The World as Will and Idea

Chapter 14

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And what I have here described with feeble tongue and only in general terms, is no philosophical fable, invented by myself, and only of to-day; no, it was the enviable life of so many saints and beautiful souls among Christians, and still more among Hindus and Buddhists, and also among the believers of other religions. However different were the dogmas impressed on their reason, the same inward, direct, intuitive knowledge, from which alone all virtue and holiness proceed, expressed itself in precisely the same way in the conduct of life. For here also the great distinction between intuitive and abstract knowledge shows itself; a distinction which is of such importance and universal application in our whole investigation, and which has. .h.i.therto been too little attended to. There is a wide gulf between the two, which can only be crossed by the aid of philosophy, as regards the knowledge of the nature of the world.

Intuitively or _in concreto_, every man is really conscious of all philosophical truths, but to bring them to abstract knowledge, to reflection, is the work of philosophy, which neither ought nor is able to do more than this.

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

But the description I have given above of the denial of the will to live, of the conduct of a beautiful soul, of a resigned and voluntarily expiating saint, is merely abstract and general, and therefore cold. As the knowledge from which the denial of the will proceeds is intuitive and not abstract, it finds its most perfect expression, not in abstract conceptions, but in deeds and conduct. Therefore, in order to understand fully what we philosophically express as denial of the will to live, one must come to know examples of it in experience and actual life. Certainly they are not to be met with in daily experience: _Nam omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt_, Spinoza admirably says. Therefore, unless by a specially happy fate we are made eye-witnesses, we have to content ourselves with descriptions of the lives of such men. Indian literature, as we see from the little that we as yet know through translations, is very rich in descriptions of the lives of saints, penitents, Samanas or ascetics, Sannyasis or mendicants, and whatever else they may be called.

Even the well-known "Mythologie des Indous, par Mad. de Polier," though by no means to be commended in every respect, contains many excellent examples of this kind (especially in ch. 13, vol. ii.) Among Christians also there is no lack of examples which afford us the ill.u.s.trations we desire. See the biographies, for the most part badly written, of those persons who are sometimes called saintly souls, sometimes pietists, quietists, devout enthusiasts, and so forth. Collections of such biographies have been made at various times, such as Tersteegen"s "Leben heiliger Seelen," Reiz"s "Geschichte der Wiedergeborennen," in our own day, a collection by Kanne, which, with much that is bad, yet contains some good, and especially the "Leben der Beata Sturmin." To this category very properly belongs the life of St. Francis of a.s.sisi, that true personification of the ascetic, and prototype of all mendicant friars. His life, described by his younger contemporary, St. Bonaventura, also famous as a scholastic, has recently been republished. "Vita S. Francisci a S.

Bonaventura concinnata" (Soest, 1847), though shortly before a painstaking and detailed biography, making use of all sources of information, appeared in France, "Histoire de S. Francois d"a.s.sise, par Chavin de Mallan"

(1845). As an Oriental parallel of these monastic writings we have the very valuable work of Spence Hardy, "Eastern Monachism; an Account of the Order of Mendicants founded by Gotama Budha" (1850). It shows us the same thing in another dress. We also see what a matter of indifference it is whether it proceeds from a theistical or an atheistical religion. But as a special and exceedingly full example and practical ill.u.s.tration of the conceptions I have established, I can thoroughly recommend the "Autobiography of Madame de Guion." To become acquainted with this great and beautiful soul, the very thought of whom always fills me with reverence, and to do justice to the excellence of her disposition while making allowance for the superst.i.tion of her reason, must be just as delightful to every man of the better sort as with vulgar thinkers, _i.e._, the majority, that book will always stand in bad repute. For it is the case with regard to everything, that each man can only prize that which to a certain extent is a.n.a.logous to him and for which he has at least a slight inclination. This holds good of ethical concerns as well as of intellectual. We might to a certain extent regard the well-known French biography of Spinoza as a case in point, if we used as a key to it that n.o.ble introduction to his very insufficient essay, "De Emendatione Intellectus," a pa.s.sage which I can also recommend as the most effectual means I know of stilling the storm of the pa.s.sions. Finally, even the great Goethe, Greek as he is, did not think it below his dignity to show us this most beautiful side of humanity in the magic mirror of poetic art, for he represented the life of Fraulein Klettenberg in an idealised form in his "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," and later, in his own biography, gave us also an historical account of it. Besides this, he twice told the story of the life of St. Philippo Neri. The history of the world, will, and indeed must, keep silence about the men whose conduct is the best and only adequate ill.u.s.tration of this important point of our investigation, for the material of the history of the world is quite different, and indeed opposed to this. It is not the denial of the will to live, but its a.s.sertion and its manifestation in innumerable individuals in which its conflict with itself at the highest grade of its objectification appears with perfect distinctness, and brings before our eyes, now the ascendancy of the individual through prudence, now the might of the many through their ma.s.s, now the might of chance personified as fate, always the vanity and emptiness of the whole effort. We, however, do not follow here the course of phenomena in time, but, as philosophers, we seek to investigate the ethical significance of action, and take this as the only criterion of what for us is significant and important. Thus we will not be withheld by any fear of the constant numerical superiority of vulgarity and dulness from acknowledging that the greatest, most important, and most significant phenomenon that the world can show is not the conqueror of the world, but the subduer of it; is nothing but the quiet, un.o.bserved life of a man who has attained to the knowledge in consequence of which he surrenders and denies that will to live which fills everything and strives and strains in all, and which first gains freedom here in him alone, so that his conduct becomes the exact opposite of that of other men. In this respect, therefore, for the philosopher, these accounts of the lives of holy, self-denying men, badly as they are generally written, and mixed as they are with superst.i.tion and nonsense, are, because of the significance of the material, immeasurably more instructive and important than even Plutarch and Livy.

