The World as Will and Idea
Arthur Schopenhauer
2,809 passages indexed from The World as Will and Idea (Arthur Schopenhauer) — Page 48 of 57
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The World as Will and Idea, passage 233
We marvel at the great sagacity of the most developed species of animals, such as the dog, the elephant, the monkey or the fox, whose cleverness has been so admirably sketched by Buffon. From these most sagacious animals, we can pretty accurately determine how far understanding can go without reason, _i.e._, abstract knowledge embodied in concepts. We could not find this out from ourselves, for in us understanding and reason always reciprocally support each other.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1002
Therefore a law of nature may be defined as a fact expressed generally—_un fait généralisé_—and thus a complete enumeration of all the laws of nature would only be a complete register of facts. The consideration of nature as a whole is thus completed in _morphology_, which enumerates, compares, and arranges all the enduring forms of organised nature.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 27
Starting then, as I do to a large extent, from what has been accomplished by the great Kant, I have yet been enabled, just on account of my earnest study of his writings, to discover important errors in them. These I have been obliged to separate from the rest and prove to be false, in order that I might be able to presuppose and apply what is true and excellent in his doctrine, pure and freed from error.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1830
But this actual world of experience, in which we are, and which is in us, remains both the material and the limits of our consideration: a world which is so rich in content that even the most searching investigation of which the human mind is capable could not exhaust it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2406
§ 65. In all the preceding investigations of human action, we have been leading up to the final investigation, and have to a considerable extent lightened the task of raising to abstract and philosophical clearness, and exhibiting as a branch of our central thought that special ethical significance of action which in life is with perfect understanding denoted by the words _good_ and _bad_.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2050
And, further, if we are thus fully acquainted with our strength and our weakness, we will not attempt to make a show of powers which we do not possess; we will not play with base coin, for all such dissimulation misses the mark in the end. For since the whole man is only the phenomenon of his will, nothing can be more perverse than to try, by means of reflection, to become something else than one is, for this is a direct contradiction of the will with itself.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2126
Thus an error and delusion always lies at the foundation of immoderate joy or grief, and consequently both these excessive strainings of the mind can be avoided by knowledge. Every immoderate joy (_exultatio, insolens lætitia_) always rests on the delusion that one has found in life what can never be found there—lasting satisfaction of the harassing desires and cares, which are constantly breeding new ones.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2352
(“Volare pennis scelera ad ætherias domus Putatis, illic in Jovis tabularia Scripto referri; tum Jovem lectis super Sententiam proferre?—sed mortalium Facinora cœli, quantaquanta est, regia Nequit tenere: nec legendis Juppiter Et puniendis par est. Est tamen ultio, Et, si intuemur, illa nos habitat prope.”)
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1335
Then all at once the peace which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. It is the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1086
If fond of similes, one might also say that their manifestations accompany that of man as necessarily as the full daylight is accompanied by all the gradations of twilight, through which, little by little, it loses itself in darkness; or one might call them the echo of man, and say: Animal and plant are the descending fifth and third of man, the inorganic kingdom is the lower octave.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2534
The allurement of hope, the flattery of the present, the sweetness of pleasure, the well-being which falls to our lot, amid the lamentations of a suffering world governed by chance and error, draws us back to it and rivets our bonds anew. Therefore Jesus says: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
The World as Will and Idea, passage 944
And the farther we go from man, the fainter becomes the trace of this individual character, so that plants have no individual qualities left, except such as may be fully explained from the favourable or unfavourable external influences of soil, climate, and other accidents. Finally, in the inorganic kingdom of nature all individuality disappears. The crystal alone is to be regarded as to a certain extent individual.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1266
As the objects of genius are the eternal Ideas, the permanent, essential forms of the world and all its phenomena, and as the knowledge of the Idea is necessarily knowledge through perception, is not abstract, the knowledge of the genius would be limited to the Ideas of the objects actually present to his person, and dependent upon the chain of circumstances that brought these objects to him, if his imagination did not extend his horizon far beyond the limits of his actual personal existence, and thus enable him to construct the whole out of the little that comes into his own actual apperception, and so to let almost all possible scenes of life pass before him in his own consciousness.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 42
