Chapter 54 Book IV The World as Will Revisited §54

We hope that the first three essays have led to the clear and precise realization that in the world as representation a mirror has been held up for the will to reflect it, and in this mirror the will has become more and more clear and complete. recognize itself.Man is the one with the highest degree of clarity and completeness, but the essence of man can only be fully expressed by a coherent series of his actions, and the coherence of his own consciousness in his actions makes it possible for him to be able to see the overall situation in the abstract. . Will in its own right is without knowledge, but a blind impulse which cannot be repressed.The phenomena of the will which we see in inorganic nature, in vegetative nature, in the laws of both, and in those parts of our own life which grow and develop, are such impulses.From the world of appearances added later and developed in its service, the will becomes aware of its desires, of what it wants;Therefore, we have called this appearing world the mirror that reflects the world, the objectivity of the will.And since what the will desires is always life, and precisely because life is nothing but the apparent manifestation of this desire; then, if we do not speak directly of will but of the will to life, the two are the same thing, and only the noun is added. It's just the vocabulary of the synonymous attributive.

Since the will is a thing in itself, it is the inner connotation and essence of the world; and life, the visible world, and phenomena are all but mirrors reflecting the will; then the phenomena will inseparably accompany the will, inseparable as a shadow. form; and where there is will, there is life, and there is a world.So as far as the will to life is concerned, it does secure life; as long as we are filled with the will to live, we need not worry about our existence, even when we see death.Although we see that individuals have birth and death, individuals are only phenomena, and they exist only in the understanding of the law of grounds and the principle of individuation.For this recognition, the individual does indeed receive his life as a gift, born out of nothing, and then suffers the loss of this gift through death and returns to nothing.But we are about to examine life philosophically, that is, from the idea of ​​life; Neither is it the subject of "knowledge", nor is it a bystander of all phenomena.Birth and death belong as much to phenomena of the will as they do, of course, to life.Life, essentially, has to be expressed in individuals that come into being and perish as phenomena of fleeting things that appear in the form of time.The thing that appears in the form of time does not know time itself, but it is precisely in this way that it presents itself in order to objectify its inherent essence.Birth and death belong equally to life and are mutually conditioned and balanced.If one prefers to put it another way, it may be said that both birth and death are balanced as the two poles of the whole phenomenon of life.The Hindu myth, the wisest of all myths, expresses this idea in this way: the myth just gives the god who symbolizes destruction and death (as Brahma, the most sinful and humblest of the three serial gods, symbolizes fertility). and generation, and Vishvi symbolizes conservation), I said that while wearing a skull necklace to Xihua, I also gave Lengga, a symbol of reproduction, as the characteristics of this god.So the reproduction here appears as the counterpoint of death; this means that birth and death are fundamental counterparts, and the two cancel each other out and compensate each other.It is exactly the same sentiment which impelled the ancient Greeks and Romans to adorn those expensive coffins just in this way.Now we can still see banquets, dances, weddings, hunting, animal fights, and parties of alcoholic women carved on the coffins, all of which are nothing more than descriptions of powerful life impulses.The ancient Greeks and Romans not only acted out for us this impulse of life in such pleasure-seeking scenes, but even in communal prostitution, down to those scenes in which satyrs with sheep's feet and ewes have sex .The purpose here is obvious: the purpose is to point out in the most emphatic manner the immortal life of nature in the death of the individual being mourned; and, though not in the abstract, it is thereby implied that the whole of nature is both the manifestation of the will to life and life itself. Connotation of will.The forms of this manifestation are time, space, and causality, and thus individuation.Individuals must have birth and death, which is inherent with "individualization".In the manifestation of the will to life, the individual is just like an individual sample or specimen.The will to life is not touched by birth and death, just as the whole nature is not lost by the death of an individual.This is because nature is not concerned with individuals but only with species.Nature has taken the preservation of the race very seriously, and has spared no expense in taking care of it with a vast excess of seeds and with the immense power of the propagating impulse.On the contrary, since infinite time, infinite space, and countless possible individuals in time and space are the kingdoms governed by nature, individuals have no value to nature, and cannot have any value.So nature is always ready to let the individual wither and die.Accordingly, the individual not only risked death in a thousand ways by the slightest chance, but was doomed at all from primordial origin; From the moment the power is exerted, nature personally sends death to the individual.Because of this, nature itself quite frankly reveals this great truth: only the Idea, not the individual, has real reality; that is to say, only the Idea is the proper objectivity of the will.Therefore, since man is nature itself, and in the highest self-consciousness of nature, and nature is only the objectified will to life; then, if a person understands this point of view and sticks to it, he certainly He may be justified in his [his] and his friend's death by looking back to the immortal life of nature, to his own being this nature.Therefore, Xi Hua who hangs the Lengjia should be understood in this way, and those ancient coffins should also be understood in this way.Those ancient coffins seem to say loudly to the sad visitors with their scorching life scenes: "Nature is incapable of mourning."

