Chapter 63 Book IV The World as Will Revisited §63

We have seen that justice of the moment, which has its place in the state, is vengeance and punishment; The punishment and retaliation imposed cannot be justified, but simply add a second disaster to the disaster that has occurred, which is meaningless and meaningless.But eternal justice is quite different, and this kind of justice has also been mentioned before.It does not rule the nation but the world, it does not depend on man-made devices, it is not at the mercy of chance and fantasy, it is not unstable, it is not vacillating and error-prone; it is infallible, firm and infallible. reliable. ——The concept of retaliation itself includes time, so eternal justice cannot be a kind of retaliatory justice, so it cannot allow delay and time limit like retaliatory justice, but only use time to offset evil deeds with evil results. to realise.Here punishment and fault must be linked in such a way that they are one and the same.

"Do you believe, Sin flies on wings, Fly to the gods? There is someone recorded there, There is no scale of evil, In the book of Zeus? Once learned by Zeus. All acquitted? Sure enough, it is stated in the book, Haotian is still afraid of being too small, How can crime be tolerated? Inspection is no longer possible, Not to mention the punishment according to the crime. no, no, no, See what you wish, Here is the punishment. " (Original work by Euripides. Reprinted in Chapter 4 of the first volume of "Classification of Greek Ancient Writings" by Stopauius.)

As to the fact that there is such an eternal justice in the nature of the world, that can be [seen] from the whole thought which we have heretofore elucidated, and to the 453 who understand this [whole] thought, it will soon be fully understandable. Phenomenon, the objectivity of this will-to-life, is the world, in all its complexity of parts and forms.Existence itself and categories of existence, in the whole or in every part, come only from the will.Will, which is free and all-powerful.How it determines itself in itself and out of time, that is precisely how it appears in everything.The world is but a mirror reflecting this [will's] desire.All the limitations, all the pains, and all the troubles contained in the world belong to the expression of what it desires; the reason why it is so painful and troubled is also because of the will, which wants to be so.According to this, every living thing is basically responsible for the general existence with the strictest fairness and rationality, and then the existence of its kind and the existence of its unique individual; How it is, what its environment is like, what its world is like, it is how it bears the burden of survival, that is, it is dominated by accidents and mistakes, it is time-sensitive, impermanent, and always in pain.Whatever happened to it, whatever could happen to it, deserves and is fair to it.This is because the will [is] its will, and what the will is, so is the world.Only the world itself can be responsible for the existence and nature of this world, and no one else.How can others take up this responsibility? ——If you want to know the moral value of a person as a whole, then you only need to look at his fate as a whole.This fate is poverty, misery, trouble, torment, and death.Eternal justice operates: if man were not altogether worthless, his lot would not be so miserable as a whole.In this sense we can say: the world itself is the world court.If people could put all the world's troubles in one weighing pan, and all the world's evils in another weighing pan, then the needle on the balance would surely stop moving.

