The World as Will and Idea
Arthur Schopenhauer
2,809 passages indexed from The World as Will and Idea (Arthur Schopenhauer) — Page 33 of 57
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The World as Will and Idea, passage 585
But every geometrical proposition is just as good an expression of such a relation as one of the twelve axioms; it is a metaphysical truth, and as such, just as certain as the principle of contradiction itself, which is a metalogical truth, and the common foundation of all logical demonstration.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1127
For it is one and the same will that objectifies itself in the whole world; it knows no time, for this form of the principle of sufficient reason does not belong to it, nor to its original objectivity, the Ideas, but only to the way in which these are known by the individuals who themselves are transitory, _i.e._, to the manifestation of the Ideas.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1508
This anticipation is the _Ideal_. It is the _Idea_ so far as it is known _a priori_, at least half, and it becomes practical for art, because it corresponds to and completes what is given _a posteriori_ through nature. The possibility of such an anticipation of the beautiful _a priori_ in the artist, and of its recognition _a posteriori_ by the critic, lies in the fact that the artist and the critic are themselves the “in-itself” of nature, the will which objectifies itself.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1984
The discovery of this through fuller knowledge is _repentance_. This extends not merely to worldly wisdom, to the choice of the means, and the judgment of the appropriateness of the end to my own will, but also to what is properly ethical.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 40
And now that I have allowed myself the jest to which in this two-sided life hardly any page can be too serious to grant a place, I part with the book with deep seriousness, in the sure hope that sooner or later it will reach those to whom alone it can be addressed; and for the rest, patiently resigned that the same fate should, in full measure, befall it, that in all ages has, to some extent, befallen all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, to which only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial. The former fate is also wont to befall its author. But life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 261
As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result—knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1289
Lastly, perceptive knowledge generally, in the province of which the Idea always lies, is directly opposed to rational or abstract knowledge, which is guided by the principle of the ground of knowing. It is also well known that we seldom find great genius united with pre-eminent reasonableness; on the contrary, persons of genius are often subject to violent emotions and irrational passions.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2092
Man, as the most complete objectification of that will, is in like measure also the most necessitous of all beings: he is through and through concrete willing and needing; he is a concretion of a thousand necessities. With these he stands upon the earth, left to himself, uncertain about everything except his own need and misery. Consequently the care for the maintenance of that existence under exacting demands, which are renewed every day, occupies, as a rule, the whole of human life.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1436
We may take this opportunity of mentioning another point in which our doctrine of Ideas differs very much from that of Plato. He teaches (De Rep., x., p. 288) that the object which art tries to express, the ideal of painting and poetry, is not the Idea but the particular thing.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 702
We direct our attention to mathematics, natural science, and philosophy, for each of these holds out the hope that it will afford us a part of the explanation we desire. Now, taking philosophy first, we find that it is like a monster with many heads, each of which speaks a different language. They are not, indeed, all at variance on the point we are here considering, the significance of the idea of perception.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1041
Thus everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict, and alternation of victory, and in it we shall come to recognise more distinctly that variance with itself which is essential to the will. Every grade of the objectification of will fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the others.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2766
38 Cf. “Critique of Pure Reason. Solution of the Cosmological Ideas of the Totality of the Deduction of the Events in the Universe,” pp. 560-586 of the fifth, and p. 532 and following of first edition; and “Critique of Practical Reason,” fourth edition, pp. 169-179; Rosenkranz’ edition, p. 224 and following. Cf. my Essay on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 43.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1841
The will, which, considered purely in itself, is without knowledge, and is merely a blind incessant impulse, as we see it appear in unorganised and vegetable nature and their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life, receives through the addition of the world as idea, which is developed in subjection to it, the knowledge of its own willing and of what it is that it wills. And this is nothing else than the world as idea, life, precisely as it exists. Therefore we called the phenomenal world the mirror of the will, its objectivity. And since what the will wills is always life, just because life is nothing but the representation of that willing for the idea, it is all one and a mere pleonism if, instead of simply saying “the will,” we say “the will to live.”
