Chapter 22 Book II The World as a Preliminary Treatise on the Will §22

This thing-in-itself (we shall retain the Kantian term as a fixed formula) as a thing-in-itself is by no means an object, since all objects are again its appearance and not itself.But when it needs to be conceived objectively, it must borrow names and concepts from an object, from something known objectively, that is, from a phenomenon of its own.But for the purpose of serving as a fulcrum for common understanding.This phenomenon cannot be anything else but the most perfect of all its phenomena, that is, the most vivid, most developed, and directly illuminated by cognition.And this is the will of man.It can also be easily pointed out that we have here, of course, only used the nomenclature of favoritism, whereby the concept of will acquires a wider scope than it had hitherto.Recognizing the same thing in different phenomena and recognizing the difference in similar phenomena, as Plato said many times, is the condition for doing philosophy.But until now, people have not recognized the identity of any kind of struggling, acting force and will in nature, and therefore do not regard those complex phenomena as just different species of a genus, but see It is a completely different genus and a different kind of [thing], so there is no word to mark the concept of this genus.I therefore call this genus by the most preferred species, of which immediate and immediate knowledge leads to indirect knowledge of all the others.But for the concept of "will", it is required to expand this concept. If anyone can't do this, the word "will" should still be understood as a species that is only marked by this word. If he expresses his own will, guided by knowledge, exclusively by motives, or even only by abstract motives—that is, under the guidance of reason—he will be in endless misunderstandings; [because reason guides The following] This kind of will, as mentioned above, is only the most obvious phenomenon of will.We must bring out in thought the innermost essence of our immediate acquaintance with this phenomenon, and then transfer it to all the weaker and more obscure phenomena of the same essence, and thus we are satisfied with the enlargement of the will. concept requirements. —On the contrary, anyone who thinks that the essence of all appearances is the same by the word will, or by any other word, will misunderstand me.If the thing-in-itself is such that we only infer its existence, and we know it only indirectly and in the abstract; It's just an unknown symbol.But the word will, like a spell, intends to reveal to us the innermost essence of everything in nature. It does not signify an unknown quantity, or something deduced by reasoning, but a sign that we know directly. [something] of the will, and something so familiar to us; we know and understand what the will is better than we know anything else, whatever that is.In the past people have always included the concept of will under the concept of force, but I have done exactly the opposite, and have conceived of every force in nature as will.People should not think that this is a literal dispute, nor that it does not matter and can be indifferent [things], but it should be said that this is a [thing] of first-class significance and importance.It turns out that the concept of force, like all other concepts, is ultimately based on the intuitive knowledge of the objective world, that is, phenomena, that is, representations, and the concept of force is derived from this.It is raised from within the sphere governed by cause and effect, and therefore also from intuitive representations, and thus signifies precisely the cause as cause, [that is] where the cause as cause cannot be found in etiology. On the contrary, it is the indispensable premise of all etiological explanations that a further explanation above means that the cause is the cause.On the contrary, among all possible concepts, the concept of will is the only one which is not in appearance, not in mere intuitive representation, but has its source, which comes from the heart, from the most immediate consciousness of each person.In this consciousness, immediately, without all forms, not even the forms of subject and object, each person knows in essence his own individuality, that he is at the same time this body; for here the knower and the known are completely merged into one.If, therefore, we reduce the concept of force to that of will, we are in fact reducing the lesser known to what is no more familiar, to what is truly immediate and complete known, and greatly enlarges our knowledge. .If, on the contrary, we subsume, as before, the concept of will under the concept of force, we deprive ourselves of the only direct knowledge we have of the inner nature of the world . . . because We let this knowledge disappear in a concept abstracted from the phenomenon, so we can never go beyond the phenomenon with this concept.