The reason why reproduction and death are regarded as belonging to life, as essential to the phenomenon of the will, is also because both appear to us as mere components of which all other life is composed. ] enhanced performance.This [thing] is always nothing else, but the transformation of matter under the permanence of form, which is exactly the birth and death of the individual under the eternal life of the race. [Physically] constant nourishment and regeneration differ only in degree from reproduction, and constant excretion differ only in degree from death.The former is the most straightforward in terms of plants.The plant is always only the repetition of the same impulse, of its simplest fibers, which in turn assemble themselves into branches and leaves.It is a systematic aggregate of identical and mutually supporting vegetal qualities, the continual regeneration of which is their only impulse.The plant gradually ascends by means of a stairway of metamorphosis to the fuller satisfaction of this impulse, and finally to flower and fruit, the total result of its existence and struggle.In this totality, the plant achieves its only goal by a short cut, accomplishing in one stroke a thousandfold what it has been seeking for so many times: the reproduction of the plant itself.The fruit-bearing of a plant is to its own reproduction what the type is to the print.Apparently the same thing is true of animals.The process of absorbing nutrition is a kind of continuous reproduction, and the reproduction process is also a higher meaning of nutrition; and the pleasure of sex is a higher meaning of comfort in the sense of life.On the other hand, the excretion or continuous throwing away of matter and exhalation of matter with breathing is also a death in a higher sense that is commensurate with reproduction.Since in this case we are always content with the form of the body, and do not grieve for the discarded substance; then, when the same situation occurs in excretion every day and every moment, We should adopt the same attitude as above when death occurs in a higher sense without exception.As we are indifferent to the former, we should not tremble and shrink from the latter.From this point of view, too, it would be wrong for a person to claim to prolong his individuality.When one's own individual is replaced by other individual, it means that the material constituting oneself is continuously replaced by new material.It is equally foolish to soak a dead body in spice oil, as it is to seal up one's own excrement.As for the individual consciousness bound to the individual body [also] is completely interrupted by sleep every day.Sound sleep can often turn into death without trace, as is the case with freezing to death in deep sleep.There is no difference between death and death while sleep is continuing; the difference is only with respect to the future, that is, only with respect to waking.Death is a sleep in which individuality is forgotten; everything else wakes up again, or rather is awake at all.

