The World as Will and Idea
Arthur Schopenhauer
2,809 passages indexed from The World as Will and Idea (Arthur Schopenhauer) — Page 18 of 57
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The World as Will and Idea, passage 402
It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 600
So far then it is like a cowardly soldier, who adds a wound to an enemy slain by another, and then boasts that he slew him himself.(22)
The World as Will and Idea, passage 986
For in both cases it is one and the same will which appears; very different in the grades of its manifestation, multiplied in the phenomena of these grades, and, in respect of these, subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason, but in itself free from all this. Motives do not determine the character of man, but only the phenomena of his character, that is, his actions; the outward fashion of his life, not its inner meaning and content.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2398
But that the deeper knowledge, which is no longer involved in the _principium individuationis_, from which all virtue and nobleness proceed, no longer retains the disposition which demands requital, is shown by the Christian ethics, which absolutely forbids all requital of evil with evil, and allows eternal justice to proceed in the sphere of the thing-in-itself, which is different from that of the phenomenon. (“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord,”—Rom. xii. 19.)
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1396
An empty space can never be thus perceived, and therefore never an open space, but only space that is directly perceptible in all its dimensions by means of the limits which enclose it; thus for example a very high, vast dome, like that of St. Peter’s at Rome, or St. Paul’s in London.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 686
For Kleanthes meant the whole of nature in general, while Chrysippus meant human nature in particular (Diog. Laert., 7, 89). It followed that what alone was adapted to the latter was virtue, just as the satisfaction of animal desires was adapted to animal natures; and thus ethics had again to be forcibly united to a doctrine of virtue, and in some way or other established through physics. For the Stoics always aimed at unity of principle, as for them God and the world were not dissevered.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 157
But as the object in general is only for the subject, as its idea, so every special class of ideas is only for an equally special quality in the subject, which is called a faculty of perception. This subjective correlative of time and space in themselves as empty forms, has been named by Kant pure sensibility; and we may retain this expression, as Kant was the first to treat of the subject, though it is not exact, for sensibility presupposes matter.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 417
In all other sciences reason has received its content from ideas of perception; in mathematics from the relations of space and time, presented in intuition or perception prior to all experience; in pure natural science, that is, in what we know of the course of nature prior to any experience, the content of the science proceeds from the pure understanding, _i.e._, from the _a priori_ knowledge of the law of causality and its connection with those pure intuitions or perceptions of space and time.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1465
For the light is intercepted, confined, and reflected by the great opaque, sharply outlined, and variously formed masses of stone, and thus it unfolds its nature and qualities in the purest and clearest way, to the great pleasure of the beholders, for light is the most joy-giving of things, as the condition and the objective correlative of the most perfect kind of knowledge of perception.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 302
Just as if Kant had never existed, the principle of sufficient reason is to Fichte precisely what it was to all the schoolmen, a _veritas aeterna_. As an eternal fate reigned over the gods of old, so these _aeternæ veritates_, these metaphysical, mathematical and metalogical truths, and in the case of some, the validity of the moral law also, reigned over the God of the schoolmen. These _veritates_ alone were independent of everything, and through their necessity both God and the world existed.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2151
But it can also show itself in the little world, for the size of the objects is measured here by the degree in which they influence the will, not according to their external relations. Secondly, pure knowing, the comprehension of the Ideas, conditioned by the freeing of knowledge from the service of will: the life of genius (Satwa-Guna). Thirdly and lastly, the greatest lethargy of the will, and also of the knowledge attaching to it, empty longing, life-benumbing languor (Tama-Guna).
