Chapter 57 Book IV The World as Will Revisited §57

At every level illuminated by cognition, the will appears as an individual.Individual human beings feel that they are very limited in the boundless space and infinite time. Compared with the endless time and space, they are a quantity that is nearly evanescent, and they are invested in time and space.Since time and space are infinite, human individuals will always have only a relative and never an absolute certain time and place. The place and time of the individual are originally [extremely] limited parts of the infinity. —The existence of the real individual is only in the present.The unhindered escape of the present into the past is the constant transition to death, the slow death.The past life of the individual, apart from having certain consequences for the present, and apart from the evidence of the will of the individual inscribed in the past, is completely over, dead, and reduced to nothing, so the individual must, in reasonable cases, Put the past indifferently, regardless of whether the content of the past is bitter or happy.However, in the hands of individuals, the present is constantly turning into the past; the future is completely unpredictable and always short-lived. Therefore, in terms of form alone, human individual existence is already the present constantly turning into the past, that is, A slow death.If we now look at individual existence from the aspect of the body, then it is obvious that just as everyone knows that our [body] walking is just a constant stumbling block, our physical lifespan [living alive] is just constantly being blocked. The imperiled death is only a postponed and postponed death.In the end, our spiritual activity is just a constant postponement of idleness and boredom.Every breath is death to invade when repelling.In this way we struggle with death every second; and in the longer intervals with three meals a day, sleeping [at night], keeping warm [by the hour], etc.In the end death must triumph, for our birth dooms us to death's clutches: death merely teases its prey for a while before devouring it.Before being swallowed up, we try to prolong our lives with great enthusiasm and every possible way, the longer the better, just like blowing soap bubbles, even though we know that we must burst, we still try to blow them down as much as possible and blow them bigger .

Since we have seen in the ignorant nature that the inner nature of nature is constant pursuit and struggle, aimless and endless pursuit and struggle; then, when we examine animals and people, this will appear more clearly before our eyes up.Desire and struggle are the whole essence of human beings, and they can be compared with the unquenchable thirst.But the basis of all desires is need, deficiency, which is pain; therefore, man is always miserable, because his essence falls into the hands of pain.If, on the contrary, man were deprived of the object of his desire, because his easy gratifications immediately eliminated his desire, then a terrible emptiness and ennui would assail him, that is to say, man's being and existence itself would become His unbearable burden.So life swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom; in fact both pain and boredom are the two final ingredients of life.This is curiously and necessarily demonstrated by the fact that, after all pain and torment has been considered hell, there is nothing left for Paradise but idleness.

The continual striving which constitutes the essence of every phenomenon of the will acquires its first and most universal ground at the higher levels of objectification, because the will appears at these levels as a living being, with its sustenance and sustenance. The iron law of this living body; and what gives this iron law its effectiveness is that this living body is the objectified will to live itself and nothing else.Accordingly, man, as the most perfect objectification of this will, is correspondingly the most needy of all living beings.Human beings are completely concrete desires and needs, the aggregate of thousands of needs.People live in this world with these needs, and they have no one to rely on, and they are completely dependent on themselves; everything is uncertain, but their own needs and poverty are certain.According to this, the whole life is generally full of worries about maintaining that existence under such a heavy need to meet each other every day.Directly linked to this worry is a second need, that of racial continuity.At the same time, various dangers threaten people from all directions, and constant vigilance is required to avoid these dangers.He walks his way with a cautious step, looking around fearfully, for a thousand accidents, a thousand enemies are watching him.As he walks in the wilderness, so he walks in civilized society, there is no safety for him anywhere. [There are poems to prove it:]

"In such a dark life, in so many dangers; As long as this life goes on, That's it, spend it like this! " (Luknez: "On the Nature of Things II") The life of most people is just a constant struggle for existence itself, and they know that they will eventually lose in this struggle.What makes them stand up to this hard struggle is that although they are also greedy for life, they are even more afraid of death; but death always stands in the background, is inevitable, and can come to the foreground at any time. —Life itself is an ocean full of reefs and eddies.Man is the most careful and tries his best to avoid these hidden reefs and vortexes, even though he knows that even though he has gone through all kinds of hardships and tried his best to get around them, he is also approaching the final and complete world step by step. , the inevitable and irretrievable shipwreck [under the sea], and sailing straight to the end, to death.This was the final destination of the arduous voyage, and [this destination] was more perilous to him than all the rocks he avoided.

