the Second Book,—a passage occasioned by the question, which met us then,
as to the end and aim of the will. Instead of the answer to this question,
it appeared clearly before us how, in all the grades of its manifestation,
from the lowest to the highest, the will dispenses altogether with a final
goal and aim. It always strives, for striving is its sole nature, which no
attained goal can put an end to. Therefore it is not susceptible of any
final satisfaction, but can only be restrained by hindrances, while in
itself it goes on for ever. We see this in the simplest of all natural
phenomena, gravity, which does not cease to strive and press towards a
mathematical centre to reach which would be the annihilation both of
itself and matter, and would not cease even if the whole universe were
already rolled into one ball. We see it in the other simple natural
phenomena. A solid tends towards fluidity either by melting or dissolving,
for only so will its chemical forces be free; rigidity is the imprisonment
in which it is held by cold. The fluid tends towards the gaseous state,
into which it passes at once as soon as all pressure is removed from it.
No body is without relationship, _i.e._, without tendency or without
desire and longing, as Jacob Böhme would say. Electricity transmits its
inner self-repulsion to infinity, though the mass of the earth absorbs the
effect. Galvanism is certainly, so long as the pile is working, an
aimless, unceasingly repeated act of repulsion and attraction. The
existence of the plant is just such a restless, never satisfied striving,
a ceaseless tendency through ever-ascending forms, till the end, the seed,
becomes a new starting-point; and this repeated _ad infinitum_—nowhere an
end, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a resting-place. It will also
be remembered, from the Second Book, that the multitude of natural forces
and organised forms everywhere strive with each other for the matter in
which they desire to appear, for each of them only possesses what it has
wrested from the others; and thus a constant internecine war is waged,
from which, for the most part, arises the resistance through which that
striving, which constitutes the inner nature of everything, is at all
points hindered; struggles in vain, yet, from its nature, cannot leave
off; toils on laboriously till this phenomenon dies, when others eagerly
seize its place and its matter.
We have long since recognised this striving, which constitutes the kernel
and in-itself of everything, as identical with that which in us, where it
manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullest
consciousness, is called _will_. Its hindrance through an obstacle which
places itself between it and its temporary aim we call _suffering_, and,
on the other hand, its attainment of the end satisfaction, wellbeing,
happiness. We may also transfer this terminology to the phenomena of the
unconscious world, for though weaker in degree, they are identical in
nature. Then we see them involved in constant suffering, and without any
continuing happiness. For all effort springs from defect—from discontent
with one’s estate—is thus suffering so long as it is not satisfied; but no
satisfaction is lasting, rather it is always merely the starting-point of
a new effort. The striving we see everywhere hindered in many ways,
everywhere in conflict, and therefore always under the form of suffering.
Thus, if there is no final end of striving, there is no measure and end of
suffering.
But what we only discover in unconscious Nature by sharpened observation,
and with an effort, presents itself distinctly to us in the intelligent
world in the life of animals, whose constant suffering is easily proved.
But without lingering over these intermediate grades, we shall turn to the
life of man, in which all this appears with the greatest distinctness,
illuminated by the clearest knowledge; for as the phenomenon of will
becomes more complete, the suffering also becomes more and more apparent.
In the plant there is as yet no sensibility, and therefore no pain. A
certain very small degree of suffering is experienced by the lowest
species of animal life—infusoria and radiata; even in insects the capacity
to feel and suffer is still limited. It first appears in a high degree
with the complete nervous system of vertebrate animals, and always in a
higher degree the more intelligence develops. Thus, in proportion as
knowledge attains to distinctness, as consciousness ascends, pain also
increases, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man. And then,
again, the more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the
more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.
In this sense, that is, with reference to the degree of knowledge in
general, not mere abstract rational knowledge, I understand and use here
that saying of the Preacher: _Qui auget scientiam, auget at dolorem._ That
philosophical painter or painting philosopher, Tischbein, has very
beautifully expressed the accurate relation between the degree of
consciousness and that of suffering by exhibiting it in a visible and
clear form in a drawing. The upper half of his drawing represents women
whose children have been stolen, and who in different groups and
attitudes, express in many ways deep maternal pain, anguish, and despair.
The lower half of the drawing represents sheep whose lambs have been taken
away. They are arranged and grouped in precisely the same way; so that
every human head, every human attitude of the upper half, has below a
brute head and attitude corresponding to it. Thus we see distinctly how
the pain which is possible in the dull brute consciousness is related to
the violent grief, which only becomes possible through distinctness of
knowledge and clearness of consciousness.
