inner being.

As we have just been considering, not only are life and death dependent on the most trifling accidents, but the existence of organic beings generally is also ephemeral; animal and plant arise today and tomorrow pass away; birth and death follow in quick succession, whereas to inorganic things, standing so very much lower, an incomparably longer duration is assured, but an infinitely long one only to absolutely formless matter, to which we attribute this even a priori. Now if we ponder over all this, I think the merely empirical, but objective and unprejudiced, comprehension of such an order of things must be followed as a matter of course by the thought that this order is only a superficial phenomenon, that such a constant arising and passing away cannot in any way touch the root of things, but can be only relative, indeed only apparent. The true inner being of everything, which, moreover, evades our glance everywhere and is thoroughly mysterious, is not affected by that arising and passing away, but rather continues to exist undisturbed thereby. Of course, we can neither perceive nor comprehend the way in which this happens, and must therefore think of it only generally as a kind of conjuring trick that took place here. For whereas the most imperfect thing, the lowest, the inorganic, continues to exist unassailed, it is precisely the most perfect beings, namely living things with their infinitely complicated and inconceivably ingenious organizations, which were supposed always to arise afresh from the very bottom, and after a short span of time to become absolutely nothing, in order to make room once more for new ones like them coming into existence out of nothing. This is something so obviously absurd that it can never be the true order of things, but rather a mere veil concealing such an order, or more correctly a phenomenon conditioned by the constitution of our intellect. In fact, the entire existence and non-existence of these individual beings, in reference to which life and death are opposites can be only relative. Hence the language of nature, in which it is given to us as something absolute, cannot be the true and ultimate expression of the quality and constitution of things and of the order of the world, but really only a provincial dialect in other words, something merely relatively true, something self-styled, to be understood with a grain of salt, or properly speaking, something conditioned by our intellect. I say that an immediate, intuitive conviction of the kind I have here tried to describe in words will force itself on everyone, of course only on everyone whose mind is not of the utterly common species. Such common minds are capable of knowing absolutely only the particular thing, simply and solely as such, and are strictly limited to knowledge of individuals, after the manner of the animal intellect. On the other hand, whoever, through an ability of an only somewhat higher power, even just begins to see in individual beings their universal, their Ideas, will also to a certain extent participate in that conviction, a conviction indeed that is immediate and therefore certain. Indeed, it is also only small, narrow minds that quite seriously fear death as their annihilation; those who are specially favoured with decided capacity are entirely remote from such terrors. Plato rightly founded the whole of philosophy on knowledge of the doctrine of Ideas, in other words, on the perception of the universal in the particular. But the conviction here described and arising directly out of the apprehension of nature must have been extremely lively in those sublime authors of the Upanishads of the Vedas, who can scarcely be conceived as mere human beings. For this conviction speaks to us so forcibly from an immense number of their utterances that we must ascribe this immediate illumination of their mind to the fact that, standing nearer to the origin of our race as regards time, these sages apprehended the inner essence of things more clearly and profoundly than the already enfeebled race, as mortals now are, is capable of doing. But, of course, their comprehension was also assisted by the natural world of India, which is endowed with life in quite a different degree from that in which our northern world is. Thorough reflection, however, as carried through by Kant’s great mind, also leads to just the same result by a different path; for it teaches us that our intellect, in which that rapidly changing phenomenal world exhibits itself, does not comprehend the true, ultimate essence of things, but merely its appearance or phenomenon; and indeed, as I add, because originally such an intellect is destined only to present motives to our will, in other words, to be serviceable to it in the pursuit of its paltry aims.

But let us continue still farther our objective and unprejudiced consideration of nature. If I kill an animal, be it a dog, a bird, a frog, or even only an insect, it is really inconceivable that this being, or rather the primary and original force by virtue of which such a marvellous phenomenon displayed itself only a moment before in its full energy and love of life, could through my wicked or thoughtless act have become nothing. Again, on the other hand, the millions of animals of every kind which come into existence at every moment in endless variety, full of force and drive, can never have been absolutely nothing before the act of their generation, and can never have arrived from nothing to an absolute beginning. If in this way I see one of these creatures withdraw from my sight without my ever knowing where it goes to, and another appear without my ever knowing where it comes from; moreover, if both still have the same form, the same inner nature, the same character, but not the same matter, which they nevertheless continue to throw off and renew during their existence; then of course the assumption that what vanishes and what appears in its place are one and the same thing, which has experienced only a slight change, a renewal of the form of its existence, and consequently that death is for the species what sleep is for the individual — this assumption, I say, is so close at hand, that it is impossible for it not to occur to us, unless our minds, perverted in early youth by the impression of false fundamental views, hurry it out of the way, even from afar, with superstitious fear. But the opposite assumption that an animal’s birth is an arising out of nothing, and accordingly that its death is an absolute annihilation, and this with the further addition that humanity has also come into existence out of nothing, yet has an individual and endless future existence, and that indeed with consciousness, whereas the dog, the ape, and the elephant are annihilated by death — is really something against which the sound mind must revolt, and must declare to be absurd. If, as is often enough repeated, the comparison of a system’s result with the utterances of common sense is supposed to be a touchstone of its truth, I wish that the adherents of that fundamental view, handed down by Descartes to the preKantian eclectics, and indeed still prevalent even now among the great majority of cultured people in Europe, would once apply this touchstone here.

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. It is carried through in everything from the course of the constellations down to the death and birth of organic beings. In this way alone, in the restless stream of time and its content, a continued existence, i.e., a nature, becomes possible.

In autumn we observe the tiny world of insects, and see how one prepares its bed, in order to sleep the long, benumbing wintersleep; another spins a cocoon, in order to hibernate as a chrysalis, and to awake in spring rejuvenated and perfected; finally, how most of them, intending to rest in the arms of death, carefully arrange a suitable place for depositing their eggs, in order one day to come forth from these renewed. This is nature’s great doctrine of immortality, which tries to make it clear to us that there is no radical difference between sleep and death, but that the one endangers existence just as little as the other. The care with which the insect prepares a cell, or hole, or nest, deposits therein its egg, together with food for the larva that will emerge from it in the following spring, and then calmly dies, is just like the care with which a person in the evening lays out their clothes and breakfast ready for the following morning, and then calmly goes to bed; and at bottom it could not take place at all, unless the insect that dies in autumn were in itself and according to its true essence just as identical with the insect hatched in spring as the person who lies down to sleep is with the one who gets up.

After these considerations, we now return to ourselves and our species; we then cast our glance forward far into the future, and try to picture to ourselves future generations with the millions of their individuals in the strange form of their customs and aspirations. But then we interpose with the question: Whence will all these come? Where are they now? Where is the abundant womb of that nothing which is pregnant with worlds, and which still conceals them, the coming generations? Would not the smiling and true answer to this be: Where else could they be but there where alone the real always was and will be, namely in the present and its content? hence with you, the deluded questioner, who in this mistaking of your own true nature is like the leaf on the tree. Fading in the autumn and about to fall, this leaf grieves over its own extinction, and will not be consoled by looking forward to the fresh green which will clothe the tree in spring, but says as a lament: “I am not these! These are quite different leaves!” Oh, foolish leaf! Whither do you want to go? And whence are the others supposed to come? Where is the nothing, the abyss of which you fear? Know your own inner being, precisely that which is so filled with the thirst for existence; recognize it once more in the inner, mysterious, sprouting force of the tree. This force is always one and the same in all the generations of leaves, and it remains untouched by arising and passing away. And now

As the leaves on the tree, so are the generations of human beings.[9]

Whether the fly now buzzing round me goes to sleep in the evening and buzzes again the following morning, or whether it dies in the evening and in spring another fly buzzes which has emerged from its egg, this in itself is the same thing. But then the knowledge that presents these as two fundamentally different things is not unconditioned, but relative, a knowledge of the phenomenon, not of the thing-in-itself. In the morning the fly exists again; it also exists again in the spring. For the fly what distinguishes the winter from the night? In Burdach’s Physiology, vol. I, § 275, we read: “Up till ten o’clock in the morning no Cercaria ephemera (one of the infusoria) is yet to be seen (in the infusion), and at twelve the whole water swarms with them. In the evening they die, and the next morning new ones come into existence again. It was thus observed for six days in succession by Nitzsch.”

Thus everything lingers only for a moment, and hurries on to death. The plant and the insect die at the end of the summer, the animal and human being after a few years; death reaps unweariedly. But despite all this, in fact as if this were not the case at all, everything is always there and in its place, just as if everything were imperishable. The plant always flourishes and blooms, the insect hums, animal and human are there in evergreen youth, and every summer we again have before us the cherries that have already been a thousand times enjoyed. Nations also exist as immortal individuals, though sometimes they change their names. Even their actions, what they do and suffer, are always the same, though history always pretends to relate something different; for it is like the kaleidoscope, that shows us a new configuration at every turn, whereas really we always have the same thing before our eyes. Therefore, what forces itself on us more irresistibly than the thought that arising and passing away do not concern the real essence of things, but that this remains untouched by them, hence is imperishable, consequently that each and every thing that wills to exist actually does exist continuously and without end? Accordingly, at every given point of time all species of animals, from the gnat to the elephant, exist together complete. They have already renewed themselves many thousands of times, and withal have remained the same. They know nothing of others like them who have lived before them, or who will live after them; it is the species that always lives, and the individuals cheerfully exist in the consciousness of the imperishability of the species and their identity with it. The will-to-live manifests itself in an endless present, because this is the form of the life of the species, which therefore does not grow old, but remains always young. Death is for the species what sleep is for the individual, or winking for the eye; when the Indian gods appear in human form, they are recognized by their not winking. Just as at nightfall the world vanishes, yet does not for a moment cease to exist, so human and animal apparently pass away through death, yet their true inner being continues to exist just as undisturbed. Let us now picture to ourselves that alternation of birth and death in infinitely rapid vibrations, and we have before us the persistent and enduring objectification of the will, the permanent Ideas of beings, standing firm like the rainbow on the waterfall. This is temporal immortality. In consequence of this, in spite of thousands of years of death and decay, there is still nothing lost, no atom of matter, still less anything of the inner being exhibiting itself as nature. Accordingly, we can at any moment cheerfully exclaim: “In spite of time, death, and decay, we are still all together!”

Perhaps an exception would have to be made of the person who should once have said from the bottom of their heart with regard to this game: “I no longer like it.” But this is not yet the place to speak of that.

Attention, however, must indeed be drawn to the fact that the pangs of birth and the bitterness of death are the two constant conditions under which the will-to-live maintains itself in its objectification, in other words, our being-in-itself, untouched by the course of time and by the disappearance of generations, exists in an everlasting present, and enjoys the fruit of the affirmation of the will-to-live. This is analogous to our being able to remain awake during the day only on condition that we sleep every night; indeed, this is the commentary furnished by nature for an understanding of that difficult passage. For the suspension of the animal functions is sleep; that of the organic functions is death.

The substratum or filling out, the pleroma or material of the present, is really the same through all time. The impossibility of directly recognizing this identity is just time, a form and limitation of our intellect. The fact that by virtue of it, for example, the future event does not as yet exist, rests on a delusion of which we become aware when the event has come to pass. The essential form of our intellect produces such a delusion, and this is explained and justified from the fact that the intellect has come forth from the hands of nature by no means for the purpose of comprehending the inner being of things, but merely for the purpose of comprehending motives, and hence to serve an individual and temporal phenomenon of will.[10]

If we comprehend the observations that concern us here, we shall also understand the true meaning of the paradoxical doctrine of the Eleatics, that there is no arising and passing away at all, but that the whole stands firm and immovable: “Parmenides and Melissus denied arising and passing away, because they believed the universe to be immovable” (Stobaeus, Extracts, I, 21). In the same way light is also thrown here on the fine passage of Empedocles, which Plutarch has preserved for us in the book Against Colotes, ch. 12:

Foolish and lacking far-sighted reflection are they

Who imagine there could arise what had not already been,

Or that it could pass away and become entirely nothing

Never will such things occur to the sage,

That so long as we live-what is thus described as life

Only for so long also are we subject to good and bad,

And that before birth and after death we are nothing.[11]

The very remarkable passage in Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, which in its place is surprising, deserves just as much to be mentioned: “An immense castle over the front entrance of which one read: ‘I belong to no one, and I belong to all the world; you were in it before you entered it, and you will still be in it when you have gone out of it.’”

Of course, in that sense in which they arise out of nothing when begotten, the human being becomes nothing through death. But really to become so thoroughly acquainted with this nothing would be very interesting, for it requires only moderate discernment to see that this empirical nothing is by no means an absolute nothing, in other words, such as would be nothing in every sense. We are already led to this insight by the empirical observation that all the features and characteristics of the parents are found once again in their children, and have thus surmounted death. Of this, however, I shall speak in a special chapter.[12]

There is no greater contrast than that between the ceaseless, irresistible flight of time carrying its whole content away with it, and the rigid immobility of what is actually existing, which is at all times one and the same; and if, from this point of view, we fix our really objective glance on the immediate events of life, the “flowing now” becomes clear and visible to us in the centre of the wheel of time. To the eye of a being who lived an incomparably longer life and took in at a single glance the human race in its whole duration, the constant alternation of birth and death would present itself merely as a continuous vibration. Accordingly, it would not occur to it at all to see in it a constantly new coming out of nothing and passing into nothing, but, just as to our glance the rapidly turning spark appears as a continuous circle, the rapidly vibrating spring as a permanent triangle, the vibrating cord as a spindle, so to its glance the species would appear as that which is and remains, birth and death as vibrations.

We shall have false notions about the indestructibility of our true nature through death, so long as we do not make up our minds to study it first of all in the animals, and claim for ourselves alone a class apart from them under the boastful name of immortality. But it is this presumption alone and the narrowness of view from which it proceeds, on account of which most people struggle so obstinately against recognizing the obvious truth that, essentially and in the main, we are the same as the animals; in fact that such people recoil at every hint of our relationship with these. Yet it is this denial of the truth which, more than anything else, bars to them the way to real knowledge of the indestructibility of our true nature. For if we seek anything on a wrong path, we have in so doing forsaken the right; and on the wrong path we shall never attain to anything in the end but belated disillusionment. Therefore, pursue truth straight away, not according to preconceived freaks and fancies, but guided by the hand of nature! First of all learn to recognize, when looking at every young animal, the never-ageing existence of the species, which, as a reflection of its own eternal youth, bestows on every new individual a temporal youth, and lets it step forth as new, as fresh, as if the world were of today. Ask yourself honestly whether the swallow of this year’s spring is an entirely different one from the swallow of the first spring, and whether actually between the two the miracle of creation out of nothing has been renewed a million times, in order to work just as often into the hands of absolute annihilation. I know quite well that anyone would regard me as mad if I seriously assured them that the cat, playing just now in the yard, is still the same one that did the same jumps and tricks there three hundred years ago; but I also know that it is much more absurd to believe that the cat of today is through and through and fundamentally an entirely different one from that cat of three hundred years ago. We need only become sincerely and seriously engrossed in the contemplation of one of these higher vertebrates, in order to become distinctly conscious that this unfathomable inner being, taken as a whole as it exists, cannot possibly become nothing, and yet, on the other hand, we know its transitoriness. This rests on the fact that in this animal the eternity of its Idea (species) is distinctly marked in the finitude of the individual. For in a certain sense it is of course true that in the individual we always have before us a different being, namely in the sense resting on the principle of sufficient reason, under which are also included time and space; these constitute the principle of individuation. But in another it is not true, namely in the sense in which reality belongs only to the permanent forms of things, to the Ideas, and which was so clearly evident to Plato that it became his fundamental thought, the centre of his philosophy; the comprehension of it became the criterion for the ability to philosophize generally.

Just as the spraying drops of the roaring waterfall change with lightning rapidity, while the rainbow, of which they are the supporter, remains immovably at rest, quite untouched by that restless change, so every Idea, i.e., every species of living beings remains entirely untouched by the constant change of its individuals. But it is the Idea or the species in which the will-to-live is really rooted and manifests itself; therefore the will is really concerned only in the continuance of the species. For example, the lions that are born and that die are like the drops of the waterfall; but leonitas, the Idea or form or shape of the lion, is like the unshaken and unmoved rainbow on the waterfall. Plato therefore attributed real and true being only to the Ideas, i.e., to the species; but to the individuals he attributed only a restless arising and passing away. From the deepest consciousness of its imperishable nature there also spring the confidence and serenity with which every animal and even every human individual move along light-heartedly amid a host of chances and hazards that may annihilate them at any moment, and moreover move straight on to death. Out of its eyes, however, there glances the peace of the species, which is unaffected and untouched by that destruction and extinction. Not even to the human race could this peace and calm be vouchsafed by uncertain and changing dogmas. As I have said, however, the sight of every animal teaches us that death is no obstacle to the kernel of life, the will in its manifestation. Yet what an unfathomable mystery lies in every animal! Look at the nearest one; look at your dog, and see how cheerfully and calmly it stands there! Many thousands of dogs have had to die before it was this dog’s turn to live; but the death and extinction of those thousands have not affected the Idea of the dog. This Idea has not in the least been disturbed by all that dying. Therefore the dog stands there as fresh and endowed with original force as if this day were its first and none could be its last, and out of its eyes there shines the indestructible principle in it, the archaeus. Now what has died throughout those thousands of years? Not the dog; it stands there before us intact and unscratched; merely the shadow, the image or copy in our manner of knowing, which is bound to time. Yet how can we ever believe that that passes away which exists forever and ever, and fills all time? The matter is, of course, explainable empirically, namely according as death destroyed the individuals, the generation brought forth new ones. This empirical explanation, however, is only an apparent explanation; it puts one riddle in place of the other. Although a metaphysical understanding of the matter is not to be had so cheaply, it is nevertheless the only true and satisfactory one.

In his subjective method, Kant brought to light the great though negative truth that time cannot belong to the thing-in-itself, because it lies preformed in our apprehension. Now death is the temporal end of the temporal phenomenon; but as soon as we take away time, there is no longer any end at all, and the word has lost all meaning. But here, on the objective path, I am now trying to show the positive aspect of the matter, namely that the thing-in-itself remains untouched by time and by that which is possible only through time, that is, by arising and passing away, and that the phenomena in time could not have even that restless, fleeting existence that stands next to nothingness, unless there were in them a kernel of eternity. It is true that eternity is a concept having no perception as its basis; for this reason, it is also of merely negative content, and thus implies a timeless existence. Time, however, is a mere image of eternity, “time is the image of eternity,” as Plotinus has it; and in just the same way, our temporal existence is the mere image of our true inner being. This must lie in eternity, just because time is only the form of our knowing; but by virtue of this form alone we know our own existence and that of all things as transitory, finite, and subject to annihilation.

In the second book[13] I have explained that the adequate objectivity of the will as thing-in-itself is the (Platonic) Idea at each of its grades. Similarly in the third book I have shown that the Ideas of beings have as their correlative the pure subject of knowing, consequently that the knowledge of them appears only by way of exception and temporarily under specially favourable conditions. For individual knowledge, on the other hand, and hence in time, the Idea exhibits itself under the form of the species, and this is the Idea drawn apart by entering into time. The species is therefore the most immediate objectification of the thing-in-itself, i.e., of the will-to-live. Accordingly, the innermost being of every animal and of humanity also lies in the species; thus the will-to-live, which is so powerfully active, has its root in the species, not really in the individual. On the other hand, immediate consciousness is to be found only in the individual; therefore, it imagines itself to be different from the species, and thus fears death. The will-to-live manifests itself in reference to the individual as hunger and fear of death; in reference to the species, as sexual impulse and passionate care for the offspring. In agreement with this, we find nature, as being free from that delusion of the individual, just as careful for the maintenance of the species as it is indifferent to the destruction of the individuals; for the latter are always only means, the former the end. Therefore, a glaring contrast appears between nature’s stinginess in the equipment of individuals and its lavishness when the species is at stake. From one individual often a hundred thousand seeds or more are obtained annually, for example, from trees, fish, crabs, termites, and many others. In the case of its stinginess, on the other hand, only barely enough in the way of strength and organs is given to each to enable it with ceaseless exertion to maintain a bare living. If, therefore, an animal is crippled or weakened, it must, as a rule, die of starvation. And where an occasional economy was possible, through the circumstance that a part could be dispensed with in an emergency, it has been withheld, even out of order. Hence, for example, many caterpillars are without eyes; the poor animals grope about in the dark from leaf to leaf, and in the absence of antennae they do this by moving three quarters of their body to and fro in the air, till they come across an object. In this way they often miss their food that is to be found close at hand. But this happens in consequence of the parsimony in nature, to the expression of which, “Nature does nothing in vain and creates nothing superfluous,” can be added “and gives away nothing.” The same tendency of nature shows itself also in the fact that the fitter an individual is for propagation by virtue of their age, the more powerfully does the “healing power of nature” manifest itself. A person’s wounds, therefore, heal easily, and they easily recover from illnesses. This diminishes with the power of procreation, and sinks low after this power is extinguished; for in the eyes of nature the individual has now become worthless.

Now if we cast a glance at the scale of beings together with the gradation of consciousness that accompanies them, from the polyp to human being, we see this wonderful pyramid kept in ceaseless oscillation certainly by the constant death of the individuals, yet enduring in the species throughout the endlessness of time by means of the bond of generation. Now, whereas, as was explained above, the objective, the species, manifests itself as indestructible, the subjective, consisting merely in the self-consciousness of these beings, seems to be of the shortest duration, and to be incessantly destroyed, in order just as often to come forth again out of nothing in an incomprehensible way. But a person must really be very short-sighted to allow themselves to be deceived by this appearance, and not to understand that, although the form of temporal permanence belongs only to the objective, the subjective — i.e., the will, living and appearing in everything, and with it the subject of knowing in which this exhibits itself — must be no less indestructible. For the permanence of the objective, or the external, can indeed be only the phenomenal appearance of the indestructibility of the subjective, or the internal, since the former cannot possess anything that it had not received in fee from the latter; it cannot be essentially and originally something objective, a phenomenon, and then secondarily and accidentally something subjective, a thing-in-itself, something conscious of itself. For obviously, the former as phenomenon or appearance presupposes something that appears, just as being-for-another presupposes being-for-self, and object presupposes subject; but not conversely, since everywhere the root of things must lie in that which they are by themselves, hence in the subjective, not in the objective, not in that which they are only for others, not in the consciousness of another. Accordingly, we found in the first book[14] that the correct starting-point for philosophy is essentially and necessarily the subjective, i.e., the idealistic, just as the opposite starting-point, proceeding from the objective, leads to materialism. Fundamentally, however, we are far more at one with the world than we usually think; its inner nature is our will, and its phenomenal appearance our representation. The difference between the continuance of the external world after one’s death and one’s own continuance after death would vanish for anyone who could bring this unity or identity of being to distinct consciousness; the two would present themselves as one and the same thing; in fact, one would laugh at the delusion that could separate them. For an understanding of the indestructibility of our true nature coincides with that of the identity of macrocosm and microcosm. Meanwhile we can elucidate what has here been said by a peculiar experiment that is to be carried out by means of the imagination, and might be called metaphysical. Let a person attempt to present vividly to their mind the time, not in any case very distant, when they will be dead. They then think themselves away, and allow the world to go on existing; but soon, to that person’s own astonishment, they will discover that nevertheless they still exist. For they imagined they made a mental representation of the world without themselves; but the I or ego is in consciousness that which is immediate, by which the world is first brought about, and for which alone the world exists. This centre of all existence, this kernel of all reality, is to be abolished, and yet the world is to be allowed to go on existing; it is an idea that may, of course, be conceived in the abstract, but not realized. The endeavour to achieve this, the attempt to think the secondary without the primary, the conditioned without the condition, the supported without the supporter, fails every time, much in the same way as the attempt fails to conceive an equilateral right-angled triangle, or an arising and passing away of matter, and similar impossibilities. Instead of what was intended, the feeling here forces itself on us that the world is no less in us than we are in it, and that the source of all reality lies within ourselves. The result is really that the time when I shall not be will come objectively; but subjectively it can never come. Indeed, it might therefore be asked how far anyone in their heart actually believes in a thing that cannot really be conceived at all; or whether, since the deep consciousness of the indestructibility of our real inner nature is associated with that merely intellectual experiment that has, however, already been carried out more or less distinctly by everyone, whether, I say, our own death is not perhaps for us at bottom the most incredible thing in the world.