It will further a.s.sist us much in obtaining a more definite and full knowledge of what we have expressed abstractly and generally, according to our method of exposition, as the denial of the will to live, if we consider the moral teaching that has been imparted with this intention, and by men who were full of this spirit; and this will also show how old our view is, though the pure philosophical expression of it may be quite new. The teaching of this kind which lies nearest to hand is Christianity, the ethics of which are entirely in the spirit indicated, and lead not only to the highest degrees of human love, but also to renunciation. The germ of this last side of it is certainly distinctly present in the writings of the Apostles, but it was only fully developed and expressed later. We find the Apostles enjoining the love of our neighbour as ourselves, benevolence, the requital of hatred with love and well-doing, patience, meekness, the endurance of all possible injuries without resistance, abstemiousness in nourishment to keep down l.u.s.t, resistance to sensual desire, if possible, altogether. We already see here the first degrees of asceticism, or denial of the will proper. This last expression denotes that which in the Gospels is called denying ourselves and taking up the cross (Matt. xvi. 24, 25; Mark viii. 34, 35; Luke ix. 23, 24, xiv.

26, 27, 33). This tendency soon developed itself more and more, and was the origin of hermits, anchorites, and monasticism-an origin which in itself was pure and holy, but for that very reason unsuitable for the great majority of men; therefore what developed out of it could only be hypocrisy and wickedness, for _abusus optimi pessimus_. In more developed Christianity, we see that seed of asceticism unfold into the full flower in the writings of the Christian saints and mystics. These preach, besides the purest love, complete resignation, voluntary and absolute poverty, genuine calmness, perfect indifference to all worldly things, dying to our own will and being born again in G.o.d, entire forgetting of our own person, and sinking ourselves in the contemplation of G.o.d. A full exposition of this will be found in Fenelon"s "Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure." But the spirit of this development of Christianity is certainly nowhere so fully and powerfully expressed as in the writings of the German mystics, in the works of Meister Eckhard, and in that justly famous book "Die Deutsche Theologie," of which Luther says in the introduction to it which he wrote, that with the exception of the Bible and St. Augustine, he had learnt more from it of what G.o.d, Christ, and man are than from any other book. Yet we only got the genuine and correct text of it in the year 1851, in the Stuttgart edition by Pfeiffer. The precepts and doctrines which are laid down there are the most perfect exposition, sprung from deep inward conviction of what I have presented as the denial of the will. It should therefore be studied more closely in that form before it is dogmatised about with Jewish-Protestant a.s.surance. Tauler"s "Nachfolgung des armen Leben Christi," and also his "Medulla Animae," are written in the same admirable spirit, though not quite equal in value to that work. In my opinion the teaching of these genuine Christian mystics, when compared with the teaching of the New Testament, is as alcohol to wine, or what becomes visible in the New Testament as through a veil and mist appears to us in the works of the mystics without cloak or disguise, in full clearness and distinctness. Finally, the New Testament might be regarded as the first initiation, the mystics as the second,-s???a ?a?

e?a?a ?st???a.

We find, however, that which we have called the denial of the will to live more fully developed, more variously expressed, and more vividly represented in the ancient Sanscrit writings than could be the case in the Christian Church and the Western world. That this important ethical view of life could here attain to a fuller development and a more distinct expression is perhaps princ.i.p.ally to be ascribed to the fact that it was not confined by an element quite foreign to it, as Christianity is by the Jewish theology, to which its sublime author had necessarily to adopt and accommodate it, partly consciously, partly, it may be, unconsciously. Thus Christianity is made up of two very different const.i.tuent parts, and I should like to call the purely ethical part especially and indeed exclusively Christian, and distinguish it from the Jewish dogmatism with which it is combined. If, as has often been feared, and especially at the present time, that excellent and salutary religion should altogether decline, I should look for the reason of this simply in the fact that it does not consist of one single element, but of two originally different elements, which have only been combined through the accident of history.

In such a case dissolution had to follow through the separation of these elements, arising from their different relationship to and reaction against the progressive spirit of the age. But even after this dissolution the purely ethical part must always remain uninjured, because it is indestructible. Our knowledge of Hindu literature is still very imperfect.

Yet, as we find their ethical teaching variously and powerfully expressed in the Vedas, Puranas, poems, myths, legends of their saints, maxims and precepts,(85) we see that it inculcates love of our neighbour with complete renunciation of self-love; love generally, not confined to mankind, but including all living creatures; benevolence, even to the giving away of the hard-won wages of daily toil; unlimited patience towards all who injure us; the requital of all wickedness, however base, with goodness and love; voluntary and glad endurance of all ignominy; abstinence from all animal food; perfect chast.i.ty and renunciation of all sensual pleasure for him who strives after true holiness; the surrender of all possessions, the forsaking of every dwelling-place and of all relatives; deep unbroken solitude, spent in silent contemplation, with voluntary penance and terrible slow self-torture for the absolute mortification of the will, torture which extends to voluntary death by starvation, or by men giving themselves up to crocodiles, or flinging themselves over the sacred precipice in the Himalayas, or being buried alive, or, finally, by flinging themselves under the wheels of the huge car of an idol drawn along amid the singing, shouting, and dancing of bayaderes. And even yet these precepts, whose origin reaches back more than four thousand years, are carried out in practice, in some cases even to the utmost extreme,(86) and this notwithstanding the fact that the Hindu nation has been broken up into so many parts. A religion which demands the greatest sacrifices, and which has yet remained so long in practice in a nation that embraces so many millions of persons, cannot be an arbitrarily invented superst.i.tion, but must have its foundation in the nature of man. But besides this, if we read the life of a Christian penitent or saint, and also that of a Hindu saint, we cannot sufficiently wonder at the harmony we find between them. In the case of such radically different dogmas, customs, and circ.u.mstances, the inward life and effort of both is the same. And the same harmony prevails in the maxims prescribed for both of them. For example, Tauler speaks of the absolute poverty which one ought to seek, and which consists in giving away and divesting oneself completely of everything from which one might draw comfort or worldly pleasure, clearly because all this constantly affords new nourishment to the will, which it is intended to destroy entirely. And as an Indian counterpart of this, we find in the precepts of Fo that the Sania.s.si, who ought to be without a dwelling and entirely without property, is further finally enjoined not to lay himself down often under the same tree, lest he should acquire a preference or inclination for it above other trees. The Christian mystic and the teacher of the Vedanta philosophy agree in this respect also, they both regard all outward works and religious exercises as superfluous for him who has attained to perfection. So much agreement in the case of such different ages and nations is a practical proof that what is expressed here is not, as optimistic dulness likes to a.s.sert, an eccentricity and perversity of the mind, but an essential side of human nature, which only appears so rarely because of its excellence.