The World as Will and Idea, passage 29
On the other hand, it could not be avoided, from the nature of the case, that here and there the appendix also should refer to the text of the work; and the only result of this is, that the appendix, as well as the principal part of the work, must be read twice.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2639
From that moment, as if he had looked into hell, 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 Abbé Rancé, which I have briefly related in the 48th chapter of the Supplement.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1703
In both, however, absolute truth is a necessary condition of their effect, and want of unity in the characters, contradiction either of themselves or of the nature of humanity in general, as well as impossibility, or very great improbability in the events, even in mere accessories, offend just as much in poetry as badly drawn figures, false perspective, or wrong lighting in painting.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1047
The young hydra, which grows like a bud out of the old one, and afterwards separates itself from it, fights while it is still joined to the old one for the prey that offers itself, so that the one snatches it out of the mouth of the other (Trembley, Polypod., ii. p. 110, and iii. p. 165). But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 682
This was indeed arbitrary and a matter of choice, and did not make any real difference, but yet the Stoics disputed everlastingly with the Peripatetics and Epicureans about it, and amused themselves with the inadmissible comparison of two entirely incommensurable quantities, and the antithetical, paradoxical judgments which proceeded from them, and which they flung at each other. The _Paradoxa_ of Cicero afford us an interesting collection of these from the Stoical side.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2145
Certainly the aim of the idyll is the description of such a happiness, but one also sees that the idyll as such cannot continue.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1894
What we fear in death is by no means the pain, for it lies clearly on this side of death, and, moreover, we often take refuge in death from pain, just as, on the contrary, we sometimes endure the most fearful suffering merely to escape death for a while, although it would be quick and easy. Thus we distinguish pain and death as two entirely different evils.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 339
xvii., §§ 2 and 3) comes to the special explanation of reason he entirely loses sight of this simple, primary characteristic, and he also falls into a wavering, undetermined, incomplete account of mangled and derivative manifestations of it. Leibnitz also, in the corresponding part of his work, behaves in a similar manner, only with more confusion and indistinctness. In the Appendix, I have fully considered how Kant confused and falsified the conception of the nature of reason.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1190
They would not have let themselves be led by the nose, to-day by one vain boaster and to-morrow by another, nor would they have opened the nineteenth century, which promised so much in Germany, with the philosophical farces that were performed over the grave of Kant (as the ancients sometimes did at the funeral obsequies of their dead), and which deservedly called forth the derision of other nations, for such things least become the earnest and strait-laced German.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 66
Only the criticism of the Kantian philosophy has received important corrections and large additions, for these could not be put into a supplementary book, such as those which are given in the second volume, and which correspond to each of the four books that contain the exposition of my own doctrine.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2201
Accordingly it regards every individual as on one side identical with Adam, the representative of the assertion of life, and, so far, as subject to sin (original sin), suffering, and death; on the other side, the knowledge of the Idea of man enables it to regard every individual as identical with the saviour, the representative of the denial of the will to live, and, so far as a partaker of his sacrifice of himself, saved through his merits, and delivered from the bands of sin and death, _i.e._, the world (Rom.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2202
Another mythical exposition of our view of sexual pleasure as the assertion of the will to live beyond the individual life, as an attainment to life which is brought about for the first time by this means, or as it were a renewed assignment of life, is the Greek myth of Proserpine, who might return from the lower world so long as she had not tasted its fruit, but who became subject to it altogether through eating the pomegranate. This meaning appears very clearly in Goethe’s incomparable presentation of this myth, especially when, as soon as she has tasted the pomegranate, the invisible chorus of the Fates—
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1173
What Plato says is this:—“The things of this world which our senses perceive have no true being; _they always become, they never are:_ they have only a relative being; they all exist merely in and through their relations to each other; their whole being may, therefore, quite as well be called a non-being.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1550
I may be allowed, in passing, to insert here a comparison that is very pertinent to the arts we are discussing.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2197
As thing-in-itself, the will of the begetter and that of the begotten are not different, for only the phenomenon, not the thing-in-itself, is subordinate to the _principim individuationis_.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 721
Consequently the most complete etiological explanation of the whole of nature can never be more than an enumeration of forces which cannot be explained, and a reliable statement of the rule according to which phenomena appear in time and space, succeed, and make way for each other. But the inner nature of the forces which thus appear remains unexplained by such an explanation, which must confine itself to phenomena and their arrangement, because the law which it follows does not extend further.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2166
Every one who has awakened from the first dream of youth, who has considered his own experience and that of others, who has studied himself in life, in the history of the past and of his own time, and finally in the works of the great poets, will, if his judgment is not paralysed by some indelibly imprinted prejudice, certainly arrive at the conclusion that this human world is the kingdom of chance and error, which rule without mercy in great things and in small, and along with which folly and wickedness also wield the scourge.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2407
First, however, I wish to trace back to their real meaning those conceptions of _good_ and _bad_ which have been treated by the philosophical writers of the day, very extraordinarily, as simple conceptions, and thus incapable of analysis; so that the reader may not remain involved in the senseless delusion that they contain more than is actually the case, and express in and for themselves all that is here necessary.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2809
92 This is also just the Prajna—Paramita of the Buddhists, the “beyond all knowledge,” _i.e._, the point at which subject and object are no more. (Cf. J. J. Schmidt, “Ueber das Mahajana und Pratschna-Paramita.”)