First of all, we must realize clearly that the will appears as a form of appearance, that is, a form of life or reality, which is really only the present, not the future, nor the past.Both the past and the future exist only in concepts; when cognition obeys the principle of sufficient reason, the past and future also only exist in the association of cognition.No one has ever lived in the past, and no one will ever live in the future; only the present is all life, the form of life, but also life's sure possession, which can never be stripped. seized. [If there is life, there is now. ] Now [the form], together with its content, is constant, and both sides stand firm and unmoved, as the rainbow is over the waterfall.This is because life is secured and secured by the will, and the present is secured and secured by life.Indeed, if we think of the tens of centuries that have passed, and of the billions of people who have lived in those centuries, we ask, what were these people?What have they become? —But we can only recall our own past life for these questions, revisit them vividly in our imagination, and then ask: What is all this?What has become of our past life? ——Just like this, so are the lives of hundreds of millions of people.Shall we think that this past, because death has sealed it, acquires a new existence?Our own past, even the most recent past, even yesterday, is already but an empty dream of the imagination; the past of those billions is of course the same thing.What is the past?What is it now? —It is the will, and life is the mirror in which it is reflected; it is knowledge without will, and knowledge sees the will clearly in this mirror.Whoever does not realize this, or does not want to, must ask, after he has asked the fate of past generations, why it happens that he, the one who asks, has the good fortune to possess this precious, erratic, What about the only real present?When hundreds of generations of people, and all the heroes and philosophers of those generations, are lost in the dark night of the past; but why is he, his little me, actually still there? —or, more briefly, and of course more peculiarly, one can also ask: why is this present, his present, just now still present and not also long gone? —When the questioner asks so strangely, he sees his existence and his time as independent, as invested in his time.In fact, he assumes two nows, one belonging to the object and the other to the subject, and marvels at the luck of the two "nows" coming together.In fact it is only (as already indicated in the treatise on the principle of sufficient reason) that the point of contact between an object in the form of time and a subject in the form of neither of the modes of the principle of sufficient reason constitutes the present.But as far as the will has become a representation, all objects are wills, and the subject is the counterpart of the objects; but since real objects exist only in the present, and the past and future contain only concepts and illusions, the present is the The basic form of the phenomenon of will is inseparable from the phenomenon of will.Only the present is ever present and stands still.The present, which is more elusive than all else in the experience of experience, appears to be the only constant, the permanent present of the scholastics, as soon as it comes to the metaphysical vision which separates the forms of intuitive experience.The source and bearer of its content is the will-to-live or the thing-in-itself—and these in turn are ourselves.Everything that is constantly arising and passing away while it has passed or is yet to appear belongs to this phenomenon by means of the form that makes birth and death possible.Then people think: "What is the past? The past is the present. - What is the future? - The future is the past".What people mean by these words is seriousness, not as a metaphor but as a matter of fact.This is because life is what the will holds, and now life holds.So anyone can say again: "Once and countless times, I am always the master of [this thing], and it will always be with me like my shadow; so I don't wonder when it came from, why it happened to be Now again."—I can liken time to a circle that turns forever: the sinking half is like the past, the rising half is the future, and the indivisible point [right] above is also That is, the place where the [horizontal] tangent and the circle touch is like the present without extension.The tangent does not rotate with the [circle], nor does it now.The present is the point of contact between object and subject in the form of time.The subject has no form, since it is not of the class of knowables, but is the condition of all [things] to be known.It can also be said: Time is like an irresistible stream, but now is like a reef that the current meets and divides, but the current cannot carry it forward together.As a thing-in-itself, will does not obey the principle of sufficient reason and is not weaker than the subject of cognition; and the subject of cognition is ultimately the will itself or its expression from a certain point of view.And just as this manifestation of life, the will itself, is inherent in the will, so now this unique form of life is inherent in the will.Therefore, we do not need to discuss the past before death, nor the future after death.Rather, we