I have now indicated the sources from which there may be obtained a direct knowledge, drawn from life itself, of the phenomena in which the denial of the will to live exhibits itself. In some respects this is the most important point of our whole work; yet I have only explained it quite generally, for it is better to refer to those who speak from direct experience, than to increase the size of this book unduly by weak repet.i.tions of what is said by them.

I only wish to add a little to the general indication of the nature of this state. We saw above that the wicked man, by the vehemence of his volition, suffers constant, consuming, inward pain, and finally, if all objects of volition are exhausted, quenches the fiery thirst of his self-will by the sight of the suffering of others. He, on the contrary, who has attained to the denial of the will to live, however poor, joyless, and full of privation his condition may appear when looked at externally, is yet filled with inward joy and the true peace of heaven. It is not the restless strain of life, the jubilant delight which has keen suffering as its preceding or succeeding condition, in the experience of the man who loves life; but it is a peace that cannot be shaken, a deep rest and inward serenity, a state which we cannot behold without the greatest longing when it is brought before our eyes or our imagination, because we at once recognise it as that which alone is right, infinitely surpa.s.sing everything else, upon which our better self cries within us the great _sapere aude_. Then we feel that every gratification of our wishes won from the world is merely like the alms which the beggar receives from life to-day that he may hunger again on the morrow; resignation, on the contrary, is like an inherited estate, it frees the owner for ever from all care.

It will be remembered from the Third Book that the aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists in great measure in the fact that in entering the state of pure contemplation we are lifted for the moment above all willing, _i.e._, all wishes and cares; we become, as it were, freed from ourselves. We are no longer the individual whose knowledge is subordinated to the service of its constant willing, the correlative of the particular thing to which objects are motives, but the eternal subject of knowing purified from will, the correlative of the Platonic Idea. And we know that these moments in which, delivered from the ardent strain of will, we seem to rise out of the heavy atmosphere of earth, are the happiest which we experience. From this we can understand how blessed the life of a man must be whose will is silenced, not merely for a moment, as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but for ever, indeed altogether extinguished, except as regards the last glimmering spark that retains the body in life, and will be extinguished with its death. Such a man, who, after many bitter struggles with his own nature, has finally conquered entirely, continues to exist only as a pure, knowing being, the undimmed mirror of the world.

Nothing can trouble him more, nothing can move him, for he has cut all the thousand cords of will which hold us bound to the world, and, as desire, fear, envy, anger, drag us. .h.i.ther and thither in constant pain. He now looks back smiling and at rest on the delusions of this world, which once were able to move and agonise his spirit also, but which now stand before him as utterly indifferent to him, as the chess-men when the game is ended, or as, in the morning, the cast-off masquerading dress which worried and disquieted us in a night in Carnival. Life and its forms now pa.s.s before him as a fleeting illusion, as a light morning dream before half-waking eyes, the real world already shining through it so that it can no longer deceive; and like this morning dream, they finally vanish altogether without any violent transition. From this we can understand the meaning of Madame Guion when towards the end of her autobiography she often expresses herself thus: "Everything is alike to me; I _cannot_ will anything more: often I know not whether I exist or not." In order to express how, after the extinction of the will, the death of the body (which is indeed only the manifestation of the will, and therefore loses all significance when the will is abolished) can no longer have any bitterness, but is very welcome, I may be allowed to quote the words of that holy penitent, although they are not very elegantly turned: "_Midi de la gloire; jour ou il n"y a plus de nuit; vie qui ne craint plus la mort, dans la mort meme: parceque la mort a vaincu la mort, et que celui qui a souffert la premiere mort, ne goutera plus la seconde mort_" (Vie de Mad.

de Guion, vol. ii. p. 13).

We must not, however, suppose that when, by means of the knowledge which acts as a quieter of will, the denial of the will to live has once appeared, it never wavers or vacillates, and that we can rest upon it as on an a.s.sured possession. Rather, it must ever anew be attained by a constant battle. For since the body is the will itself only in the form of objectivity or as manifestation in the world as idea, so long as the body lives, the whole will to live exists potentially, and constantly strives to become actual, and to burn again with all its ardour. Therefore that peace and blessedness in the life of holy men which we have described is only found as the flower which proceeds from the constant victory over the will, and the ground in which it grows is the constant battle with the will to live, for no one can have lasting peace upon earth. We therefore see the histories of the inner life of saints full of spiritual conflicts, temptations, and absence of grace, _i.e._, the kind of knowledge which makes all motives ineffectual, and as an universal quieter silences all volition, gives the deepest peace and opens the door of freedom. Therefore also we see those who have once attained to the denial of the will to live strive with all their might to keep upon this path, by enforced renunciation of every kind, by penance and severity of life, and by selecting whatever is disagreeable to them, all in order to suppress the will, which is constantly springing up anew. Hence, finally, because they already know the value of salvation, their anxious carefulness to retain the hard-won blessing, their scruples of conscience about every innocent pleasure, or about every little excitement of their vanity, which here also dies last, the most immovable, the most active, and the most foolish of all the inclinations of man. By the term _asceticism_, which I have used so often, I mean in its narrower sense this _intentional_ breaking of the will by the refusal of what is agreeable and the selection of what is disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen life of penance and self-chastis.e.m.e.nt for the continual mortification of the will.