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1577
In their countenances, and especially in the eyes, we see the expression, the reflection, of the completest knowledge, that which is not directed to particular things, but has fully grasped the Ideas, and thus the whole nature of the world and life.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1460
Therefore no real work of architecture as a fine art can be made of wood, although it assumes all forms so easily; this can only be explained by our theory. If we were distinctly told that a building, the sight of which gave us pleasure, was made of different kinds of material of very unequal weight and consistency, but not distinguishable to the eye, the whole building would become as utterly incapable of affording us pleasure as a poem in an unknown language.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2114
Besides, through this view of the inevitableness of pain, of the supplanting of one pain by another, and the introduction of a new pain through the passing away of that which preceded it, one might be led to the paradoxical but not absurd hypothesis, that in every individual the measure of the pain essential to him was determined once for all by his nature, a measure which could neither remain empty, nor be more than filled, however much the form of the suffering might change.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 194
This is strongly supported by the remark of Hobbes in the second chapter of Leviathan, that we easily mistake dreams for reality if we have unintentionally fallen asleep without taking off our clothes, and much more so when it also happens that some undertaking or design fills all our thoughts, and occupies our dreams as well as our waking moments. We then observe the awaking just as little as the falling asleep, dream and reality run together and become confounded.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 281
This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1097
The animal not only develops its organism in the same manner, in a succession of forms which are often very different (metamorphosis), but this form itself, although it is already objectivity of will at this grade, does not attain to a full expression of its Idea.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 215
Therefore the body as object proper, that is, as an idea perceived in space, is first known indirectly, like all other objects, through the application of the law of causality to the action of one of its parts upon another, as, for example, when the eye sees the body or the hand touches it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2632
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_.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2430
Now on this account, because much intense suffering is inseparable from much intense volition, very bad men bear the stamp of inward suffering in the very expression of the countenance; even when they have attained every external happiness, they always look unhappy so long as they are not transported by some momentary ecstasy and are not dissembling.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1792
How rich in content and full of significance the language of music is, we see from the repetitions, as well as the _Da capo_, the like of which would be unbearable in works composed in a language of words, but in music are very appropriate and beneficial, for, in order to comprehend it fully, we must hear it twice.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 612
The advantage which mathematics, pure natural science, and logic have over them, as _a priori_ knowledge, rests merely upon this, that the formal element in knowledge upon which all that is _a priori_ is based, is given as a whole and at once, and therefore in it we can always proceed from the cause to the effect, while in the former kind of knowledge we are generally obliged to proceed from the effect to the cause.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 816
Further, it is free from all _multiplicity_, although its manifestations in time and space are innumerable.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1413
There is also a negative species of the charming or exciting which is even more reprehensible than the positive form which has been discussed; this is the disgusting or the loathsome. It arouses the will of the beholder, just as what is properly speaking charming, and therefore disturbs pure æsthetic contemplation. But it is an active aversion and opposition which is excited by it; it arouses the will by presenting to it objects which it abhors. Therefore it has always been recognised that it is altogether inadmissible in art, where even what is ugly, when it is not disgusting, is allowable in its proper place, as we shall see later.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 361
Thus we see that several ideas which are different in unessential particulars may be thought by means of one concept, _i.e._, may be brought under it. Yet this power of embracing several things is not an essential but merely an accidental characteristic of the concept. There may be concepts through which only one real object is thought, but which are nevertheless abstract and general, by no means capable of presentation individually and as perceptions.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 396
Although this was not exposed to any doubt or difference of opinion, some pedantically systematic philosopher hit upon the idea that it would look well, and be the completion of the method of dialectic, if this formal part of all discussion, this regular procedure of reason itself, were to be expressed in abstract propositions, just like the substantial propositions admitted on both sides, and placed at the beginning of every investigation, as the fixed canon of debate to which reference and appeal must always be made.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 964
I repeat all this in passing, merely to call to mind what was demonstrated in the First Book, for it is necessary for the complete understanding of these two books that their inner agreement should be observed, since what is inseparably united in the actual world as its two sides, will and idea, has, in order that we might understand each of them more clearly in isolation, been dissevered in these two books.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1513
Human beauty was explained above as the fullest objectification of will at the highest grade at which it is knowable. It expresses itself through the form; and this lies in space alone, and has no necessary connection with time, as, for example, motion has. Thus far then we may say: the adequate objectification of will through a merely spatial phenomenon is beauty, in the objective sense.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 703
For, with the exception of the Sceptics and the Idealists, the others, for the most part, speak very much in the same way of an _object_ which constitutes the _basis_ of the idea, and which is indeed different in its whole being and nature from the idea, but yet is in all points as like it as one egg is to another.