Yet it is now noticeable that, on the one hand, the pains and troubles of life are so apt to multiply that death—from which the whole of life consists in fleeing—becomes [something] desired, to which one voluntarily wishes. It rushes; on the other hand, if weariness and pain give a person a respite, emptiness and boredom immediately surround him in such a way that people inevitably need recreation again.It is the struggle for existence that keeps all living beings busy and in motion, but if their existence has been consolidated, they do not know what to do with it.So the second [drive] that moves them is the struggle to get rid of the burden of existence, to make existence imperceptible, that is, to annihilate time, to escape the emptiness.Thus we see almost all the carefree and carefree people, after they have at last lost all other burdens, now burden themselves; If you go all out and extend your life as much as possible, one point will be deducted, but it will be counted as a gain.But emptiness and boredom are not a disaster that can be taken lightly. In the end, it will portray real despair on people's faces.It makes creatures like people who don't love each other so much to pursue each other so eagerly, so it becomes the source of people's sociability again.As with other disasters in general, public devices are here and there arranged against emptiness, purely political considerations; for this disaster and its opposite extreme, like hunger, drive men to Unscrupulous and unscrupulous. "Bread and circus" is what the masses want.

The Philadelphia Confessions, with their solitude and idleness, made emptiness an instrument of punishment; and this is a terrible instrument of punishment, which has led prisoners to suicide.As sleepiness is the daily misfortune of the common people, so emptiness is the daily misfortune of the upper classes.In civic life, Sundays represent emptiness, and the six weekdays represent sleepiness. So any life completely disappears between the desire and the realization of the desire.Desire is pain in its very nature.The fulfillment of the wish quickly produces saturation.The goal is just like a vain: possessing one thing makes the other thing lose its stimulation: so desire and demand come back under the new 107 posture.Otherwise, loneliness, emptiness, and boredom follow; and fighting these things is no less painful than fighting sleepiness. ——[Only] desire and satisfaction alternate, the interval is not too long and not too short, and the pain caused by each of the two is reduced to the minimum, [only] constitutes the happiest life process.For what is commonly called the most beautiful part of life, the purest pleasure—and only because this pleasure pulls us out of real existence and turns us into indifferent spectators of it. —that is, pure knowledge, independent of all desires, the appreciation of beauty, the true joy of art, etc., can only be enjoyed by a few,—for this requires a rare gift—and it is among these few , this is only enjoyed as a passing cloud.And this higher intellect enables these few to suffer far more than the duller ones can at any time; in, and even that little [appreciation of beauty] is thereby counteracted.As for the vast majority of people, they cannot obtain this kind of pure intellectual enjoyment. They are almost completely incapable of enjoying the pleasure of pure knowledge, but are completely under the domination of desire.Therefore, if anything is to win their attention, to interest them, it must (and this is included in the meaning of the word [interest]) stir their will in some way, even if only remotely, only in possibility. The will may be involved, but never without the participation of the will, for they live far more in desire than in knowledge: action and reaction are their only [life] elements.This nature often shows itself innocently, and people can glean it from trivial details and everyday phenomena. ] role, they use this to express their response to this place, so as to have some effect on this place.Also, it is not easy for them to stop at just looking at a rare animal from afar, but they must stimulate it, tease it, play with it, and this is just to feel the effect and reaction.In the invention and spread of playing cards, we can especially see the need for will to rise up, and this just shows the pitiful side of human beings.