We desire to consider in this way, in _human existence_, the inner and
essential destiny of will. Every one will easily recognise that same
destiny expressed in various degrees in the life of the brutes, only more
weakly, and may also convince himself to his own satisfaction, from the
suffering animal world, _how essential to all life is suffering_.
§ 57. At every grade that is enlightened by knowledge, the will appears as
an individual. The human individual finds himself as finite in infinite
space and time, and consequently as a vanishing quantity compared with
them. He is projected into them, and, on account of their unlimited
nature, he has always a merely relative, never absolute _when_ and _where_
of his existence; for his place and duration are finite parts of what is
infinite and boundless. His real existence is only in the present, whose
unchecked flight into the past is a constant transition into death, a
constant dying. For his past life, apart from its possible consequences
for the present, and the testimony regarding the will that is expressed in
it, is now entirely done with, dead, and no longer anything; and,
therefore, it must be, as a matter of reason, indifferent to him whether
the content of that past was pain or pleasure. But the present is always
passing through his hands into the past; the future is quite uncertain and
always short. Thus his existence, even when we consider only its formal
side, is a constant hurrying of the present into the dead past, a constant
dying. But if we look at it from the physical side; it is clear that, as
our walking is admittedly merely a constantly prevented falling, the life
of our body is only a constantly prevented dying, an ever-postponed death:
finally, in the same way, the activity of our mind is a constantly
deferred ennui. Every breath we draw wards off the death that is
constantly intruding upon us. In this way we fight with it every moment,
and again, at longer intervals, through every meal we eat, every sleep we
take, every time we warm ourselves, &c. In the end, death must conquer,
for we became subject to him through birth, and he only plays for a little
while with his prey before he swallows it up. We pursue our life, however,
with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, as we blow
out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although we know
perfectly well that it will burst.
We saw that the inner being of unconscious nature is a constant striving
without end and without rest. And this appears to us much more distinctly
when we consider the nature of brutes and man. Willing and striving is its
whole being, which may be very well compared to an unquenchable thirst.
But the basis of all willing is need, deficiency, and thus pain.
Consequently, the nature of brutes and man is subject to pain originally
and through its very being. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of
desire, because it is at once deprived of them by a too easy satisfaction,
a terrible void and ennui comes over it, _i.e._, its being and existence
itself becomes an unbearable burden to it. Thus its life swings like a
pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui. This has also had
to express itself very oddly in this way; after man had transferred all
pain and torments to hell, there then remained nothing over for heaven but
ennui.
But the constant striving which constitutes the inner nature of every
manifestation of will obtains its primary and most general foundation at
the higher grades of objectification, from the fact that here the will
manifests itself as a living body, with the iron command to nourish it;
and what gives strength to this command is just that this body is nothing
but the objectified will to live itself. Man, as the most complete
objectification of that will, is in like measure also the most necessitous
of all beings: he is through and through concrete willing and needing; he
is a concretion of a thousand necessities. With these he stands upon the
earth, left to himself, uncertain about everything except his own need and
misery. Consequently the care for the maintenance of that existence under
exacting demands, which are renewed every day, occupies, as a rule, the
whole of human life. To this is directly related the second claim, that of
the propagation of the species. At the same time he is threatened from all
sides by the most different kinds of dangers, from which it requires
constant watchfulness to escape. With cautious steps and casting anxious
glances round him he pursues his path, for a thousand accidents and a
thousand enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went while yet a savage,
thus he goes in civilised life; there is no security for him.
“_Qualibus in tenebris vitæ, quantisque periclis_
_Degitur hocc’ ævi, quodcunque est!_”—LUCR. ii. 15.
The life of the great majority is only a constant struggle for this
existence itself, with the certainty of losing it at last. But what
enables them to endure this wearisome battle is not so much the love of
life as the fear of death, which yet stands in the background as
inevitable, and may come upon them at any moment. Life itself is a sea,
full of rocks and whirlpools, which man avoids with the greatest care and
solicitude, although he knows that even if he succeeds in getting through
with all his efforts and skill, he yet by doing so comes nearer at every
step to the greatest, the total, inevitable, and irremediable shipwreck,
death; nay, even steers right upon it: this is the final goal of the
laborious voyage, and worse for him than all the rocks from which he has
escaped.
