order to enable him to persist in it; but suffering in general, as it is
inflicted by fate, is a second way (δευτερος πλους(87)) of attaining to
that denial. Indeed, we may assume that most men only attain to it in this
way, and that it is the suffering which is personally experienced, not
that which is merely known, which most frequently produces complete
resignation, often only at the approach of death. For only in the case of
a few is the mere knowledge which, seeing through the _principium
individuationis_, first produces perfect goodness of disposition and
universal love of humanity, and finally enables them to regard all the
suffering of the world as their own; only in the case of a few, I say, is
this knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of the will. Even with
him who approaches this point, it is almost invariably the case that the
tolerable condition of his own body, the flattery of the moment, the
delusion of hope, and the satisfaction of the will, which is ever
presenting itself anew, _i.e._, lust, is a constant hindrance to the
denial of the will, and a constant temptation to the renewed assertion of
it. Therefore in this respect all these illusions have been personified as
the devil. Thus in most cases the will must be broken by great personal
suffering before its self-conquest appears. Then we see the man who has
passed through all the increasing degrees of affliction with the most
vehement resistance, and is finally brought to the verge of despair,
suddenly retire into himself, know himself and the world, change his whole
nature, rise above himself and all suffering, as if purified and
sanctified by it, in inviolable peace, blessedness, and sublimity,
willingly renounce everything he previously desired with all his might,
and joyfully embrace death. It is the refined silver of the denial of the
will to live that suddenly comes forth from the purifying flame of
suffering. It is salvation. Sometimes we see even those who were very
wicked purified to this degree by great grief; they have become new beings
and are completely changed. Therefore their former misdeeds trouble their
consciences no more, yet they willingly atone for them by death, and
gladly see the end of the manifestation of that will which is now foreign
to them and abhorred by them. The great Goethe has given us a distinct and
visible representation of this denial of the will, brought about by great
misfortunes and despair of all deliverance, in his immortal masterpiece
“Faust,” in the story of the sufferings of Gretchen. I know no parallel to
this in poetry. It is a perfect example of the second path that leads to
the denial of the will, not, as the first, through the mere knowledge of
the sufferings of a whole world which one has voluntarily acquired, but
through excessive suffering experienced in one’s own person. Many
tragedies certainly end by conducting their strong-willed heroes to the
point of entire resignation, and then generally the will to live and its
manifestation end together, but no representation that is known to me
brings what is essential to that change so distinctly before us, free from
all that is extraneous, as the part of “Faust” I have referred to.
In actual life we see that those unfortunate persons who have to drink to
the dregs the greatest cup of suffering, since when all hope is taken from
them they have to face with full consciousness a shameful, violent, and
often painful death on the scaffold, are very frequently changed in this
way. We must not indeed assume that there is so great a difference between
their character and that of most men as their fate would seem to indicate,
but must attribute the latter for the most part to circumstances; yet they
are guilty and to a considerable degree bad. We see, however, many of
them, when they have entirely lost hope, changed in the way referred to.
They now show actual goodness and purity of disposition, true abhorrence
of doing any act in the least degree bad or unkind. They forgive their
enemies, even if it is through them that they innocently suffer; and not
with words merely and a sort of hypocritical fear of the judges of the
lower world, but in reality and with inward earnestness and no desire for
revenge. Indeed, their sufferings and death at last becomes dear to them,
for the denial of the will to live has appeared; they often decline the
deliverance when it is offered, and die gladly, peacefully, and happily.
To them the last secret of life has revealed itself in their excessive
pain; the secret that misery and wickedness, sorrow and hate, the sufferer
and the inflicter of suffering, however different they may appear to the
knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason, are in
themselves one, the manifestation of that one will to live which
objectifies its conflict with itself by means of the _principium
individuationis_. They have learned to know both sides in full measure,
the badness and the misery; and since at last they see the identity of the
two, they reject them both at once; they deny the will to live. In what
myths and dogmas they account to their reason for this intuitive and
direct knowledge and for their own change is, as has been said, a matter
of no importance.