The deep conviction of the impossibility of our extermination by death, which, as the inevitable qualms of conscience at the approach of death also testify, everyone carries at the bottom of their heart, depends entirely on the consciousness of our original and eternal nature; therefore Spinoza expresses it thus: “We feel and experience that we are eternal.”[15] For a reasonable person can think of themselves as imperishable only in so far as they think of themselves as beginningless, as eternal, in fact as timeless. On the other hand, the person who regards themselves as having come out of nothing must also think that they become nothing again; for it is a monstrous idea that an infinity of time elapsed before they were, but that a second infinity has begun throughout which they will never cease to be. Actually the most solid ground for our imperishable nature is the old aphorism: “Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing can again become nothing.” Therefore, Theophrastus Paracelsus (Works, Strasburg, 1603, vol. II, p. 6) says very pertinently: “The soul in me has come from something, therefore it does not come to nothing; for it comes out of something.” He states the true reason. But whoever regards humanity’s birth as the absolute beginning must regard death as the absolute end. For both are what they are in the same sense; consequently everyone can think of themselves as immortal only in so far as they also think of themselves as unborn, and in the same sense. What birth is, that also is death, according to its true nature and significance; it is the same line drawn in two directions. If the former is an actual arising out of nothing, the latter is also an actual annihilation. In truth, however, it is only by means of the eternity of our real inner nature that an imperishability of it is conceivable; consequently, such an imperishableness is not temporal. The assumption that the human being is created out of nothing necessarily leads to the assumption that death is the absolute end. In this respect, therefore, the Old Testament is quite consistent; for no doctrine of immortality is appropriate to a creation out of nothing. New Testament Christianity has such a doctrine, because it is Indian in spirit, and therefore, more than probably, Indian in origin, although only indirectly, through Egypt. Such a doctrine, however, is as little suited to the Jewish stem on which that Indian wisdom had to be grafted in the Holy Land as the freedom of the will is to the will’s being created, or as

If a painter wanted to join a human head to the neck of a horse.[16]

It is always bad if we are not allowed to be thoroughly original and to carve out of the whole wood. Brahmanism and Buddhism, on the other hand, quite consistently with a continued existence after death, have an existence before birth, and the purpose of this life is to atone for the guilt of that previous existence. The following passage from Colebrooke’s History of Indian Philosophy in the Transactions of the Asiatic London Society, vol. I, p. 577, shows also how clearly conscious they are of the necessary consistency in this: “Against the system of the Bhagavatas, which is but partially heretical, the objection upon which the chief stress is laid by Vyasa is, that the soul would not be eternal, if it were a production, and consequently had a beginning.”[17] Further, in Upham’s Doctrine of Buddhism, p. 110, it is said: “The lot in hell of impious persons called Deitty is the most severe: these are they who, discrediting the evidence of Buddha, adhere to the heretical doctrine, that all living beings had their beginning in the mother’s womb, and will have their end in death.”[18]

The person who conceives their existence as merely accidental, must certainly be afraid of losing it through death. On the other hand the person who sees, even only in a general way, that their existence rests on some original necessity, will not believe that this necessity, which has produced so wonderful a thing, is limited to such a brief span of time, but that it is active at all times. But whoever reflects that up till now, when they exist, an infinite time, and thus an infinity of changes, has run its course, but yet notwithstanding this they exist, will recognize their existence as a necessary one. Therefore, the entire possibility of all states and conditions has exhausted itself already without being able to eliminate one’s existence. If ever a person could not be, they would already not be now. For the infinity of the time that has already elapsed, with the exhausted possibility of its events in it, guarantees that what exists necessarily exists. Consequently, everyone has to conceive themselves as a necessary being, in other words, as a being whose existence would follow from its true and exhaustive definition, if only we had this. Actually in this train of thought is to be found the only immanent proof of the imperishability of our real inner nature, that is to say, the only proof that keeps within the sphere of empirical data. Existence must be inherent in this inner nature, since it shows itself to be independent of all states or conditions that can possibly be brought about through the causal chain; for these states have already done what they could, and yet our existence has remained just as unshaken thereby, as the ray of light is by the hurricane that it cuts through. If from its own resources time could bring us to a happy state, we should already have been there long ago; for an infinite time lies behind us. But likewise, if time could lead us to destruction, we should already long ago have ceased to exist. It follows from the fact that we now exist, if the matter is well considered, that we are bound to exist at all times. For we ourselves are the inner nature that time has taken up into itself, in order to fill up its void; therefore this inner nature fills the whole of time, present, past, and future, in the same way; and it is just as impossible for us to fall out of existence as it is for us to fall out of space. If we carefully consider this, it is inconceivable that what once exists in all the force of reality could ever become nothing, and then not exist throughout an infinite time. From this have arisen the Christian doctrine of the restoration of all things, the Hindu doctrine of the constantly renewed creation of the world by Brahma, together with similar dogmas of the Greek philosophers. The great mystery of our existence and non-existence, to explain which these and all kindred dogmas were devised, ultimately rests on the fact that the same thing that objectively constitutes an infinite course of time is subjectively a point, an indivisible, ever-present present-moment; but who comprehends it? It has been most clearly expounded by Kant in his immortal doctrine of the ideality of time and of the sole reality of the thing-in-itself. For it follows from this that what is really essential in things, in humanity, in the world, lies permanently and enduringly in the now, firm and immovable; and that the change of phenomena and of events is a mere consequence of our apprehension of it by means of our perception-form of time. Accordingly, instead of saying: “You have arisen through birth, but are immortal,” one should say: “You are not nothing,” and teach them to understand this in the sense of the saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: “For that which is must always be.” (Stobaeus, Extracts, I, 43, 6). Yet if this does not succeed, but the anxious heart breaks out into its old lament: “I see all beings arise out of nothing through birth, and again after a brief term return to nothing; even my existence, now in the present, will soon lie in the remote past, and I shall be nothing!” then the right answer is: “Do you not exist? Do you not possess the precious present, to which you children of time all aspire so eagerly, actually at this moment? And do you understand how you have attained to it? Do you know the paths which have led you to it, that you could see them barred to you by death? An existence of yourself after the destruction of your body is not possibly conceivable to you; but can it be more inconceivable to you than are your present existence and the way you have attained to it? Why should you doubt that the secret paths that stood open to you up to this present, will not also stand open to you to every future present?”

Therefore, if considerations of this kind are certainly calculated to awaken the conviction that there is something in us that death cannot destroy, this nevertheless happens only by our being raised to a point of view from which birth is not the beginning of our existence. It follows from this, however, that what is proved to be indestructible through death is not really the individual. Moreover, having arisen through generation and carrying within itself the qualities of the father and mother, this individual exhibits itself as a mere difference of the species, and as such can be only finite. Accordingly, just as the individual has no recollection of their existence before birth, so can they have no recollection of their present existence after death. Everyone, however, places the I or ego in consciousness; therefore this seems to be tied to individuality. Moreover, with individuality there disappears all that which is peculiar to a person, as to this, and which distinguishes one from others. Therefore a person’s continued existence without individuality becomes for them indistinguishable from the continuance of all other beings, and they see the I or ego become submerged. Now the person who thus links their existence to the identity of consciousness, and therefore desires for this an endless existence after death, should bear in mind that in any case they can attain to this only at the price of just as endless a past before birth. For as one has no recollection of an existence before birth, and so consciousness begins with birth, one must look upon birth as an arising of one’s existence out of nothing. But then one purchases the endless time of one’s existence after death for just as long a time before birth; in this way the account is balanced without any profit. On the other hand, if the existence left untouched by death is different from that of individual consciousness, then it must be independent of birth just as it is of death. Accordingly, with reference to it, it must be equally true to say, “I shall always be” and “I have always been,” which then gives us two infinities for one. However, the greatest equivocation really lies in the word “I,” as will be seen at once by anyone who calls to mind the contents of our second book[19] and the separation there carried out of the willing part of our true inner nature from the knowing part. According as I understand this word, I can say: “Death is my entire end”; or else: “This my personal phenomenal appearance is just as infinitely small a part of my true inner nature as I am of the world.” But the I or ego is the dark point in consciousness, just as on the retina the precise point of entry of the optic nerve is blind, the brain itself is wholly insensible, the body of the sun is dark, and the eye sees everything except itself. Our faculty of knowledge is directed entirely outwards in accordance with the fact that it is the product of a brain-function that has arisen for the purpose of mere self-maintenance, and hence for the search for nourishment and the seizing of prey. Therefore everyone knows of themselves only as of this individual, just as it exhibits itself in external perception. If, on the other hand, a person could bring to consciousness what they are besides and beyond this, they would willingly give up their individuality, smile at the tenacity of their attachment thereto, and say: “What does the loss of this individuality matter to me? for I carry within myself the possibility of innumerable individualities.” They would see that, although there is not in store for them a continued existence of their individuality, it is nevertheless just as good as if they had such an existence, since they carry within themselves a complete compensation for it. Besides this, however, it might also be taken into consideration that the individuality of most people is so wretched and worthless that they actually lose nothing in it, and that what in them may still have some value is the universal human element; but to this we can promise imperishableness. In fact, even the rigid unalterability and essential limitation of every individuality as such would, in the case of its endless duration, inevitably and necessarily produce ultimately such great weariness by its monotony, that we should prefer to become nothing, merely in order to be relieved of it. To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever; for at bottom every individuality is really only a special error, a false step, something that it would be better had it not been, in fact something from which it is the real purpose of life to bring us back. This also finds confirmation in the fact that most, indeed really all, people are so constituted that they could not be happy, no matter in what world they might be placed. In so far as such a world would exclude want and hardship, they would become a prey to boredom, and in so far as this was prevented, they would fall into misery, vexation, and suffering. Thus, for a blissful condition of humanity, it would not be by any means sufficient to be transferred to a “better world”; on the contrary, it would also be necessary for a fundamental change to occur in humanity itself, and hence for each person to be no longer what they are, but rather to become what they are not. For this, however, a person must first of all cease to be what they are; as a preliminary, this requirement is fulfilled by death, and the moral necessity of this can from this point of view already be seen. To be transferred to another world and to change one’s entire nature are at bottom one and the same thing. On this also ultimately rests that dependence of the objective on the subjective which is explained by the idealism of our first book; accordingly, here is to be found the point of contact between transcendental philosophy and ethics. If we bear this in mind, we shall find that the awakening from the dream of life is possible only through the disappearance along with it of its whole fundamental fabric as well; but this is its organ itself, the intellect together with its forms. With this the dream would go on spinning itself forever, so firmly is it incorporated with that organ. That which really dreamt the dream is, however, still different from it, and alone remains over. On the other hand, the fear that with death everything might be over and finished may be compared to the case of a person who in a dream should think that there were mere dreams without a dreamer. But would it even be desirable for an individual consciousness to be kindled again, after it had once been ended by death, in order that it might continue forever? For the most part, often in fact entirely, its content is nothing but a stream of paltry, earthly, poor ideas, and endless worries and anxieties; let these then be finally silenced! Therefore with true instinct the ancients put on their tombstones: “To eternal security”; “to good repose.” But if even here, as has happened so often, we wanted continued existence of the individual consciousness, in order to connect with it a reward or punishment in the next world, then at bottom the aim would be merely the compatibility of virtue with egoism. But these two will never embrace; they are fundamentally opposed. On the other hand, the immediate conviction, which the sight of noble actions calls forth, is well founded, that the spirit of love enjoining one person to spare their enemies, and another, even at the risk of their life, to befriend a person never previously seen, can never pass away and become nothing.

The most complete answer to the question of the individual’s continued existence after death is to be found in Kant’s great doctrine of the ideality of time. Just here does this doctrine show itself to be specially fruitful and rich in important results, since it replaces dogmas, which lead to the absurd on the one path as on the other, by a wholly theoretical but well proved insight, and thus at once settles the most exciting of all metaphysical questions. To begin, to end, and to continue are concepts that derive their significance simply and solely from time; consequently, they are valid only on the presupposition of time. But time has no absolute existence; it is not the mode and manner of the being-in-itself of things, but merely the form of our knowledge of the existence and inner being of ourselves and of all things; and for this reason such knowledge is very imperfect, and is limited to mere phenomena. Thus in reference to this knowledge alone do the concepts of ceasing and continuing find application, not in reference to that which manifests itself in them, namely the being-in-itself of things; applied to this, such concepts therefore no longer have any true meaning. For this is also seen in the fact that an answer to the question arising from those time, concepts becomes impossible, and every assertion of such an answer, whether on the one side or the other, is open to convincing objections. We might indeed assert that our being-in-itself continues after death, because it would be wrong to say that it was destroyed; but we might just as well assert that it is destroyed, because it would be wrong to say that it continues; at bottom, the one is just as true as the other. Accordingly, something like an antinomy could certainly be set up here, but it would rest on mere negations. In it one would deprive the subject of the judgement of two contradictorily opposite predicates, but only because the whole category of these predicates would not be applicable to that subject. But if one deprives it of those two predicates, not together but separately, it appears as if the contradictory opposite of the predicate, denied in each case, were thus proved of the subject of the judgement. This, however, is due to the fact that incommensurable quantities are here compared, inasmuch as the problem removes us to a scene that abolishes time, but yet asks about time-determinations. Consequently, it is equally false to attribute these to the subject and to deny them, which is equivalent to saying that the problem is transcendent. In this sense death remains a mystery.

On the other hand, adhering to that very distinction between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, we can make the assertion that the human being as phenomenon is certainly perishable, yet their true inner being is not affected by this. Hence this true inner being is indestructible, although, on account of the elimination of the time-concepts which is connected with this, we cannot attribute continuance to it. Accordingly, we should be led here to the concept of an indestructibility that was nevertheless not a continuance. Now this concept is one which, obtained on the path of abstraction, may possibly be thought in the abstract; yet it cannot be supported by any perception; consequently, it cannot really become distinct. On the other hand, we must here keep in mind that we have not, like Kant, absolutely given up the ability to know the thing-in-itself; on the contrary, we know that it is to be looked for in the will. It is true that we have never asserted an absolute and exhaustive knowledge of the thing-in-itself; indeed, we have seen quite well that it is impossible to know anything according to what it may be absolutely in and by itself. For as soon as I know, I have a representation, a mental picture; but just because this representation is mine, it cannot be identical with what is known; on the contrary, it reproduces in an entirely different form that which is known by making it a being-for-others out of a being-for-self; hence it is still always to be regarded as the phenomenal appearance of this. However, therefore, a knowing consciousness may be constituted, there can always be for it only phenomena. This is not entirely obviated even by the fact that my own inner being is that which is known; for, in so far as it falls within my knowing consciousness, it is already a reflex of my inner being, something different from this inner being itself, and so already in a certain degree phenomenon. Thus, in so far as I am that which knows, I have even in my own inner being really only a phenomenon; on the other hand, in so far as I am directly this inner being itself, I am not that which knows. For it is sufficiently proved in the second book that knowledge is only a secondary property of our inner being, and is brought about through the animal nature of this. Strictly speaking, therefore, we know even our own will always only as phenomena, and not according to what it may be absolutely in and by itself. But in that second book, as well as in my work On the Will in Nature, it is fully discussed and demonstrated that if, in order to penetrate into the essence of things, we leave what is given only indirectly and from outside, and stick to the only phenomenon into whose inner nature an immediate insight is accessible to us from within, we quite definitely find in this the will as the ultimate thing and the kernel of reality. In the will, therefore, we recognize the thing-in-itself in so far as it no longer has space, but time for its form; consequently, we really know it only in its most immediate manifestation, and thus with the reservation that this knowledge of it is still not exhaustive and entirely adequate. In this sense, therefore, we here retain the concept of the will as that of the thing-in-itself.

The concept of ceasing to be is certainly applicable to the human being as phenomenon in time, and empirical knowledge plainly presents death as the end of this temporal existence. The end of the person is just as real as was its beginning, and in just that sense in which we did not exist before birth, shall we no longer exist after death. But no more can be abolished through death than was produced through birth; and so that cannot be abolished by which birth first of all became possible. In this sense “born and unborn” is a fine expression. Now the whole of empirical knowledge affords us mere phenomena; thus only phenomena are affected by the temporal processes of arising and passing away, not that which appears, namely the being-in-itself. For this inner being the contrast, conditioned by the brain, between arising and passing away, does not exist at all; on the contrary, it has lost meaning and significance. This inner being, therefore, remains unaffected by the temporal end of a temporal phenomenon, and always retains that existence to which the concepts of beginning, end, and continuance are not applicable. But in so far as we can follow up this inner being, it is in every phenomenal being its will; so too in the human being. Consciousness, on the other hand, consists in knowledge; but this, as has been sufficiently demonstrated, belongs, as activity of the brain, and consequently as function of the organism, to the mere phenomenon, and therefore ends therewith. The will alone, of which the work or rather the copy was the body, is what is indestructible. The sharp distinction between will and knowledge, together with the former’s primacy, a distinction that constitutes the fundamental characteristic of my philosophy, is therefore the only key to the contradiction that shows itself in many different ways, and always arises afresh in every consciousness, even the crudest. This contradiction is that death is our end, and yet we must be eternal and indestructible; hence it is the “we feel and experience that we are eternal” of Spinoza. All philosophers have made the mistake of placing that which is metaphysical, indestructible, and eternal in the human being in the intellect. It lies exclusively in the will, which is entirely different from the intellect, and alone is original. As was most thoroughly explained in the second book, the intellect is a secondary phenomenon, and is conditioned by the brain, and therefore begins and ends with this. The will alone is that which conditions, the kernel of the whole phenomenon; consequently, it is free from the forms of the phenomenon, one of which is time, and hence it is also indestructible. Accordingly, with death consciousness is certainly lost, but not what produced and maintained consciousness; life is extinguished, but with it not the principle of life which manifested itself in it. Therefore a sure and certain feeling says to everyone that there is in them something positively imperishable and indestructible. Even the freshness and vividness of recollections from earliest times, from early childhood, are evidence that something in us does not pass away with time, does not grow old, but endures unchanged. However, we were not able to see clearly what this imperishable element is. It is not consciousness any more than it is the body, on which consciousness obviously depends. On the contrary, it is that on which the body together with consciousness depends. It is, however, just that which, by entering into consciousness, exhibits itself as will. Of course, we cannot go beyond this most immediate phenomenal appearance of it, because we cannot go beyond consciousness. Therefore the question what that something may be in so far as it does not enter into consciousness, in other words, what it is absolutely in itself, remains unanswerable.

In the phenomenon, and by means of its forms time and space, as principle of individuation, it is thus evident that the human individual perishes, whereas the human race remains and continues to live. But in the being-in-itself of things which is free from these forms, the whole difference between the individual and the race is also abolished, and the two are immediately one. The entire will-to-live is in the individual, as it is in the race, and thus the continuance of the species is merely the image of the individual’s indestructibility.

Now, since the infinitely important understanding of the indestructibility of our true nature by death rests entirely on the difference between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, I wish to put this very difference in the clearest light by elucidating it in the opposite of death, hence in the origin of animal beings, i.e., in generation. For this process, that is just as mysterious as death, places most directly before our eyes the fundamental contrast between phenomenon and the being-in-itself of things, i.e., between the world as representation and the world as will, and also shows us the entire heterogeneity of the laws of these two. The act of procreation thus presents itself to us in a twofold manner: firstly for self-consciousness, whose sole object is, as I have often shown, the will with all its affections; and secondly for the consciousness of other things, i.e., of the world of the representation, or the empirical reality of things. Now from the side of the will, and thus inwardly, subjectively, for self-consciousness, that act manifests itself as the most immediate and complete satisfaction of the will, i.e., as sensual pleasure. On the other hand, from the side of the representation, and thus outwardly, objectively, for the consciousness of other things, this act is just the weft of the most ingenious of all fabrics, the foundation of the inexpressibly complicated animal organism which then needs only development in order to become visible to our astonished eyes. This organism, whose infinite complication and perfection are known only to the student of anatomy, is not to be conceived and thought of, from the side of the representation, as other than a system, devised with the most carefully planned combination and carried out with the most consummate skill and precision, the most arduous work of the profoundest deliberation. Now from the side of the will, we know through self-consciousness that the production of the organism is the result of an act the very opposite of all reflection and deliberation, of an impetuous, blind craving, an exceedingly voluptuous sensation. This contrast is exactly akin to the infinite contrast, shown above, between the absolute facility with which nature produces its works, together with the correspondingly boundless carelessness with which it abandons such works to destruction — and the incalculably ingenious and well-thought-out construction of these very works. To judge from these, it must have been infinitely difficult to make them, and therefore to provide for their maintenance with every conceivable care, whereas we have the very opposite before our eyes. Now if, by this naturally very unusual consideration, we have brought together in the sharpest manner the two heterogeneous sides of the world, and so to speak grasped them with one hand, we must now hold them firmly, in order to convince ourselves of the entire invalidity of the laws of the phenomenon, or of the world as representation, for that of the will, or of things-in-themselves. It will then become clearer to us that whereas, on the side of the representation, i.e., in the phenomenal world, there is exhibited to us first an arising out of nothing, then a complete annihilation of what has arisen, from that other side, or in itself, there lies before us an essence or entity, and when the concepts of arising and passing away are applied to it, they have absolutely no meaning. For by going back to the root, where, by means of self-consciousness, the phenomenon and the being-in-itself meet, we have just palpably apprehended, as it were, that the two are absolutely incommensurable. The whole mode of being of the one, together with all the fundamental laws of this being, signifies nothing, and less than nothing, in the other. I believe that this last consideration will be rightly understood only by a few, and that it will be unpleasant and even offensive to all who do not understand it. However, I shall never on this account omit anything that can serve to illustrate my fundamental idea.

At the beginning of this chapter I explained that the great attachment to life, or rather the fear of death, by no means springs from knowledge, for in that case it would be the result of the known value of life, but that that fear of death has its root directly in the will; it proceeds from the will’s original and essential nature, in which that will is entirely without knowledge, and is therefore the blind will-to-live. Just as we are allured into life by the wholly illusory inclination for sensual pleasure, so are we firmly retained in life by the fear of death, certainly just as illusory. Both spring directly from the will that is in itself without knowledge. On the other hand, if the human being were a merely knowing being, death would necessarily be not only a matter of indifference, but even welcome to them. Now the consideration we have reached here teaches us that what is affected by death is merely the knowing consciousness; that the will, on the other hand, in so far as it is the thing-in-itself that lies at the root of every individual phenomenon, is free from everything that depends on determinations of time, and so is imperishable. Its striving for existence and manifestation, from which the world results, is always satisfied, for it is accompanied by this world just as the body is by the shadow, since the world is merely the visibility of the true inner nature of the will. Nevertheless, the will in us fears death, and this is because knowledge presents to this will its true nature merely in the individual phenomenon. From this there arises for the will the illusion that it perishes with this phenomenon, just as when the mirror is smashed my image in it seems to be destroyed at the same time. Therefore this fills the will with horror, because it is contrary to its original nature, which is a blind craving for existence. It follows from this that that in us which alone is capable of fearing death, and also alone fears it, namely the will, is not affected by it; and that, on the other hand, what is affected by it and actually perishes is that which, by its nature, is not capable of any fear, and generally of any desire or emotion, and is therefore indifferent to existence and nonexistence. I refer to the mere subject of knowledge, the intellect, the existence of which consists in its relation to the world of the representation, in other words the objective world; it is the correlative of this objective world, with whose existence its own existence is at bottom identical. Thus, although the individual consciousness does not survive death, that survives it which alone struggles against it, the will. From this is also explained the contradiction that, from the standpoint of knowledge, philosophers have at all times with cogent arguments shown death to be no evil; yet the fear of death remains impervious to them all, simply because it is rooted not in knowledge, but in the will alone. Just because the will alone, not the intellect, is the indestructible element, it follows that all religions and philosophies promise a reward in eternity only to the virtues of the will or heart, not to those of the intellect or head.

The following may also serve to illustrate this consideration. The will, which constitutes our being-in-itself, is of a simple nature; it merely wills and does not know. The subject of knowing, on the other hand, is a secondary phenomenon, arising out of the objectification of the will; it is the point of unity of the nervous system’s sensibility, the focus, as it were, in which the rays of activity of all parts of the brain converge. Therefore with this brain the subject of knowing is bound to perish. In self-consciousness, as that which alone knows, the subject of knowing stands facing the will as a spectator, and although it has sprung from the will, it knows that will as something different from itself, something foreign to it, and thus only empirically, in time, piecemeal, in the successive agitations and acts of the will; only a posteriori and often very indirectly does it come to know the will’s decisions. This is why our own inner being is a riddle to us, in other words, to our intellect, and why the individual regards itself as newly arisen and as perishable, although its inner being-in-itself is something timeless, and therefore eternal. Now just as the will does not know, so, conversely, the intellect, or the subject of knowledge, is simply and solely knowing, without ever willing. This can be proved even physically from the fact that, as already mentioned in the second book, the various emotions, according to Bichat, directly affect all parts of the organism and disturb their functions, with the exception of the brain as that which can be affected by them at most indirectly, in other words, in consequence of those very disturbances (On Life and On Death, art. 6, § 2). Yet it follows from this that the subject of knowing, by itself and as such, cannot take any part or interest in anything, but that the existence or non-existence of everything, in fact even of itself, is a matter of indifference to it. Now why should this indifferent being be immortal? It ends with the temporal phenomenon of the will, i.e., with the individual, just as it originated therewith. It is the lantern that after it has served its purpose is extinguished. The intellect, like the world of perception which exists in it alone, is mere phenomenon; but the finitude of both does not affect that of which they are the phenomenal appearance. The intellect is the function of the cerebral nervous system; but this, like the rest of the body, is the objectivity of the will. The intellect, therefore, depends on the somatic life of the organism; but this organism itself depends on the will. Thus, in a certain sense, the organic body can be regarded as the link between the will and the intellect; although, properly speaking, the body is only the will itself spatially exhibiting itself in the perception of the intellect. Death and birth are the constant renewal and revival of the will’s consciousness. In itself this will is endless and beginningless; it alone is, so to speak, the substance of existence (every such renewal, however, brings a new possibility of the denial of the will-to-live). Consciousness is the life of the subject of knowing, or of the brain, and death is its end. Therefore consciousness is finite, is always new, beginning each time at the beginning. The will alone is permanent; but permanence also concerns it alone, for it is the will-to-live. Nothing is of any consequence to the knowing subject by itself; yet the will and the knowing subject are united in the I or ego. In every animal being the will has achieved an intellect, and this is the light by which the will here pursues its ends. Incidentally, the fear of death may also be due partly to the fact that the individual will is so reluctant to separate itself from the intellect that has fallen to its lot through the course of nature, from its guide and guard, without which it knows that it is helpless and blind.