But no matter what nature does, no matter what fate does: no matter who men are, no matter what they have; the pain that constitutes the essence of life is always inescapable; [exactly]: "Briedus was sighing, Raise your eyes to the sky. " again: "Though Cronides, favorite of Zeus, Unavoidable, real sadness, endless pain! " Constant efforts to eliminate suffering do nothing but change the shape of suffering.The shape of pain turns out to be defect, sleepiness, life-preserving care.If one succeeds in eradicating this form of suffering--which is not easy--immediately a thousand other forms of suffering follow, alternating according to age and condition, such as lust, passionate love, jealousy. , love rival, hatred, fear, good name, love of money, disease and so on.Finally, if pain can no longer break in in another form, it comes in the sad gray coat of nameless trouble and emptiness.So I have to find a way to eliminate the emptiness and boredom.Even if boredom is driven out later, it is very difficult, when it is driven out, without pain stepping in again in those aforementioned forms and starting the [original] dance from the beginning, because any human life is a combination of pain and pain. Tossing back and forth between emptiness and boredom.So depressing as this examination is, I would like to call attention to another aspect of it that stands alongside it, from which one can derive a consolation, yes, even a sort of stoicism. To deal with his present misfortune with his indifference.It turns out that our impatience with misfortune is mostly caused by our taking it as accidental, as a chain of easily replaceable causes, because we are often not directly necessary, completely Common misfortunes, such as the inevitability of [increasing] age, the inevitability of death, and other everyday unsatisfaction, etc., trouble themselves.Rather, it is stinging to see the contingent nature of the circumstances that are causing us pain.But if we now realize that suffering as suffering is an essential and unavoidable [thing] in life; Realize that our present pain only fills a place where, if this pain were absent, another pain would immediately occupy it; but this other pain is now excluded by the present pain ] and nothing more; the realization that fate, in this sense, basically has nothing to do with us; then, when such reflective thinking becomes flesh-and-blood belief, it brings about a considerable degree of Stoic indifference. And it can greatly reduce the anxiety and worry surrounding personal happiness.In fact, however, it is difficult or never possible to see that reason has such a wide range of jurisdiction as to govern directly felt pain.

In addition, because people observe the inevitability of pain, the observation that pain squeezes out one another, and the resignation of the previous pain immediately brings new pain, it can even lead to a seemingly contradictory but not unspeakable situation. The rational assumption is that every individual is essentially suffering without pain, no matter how the form of pain changes, but the quota of pain is determined once and for all by the nature of the individual, and within the quota there can be no pain. There is a shortage, and there can be no excess.According to this, man's pain and happiness are not at all external, but precisely due to this quota, this endowment, although this endowment can also be experienced at different times due to [changes] of physiological conditions. Some increase and decrease, but the whole remains the same.And this is nothing but what is called his disposition; or, more precisely, the degree to which he, as Plato says in the first book of the Republic, or mood Uplifted or depressed.This hypothesis is supported not only by the well-known experience that great pain makes all lesser pains completely insensible, but that, on the contrary, in the absence of great pain, even the most trivial discomforts torment us, and experience tells us that if there is a great misfortune, [on weekdays] we would shudder at the thought of it, and now that it really happened, our emotions at this time, generally speaking, as long as we endure the first After a burst of pain, there will be no major changes in the future.The opposite is also true. After the long-awaited happiness comes, we will not feel more comfortable and comfortable than before.It is only at the moment when the change first occurs that it excites us strangely, either as a low distress or a high joy, but the music soon fades on both sides, because both are based on fantasy. Party.It turns out that both pain and happiness are not generated from the immediate enjoyment or pain, but from the beginning of a new future, which is expected by people in the immediate enjoyment or pain.Only by borrowing pain and pleasure from the "future" can the music be abnormally intensified and therefore not durable. —The following observation may also be cited as support for the above hypothesis,—according to which, whether in the knowledge of music or in the perception of pain and pleasure, a large part is determined subjectively and a priori —that is, that man's joys and sorrows are evidently not determined by external circumstances, by wealth or position, for we meet at least as many cheerful faces among the poor as among the rich. And , the motives for suicide are so varied that we cannot name any one misfortune great enough to be presumed to induce suicide in any character, but a few misfortunes as small as suicide. All] disproportionate yet contributing to suicide. If our levels of joy and sorrow are not the same at all times, then, on this view, this cannot be attributed to external changes, but only to internal changes. Circumstances, the physical condition of the person. This is because our ecstasy, when it is really high, though often only momentary, even to the point of joy, is customary to occur without any external cause. We certainly We often see that our pain arises only from some external situation, that we are obviously oppressed and troubled by this situation; so we think that if only the situation is relieved, the greatest satisfaction will follow. But this is only an illusion. According to our assumption, our quota of pain and pleasure is determined subjectively at each moment, and for this quota, the external motive that causes trouble is only physical. A sore poultice, the sepsis that spread out is now concentrated on the plaster. [That is to say] In the period of our existence, the wounds that are based on our nature and cannot get rid of, if there is no external cause of pain, the reason It is distributed on hundreds of points, and it appears in the form of hundreds of trivial troubles and nitpicking about things. The reason why we ignore these troubles and nitpicking now is because we have already quantified the pain. is filled with that chief misfortune which concentrates at one point the misery which would otherwise have been scattered. Consistent with this [phenomenon] is another observation: that if a heavy, oppressive care is driven from our breast, and another worry immediately takes its place. The whole element of this latter worry is already there, and it [has] not [yet] entered our consciousness as a worry only because our consciousness has There was no spare capacity for it; therefore the element of anxiety had to remain as an unnoticed dark mist at the farthest end of its horizon. But now that the place was vacated, this ready-made element at once came forward and Occupy the throne of the (dominating) anxiety of the rulers of the day. Although this element is much lighter in material than that of the vanished anxiety, it still knows how to put itself up, on the surface and in the front. Anxiety equal in magnitude, filling that throne with the major anxieties of the day [qualification].