should recognize the present as the only form in which the will manifests itself.The present does not slip away from the will, but the will certainly does not slip away from the present either.Therefore, if such and such a life is enough for a man, if this man affirms life in every case, he can also have the confidence to see life as infinite and drive away the fear of death as an illusion. .This hallucination feeds on him an undue dread that he may finally lose the present, and presents him in advance with a time in which there is no "now."There is this illusion in time, and another illusion in space.By means of this other illusion men regard in their imagination the place which they are occupying on the earth as above, and all the rest as below.In the same way, people all attach the present to their own individuality, and think that all the present will disappear with the extinction of individuality, as if there is no present in the past and in the future.But [actually] the top is everywhere on the earth, and like this, it is also the form of all life now.It is no wiser to be afraid of death because it will rob us of our present than to be afraid of slipping down from the round earth when one thinks he is lucky to be standing upright on the round earth.Now this form is essentially necessary for the objectification of the will.As a point without extension, now cut off from the infinite [extension] of time to both ends, it stands still, as if it continued forever. It looked as if it had sunk into the embrace of the night.So when one fears death as one's own destruction, it is nothing but the imagining of the sun crying at night, "I am wretched, I shall sink into eternal night!" And, on the other hand, whoever is compelled to bear the burden of life, who, though he desires life and affirms it, hates its troubles and hardships, and above all the hardships which happen to befall him and make him no longer want to endure them. ; such a person should not expect liberation from death, nor can he be saved by suicide.The dark and gloomy underworld can seduce him by deceiving the underworld as a dry harbor for mooring.The earth rotates, from day to night; individuals die; but the sun itself burns endlessly, eternal noon.No matter how those individuals, those phenomena of ideals, arise and die in time like erratic dreams, the will to life always maintains life, and the form of life is the endless "now". —Suicide already appears to us here as a futile and therefore foolish act; the further our investigation proceeds, the more disadvantaged it will be.

Dogma changes and our knowledge is [often] distorted, but nature is never wrong.Its steps are steady, and it does not conceal its course.Everything is entirely in nature, and nature is entirely in everything.Nature has her center in every animal: just as the animal has found its way into existence just as well as it will find its way out of existence.In existence, the animal lives without care, without fear of destruction; it is sustained by the consciousness that it is nature, as indestructible as nature.Only man harbors in his abstractions [the apprehension] that he must die.Fortunately, [thinking about] this kind of inevitability does not happen often, but only when a certain moment and some cause make the future life and death appear before the imagination, it makes people feel afraid.Before the powerful momentum of nature, the ability of reflective thinking is tiny.Like non-thinking animals, man has an inner consciousness: he is aware that he is nature, that is, the world itself.The sense of security arising from this awareness is overwhelmingly normal in humans and animals alike.Because of this sense of security, no one disturbs him in any significant way at the thought of the inevitable death, which is by no means too distant; As if he must live forever.People go on living in this way, so that no one has a vivid conviction of the certainty of his own mortality, otherwise his emotions would not be so different from those of a condemned criminal; In the abstract generality, he theoretically admits the inevitability of death, but he treats this inevitability like other theoretical truths that cannot be applied in practice, and puts it aside, and does not put it in his current consciousness. go.Whoever pays attention to this characteristic of the human mind will know how to explain it, and those psychological explanations, from habit, from the feeling of being at ease with the inevitable, will not suffice. ; Rather, it should be said that the root of this characteristic is still the deeper statement mentioned above.On the same ground it may be explained why all ages and peoples have had, and respected, the belief that something continues after the death of the individual, despite the fact that the evidence for this must always be very weak, whatever The evidence to the contrary is numerous and strong.In fact, the opposite of this point does not need any evidence, but is recognized as a fact by a sound understanding, and as a fact, it is due to the conviction that nature is neither wrong nor lying, but frankly presents its actions and essence, even Frankly revealing these is warranted; at the same time it is only our own delusions that have confused the reverse of this in order to explain it to fit our limited knowledge.