Finally, this explanation agrees also with that of daily moral experience, teaching us that the will alone is real, while its objects, on the other hand, as conditioned by knowledge, are only phenomena, mere froth and vapour, like the wine provided by Mephistopheles in Auerbach’s cellar; thus after every pleasure of the senses we say; “And yet it seemed as I were drinking wine.”[20]

The terrors of death rest for the most part on the false illusion that then the I or ego vanishes, and the world remains. But rather is the opposite true, namely that the world vanishes; on the other hand, the innermost kernel of the ego endures, the bearer and producer of that subject in whose representation alone the world had its existence. With the brain the intellect perishes, and with the intellect the objective world, this intellect’s mere representation. The fact that in other brains a similar world lives and moves, now as before, is a matter of indifference with reference to the intellect that is perishing. If, therefore, reality proper did not lie in the will, and if the moral existence were not that which extended beyond death, then, as the intellect and with it its world are extinguished, the true essence of things generally would be nothing more than an endless succession of short and troubled dreams without connexion among themselves; for the permanence of nature-without-knowsledge consists merely in the time-representation of nature that knows. Therefore, a world-spirit, dreaming without aim or purpose dreams that are often heavy and troubled, would then be all in all.

When an individual experiences the dread of death, we really have the strange, and even ludicrous, spectacle of the lord of the worlds, who fills everything with its true nature, and through whom alone everything that is has its existence, in despair and afraid of perishing, of sinking into the abyss of eternal nothingness; whereas, in truth, everything is full with this world-spirit, and there is no place where it would not be, no being in whom it would not live, for existence does not support it, but it supports existence. Yet it is this world-spirit that despairs in the individual who suffers the dread of death, since it is exposed to the illusion, produced by the principle of individuation, that one’s existence is limited to the being that is now dying. This illusion is part of the heavy dream into which this world-spirit, as will-to-live, has fallen. However, we might say to the dying individual: “You are ceasing to be something which you would have done better never to become.”

As long as no denial of that will has taken place, that of us which is left over by death is the seed and kernel of quite another existence, in which a new individual finds itself again so fresh and original, that it broods over itself in astonishment. Hence the enthusiastic, visionary, and dreamy disposition of noble youths at the time when this fresh consciousness has just been fully developed. What sleep is for the individual, death is for the will as thing-in-itself. It could not bear to continue throughout endless time the same actions and sufferings without true gain, if memory and individuality were left to it. It throws them off; this is Lethe; and through this sleep of death it reappears as a new being, refreshed and equipped with another intellect; “A new day beckons to a newer shore!”[21]

As the self-affirming will-to-live, the human being has the root of its existence in the species. Accordingly, death is the losing of one individuality and the receiving of another, and consequently a changing of the individuality under the exclusive guidance of one’s own will. For in this alone lies the eternal force which was able to produce one’s existence with one’s ego, yet, on account of the nature of this ego, is unable to maintain it in existence. For death is the denial that the essence (essentia) of everyone receives in its claim to existence (existentia), the appearance of a contradiction lying in every individual existence:

for all things, from the Void

Called forth, deserve to be destroyed.[22]

Yet an infinite number of just such existences, each with its ego, stands within reach of the same force, that is, of the will, but these again will be just as perishable and transitory. Now as every ego has its separate consciousness, that infinite number of them, in respect of such an ego, is not different from a single one. From this point of view, it does not appear to me accidental that aeon signifies both the individual term of life and infinite time; thus it may be seen from this point, though indistinctly, that ultimately and in themselves both are the same. According to this it would really make no difference whether I existed only through my term of life or throughout an infinite time.

But of course, we cannot obtain a notion of all that has been said above entirely without time-concepts; yet these should be excluded when we are dealing with the thing-in-itself. But it is one of the unalterable limitations of our intellect that it can never entirely cast off this first and most immediate form of all its representations, in order to operate without it. Therefore we naturally come here to a kind of metempsychosis, though with the important difference that this does not affect the whole living and hence the knowing being, but the will alone, whereby so many absurdities that accompany the doctrine of metempsychosis disappear; and with the consciousness that the form of time here appears only as an unavoidable accommodation to the limitation of our intellect. If we now call in the assistance of the fact that the character, i.e., the will, is inherited from the father, whereas the intellect comes from the mother, then this agrees very well with our view that the will of the human being, in itself individual, separates itself in death from the intellect that was obtained from the mother at procreation, and receives a new intellect in accordance with its now modified nature under the guidance of the absolutely necessary course of the world which harmonizes with this nature. With this new intellect, the will would become a new being that would have no recollection of a previous existence; for the intellect, alone having the faculty of recollection, is the mortal part or the form, whereas the will is the eternal part, the substance. Accordingly, the word “palingenesis” is more correct than “metempsychosis” for describing this doctrine. These constant rebirths then constitute the succession of the life-dreams of a will in itself indestructible, until, instructed and improved by so much and such varied and successive knowledge in a constantly new form, it would abolish itself.

The proper and, so to speak, esoteric doctrine of Buddhism, as we have come to know it through the most recent researches, also agrees with this view, since it teaches not metempsychosis, but a peculiar palingenesis resting on a moral basis, and it expounds and explains this with great depth of thought. This may be seen from the exposition of the subject, well worth reading and considering, given in Spence Hardy’s Manual of Buddhism, pp. 394–96 (with which are to be compared pp. 429, 440, and 445 of the same book). Confirmations of it are to be found in Taylor’s Prabodha Chandrodaya, London, 1812, p. 35;[23] also in Sangermano’s Burmese Empire, p. 6,[24] as well as in the Asiatic Researches, vol. VI, p. 179, and vol. IX, p. 256.[25] The very useful German compendium of Buddhism by Köppen is also right on this point.[26] Yet for the great mass of Buddhists this doctrine is too subtle; and so plain metempsychosis is preached to them as a comprehensible substitute.

Moreover, it must not be overlooked that even empirical grounds support a palingenesis of this kind. As a matter of fact, there does exist a connexion between the birth of the newly appearing beings and the death of those who are decrepit and worn out. It shows itself in the great fertility of the human race, arising as the result of devastating epidemics. When, in the fourteenth century, the Black Death had for the most part depopulated the Old World, a quite abnormal fertility appeared among the human race, and twin births were very frequent. Most remarkable also was the circumstance that none of the children born at this time acquired all their teeth; thus nature, exerting itself to the utmost, was stingy in details. This is stated by F. Schnurrer in the Chronicle of Plague (1825). Casper, in The Probable Lifespan of Human Beings (1835), also confirms the principle that, in a given population, the number of procreations has the most decided influence on the duration of life and on mortality, as it always keeps pace with the mortality; so that, everywhere and at all times, the births and deaths increase and decrease in equal ratio. This he places beyond doubt by accumulated evidence from many countries and their different provinces. And yet there cannot possibly be a physical causal connection between my previous death and the fertility of a couple who are strangers to me, or vice versa. Here, then, the metaphysical appears undeniably and in an astonishing way as the immediate ground of explanation of the physical. Every new-born being comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a gift; but nothing is or can be freely given. Its fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn-out and decrepit existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed. Out of this seed the new existence arose; the two existences are one being. To show the bridge between the two would, of course, be the solution to a great riddle.

The great truth here expressed has never been entirely overlooked, although it could not be reduced to its precise and correct meaning. This becomes possible only through the doctrine of the primacy and metaphysical nature of the will and the secondary, merely organic, nature of the intellect. Thus we find the doctrine of metempsychosis, springing from the very earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always world-wide, as the belief of the great majority of humanity, in fact really as the doctrine of all religions, with the exception of Judaism and the two religions that have arisen from it. But, as already mentioned, we find this doctrine in its subtlest form, and coming nearest to the truth in Buddhism. Accordingly, while Christians console themselves with the thought of meeting again in another world, in which they regain their complete personality and at once recognize one another, in those other religions the meeting is going on already, though incognito. Thus, in the round of births, and by virtue of metempsychosis or palingenesis, the persons who now stand in close connexion or contact with us will also be born simultaneously with us at the next birth, and will have the same, or analogous, relations and sentiments towards us as they now have, whether these are of a friendly or hostile nature. (See, for example, Spence Hardy’s Manual of Buddhism, p. 162.) Of course, recognition is limited here to an obscure inkling, a reminiscence which is not to be brought to distinct consciousness, and which points to an infinite remoteness; with the exception, however, of the Buddha himself. He has the prerogative of distinctly knowing his own previous births and those of others; this is described in the Jatakas. But, in fact, if at favourable moments we look at the doings and dealings of people in real life in a purely objective way, the intuitive conviction is forced on us that they not only are and remain the same according to the (Platonic) Ideas, but also that the present generation, according to its real kernel, is precisely and substantially identical with every generation that previously existed. The question is only in what this kernel consists; the answer given to it by my teaching is well known. The above-mentioned intuitive conviction can be conceived as arising from the fact that the multiplying glasses, time and space, for a moment lose their effectiveness. With regard to the universal nature of the belief in metempsychosis, Obry rightly says in his excellent book On the Indian Nirvana, p. 13: “This old belief has journeyed round the world, and was so widespread in ancient times that a learned follower of the Anglican Church judged it to be without father, without mother, without genealogy.” Taught already in the Vedas, as in all the sacred books of India, metempsychosis is well known to be the kernel of Brahmanism and Buddhism. Accordingly, it prevails even now in the whole of non-Islamic Asia, and thus among more than half of the human race, as the firmest of convictions, with an incredibly strong practical influence. It was also the belief of the Egyptians (Herodotus, II, 123), from whom it was received with enthusiasm by Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato; the Pythagoreans in particular held firmly to it. That it was taught also in the mysteries of the Greeks follows undeniably from the ninth book of Plato’s Laws (pp. 38 and 42, Bipont edition). Nemesius even says (On Human Nature, ch. 2): “Belief in a wandering from one body to another is common to all the Greeks, who declared that the soul was immortal.” The Edda, particularly in the Völuspá, also teaches metempsychosis. No less was it the foundation of the religion of the Druids (Caesar, The Gallic Wars, VI; A. Pictet, The Mystery of the Bards of the British Isles, 1856). Even an Islamic sect in India, the Bohras, of whom Colebrooke gives a detailed account in the Asiatic Researches, vol. VII, pp. 336ff., believe in metempsychosis, and accordingly abstain from all animal food. Among American Indians and African tribes, indeed even among the natives of Australia, traces of this belief are found, as appears from an exact description, given in The Times of 29 January 1841, of the execution of two Australian savages for arson and murder. It says: “The younger of the 2 prisoners met his end with a dogged and determinate spirit, as it appear’d of revenge; the only intelligible expression he made use of conveyed an impression that he would rise up ‘a white fellow,’ which, it was considered, strengthened his resolution.” In a book by Ungewitter, The Australian Continent (1853), it is related also that the Papuans of New Holland regarded the whites as their own relations who had returned to the world. As the result of all this, belief in metempsychosis presents itself as the natural conviction of people whenever they reflect at all in an unprejudiced way. Accordingly, it would actually be that which Kant falsely asserts of his three pretended Ideas of reason, namely a philosopheme natural to human reason, and resulting from the forms of that faculty; and where this belief is not found, it would only be supplanted by positive religious doctrines coming from a different source. I have also noticed that it is at once obvious to everyone who hears of it for the first time. Just see how seriously even Lessing defends it in the last seven paragraphs of his Education of the Human Race. Lichtenberg also says in his autobiography: “I cannot get rid of the idea that I had died before I was born.”[27] Even the exceedingly empirical Hume says in his sceptical essay on immortality, p. 23: “The metempsychosis is therefore the only system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to.”[28] What opposes this belief, which is spread over the whole human race and is evident to the wise as well as to the vulgar, is Judaism, together with the two religions that have sprung from it, inasmuch as they teach humanity’s creation out of nothing. One then has the hard task of connecting this with the belief in an endless future existence after death. Of course, they have succeeded, with fire and sword, in driving that consoling, primitive belief of humanity out of Europe and of a part of Asia; for how long is still uncertain. The oldest Church history is evidence of precise1y how difficult this was. Most of the heretics were attached to that primitive belief; for example, the Simonians, Basilidians, Valentinians, Marcionites, Gnostics, and Manichaeans. The Jews themselves have come to it to some extent, as is reported by Tertullian and Justin (in his dialogues). In the Talmud it is related that Abel’s soul passed into the body of Seth, and then into that of Moses. Even the biblical passage, Matthew 16:13–15, takes on a rational meaning only when we understand it as spoken on the assumption of the dogma of metempsychosis. Luke, of course, who also has the passage (9:18–20), adds the words that one of the old prophets is risen again, he thus attributes to the Jews the assumption that an ancient prophet can thus rise again with skin and hair; but, as they know that he has already been in the grave for six or seven hundred years, and consequently has long since turned to dust, such rising again would be a palpable absurdity. However, in Christianity the doctrine of original sin, in other words of atonement for the sin of another individual, has taken the place of the transmigration of souls and of the expiation by means thereof of all the sins committed in a previous life. Thus both identify, and indeed with a moral tendency, the existing person with one who has existed previously; transmigration of souls does this directly, original sin indirectly.

Death is the great reprimand that the will-to-live, and more particularly the egoism essential thereto, receive through the course of nature; and it can be conceived as a punishment for our existence.[29] Death is the painful untying of the knot that generation with sensual pleasure had tied; it is the violent destruction, bursting in from outside, of the fundamental error of our true nature, the great disillusionment. At bottom, we are something that ought not to be; therefore we cease to be. Egoism really consists in the human being’s restricting all reality to its own person, in that it imagines it lives in this alone, and not in others. Death teaches the human being something better, since it abolishes this person, so that a person’s true nature, that is their will, will henceforth live only in other individuals. The intellect, however, which itself belonged only to the phenomenon, i.e., to the world as representation, and was merely the form of the external world, also continues to exist in the condition of being representation, in other words, in the objective being, as such, of things, hence also only in the existence of what was hitherto the external world. Therefore, from this time forward, the whole ego lives only in what had hitherto been regarded as non-ego; for the difference between external and internal ceases. Here we recall that the better person is the one who makes the least difference between itself and others, and does not regard them as absolutely non-ego; whereas to the bad person this difference is great, in fact absolute. I have discussed this at length in the essay On the Basis of Morality. The conclusion from the above remarks is that the degree in which death can be regarded as humanity’s annihilation is in proportion to this difference. But if we start from the fact that the difference between outside me and inside me, as a spatial difference, is founded only in the phenomenon, not in the thing-in-itself, and so is not an absolutely real difference, then in the losing of our own individuality we shall see only the loss of a phenomenon, and thus only an apparent loss. However much reality that difference has in empirical consciousness, yet from the metaphysical standpoint the sentences “I perish, but the world endures,” and “The world perishes, but I endure,” are not really different at bottom.

But beyond all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I; to the person, of course, who embraces it. During life, one’s will is without freedom; on the basis of this unalterable character, their conduct takes place with necessity in the chain of motives. Now everyone carries in their memory very many things which they have done, about which they are not satisfied. If they were to go on living, they would go on acting in the same way by virtue of the unalterability of one’s character. Accordingly, one must cease to be what one is, in order to be able to arise out of the germ of one’s true nature as a new and different being. Death, therefore, loosens those bonds; the will again becomes free, for freedom lies in the being, not in the works. “Whoever beholds the highest and profoundest, has their heart’s knot cut, all doubts are resolved, and all works come to nought”[30] is a very famous saying of the Veda often repeated by all Vedantists.[31] Dying is the moment of that liberation from the one-sidedness of an individuality which does not constitute the innermost kernel of our true being, but is rather to be thought of as a kind of aberration thereof. The true original freedom again enters at this moment which in the sense stated can be regarded as a restitution to wholeness. The peace and composure on the countenance of most dead people seem to have their origin in this. As a rule, the death of every good person is peaceful and gentle; but to die willingly, to die gladly, to die cheerfully, is the prerogative of the resigned, of the person who gives up and denies the will-to-live. For they alone wished to die actually and not merely apparently, and consequently need and desire no continuance of their person. They willingly give up the existence that we know; what comes to them instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence in reference to that one is nothing. The Buddhist faith calls that existence Nirvana, that is to say, extinction.[32]

NOTES

1. 1 Corinthians 15:32 (NIV).

2. Letter to Marquise de Deffand, 1 November 1769.

3. “In gladiatorial conflicts we usually abhor and abominate the cowards who beg and implore us to let them live. On the other hand, we seek to preserve the lives of the brave, the courageous, and those who of their own free will impetuously face death.” Cicero, Defence of Milo, ch. 34. [S]

4. a parte post.

5. a parte ante.

6. in partem ante.

7. A reference to the first volume of The World as Will and Representation.

8. A reference to the second volume of The World as Will and Representation.

9. Iliad, vi, 146.

10. There is only one present, and this always exists: for it is the sole form of actual existence. We must arrive at the insight that the past is not in itself different from the present, but is so only in our apprehension. This has time as its form, by virtue of which alone the present shows itself as different from the past. To make this insight easier, let us imagine all the events and scenes of human life, good and bad, fortunate and unfortunate, delightful and dreadful, which are presented to us successively in the course of time and variety of places, in the most motley multifariousness and succession, as existing all at once and simultaneously and forever, in the Nunc stans [present moment], whereas only apparently now this now that exists; then we shall understand what the objectification of the will-to-live really means. Our pleasure in genre pictures is also due mainly to their fixing the fleeting scenes of life. The dogma of metempsychosis resulted from the feeling of the truth just expressed. [S]

11. Lines 1130c–d.

12. A possible reference to the chapter “The Hereditary Nature of Qualities” in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation.

13. A reference to The World as Will and Representation.

14. The World as Will and Representation.

15. Ethics, v, prop. 23, schol.

16. Horace, Ars poetica, 1.

17. Henry Thomas Colebrooke, “On the Philosophy of the Hindus,” Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. I (1837), p. 416.

18. Edward Upham, The History and Doctrine of Buddhism (1829), p. 110.

19. The World as Will and Representation.

20. Goethe, Faust I, 2334, trans. Bayard Taylor.

21. Goethe, Faust I, 701, trans. Bayard Taylor.

22. Goethe, Faust I, 1339–40, trans. Bayard Taylor.

23. Prabodha Chandrodaya; or Rise of the Moon of Intellect, an 11th century Sanskrit drama.

24. Vincenzo Sangermano, A Description of the Burmese Empire (1833).

25. The Asiatic Researches was a journal frequently consulted by Schopenhauer; it published translations of classical Indian and Buddhist texts.

26. Carl Friedrich Köppen, The Religion of the Buddha and its Origins (1857).

27. Miscellaneous Writings, vol. i (1844).

28. This posthumous essay is found in the Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul by the late David Hume (Basel, 1799), sold by James Decker. Through this Basel reprint, those two works of one of England’s greatest thinkers and authors have been saved from destruction, after they had been suppressed in their own country, in consequence of the stupid and utterly contemptible bigotry there prevailing, through the influence of a powerful and insolent clergy, to England’s lasting discredit. They are entirely dispassionate, coldly rational investigations of the two subjects mentioned above. [S]

29. Death says: You are the product of an act that ought not to have taken place; therefore, to wipe it out, you must die. [S]

30. Mundaka Upanishad, 2.2.8.

31. Shankara, or On Vedantic Theological Doctrines, ed. F.H.H. Windischmann, p. 37; Upanishads, vol. i, pp. 387 and 78; Colebrooke’s Miscellaneous Essays, vol. i, p. 363. [S]

32. The etymology of the word Nirvana is given in various ways. According to Colebrooke (Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. i, p. 566), it comes from va, “to blow” like the wind, with the prefixed negative nir, hence it signifies a lull or calm, but as adjective “extinguished.” Obry, On the Indian Nivrvana, p. 3, says: “Nirvanam in Sanskrit literally means extinction, e.g., as of a fire.” According to the Asiatic Journal, vol. xxiv, p. 735, it is really Neravana, from nera, “without,” and vana, “life,” and the meaning would be annihilatio. In Spence Hardy’s Eastern Monachism, p. 295, Nirvana is derived from vana, “sinful desires,” with the negative nir. I. J. Schmidt, in his translation of the History of the Eastern Mongolians, p. 307, says that the Sanskrit Nirvana is translated into Mongolian by a phrase meaning “departed from misery,” “escaped from misery.” According to the same scholar’s lectures at the St. Petersburg Academy, Nirvana is the opposite of Samsara, which is the world of constant rebirths, of craving and desire, of the illusion of the senses, of changing and transient forms, of being born, growing old, becoming sick, and dying. In Burmese the word Nirvana, on the analogy of other Sanskrit words, is transformed into Nieban, and is translated by “complete vanishing.” See Sangermano’s Description of the Burmese Empire, transl. by Tandy, Rome 1833, § 27. In the first edition of 1819, I also wrote Nieban, because at that time we knew Buddhism only from inadequate accounts of the Burmese. [S]

5. ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF OUR TRUE NATURE BY DEATH

Although I have dealt with this subject consistently and fully in my chief work[1], I still think that a further short selection of isolated observations will always throw some light on that discussion and will not be without value to many a reader.

One must read Jean Paul’s Selina to see how this exceedingly eminent mind wrestles with the absurdities of a false conception which obtrudes itself on him, and how he will not give it up because he has set his heart on it and yet is always disturbed by the inconsistencies he is unable to digest. I refer to the conception of the continued individual existence of our entire personal consciousness after death. It is just that wrestling and struggling of Jean Paul’s which show that such notions, made up of what is false and true, are not wholesome errors as is maintained; they are, on the contrary, decidedly harmful and pernicious. For the true knowledge, based on the contrast between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, of the indestructibility of our real nature — a nature that is untouched by time, causality, and change — is rendered impossible by the false contrast between body and soul as also by raising the whole personality to a thing-in-itself that is said to last forever. Not only is this the case, but also that false conception cannot even be definitely regarded as the representative of truth because our faculty of reason constantly rebels at the absurdity that underlies it, and in so doing has also to give up the truth that is amalgamated with it. For in the long run, what is true can exist only in all its purity; mixed with errors, it partakes of their weakness, just as granite disintegrates when its feldspar is decayed, although quartz and mica are not subject to such decay. The substitutes of truth are, therefore, in a bad way.

If in daily conversation we are asked, by one of the many who would like to know everything but who will learn nothing, about continued existence after death, the most suitable answer and above all the most correct would be: “After your death you will be what you were before your birth.” For it implies the absurdity of the demand that the kind of existence which has a beginning ought to be without an end; but in addition, it contains the hint that there may be two kinds of existence and accordingly two kinds of nothing. However, we could also reply: “Whatever you will be after your death, and it might be nothing, will then be just as natural and appropriate to you as is your individual organic existence to you now; and so at most you might have to fear the moment of transition. Indeed, as a mature consideration of the matter leads to the result that complete nonexistence would be preferable to an existence such as ours, the thought of a cessation of our existence, or of a time when we shall no longer exist, cannot reasonably disturb us any more than can the idea that we might never have come into existence. Now as this existence is essentially personal, the end of the personality is accordingly not to be regarded as a loss.”

On the other hand, the person who had followed the plausible thread of materialism on the objective and empirical path, and now turned to us in terror at the total destruction through death which stared them in the face, would probably derive from us some consolation in the briefest manner and in keeping with this empirical way of thinking, if we pointed out to them the difference between matter and the metaphysical force that is always temporarily taking possession thereof. For instance, we could show them how, as soon as the proper temperature occurs, the homogeneous formless fluid in the bird’s egg assumes the complex and precisely determined shape of the genus and species of its bird. To a certain extent, this is indeed a kind of spontaneous generation; and it is exceedingly probable that the ascending series of animal forms arose from the fact that, once in primeval times and at a happy hour, it jumped to a higher type from that of the animal to which the egg belonged. At all events, something different from matter most definitely makes its appearance here, especially as, with the smallest unfavourable circumstance, it fails to appear. In this way, it becomes obvious that, after an operation that is completed or subsequently impeded, this something can also depart just as unimpaired from matter. This suggests a permanence of quite a different kind from that of the persistence of matter in time.

No individual is calculated to last forever; it is swallowed up in death; yet in this way we lose nothing, for underlying the individual existence is one quite different whose manifestation it is. This other existence knows no time and so neither duration nor extinction.