Now it is well worth observing that, on the one hand, the suffering and
misery of life may easily increase to such an extent that death itself, in
the flight from which the whole of life consists, becomes desirable, and
we hasten towards it voluntarily; and again, on the other hand, that as
soon as want and suffering permit rest to a man, ennui is at once so near
that he necessarily requires diversion. The striving after existence is
what occupies all living things and maintains them in motion. But when
existence is assured, then they know not what to do with it; thus the
second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get free from the
burden of existence, to make it cease to be felt, “to kill time,” _i.e._,
to escape from ennui. Accordingly we see that almost all men who are
secure from want and care, now that at last they have thrown off all other
burdens, become a burden to themselves, and regard as a gain every hour
they succeed in getting through; and thus every diminution of the very
life which, till then, they have employed all their powers to maintain as
long as possible. Ennui is by no means an evil to be lightly esteemed; in
the end it depicts on the countenance real despair. It makes beings who
love each other so little as men do, seek each other eagerly, and thus
becomes the source of social intercourse. Moreover, even from motives of
policy, public precautions are everywhere taken against it, as against
other universal calamities. For this evil may drive men to the greatest
excesses, just as much as its opposite extreme, famine: the people require
_panem et circenses_. The strict penitentiary system of Philadelphia makes
use of ennui alone as a means of punishment, through solitary confinement
and idleness, and it is found so terrible that it has even led prisoners
to commit suicide. As want is the constant scourge of the people, so ennui
is that of the fashionable world. In middle-class life ennui is
represented by the Sunday, and want by the six week-days.
Thus between desiring and attaining all human life flows on throughout.
The wish is, in its nature, pain; the attainment soon begets satiety: the
end was only apparent; possession takes away the charm; the wish, the
need, presents itself under a new form; when it does not, then follows
desolateness, emptiness, ennui, against which the conflict is just as
painful as against want. That wish and satisfaction should follow each
other neither too quickly nor too slowly reduces the suffering, which both
occasion to the smallest amount, and constitutes the happiest life. For
that which we might otherwise call the most beautiful part of life, its
purest joy, if it were only because it lifts us out of real existence and
transforms us into disinterested spectators of it—that is, pure knowledge,
which is foreign to all willing, the pleasure of the beautiful, the true
delight in art—this is granted only to a very few, because it demands rare
talents, and to these few only as a passing dream. And then, even these
few, on account of their higher intellectual power, are made susceptible
of far greater suffering than duller minds can ever feel, and are also
placed in lonely isolation by a nature which is obviously different from
that of others; thus here also accounts are squared. But to the great
majority of men purely intellectual pleasures are not accessible. They are
almost quite incapable of the joys which lie in pure knowledge. They are
entirely given up to willing. If, therefore, anything is to win their
sympathy, to be _interesting_ to them, it must (as is implied in the
meaning of the word) in some way excite their _will_, even if it is only
through a distant and merely problematical relation to it; the will must
not be left altogether out of the question, for their existence lies far
more in willing than in knowing,—action and reaction is their one element.
We may find in trifles and everyday occurrences the naïve expressions of
this quality. Thus, for example, at any place worth seeing they may visit,
they write their names, in order thus to react, to affect the place since
it does not affect them. Again, when they see a strange rare animal, they
cannot easily confine themselves to merely observing it; they must rouse
it, tease it, play with it, merely to experience action and reaction; but
this need for excitement of the will manifests itself very specially in
the discovery and support of card-playing, which is quite peculiarly the
expression of the miserable side of humanity.
But whatever nature and fortune may have done, whoever a man be and
whatever he may possess, the pain which is essential to life cannot be
thrown off:—Πηλειδης δ᾽ ῳμωξεν, ιδων εις ουρανον ευρυν (_Pelides autem
ejulavit, intuitus in cælum latum_). And again:—Ζηνος μεν παις ηα
Κρονιονος, αυταρ οιζυν ειχον απειρεσιην (_Jovis quidem filius eram
Saturnii; verum ærumnam habebam infinitam_). The ceaseless efforts to
banish suffering accomplish no more than to make it change its form. It is
essentially deficiency, want, care for the maintenance of life. If we
succeed, which is very difficult, in removing pain in this form, it
immediately assumes a thousand others, varying according to age and
circumstances, such as lust, passionate love, jealousy, envy, hatred,
anxiety, ambition, covetousness, sickness, &c., &c. If at last it can find
entrance in no other form, it comes in the sad, grey garments of
tediousness and ennui, against which we then strive in various ways. If
finally we succeed in driving this away, we shall hardly do so without
letting pain enter in one of its earlier forms, and the dance begin again
from the beginning; for all human life is tossed backwards and forwards
between pain and ennui. Depressing as this view of life is, I will draw
attention, by the way, to an aspect of it from which consolation may be
drawn, and perhaps even a stoical indifference to one’s own present ills
may be attained. For our impatience at these arises for the most part from
the fact that we regard them as brought about by a chain of causes which
might easily be different. We do not generally grieve over ills which are
directly necessary and quite universal; for example, the necessity of age
and of death, and many daily inconveniences. It is rather the
consideration of the accidental nature of the circumstances that brought
some sorrow just to us, that gives it its sting. But if we have recognised
that pain, as such, is inevitable and essential to life, and that nothing
depends upon chance but its mere fashion, the form under which it presents
itself, that thus our present sorrow fills a place that, without it, would
at once be occupied by another which now is excluded by it, and that
therefore fate can affect us little in what is essential; such a
reflection, if it were to become a living conviction, might produce a
considerable degree of stoical equanimity, and very much lessen the
anxious care for our own well-being. But, in fact, such a powerful control
of reason over directly felt suffering seldom or never occurs.