We see this practised by him who has attained to the denial of the will in order to enable him to persist in it; but suffering in general, as it is inflicted by fate, is a second way (de?te??? p????(87)) of attaining to that denial. Indeed, we may a.s.sume that most men only attain to it in this way, and that it is the suffering which is personally experienced, not that which is merely known, which most frequently produces complete resignation, often only at the approach of death. For only in the case of a few is the mere knowledge which, seeing through the _principium individuationis_, first produces perfect goodness of disposition and universal love of humanity, and finally enables them to regard all the suffering of the world as their own; only in the case of a few, I say, is this knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of the will. Even with him who approaches this point, it is almost invariably the case that the tolerable condition of his own body, the flattery of the moment, the delusion of hope, and the satisfaction of the will, which is ever presenting itself anew, _i.e._, l.u.s.t, is a constant hindrance to the denial of the will, and a constant temptation to the renewed a.s.sertion of it. Therefore in this respect all these illusions have been personified as the devil. Thus in most cases the will must be broken by great personal suffering before its self-conquest appears. Then we see the man who has pa.s.sed through all the increasing degrees of affliction with the most vehement resistance, and is finally brought to the verge of despair, suddenly retire into himself, know himself and the world, change his whole nature, rise above himself and all suffering, as if purified and sanctified by it, in inviolable peace, blessedness, and sublimity, willingly renounce everything he previously desired with all his might, and joyfully embrace death. It is the refined silver of the denial of the will to live that suddenly comes forth from the purifying flame of suffering. It is salvation. Sometimes we see even those who were very wicked purified to this degree by great grief; they have become new beings and are completely changed. Therefore their former misdeeds trouble their consciences no more, yet they willingly atone for them by death, and gladly see the end of the manifestation of that will which is now foreign to them and abhorred by them. The great Goethe has given us a distinct and visible representation of this denial of the will, brought about by great misfortunes and despair of all deliverance, in his immortal masterpiece "Faust," in the story of the sufferings of Gretchen. I know no parallel to this in poetry. It is a perfect example of the second path that leads to the denial of the will, not, as the first, through the mere knowledge of the sufferings of a whole world which one has voluntarily acquired, but through excessive suffering experienced in one"s own person. Many tragedies certainly end by conducting their strong-willed heroes to the point of entire resignation, and then generally the will to live and its manifestation end together, but no representation that is known to me brings what is essential to that change so distinctly before us, free from all that is extraneous, as the part of "Faust" I have referred to.

In actual life we see that those unfortunate persons who have to drink to the dregs the greatest cup of suffering, since when all hope is taken from them they have to face with full consciousness a shameful, violent, and often painful death on the scaffold, are very frequently changed in this way. We must not indeed a.s.sume that there is so great a difference between their character and that of most men as their fate would seem to indicate, but must attribute the latter for the most part to circ.u.mstances; yet they are guilty and to a considerable degree bad. We see, however, many of them, when they have entirely lost hope, changed in the way referred to.

They now show actual goodness and purity of disposition, true abhorrence of doing any act in the least degree bad or unkind. They forgive their enemies, even if it is through them that they innocently suffer; and not with words merely and a sort of hypocritical fear of the judges of the lower world, but in reality and with inward earnestness and no desire for revenge. Indeed, their sufferings and death at last becomes dear to them, for the denial of the will to live has appeared; they often decline the deliverance when it is offered, and die gladly, peacefully, and happily.

To them the last secret of life has revealed itself in their excessive pain; the secret that misery and wickedness, sorrow and hate, the sufferer and the inflicter of suffering, however different they may appear to the knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason, are in themselves one, the manifestation of that one will to live which objectifies its conflict with itself by means of the _principium individuationis_. They have learned to know both sides in full measure, the badness and the misery; and since at last they see the ident.i.ty of the two, they reject them both at once; they deny the will to live. In what myths and dogmas they account to their reason for this intuitive and direct knowledge and for their own change is, as has been said, a matter of no importance.

Matthias Claudius must without doubt have witnessed a change of mind of this description when he wrote the remarkable essay in the "Wandsbecker Boten" (pt. i. p. 115) with the t.i.tle "Bekehrungsgeschichte des ***"

("History of the Conversion of ***"), which concludes thus: "Man"s way of thinking may pa.s.s from one point of the periphery to the opposite point, and again back to the former point, if circ.u.mstances mark out for him the path. And these changes in a man are really nothing great or interesting, but that _remarkable, catholic, transcendental change_ in which the whole circle is irreparably broken up and all the laws of psychology become vain and empty when the coat is stripped from the shoulders, or at least turned outside in, and as it were scales fall from a man"s eyes, is such that every one who has breath in his nostrils forsakes father and mother if he can hear or experience something certain about it."

The approach of death and hopelessness are in other respects not absolutely necessary for such a purification through suffering. Even without them the knowledge of the contradiction of the will to live with itself can, through great misfortune and pain, force an entrance, and the vanity of all striving become recognised. Hence it has often happened that men who have led a very restless life in the full strain of the pa.s.sions, kings, heroes, and adventurers, suddenly change, betake themselves to resignation and penance, become hermits or monks. To this cla.s.s belong all true accounts of conversions; for example, that of Raymond Lully, who had long wooed a fair lady, and was at last admitted to her chamber, antic.i.p.ating the fulfilment of all his wishes, when she, opening her bodice, showed him her bosom frightfully eaten with cancer. From that moment, as if he had looked into h.e.l.l, he was changed; he forsook the court of the king of Majorca, and went into the desert to do penance.(88) This conversion is very like that of the Abbe Rance, which I have briefly related in the 48th chapter of the Supplement. If we consider how in both cases the transition from the pleasure to the horror of life was the occasion of it, this throws some light upon the remarkable fact that it is among the French, the most cheerful, gay, sensuous, and frivolous nation in Europe, that by far the strictest of all monastic orders, the Trappists, arose, was re-established by Rance after its fall, and has maintained itself to the present day in all its purity and strictness, in spite of revolutions, Church reformations, and encroachments of infidelity.

But a knowledge such as that referred to above of the nature of this existence may leave us again along with the occasion of it and the will to live, and with it the previous character may reappear. Thus we see that the pa.s.sionate Benvenuto Cellini was changed in this way, once when he was in prison, and again when very ill; but when the suffering pa.s.sed over, he fell back again into his old state. In general, the denial of the will to live by no means proceeds from suffering with the necessity of an effect from its cause, but the will remains free; for this is indeed the one point at which its freedom appears directly in the phenomenon; hence the astonishment which Asmus expresses so strongly at the "transcendental change." In the case of every suffering, it is always possible to conceive a will which exceeds it in intensity and is therefore unconquered by it.