If we picture to ourselves a being who knew, understood, and took in at a glance everything, the question whether we continued to exist after death would probably have for them no meaning at all, since beyond our present, temporal, individual existence duration and cessation would no longer have any significance and would be indistinguishable concepts. Accordingly, neither the concept of extinction nor that of duration would have any application to our true nature, or to the thing-in-itself manifesting itself in our phenomenal appearance, since such concepts are borrowed from time that is merely the form of the phenomenon. However, we can picture to ourselves the indestructibility of that core of our phenomenon only as a continued existence of it and really in accordance with the schema of matter as that which persists and continues in time under all the changes of forms. Now if we deny to that core this continued existence, then we regard our temporal end as an annihilation in accordance with the schema of form that vanishes when the matter carrying it is withdrawn from it. Yet both are a transition to another genus, a transference of the forms of the phenomenon to the thing-in-itself. But we can hardly form even an abstract notion of an indestructibility that would not be a continuance, because we lack all intuitive perception for verifying such a notion.

In point of fact, however, the constant arising of new beings and the perishing of those that exist are to be regarded as an illusion, produced by the apparatus of two polished lenses (brain-functions) through which alone we are able to see something. They are called space and time and, in their mutual interpenetration, causality. For all that we perceive under these conditions is mere phenomenon; but we do not know how things may be in themselves, that is, independently of our perception. This is really the core of the Kantian philosophy; and we cannot too often call to mind that philosophy and its contents, after a period in which mercenary charlatanry had by its process of obscurantism driven philosophy from Germany with the willing help of those for whom truth and intellect are the least important matters in the world, whereas salaries and fees are the weightiest.

This existence, which is in no way concerned with the death of the individual, does not have time and space as its forms, but everything that for us is real appears therein; and so, to us death manifests itself as an annihilation.

Everyone feels that they are something different from a being whom another once created out of nothing. From this there arises the assurance that death may bring to an end one’s life but not one’s existence.

By virtue of the cognitive form of time, humanity (i.e. the affirmation of the will-to-live at the highest stage of its objectification) appears as a race of human beings who are always being born afresh and then dying.

The human being is something different from an animated nothing; and so too is the animal.

How can we imagine, on seeing the death of a human being, that here a thing-in-itself becomes nothing? On the contrary, that only a phenomenon comes to an end in time, this form of all phenomena, without the thing-in-itself being thereby affected, is the immediate intuitive knowledge of everyone. Therefore at all times, attempts have been made to state it in the most varied forms and expressions all of which, however, are taken from the phenomenon in its proper sense and merely refer thereto.

Whoever imagines that their existence is limited to this present life considers themselves to be an animated nothing; for thirty years ago they were nothing and thirty years hence they will again be nothing.

If we had a complete knowledge of our own true nature through and through to its innermost core, we should regard it as ridiculous to demand the immortality of the individual, since this would be equivalent to giving up that true inner nature in exchange for a single one of its innumerable manifestations, or fulgurations.

The more clearly conscious a person is of the frailty, vanity, and dreamlike nature of all things, the more clearly aware are they also of the eternity of their own true inner nature. For really only in contrast thereto is that dreamlike nature of things known; just as we perceive the rapid motion of the ship we are in only by looking at the fixed shore and not at the ship itself.

The present has two halves, an objective and a subjective. The objective half alone has as its form the intuition of time and therefore rolls on irresistibly; the subjective half stands firm and is, therefore, always the same. From this arise our vivid recollection of what is long past and the consciousness of our immortality, in spite of the knowledge of the fleeting nature of our existence.

From my initial proposition: “the world is my representation,” we have, to begin with, the proposition: “first I am and then the world.” We should stick firmly to this as an antidote to confusing death with annihilation.

Everyone thinks that their innermost core is something that contains and carries about the present moment.

Whenever we may happen to live, we always stand with our consciousness in the centre of time, never at its extremities; and from this we might infer that everyone carries within themselves the immovable centre of the whole of infinite time. At bottom, it is this that gives a person the confidence with which they go on living without the constant dread of death. Now whoever is able most vividly to conjure up in their own mind, by virtue of the strength of memory and imagination, that which is long past in the course of their life, becomes more clearly conscious than others of the identity of the now in all time. Perhaps even the converse of this proposition is more correct. But at all events, such a more vivid consciousness of the identity of all now is an essential requirement for a philosophical turn of mind. By means of it, we apprehend that which is the most fleeting of all things, the Now, as that which alone persists. Now whoever is aware in this intuitive way that the present moment, the sole form of all reality in the narrowest sense, has its source in us and thus springs from within and not from without, cannot have any doubt about the indestructibility of their own true nature. On the contrary, they will grasp that, with death, the objective world together with the intellect, the medium of its presentation, certainly does perish for them, but that this does not affect their existence; for there was just as much reality within as without. They will say with perfect understanding: “I am all that was, and is, and will be.” (See Stobaeus, Selected Works, 44, 42; vol. I, p. 201.)

Whoever refuses to admit all this, must assert the contrary and say: “Time is something purely objective and real, existing quite independently of me. I am thrown into it only accidentally, have got possession of a small portion of it, and have thus arrived at a transient reality just as did thousands of others before me who are now no more, and I too shall very soon be nothing. Time, on the other hand, is that which is real; it then goes on without me.” I think that the fundamental absurdity of such a view is obvious from the definite way in which it has been expressed.

In consequence of all this, life may certainly be regarded as a dream and death as an awakening. But then the personality, the individual, belongs to the dreaming and not to the waking consciousness; and so, death presents itself to the former as annihilation. Yet at all events, from this point of view death is not to be regarded as the transition to a state that to us is entirely new and strange, but rather only as the return to our own original state, of which life was only a brief episode.

If, however, a philosopher should perhaps imagine that in dying they would find a consolation peculiar to them alone, or at any rate a diversion in the fact that a problem would be solved on which they had been so often engaged, then probably this philosopher would be no better off than the person whose lamp is blown out when they are just on the point of finding the thing they have been looking for.

For in death consciousness assuredly perishes, but certainly not that which had till then produced it. Thus, consciousness rests primarily on the intellect, but this on a physiological process. For it is obviously the function of the brain and, therefore, conditioned by the co-operation of the nervous and vascular systems, more specifically by the brain that is nourished, animated, and constantly agitated by the heart. It is through the ingenious and mysterious structure of the brain which anatomy describes but physiology does not understand, that the phenomenon of the objective world and the whole mechanism of our thoughts are brought about. An individual consciousness and thus a consciousness in general are not conceivable in an immaterial or incorporeal being, since the condition of every consciousness, knowledge, is necessarily a brain-function really because the intellect manifests itself objectively as brain. Therefore, just as the intellect appears physiologically and consequently in empirical reality, that is, in the phenomenon, as something secondary, as a result of the life-process, so too psychologically it is secondary, in contrast to the will that is alone the primary and everywhere the original thing. Even the organism itself is really only the will manifesting itself intuitively and objectively in the brain and consequently in the brain-forms of space and time, as I have often explained especially in the essay On the Will in Nature and in my chief work, volume II, chapter 20.[2] Therefore, as consciousness is not directly dependent on the will, but is conditioned by the intellect, the latter being conditioned by the organism, there is no doubt that consciousness is extinguished by death, as also by sleep and every fainting fit.[3] But let us take courage! For what kind of a consciousness is this? A cerebral animal consciousness, one that is somewhat more highly developed, animal in so far as we have it essentially in common with the whole animal kingdom, although in us it reaches its summit. As I have shown often enough, as regards its origin and purpose, this consciousness is a mere instrument of nature, a remedy or expedient for helping our animal essence to satisfy its needs. On the other hand, the condition into which death returns us is our original state, that is, the one peculiar to our true nature whose primary force manifests itself in the production and maintenance of the life that is now ceasing. Thus it is the condition or state of the thing-in-itself in contrast to the phenomenon. Now in this original state, such an expedient as cerebral knowledge, as being extremely mediate and therefore furnishing mere phenomena, is without doubt entirely superfluous; and so we lose it. Its disappearance is identical with the cessation for us of the phenomenal world, whose mere medium it was, and it can serve no other purpose. If in this original state of ours the retention of that animal consciousness were even offered to us, we should reject it, just as a lame person who had been cured would scorn to use crutches. Therefore whoever deplores the impending loss of this cerebral consciousness that is merely phenomenal and adapted to the phenomenal, is comparable to the converted Greenlanders who did not want heaven when they heard that no seals were there.

Moreover, all that is said here rests on the assumption that we cannot even picture to ourselves a not unconscious state except as one of knowing which consequently carries within itself the fundamental form of all knowledge, the separation into subject and object, into a knower and a known. But we have to bear in mind that this entire form of knowing and being known is conditioned merely by our animal, and therefore very secondary and derivative nature and is thus by no means the original state of all essence and existence, a state that may, therefore, be quite different and yet not without consciousness. However, in so far as we are able to pursue our own present nature to its innermost core, even it is mere will, but this in itself is something without knowledge. Now if through death we forfeit the intellect, we are thereby shifted only into the original state which is without knowledge, but is not for that reason absolutely without consciousness; on the contrary, it will be a state that is raised above and beyond that form where the contrast between subject and object vanishes because that which is to be known would here be actually and immediately identical with the knower itself; and thus the fundamental condition of all knowing (that very contrast) is wanting. By way of elucidation, this may be compared with World as Will and Representation, volume II, chapter 22. Giordano Bruno’s statement is to be regarded as another expression of what is said here and in that work: “The divine mind, the absolute unity without any distinctions, is in itself that which knows and that which is known” (ed. Wagner, vol. I, p. 287).

From time to time, everyone will perhaps feel in their heart of hearts a consciousness that an entirely different kind of existence would really suit them rather than this one which is so unspeakably wretched, temporal, transient, individual, and preoccupied with nothing but misery and distress. On such an occasion, one then thinks that death might lead one back to that other existence.

Now if, in contrast to this method of consideration which is directed inwards, we again look outwards and apprehend quite objectively the world that presents itself to us, then death certainly appears to be a passing into nothing; but, on the other hand, birth is apparently a proceeding out of nothing. Yet the one like the other cannot be unconditionally true, since it has only the reality of the phenomenon. That in some sense we should survive death is certainly not a greater miracle than that of generation which we daily see before us. That which dies passes away to the source whence all life comes, its own included. In this sense, the Egyptians called Orcus Amenthes which according to Plutarch (On Isis and Osiris, ch. 29), signifies “the taker and the giver” in order to express that it is the same source whither everything returns and whence everything proceeds. From this point of view, our life might be regarded as a loan received from death; sleep would then be the daily interest on that loan. Death openly proclaims itself as the end of the individual, but in this there dwells the seed for a new being. Accordingly, of all that dies, nothing dies forever; but also, nothing that is born receives an entirely and fundamentally new existence. That which dies perishes, but a seed is left behind out of which a new being proceeds; and this now enters existence without knowing whence it comes and why it is precisely as it is. This is the mystery of palingenesis, and chapter 41 of volume II of my chief work may be regarded as its explanation.[4] It is accordingly clear to us that all beings living at this moment contain the real kernel of all that will live in the future; and so, to a certain extent these future beings already exist. Similarly, every animal standing before us in the prime of life seems to exclaim to us: “Why do you complain of the fleeting nature of all those who are alive? How could I exist if all those of my species who existed before me had not died?” Accordingly, however much the plays and masks may change on the world’s stage, the actors in all of them nevertheless remain the same. We sit together, talk, and excite one another; eyes gleam and voices grow louder. Thousands of years ago, others sat in just the same way; it was the same and they were the same. It will be just the same thousands of years hence. The contrivance that prevents us from becoming aware of this is time.

We might very well distinguish between metempsychosis as the transition of the entire so-called soul into another body, and palingenesis as the disintegration and new formation of the individual, since will alone persists and, assuming the shape of a new being, receives a new intellect. The individual, therefore, decomposes like a neutral salt whose base then combines with another acid to form a new salt. The difference between metempsychosis and palingenesis which is assumed by Servius, the commentator of Virgil, and is briefly stated in Wernsdorf’s Dissertation on Metempsychosis, p. 48, is obviously false and valueless.

From Spence Hardy’s Manual of Buddhism (pp. 394–6, to be compared with pp. 429, 440, and 445 of the same book) and also from Sangermano’s Burmese Empire, p. 6, as well as the Asiatic Researches, vol. VI, p. 179 and vol. IX, p. 256, it appears that there are in Buddhism, as regards continued existence after death, an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine. The former is just metempsychosis as in Brahmanism, but the latter is a palingenesis which is much more difficult to understand and is very much in agreement with my doctrine of the metaphysical permanence of the will in spite of the intellect’s physical constitution and fleeting nature in keeping therewith. Regeneration occurs even in the New Testament.[5]

Now if, to penetrate more deeply into the mystery of palingenesis, we make use of my chief work[6], volume II, chapter 43, the matter, more closely considered, it will then appear to be that, throughout all time, the male sex has been the guardian or keeper of the will of the human species, the female sex being the guardian of the intellect, whereby the human species then obtains perennial existence. Accordingly, everyone now has a paternal and a maternal element; and just as these were united through generation, so are they disintegrated in death; and so, death is the end of the individual. This individual it is whose death we deplore so much, feeling that they are actually lost because they were a mere combination which irretrievably ceases. Yet in all this we must not forget that the inheritableness of the intellect from the mother is not so decided and absolute as is that of the will from the father, on account of the secondary and merely physical nature of the intellect and of its entire dependence on the organism, not only in respect of the brain, but also otherwise. All this has been discussed in the above-mentioned chapter of my chief work.[7] Incidentally, it may be mentioned here that I am in agreement with Plato in so far as he distinguishes in the so-called soul between a mortal and an immortal part. But he is diametrically opposed to me and to truth when, after the manner of all philosophers prior to me, he regards the intellect as the immortal part, the will, on the contrary, that is, the seat of the appetites and passions, as the mortal. We see this in the Timaeus, pp. 386, 387, and 395, Bipont edition. Aristotle states the same thing.[8]

But however strangely and precariously the physical may prevail through generation and death, together with the obvious constitution of individuals from will and intellect and the subsequent dissolution of these, the metaphysical underlying the physical is of a nature so entirely different that it is not affected by this and we may take courage.

Accordingly, every person can be considered from two opposite points of view; from the one, they are an individual, beginning and ending in time, fleeting and transitory, “the dream of a shadow,” besides being afflicted with pangs and failings; from the other, they are the indestructible primary being that objectifies itself in every existing thing and as such can say like the statue of Isis at Sais: “I am all that was, and is, and will be.” Such a being, of course, might do something better than manifest itself in a world such as this. For it is the world of finitude, suffering, and death. What is in it and comes out of it must end and die. But what is not out of it and will not be out of it, pierces through it, all-powerful like a flash of lightning which strikes upwards and then knows neither time nor death. To reconcile all these antitheses is really the theme of philosophy.[9]

Short concluding Diversion in the Form of a Dialogue

THRASYMACHOS: To be brief, what am I after my death? Now, be clear and precise!

PHILALETHES: Everything and nothing.

THRASYMACHOS: There we have it! A contradiction as the solution to a problem. The trick is played out.

PHILALETHES: To answer transcendent questions in the language created for immanent knowledge can certainly lead to contradictions.

THRASYMACHOS: What do you call transcendent, and what immanent knowledge? It is true that I know these expressions from my professor, but only as predicates of Almighty God with whom his philosophy was exclusively concerned, as is only right and proper. Thus, if God is within the world, God is immanent; if God resides somewhere outside, God is transcendent. See, that is dear, that is intelligible! We then know what we have to stick to. No one any longer understands Kantian jargon. The time consciousness of the present time, from the metropolis of German science —

PHILALETHES (aside): — German philosophical humbug —

THRASYMACHOS: — through a whole succession of great individuals, especially the great Schleiermacher and Hegel’s gigantic minds, have been brought back from all this or rather carried so far forward that it has left it all behind and knows nothing more about it. And so what is it all about?

PHILALETHES: Transcendent knowledge is that which, going beyond all possibility of experience, endeavours to determine the nature of things as they are in themselves; immanent knowledge, on the other hand, is that which keeps within the bounds of the possibility of experience, but thus can speak only of phenomena. You as an individual end at your death; but the individual is not your true and ultimate essence, but rather a mere manifestation thereof. It is not the thing-in-itself, but only its phenomenon which manifests itself in the form of time and accordingly has a beginning and an end. On the other hand, your true essence-in-itself does not know either time, beginning, end, or the limits of a given individuality; and so, it cannot be excluded from any individuality, but exists in each and all.

Therefore, in the first sense, you become nothing through your death; in the second, you are and remain everything. Therefore, I said that after your death you would be everything and nothing. In so short a time, your question hardly admits of a more correct answer than this, which nevertheless certainly contains a contradiction just because your life is in time, but your immortality is in eternity. Therefore, this can also be called an indestructibility without continuance, which again leads to a contradiction. But this is always the case when the transcendent is to be brought into immanent knowledge; for then a kind of violence is done to such knowledge because it is wrongly applied to that for which it is not born.

THRASYMACHOS: Listen, without a continuance of my individuality, I could care less about all your immortality.

PHILALETHES: Perhaps we can still bargain with you. Suppose I guaranteed you the continuance of your individuality, yet made it a condition that a completely unconscious death-sleep of three months should precede the reawakening of that individuality.

THRASYMACHOS: That would do.

PHILALETHES: Now as in a state of complete unconsciousness we have absolutely no measure of time, it is quite immaterial to us whether three months or ten thousand years elapsed in the world of consciousness while we were lying in that death-sleep. For on waking up, we must accept on faith and trust the one thing as well as the other; and so, it must be a matter of indifference to you whether your individuality is given back to you after three months or after ten thousand years.

THRASYMACHOS: In the last resort, of course, that is undeniable.

PHILALETHES: Now if after the lapse of the ten thousand years, someone forgot to wake you up, I believe that such a misfortune would not be great after you had become so accustomed to that very long non-existence which followed a very brief existence. But it is certain that you could not feel anything of it; and you would be quite consoled about the matter if you knew that the mysterious mechanism, maintaining in motion your present phenomenal appearance, had not for one moment ceased during those ten thousand years to produce and set in motion other phenomenal appearances of the same kind.

THRASYMACHOS: Indeed? And in this way you mean quite furtively and imperceptibly to cheat me of my individuality?

You cannot swindle me in this way. I have stipulated for myself a continuance of my individuality, and no motives and phenomena can console me for the loss thereof. It lies nearest to my heart and I will not let it go.

PHILALETHES: Then you regard your individuality as so agreeable, admirable, perfect, and incomparable that there can be none more perfect whereof it might perhaps be asserted that one could live better and more easily in it than in yours.

THRASYMACHOS: Now look, whatever my individuality may be, I am this.

For me there is nothing in the world like me;

For God is God, and I am I.[10]

I, I, I, want to exist! That is of importance to me and not an existence concerning which one must first convince me by arguments that it is mine.

PHILALETHES: Now look! That which exclaims “I, I, I want to exist” is not you alone but everything, absolutely everything, that has even only a trace of consciousness. Consequently, this desire in you is precisely that which is not individual, but is without distinction common to all. It springs not from individuality, but from existence generally, is essential to everything that exists, indeed is that whereby it exists, and accordingly is satisfied by existence in general to which alone it refers, and not exclusively through any definite individual existence. For it is certainly not directed to such individual existence, although this always appears so, because it cannot arrive at consciousness otherwise than in an individual being and therefore it always seems to refer to this alone. Yet this is a mere illusion to which indeed the individual’s narrow-mindedness clings, but which reflection can destroy. We can also be freed from it by reflection. Thus, what craves so impetuously for existence is merely indirectly the individual; directly and properly speaking, it is the will-to-live in general, which is one and the same in all. Now as existence itself is the will’s free work, in fact is the mere reflection of the will, it cannot escape therefrom. The will for the time being is satisfied by existence in general, in so far as the eternally unsatisfied will can be satisfied. To it individualities are equal; it does not really speak of them, although to the individual who is immediately aware of it only in themselves, it appears to speak of them. A consequence of this is that the will guards this, its own existence, more carefully than it otherwise would and thereby ensures the maintenance of the species. It follows from this that individuality is no perfection but a limitation, and that to be rid of it is, therefore, no loss, but rather a gain. Therefore, give up a fear that would seem to you to be childish and utterly ridiculous if you knew thoroughly and to its very foundation your own nature, namely as the universal will-to-live, which you are.

THRASYMACHOS: You yourself and all philosophers are childish and utterly ridiculous, and it is only for amusement and pastime that a serious and sedate fellow like me embarks on a quarter of an hour’s talk with fools of this sort. I have more important things to do. Goodbye and God help you!

NOTES

1. A reference to The World as Will and Representation.

2. The World as Will and Representation.

3. It would, of course, be delightful if the intellect did not perish with death, for we should then bring ready and complete into the next world all the Greek we had learnt in this. [S]

4. The World as Will and Representation. See Chapter 4 in this edition.

5. In the New Testament the word does not express either metempsychosis or indestructibility of the will through death. In general, it is found only in two passages, Matthew 19:28 in the sense of “resurrection of the dead,” and Titus 3:5, in the sense of “conversion of the old person into the new.” [S]

6. The World as Will and Representation.

7. The World as Will and Representation

8. On the Soul (1.4, p. 408), right at the beginning, Aristotle lets out incidentally his own opinion that “mind” is the real soul and immortal, which he supports with false assertions. He says that hating and loving belong not to the soul, but to its organ, the perishable part! [S]

9. To think that life is a romance which, like Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer, lacks a sequel and moreover breaks off in the middle of the context, like Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, is both aesthetically and morally an idea that is impossible to digest.

For us death is and remains something negative, the cessation of life; but it must also have a positive side that nevertheless remains hidden from us because our intellect is quite incapable of grasping it. We therefore know quite well what we lose, but not what we gain through death.

The loss of the intellect which the will suffers through death, the will being the kernel of the now perishing phenomenon and as thing-in-itself indestructible, is the Lethe of just this individual will. Without it the will would recall the many phenomena whereof it had already been the kernel.

When a person dies, they should cast off their individuality like an old garment and rejoice at the new and better one which they will now assume in exchange for it, after receiving instruction.

If we reproached the World Spirit for destroying individuals after a brief existence, it would say: “Now just look at these individuals; look at their faults, their absurdities, their vicious and detestable qualities! Am I to allow these to go on forever?”

To the Demiurge I would say: “Instead of ceaselessly making by half a miracle new human beings and destroying them while they are still alive, why are you not satisfied once for all with those that exist and why do you not let them go on living to all eternity?”

Probably his reply would be: “If they want to go on making new ones, l must provide for room. Ah, if only this were not the case! Although, between ourselves, a race living and going on in this way for ever, without any further object than just to exist thus, would be objectively ridiculous and subjectively wearisome, much more than you imagine. Just picture it to yourself!”

I: “Why, they might get on and succeed in every way.” [S]

10. Goethe, Satyros, or the Deified Wood-Devil (1773), ii, 17.

6. ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE DENIAL OF THE WILL-TO-LIVE

The human being has their existence and being either with their will, in other words, with their consent, or without it; in the latter case such an existence, embittered by inevitable sufferings of many kinds, would be a flagrant injustice. The ancients, particularly the Stoics, and also the Peripatetics and Academics, laboured in vain to prove that virtue is enough to make life happy; experience loudly cried out against this. Although they were clearly not aware of it, what was really at the root of the attempt of those philosophers was the assumed justice of the case; whoever was without guilt ought to be free from suffering, and hence happy. But the serious and profound solution of the problem is to be found in the Christian doctrine that works do not justify. Accordingly, although a person has practised all justice and philanthropy, consequently virtue, they are still not free from all guilt as Cicero imagines (Tusculan Disputations, V, 1); but “the human being’s greatest offence is that it was born,”[1] as the poet Calderón, inspired by Christianity, has expressed it from a knowledge far profounder than was possessed by those sages. Accordingly, that a person comes into the world already involved in guilt can appear absurd only to the person who regards them as just having come from nothing, and as the work of another. Hence in consequence of this guilt, which must therefore have come from their will, a person rightly remains abandoned to physical and mental sufferings, even when they have practised all those virtues, and so they are not happy. This follows from the eternal justice of which I spoke in § 63 of Volume 1. However, as St. Paul (Romans 3:21ff.), Augustine, and Luther teach, works cannot justify, since we all are and remain essentially sinners. This is due in the last resort to the fact that, since what we do follows from what we are if we acted as we ought to act, we should also necessarily be what we ought to be. But then we should not need any salvation from our present condition, and such salvation is represented as the highest goal not only by Christianity, but also by Brahmanism and Buddhism (under the name expressed in English by final emancipation); in other words, we should not need to become something quite different from, indeed the very opposite of, what we are. However, since we are what we ought not to be, we also necessarily do what we ought not to do. We therefore need a complete transformation of our nature and disposition, i.e., the new spiritual birth, regeneration, as the result of which salvation appears. Although the guilt lies in conduct, in deeds, yet the root of the guilt lies in our essence and existence, for the deeds necessarily proceeds from these, as I have explained in the essay On the Freedom of the Will. Accordingly, original sin is really our only true sin. Now it is true that the Christian myth makes original sin arise only after humanity already existed, and for this purpose ascribes to it, which is impossible, free will; it does this, however, simply as a myth. The innermost kernel and spirit of Christianity is identical with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism; they all teach a heavy guilt of the human race through its existence itself, only Christianity does not proceed in this respect directly and openly, like those more ancient religions. It represents the guilt not as being established simply by existence itself, but as arising through the act of the first human couple. This was possible only under the fiction of a free decision of the will, and was necessary only on account of the Jewish fundamental dogma, into which that doctrine was here to be implanted. According to the truth, the very origin of humanity itself is the act of free will, and is accordingly identical with the Fall, and therefore the original sin, of which all others are the result, appeared already with humanity’s essence and existence; but the fundamental dogma of Judaism did not admit of such an explanation. Therefore, Augustine taught in his book On Free Choice of the Will that only as Adam before the Fall was humanity guiltless and had free will, whereas forever after it is involved in the necessity of sin. The law, in the biblical sense, always demands that we should change our conduct, while our essential nature would remain unchanged. But since this is impossible, Paul says that no one is justified before the law; we can be transferred from the state of sinfulness into that of freedom and salvation only by the new birth or regeneration in Jesus Christ, in consequence of the effect of grace, by virtue of which a new humanity arises, and the old humanity is abolished (in other words, a fundamental change of disposition). This is the Christian myth with regard to ethics. But of course, Jewish theism, on to which the myth was grafted, must have received marvellous additions in order to attach itself to that myth. Here the fable of the Fall presented the only place for the graft of the old Indian stem. It is to be ascribed just to this forcibly surmounted difficulty that the Christian mysteries have obtained an appearance so strange and opposed to common sense. Such an appearance makes proselytizing more difficult; on this account and from an inability to grasp their profound meaning, Pelagianism, or present-day rationalism, rises up against them, and tries to explain them away by exegesis, but in this way, it reduces Christianity to Judaism.