Besides, through this view of the inevitableness of pain, of the
supplanting of one pain by another, and the introduction of a new pain
through the passing away of that which preceded it, one might be led to
the paradoxical but not absurd hypothesis, that in every individual the
measure of the pain essential to him was determined once for all by his
nature, a measure which could neither remain empty, nor be more than
filled, however much the form of the suffering might change. Thus his
suffering and well-being would by no means be determined from without, but
only through that measure, that natural disposition, which indeed might
experience certain additions and diminutions from the physical condition
at different times, but yet, on the whole, would remain the same, and
would just be what is called the temperament, or, more accurately, the
degree in which he might be ευκολος or δυσκολος, as Plato expresses it in
the First Book of the Republic, _i.e._, in an easy or difficult mood. This
hypothesis is supported not only by the well-known experience that great
suffering makes all lesser ills cease to be felt, and conversely that
freedom from great suffering makes even the most trifling inconveniences
torment us and put us out of humour; but experience also teaches that if a
great misfortune, at the mere thought of which we shuddered, actually
befalls us, as soon as we have overcome the first pain of it, our
disposition remains for the most part unchanged; and, conversely, that
after the attainment of some happiness we have long desired, we do not
feel ourselves on the whole and permanently very much better off and
agreeably situated than before. Only the moment at which these changes
occur affects us with unusual strength, as deep sorrow or exulting joy,
but both soon pass away, for they are based upon illusion. For they do not
spring from the immediately present pleasure or pain, but only from the
opening up of a new future which is anticipated in them. Only by borrowing
from the future could pain or pleasure be heightened so abnormally, and
consequently not enduringly. It would follow, from the hypothesis
advanced, that a large part of the feeling of suffering and of well-being
would be subjective and determined _a priori_, as is the case with
knowing; and we may add the following remarks as evidence in favour of it.
Human cheerfulness or dejection are manifestly not determined by external
circumstances, such as wealth and position, for we see at least as many
glad faces among the poor as among the rich. Further, the motives which
induce suicide are so very different, that we can assign no motive that is
so great as to bring it about, even with great probability, in every
character, and few that would be so small that the like of them had never
caused it. Now although the degree of our serenity or sadness is not at
all times the same, yet, in consequence of this view, we shall not
attribute it to the change of outward circumstances, but to that of the
inner condition, the physical state. For when an actual, though only
temporary, increase of our serenity, even to the extent of joyfulness,
takes place, it usually appears without any external occasion. It is true
that we often see our pain arise only from some definite external
relation, and are visibly oppressed and saddened by this only. Then we
believe that if only this were taken away, the greatest contentment would
necessarily ensue. But this is illusion. The measure of our pain and our
happiness is on the whole, according to our hypothesis, subjectively
determined for each point of time, and the motive for sadness is related
to that, just as a blister which draws to a head all the bad humours
otherwise distributed is related to the body. The pain which is at that
period of time essential to our nature, and therefore cannot be shaken
off, would, without the definite external cause of our suffering, be
divided at a hundred points, and appear in the form of a hundred little
annoyances and cares about things which we now entirely overlook, because
our capacity for pain is already filled by that chief evil which has
concentrated in a point all the suffering otherwise dispersed. This
corresponds also to the observation that if a great and pressing care is
lifted from our breast by its fortunate issue, another immediately takes
its place, the whole material of which was already there before, yet could
not come into consciousness as care because there was no capacity left for
it, and therefore this material of care remained indistinct and unobserved
in a cloudy form on the farthest horizon of consciousness. But now that
there is room, this prepared material at once comes forward and occupies
the throne of the reigning care of the day (πρυτανευουσα). And if it is
very much lighter in its matter than the material of the care which has
vanished, it knows how to blow itself out so as apparently to equal it in
size, and thus, as the chief care of the day, completely fills the throne.