And while the lapse of time has not been able to make me doubt the worth of my work, neither has the lack of sympathy; for I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and senseless,(2) stand in universal admiration and honour, and I bethought myself that if it were not the case those who are capable of recognising the genuine and right are so rare that we may look for them in vain for some twenty years, then those who are capable of producing it could not be so few that their works afterwards form an exception to the perishableness of earthly things; and thus would be lost the reviving prospect of posterity which every one who sets before himself a high aim requires to strengthen him.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1484
Pure knowing as such is no longer the paramount consideration, for we are equally affected by the known Platonic Idea, the world as idea at an important grade of the objectification of will.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1395
We receive this impression of the mathematical-sublime, quite directly, by means of a space which is small indeed as compared with the world, but which has become directly perceptible to us, and affects us with its whole extent in all its three dimensions, so as to make our own body seem almost infinitely small.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 264
Some such thing it takes, as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 490
Since then Kant makes it a condition of the moral worth of an action, that it shall proceed from pure rational abstract maxims, without any inclination or momentary emotion, we cannot entirely absolve him from the reproach of encouraging moral pedantry.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 738
In one respect, therefore, I shall call the body the _objectivity of will_; as in the previous book, and in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, in accordance with the one-sided point of view intentionally adopted there (that of the idea), I called it _the immediate object_. Thus in a certain sense we may also say that will is the knowledge _a priori_ of the body, and the body is the knowledge _a posteriori_ of the will.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 921
The multiplicity of things in space and time, which collectively constitute the objectification of will, does not affect the will itself, which remains indivisible notwithstanding it. It is not the case that, in some way or other, a smaller part of will is in the stone and a larger part in the man, for the relation of part and whole belongs exclusively to space, and has no longer any meaning when we go beyond this form of intuition or perception.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 568
Therefore, not till two thousand years later will the doctrine of Kant, which is destined to make such great changes in all the knowledge, thought, and action of European nations, produce this change in mathematics also.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 625
Only certain mistakes in counting are to be excepted, and they are not really errors, but merely mistakes. The operation prescribed by the concepts of the numbers has not been carried out in pure intuition or perception, in counting, but some other operation instead of it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1350
The fancy recalls only what was objective, not what was individually subjective, and we imagine that that objective stood before us then just as pure and undisturbed by any relation to the will as its image stands in our fancy now; while in reality the relation of the objects to our will gave us pain then just as it does now.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1796
Consequently the saying of Leibnitz quoted above, which is quite accurate from a lower standpoint, may be parodied in the following way to suit our higher view of music: _Musica est exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi_; for _scire_, to know, always means to have fixed in abstract concepts.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2653
Only if suffering assumes 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 nobility of character, and also seems like a reproach of our own happy condition.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1998
For in general our greatest sufferings do not lie in the present as ideas of perception or as immediate feelings; but in the reason, as abstract conceptions, painful thoughts, from which the brute, which lives only in the present, and therefore in enviable carelessness, is entirely free.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 560
This specially empirical and unscientific knowledge is like that of the doctor who knows both the disease and the cure for it, but does not know the connection between them. But all this is the necessary consequence if we capriciously reject the special kind of proof and evidence of one species of knowledge, and forcibly introduce in its stead a kind which is quite foreign to its nature.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2244
It follows from this that all true, _i.e._, moral, right of property is based simply and solely on work, as was pretty generally assumed before Kant, and is distinctly and beautifully expressed in the oldest of all codes of law: “Wise men who know the past explain that a cultured field is the property of him who cut down the wood and cleared and ploughed it, as an antelope belongs to the first hunter who mortally wounds it” (Laws of Manu, ix. 44).