However, to speak without myth; as long as our will is the same, our world cannot be other than it is. It is true that all people wish to be delivered from the state of suffering and death; they would like, as we say, to attain to eternal bliss, to enter the kingdom of heaven, but not on their own feet; they would like to be carried there by the course of nature. But this is impossible; for nature is only the copy, the shadow, of our will. Therefore, of course, nature will never let us fall and become nothing; but it cannot bring us anywhere except always into nature again. Yet everyone experiences in their own life and death how precarious it is to exist as a part of nature. Accordingly, existence is certainly to be regarded as an error or mistake, to return from which is salvation; it bears this character throughout. Therefore, it is conceived in this sense by the ancient Śramaṇa religions, and also by real and original Christianity, although in a roundabout way. Even Judaism itself contains the germ of such a view, at any rate in the Fall; this is its redeeming feature. Only Greek paganism and Islam are wholly optimistic; therefore, in the former the opposite tendency had to find expression at least in tragedy. In Islam, however, the most modern as well as the worst of all religions, this opposite tendency appeared as Sufism, that very fine phenomenon, which is entirely Indian in spirit and origin, and has now continued to exist for over a thousand years. In fact, nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist. This, however, is the most important of all truths, and must therefore be stated, however much it stands in contrast with the present-day mode of European thought. On the other hand, it is nevertheless the most universally recognized fundamental truth in the whole of non-Islamic Asia, today as much as three thousand years ago.

Now if we consider the will-to-live as a whole and objectively, we have to think of it, according to what has been said, as involved in a delusion. To return from this, and hence to deny its whole present endeavour, is what religions describe as self-denial or self-renunciation, denial of one’s own self; for the real self is the will-to-live. The moral virtues, hence justice and philanthropy, if pure, spring, as I have shown, from the fact that the will-to-live, seeing through the principle of individuation, recognizes itself again in all its phenomena; accordingly they are primarily a sign, a symptom, that the appearing will is no longer firmly held in that delusion, but that disillusionment already occurs. Thus it might be said figuratively that the will already flaps its wings, in order to fly away from it. Conversely, injustice, wickedness, cruelty are signs of the opposite, that is, of deep entanglement in that delusion. But in the second place, these moral virtues are a means of advancing self-renunciation, and accordingly of denying the will-to-live. For true righteousness, inviolable justice, that first and most important cardinal virtue, is so heavy a task, that whoever professes it unconditionally and from the bottom of their heart has to make sacrifices which soon deprive life of the sweetness required to make it enjoyable, and thereby turn the will from it, and thus lead to resignation. Yet the very thing that makes righteousness venerable is the sacrifices it costs; in trifles it is not admired. Its true nature really consists in the righteous person’s not throwing on others, by craft or force, the burdens and sorrows incidental to life, as is done by the unrighteous, but in their bearing, what has fallen to their lot. In this way one has to endure undiminished the full burden of the evil imposed on human life. Justice thereby becomes a means for advancing the denial of the will-to-live, since want and suffering, those actual conditions of human life, are its consequence; but these lead to resignation. Caritas, the virtue of philanthropy which goes farther, certainly leads even more quickly to the same result. For on the strength of it, a person takes over also the sufferings that originally fall to the lot of others; they therefore appropriate to themselves a greater share of these than would come to them as an individual in the ordinary course of things. One who is inspired by this virtue has again recognized in everyone else their own inner nature. In this way one now identifies their own lot with that of humanity in general; but this is a hard lot, namely that of striving, suffering, and dying. Therefore, whoever, by renouncing every accidental advantage, desires for themselves no other lot than that of humanity in general, can no longer desire even this for any length of time. Clinging to life and its pleasures must now soon yield, and make way for a universal renunciation; consequently, there will come about the denial of the will. Now since, according to this, poverty, privations, and special sufferings of many kinds are produced by the most complete exercise of moral virtues, asceticism in the narrowest sense, the giving up of all property, the deliberate search for the unpleasant and repulsive, self-torture, fasting, the hairy garment, mortification of the flesh; all these are rejected by many as superfluous, and perhaps rightly so. Justice itself is the hairy garment that causes its owner constant hardship, and philanthropy that gives away what is necessary provides us with constant fasting.[2] For this reason, Buddhism is free from that strict and excessive asceticism that plays a large part in Brahmanism, and thus from deliberate self-mortification. It rests content with the celibacy, voluntary poverty, humility, and obedience of the monks, with abstinence from animal food, as well as from all worldliness. Further, since the goal to which the moral virtues lead is the one here indicated, the Vedanta philosophy[3] rightly says that, after the entrance of true knowledge with complete resignation in its train, and so after the arrival of the new birth, the morality or immorality of previous conduct becomes a matter of indifference; and it uses here the saying so often quoted by the Brahmans: “The person who beholds the highest and profoundest, has their heart’s knot cut, all doubts are resolved, and all works come to nought” (Shankara, Stotras, 32). Now, however objectionable this view may be to many, to whom a reward in heaven or a punishment in hell is a much more satisfactory explanation of the ethical significance of human action, just as even the good Windischmann rejects that teaching with horror while expounding it; yet whoever is able to get to the bottom of things will find that, in the end, this teaching agrees with the Christian doctrine that is urged especially by Luther. This doctrine teaches that it is not works that save us, but only faith appearing through the effect of grace, and that therefore we can never be justified by our actions, but obtain forgiveness for our sins only by virtue of the merits of the Mediator. In fact, it is easy to see that, without such assumptions, Christianity would have to teach endless punishments for all, and Brahmanism endless rebirths, and hence that no salvation would be attained by either. Sinful works and their consequence must be annulled and annihilated at some time either by the pardon of another, or by the appearance of our own better knowledge, otherwise the world cannot hope for any salvation; afterwards, however, these become a matter of indifference. This is also the repentance and remission of sins, the announcement of which is finally imposed by the already risen Christ on his Apostles as the sum of their mission (Luke 24:47). The moral virtues are not really the ultimate end, but only a step towards it. In the Christian myth, this step is expressed by the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and with this moral responsibility appears simultaneously with original sin. This original sin itself is in fact the affirmation of the will-to-live; on the other hand, the denial of this will, in consequence of the dawning of better knowledge, is salvation. Therefore, what is moral is to be found between these two; it accompanies one as a light on the path from the affirmation to the denial of the will, or, mythically, from the entrance of original sin to salvation through faith in the mediation of the incarnate God (Avatar): or, according to the teaching of the Veda, through all the rebirths that are the consequence of the works in each case, until right knowledge appears, and with it salvation (final emancipation), Moksha, i.e., reunion with Brahma. But the Buddhists with complete frankness describe the matter only negatively as Nirvana, which is the negation of this world or of Samsara. If Nirvana is defined as nothing, this means only that Samsara contains no single element that could serve to define or construct Nirvana. For this reason the Jains, who differ from the Buddhists only in name, call the Brahmans who believe in the Vedas, Sabdapramans, a nickname supposed to signify that they believe on hearsay what cannot be known or proved (Asiatic Researches, vol. VI, p. 474).

When certain ancient philosophers, such as Orpheus, the Pythagoreans, Plato (e.g., in the Phaedo, pp. 151, 183ff., Bipont edition, and see Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III, p. 400ff.), deplore the soul’s connexion with the body, as the Apostle Paul does, and wish to be liberated from this connexion, we understand the real and true meaning of this complaint, in so far as we recognize in the second book that the body is the will itself, objectively perceived as spatial phenomenon.

In the hour of death, the decision is made whether a person falls back into the womb of nature, or else no longer belongs to it, but: we lack image, concept, and word for this opposite, just because all these are taken from the objectification of the will, and therefore belong to that objectification; consequently, they cannot in any way express its absolute opposite; accordingly, this remains for us a mere negation. However, the death of the individual is in each case the unweariedly repeated question of nature to the will-to-live: “Have you had enough? Do you wish to escape from me?” The individual life is short, so that the question may be put often enough. The ceremonies, prayers, and exhortations of the Brahmans at the time of death are conceived in this sense, as we find them preserved in several passages of the Upanishads. In just the same way, the Christian concern is for the proper employment of the hour of death by means of exhortation, confession, communion, and extreme unction; hence the Christian prayers for preservation from a sudden end. That many desire just such an end at the present day simply shows that they no longer stand at the Christian point of view, which is that of the denial of the will-to-live, but at that of its affirmation, which is the heathen.

However, a person will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that they are already nothing now, and who consequently no longer takes any interest in their individual phenomenon, since in them knowledge has, so to speak, burnt up and consumed the will, so that there is no longer left any will or any keen desire for individual existence.

Individuality, of course, is inherent above all in the intellect; reflecting the phenomenon, the intellect is related thereto, and the phenomenon has the principle of individuation as its form. But individuality is also inherent in the will, in so far as the character is individual; yet this character itself is abolished in the denial of the will. Thus, individuality is inherent in the will only in its affirmation, not in its denial. The holiness attaching to every purely moral action rests on the fact that ultimately such action springs from the immediate knowledge of the numerical identity of the inner nature of all living things.[4] But this identity is really present only in the state of the· denial of the will (Nirvana), as the affirmation of the will (Samsara) has for its form the phenomenal appearance of this in plurality and multiplicity. Affirmation of the will-to-live, the phenomenal world, diversity of all beings, individuality, egoism, hatred, wickedness, all spring from one root. In just the same way, on the other hand, the world as thing-in-itself, the identity of all beings, justice, righteousness, philanthropy, denial of the will-to-live, spring from one root. Now, as I have sufficiently shown, moral virtues spring from an awareness of that identity of all beings; this, however, lies not in the phenomenon, but in the thing-in-itself, in the root of all beings. If this is the case, then the virtuous action is a momentary passing through the point, the permanent return to which is the denial of the will-to-live.

It is a deduction from what has been said that we have no ground for assuming that there are even more perfect intelligences than those of human beings. For we see that this intelligence is already sufficient for imparting to the will that knowledge in consequence of which the will denies and abolishes itself. With this knowledge, individuality, and therefore intelligence, as being merely a tool of individual nature, of animal nature, cease. To us this will appear less objectionable when we consider that we cannot conceive even the most perfect possible intelligences, which we may tentatively assume for this purpose, as indeed continuing to exist throughout an endless time, a time that would prove to be much too poor to afford them constantly new objects worthy of them. Thus, because the inner essence of all things is at bottom identical, all knowledge of it is necessarily tautological. If this inner essence is once grasped, as it soon would be by those most perfect intelligences, what would be left for them but mere repetition and its tedium throughout endless time? Thus, even from this point of view, we are referred to the fact that the aim of all intelligence can only be reaction to a will; but since all willing is error, the last work of intelligence is to abolish willing, whose aims and ends it had hitherto served. Accordingly, even the most perfect intelligence possible can be only a transition stage to that which no knowledge can ever reach; in fact, such an intelligence, in the nature of things, can take only the place of the moment of attained, perfect insight.

In agreement with all these considerations, and with what was shown in the second book to be the origin of knowledge from the will, since knowledge is serviceable to the aims of the will, and in this way reflects the will in its affirmation, whereas true salvation lies in the denial of the will, we see all religions at their highest point end in mysticism and mysteries, that is to say, in darkness and veiled obscurity. These really indicate merely a blank spot for knowledge, the point where all knowledge necessarily ceases. Hence for thought this can be expressed only by negations, but for sense-perception it is indicated by symbolical signs, in temples by dim light and silence, in Brahmanism even by the required suspension of all thought and perception for the purpose of entering into the deepest communion with one’s own self, by mentally uttering the mysterious Om.[5] In the widest sense, mysticism is every guidance to the immediate awareness of that which is not reached either by perception or conception, or generally by any knowledge. The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that the mystic begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. The mystic starts from the inner, positive, individual experience, in which they find themselves as the eternal and only being, and so on. But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on their word; consequently, they are unable to convince. The philosopher, on the other hand, starts from what is common to all, the objective phenomena lying before us all, and from the facts of self-consciousness as they are to be found in everyone. Therefore, reflection on all this, and the combination of the data given in it, are the method; for this reason, they are able to convince. Philosophers should therefore beware of falling into the way of the mystics, and, for instance, by assertion of intellectual intuitions, or of pretended immediate apprehensions of the faculty of reason, of trying to give in bright colours a positive knowledge of what is forever inaccessible to all knowledge, or at most can be expressed only by a negation. Philosophy has its value and virtue in its rejection of all assumptions that cannot be substantiated, and in its acceptance as its data only of that which can be proved with certainty in the external world given by perception, in the forms constituting our intellect for the apprehension of the world, and in the consciousness of one’s own self common to all. For this reason, it must remain cosmology, and cannot become theology. Its theme must restrict itself to the world; to express from every aspect what this world is, what it may be in its innermost nature, is all that it can honestly achieve. Now it is in keeping with this that, when my teaching reaches its highest point, it assumes a negative character, and so ends with a negation. Thus it can speak here only of what is denied or given up; but what is gained in place of this, what is laid hold of, it is forced (at the conclusion of the fourth book) to describe as nothing; and it can add only the consolation that it may be merely a relative, not an absolute, nothing. For, if something is not one of all the things that we know, then certainly it is for us in general nothing. Yet it still does not follow from this that it is nothing absolutely, namely that it must be nothing from every possible point of view and in every possible sense, but only that we are restricted to a wholly negative knowledge of it; and this may very well lie in the limitation of our point of view. Now it is precisely here that the mystic proceeds positively, and therefore, from this point, nothing is left but mysticism. Anyone, however, who desires this kind of supplement to the negative knowledge to which alone philosophy can guide them, will find it in its most beautiful and richest form in the Upanishads, in the Enneads of Plotinus, in John Scottus Eriugena, in passages of Jakob Böhme, and especially in the wonderful work of Madame de Guyon, The Spiritual Torrents, and in Angelus Silesius, and finally also in the poems of the Sufis, of which Tholuck has given us one collection in Latin and another translation into German, and in many other works. The Sufis are the Gnostics of Islam; hence also Sadi describes them by an expression that is translated by “full of insight.” Theism, calculated with reference to the capacity of the crowd, places the primary source of existence outside us, as an object. All mysticism, and so Sufism also, at the various stages of its initiation, draw this source gradually back into ourselves as the subject, and the adept at last recognizes with wonder and delight that they themselves are it. We find this course of events expressed by Meister Eckhart, the father of German mysticism, not only in the form of a precept for the perfect ascetic “that they seek not God outside themselves” (Eckhart’s Works, edited by Pfeiffer, vol. I, p. 626), but also exhibited extremely naively by the fact that, after Eckhart’s spiritual daughter had experienced that conversion in herself, she sought him out, in order to cry out to him jubilantly: “Sir, rejoice with me, I have become God!” (ibid., p. 465). The mysticism of the Sufis also expresses itself generally in this same spirit, principally as a revelling in the consciousness that we ourselves are the kernel of the world and the source of all existence, to which everything returns. It is true that there also frequently occurs the call to give up all willing as the only way in which deliverance from individual existence and its sufferings is possible; yet it is subordinated and is required as something easy. In the mysticism of the Hindus, on the other hand, the latter side comes out much more strongly, and in Christian mysticism it is quite predominant, so that the pantheistic consciousness, essential to all mysticism, here appears only in a secondary way, in consequence of the giving up of all willing, as union with God. In keeping with this difference of conception Islamic mysticism has a very cheerful character, and Christian mysticism a melancholy and painful character, while that of the Hindus, standing above both, holds the balance in this respect.

Quietism, i.e., the giving up of all willing, asceticism, i.e., intentional mortification of one’s own will, and mysticism, i.e., consciousness of the identity of one’s own inner being with that of all things, or with the kernel of the world, stand in the closest connexion, so that whoever professes one of them is gradually led to the acceptance of the others, even against one’s intention. Nothing can be more surprising than the agreement among the writers who express those teachings, in spite of the greatest difference of their age, country, and religion, accompanied as it is by the absolute certainty and fervent assurance with which they state the permanence and consistency of their inner experience. They do not form some sect that adheres to, defends, and propagates a dogma theoretically popular and once adopted; on the contrary, they generally do not know of one another; in fact, the Indian, Christian, and Islamic mystics, quietists, and ascetics are different in every respect except in the inner meaning and spirit of their teachings. A most striking example of this is afforded by the comparison of Madame de Guyon’s The Spiritual Torrents with the teaching of the Vedas, especially with the passage in the Upanishads, vol. I, p. 63.[6] This contains the substance of that French work in the briefest form, but accurately and even with the same figures of speech, and yet it could not possibly have been known to Madame de Guyon in 1680. In the German Theology (the only unmutilated edition, Stuttgart, 1851), it is said in Chapters 2 and 3 that the fall of the devil as well as that of Adam consisted in the fact that the one, like the other, had ascribed to themselves I and me, mine and to me. On page 89 it says: “In true love there remains neither I nor me, mine, to me, you, yours, and the like.” In keeping with this, it says in the Kural, translated from the Tamil by Graul, p. 8: “The passion of the mind directed outwards and that of the I directed inwards cease” (cf. verse 346).[7] And in the Manual of Buddhism by Spence Hardy, p. 258, the Buddha says: “My disciples, reject the idea that I am this or this is mine.” If we turn from the forms, produced by external circumstances, and go to the root of things, we shall find generally that Shakyamuni and Meister Eckhart teach the same thing; only that the former dared to express his ideas plainly and positively, whereas the latter is obliged to clothe them in the garment of the Christian myth, and to adapt his expressions thereto. This goes to such lengths that with him the Christian myth is little more than a metaphorical language, in much the same way as the Hellenic myth is to the Neo-Platonists; he takes it throughout allegorically. In the same respect, it is noteworthy that the turning of St. Francis from prosperity to a beggar’s life is entirely similar to the even greater step of the Buddha Shakyamuni from prince to beggar, and that accordingly the life of St. Francis, as well as the order founded by him, was only a kind of Sannyasi existence. In fact, it is worth mentioning that his relationship with the Indian spirit also appears in his great love for animals, and his frequent association with them, when he always calls them his sisters and brothers; and his beautiful Canticle of the Creatures is evidence of his inborn Indian spirit through the praise of the sun, moon, stars, wind, water, fire and earth.[8]

Even the Christian quietists must often have had little or no knowledge of one another, for example, Molinos and Madame de Guyon of Tauler and the German Theology, or Gichtel of the former. Likewise, the great difference of their culture, in that some of them, like Molinos, were learned, others, like Gichtel and many more, were illiterate, has no essential influence on their teachings. Their great inner agreement, together with the firmness and certainty of their utterances, proves all the more that they speak from actual inner experience, from an experience which is, of course, not accessible to everyone, but comes only to a favoured few. This experience has therefore been called the effect of grace, whose reality, however, is indubitable for the above reasons. But to understand all this we must read the mystics themselves, and not be content with second-hand reports; for everyone must themselves be comprehended before we judge of them. Therefore, I specially recommend for an acquaintance with quietism Meister Eckhart, the German Theology, Tauler, Madame de Guyon, Antoinette Bourignon, Bunyan, Molinos,[9] and Gichtel. As practical proofs of the deep seriousness of asceticism, Pascal’s life edited by Reuchlin together with his history of Port Royal, and also the History of Saint Elisabeth by the Comte de Montalembert and The Life of Rancé by Chateaubriand are also well worth reading; yet these by no means exhaust all that is important in this class. Whoever has read such works, and has compared their spirit with that of asceticism and quietism, as it runs through all the works of Brahmanism and Buddhism and speaks from every page, will admit that every philosophy, which, to be consistent, must reject that whole mode of thought, in that it declares the representatives of it to be impostors or madmen, must on this account necessarily be false. But all European systems, my own excepted, find themselves in this position. It must truly be a strange madness which, in circumstances and among persons of the widest possible difference, expressed itself with such agreement, and was, moreover, exalted to a principal teaching of their religion by the oldest and most numerous races on earth, by some three-quarters of all the inhabitants of Asia. But no philosophy can leave undecided the theme of quietism and asceticism, if the question is put to it, since this theme is in substance identical with that of all metaphysics and ethics. Here, then, is a point on which I expect and desire every philosophy with its optimism to express itself. And if, in the judgement of contemporaries, the paradoxical and unexampled agreement of my philosophy with quietism and asceticism appears as an obvious stumbling-block, yet I, on the other hand, see in this very agreement a proof of its sole accuracy and truth, and also a ground for explaining why it has been discreetly ignored and kept secret by Protestant universities.

For not only the religions of the East, but also true Christianity has throughout this fundamental ascetic character that my philosophy explains as denial of the will-to-live, although Protestantism, especially in its present-day form, tries to keep this dark. Yet even the open enemies of Christianity who have appeared in most recent times have attributed to it the teaching of renunciation, self-denial, perfect chastity, and generally mortification of the will, which they quite rightly describe by the name of “anticosmic tendency”; and they have thoroughly demonstrated that such doctrines are essentially peculiar to original and genuine Christianity. In this respect they are undeniably right; but they set up this very thing as an obvious and patent reproach to Christianity, whereas just in this are its deepest truth, its high value, and its sublime character to be found. Such an attitude is evidence of a mental obscurity to be explained only from the fact that the minds of such people, unfortunately like thousands of others at the present time in Germany, are completely ruined and forever confused by that miserable Hegelism, that school of dullness, that centre of stupidity and ignorance, that mind-destroying, spurious wisdom that people are at last beginning to recognize as such. Admiration of this school will soon be left to the Danish Academy alone; in their eyes, indeed, that coarse and clumsy charlatan is a “distinguished philosopher,” for whom it takes the field:

For they will follow the belief and choice

Of the ignorant and stupid crowd

Whose dullest member will be welcomed as judge.[10]

Rabelais

The ascetic tendency is certainly unmistakable in genuine and original Christianity, as it was developed in the writings of the Church Fathers from the kernel of the New Testament; this tendency is the highest point to which everything strives upwards. We find, as its principal teaching, the recommendation of genuine and pure celibacy (that first and most important step in the denial of the will-to-live) already expressed in the New Testament.[11] In his Life of Jesus (vol. I, p. 618), Strauss also says with regard to the recommendation of celibacy given in Matthew 19:11ff. “That in order not to represent Jesus as saying anything running counter to present-day ideas, people hasten to introduce surreptitiously the idea that Jesus commends celibacy only with regard to the circumstances of the time, and in order to leave unfettered the activity of the Apostles; but in the context there is even less indication of this than there is in the kindred passage, I Corinthians 7:25ff. On the contrary, we have here again one of the places where ascetic principles such as were widespread among the Essenes, and probably even more so among the Jews, appear in the teaching of Jesus also.” This ascetic tendency later appears more decided than at the beginning, when, still looking for adherents, Christianity did not dare to pitch its demands too high; and by the beginning of the third century it is emphatically urged. In Christianity proper, marriage is regarded merely as a compromise with humanity’s sinful nature, as a concession, as something allowed to those who lack the strength to aspire to the highest, and as an expedient for preventing greater perdition. In this sense, it receives the sanction of the Church so that the bond may be indissoluble. But celibacy and virginity are set up as the higher inspiration of Christianity, by which one enters into the ranks of the elect. Through these alone does one attain the victor’s crown, which is indicated even at the present time by a wreath on the coffin of the unmarried, as also by the wreath laid aside by the bride on the day of her marriage.

