Chapter 18 Part II The World as a Preliminary Treatise on the Will §18

In fact, if the person in question is simply a knowing subject (an angel with wings but no body) and nothing else, then the pursuit of this world is only against me as my appearance It is absolutely impossible to understand the meaning of the world, or to discover (how) the transition from this world as a mere representation of the knowing subject to what it could be other than representation.However, the root of this discussion of man himself is planted in this world in which he exists as an individual [man], that is to say, although his knowledge is based on the whole world as representation After all, this knowledge is obtained through the medium of a body.Bodily sensations, as already pointed out, are the point of departure for the understanding in perceiving the world.As far as the subject is only aware, as far as it is a subject, this body is also one of the appearances, no different from other appearances, and it is an object among objects.The meaning of the activities and actions of this body would be as foreign and incomprehensible to the subject as it is to the changes of all other objects of intuition known to it, were it not to unravel the mystery in a quite different way. of.Were it not for (another way of deciphering the riddle), the subject would also see its own actions ebb and flow with the constancy of a natural law according to the motives that have emerged, just as the changes of other objects ebb and flow with causes, stimuli, motives. Generally the same.And as to the effects of motives, the subject has no further knowledge than [as] the connection between any other effect of the subject's appearance and its cause.It will call the inner, unknown nature of the manifestations and actions of its own body a force, a property, or a quality at will, but no further insight.But in fact, all these [views] are wrong, and it should be said that the answer to the riddle here is already known by the cognitive subject who appears as an individual; this answer is called will.This, and only this, gives the subject the key to understand its own phenomenon, reveals and points out its essence, the meaning and inner motivation of its deeds and actions.Since the subject of knowledge appears as an individual by virtue of its identity with the body, the body exists for it in two ways: as a representation in the intuitions of the understanding, as an object of objects, subject to them the law.At the same time there is a quite different way, which everyone immediately recognizes [that which] the word will refers to.Every genuine act of his will is immediately and inevitably also an act of his body; and he has not really demanded this act of will if he had not at the same time found its expression in an act of the body.The activity of the will and the activity of the body are not two objectively recognized different situations connected by a causal ligament. They are not in the relationship between cause and effect, but they are two in one, and they are the same thing; It is only given in different ways: one is given completely directly, and the other is given to comprehension in intuition.The activity of the body is nothing but objectified, that is to say, the activity of the will that enters intuition.Later on we shall see that this applies not only to motivated movements, but also to involuntary bodily movements that arise only from stimuli.Suitable for every kind of physical activity.It can be said that the whole body is nothing but the objectified, that is, the will that has become a representation.All this is explained in the following text and has a clear [explanation].In the first essay and in the treatise on the Principle of Reason, I called the body the immediate object in the one-sided position (the position of representation) which I had deliberately taken at the time, and here in another sense I [again] called it the object of the will. objectivity.Therefore, in a sense, one can also say that the will is the prior knowledge of the body, and the body is the posterior knowledge of the will.Future-oriented volitional decisions are just rational considerations of what people are about to desire, not volitional activities in the original sense.Only the implementation stamps the decision; until then, the decision is always a variable predestination, existing only in reason, in the abstract.Only in reflective thinking are desire and action distinct [two things], in reality they are only one [thing].Every genuine, inauthentic, direct act of the will is immediately and immediately an outward act of the body.Corresponding to this, on the other hand, is that every action on the body is also immediately and directly an action on the will.If this effect is contrary to the will, it is called pain; if it coincides, it is called comfort and pleasure.The degree and weight of the two sides are very different.So, if people call pleasure and pain appearances, that is completely wrong.Suffering and happiness are by no means appearances, but the direct feeling of the will, in the manifestation of the will, in the body.Xile is the body's compulsive, momentary satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the external impressions it endures.It can be taken directly as an appearance only, so that what has to be excluded from what has just been said are only certain few impressions exerted on the body.These impressions do not excite the will, and it is only because of them that the body is the immediate object of cognition; for the body, as an intuition in the understanding, is already an indirect object like any other.What is meant here is the purely objective sensory sensations, such as sight, hearing, touch, etc., and is limited to the extent that these organs are perceived in a way that is specific, specialized, and consistent with their nature. , and only then are those sensations the weakest stimuli to the heightened and specialized sensibility of these organs, weak enough to affect the will, not disturbed by its agitation: but merely to the understanding The data are provided from which intuitions are generated.Any stronger or other kind of feeling for the sensual organs is painful, that is, it is contrary to the will, so the sensual organs also belong to one of the objectivity of the will. - Neurasthenia consists in the fact that these external influences, originally of sufficient intensity to make them material for the understanding, now attain a higher intensity, so that they excite the will, i.e. produce pain or pleasure, and mostly pain, Part of it, however, is dull and vague: so neurasthenia is not only painful to individual sounds and strong lights, but generally also produces a morbid irritability and emotional state, but it is not clearly recognized.There are other cases which suffice to show the identity of body and will, one of which is that every violent and excessive agitation of the will, that is to say, passion, absolutely and directly shakes the body and its inner dynamics, disturbing the operation of its vital functions.One can find a special treatise on this point on page 27 of the second edition of The Will of Nature.