As soon as knowledge, which sprouts from the will in order to serve it, becomes the knowledge of the individual himself [and serves the individual], the world certainly does not reveal itself to this knowledge as it does to the scholar. The objectivity that reveals itself as the only living will - which is the will itself: rather obscures the vision of the untrained individual, like what the Hindus call the veil of Maya.For such an individual, what is presented is not a thing in itself, but only a phenomenon in time and space, in the principle of individuation, and in other forms of the law of reason.In this form of his limited knowledge he sees not the essence of things, which is unique; Or even the opposite.For him, then, the orgy is one thing, and the pain quite another; this one is the pain-maker, the murderer; the other the pain-bearer, the victim; Deeds are one thing, but the misfortunes caused by evil deeds are another.He sees one man living in pleasure, abundance, and revelry, while at the same time another man dies of hunger and cold in agony at his door.So he will ask: where is the justice?And he himself, in a violent impulse of the will, which is his origin and essence, clings to the revelry and enjoyment of life, not knowing that he is due to this act of his will. At the same time, he was grasping, embracing tightly all the pain and suffering in life that he saw and dreaded.He sees evil, and he sees evil in the world, but he is far from realizing that the two are but different aspects of one phenomenon of the will to live;He also often tries to avoid evil, to avoid his own personal suffering, by evil deeds, that is, by creating suffering in others, limited by the principle of individuation, blinded by the veil of Maya. — Just like a sailor who steers a small boat on the boundless raging sea, where the mountain-like waves are heaving and roaring, but he trusts in this tiny flat boat; That is how man puts his trust in the principle of individuation, that is, in the way in which the individual knows things and takes them as phenomena.The boundless world is full of pain everywhere, endless in the past and infinite in the future, which he cannot understand, and it is even just a fairy tale in his opinion.But his small "jue bow", his magnitudeless present, and the momentary comfort, are the only things that are real to him, and every day he doesn't have a better understanding to open his eyes, he thinks about it every day. Do what you can to keep these things.Before that day came, there was only a very vague realization active in the deepest part of his consciousness, that is, the realization that all those pains were not so strange but related to him; Nor can the principle of individuation be sheltered before association.An indelible terror, common to all men (and perhaps intelligent animals), arose from this insight.If people are confused about the principle of individuation by some accident, it is because the principle of sufficient reason seems to encounter an exception in one of its forms, for example, a change seems to happen for no reason. Or a dead person comes again, or some past or future event appears in front of the eyes, and the distant is getting closer, and this kind of terror will suddenly capture people.The great astonishment of such accidents is based on the sudden confusion in some ways of [grasping] phenomena; and these are the only [things] that keep one's own individuality separate from the rest of the world. Know the form.But precisely this separateness exists only in appearances and not in things-in-itself: it is on this that eternal justice rests. ——In fact, all temporary happiness is built on the base hollowed out below, and all wisdom is spent [in vain] on such a base.Happiness and intelligence protect the individual from accidents and find enjoyment for him; but the individual is a mere phenomenon, he is different from other individuals, and it is on the basis of the form of the phenomenon, of the individual The principle of chemicalization.As far as the true essence of things is concerned, as long as a person has a strong will to live, that is, if he affirms life with all his strength, then all the pain in the world is also his pain, and even all the pain that is only possible is in him. Real pain.For the knowledge of seeing through the principle of individuation, that happiness lives in time, or is given by "chance" [chance], or is wrought from chance by cleverness; and [this happiness] is sandwiched in the suffering of countless others, After all, it is only a dream of a beggar in which the beggar is a king, but he must wake up from the dream and realize that it is only a fleeting illusion that separates him [temporarily] from the pain of his life.

For the vision limited to the cognition of obeying the law of sufficient reason, the perspective limited to the principle of individuation, eternal justice is hidden from view, and there is nothing eternal in this vision if it is not decorated with some fabrications. justice.It is the look that sees the wicked, having done all sorts of evil and atrocities, yet live in joy, and pass away [easily] from the world without leaving condemnation.It is the kind of vision that sees the oppressed dragging out a life full of misery to death without a single avenger [for him].But for eternal justice, there is only one person who makes himself go beyond the thread of the principle of sufficient reason, who is bound to the cognition of individual things and knows the idea, sees through the principle of individuation and realizes that things in themselves cannot be manifested. Only after the form can we understand and comprehend.Only such a person, by means of this same knowledge, can understand the true nature of virtue, which will soon be expressed to us in so far as it relates to the present investigation, but the practice of virtue does not require this abstraction. understanding.Therefore, whoever has acquired this knowledge, he will also understand that since the will is the substance of all phenomena, even though those phenomena - in which they express now this and now that - are all regarded as completely different Individuals exist, even separated by long distances of time and space, yet pain inflicted on others and pain experienced by oneself, evil deeds and evil consequences often only touch the same essence.He will realize that the difference between the one who causes pain and the one who has to bear it is mere appearance and does not touch the thing-in-itself.This thing-in-itself is the will active in the two, which here, blinded by the knowledge destined to serve it, misrecognizes itself, and seeks a surge of comfort in one of its phenomena, in which It is thus inflicting great pain on another phenomenon of its own; thus it bites its teeth into its own flesh in a strong urge, without knowing that it is always only hurting itself, and that it does so because the medium of individuation exposes It turns out that there is a contradiction hidden within it.The maker and the bearer of pain are one [not two].The former is wrong because he thinks he has no share in pain, and the latter is wrong because he thinks he has no share in sin.If the eyes of both are opened, the one who inflicts pain will realize that he lives among all those who suffer in the wide world, and, if he is rational, It is vain to wonder why these beings and things, ignorant of their own responsibility for suffering, were called into this world to suffer so much.And the one who suffers will feel that all the evil that is or has been done in the world flows from the will that manifests in him, which is also the essence that constitutes him; The appearance of it, and the affirmation of it, has borne all the pains which spring from this will; as long as he is this will, he is justified in enduring them. ——Starting from this understanding, Calderon, a poet full of meditation, said in "Life is a Dream":