A piece of evidence on this point, coming certainly from the earliest days of Christianity, is the pregnant answer of the Lord quoted by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, III, 6 and 9) from the Gospel of the Egyptians: “When Salome asked the Lord how long death would reign, he replied ‘As long as you women continue to be born’; in other words, as long as desires show their strength.” Clement adds (ch. 9) with which he connects at once the famous passage, Romans 5:12. Further, in ch. 13, he quotes the words of Cassianus: “When Salome asked at what time that which she enquired about would be known, the Lord answered: ‘When you trample on the veil of modesty and when the two sexes become one, and when male as well as female are neither male nor female.’” In other words, when she no longer needs the veil of modesty, since all distinction of sex will have disappeared.

On this point the heretics have certainly gone farthest, thus the Tatianites or Encratites, the Gnostics, the Marcionites, the Montanists, Valentinians, and Cassians in the second century, yet only by their paying honour to truth with reckless consistency, and therefore teaching, according to the spirit of Christianity, complete abstinence, ascetic self-mastery, whereas the Church prudently declared heresy all that ran counter to its far-seeing policy. Of the Tatianites Augustine says: “They reject marriage and put it on a level with fornication and other vices; also they do not receive any married people into their ranks, either men or women. They do not eat meat and detest it” (On Heresies, Heresy 25). But even the orthodox fathers consider marriage in the light indicated above, and zealously preach complete abstinence. Athanasius states as the cause of marriage: “That the damnation of our progenitor has fallen to our lot;… since the aim intended by God was that we should not be born through marriage and corruption; but the transgressing of the commandment gave rise to marriage, because Adam had been disobedient” (On the Psalms, 50). Tertullian calls marriage “a kind of inferior evil resting on indulgence” (On Modesty, ch. 16) and says: “Marriage, like adultery, is a carnal intercourse; for the Lord has put strong desire for it on a level with adultery. Therefore can one object that you condemn also the first of all marriages, and at the time the only one? Certainly, and rightly so, for it too consists in what is called adultery.’” (An Exhortation to Chastity, ch. 9). In fact, Augustine himself acknowledges entirely this teaching and all its results, since he says: “I know some who grumble and say: If all were to abstain from pro creation, how would the human race continue to exist? Would that all wanted to abstain! provided it were done in love, from a pure heart, with a good conscience, and sincere belief, then the kingdom of God would be realized far more quickly, since the end of the world would be hastened.” (On the Good of Marriage, ch. 10). And again: “Might not the futile complaint of those who ask how the human race could continue to exist if all were to practise abstinence, perplex you in this endeavour by which you inspire many to emulate you? As though a reprieve would be given to this world for yet another reason than that the predestined number of saints was complete. But the more quickly this becomes complete, the less need is there for the end of the world to be postponed.” (On the Good of Widowhood, ch. 23). At the same time, we see that he identifies salvation with the end of the world. The remaining passages bearing on this point from the works of Augustine are found collected in The Confessions of Augustine Compiled by Hieronymus Torrensis, 1610, under the headings “On Matrimony,” “On Celibacy,” and so on. From these anyone can convince themselves that in old, genuine Christianity marriage was a mere concession; moreover, that it was supposed to have only the begetting of children as its object; and that on the other hand, total abstinence was the true virtue much to be preferred to marriage. To remove all doubts about the tendency of the Christianity we are discussing, I recommend for those who do not wish to go back to the sources, two works: Carové, On the Law of Chastity (1832), and Lind, On Christian Celibacy During the First Three Centuries (Copenhagen, 1839). But it is by no means the views of these writers themselves to which I refer, as these are opposed to mine, but simply the accounts and quotations carefully collected by them, which merit complete trust and confidence as being quite undesigning, just because these two authors are opponents of celibacy, the former a rationalistic Catholic, and the latter a Protestant theological student who speaks exactly like one. In the first-named work we find (vol. I, p. 166), the following result expressed in that regard: “By virtue of the Church view, as it may be read in the canonical Church Fathers, in Synodal and Papal instructions, and in innumerable writings of orthodox Catholics, perpetual chastity is called a divine, heavenly, angelic virtue, and the obtaining of the assistance of divine grace for this purpose is made dependent on the earnest entreaty therefore. We have already shown that this Augustinian teaching is found expressed by Canisius and by the Council of Trent as the invariable belief of the Church. But that it has been retained till the present day as a dogma may be sufficiently established by the June 1831 number of the periodical The Catholic. On p. 263 it says: ‘In Catholicism the observance of a perpetual chastity, for God’s sake, appears in itself as the highest merit of humanity. The view that the observance of perpetual chastity as an end in itself sanctifies and exalts humanity, is, as every instructed Catholic is convinced, deep-rooted in Christianity according to its spirit and its express precept. The Council of Trent has removed all possible doubt about this.’ It must certainly be admitted by every unbiassed person not only that the teaching expressed by The Catholic is really Catholic, but also that the arguments adduced may be absolutely irrefutable for a Catholic’s faculty of reason, as they are drawn directly from the fundamental ecclesiastical view of the Church on life and its destiny.” Further, it is said on p. 270 of the same work: “Although Paul describes the prohibition to marry as a false teaching, and the even more Judaistic author of the Epistle to the Hebrews enjoins that ‘Marriage shall be honourable in all, and the marriage bed undefiled’ (Hebrews 13:4), yet the main tendency of these two sacred writers must not on this account be misunderstood. To both virginity was perfection, marriage only a makeshift for the weaker, and only as such was it to be held inviolate. The highest endeavour, on the other hand, was directed to complete, material casting off of self. The self should turn away and refrain from everything that contributes only to its pleasure and to this only temporarily.” Finally, on p. 288: “We agree with the Abbe Zaccaria, who asserts that celibacy (not the law of celibacy) is derived above all from the teaching of Christ and of the Apostle Paul.”

What is opposed to this really Christian fundamental view is everywhere and always only the Old Testament, with its “And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” This appears with particular distinctness from that important third book of the Stromata of Clement. Arguing against the abovementioned Encratite heretics, he there always confronts them merely with Judaism and its optimistic history of creation, with which the world-denying tendency of the New Testament is most certainly in contradiction. But the connexion of the New Testament with the Old is at bottom only an external, accidental, and in fact forced one; and, as I have said, this offered a sole point of contact for the Christian teaching only in the story of the Fall, which, moreover, in the Old Testament is isolated, and is not further utilized. Yet according to the Gospel’s account, it is just the orthodox followers of the Old Testament who bring about the crucifixion of the Founder, because they consider his teachings to be in contradiction with their own. In the above-mentioned third book of the Stromata of Clement the antagonism between optimism together with theism on the one hand, and pessimism together with asceticism on the other, comes out with surprising distinctness. This book is directed against the Gnostics, who taught precisely pessimism and asceticism, particularly ascetic self-mastery (abstinence of every kind, but especially from all sexual satisfaction); for this reason, Clement vigorously censures them. But at the same time, it becomes apparent that the spirit of the Old Testament stands in this antagonism with that of the New. For, apart from the Fall which appears in the Old Testament like an hors d’oeuvre, the spirit of the Old Testament is diametrically opposed to that of the New; the former is optimistic, and the latter pessimistic. This contradiction is brought out by Clement himself at the end of the eleventh chapter (“That Paul puts himself in opposition to the Creator”) although he will not admit it, but declares it to be apparent, like the good Jew that he is. In general, it is interesting to see how for Clement the New and Old Testaments always get mixed up, and how he strives to reconcile them, yet often drives out the New Testament with the Old. At the very beginning of the third chapter he objects to the Marcionites for having found fault with the creation, after the manner of Plato and Pythagoras, since Marcion teaches that nature is bad and made of bad material, hence this world should not be populated, but human beings should abstain from marriage. Now Clement, to whom the Old Testament is generally much more congenial and convincing than the New, takes this very much amiss. He sees in this their flagrant ingratitude, enmity, and resentment towards the one who made the world, towards the just demiurge, whose work they themselves are. In godless rebellion “forsaking the natural disposition,” they nevertheless disdained to make use of creation (“Since they resist the Creator who has created them,… persisting in their hostility to their Creator, in that they do not wish to make any use of creation,… and in wanton and wicked conflict with God, they forsake the natural disposition”). Here in Clement’s holy ardour he will not allow the Marcionites even the honour of originality, but, armed with his well-known erudition, he reproaches them and supports his case with the finest quotations, that the ancient philosophers, that Heraclitus and Empedocles, Pythagoras and Plato, Orpheus and Pindar, Herodotus and Euripides, and in addition the Sibyls, already deeply deplored the wretched nature of the world, and thus taught pessimism. Now he does not notice in this scholarly enthusiasm that precisely in this way he is providing grist to the mill of the Marcionites, for he shows indeed that “All the wisest of all the ages”[12] have taught and sung the same thing as they. On the contrary, he confidently and boldly quotes the most decided and emphatic utterances of the ancients in that sense. Of course, Clement is not put out by them; sages may lament the melancholy nature of existence, poets may pour out the most affecting lamentations about it, nature and experience may cry out ever so loudly against optimism; all this does not disturb our Church Father; he still holds his Jewish revelation in hand, and remains confident. The demiurge has made the world; from this it is a priori certain that it is excellent, no matter what it looks like. It is then just the same with the second point, with ascetic self-mastery, by which, according to his view, the Marcionites reveal their ingratitude to the demiurge, and the stubbornness with which they reject divine gifts. The tragic poets had already paved the way for the Encratites (to the detriment of their originality), and had said the same thing. Thus, they lamented the infinite misery of existence, and added that it is better to bring no children into such a world. Again, he supports this with the finest passages, and at the same time accuses the Pythagoreans of having renounced sexual pleasure for this reason. All this, however, does not worry him at all; he sticks to the principle that through their abstinence all these sin against the demiurge, since they teach that one should not marry, should not beget children, should not bring into the world new miserable beings, should not produce fresh fodder for death (“For through their abstinence they sin against creation and the holy Creator, against the sole, almighty God; and they teach that one should not enter into matrimony and beget children, should not bring further unhappy beings into the world, and produce fresh fodder for death.” Stromata, ch. 6). Since the learned Church Father thus denounces ascetic self-mastery he does not appear to have foreseen that, just after his time, the celibacy of the Christian priesthood would be introduced more and more, and finally in the eleventh century would be passed into law, because it is in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament. It is precisely this spirit that the Gnostics grasped more profoundly and understood better than did our Church Father, who was more of a Jew than a Christian. The point of view of the Gnostics stands out very clearly at the beginning of the ninth chapter, where the following is quoted from the Gospel of the Egyptians: “For they say that the Saviour himself said: ‘I have come that I may bring to nought the works of woman’; of woman, in other words of desire; but the works are generation and destruction”; but particularly at the end of the thirteenth chapter and at the beginning of the fourteenth. The Church, of course, had to consider how to set on its feet a religion that could also walk and stand in the world as it is, and among human beings; it therefore declared these groups to be heretics. At the conclusion of the seventh chapter, our Church Father sets up Indian asceticism as bad in opposition to the Christian-Jewish; here is clearly brought out the fundamental difference in the spirit of the two religions. In Judaism and Christianity, everything runs back to obedience or disobedience to God’s command, “Us, who have been created by the will of the Almighty,” ch. 14. Then comes, as a second duty, to serve the Lord, to praise the Lord’s works, and to overflow with thankfulness. In Brahmanism and Buddhism, of course, the matter has quite a different aspect, since in the latter all improvement, conversion, and salvation to be hoped for from this world of suffering, from this Samsara, proceed from knowledge of the four fundamental truths: (1) suffering, (2) the origin of suffering, (3) the cessation of suffering, (4) the eightfold path towards the cessation of suffering (Dhammapada, ed. Fausboll, pp. 35 and 347). The explanation of these four truths is found in Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Buddhism, p. 629, and in all descriptions of Buddhism.

In truth it is not Judaism with its “All was very good,” but Brahmanism and Buddhism that in spirit and ethical tendency are akin to Christianity. The spirit and ethical tendency, however, are the essentials of a religion, not the myths in which it clothes them. Therefore, I do not abandon the belief that the teachings of Christianity are to be derived in some way from those first and original religions. I have already pointed out some traces of this in the second volume of the Parerga, § 179. In addition to these is the statement of Epiohanius (Against Heresies, XVIII) that the first Jewish Christians of Jerusalem, who called themselves Nazarenes, abstained from all animal food. By virtue of this origin (or at any rate of this agreement), Christianity belongs to the ancient, true, and sublime faith of humanity. This faith stands in contrast to the false, shallow, and pernicious optimism that manifests itself in Greek paganism, Judaism, and Islam. To a certain extent the Zoroastrian religion holds the mean, since it opposes to Ormuzd a pessimistic counterpoise in Ahriman. The Jewish religion resulted from this Zoroastrian religion, as J.G. Rhode has thoroughly demonstrated in his book The Sacred Myths of the Zend Peoples; Jehovah came from Ormuzd, and Satan from Ahriman. The latter, however, plays only a very subordinate role in Judaism, in fact almost entirely disappears. In this way optimism gains the upper hand, and there is left only the myth of the Fall as a pessimistic element, which (as the fable of Meshian and Meshiane) is also taken from the Zend-Avesta, but nevertheless falls into oblivion until it, as well as Satan, is again taken up by Christianity. But Ormuzd himself is derived from Brahmanism, although from a lower region thereof; he is no other than Indra, that subordinate god of the firmament and the atmosphere, who is frequently in competition with humanity. This has been very clearly shown by the eminent scholar I.J. Schmidt in his work On the Relation of Gnostic-Theosophical Teachings to the Religions of the Orient. This Indra-Ormuzd-Jehovah afterwards had to pass into Christianity, as that religion arose in Judaea. But in consequence of the cosmopolitan character of Christianity, the proper name was laid aside, in order to be described in the language of each converted nation by the appellative of the superhuman individuals that were supplanted, as Deus, which comes from the Sanskrit Deva (from which also devil, Teufel is derived), or among the Gothic-Germanic nations by the word God, Gott, which comes from Odin, or Wodan, Guodan, Godan. In just the same way the deity assumed in Islam, which also springs from Judaism, the name of Allah, which existed previously in Arabia. Analogously to this, when the gods of the Greek Olympus were transplanted to Italy in prehistoric times, they assumed the names of the gods who reigned there previously; hence among the Romans Zeus is called Jupiter, Hera Juno, Hermes Mercury, and so on. In China the first embarrassment of the missionaries arose from the fact that the Chinese language has absolutely no appellative of the kind, and also no word for creating;[13] for the three religions of China know of no gods either in the plural or in the singular.

However it may be in other respects, that “All was very good” of the Old Testament is really foreign to Christianity proper; for in the New Testament the world is generally spoken of as something to which we do not belong, which we do not love, the ruler of which, in fact, is the devil.[14] This agrees with the ascetic spirit of the denial of one’s self and the overcoming of the world. Like boundless love of one’s neighbour, even of one’s enemy, this spirit is the fundamental characteristic which Christianity has in common with Brahmanism and Buddhism, and which is evidence of their relationship. There is nothing in which we have to distinguish the kernel from the shell so much as in Christianity. Just because I value this kernel highly, I sometimes treat the shell with little ceremony; yet it is thicker than is often supposed.

By eliminating asceticism and its central point, the meritorious nature of 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. In our day, this has shown itself in the gradual transition of Protestantism into shallow rationalism, that modern Pelagianism. In the end, this results in a doctrine of a loving father who made the world, in order that things might go on very pleasantly in it (and in this, of course, He was bound to fail), and who, if only we conform to his will in certain respects, will afterwards provide an even much pleasanter world (in which case it is only to be regretted that it has so fatal an entrance). This may be a good religion for comfortable, married, and civilized Protestant parsons, but it is not Christianity. Christianity is the doctrine of the deep guilt of the human race by reason of its very existence, and of the heart’s intense longing for salvation therefrom. That salvation, however, can be attained only by the heaviest sacrifices and by the denial of one’s own self, hence by a complete reform of one’s nature. From a practical point of view, Luther may have been perfectly right, that is to say, with reference to the Church scandal of his time which he wished to stop, but not so from a theoretical point of view. The more sublime a teaching is, the more open is it to abuse at the hands of human nature, which is, on the whole, of a mean and evil disposition; for this reason, the abuses in Catholicism are much more numerous and much greater than those in Protestantism. Thus, for example, monasticism, that methodical denial of the will, practised in common for the purpose of mutual encouragement, is an institution of a sublime nature. For this reason, however, it often becomes untrue to its spirit. The revolting abuses of the Church provoked in Luther’s honest mind a lofty indignation. In consequence of this, however, he was led to a desire to reduce the claims of Christianity itself as much as possible. For this purpose, he first of all restricted it to the words of the Bible; for he went too far in his well-meant zeal, and attacked the heart of Christianity in the ascetic principle. For, after the withdrawal of this, the optimistic principle of necessity soon stepped into its place. But in religions, as well as in philosophy, optimism is a fundamental error that bars the way to all truth. From all this, it seems to me that Catholicism is a disgracefully abused, and Protestantism a degenerate, Christianity. Christianity in general thus appears to have suffered the fate that falls to the lot of everything that is noble, sublime, and great, as soon as it has to exist among humankind.

However, even in the very midst of Protestantism, the essentially ascetic and Encratite spirit of Christianity has again asserted itself, and the result of this is a phenomenon that perhaps has never previously existed in such magnitude and definiteness, namely the extremely remarkable sect of the Shakers in North America, founded in 1774 by an Englishwoman, Ann Lee. The followers of this sect have already increased to six thousand; they are divided into fifteen communities, and inhabit several villages in the states of New York and Kentucky, especially in the district of New Lebanon near Nassau village. The fundamental characteristic of their religious rule of life is celibacy and complete abstinence from all sexual satisfaction. It is unanimously admitted even by English and American visitors, who in every other respect laugh and jeer at them, that this rule is observed strictly and with perfect honesty, although brothers and sisters sometimes even occupy the same house, eat at the same table, in fact dance together in church during divine service. For whoever has made that heaviest of all sacrifices, may dance before the Lord; they are victors, they have overcome. Their hymns in church are generally cheerful; in fact, some of them are merry songs. That church dance which follows the sermon is also accompanied by the singing of the rest; it is executed rhythmically and briskly, and ends with a gallopade that is carried on till all are exhausted. After each dance, one of their teachers cries aloud: “Remember that you rejoice before the Lord for having mortified your flesh! For this is the only use that we can here make of our refractory limbs.” Most of the other conditions are automatically tied up with celibacy. There is no family, and hence no private property, but community of ownership. All are dressed alike, similarly to Quakers and very neatly. They are industrious and diligent; idleness is by no means tolerated. They also have the enviable rule of avoiding all unnecessary noise, such as shouting, door-slamming, whip-cracking, loud knocking, and so on. One of them has thus expressed their rule of life: “Lead a life of innocence and purity, love your neighbours as yourself, live in peace with all, and refrain from war, bloodshed, and all acts of violence towards others, as well as from all striving after worldly honour and distinction. Give to each what is theirs, and observe holiness, without which no person can see the Lord. Do good to all in so far as there is opportunity and as long as your strength lasts.” They do not persuade anyone to join them, but test those who present themselves for admission by a novitiate of several years. Everyone is free to leave them; very rarely is anyone expelled for misconduct. Children by a former husband or wife are carefully educated, and only when they have grown up do they take the vow voluntarily. It is said that during the controversies of their ministers with Anglican clergy the latter often come off the worse, for the arguments consist of passages from the New Testament. More detailed accounts of them are found especially in Maxwell’s Run through the United States, 1841; also in Benedict’s History of All Religions, 1830; likewise in The Times of 4 November 1837, and also in the May 1831 number of the German periodical Columbus. A German sect in America, very similar to them, are the Rappists, who also live in strict celibacy and abstinence. An account of them is given in F. Löher’s The History and Status of Germans in America, 1853. In Russia the Raskolniki are said to be a similar sect. The Gichtelians likewise live in strict chastity. We find also among the ancient Jews a prototype of all these sects, namely the Essenes, of whom even Pliny gives an account (Natural History, V, 15), and who were very similar to the Shakers, not only in celibacy, but also in other respects, even in the dance during divine service.[15] This leads to the supposition that the woman who founded the Shakers took the Essenes as a pattern. In the face of such facts, how does Luther’s assertion appear: “Where nature, as implanted in us by God, is carried away, then it is in no way possible for a chaste life to be lived outside matrimony” (Large Catechism)?

Although, in essential respects, Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better, for Europe it was nevertheless a new and great revelation. In consequence of this, the spiritual tendency of European nations was entirely transformed. For it disclosed to them the metaphysical significance of existence, and accordingly taught them to look beyond the narrow, paltry, and ephemeral life on earth, and no longer to regard that as an end in itself, but as a state or condition of suffering, guilt, trial, struggle and purification, from which we can soar upwards to a better existence, inconceivable to us, by means of moral effort, severe renunciation, and the denial of our own self. Thus it taught the great truth of the affirmation and denial of the will-to-live in the garment of allegory by saying that, through the Fall of Adam, the curse had come upon all people, sin had come into the world, and guilt was inherited by all; but that through the sacrificial death of Jesus, on the other hand, all were purged of sin, the world was saved, guilt abolished, and justice appeased. But in order to understand the truth itself contained in this myth, we must regard human beings not merely in time as entities independent of one another, but must comprehend the (Platonic) Idea of humanity. This is related to the series of human beings as eternity in itself is to eternity drawn out in time. Hence the eternal Idea humanity, extended in time to the series of human beings, appears once more in time as a whole through the bond of generation that unites them. Now if we keep in view the Idea of humanity, we see that the Fall of Adam represents humanity’s finite, animal, sinful nature, in respect of which it is just a being abandoned to limitation, sin, suffering, and death. On the other hand, the conduct, teaching, and death of Jesus Christ represent the eternal, supernatural side, the freedom, the salvation of humanity. Now, as such and in potential, every person is Adam as well as Jesus, according as they comprehend themselves, and their will thereupon determines them. In consequence of this, every person is then damned and abandoned to death, or else saved and attains to eternal life. Now these truths were completely new, both in the allegorical and in the real sense, as regards the Greeks and Romans, who were still entirely absorbed in life, and did not seriously look beyond this. Whoever doubts this last statement should see how even Cicero (Defence of Cluentius, ch. 61) and Sallust (The Conspiracy of Catiline, ch. 47) speak of the state after death. Although the ancients were far advanced in almost everything else, they had remained children in the principal matter; and in this they were surpassed even by the Druids, who indeed taught metempsychosis. The fact that one or two philosophers, like Pythagoras and Plato, thought otherwise, alters nothing as regards the whole.

Therefore that great fundamental truth contained in Christianity as well as in Brahmanism and Buddhism, the need for salvation from an existence given up to suffering and death, and its attainability through the denial of the will, hence by a decided opposition to nature, is beyond all comparison the most important truth there can be. But it is at the same time entirely opposed to the natural tendency of humankind, and is difficult to grasp as regards its true grounds and motives; for, in fact, all that can be thought only generally and in the abstract is quite inaccessible to the great majority of people. Therefore, in order to bring that great truth into the sphere of practical application, a mythical vehicle for it was needed everywhere for this great majority, a receptacle, so to speak, without which it would be lost and dissipated. The truth had therefore everywhere to borrow the garb of fable, and, in addition, had to try always to connect itself in each case with what is historically given, and is already known and revered. That which literally speaking was and remained inaccessible to the great masses of all times and countries with their low mentality, their intellectual stupidity, and their general brutality, had to be brought home to them allegorically speaking for practical purposes, in order to be their guiding star. Thus the abovementioned religions are to be regarded as sacred vessels in which the great truth, recognized and expressed for thousands of years, possibly indeed since the beginning of the human race, and yet remaining in itself an esoteric doctrine as regards the great mass of humankind, is made accessible to them according to their powers, and preserved and passed on through the centuries. Yet because everything that does not consist throughout of the indestructible material of pure truth is subject to destruction, whenever this fate befalls such a vessel through contact with a heterogeneous age, the sacred contents must be saved in some way by another vessel, and preserved for humanity. But philosophy has the task of presenting those contents, since they are identical with pure truth, pure and unalloyed, hence merely in abstract concepts, and consequently without that vehicle, for those who are capable of thinking, the number of whom is at all times extremely small. Philosophy is related to religions as a straight line is to several curves running near it; for it expresses literally, and consequently reaches directly, that which religions show under disguises, and reach in roundabout ways.

Now if, in order to illustrate by an example what has just been said, and at the same time to follow a philosophical fashion of my time, I wish perhaps to try to resolve the deepest mystery of Christianity, namely that of the Trinity, into the fundamental conceptions of my philosophy, this might be done in the following manner with the licence granted in the case of such interpretations. The Holy Ghost is the decided denial of the will-to-live; the person in whom this exhibits itself concretely is the Son. He is identical with the will that affirms life, and thereby produces the phenomenon of this world of perception, i.e., with the Father, in so far as affirmation and denial are opposite acts of the same will. The ability of the will to affirm or deny is the only true freedom. This, however, is to be regarded as a mere playful fancy.