Thus Plato speaks in the "Phaedon" of men who up to the moment of their execution feast, drink, and indulge in sensuous pleasure, a.s.serting life even to the death. Shakespeare shows us in Cardinal Beaufort the fearful end of a profligate, who dies full of despair, for no suffering or death can break his will, which is vehement to the extreme of wickedness.(89)

The more intense the will is, the more glaring is the conflict of its manifestation, and thus the greater is the suffering. A world which was the manifestation of a far more intense will to live than this world manifests would produce so much the greater suffering; would thus be a h.e.l.l.

All suffering, since it is a mortification and a call to resignation, has potentially a sanctifying power. This is the explanation of the fact that every great misfortune or deep pain inspires a certain awe. But the sufferer only really becomes an object of reverence when, surveying the course of his life as a chain of sorrows, or mourning some great and incurable misfortune, he does not really look at the special combination of circ.u.mstances which has plunged his own life into suffering, nor stops at the single great misfortune that has befallen him; for in so doing his knowledge still follows the principle of sufficient reason, and clings to the particular phenomenon; he still wills life only not under the conditions which have happened to him; but only then, I say, he is truly worthy of reverence when he raises his glance from the particular to the universal, when he regards his suffering as merely an example of the whole, and for him, since in a moral regard he partakes of genius, one case stands for a thousand, so that the whole of life conceived as essentially suffering brings him to resignation. Therefore it inspires reverence when in Goethe"s "Torquato Ta.s.so" the princess speaks of how her own life and that of her relations has always been sad and joyless, and yet regards the matter from an entirely universal point of view.

A very n.o.ble character we always imagine with a certain trace of quiet sadness, which is anything but a constant fretfulness at daily annoyances (this would be an ign.o.ble trait, and lead us to fear a bad disposition), but is a consciousness derived from knowledge of the vanity of all possessions, of the suffering of all life, not merely of his own. But such knowledge may primarily be awakened by the personal experience of suffering, especially some one great sorrow, as a single unfulfilled wish brought Petrarch to that state of resigned sadness concerning the whole of life which appeals to us so pathetically in his works; for the Daphne he pursued had to flee from his hands in order to leave him, instead of herself, the immortal laurel. When through some such great and irrevocable denial of fate the will is to some extent broken, almost nothing else is desired, and the character shows itself mild, just, n.o.ble, and resigned.

When, finally, grief has no definite object, but extends itself over the whole of life, then it is to a certain extent a going into itself, a withdrawal, a gradual disappearance of the will, whose visible manifestation, the body, it imperceptibly but surely undermines, so that a man feels a certain loosening of his bonds, a mild foretaste of that death which promises to be the abolition at once of the body and of the will.

Therefore a secret pleasure accompanies this grief, and it is this, as I believe, which the most melancholy of all nations has called "the joy of grief." But here also lies the danger of _sentimentality_, both in life itself and in the representation of it in poetry; when a man is always mourning and lamenting without courageously rising to resignation. In this way we lose both earth and heaven, and retain merely a watery sentimentality. Only if suffering a.s.sumes the form of pure knowledge, and this, acting as a _quieter of the will_, brings about resignation, is it worthy of reverence. In this regard, however, we feel a certain respect at the sight of every great sufferer which is akin to the feeling excited by virtue and n.o.bility of character, and also seems like a reproach of our own happy condition. We cannot help regarding every sorrow, both our own and those of others, as at least a potential advance towards virtue and holiness, and, on the contrary, pleasures and worldly satisfactions as a retrogression from them. This goes so far, that every man who endures a great bodily or mental suffering, indeed every one who merely performs some physical labour which demands the greatest exertion, in the sweat of his brow and with evident exhaustion, yet with patience and without murmuring, every such man, I say, if we consider him with close attention, appears to us like a sick man who tries a painful cure, and who willingly, and even with satisfaction, endures the suffering it causes him, because he knows that the more he suffers the more the cause of his disease is affected, and that therefore the present suffering is the measure of his cure.

According to what has been said, the denial of the will to live, which is just what is called absolute, entire resignation, or holiness, always proceeds from that quieter of the will which the knowledge of its inner conflict and essential vanity, expressing themselves in the suffering of all living things, becomes. The difference, which we have represented as two paths, consists in whether that knowledge is called up by suffering which is merely and purely _known_, and is freely appropriated by means of the penetration of the _principium individuationis_, or by suffering which is directly _felt_ by a man himself. True salvation, deliverance from life and suffering, cannot even be imagined without complete denial of the will. Till then, every one is simply this will itself, whose manifestation is an ephemeral existence, a constantly vain and empty striving, and the world full of suffering we have represented, to which all irrevocably and in like manner belong. For we found above that life is always a.s.sured to the will to live, and its one real form is the present, from which they can never escape, since birth and death reign in the phenomenal world. The Indian mythus expresses this by saying "they are born again." The great ethical difference of character means this, that the bad man is infinitely far from the attainment of the knowledge from which the denial of the will proceeds, and therefore he is in truth _actually_ exposed to all the miseries which appear in life as _possible_; for even the present fortunate condition of his personality is merely a phenomenon produced by the _principium individuationis_, and a delusion of Maya, the happy dream of a beggar. The sufferings which in the vehemence and ardour of his will he inflicts upon others are the measure of the suffering, the experience of which in his own person cannot break his will, and plainly lead it to the denial of itself. All true and pure love, on the other hand, and even all free justice, proceed from the penetration of the _principium individuationis_, which, if it appears with its full power, results in perfect sanctification and salvation, the phenomenon of which is the state of resignation described above, the unbroken peace which accompanies it, and the greatest delight in death.(90)