As for what we have now made clear consciously, for example, although the individual phenomena of the will start and end in time, the will itself, as a thing in itself, has nothing to do with the beginning and end of time; The counterpart of the object, that is, the subject who knows but is never known, is also irrelevant to the beginning and end of time; and if there is a living will, there is life, etc.; these cannot be counted as continuing existence after death. In the class theory.This is because the will, seen as a thing-in-itself, like the pure subject of knowledge, the eye of the eternal creator, can neither persevere nor perish; Both the will as a thing-in-itself and the pure subject are timeless.Thus the egoism of the individual (this individual phenomenon of will illuminated by the subject of "knowing") cannot continue in time neither from the insights we have expounded nor from the external world that remains after his death. In this realization, there is no nourishment or comfort to be found in this body's desire to preserve itself for an indefinite period.And the statement that the external world continues to exist is just the expression of that view, but only objectively, and therefore temporally.This is because each man perishes only as an appearance, and on the other hand, as a thing-in-itself, is timeless, i.e., endless; ; as a thing-in-itself he is still the will that appears in all things, and death removes the illusion that separates our individual consciousness: this is the continuation [after death].Only as a thing-in-itself is each person inaccessible to death.Phenomenologically, his untouchability by death is one with the rest of the continuation of the external world.It is from this that the internal, mere felt consciousness, of the [reason] which we have just raised to definite knowledge, does, of course, prevent even rational beings from being poisoned by the idea of ​​death, as has been said. life, because this kind of consciousness is the foundation of courage in life, that is to say, as long as the creature faces life and concentrates on life, this courage can keep all living things standing upright and make them full of vitality He lives as if there were no such thing as death; this does not mean, however, that awareness of death, when it confronts him individually, in reality or only in imagination, compels him to face it. It can prevent individuals from being attacked by the fear of death, and from trying to escape death.This is because when an individual and his cognition have been yearning for life as life, he will inevitably see the permanence and indestructibility in life; and when death appears before his eyes, he also cannot but see what death is. Death is regarded as something, that is, as the temporal end of individual phenomena.We are not afraid of death because there is pain in death. On the one hand, the pain is obviously on the side before death; on the other hand, we often go to death to avoid pain.And the reverse is also true: although death is quick and easy, we sometimes prefer to avoid death by suffering terrible pain, if only we can live a little longer.We therefore regard suffering and death as two entirely different evils.What we fear of death is really the destruction of the individual, and death expresses itself openly as this destruction.But the individual is the life will itself in the individual objectification, so the whole existence of the individual must stand up and resist death. —Since emotion thus leaves us helpless, reason can appear again and overcome a large part of the unpleasant impressions of emotion; From now on, as far as our eyes can see, it is no longer an individual but a general whole [problem].This philosophical knowledge of the nature of the world, therefore, has itself reached the point which our investigation has now reached, but before going any further, this [higher] standpoint is sufficient to overcome the Horror.How far it is overcome depends on how much preponderance reflective thought has over immediate feeling in a given individual.If a person has assimilated into his mind the truths which have been set forth before, and at the same time does not conclude, from experience or any further insight, that all life is basically continual suffering, It is because he is satisfied in life, lives very well in life, and when he thinks about it calmly, he still hopes that his life will continue indefinitely or repeat again and again like what he has experienced; he still has so much courage to live, So that for the enjoyment of life, he is willing and willing to endure all troubles and pains incidentally; then, such a person stands on the round and eternal earth with "strong muscles and bones", and he has nothing to be afraid of. something.Armed with the knowledge we have given him, he looks without hesitation upon death rushing on the wings of time as a deceitful sham, a powerless phantom to terrify the weak But powerless over those who know themselves to be will, and the whole world is the objectification or reflection of this will.He therefore has life at all times, as well as the present, the only true form of the phenomenon of will.Therefore, neither the infinite past nor the future can frighten him, and he does not seem to be in the past and future; he has seen these past and future as a illusory trick and a veil of maya.So he has no fear of death, just as the sun has no fear of night. —It is his untested disciple Arun who is placed on this position by Krishna in the Vahava Jita.Seeing the army (similar to Xerx's army) preparing for the battle, Ah Rong was suddenly overwhelmed by grief, and hesitated to stop the battle to save the lives of thousands of soldiers.Krishna immediately taught Arong based on the above position, so the death of thousands of soldiers on the battlefield could no longer stop Arong, and he issued an order to fight. - Goethe's "Prometheus" also implies this position, especially when Prometheus says:

"Here I sit, Make people in their own image. the race of man, to suffer, to weep, To have fun, to be happy. To me, it's all the same, irrelevant. No matter what you- that's me! " And the philosophies of both Puruno and Spinoza may bring a man to this position, if he is convinced of the truth and not disturbed or weakened by the errors and shortcomings of the two philosophies.There is no real ethics in Puruno's philosophy, and although the ethics in Spinoza's philosophy is commendable and well written, it does not start from the essence of his philosophy at all, but borrows the essence of his philosophy. Some feeble, freehand sophistry clings to his doctrine. —Finally, there are probably many others who, if their knowledge and their desires go hand in hand, that is, if they can get rid of all delusions and make themselves clear, may also take the position indicated above : Because from the perspective of cognition, this is the standpoint of completely affirming the will to life.