Finally, my knowledge of my will, though immediate, is inseparable from my knowledge of my body.I do not know my will in its entirety, not as a unity, in its essential completeness, but only in its individual activities, that is, in time, which is mine. The form of the phenomenon, the body, is also the form of any object; the body is therefore the condition of my knowing my will.Accordingly, I cannot imagine this will without my body.Although in the treatise "The Principle of Reason" the will, or rather the subject of desire, is presented as a special class of representation or object, yet even there we have seen that this object and subject fall into the same category. When everything becomes one, it means that it is no longer an object.There we call this unity a miracle in the highest sense.The whole of this text is, within certain limits, an account of this miracle. —As long as I really know my will as an object, I know it as a body; but here I come again to the first class of representations proposed in the above-mentioned treatise, which is to say, To the real object.We will gradually realize that the first category of representations can only find its explanation and its answer in the fourth category of representations proposed there, and the fourth category of representations is no longer convenient to be viewed as an object opposed to the subject. We will realize more clearly that we must understand the inner nature of the causal law governing the first kind of representation from the motivational law governing the fourth kind of representation, and the inner nature of [things] that operate according to this law.

The identity of the will and the body, which has been initially described, can only be confirmed as done here; although this is the first time it is done here, it will be gradually strengthened in the following texts.The so-called "referring to reality" here refers to upgrading from direct consciousness, cognition in the concrete to rational knowledge or cognition in the abstract.On the other hand, this identity, by its very nature, can never be proved, that is, as an indirect knowledge deriving from another immediate knowledge; , and if we do not grasp it firmly as such knowledge, we shall wait in vain for how to grasp it indirectly as derived knowledge.It is entirely a special kind of knowledge, and therefore its truth cannot be included in the four distinctions I made between all truths in the treatise § 29 and the following sections of "The Law of Reason", that is, it cannot be classified under Logical, empirical, metaphysical, and metalogical truths.It turns out that it differs from all these truths in that it is neither the relation of one abstract representation to another, nor the formal relation of an abstract representation to the action of intuitive representations or abstract representations, but the relation of a pair of relations. Judging, this relation is an intuitive representation, that is, the relation of the body to something which is not an representation at all, but differs in kind from it, namely the will.Therefore, I want to make this truth stand out above all other truths, and call it the philosophical truth in the highest sense.One can express this truth in various ways, by saying: My body and my will are the same thing; or: What I call my body as an intuitive representation, as long as it is conscious of me in a totally different and incomparable way, which I call my will; or: my body is the objectivity of my will; or: if my Leaving aside the fact that the body is my representation [side], then my body is only my will; and so on.