-- 69. Suicide, the actual doing away with the individual manifestation of will, differs most widely from the denial of the will to live, which is the single outstanding act of free-will in the manifestation, and is therefore, as Asmus calls it, the transcendental change. This last has been fully considered in the course of our work. Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phenomenon of strong a.s.sertion of will; for the essence of negation lies in this, that the joys of life are shunned, not its sorrows. The suicide wills life, and is only dissatisfied with the conditions under which it has presented itself to him. He therefore by no means surrenders the will to live, but only life, in that he destroys the individual manifestation. He wills life-wills the unrestricted existence and a.s.sertion of the body; but the complication of circ.u.mstances does not allow this, and there results for him great suffering. The very will to live finds itself so much hampered in this particular manifestation that it cannot put forth its energies. It therefore comes to such a determination as is in conformity with its own nature, which lies outside the conditions of the principle of sufficient reason, and to which, therefore, all particular manifestations are alike indifferent, inasmuch as it itself remains unaffected by all appearing and pa.s.sing away, and is the inner life of all things; for that firm inward a.s.surance by reason of which we all live free from the constant dread of death, the a.s.surance that a phenomenal existence can never be wanting to the will, supports our action even in the case of suicide. Thus the will to live appears just as much in suicide (Siva) as in the satisfaction of self-preservation (Vishnu) and in the sensual pleasure of procreation (Brahma). This is the inner meaning of the unity of the Trimurtis, which is embodied in its entirety in every human being, though in time it raises now one, now another, of its three heads. Suicide stands in the same relation to the denial of the will as the individual thing does to the Idea. The suicide denies only the individual, not the species. We have already seen that as life is always a.s.sured to the will to live, and as sorrow is inseparable from life, suicide, the wilful destruction of the single phenomenal existence, is a vain and foolish act; for the thing-in-itself remains unaffected by it, even as the rainbow endures however fast the drops which support it for the moment may change. But, more than this, it is also the masterpiece of Maya, as the most flagrant example of the contradiction of the will to live with itself. As we found this contradiction in the case of the lowest manifestations of will, in the permanent struggle of all the forces of nature, and of all organic individuals for matter and time and s.p.a.ce; and as we saw this antagonism come ever more to the front with terrible distinctness in the ascending grades of the objectification of the will, so at last in the highest grade, the Idea of man, it reaches the point at which, not only the individuals which express the same Idea extirpate each other, but even the same individual declares war against itself. The vehemence with which it wills life, and revolts against what hinders it, namely, suffering, brings it to the point of destroying itself; so that the individual will, by its own act, puts an end to that body which is merely its particular visible expression, rather than permit suffering to break the will. Just because the suicide cannot give up willing, he gives up living. The will a.s.serts itself here even in putting an end to its own manifestation, because it can no longer a.s.sert itself otherwise. As, however, it was just the suffering which it so shuns that was able, as mortification of the will, to bring it to the denial of itself, and hence to freedom, so in this respect the suicide is like a sick man, who, after a painful operation which would entirely cure him has been begun, will not allow it to be completed, but prefers to retain his disease. Suffering approaches and reveals itself as the possibility of the denial of will; but the will rejects it, in that it destroys the body, the manifestation of itself, in order that it may remain unbroken. This is the reason why almost all ethical teachers, whether philosophical or religious, condemn suicide, although they themselves can only give far-fetched sophistical reasons for their opinion. But if a human being was ever restrained from committing suicide by purely moral motives, the inmost meaning of this self-conquest (in whatever ideas his reason may have clothed it) was this: "I will not shun suffering, in order that it may help to put an end to the will to live, whose manifestation is so wretched, by so strengthening the knowledge of the real nature of the world which is already beginning to dawn upon me, that it may become the final quieter of my will, and may free me for ever."

It is well known that from time to time cases occur in which the act of suicide extends to the children. The father first kills the children he loves, and then himself. Now, if we consider that conscience, religion, and all influencing ideas teach him to look upon murder as the greatest of crimes, and that, in spite of this, he yet commits it, in the hour of his own death, and when he is altogether uninfluenced by any egotistical motive, such a deed can only be explained in the following manner: in this case, the will of the individual, the father, recognises itself immediately in the children, though involved in the delusion of mistaking the appearance for the true nature; and as he is at the same time deeply impressed with the knowledge of the misery of all life, he now thinks to put an end to the inner nature itself, along with the appearance, and thus seeks to deliver from existence and its misery both himself and his children, in whom he discerns himself as living again. It would be an error precisely a.n.a.logous to this to suppose that one may reach the same end as is attained through voluntary chast.i.ty by frustrating the aim of nature in fecundation; or indeed if, in consideration of the unendurable suffering of life, parents were to use means for the destruction of their new-born children, instead of doing everything possible to ensure life to that which is struggling into it. For if the will to live is there, as it is the only metaphysical reality, or the thing-in-itself, no physical force can break it, but can only destroy its manifestation at this place and time. It itself can never be transcended except through knowledge.

Thus the only way of salvation is, that the will shall manifest itself unrestrictedly, in order that in this individual manifestation it may come to apprehend its own nature. Only as the result of this knowledge can the will transcend itself, and thereby end the suffering which is inseparable from its manifestation. It is quite impossible to accomplish this end by physical force, as by destroying the germ, or by killing the new-born child, or by committing suicide. Nature guides the will to the light, just because it is only in the light that it can work out its salvation.

Therefore the aims of Nature are to be promoted in every way as soon as the will to live, which is its inner being, has determined itself.

There is a species of suicide which seems to be quite distinct from the common kind, though its occurrence has perhaps not yet been fully established. It is starvation, voluntarily chosen on the ground of extreme asceticism. All instances of it, however, have been accompanied and obscured by much religious fanaticism, and even superst.i.tion. Yet it seems that the absolute denial of will may reach the point at which the will shall be wanting to take the necessary nourishment for the support of the natural life. This kind of suicide is so far from being the result of the will to live, that such a completely resigned ascetic only ceases to live because he has already altogether ceased to will. No other death than that by starvation is in this case conceivable (unless it were the result of some special superst.i.tion); for the intention to cut short the torment would itself be a stage in the a.s.sertion of will. The dogmas which satisfy the reason of such a penitent delude him with the idea that a being of a higher nature has inculcated the fasting to which his own inner tendency drives him. Old examples of this may be found in the "Breslauer Sammlung von Natur- und Medicin-Geschichten," September 1799, p. 363; in Bayle"s "Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres," February 1685, p. 189; in Zimmermann, "Ueber die Einsamkeit," vol. i. p. 182; in the "Histoire de l"Academie des Sciences" for 1764, an account by Houttuyn, which is quoted in the "Sammlung fur praktische Aerzte," vol. i. p. 69. More recent accounts may be found in Hufeland"s "Journal fur praktische Heilkunde,"