The World as Will and Idea, passage 981
For the power of truth is incredibly great and of unspeakable endurance. We find constant traces of it in all, even the most eccentric and absurd dogmas, of different times and different lands,—often indeed in strange company, curiously mixed up with other things, but still recognisable. It is like a plant that germinates under a heap of great stones, but still struggles up to the light, working itself through with many deviations and windings, disfigured, worn out, stunted in its growth,—but yet, to the light.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 169
This, however, cannot be deduced in the manner attempted by Kant, which I have criticised in the essay on “The Principle of Sufficient Reason,” § 23.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1238
When the clouds move, the figures which they form are not essential, but indifferent to them; but that as elastic vapour they are pressed together, drifted along, spread out, or torn asunder by the force of the wind: this is their nature, the essence of the forces which objectify themselves in them, the Idea; their actual forms are only for the individual observer.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 860
But if the objects appearing in these forms are not to be empty phantoms, but are to have a meaning, they must refer to something, must be the expression of something which is not, like themselves, object, idea, a merely relative existence for a subject, but which exists without such dependence upon something which stands over against it as a condition of its being, and independent of the forms of such a thing, _i.e._, _is not idea_, but a _thing-in-itself_.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1873
As the tangent does not revolve with the sphere, neither does the present, the point of contact of the object, the form of which is time, with the subject, which has no form, because it does not belong to the knowable, but is the condition of all that is knowable. Or, time is like an unceasing stream, and the present a rock on which the stream breaks itself, but does not carry away with it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2128
Consequently we might avoid them both if we had sufficient control over ourselves to survey things always with perfect clearness as a whole and in their connection, and steadfastly to guard against really lending them the colours which we wish they had. The principal effort of the Stoical ethics was to free the mind from all such delusion and its consequences, and to give it instead an equanimity that could not be disturbed. It is this insight that inspires Horace in the well-known ode—
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2584
A full exposition of this will be found in Fénélon’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.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 50
It finds no partisans; rather, it may pursue its way as silently and unheeded through such a philosophical riot as through the winter night of the darkest century bound in the rigid faith of the church, when it was communicated only to a few alchemists as esoteric learning, or entrusted it may be only to the parchment.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2618
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.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 637
In philosophy nothing would be gained by such a reference, as one member of the series is just as external to it as another; and, moreover, that kind of connection is just as much a problem for philosophy as what is joined together by it, and the latter again is just as much a problem after its combination has been explained as before it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1936
In order to make the relation of the two comprehensible, the best expression is that which I have already used in the introductory essay, that the intelligible character of every man is to be regarded as an act of will outside time, and therefore indivisible and unchangeable, and the manifestation of this act of will developed and broken up in time and space and all the forms of the principle of sufficient reason is the empirical character as it exhibits itself for experience in the whole conduct and life of this man.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1723
This last kind of tragedy seems to me far to surpass the other two, for it shows us the greatest misfortune, not as an exception, not as something occasioned by rare circumstances or monstrous characters, but as arising easily and of itself out of the actions and characters of men, indeed almost as essential to them, and thus brings it terribly near to us.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 517
Therefore a directly established truth is as much to be preferred to a truth established by demonstration as water from the spring is to water from the aqueduct. Perception, partly pure _a priori_, as it forms the basis of mathematics, partly empirical _a posteriori_, as it forms the basis of all the other sciences, is the source of all truth and the foundation of all science.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 114
How early again this truth was recognised by the wise men of India, appearing indeed as the fundamental tenet of the Vedânta philosophy ascribed to Vyasa, is pointed out by Sir William Jones in the last of his essays: “On the philosophy of the Asiatics” (Asiatic Researches, vol. iv. p.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 92
This procedure, which further commended itself by the great ease of carrying it out, consists, as is well known, in altogether ignoring and thus in secreting—according to Goethe’s malicious phrase, which just means the appropriating of what is of weight and significance.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 496
§ 14. By means of these various discussions it is hoped that both the difference and the relation between the process of knowledge that belongs to the reason, rational knowledge, the concept on the one hand, and the direct knowledge in purely sensuous, mathematical intuition or perception, and apprehension by the understanding on the other hand, has been clearly brought out.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1863
The present always exists, together with its content. Both remain fixed without wavering, like the rainbow on the waterfall. For life is firm and certain in the will, and the present is firm and certain in life. Certainly, if we reflect on the thousands of years that are past, of the millions of men who lived in them, we ask, What were they? what has become of them?
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2465
But this distinction is very hard to make, because it lies in the heart of a man. Therefore we can scarcely ever pass a correct moral judgment on the action of others, and very seldom on our own. The deeds and conduct of an individual and of a nation may be very much modified through dogmas, example, and custom. But in themselves all deeds (_opera operata_) are merely empty forms, and only the disposition which leads to them gives them moral significance.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2024
As events always take place according to fate, _i.e._, according to the infinite concatenation of causes, so our actions always take place according to our intelligible character. But just as we do not know the former beforehand, so no _a priori_ insight is given us into the latter, but we only come to know ourselves as we come to know other persons _a posteriori_ through experience.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 253
For it does not escape these two opposite errors in spite of its identity of subject and object, which is not thinkable, but only “intellectually intuitable,” or to be experienced by a losing of oneself in it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1529
This will be observed, not only by the sculptor and the painter, but also by every good actor; otherwise caricature will appear here also as grimace or distortion.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 571
This is always the principle of sufficient reason; here as the form of perception, _i.e._, space, it is the principle of the ground of being, the evidence and validity of which is, however, just as great and as immediate as that of the principle of the ground of knowing, _i.e._, logical certainty.