Before ending this chapter I will quote a few proofs in support of that which I denoted in § 68 of the first volume[16] by the expression “the next best course,” namely the bringing about of the denial of the will by one’s own deeply felt suffering, thus not merely by the appropriation of others’ suffering and by the knowledge, introduced thereby, of the vanity and wretchedness of our existence. We can understand what goes on in a person’s heart in the case of an exaltation of this kind, and of the process of purification introduced by it, if we consider what every sensitive person experiences when looking on at a tragedy, as it is of a similar nature to this. Thus possibly in the third and fourth acts such a person is painfully affected and filled with anxiety by the sight of the ever more clouded and threatened happiness of the hero. On the other hand, when in the fifth act this happiness is entirely wrecked and shattered, one feels a certain elevation of mind. This affords one a pleasure of an infinitely higher order than any which could ever have been derived from the sight of the hero’s happiness, however great this might have been. Now in the weak watercolours of fellow-feeling, such as can be stirred by a well-known illusion, this is the same as that which occurs with the force of reality in the feeling of our own fate, when it is grave misfortune that finally drives one into the haven of complete resignation. All those conversions that completely transform one, such as I have described in the text, are due to this occurrence. The story of the conversion of the Abbé Rancé may be given here in a few words, as one that is strikingly similar to that of Raymond Lull given in the text; moreover, it is notable on account of its result. His youth was devoted to pleasure and enjoyment; finally, he lived in a passionate relationship with a Madame de Montbazon. When he visited her one evening, he found her room empty, dark, and in disorder. He struck something with his foot; it was her head, which had been severed from the trunk because, after her sudden death, the corpse could not otherwise have been put into the leaden coffin that was standing beside it. After recovering from a terrible grief, Rancé became in 1663 the reformer of the order of the Trappists, which at that time had departed entirely from the strictness of its rules. He at once entered this order, and through him it was brought back to that terrible degree of renunciation in which it continues to exist at La Trappe even at the present time. As the denial of the will, methodically carried out and supported by the severest renunciations, and by an incredibly hard and painful way of life, this order fills the visitor with sacred awe after they have been touched at the humility of these genuine monks. Emaciated by fasting, shivering, night-watches, praying, and working, these monks kneel before one, the worldling and sinner, to ask for a blessing. In France, of all the monastic orders this one alone has maintained itself completely after all the revolutionary changes. This is to be ascribed to the deep seriousness which is unmistakable in it, and which excludes all secondary purposes. It has remained untouched, even by the decline of religion, because its root is to be found deeper in human nature than is any positive doctrine of belief.

I have mentioned previously that the great and rapid revolutionary change in humanity’s innermost nature, which has here been considered, and has hitherto been entirely neglected by philosophers, occurs most frequently when, fully conscious, one goes out to a violent and certain death, as in the case of executions. But to bring this process much more closely before our eyes, I do not regard it as in any way unbecoming to the dignity of philosophy to record the statements of a few criminals before execution, although I might in this way incur the sneer that I encourage gallows-sermons. On the contrary, I certainly believe that the gallows is a place of quite peculiar revelations, and a watch-tower from which the person who still retains their senses often obtains a much wider view and a clearer insight into eternity than most philosophers have over the paragraphs of their rational psychology and theology. The following gallows-sermon was given at Gloucester on 15 April 1837, by a certain Bartlett who had murdered his mother-in-law: “Englishmen and fellow-countrymen! I have a few words to say, and very few they shall be. Yet let me entreat you, one and all, that these few words may strike deep into your hearts. Bear them in your minds, not only while you are witnessing this sad scene, but take them to your homes, take them and repeat them to your children and friends; I implore you as one dying, one for whom the instrument of death is even now prepared. And these words are, that you may loose yourselves from the love of this dying world and its vain pleasures. Think less of it and more of your God. Do this: repent, repent! For be assured, that without deep and true repentance, without turning to your heavenly Father, you will never attain, nor can hold the slightest hope of ever reaching those bowers of bliss and that land of peace, to which I trust I am now fast advancing, etc. ” (From The Times 18 April, 1837). Even more remarkable is a last statement of the well-known murderer Greenacre, who was executed in London on 1 May 1837. The English newspaper The Post gives the following account of it, which is also reprinted in Galignani’s Messenger of 6 May 1837: “On the morning of his execution a gentleman recommended him to put his trust in God and pray to be forgiven through the intercession of Jesus Christ. Greenacre made answer that praying through the intercession of Christ was a matter of opinion: as for himself, he believed that a Mahommetan in the eyes of the supreme being was equal to a Christian and had as great a claim to salvation. He remarked that since his confinement he had turned his attention to theological matters, and had come to the conclusion: that the gallows was a passport to Heaven.” The indifference here displayed towards positive religions is just what gives this statement greater weight, since it shows that the basis of such a statement is no fanatical delusion, but the individual’s own immediate knowledge. The following extract, taken from the Limerick Chronicle and given in Galignani’s Messenger of 15 August 1837, may also be mentioned: “Mary Cooney, for the revolting murder of Mrs. Anne Anderson, was executed at Gallowsgreen on Monday last. So deeply sensible of her crime was the wretched woman, that she kissed the rope which encircled her neck, and humbly implored God for mercy.” Finally, also this: The Times of 29 April 1845 gives several letters, written on the day before his execution by Hocker, who was condemned for the murder of Delarue. In one of them he says: “I am persuaded that unless the natural heart be broken, and renewed by divine mercy, however noble and amiable it may be deemed by the world, it can never think of eternity without inwardly shuddering.” These are the outlooks into eternity mentioned above, which are disclosed from that watchtower, and I have the less hesitation in giving them here, since Shakespeare also says:

out of these convertites

There is much matter to be heard and learn’d.

(As You Like It, last scene.)

In his Life of Jesus (vol. I, Sec. 2, ch. 6, § 72 and 74), Strauss has shown that Christianity also attributes to suffering as such the purifying and sanctifying power here described, and, on the other hand, ascribes to great prosperity an opposite effect. Thus he says that the beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount have a different meaning in Luke (6:21) from that which they have in Matthew (5:3), for only the latter adds “in spirit” to “blessed are the poor”; “after righteousness” to “those who hunger.” Thus, only with him are the ingenuous, the innocent, the humble, and so on meant; with Luke, on the other hand, the really poor are meant, so that here the contrast is that between present suffering and future well-being. With the Ebionites it was a cardinal principle that whoever takes their share at the present time, gets nothing in the future, and vice versa. Accordingly, in Luke the blessings are followed by as many “woes,” which are addressed to “the rich,” to “the satisfied,” and to “those who laugh,” in the Ebionite sense. On p. 604 Strauss says that the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19) is given in the same sense. This parable does not mention at all any transgression of the former or any merit of the latter, and takes as the standard of future requital not the good done or the wickedness practised in this life, but the evil suffered and the good enjoyed here, in the Ebionite sense. Strauss goes on to say that “a similar appreciation of outward poverty is also ascribed to Jesus by the other synoptists (Matthew 19:16; Mark 10:17; Luke 18:18) in the story of the rich man, and in the maxim about the camel and the eye of a needle.”

If we go to the bottom of things, we shall recognize that even the most famous passages of the Sermon on the Mount contain an indirect injunction to voluntary poverty, and thus to the denial of the will-to-live. For the precept (Matthew 5:40ff.), to comply unconditionally with all demands made on us, to give also our cloak to those who will take away our coat, and so on; likewise (Matthew 6:25–34) the precept to banish all cares for the future, even for the morrow, and so to live for the day, are rules of life whose observance inevitably leads to complete poverty. Accordingly, they state in an indirect manner just what the Buddha directly commands his followers to do, and confirmed by his own example, namely, to cast away everything and become bhikkhus, that is to say, mendicants. This appears even more decidedly in the passage Matthew 10:9–15, where the Apostles are not allowed to have any possessions, not even shoes and staff, and are directed to go and beg. These precepts afterwards became the foundation of the mendicant order of St. Francis (Bonaventure, Life of Saint Francis, ch. 3). I say therefore that the spirit of Christian morality is identical with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism. In accordance with the whole view discussed here, Meister Eckhart also says (Works, vol. I, p. 492): “Suffering is the fleetest animal that bears you to perfection.”

NOTES

1. Calderón, Life is a Dream (1653), Act 1, Scene 1.

2. On the other hand, in so far as asceticism is admitted, the statement of the ultimate motives of human conduct given in my essay On the Basis of Morality, namely (1) one’s own weal, (2) another’s woe, and (3) another’s weal, is to be supplemented by a fourth, namely one’s own woe. I mention this here incidentally merely in the interest of systematic consistency. In that essay, this fourth motive had to be passed over in silence, since the prize question was stated in the spirit of the philosophical ethics prevailing in Protestant Europe. [S]

3. See F.H.H. Windischmann’s Shankara, or on Vendanta Theological Doctrine, pp. 116, 117 and 121–123; also Upanishads, vol. i, pp. 340, 356, 360. [S]

4. Compare my work The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, p. 274 (2nd ed., p. 271). [S]

5. If we keep in view this essential immanence of our knowledge and of all knowledge, which springs from its being something secondary, something that has arisen for the aims of the will — it becomes easy to explain that all the mystics of all religions ultimately arrive at a kind of ecstasy. In this each and every kind of knowledge together with its fundamental form, object and subject, entirely ceases. Only in this sphere, lying beyond all knowledge, do they claim to have attained their highest goal, since they have reached the point where there is no longer any subject and object, consequently no kind of knowledge, just because there is no longer any will, to serve which is the sole destiny of knowledge.

Whoever has grasped this will no longer regard it as excessively extravagant for fakirs to sit down, contemplate the tip of their noses, and attempt to banish all ideas and representations, or that in many a passage of the Upanishads guidance is given to sink oneself, silently and inwardly uttering the mysterious Om, into the depths of one’s own being, where subject and object and all knowledge vanish. [S]

6. Here and elsewhere in his writings, Schopenhauer is referring to an edition of the Upanishads known as the Oupnek’hat, a collection of fifty Upanishads translated into Latin in 1801–1802 by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperon. This edition was itself based on a 17th century Persian translation of Sanskrit.

7. Karl Graul, Tamil Writings to Explain the Vendanta System (1854).

8. Bonaventure, Life of Saint Francis, ch. 8; K. Hase, Francis of Assisi, ch. 10; The Canticles of Saint Francis, edited by Schlosser and Steinle, Frankfurt am Main, 1842. [S]

9. Miguel de Molinos, Spiritual Guide: Spanish 1675, Italian 1680, Latin 1687, French in a book with the title A Collection of Texts Concerning Quietism, or Molinos and His Followers: Amsterdam, 1688. [S]

10. François Rabelais, The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (c.1564), ch. 58.

11. Matthew 19:11ff.; Luke 20:35–37; i Corinthians 7:1-11 and 25–40; i Thessalonians 4:3; i John 3:3; Revelations 14:4. [S]

12. Goethe, “Coptic Song” (1814), line 3.

13. Cf. On the Will in Nature, 2nd ed., p. 124. [S]

14. For example, John 7:25 and 31; 14:30; 15:18, 19; 26:33; Colossians 2:20; Ephesians 2:1–3; I John 2:15–17, and 4:4, 5. Here is an opportunity to see how, in their efforts to misinterpret the text of the New Testament in conformity with their rationalistic, optimistic, and unutterably shallow worldview, certain Protestant theologians go to the length of positively falsifying this text in their translations. Thus, in his new Latin version, added to the Griesbach text of 1805, H. A. Schott translates the word kosmos, John 15:18, 19 by Judaei [Jews], I John 4:4 by profani homines [godless people], and Colossians 2:20 stoicheia tou kosmou by elementa Judaica [Judaic elements]; whereas Luther everywhere renders the word honestly and correctly by “world.” [S]

15. Bellermann, Historical Reports on the Essenes and Therapeuts (1821), p. 106. [S]

16. A reference to The World as Will and Representation.

7. ADDITIONAL REMARKS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE AFFIRMATION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL-TO-LIVE

To a certain extent, it can be seen a priori, it is colloquially self-evident, that that which now produces the phenomenon of the world must also be capable of not doing this and consequently of remaining at rest; in other words, that to the present expansion there must also be a contraction. Now if the former is the phenomenon of the will-to-live, the latter will be that of the will-not-to-live. Essentially this will also be the same as the “great and profound sleep” of the Veda teaching (in the Upanishads, vol. I, p. 163), as the Nirvana of the Buddhists, and also as the “beyond” of the Neoplatonists.

Contrary to certain silly objections, I observe that the denial of the will-to-live does not in any way assert the annihilation of a substance, but the mere act of not-willing; that which hitherto willed no longer wills. As we know this being, this essence, the will, as thing-in-itself merely in and through the act of willing, we are incapable of saying or comprehending what it still is or does after it has given up that act. And so, for us who are the phenomenon of willing, this denial is a passing over into nothing.

The affirmation and denial of the will-to-live is a mere “willing” and “not-willing.” The subject of these two acts is one and the same and consequently, as such, is not annihilated either by the one act or by the other. Its willing manifests itself in this world of intuitive perception which is for that very reason the phenomenon of its own thing-in-itself. On the other hand, we know of no phenomenon of not-willing except merely that of its appearance and in fact in the individual who already belongs originally to the phenomenon of willing. And so as long as the individual exists, we still see not-willing always in conflict with willing. If the individual has come to an end and not-willing has triumphed, this has been a pure declaration of not-willing (this is the meaning of the Papal Canonization). Of this we can only say that its phenomenon cannot be that of willing; but we do not know whether it appears at all, that is, whether it maintains a secondary existence for an intellect which it would first have to produce. Since we know the intellect only as an organ of the will in the affirmation thereof, we do not see why, after the suppression of such affirmation, it should produce the intellect; and we cannot make any statement about the subject thereof, for we have known this positively only in the opposite act, the willing, as the thing-in-itself of its phenomenal world.

Between the ethics of the Greeks and that of the Hindus there is a striking contrast. The former (although with the exception of Plato) has for its object the ability to lead a happy life, vita beata; the latter, on the other hand, the liberation and salvation from life generally, as is directly expressed in the very first sentence of the Samkhyakarika.[1]

We shall obtain a contrast which is akin to this and is more marked and vivid, if in the gallery at Florence we contemplate the fine antique sarcophagus whose reliefs depict the whole series of ceremonies of a wedding from the first proposal to where Hymen’s torch lights the way to the torus, and then picture next to it the Christian coffin, draped in black as a sign of mourning and with the crucifix on top. The contrast is highly significant. In opposite ways both attempt to comfort and console for death, and both are right. The one expresses the affirmation of the will-to-live to which life remains sure and certain throughout all time, however rapidly the forms may change. The other expresses through the symbols of suffering and death the denial of the will-to-live and salvation from a world where death and the devil reign; until willing becomes not-willing.

Between the spirit of Graeco-Roman paganism and that of Christianity is the proper contrast of the affirmation and denial of the will-to-live, according to which, in the last resort, Christianity is fundamentally right.

My ethics is related to all the ethical systems of European philosophy as the New Testament to the Old, according to the ecclesiastical conception of this relation. Thus, the Old Testament puts humanity under the authority of the law which, however, does not lead to salvation. The New Testament, on the other hand, declares the law to be inadequate, in fact repudiates it (e.g. Romans 7, Galatians 2 and 3). On the contrary, it preaches the kingdom of grace which is attained by faith, love of one’s neighbour, and complete denial of oneself; this is the path to salvation from evil and the world. For in spite of all Protestant-rationalistic distortions and misrepresentations, the ascetic spirit is assuredly and quite properly the soul of the New Testament. But this is just the denial of the will-to-live; and that transition from the Old Testament to the New, from the dominion of the law to that of faith, from justification through works to salvation through the Mediator, from the dominion of sin and death to eternal life in Christ, signifies, strictly speaking, the transition from the merely moral virtues to the denial of the will-to-live. Now all the philosophical systems of ethics prior to mine have kept to the spirit of the Old Testament with their absolute (i.e. dispensing with ground as well as goal) moral law and all their moral commandments and prohibitions to which the commanding Jehovah is secretly added in thought, different as their forms and descriptions of the matter may prove to be. My ethics, on the other hand, has ground, basis, purpose, and goal; it first demonstrates theoretically the metaphysical ground of justice and loving kindness and then indicates the goal to which these must ultimately lead if they are completely carried out. At the same time, it frankly and sincerely admits the abominable nature of the world and points to the denial of the will as the path to redemption therefrom. It is, accordingly, actually in the spirit of the New Testament, whereas all the others are in that of the Old and thus theoretically amount to mere Judaism (plain despotic theism). In this sense, my teaching could be called Christian philosophy proper, paradoxical as this may seem to those who do not go to the root of the matter, but stick merely to the surface.

Whoever is capable of thinking somewhat more deeply will soon see that human desires cannot begin to be sinful first at that point where, in their individual tendencies, they accidentally cross one another and cause evil from one quarter and malice from another. On the contrary, it will be seen that, if this is so, they must already be sinful and bad originally and according to their true nature and consequently that the entire will-to-live itself is detestable. Indeed, all the misery and horrors whereof the world is full are merely the necessary result of all the characters in which the will-to-live objectifies itself under circumstances which occur on the unbroken chain of necessity and furnish the characters with motives. Those horrors and miseries are, therefore, the mere commentary to the affirmation of the will-to-live. (Cf. German Theology, p. 93.) That our existence itself implies a guilt is proved by death.

A noble character will not readily complain about its own fate; on the contrary, what Hamlet says in praise of Horatio will apply:

for thou hast been

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing.[2]

This can be understood from the fact that such a person, recognizing their own true nature in others and thus sharing their fate, almost invariably sees around them an even harder lot than their own and so cannot bring themselves to complain of the latter. An ignoble egoist, on the other hand, who limits all reality to themselves and regards others as mere masks and phantoms, will take no part in their fate, but will devote all their sympathy and interest to themselves; the results of this will then be great sensitiveness and frequent complaints.

It is precisely that recognition of oneself in another’s phenomenal appearance from which, as I have often shown, justice and loving kindness proceed in the first instance, and which finally leads to giving up the will. For the phenomena, wherein this will manifests itself, are so definitely in a state of suffering, that whoever extends their own self to all others can no longer will its continuance; just as one who takes all the tickets in a lottery must necessarily suffer a great loss. The affirmation of the will presupposes the restriction of self-consciousness to one’s own individuality and reckons on the possibility of a favourable career in life from the hand of chance.

If in our conception of the world we start from the thing-in-itself, the will-to-live, we find as its kernel and greatest concentration the act of generation. This presents itself as the first thing, the point of departure; it is the first trace of life in the world-egg and the main issue. What a contrast, on the other hand, if we start from the empirical world that is given as phenomenon, from the world as representation! Here that act manifests itself as something quite individual and special, of secondary significance, in fact as a matter concealed and covered up which is of no importance and merely slips in, a paradoxical anomaly that often affords material for laughter. However, it might even seem to us that here the devil wanted merely to hide his game, for copulation is his currency and the world his kingdom. For has it not been observed how directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard? Seriously speaking, this is due to the fact that sexual desire, especially when through fixation on a definite woman it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little.

The woman’s share in generation is, in a certain sense, more innocent than the man’s, in so far as the man gives to the being to be procreated the will that is the first sin and hence the source of all wickedness and evil, whereas the woman gives knowledge which opens up the way to salvation. The act of generation is the world-knot, for it states: “The will-to-live has affirmed itself anew.” In this sense, a standing Brahmanical phrase laments: “Alas, alas, the lingam is in the yoni!” Conception and pregnancy, on the other hand, say: “To the will is once more given the light of knowledge”; whereby it can again find its way out; and so, the possibility of salvation has once more appeared.

From this is explained the remarkable phenomenon that, whereas every woman would die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, she nevertheless bears her pregnancy in public without a trace of shame and even with a kind of pride. For as everywhere else an infallibly certain sign is taken as equivalent to the thing signified, so also does every other sign of the completed coitus shame and confuse the woman in the highest degree; pregnancy alone does not. This can be explained from the fact that, according to what has been said, pregnancy in a certain sense entails, or at any rate offers, the prospect of an expiation of the guilt or debt that was contracted by the coitus. And so this bears all the shame and disgrace of the matter, whereas the pregnancy, so closely related to it, remains pure and innocent, and to a certain extent even becomes sacred.

Coitus is mainly the affair of the man; pregnancy is entirely that of the woman. From the father the child receives the will, the character; from the mother, the intellect. The latter is the redeeming principle, the former the binding. The sign of the constant existence of the will-to-live in time, in spite of all increase in illumination through the intellect, is the coitus. The sign of the light of knowledge and indeed in the supreme degree of clearness, which is presented afresh to this will and holds open to it the possibility of salvation, is the renewed coming into existence of the will-to-live as humanity. The sign of this is pregnancy which, therefore, goes about frankly and freely and even proudly, whereas coitus like a criminal creeps into a corner.

Some Fathers of the Church have taught that even marital cohabitation should be permitted only when it occurs for the sake of procreating children, as is said by Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III, ch. 11. (The relevant passages are found collected in P.E. Lind, On the Celibacy of the Christians, ch. 1.) Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III, ch. 3, attributes this view to the Pythagoreans. However, such a view is, strictly speaking, incorrect; for if coitus is no longer desired for its own sake, the denial of the will-to-live has already appeared and then the propagation of the human race is superfluous and senseless in so far as its object is already attained. Moreover, to place a human being in the world so that it should exist therein and to do so without any subjective passion and without lust and physical ardour, merely from sheer deliberation and cold-blooded intention, would be morally a very questionable action. Indeed, few would take this upon themselves and perhaps one might even say of it that it was related to generation from mere sexual impulse as is coldblooded and deliberate murder to a mortal blow given in anger.

The condemnation of all unnatural sexual satisfaction rests really on the opposite ground, since through it the impulse is gratified and thus the will-to-live is affirmed, but propagation is suppressed, which alone keeps open the possibility of the denial of the will. This is the reason why pederasty was recognized as a grave sin only with the appearance of Christianity whose tendency is ascetic.

A monastery is an assemblage of those who have embraced poverty, chastity, obedience (i.e. renunciation of one’s own will) and who, by living together, try to lighten to some extent existence itself, but even more so that state of severe renunciation. For the sight of those who hold similar views and undergo the same renunciation strengthens their resolve and consoles them, and the companionship of living together within certain limits is suited to human nature and is an innocent relaxation in spite of many severe privations. This is the normal conception of monasteries. And who can call such a society an association of fools and simpletons, as one is bound to according to every philosophy except mine?

The inner spirit and meaning of genuine monastic life, as of asceticism generally, are that a person has recognized themselves as worthy and capable of an existence better than ours and wants to strengthen and maintain this conviction by despising what this world offers, casting aside all its pleasures as worthless, and now awaiting calmly and confidently the end of this life that is stripped of its empty allurements, in order one day to welcome the hour of death as that of salvation. The Sannyasis have exactly the same tendency and significance, and so too have the Buddhist monks. Certainly, in no case does practice so rarely correspond to theory as in that of monasticism just because its fundamental idea is so sublime; and “the worst is the abuse of the best.” A genuine monk is exceedingly venerable, but in the great majority of cases the cowl is a mere mask behind which there is just as little of the real monk as there is behind one at a masquerade.

The notion that we should submit and surrender entirely and without reserve to the individual will of another is a psychic means of facilitating the denial of our own will and is thus a suitable allegorical vehicle of the truth.

The number of regular Trappists is naturally small; but yet half of humanity consists of involuntary Trappists; poverty, obedience, absence of all pleasures and even of the most necessary means of relief, and frequently also chastity that is forced or brought about through want or some defect, are their lot. The difference is simply that the Trappists pursue the matter of their own free choice, methodically and without hope of any change for the better; whereas the other way is to be ranged with what I have described in my ascetic chapters by the expression “the next best course.” Therefore by virtue of the basis of its order, nature has already taken adequate care to bring this about, especially if we add to the evils that spring directly from it those others that are produced by the discord, dissension, and malice of human beings in war and peace. But this very necessity of involuntary suffering for eternal salvation is also expressed by that utterance of the Saviour (Matthew 19:24): “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.” Therefore those who were greatly in earnest about their eternal salvation,’ chose voluntary poverty when fate had denied this to them and they had been born in wealth. Thus Buddha Sakyamuni was born a prince, but voluntarily took to the mendicant’s staff; and Francis of Assisi, the founder of the mendicant orders who, as a youngster at the ball, where the daughters of all the notabilities were sitting together, was asked: “Now, Francis, will you not soon make your choice from these beauties?” and who replied: “I have made a far more beautiful choice!” “Whom?” “Poverty”; whereupon he abandoned everything shortly afterwards and wandered through the land as a mendicant.

Whoever through such considerations realizes how necessary to our salvation misery and suffering usually are will see that we should envy others their unhappiness rather than their happiness.