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2734
That which is generally received as positive, which we call the real, and the negation of which the concept nothing in its most general significance expresses, is just the world as idea, which I have shown to be the objectivity and mirror of the will. Moreover, we ourselves are just this will and this world, and to them belongs the idea in general, as one aspect of them. The form of the idea is space and time, therefore for this point of view all that is real must be in some place and at some time. Denial, abolition, conversion of the will, is also the abolition and the vanishing of the world, its mirror. If we no longer perceive it in this mirror, we ask in vain where it has gone, and then, because it has no longer any where and when, complain that it has vanished into nothing.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 790
The parts of the body must, therefore, completely correspond to the principal desires through which the will manifests itself; they must be the visible expression of these desires. Teeth, throat, and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire; the grasping hand, the hurrying feet, correspond to the more indirect desires of the will which they express.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2789
So much is this the case, that although the ethical significance of action cannot be explained in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, yet since every mythus follows this principle, believers regard the ethical significance of action as quite inseparable, and indeed as absolutely identical, and regard every attack upon the mythus as an attack upon right and virtue.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2194
Our own consciousness, the intensity of the impulse, teaches us that in this act the most decided _assertion of the will to live_ expresses itself, pure and without further addition (any denial of other individuals); and now, as the consequence of this act, a new life appears in time and the causal series, _i.e._, in nature; the begotten appears before the begetter, different as regards the phenomenon, but in himself, _i.e._, according to the Idea, identical with him.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1171
What Kant says is in substance this:—“Time, space, and causality are not determinations of the thing-in-itself, but belong only to its phenomenal existence, for they are nothing but the forms of our knowledge. Since, however, all multiplicity, and all coming into being and passing away, are only possible through time, space, and causality, it follows that they also belong only to the phenomenon, not to the thing-in-itself.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1947
Indeed, we receive an empirical proof of this when any difficult and important choice lies before us, but only under a condition which is not yet present, but merely hoped for, so that in the meanwhile we can do nothing, but must remain passive. Now we consider how we shall decide when the circumstances occur that will give us a free activity and choice. Generally the foresight of rational deliberation recommends one decision, while direct inclination leans rather to the other.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 426
In the same way Schleiermacher speaks in his “Critique of Ethics” of logical and mathematical feeling (p. 339), and also of the feeling of the sameness or difference of two formulas (p. 342). Again Tennemann in his “History of Philosophy” (vol. I., p.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2532
But, on the other hand, that knowledge of the whole, of the nature of the thing-in-itself which has been described, becomes a _quieter_ of all and every volition. The will now turns away from life; it now shudders at the pleasures in which it recognises the assertion of life. Man now attains to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true indifference, and perfect will-lessness.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 881
It is true that at all times an etiology, unmindful of its real aim, has striven to reduce all organised life to chemism or electricity; all chemism, that is to say quality, again to mechanism (action determined by the shape of the atom), this again sometimes to the object of phoronomy, _i.e._, the combination of time and space, which makes motion possible, sometimes to the object of mere geometry, _i.e._, position in space (much in the same way as we rightly deduce the diminution of an effect from the square of the distance, and the theory of the lever in a purely geometrical manner): geometry may finally be reduced to arithmetic, which, on account of its one dimension, is of all the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, the most intelligible, comprehensible, and completely susceptible of investigation.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2298
In both cases there existed as yet no state; it first arose through that common agreement; and according as that agreement is more or less free from anarchy or despotism, the state is more or less perfect. Republics tend to anarchy, monarchies to despotism, and the mean of constitutional monarchy, which was therefore devised, tends to government by factions.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 499
Every one has gained a rational knowledge of many different things through experience, through consideration of the individual objects presented to him, but only he who sets himself the task of acquiring a complete knowledge in the abstract of a particular class of objects, strives after science.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2560
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.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2217
The will itself is present, whole and undivided, in every one of these, and beholds around it the innumerably repeated image of its own nature; but this nature itself, the actually real, it finds directly only in its inner self. Therefore every one desires everything for himself, desires to possess, or at least to control, everything, and whatever opposes it it would like to destroy.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1251
§ 36. History follows the thread of events; it is pragmatic so far as it deduces them in accordance with the law of motivation, a law that determines the self-manifesting will wherever it is enlightened by knowledge. At the lowest grades of its objectivity, where it still acts without knowledge, natural science, in the form of etiology, treats of the laws of the changes of its phenomena, and, in the form of morphology, of what is permanent in them.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1029
This process is only intelligible from the identity of the will which manifests itself in all the Ideas, and which is always striving after higher objectification. We thus see, for example, in the hardening of the bones, an unmistakable analogy to crystallisation, as the force which originally had possession of the chalk, although ossification is never to be reduced to crystallisation. The analogy shows itself in a weaker degree in the flesh becoming firm.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 556
For just at the beginning, for example, when he ought to show once for all how in a triangle the angles and sides reciprocally determine each other, and stand to each other in the relation of reason and consequent, in accordance with the form which the principle of sufficient reason has in pure space, and which there, as in every other sphere, always affords the necessity that a thing is as it is, because something quite different from it, is as it is; instead of in this way giving a thorough insight into the nature of the triangle, he sets up certain disconnected arbitrarily chosen propositions concerning the triangle, and gives a logical ground of knowledge of them, through a laborious logical demonstration, based upon the principle of contradiction.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1621
This conclusion in regard to allegory, which is founded on our consideration of the nature of art and quite consistent with it, is directly opposed to the opinion of Winckelmann, who, far from explaining allegory, as we do, as something quite foreign to the end of art, and often interfering with it, always speaks in favour of it, and indeed (Works, vol. i. p.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1671