Excessive pleasure and very intense pain can often only occur in the same person, since both condition both the other and the high activity of the mind.Both, as we have just seen, arise not from mere present [things], but from anticipation of the future.But suffering is essential to life, and its degree is determined by the nature of the subject. A sudden change, because it is always an external change, cannot actually change the degree of pain; Our share of joy and pain is always based on mistakes and illusions.Therefore, the excessive tension of these two emotions can be avoided by the insight of true knowledge.Excessive joy of any kind (carnival, ecstasy) is always based on the illusion that one finds in life something which is impossible to come across in it, that is to say, tormenting wishes or anxieties which are constantly renewing themselves. There has been lasting gratification.People must inevitably look back on any individual hallucination of this kind after the fact, and what joy the occurrence of the hallucination brought, it will be compensated by pain after its disappearance.In this respect, hallucinations are like a steep slope from which one cannot descend unless one falls; and such steep slopes should therefore be avoided.Any sudden, excessive pain is just a fall down such a steep slope, the annihilation of such an illusion, and thus is conditioned by it.Therefore, if one manages to always see things fully and in relation to them with sufficient clarity, and takes one's own firm guard against not really giving those things the colors one would want them to have, both [excessive pain and pleasure] All people can avoid.It is the chief interest of Stoic ethics to free the mind from all these illusions and their consequences, and to replace them with that which is imparted to [man's] mood by a firm indifference.Honessius is full of this insight in a famous blank poem:

"When your luck is bad, Never forget for a day: Insist on not being tempted. How lucky you are, Also don't mess around: Avoid merrymaking. " But we mostly shut ourselves off from the bitter medicine of knowing that pain is an essential part of life, that it doesn't come pouring in on us from without, it's We each carry within ourselves an inexhaustible source of pain.Instead, we are often made to excuse some particular cause for the pain that never leaves us, as free men make an idol for themselves, in order to have a master.It turns out that we are tirelessly running from one wish to another, and although the satisfaction we get each time promises us so many benefits, it does not satisfy us in the end, but is probably an embarrassing mistake that will soon appear; But we still can't see that we are drawing water with Thaneid's bottomed bucket, and we are always rushing to new wishes:

"For what we seek we have not yet attained, To us it is worth more than anything else, But once he got it, he immediately asked for something else. Always that longing holds us tight, Those of us who thirst for life. " (Lucknez: "On the Nature of Things) III) So desire-chasing is either so to the point of infinity, or is something rarer and presupposes a certain force of character, [that is to say] till we come across a desire which we can neither satisfy nor give up; , we seem to have what we are looking for, something that can always replace our own essence and complain as the source of our pain, so that we break with our destiny, but it is too late for us. Reconciled with one's own existence [instead of being] reconciled, it turns out that at this time, the recognition that pain is the essence of this existence itself and that true satisfaction is impossible is thrown away again.The result of this last development is a somewhat melancholic mood, which often endures a single great pain and the resulting contempt for all trivial pains and pleasures; Already a more sublime phenomenon, but the pursuit of illusions is more common.