For the same reason, the stoicism of the disposition which defies fate is also, it is true, a good armour against the sufferings of life and helps us to endure the present; but it stands in the way of true salvation, for it hardens the heart. Indeed, how can this be improved by sufferings if it is surrounded by a crust of stone and does not feel them? Moreover, a certain degree of this stoicism is not very rare. Often it may be affectation and amount to a smile in the face of adversity, where, however, it is genuine and unfeigned, it springs in most cases from a mere want of feeling, from a lack of energy, brightness, sensitiveness, and imagination, all of which are requisite to a great agony of sorrow. The phlegmatic and sluggish temperament of the Germans is particularly favourable to this kind of stoicism.

With regard to the person who commits them, unjust or malicious actions are a sign of the strength of the affirmation of the will-to-live and accordingly of the distance separating them from true salvation, from denial of the will-to-live, and consequently from redemption from the world. They are also a sign of the long school of knowledge and suffering they have still to go through before they attain salvation. In respect of the person who has to suffer such actions, they are physically an evil, it is true, but metaphysically a blessing and at bottom a benefit, for they help to lead them to true salvation.

WORLD-SPIRIT: Here then is the task of your labours and sufferings; for these you shall exist, as do all other things.

HUMAN: But what have I from existence? If my existence is occupied, I have trouble; if it is unoccupied, I have boredom. How can you offer me so miserable a reward for so much labour and suffering?

WORLD-SPIRIT: And yet this reward is the equivalent of all your troubles, and it is precisely this by virtue of its inadequacy.

HUMAN: Indeed? This really exceeds my powers of comprehension.

WORLD-SPIRIT: I know. — (aside) Should I tell them that the value of life consists precisely in its teaching them not to will it? For this supreme dedication life itself must first prepare them.

As I have said, looked at as a whole, each human life reveals the qualities of a tragedy and we see that, as a rule, life is nothing but a series of disappointed hopes, frustrated plans, and errors recognized too late, and that the truth of the mournful verse applies to it:

Then old age and experience, hand in hand,

Lead him to death and make him understand,

After a search so painful and so long,

That all his life he has been in the wrong.[3]

All this agrees entirely with my view of the world which regards existence itself as something that were better not to be, a kind of mistake from which a knowledge of it is to bring us back. Humanity in general, is already in the wrong in so far as it exists and is human; consequently, it is wholly in keeping with this that each individual human being also finds themselves generally in the wrong when they survey their life. That they see it in general is their salvation, and for this they must begin by recognizing it in the individual case, i.e. in their own individual life. For what applies to the genus applies also to the species.

Life is to be regarded entirely as a sharp scolding, which is administered to us, although, with our forms of thought that are calculated for quite different ends, we cannot understand how it could be possible for us to need it. Accordingly, we should look back with satisfaction on our deceased friends, bearing in mind that they have got over their scolding and heartily wishing that it has had the desired effect. From the same point of view, we should look forward to our own death as a desirable and happy event instead of, as is generally the case, with fear and trembling.

A happy life is impossible; the best that a person can attain is a heroic life, such as is lived by one who struggles against overwhelming odds in some way and some affair that will benefit the whole of humanity, and who in the end triumphs, although they obtain a poor reward or none at all. For in the end, they are turned to stone like the prince in Gozzi’s The Stag King, but with a noble bearing and magnanimous look. Their memory lasts and is celebrated as that of a hero; their will, mortified by toil and trouble, failure, and the world’s ingratitude throughout their life, is extinguished in Nirvana. (In this sense, Carlyle wrote On Heroes and Hero-Worship, London, 1842.)

Now if through considerations such as the above and so from a very lofty standpoint, we see a justification for the sufferings of humanity, this nevertheless does not extend to the animals whose sufferings are considerable, brought on for the most part through human beings, but often also without their agency. (See World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 28.) And so, the question then forces itself on us as to the purpose of this troubled and tormented will in its thousands of different forms without the freedom to salvation which is conditioned by reflectiveness. The suffering of the animal world is to be justified merely from the fact that the will-to-live must devour its own flesh because in the phenomenal world absolutely nothing exists besides it, and it is a hungry will. Hence the gradation of its phenomena each of which lives at the expense of another. Further, I refer to §153 and 154 which show that the capacity for suffering is in the animal very much less than in human beings. Now what might be added beyond this would prove to be hypothetical or even mythical and may, therefore, be left to the reader’s own speculation.

NOTES

1. An early text of the Samkhya school of classical Indian philosophy.

2. Act iii, Scene 2.

3. Wilmot, “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” (see prior note to Chapter 1).

8. ON SUICIDE

As far as I can see, it is only the monotheistic, and hence Jewish, religions whose followers regard suicide as a crime. This is the more surprising since neither in the Old Testament nor in the New is there to be found any prohibition or even merely a definite condemnation of suicide. Teachers of religion have, therefore, to base their objection to suicide on their own philosophical grounds; but their arguments are in such a bad way that they try to make up for what these lack in strength by the vigorous expressions of their abhorrence and thus by being abusive. We then of necessity hear that suicide is the greatest cowardice, that it is possible only in madness, and such like absurdities; or else the wholly meaningless phrase that suicide is “wrong”, whereas there is obviously nothing in the world over which every human being has such an indisputable right as their own person and life (cf. § 121.) As I have said, suicide is even accounted a crime and connected with this, especially in vulgar bigoted England, are an ignominious burial and the confiscation of legacies; for which reason a jury almost invariably brings in a verdict of insanity. First of all, we should allow moral feeling to decide the matter and compare the impression made on us by the news that an acquaintance of ours had committed a crime, such as murder, cruelty, fraud, or theft, with that made by the report of their voluntary death. Whereas the former report arouses lively indignation, the greatest resentment, and a demand for punishment or revenge, the latter will move us to sorrow and sympathy often mingled with a certain admiration for their courage rather than with the moral condemnation that accompanies a bad action. Who has not had acquaintances, friends, and relations who have voluntarily departed from the world? And should we all regard these with abhorrence as criminals? I say no, certainly not.! I am rather of the opinion that the clergy should be challenged once and for all to tell us with what right they stigmatize as a crime an action that has been committed by many who were honoured and beloved by us; for they do so from the pulpit and in their writings without being able to point to any biblical authority and in fact without having any valid philosophical arguments, and they refuse an honourable burial to those who voluntarily depart from the world. But here it should be stipulated that we want reasons and shall not accept in their place mere empty phrases or words of abuse. If criminal law condemns suicide, that is not an ecclesiastically valid reason and is, moreover, definitely ridiculous; for what punishment can frighten the person who seeks death? If we punish the attempt to commit suicide, then we are simply punishing the want of skill whereby it failed.

Even the ancients were far from regarding the matter in that light. Pliny (Natural History, Book XXVIII, ch. 1; vol. IV, p. 351 Bipont edition) says: “We are of the opinion that one should not love life so much as to prolong it at all costs. Whoever you may be, you who desire this will likewise die, even though you may have lived a (good or) vicious and criminal life. Therefore may everyone above all keep as a remedy for their soul the fact that, of all the blessings conferred by nature on humanity, none is better than an opportune death; and the best thing is that everyone can procure for themselves such a death.” He also says (Book II, ch. 5; vol. I, p. I25): “Not even God is capable of everything. For even if it was intended, God cannot come to a decision about God’s own death. Yet with so much suffering in life, such a death is the best gift God has granted to humanity.” In Massilia and on the island of Ceos, the cup of hemlock was even publicly handed to the person who could state convincing reasons for quitting life (Valerius Maximus, Book II, ch. 6, § 7 and 8).[1] And how many heroes and sages of antiquity have not ended their lives by a voluntary death! It is true that Aristotle says (Nicomachean Ethics, V, 15) suicide is a wrong against the State, although not against one’s own person. Yet in his exposition of the ethics of the Peripatetics, Stobaeus quotes the sentence (Ethical Eclogues, Book II, ch. 7, vol.III, p. 286): “That the good must quit life when their misfortune is too great, but the bad also when their good fortune is too great”. And similarly, on page 312: “Therefore one must marry, have children, devote themselves to the service of the State, and generally preserve their life in the cultivation of skill and ability, but again quit it under the compulsion of necessity.”

We find suicide extolled as a noble and heroic action even by the Stoics, as can be proved from hundreds of passages, the most vigorous of which are from Seneca. Further with the Hindus, it is well known that suicide often occurs as a religious action, particularly as widow-burning, self-destruction under the wheels of the Juggernaut Car, self-sacrifice to the crocodiles of the Ganges or the sacred temple-tanks, and otherwise. It is precisely the same at the theatre, that mirror of life; for example, in the celebrated Chinese play The Orphan of China (translated by Saint-Julien, 1834), we see almost all the noble characters end in suicide without there being any suggestion or its occurring to the spectator that they had committed a crime. In fact, at bottom on our own stage it is not otherwise, for example, Palmira in Mahomet. Mortimer in Maria Stuart, Othello, Countess Terzky. And Sophocles says:

“God will release me when I myself wish it.”[2]

Is Hamlet’s monologue the meditation of a crime? He merely states that, if we were sure of being absolutely annihilated by death, we would undoubtedly choose it in view of the state of the world. “Ay, there’s the rub.”[3] But the reasons against suicide which are advanced by the clergy of the monotheistic, i.e. Jewish, religions and by the philosophers who accommodate themselves to them, are feeble sophisms which can easily be refuted. (See my essay On the Basis of Ethics, § 5.) The most thorough refutation of them has been furnished by Hume in his essay On Suicide, which first appeared after his death and was at once suppressed in England by the disgraceful bigotry and scandalous power of the parsons. And so only a few copies were sold secretly and at a high price, and for the preservation of this and another essay by that great individual we are indebted to the Basel reprint: Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, by the late David Hume, Basel, 1799, sold by James Decker, 124 pp., 8vo. But that a purely philosophical essay, coldly and rationally refuting the current reasons against suicide and coming from one of the leading thinkers and authors of England, had to be secretly smuggled through that country like a forbidden thing until it found refuge abroad, brings great discredit on the English nation. At the same time, it shows what kind of a conscience the Church has on this point. I have expounded in my chief work[4], volume one, § 69, the only valid moral reason against suicide. It lies in the fact that suicide is opposed to the attainment of the highest moral goal since it substitutes for the real salvation from this world of woe and misery one that is merely apparent. But it is still a very long way from this aberration to a crime, such as the Christian clergy would like to stamp it.

In its innermost core, Christianity bears the truth that suffering (the Cross) is the real purpose of life; and therefore as suicide opposes such purpose, Christianity rejects it, whereas antiquity, from a lower point of view, approved and even honoured it. That reason against suicide is, however, ascetic and therefore applies only to an ethical standpoint much higher than that which European moral philosophers have ever occupied. But if we descend from that very high point, there is no longer any valid moral reason for condemning suicide. It seems, therefore, that the extraordinarily lively zeal of the clergy of the monotheistic religions against suicide,[5] a zeal that is not supported either by the Bible or by valid grounds, must have a hidden foundation. Might it not be that the voluntary giving up of life is a poor compliment to the one who said, “And God saw all that He had made, and it was very good”? So once again, it is the customary and orthodox optimism of these religions which denounces suicide in order not to be denounced by it.

On the whole, we shall find that, as soon as a point is reached where the terrors of life outweigh those of death, a person puts an end to their life. The resistance of the latter is nevertheless considerable; they stand, so to speak, as guardians at the gate of exit. Perhaps there is no one alive who would not already have made an end of their life if such an end were something purely negative, a sudden cessation of existence. But it is something positive, namely the destruction of the body, and this frightens people back just because the body is the phenomenon of the will-to-live.

However, the struggle with those guardians is not, as a rule, so difficult as it may seem from a distance and indeed in consequence of the antagonism between mental and bodily sufferings. Thus, if physically we suffer very severely or continuously, we become indifferent to all other troubles; only our recovery is uppermost in our thoughts. In the same way, severe mental suffering makes us indifferent to physical; we treat it with contempt. In fact, if physical suffering should predominate, this is a wholesome diversion, a pause in the mental suffering. It is precisely this that makes suicide easier, since the physical pain associated with this loses all importance in the eyes of one who is tormented by an excessive amount of mental suffering. This becomes particularly noticeable in those who are driven to suicide through a purely morbid deep depression. It does not cost such individuals any self-restraint at all; they need not make a resolute rush at it, but, as soon as the warder appointed to look after them leaves them for two minutes, they quickly put an end to their life.

If in heavy horrible dreams anxiety reaches its highest degree, it causes us to wake up, whereby all those monstrous horrors of the night vanish. The same thing happens in the dream of life when the highest degree of anxiety forces us to break it off.

Suicide can also be regarded as an experiment, a question we put to nature and try to make it answer, namely what change the existence and knowledge of a human being undergoes through death. But it is an awkward experiment, for it abolishes the identity of the consciousness that would have to listen to the answer.

NOTES

1. On the island of Ceos it was the custom for old people to die voluntarily. See Valerius Maximus, Book ii, ch. 6. Heraclides Ponticus, Fragments on Republics, ix. Aclianus, Historical Miscellany, iii. 37. Strabo, Book x, ch. 5, § 6, ed. Kramer. [S]

2. Not Sophocles, but a variant from Euripides, Bacchae, 498.

3. Hamlet, Act iii, Scene 1.

4. The World as Will and Representation

5. On this point all are unanimous. According to Rousseau, Oeuvres, vol. iv, p. 275, Augustine and Lactantius were the first to declare suicide as a sin, but took their argument from Plato’s Phaedo (139), since shown to be as trite as it is utterly groundless, that we are on duty or are slaves of the of the gods. [S]

CHRONOLOGY

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LIFE OF SCHOPENHAUER

1788. Arthur Schopenhauer born in Danzig on 22 February. His father Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer is a patrician merchant, and his mother Johanna (née Trosiener) would later become a popular travel writer and novelist.

1797. Schopenhauer’s sister Louise Adelaide (Adele) is born on 12 June in Hamburg. In July Schopenhauer travels to France with his father, and then to Le Havre, where he stays with a business associate of his father.

1799. Schopenhauer returns from Le Havre and is enrolled in a private business school in Hamburg.

1800. During the summer Schopenhauer and his parents visit Dresden, Hannover, Karlsbad, and Prague.

1803. In the spring Schopenhauer and his parents undertake a European tour of England, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, and Prussia. The trip is in exchange for Schopenhauer forgoing university study and training to be a merchant.

1804. The Schopenhauers return from the European tour. Schopenhauer begins apprenticeship in Danzig, and then, in the following year, in Hamburg.

1805. Schopenhauer’s father Heinrich Floris dies on 20 April. Both Schopenhauer and his mother believe it to be a suicide. Johanna sells the family business and moves with Adele to Weimar. Schopenhauer remains in Hamburg in his apprenticeship.

1807. In the spring Schopenhauer ends his apprenticeship, and attends a preparatory school in Gotha. In December he leaves the school and relocates to Weimar, but lives separately from his mother and sister. Over the next year Schopenhauer, in preparation for university, enlists private tutors for classical languages and studies other subjects on his own.

1809. In February Schopenhauer comes into his inheritance from his father’s estate. In the fall he enrolls in the University of Göttingen, where he focuses on the natural sciences. By his second year he is increasingly drawn to philosophy, having been introduced to the works of Plato and Kant.

1811. In the fall Schopenhauer transfers to the University of Berlin to study philosophy. He reads and/or attends lectures by Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Schelling. His student notes begin to reveal his irritation with German Idealism.

1813. After a short stay in Weimar, Schopenhauer moves to Rudolstadt, where he takes frequent walks in the nearby Thuringian forest. There he writes his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The dissertation earns him a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena (granted in absentia), and is published later that year. In November Schopenhauer returns to Weimar, present at the salons hosted by his mother. There he meets Goethe, and the two discuss aesthetics and color theory. He also meets Friedrich Majer, a historian, translator, and specialist in classical Indian philosophy. In December Schopenhauer is working in the Weimar library, where he is reading issues of the Asiatisches Magazin and the Asiatick Researches which contain translations of the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita.

1814. In the spring Schopenhauer checks out a copy of the Upanishads from the Weimar library. This edition, titled Oupnek’hat, is an 1801–1802 Latin translation by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperon, itself based on a 17th century Persian translation of the original Sanskrit. Schopenhauer would own a copy, referring to it as his “Bible.” Schopenhauer’s reading also includes works in early Buddhist and classical Chinese thought. In May, ongoing quarrels between Schopenhauer and his mother result in a final split. Schopenhauer leaves and moves to Dresden. He will never see his mother again.

1816. Publication of On Vision and Colors. It is the result of Schopenhauer’s discussions with Goethe. Working in Dresden, Schopenhauer comes upon his “single thought” that will become the core of his philosophy.

1818. Publication of The World as Will and Representation in March (it is published in 1818, but the title page bears the date 1819). It is regarded by Schopenhauer as his “principal work.” Schopenhauer provides strict conditions for the publication. Quarrels with the publisher.

1819. Schopenhauer visits Italy in December of 1818. While there, an illegitimate daughter is born in Dresden, but the child dies months later. In the spring of 1819 Schopenhauer is called back to Germany to help redress a family financial crisis. At the end of the year Schopenhauer applies to the University of Berlin to become an unsalaried lecturer (Privatdozent). In his application he specifically proposes teaching his course at the same time as Hegel. His proposed course is titled “General Philosophy, i.e. the Theory of the Essence of the World and Human Spirit.”

1820. In March Schopenhauer appears before the hiring committee at the University of Berlin to deliver his lecture and answer questions. Hegel is on the committee. Schopenhauer attempts to engage Hegel in a dispute, but the latter demurs. Schopenhauer is hired. In the summer, Schopenhauer offers his course (at the same time as that of Hegel). According to some accounts, only five students show up. It is the first and last time Schopenhauer would teach at a university.

1821. Schopenhauer begins an affair with Caroline Richter (also known as Caroline Medon), a dancer in the Berlin Opera. The affair will not last. At the end of the summer, a dispute over a noise disturbance breaks out between Schopenhauer and Caroline Marquet, a local seamstress. The dispute escalates and a series of lawsuits follow, occupying both parties for the next five years. In the fall Schopenhauer inquires about job opportunities at the University of Geissen. Nothing comes of it.

1823. After a second visit to Italy, Schopenhauer returns to Germany, spending the winter in Munich. All attempts to have The World as Will and Representation reviewed are ignored. Suffering from various chronic ailments and depression.

1824. After a stay in Switzerland, Schopenhauer moves again to Mannheim and then to Dresden.

1825. Schopenhauer returns to Berlin. Between 1824 and 1825 Schopenhauer attempts to convince publishers of several translation projects, including Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, none of which come to anything.

1826. Schopenhauer discovers the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Eventually he will convince the editors of Kant’s collected works to make this edition available, though it will not appear until 1837.

1828. Schopenhauer inquires about job opportunities at the University of Heidelberg. The year prior he inquires the same at the University of Wützburg. Nothing comes of these inquiries.

1829. Schopenhauer attempts to convince publishers of a translation of Gracían’s Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, for which Schopenhauer has spent the prior four years learning Spanish. Nothing comes of the project. Schopenhauer works on the translation anyway.

1831. Due to the cholera epidemic in Berlin, Schopenhauer flees the city and settles in Frankfurt. Apart from a year-long stay in Mannheim, he will remain in Frankfurt until his death. Over the next three decades he will follow an almost identical routine: waking early in the morning, he will have a bath; this is followed by coffee but no breakfast, and writing until noon; he will then practice playing the flute for half an hour, followed by lunch (usually at the Englisher Hof); reading until the late afternoon, followed by a two-hour daily walk, rain or shine; the evenings will be spent in the library (reading The Times), and afterwards, theatre or a concert; finally, dinner at a restaurant, and then home early to bed.

1836. Publication of On the Will in Nature.

1838. On 17 April Schopenhauer’s mother Johanna dies in Bonn. Schopenhauer does not attend the funeral. Schopenhauer will remain close to his sister Adele, corresponding with her frequently thereafter.

1839. Schopenhauer submits the essay “On the Freedom of the Human Will” to a contest held by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences. It is awarded the prize and translated into Norwegian.

1840. Schopenhauer submits the essay “On the Basis of Morality” to a contest held by the Royal Danish Society of Sciences. It is refused the prize. It is the only submission. In September the two essays are published as The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. The preface to the book is an extended tirade against both German Idealism (Hegel, Fichte, Schelling) and the Royal Danish Society.

1844. Publication of the second edition of The World as Will and Representation. The new edition includes revisions to the first edition, as well as a substantial, stand-alone second volume of new essays.

1847. Publication of revised, second edition of The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. The year prior Schopenhauer makes the acquaintance of Julius Frauenstädt, one of his earliest supporters. Throughout the mid-to-late 1840s, a handful of reviews of The World as Will and Representation appear, almost all of which are dismissive.

1849. Schopenhauer’s sister Adele dies on 25 August in Bonn. Schopenhauer mourns the loss. In December Schopenhauer’s white poodle Atma dies. Depression.

1851. Publication of Parerga and Paralipomena in two volumes.

1853. In April, the review “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy” is published in the London-based Westminster Review. It is one of the few laudatory reviews of Schopenhauer’s work to appear, and first synoptic review of his philosophy. It is translated into German and published in May.

1854. Publication of the second edition of On the Will in Nature. Publication of the second edition of On Vision and Colors. Correspondence with Wagner. Schopenhauer’s philosophy begins to gain recognition at universities in Bonn, Breslau, and Leipzig.

1859. Publication of the third edition of The World as Will and Representation.

1860. Arthur Schopenhauer dies on 21 September in his Frankfurt home at Schönen Aussicht 16.

FURTHER READING

Included here are selected translations of Schopenhauer’s work in English. Also included is a selection of secondary works on Schopenhauer, focusing on books of a general interest. There are several worthwhile biographies of Schopenhauer: David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Peter B. Lewis, Arthur Schopenhauer (Reaktion, 2012); Rudiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989). The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer (ed. Chirstopher Janaway et al.) offers scholarly editions of the main works. The standard German edition is Arthur Schopenhauer: Sämtliche Werke, edited by Arthur Hübscher.

SCHOPENHAUER IN ENGLISH

The Complete Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer. Trans. T. Bailey Saunders. Wiley, 1942

Essays and Aphorisms. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin, 1970.

The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. Open Court, 1974.

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings. Trans. and ed. David E. Cartwright, Edward E. Erdmann, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes. Ed. Arthur Hübscher and trans. E.F.J. Payne. Berg, 1988–1990.

Parerga and Paralipomena, vols. 1 & 2. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. Clarendon Press, 1974.

Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 1. Trans. and ed. Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2. Trans. and ed. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Philosophical Writings: Arthur Schopenhauer. Ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher. Continuum, 1994.

The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. Trans. and ed. Christopher Janaway. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

On Vision and Colors by Arthur Schopenhauer and Color Sphere by Philipp Otto Runge. Trans. Georg Stahl. Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.

The World as Will and Idea, in Three Volumes. Trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.

The World as Will and Representation, vols. 1 & 2. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. Dover, 1969.

The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1. Trans. and ed. by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2. Trans. and ed. by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

WORKS ON SCHOPENHAUER

App, Urs. Schopenhauer’s Compass. UniversityMedia, 2014.

___. The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy. UniversityMedia, 2014.

Atwell, John E. Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will. University of California Press, 1995.

Barua, Arati (ed.). Schopenhauer on Self, World, and Morality: Vedantic and Non-Vedantic Perspectives. Springer, 2017.

Barua, Arati, Michael Gerhard, and Matthias Kossler (eds.). Understanding Schopenhauer Through the Prism of Indian Culture. De Gruyter, 2012.

Beiser, Friedrick C. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Copleston, Frederick. Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism. Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1947.

Cross, Stephen. Schopenhauer’s Encounter with Indian Thought. University of Hawai’i Press, 2013.

Dienstag, Joshua Foa. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Droit, Roger-Pol. The Cult of Nothingness: Philosophers and the Buddha. Trans. David Streight and Pamela Vohnson. University of North Carolina, 2003.

Gardiner, Patrick. Schopenhauer. Penguin, 1967.

Hamlyn, D.W. Schopenhauer. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Hannan, Barbara. The Riddle of the World: A Reconsideration of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Hübscher, Arthur. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in Its Intellectual Context. Trans. Joachim T. Baer and David E. Cartwright. Edwin Mellen Press, 1989.

Jacquette, Dale (ed.). Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Janaway, Christopher. Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

___. Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Clarendon, 1989.

Janaway, Christopher (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Magee, Bryan. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Clarendon, 1997.

Mann, Thomas. “Presenting Schopenhauer.” The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer. Longmans, Green and Co., 1939.

McGill, V.J. Schopenhauer: Pessimist and Pagan. Brentano’s, 1931.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Schopenhauer as Educator.” Unfashionable Observations. Trans. Richard T. Gray. Stanford University Press, 1995.

Simmel, Georg. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein and Michael Weinstein. University of Illinois Press, 1991 [1907].

Singh, R. Raj. Death, Contemplation and Schopenhauer. Ashgate, 2007.

Vasalou, Sophia. Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Wicks, Robert. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Routledge, 2011.

Young, Julian. Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.

Zimmern, Helen. Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy. Allen & Unwin, 1932 [1876].

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