Besides, in the only aspect we are considering here, that of the inner significance of the phenomenal, it is quite the same whether the objects with which the action is concerned, are, relatively considered, trifling or important, farm-houses or kingdoms: for all these things in themselves are without significance, and obtain it only in so far as the will is moved by them.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 414
§ 10. Through all this, the question presses ever more upon us, how _certainty_ is to be attained, how _judgments __ are to be established_, what constitutes _rational knowledge_, (_wissen_), and _science_, which we rank with language and deliberate action as the third great benefit conferred by reason.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 107
First Aspect. The Idea Subordinated To The Principle Of Sufficient Reason: The Object Of Experience And Science.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2742
Thus, in this way, by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and, with the stamp of inner truth, by art, we must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1168
I hope, further, that after what has been said there will be no hesitation in recognising the definite grades of the objectification of the will, which is the inner reality of the world, to be what Plato called the _eternal Ideas_ or unchangeable forms (ειδῆ); a doctrine which is regarded as the principal, but at the same time the most obscure and paradoxical dogma of his system, and has been the subject of reflection and controversy of ridicule and of reverence to so many and such differently endowed minds in the course of many centuries.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2331
For, in order that every one may be protected from suffering wrong, men have combined to form a state, have renounced the doing of wrong, and assumed the task of maintaining the state. Thus the law and the fulfilment of it, the punishment, are essentially directed to the _future_, not to the _past_. This distinguishes _punishment_ from _revenge_; for the motives which instigate the latter are solely concerned with what has happened, and thus with the past as such.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 173
Now, just as the law of causality precedes perception and experience as their condition, and therefore cannot (as Hume thought) be derived from them, so object and subject precede all knowledge, and hence the principle of sufficient reason in general, as its first condition; for this principle is merely the form of all objects, the whole nature and possibility of their existence as phenomena: but the object always presupposes the subject; and therefore between these two there can be no relation of reason and consequent.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 425
I should like, for the sake of illustration, to give some examples of this taken from recent books, as they are striking proofs of my theory. I remember reading in the introduction to a German translation of Euclid, that we ought to make beginners in geometry draw the figures before proceeding to demonstrate, for in this way they would already feel geometrical truth before the demonstration brought them complete knowledge.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 814
In this last regard I shall call time and space the _principium individuationis_, borrowing an expression from the old schoolmen, and I beg to draw attention to this, once for all. For it is only through the medium of time and space that what is one and the same, both according to its nature and to its concept, yet appears as different, as a multiplicity of co-existent and successive phenomena.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1104
For the plant reveals its whole being at the first glance, and with complete innocence, which does not suffer from the fact that it carries its organs of generation exposed to view on its upper surface, though in all animals they have been assigned to the most hidden part. This innocence of the plant results from its complete want of knowledge. Guilt does not lie in willing, but in willing with knowledge.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2393
§ 64. From our exposition of eternal justice, which is not mythical but philosophical, we will now proceed to the kindred investigation of the ethical significance of conduct and of conscience, which is the merely felt knowledge of that significance. But first I wish at this point to draw attention to two peculiarities of human nature, that might help to make clear how the nature of that eternal justice, and the unity and identity of the will in all its phenomena upon which it rests, is known to every one, at least as an obscure feeling.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 871
But, on the other hand, these branches of knowledge show us nothing more than mere connections, relations of one idea to another, form devoid of all content.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 218
It follows from what has been said, that all animals, even the least developed, have understanding; for they all know objects, and this knowledge determines their movements as motive.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 695
But the antagonism referred to reveals and establishes the essential difference in fundamental principle between Stoicism, which is just a special form of endæmonism, and those doctrines we have mentioned, although both are often at one in their results, and are apparently related.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 185
Among real objects, ideas of perception, on the other hand, the principle of sufficient reason appears not as the principle of the ground of _knowing_, but of _being_, as the law of causality: every real object has paid its debt to it, inasmuch as it has come to be, _i.e._, has appeared as the effect of a cause. The demand for a ground of knowing has therefore here no application and no meaning, but belongs to quite another class of things.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 728
Thus much is certain, that this something we seek for must be completely and in its whole nature different from the idea; that the forms and laws of the idea must therefore be completely foreign to it; further, that we cannot arrive at it from the idea under the guidance of the laws which merely combine objects, ideas, among themselves, and which are the forms of the principle of sufficient reason.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2366
Till then, there lives only in the inmost depths of his consciousness a very obscure presentiment that all that is after all not really so strange to him, but has a connection with him, from which the _principium individuationis_ cannot protect him.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1932
Hence it arises that every uncultured man, following his feeling, ardently defends complete freedom in particular actions, while the great thinkers of all ages, and indeed the more profound systems of religion, have denied it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2710
This last is the doctrine of the Docetæ, _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 passage, Rom. viii. 3, “God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh:” “_Non enim caro peccati erat, quæ non de carnali delectatione nata erat: sed tamen inerat ei similitudo carnis peccati, quia mortalis caro erat_” (Liber 83, _quæst. qu._ 66).
The World as Will and Idea, passage 468
Lastly, virtue and holiness do not proceed from reflection, but from the inner depths of the will, and its relation to knowledge.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 998
It does not run back to such a force as if it were its first link, but the nearest link, as well as the remotest, presupposes the original force, and could otherwise explain nothing. A series of causes and effects may be the manifestation of the most different kinds of forces, whose successive visible appearances are conducted through it, as I have illustrated above by the example of a metal machine.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1333
It is essentially all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear injury or seek enjoyment; the care for the constant demands of the will, in whatever form it may be, continually occupies and sways the consciousness; but without peace no true well-being is possible. The subject of willing is thus constantly stretched on the revolving wheel of Ixion, pours water into the sieve of the Danaids, is the ever-longing Tantalus.