"Because a man's greatest sin That is: He has been born. " Under the eternal law, since the end of "life" is death, how can it be taught that "life" is not a sin?Calderon just used his verse to express the creed of original sin in Christianity. To have a clear knowledge of eternal justice, of the evil of crime and that of punishment, to which the two ends of the scale are indispensably linked, must go well beyond individuality and the principles of its possibility; and this knowledge, therefore, And like this, as I shall soon say, the pure and clear perception of the nature of all virtues remains forever inaccessible to the majority. ——Thus, the wise ancestors of the Indian nation, although in the "Veda" that can only be read by the three reincarnated races, or in the scriptures in the religion, that is, as far as the concept and language can reach within the confines of their still figurative and incoherent mode of expression, to express this knowledge directly; But [this knowledge] is conveyed only by mythology. "Veda" is the achievement of the highest knowledge and wisdom of human beings, and the core of the scriptures is finally passed on to us in "Upani Shatan" as the greatest gift of this century.In the Vedic texts we see that direct statement expressed in several ways, especially in this way: all that exists in the world, animate and inanimate, is Put them in front of the disciples one by one, and say a big mantra that has been formulated and called Mocifaguya (Mahayana) one by one: "Datumus", more correctly "Tat Duamen Assi", which means "this is you". —But for the masses, as far as they can understand in their limitations, this great truth is translated into a mode of knowing that obeys the principle of sufficient reason.Although in its nature this mode of knowing cannot at all accommodate this truth purely and vividly, and is even the exact opposite of it: nevertheless, it obtains a substitute for this truth in the form of myth.And this substitute is sufficient as a regulator of behavior, because this substitute follows the principle of reason in a way of knowing that has nothing to do with the ethical meaning itself. After all, it uses the representation of images to make the ethical meaning of the behavior understandable.And this is the purpose of all religious teachings, for they are all to clothe truths which the reckless mind cannot touch.In this sense, Kant's language can also be used to call this Indian myth a criterion of practical reason.As such, the myth has the advantage that it does not need to contain any other elements other than the things in front of us in the real world, so that all the concepts of the myth can be verified by intuition [things].This refers to the myth of reincarnation.This myth asserts that the pain that people inflict on other people or things in this life must be compensated by exactly the same pain in the next life, and also in this world.It goes so far as to think that whoever kills an animal will be born as such an animal one time in the endless future and suffer the same death.The myth says that evil deeds will afterwards be destined to be reborn in the world as suffering despised persons or things; Banya untouchables or Chandra untouchables, for lepers, for crocodiles and so on and so on.Myth terrorizes [man] with pain through persons and things who suffer without knowing what crime they have committed, and these sufferings are confirmed by intuitions from the real world, so that myth needs no other recourse. hell.On the contrary, as a good reward, it is promised to be reborn in a better and nobler human body, as a Brahmin, as a wise person, as a holy person.The best rewards are reserved for the noblest deeds and utter abstinence; and to this reward also the woman who for seven lifetimes voluntarily died on her husband's pyre, and who never A person who does not lie but has a pure mouth.This kind of good reward, the myth can only be expressed in a negative sense in the language of the world, that is, many [people] can no longer enter the cycle of reincarnation: "no longer enter the existence of phenomena"; "Buddhists who do not recognize the caste system said: "When you enter Nirvana, Nirvana is like a shape, and there are no four sufferings, birth, old age, sickness and death."

Never was a myth, nor ever will be, more closely fitted to this philosophical truth accessible to so few than this ancient teaching of the best and oldest people.Although the nation is now divided into many fragments, yet this ancient teaching, as a universal national belief, still holds sway today, and has no less decisive influence on life than it did four thousand years ago.Thus Pythagoras and Plato have marvelously discovered, understood, respected, and applied this immeasurably super-mythological teaching, though they may have received it from India or Egypt, and themselves in some unknown To some extent, I also believed in this teaching. —And yet we now send to the Brahmins English clergymen and Hernhut [brotherhood] linen weavers, saying that out of sympathy we teach them something better than this above-mentioned myth, and give them Point out that they were created out of nothing, and rejoice with gratitude for this.But what happens to us is the same as what happened to the man who hit the stone with the bullet.Our religion cannot and must not take root in India.The oldest wisdom of mankind will not be displaced by what happened to Galilee.On the contrary Indian wisdom will in turn flow into Europe and will bring about a fundamental change in our knowledge and thinking.