Chapter 29 Book II The World as a Preliminary Treatise on the Will§ 29

I conclude here the second main part of this treatise, with the hope that, to the extent possible, for the first time, of conveying an idea that has never been By virtue of the vestiges of an individuality from which it arose—I have succeeded in conveying the obvious and certain truth that the world in which we live and exists is, in its entirety, utterly Will is at the same time a representation through and through, that is to say, the representation, being a representation, presupposes a form, namely the form of object and subject, so representation is relative.If we ask what remains after removing this form and all subordinate forms represented by the principle of sufficient reason, then this which is different in kind from representation cannot be anything other than will. what.Therefore, the will is the real thing-in-itself.Anyone who can see himself is this will, and in this will the inner essence of the world is contained.At the same time, anyone can also see that he is the knowing subject, and the appearance [all] of the subject is the whole world, and the appearance only exists when human consciousness is the indispensable branch of appearance.Therefore, under these two viewpoints, each person himself is the whole world, the microcosm, and sees that both aspects of this world are completely present in me.And what everyone regards as his own inherent essence in this way also includes the essence of the entire world, the macrocosm.So the world, like man himself, is through and through will, and through and through appearance, and there is nothing else left.So here we see that Taylor Jin's philosophy of examining the large universe and Socrates' philosophy of examining the microcosm are consistent in this point because the objects of the two philosophies are the same. —All the opinions conveyed in the first two volumes of this book will acquire greater completeness by the two subsequent volumes, and will have greater validity by being more complete.In our previous investigations, some questions were implicitly or explicitly raised, and we hope that these questions can also be fully answered in the next two articles.

Such a question can still be dealt with separately at present, because it can only be asked when the meaning of the preceding statement is not fully understood, and therefore only in this case can it help to clarify the preceding statement.Here is the question: since any will is a will that desires something, has an object, has an object of its desire, then what is that will that desires or pursues in our essence itself as the world? —This problem, like many others, arises from the confusion of the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon.The law of reason only cares about the latter, not the former, and the law of motivation is also a form of the law of reason.Nowhere can a ground or justification be given to phenomena, strictly phenomena, only to individual things, but never to will itself, nor to the Idea in which it is properly objectified.Every individual action, or every change in nature, therefore, has a cause to be found, and the cause is a circumstance which necessarily brings about these changes; There is no reason or cause to be found for what reveals itself.So if you ask for the cause of gravity, electricity, etc., it is due to real ignorance, due to lack of thinking.Only after it has been shown that gravity, electricity, etc. are not primitive, inherent forces of nature, but only manifestations of a more general, known force of nature, can one ask why, which here causes those forces to produce gravity. , electricity and so on.All this has been discussed in detail above.Likewise, every individual act of will in a knowing individual (which is itself only the appearance of the will as a thing-in-itself) necessarily has a motive, without which the act of will can never occur; Just as the cause of reason consists only in the determination that the manifestation of this or that force of nature must occur here and now in this matter, so the motive consists only in the determination of the behavior of a knowing being here and now, under certain circumstances. The act of will is determined as a completely separate and individual thing, and by no means determines what the living being wants at all and wants in this way.This desire is the expression of the knowing character of the living being, and the knowing character, as the will itself, as what is present, has no ground or reason, and is outside the scope of the law of sufficient reason.Each, therefore, also always has ends and motives by which he directs his actions; at any time he can justify his individual actions.But if people ask him why there is desire at all or why there is existence at all, then he will not be able to answer it, and he will feel that the question is wrong.This is what really says that he realizes that he is the will, not anything else.The desires of the will are fundamentally self-evident, and only the individual activities of the will need at each moment to be determined in more detail by motives.

In fact, the will itself is essentially without any end, without any end, it is an endless pursuit.This point has already been touched upon when talking about centrifugal force.At the lowest level of objectification of the will, that is, in gravity, "this can also be seen: Gravity is constantly rushing [in one direction], and it is clear at a glance that it cannot have a final day. For, Even if all the matter that exists is transmitted at its will into a single mass, yet gravity struggles within this mass, rushing towards the central point, and still has to struggle against impenetrability, [regardless of] the impenetrability The intrusion appears as solidity or elasticity. So this pursuit of matter can only ever be hindered, but never, and never will be satisfied or peaceful. But all the pursuits of the phenomena of the will are just such a Situation. Every goal, when achieved, is the beginning of a new process of [pursuing], and so on [to and fro] to infinity. The plant enhances it from seed through roots, trunks, branches, and leaves to flowers and fruits. Self-manifestation, this fruit is only the beginning of a new seed, the beginning of a new individual, and this new individual repeats the old pattern again, and so on and on through endless time. The life process of animals is also like this: reproduction is a process culmination; after this [task] is accomplished, the life of this generation of individuals goes downhill more or less quickly, while naturally a new individual [rises] assuring the continued existence of the species and repeats itself The same process. Yes, the continual renewal of matter [in] every organism can only be seen as this phenomenon of continual impulse and continual transformation. Physiologists have now ceased to regard it as a response to consumption in motion. The necessary compensation of the matter of the human body is seen, for the possible wear and tear of the machine can never be equated with the continuous gain through nourishment. The eternal change, the endless flow is a manifestation [thing] of the essence of the will. Finally, in the human The same thing can be seen in the desires pursued by human beings. These desires always deceive us with their fulfillment as the ultimate goal of [man's] desire, but once achieved, the desire ceases to be a desire, and soon is forgotten, as a relic; if not openly acknowledged, is practically always set aside [regardless] as a vanished fantasy. If there is anything left to aspire to, And this game from desire to fulfillment, from fulfillment to new desire can continue without stopping, then this is lucky enough. If the endless process from desire to fulfillment to new desire, if repeated To be fast is to be called happiness, to be slow is to be called pain; if limited to a standstill, it is manifested as a terrible, life-stiffening emptiness, as a hopeless, vague desire without a definite object, as a fatal anguish. —From all this, the will, when knowledge illuminates it, always knows what it desires now, and what it desires here; but never what it desires at all. Every individual action has a purpose, and the whole The general desire of the human body has no purpose. This is exactly the same as every individual natural phenomenon, when it appears here and now, must be determined by a sufficient cause, and the forces that appear in the phenomenon have no cause at all. In the same way, since this cause already belongs to the thing-in-itself, and also to the groundless willlevel of phenomena. —The only self-knowledge of the will is in general representations in general, the whole world of perception.The intuitive world is the objectivity of will, the manifestation of will, the mirror of will.What the intuitive world reveals in this special meaning will be the object of our investigation later.