The will affirms itself, that is to say: when its own essence is fully and clearly known to it in its objectivity, that is, in the world and in life as representation, this knowledge does not hinder Its desire, on the contrary, is that life that has been known in this way is exactly what it desires as such a life; but before that, there was no knowledge, it was just a blind impulse, but now it has knowledge, is conscious, and after thinking that's it.If, on the other hand, desire ceases because of this knowledge, then there is a negation of the will to live.For now it is no longer the known individual phenomena that act as motives for desire, but the whole, the essence of the world - which in turn reflects the will - grows out of the apprehension of the Idea. Knowledge of the will becomes the tranquilizer of the will, which thus voluntarily annuls itself.I hope that these wholly unknown and generally incomprehensible notions will become clear from the description of all the phenomena, here the mode of conduct, which is to follow.In these behaviors, on the one hand, it shows various degrees of affirmation, and on the other hand, it also shows negation.This is because although both affirmation and negation start from cognition, they do not start from abstract cognition expressed in language and characters, but from a living cognition.This living knowledge is manifested only in demeanor and action, and does not depend on any dogma.At the same time, dogma as abstract knowledge is what reason engages in.Only expressing both affirmation and negation and making it a rationally clear understanding can be my purpose, rather than writing down or recommending a certain way of affirmation or negation as a [behavioral] code.This latter approach is both foolish and pointless, since the will itself is fundamentally free and entirely self-determining; there are no laws about it. —But this freedom and its relation to necessity are the first things we must discuss before we enter the above analysis; then, since the affirmation and negation of life is our problem, we have to make some general remarks about life, An examination of the will and its object.Having gone through all this, it is much easier for us to recognize the ethical significance of the manner of conduct in its innermost nature, as [we] intend to.As mentioned before, the entire book is just the expansion of a single thought, so the conclusion drawn from this is: not only does each part of this book have a necessary relationship with the part before posting, but everything The parts have the closest relation to each other; [this book] differs from all those philosophies which consist only of a series of inferences, since the necessary relation [of inferences] presupposes in the first place only the preceding parts to be remembered by the reader. [We do not,] but every part of the book is connected with and presupposes every other part.That's the case, so [we] ask the reader not only to remember the part before the post, but to remember each part before and after, so that he can still connect any part of the previous and this to each time no matter how many things are in between. The current part comes up.This is also a hope that Plato once had for his readers, because his dialogues are often intertwined and far from the line of thought of the topic, and the main idea can only be spoken after lengthy episodes, [however] the main idea is exactly This makes it even more obvious.In our case this hope is [also] necessary, since here the examination of our single thought in parts is the only way of conveying it, but in the thought itself it is not essential. important stuff, but merely a convenience. ——Dividing this single thought into four articles as four main points of view, and carefully linking similar and similar things together will help to alleviate the difficulty of exposition and the difficulty of understanding this exposition.This subject, however, does not allow for a straight line like [writing] history, but is presented in a roundabout way, which necessitates repeated reading of the book.Only in this way will the connection between each part and other parts be obvious, and then all parts of the book will complement each other and be fully understood.