vol. x. p. 181, and vol. xlviii. p. 95; also in Na.s.se"s "Zeitschrift fur psychische Aerzte," 1819, part iii. p. 460; and in the "Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal," 1809, vol. v. p. 319. In the year 1833 all the papers announced that the English historian, Dr. Lingard, had died in January at Dover of voluntary starvation; according to later accounts, it was not he himself, but a relation of his who died. Still in these accounts the persons were generally described as insane, and it is no longer possible to find out how far this was the case. But I will give here a more recent case of this kind, if it were only to ensure the preservation of one of the rare instances of this striking and extraordinary phenomenon of human nature, which, to all appearance at any rate, belongs to the category to which I wish to a.s.sign it and could hardly be explained in any other way. This case is reported in the "Nurnberger Correspondenten" of the 29th July 1813, in these words:-"We hear from Bern that in a thick wood near Thurnen a hut has been discovered in which was lying the body of a man who had been dead about a month. His clothes gave little or no clue to his social position. Two very fine shirts lay beside him. The most important article, however, was a Bible interleaved with white paper, part of which had been written upon by the deceased. In this writing he gives the date of his departure from home (but does not mention where his home was). He then says that he was driven by the Spirit of G.o.d into the wilderness to pray and fast. During his journey he had fasted seven days and then he had again taken food. After this he had begun again to fast, and continued to do so for the same number of days as before. From this point we find each day marked with a stroke, and of these there are five, at the expiration of which the pilgrim presumably died. There was further found a letter to a clergyman about a sermon which the deceased heard him preach, but the letter was not addressed." Between this voluntary death arising from extreme asceticism and the common suicide resulting from despair there may be various intermediate species and combinations, though this is hard to find out.

But human nature has depths, obscurities, and perplexities, the a.n.a.lysis and elucidation of which is a matter of the very greatest difficulty.

-- 70. It might be supposed that the entire exposition (now terminated) of that which I call the denial of the will is irreconcilable with the earlier explanation of necessity, which belongs just as much to motivation as to every other form of the principle of sufficient reason, and according to which, motives, like all causes, are only occasional causes, upon which the character unfolds its nature and reveals it with the necessity of a natural law, on account of which we absolutely denied freedom as _liberum arbitrium indifferentiae_. But far from suppressing this here, I would call it to mind. In truth, real freedom, _i.e._, independence of the principle of sufficient reason, belongs to the will only as a thing-in-itself, not to its manifestation, whose essential form is everywhere the principle of sufficient reason, the element or sphere of necessity. But the one case in which that freedom can become directly visible in the manifestation is that in which it makes an end of what manifests itself, and because the mere manifestation, as a link in the chain of causes, the living body in time, which contains only phenomena, still continues to exist, the will which manifests itself through this phenomenon then stands in contradiction to it, for it denies what the phenomenon expresses. In such a case the organs of generation, for example, as the visible form of the s.e.xual impulse, are there and in health; but yet, in the inmost consciousness, no sensual gratification is desired; and although the whole body is only the visible expression of the will to live, yet the motives which correspond to this will no longer act; indeed, the dissolution of the body, the end of the individual, and in this way the greatest check to the natural will, is welcome and desired.

Now, the contradiction between our a.s.sertions of the necessity of the determination of the will by motives, in accordance with the character, on the one hand, and of the possibility of the entire suppression of the will whereby the motives become powerless, on the other hand, is only the repet.i.tion in the reflection of philosophy of this _real_ contradiction which arises from the direct encroachment of the freedom of the will-in-itself, which knows no necessity, into the sphere of the necessity of its manifestation. But the key to the solution of these contradictions lies in the fact that the state in which the character is withdrawn from the power of motives does not proceed directly from the will, but from a changed form of knowledge. So long as the knowledge is merely that which is involved in the _principium individuationis_ and exclusively follows the principle of sufficient reason, the strength of the motives is irresistible. But when the _principium individuationis_ is seen through, when the Ideas, and indeed the inner nature of the thing-in-itself, as the same will in all, are directly recognised, and from this knowledge an universal quieter of volition arises, then the particular motives become ineffective, because the kind of knowledge which corresponds to them is obscured and thrown into the background by quite another kind. Therefore the character can never partially change, but must, with the consistency of a law of Nature, carry out in the particular the will which it manifests as a whole. But this whole, the character itself, may be completely suppressed or abolished through the change of knowledge referred to above. It is this suppression or abolition which Asmus, as quoted above, marvels at and denotes the "catholic, transcendental change;" and in the Christian Church it has very aptly been called the _new birth_, and the knowledge from which it springs, the _work of grace_.

Therefore it is not a question of a change, but of an entire suppression of the character; and hence it arises that, however different the characters which experience the suppression may have been before it, after it they show a great similarity in their conduct, though every one still speaks very differently according to his conceptions and dogmas.

In this sense, then, the old philosophical doctrine of the freedom of the will, which has constantly been contested and constantly maintained, is not without ground, and the dogma of the Church of the work of grace and the new birth is not without meaning and significance. But we now unexpectedly see both united in one, and we can also now understand in what sense the excellent Malebranche could say, "_La liberte est un mystere_," and was right. For precisely what the Christian mystics call _the work of grace_ and _the new birth_, is for us the single direct expression of _the freedom of the will_. It only appears if the will, having attained to a knowledge of its own real nature, receives from this a _quieter_, by means of which the motives are deprived of their effect, which belongs to the province of another kind of knowledge, the objects of which are merely phenomena. The possibility of the freedom which thus expresses itself is the greatest prerogative of man, which is for ever wanting to the brute, because the condition of it is the deliberation of reason, which enables him to survey the whole of life independent of the impression of the present. The brute is entirely without the possibility of freedom, as, indeed, it is without the possibility of a proper or deliberate choice following upon a completed conflict of motives, which for this purpose would have to be abstract ideas. Therefore with the same necessity with which the stone falls to the earth, the hungry wolf buries its fangs in the flesh of its prey, without the possibility of the knowledge that it is itself the destroyed as well as the destroyer.

