Chapter 53 Book IV The World as Will Revisited §53

Affirmation and denial of the will to live in attaining self-knowledge Passion recedes as soon as knowledge arises. ——Ang Kedi Du Bolong: "Studies on Urbuhnika" Volume 2, page 216 The last part of our investigation may at the outset be declared the most serious; for it deals with human conduct, and is a subject which concerns every individual directly, and which no one can be indifferent or indifferent to.And it is so natural in man to connect all other problems to this subject, that in any coherent philosophical inquiry, at least when it interests him, he always refers to the This part is regarded as the general conclusion of the whole content.Therefore, people may not take the other parts too seriously, but he must pay serious attention to this part. —If one speaks in common terms with respect to what has been indicated above, one may wish to call the part of our investigation which we are now about to continue to be practical philosophy, as opposed to the [other] parts which have been dealt with before. Philosophy called theory.

In my opinion, however, I hold that all philosophy is theoretical; for philosophy, whatever the subject matter at hand, is essentially purely observational, and is to be discussed rather than written about. Maxim precepts.On the contrary, the demand that philosophy become practical, that philosophy guide behavior and change temperament are all old demands, which should eventually be withdrawn when more mature views are obtained.Because here, at the juncture of whether life is worthless, whether it is salvation or perdition, what plays a decisive role is not the rigid concept of philosophy, but the innermost nature of man himself; that is, the gods mentioned by Plato, who guide man but never Choose people, but the "gods" chosen by people themselves; that is, what Kant called "knowledge character".Virtue, like genius, cannot be taught.Concepts do not grow for virtue, they can only be used as tools; the same is true for art.We would be foolish, therefore, to expect our moral institutions and ethics to evoke the virtuous, the noble, and the saintly, or our aesthetics to evoke the poet, the sculptor, and the musician. up.

Philosophy, wherever it may be, can do nothing except explain and elucidate what is ready-made, and bring into the definite and abstract knowledge of reason the essence of the world, in the concrete, that is, as perceived by everyone. What else to do.But philosophy does this from all possible sides, from all points of view.Just as in the previous three articles we attempted to accomplish the task from other points of view within the exclusive universality of philosophy, so this article will examine human behavior in the same way.This aspect of the world, as I have already pointed out, may well be considered the most important of all aspects of the world, not only in subjective but also in objective judgment.In doing so, I will be completely faithful to the way we have gone before, taking as the premises on which we have based [arguments]; What has been done on other subjects is the same, and now it is derived from human behavior in the same way, and in this way I will do my best to convey this idea as completely as possible.

The points raised above and the manner of discussion announced here have made it clear that no norm of conduct, no deontology, can be expected in this text of ethics.Not to mention a general moral principle here as a panacea for all virtues.Nor will I speak of an unconditional ought, which, as has been said in the appendix, contains a contradiction; nor of the legislation of liberty, which also contains a contradiction.We don't talk about shoulds at all, because that's what people say to children and primitive peoples, not to people who have absorbed the full upbringing of the mature age of civilization.This is obviously a contradiction within reach, to say that the will is free but also to legislate for the will, to say that the will should desire according to the law: "It should be desired!" This is [equal to] the iron of wood!But according to our whole view, the will is not only free, but even omnipotent.From the will come not only its deeds, but also its world; as it is, so its deeds appear, so its world appears.Both are its self-knowledge and nothing else.It determines itself, and in this way it determines both; for there is nothing outside it, and both are itself.Only then is the will truly autonomous and self-determining.From any other point of view it is determined.All that our philosophic endeavors can do is explain and account for human behavior and some so different and contrary supreme norms.Behavior is the living expression of these norms. [We are] in terms of the innermost nature and content of human behavior and of these norms, in relation to our previous investigations, and just as we have tried to explain the other phenomena of the world in the innermost nature of these phenomena. The essence of the incorporation into definite and abstract cognitions as [to illustrate].Our philosophy then asserts the same immanence as it did throughout the preceding investigation.Contrary to Kant's great doctrine, our philosophy will not make use of the forms of phenomena, but will use the principle of sufficient reason as its universal form of expression, as a pole for jumping over the only phenomena that can give meaning to these forms. Landing on the boundless territory ofRather, the real world that can be known, the world that is in us and in which we are in, will continue to be the material of our investigation, and at the same time it is the field that our investigation can reach.The content of this world is so rich that not even the human mind can exhaust [its possessions] in the deepest possible explorations.For this real and knowable world, as in the preceding considerations, never leaves us without material and truth in our ethical considerations; therefore we need not have recourse to concepts which are empty but negative, There is no need to raise your brows and talk about the absolute, the infinite, the supersensible, and so on. Nothing but nothing.”),—or, shortly, “a castle in the air in the clouds”—and then convince ourselves that it really says something [something meaningful].In fact, there is nothing more unnecessary than the fact that we do not need to send such empty dishes with lids to the table. —In the end we shall, as before, not tell historical stories, and not take them for philosophy; So, no matter how cleverly he conceals it, this person is still a long way from understanding the world through philosophy.But in one's conception of the nature of the world itself, so long as the notions of change, becoming, and will-become arise, as long as some sort of prior or subsequent [here] has at least the slightest meaning, either overtly or implicitly The earth will find, has found a beginning and an end of the world, plus a process between these two points; even the philosophical individual sees his own place in the process; How to grasp the essence of the world.Using history to rule philosophy in this way, on most occasions, it is necessary to propose a theory of cosmogenesis, and it is a theory of a wide variety; The world is always trying to fail and getting into a difficult situation, and finally forced to go a different way, go against the past and go from the dark, from the unknown reason, the original reason, the unreasonable reason and so on, and so on. What is proposed is the theory of eternal change, the theory of eternal reproduction, and the theory of eternal [from concealment] to manifestation.But since the whole of eternity, that is, the infinity of time up to the present moment, is past, everything that would and could be changed must have been changed.One can easily overthrow all these statements with the shortest sentence: because all such philosophies of history, with all their pomp, regard time as part of the thing-in-itself, as if Kant had never been in the world. Therefore, it still rests on Kant's so-called phenomenon, which is opposed to the thing in itself, and stays on what Plato calls the change that is never permanent, and the change that is opposed to the being that never changes; It is said to remain on what Hinduism calls the veil of Maya.These are the cognitions that fall into the palm of the law of grounds.Starting from this understanding, people can never reach the inner essence of things, but just endlessly chasing phenomena, just moving blindly without end and aimless, just like a little squirrel performing on a rim until the end. [Rat Rat] Man gets a little bored, stops the rim at any point up or down, and demands respect from the audience. [Actually] The way of examining the world in pure philosophy, that is, the way of examining the world that teaches us to understand the essence of the world so that we can detach ourselves from phenomena, is precisely not to ask where the world comes from, where it goes, and why, but rather when and where. A way of looking at things that simply asks what the world is.That is to say, this way of investigation does not start from any kind of relationship, and it is not a way of looking at things as growth and decay.In a word, this is not the way of looking at things from any of the four modes of the principle of sufficient reason; on the contrary, it appears in all relations precisely as what remains after the exclusion of the whole set of ways of looking at the law of sufficient reason. But itself does not belong to these relations, always from the same world essence, the way of the world's idea as the object.From this knowledge there is art: like art, there is philosophy.Yes, in this article we will see that there is another kind of inner feeling starting from this understanding, the inner feeling that only leads to true holiness and transcends the world.