_Necessity is the kingdom of nature; freedom is the kingdom of grace._

Now because, as we have seen, that _self-suppression of the will_ proceeds from knowledge, and all knowledge is involuntary, that denial of will also, that entrance into freedom, cannot be forcibly attained to by intention or design, but proceeds from the inmost relation of knowing and volition in the man, and therefore comes suddenly, as if spontaneously from without. This is why the Church has called it _the work of grace_; and that it still regards it as independent of the acceptance of grace corresponds to the fact that the effect of the quieter is finally a free act of will. And because, in consequence of such a work of grace, the whole nature of man is changed and reversed from its foundation, so that he no longer wills anything of all that he previously willed so intensely, so that it is as if a new man actually took the place of the old, the Church has called this consequence of the work of grace the _new birth_.

For what it calls the _natural man_, to which it denies all capacity for good, is just the will to live, which must be denied if deliverance from an existence such as ours is to be attained. Behind our existence lies something else, which is only accessible to us if we have shaken off this world.

Having regard, not to the individuals according to the principle of sufficient reason, but to the Idea of man in its unity, Christian theology symbolises _nature_, the _a.s.sertion of the will to live_ in Adam, whose sin, inherited by us, _i.e._, our unity with him in the Idea, which is represented in time by the bond of procreation, makes us all partakers of suffering and eternal death. On the other hand, it symbolises _grace_, the _denial of the will_, _salvation_, in the incarnate G.o.d, who, as free from all sin, that is, from all willing of life, cannot, like us, have proceeded from the most p.r.o.nounced a.s.sertion of the will, nor can he, like us, have a body which is through and through simply concrete will, manifestation of the will; but born of a pure virgin, he has only a phantom body. This last is the doctrine of the Docetae, _i.e._, certain Church Fathers, who in this respect are very consistent. It is especially taught by Apelles, against whom and his followers Tertullian wrote. But even Augustine comments thus on the pa.s.sage, Rom. viii. 3, "G.o.d sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh:" "_Non enim caro peccati erat, quae non de carnali delectatione nata erat: sed tamen inerat ei similitudo carnis peccati, quia mortalis caro erat_" (Liber 83, _quaest. qu._ 66). He also teaches in his work ent.i.tled "_Opus Imperfectum_," i. 47, that inherited sin is both sin and punishment at once. It is already present in new-born children, but only shows itself if they grow up. Yet the origin of this sin is to be referred to the will of the sinner. This sinner was Adam, but we all existed in him; Adam became miserable, and in him we have all become miserable. Certainly the doctrine of original sin (a.s.sertion of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is the great truth which const.i.tutes the essence of Christianity, while most of what remains is only the clothing of it, the husk or accessories. Therefore Jesus Christ ought always to be conceived in the universal, as the symbol or personification of the denial of the will to live, but never as an individual, whether according to his mythical history given in the Gospels, or according to the probably true history which lies at the foundation of this. For neither the one nor the other will easily satisfy us entirely. It is merely the vehicle of that conception for the people, who always demand something actual. That in recent times Christianity has forgotten its true significance, and degenerated into dull optimism, does not concern us here.

It is further an original and evangelical doctrine of Christianity-which Augustine, with the consent of the leaders of the Church, defended against the plat.i.tudes of the Pelagians, and which it was the princ.i.p.al aim of Luther"s endeavour to purify from error and re-establish, as he expressly declares in his book, "_De Servo Arbitrio_,"-the doctrine that _the will is not free_, but originally subject to the inclination to evil. Therefore according to this doctrine the deeds of the will are always sinful and imperfect, and can never fully satisfy justice; and, finally, these works can never save us, but faith alone, a faith which itself does not spring from resolution and free will, but from the work of grace, without our co-operation, comes to us as from without.

Not only the dogmas referred to before, but also this last genuine evangelical dogma belongs to those which at the present day an ignorant and dull opinion rejects as absurd or hides. For, in spite of Augustine and Luther, it adheres to the vulgar Pelagianism, which the rationalism of the day really is, and treats as antiquated those deeply significant dogmas which are peculiar and essential to Christianity in the strictest sense; while, on the other hand, it holds fast and regards as the princ.i.p.al matter only the dogma that originates in Judaism, and has been retained from it, and is merely historically connected with Christianity.(91) We, however, recognise in the doctrine referred to above the truth completely agreeing with the result of our own investigations.

We see that true virtue and holiness of disposition have their origin not in deliberate choice (works), but in knowledge (faith); just as we have in like manner developed it from our leading thought. If it were works, which spring from motives and deliberate intention, that led to salvation, then, however one may turn it, virtue would always be a prudent, methodical, far-seeing egoism. But the faith to which the Christian Church promises salvation is this: that as through the fall of the first man we are all partakers of sin and subject to death and perdition, through the divine subst.i.tute, through grace and the taking upon himself of our fearful guilt, we are all saved, without any merit of our own (of the person); since that which can proceed from the intentional (determined by motives) action of the person, works, can never justify us, from its very nature, just because it is _intentional_, action induced by motives, _opus operatum_. Thus in this faith there is implied, first of all, that our condition is originally and essentially an incurable one, from which we need _salvation_; then, that we ourselves essentially belong to evil, and are so firmly bound to it that our works according to law and precept, _i.e._, according to motives, can never satisfy justice nor save us; but salvation is only obtained through faith, _i.e._, through a changed mode of knowing, and this faith can only come through grace, thus as from without. This means that the salvation is one which is quite foreign to our person, and points to a denial and surrender of this person necessary to salvation. Works, the result of the law as such, can never justify, because they are always action following upon motives. Luther demands (in his book "_De Libertate Christiana_") that after the entrance of faith the good works shall proceed from it entirely of themselves, as symptoms, as fruits of it; yet by no means as const.i.tuting i

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