Matthias Claudius must without doubt have witnessed a change of mind of
this description when he wrote the remarkable essay in the “Wandsbecker
Boten” (pt. i. p. 115) with the title “Bekehrungsgeschichte des ***”
(“History of the Conversion of ***”), which concludes thus: “Man’s way of
thinking may pass from one point of the periphery to the opposite point,
and again back to the former point, if circumstances mark out for him the
path. And these changes in a man are really nothing great or interesting,
but that _remarkable, catholic, transcendental change_ in which the whole
circle is irreparably broken up and all the laws of psychology become vain
and empty when the coat is stripped from the shoulders, or at least turned
outside in, and as it were scales fall from a man’s eyes, is such that
every one who has breath in his nostrils forsakes father and mother if he
can hear or experience something certain about it.”
The approach of death and hopelessness are in other respects not
absolutely necessary for such a purification through suffering. Even
without them the knowledge of the contradiction of the will to live with
itself can, through great misfortune and pain, force an entrance, and the
vanity of all striving become recognised. Hence it has often happened that
men who have led a very restless life in the full strain of the passions,
kings, heroes, and adventurers, suddenly change, betake themselves to
resignation and penance, become hermits or monks. To this class belong all
true accounts of conversions; for example, that of Raymond Lully, who had
long wooed a fair lady, and was at last admitted to her chamber,
anticipating the fulfilment of all his wishes, when she, opening her
bodice, showed him her bosom frightfully eaten with cancer. From that
moment, as if he had looked into hell, he was changed; he forsook the
court of the king of Majorca, and went into the desert to do penance.(88)
This conversion is very like that of the Abbé Rancé, which I have briefly
related in the 48th chapter of the Supplement. If we consider how in both
cases the transition from the pleasure to the horror of life was the
occasion of it, this throws some light upon the remarkable fact that it is
among the French, the most cheerful, gay, sensuous, and frivolous nation
in Europe, that by far the strictest of all monastic orders, the
Trappists, arose, was re-established by Rancé after its fall, and has
maintained itself to the present day in all its purity and strictness, in
spite of revolutions, Church reformations, and encroachments of
infidelity.
But a knowledge such as that referred to above of the nature of this
existence may leave us again along with the occasion of it and the will to
live, and with it the previous character may reappear. Thus we see that
the passionate Benvenuto Cellini was changed in this way, once when he was
in prison, and again when very ill; but when the suffering passed over, he
fell back again into his old state. In general, the denial of the will to
live by no means proceeds from suffering with the necessity of an effect
from its cause, but the will remains free; for this is indeed the one
point at which its freedom appears directly in the phenomenon; hence the
astonishment which Asmus expresses so strongly at the “transcendental
change.” In the case of every suffering, it is always possible to conceive
a will which exceeds it in intensity and is therefore unconquered by it.
Thus Plato speaks in the “Phædon” of men who up to the moment of their
execution feast, drink, and indulge in sensuous pleasure, asserting life
even to the death. Shakespeare shows us in Cardinal Beaufort the fearful
end of a profligate, who dies full of despair, for no suffering or death
can break his will, which is vehement to the extreme of wickedness.(89)
The more intense the will is, the more glaring is the conflict of its
manifestation, and thus the greater is the suffering. A world which was
the manifestation of a far more intense will to live than this world
manifests would produce so much the greater suffering; would thus be a
hell.
All suffering, since it is a mortification and a call to resignation, has
potentially a sanctifying power. This is the explanation of the fact that
every great misfortune or deep pain inspires a certain awe. But the
sufferer only really becomes an object of reverence when, surveying the
course of his life as a chain of sorrows, or mourning some great and
incurable misfortune, he does not really look at the special combination
of circumstances which has plunged his own life into suffering, nor stops
at the single great misfortune that has befallen him; for in so doing his
knowledge still follows the principle of sufficient reason, and clings to
the particular phenomenon; he still wills life only not under the
conditions which have happened to him; but only then, I say, he is truly
worthy of reverence when he raises his glance from the particular to the
universal, when he regards his suffering as merely an example of the
whole, and for him, since in a moral regard he partakes of genius, one
case stands for a thousand, so that the whole of life conceived as
essentially suffering brings him to resignation. Therefore it inspires
reverence when in Goethe’s “Torquato Tasso” the princess speaks of how her
own life and that of her relations has always been sad and joyless, and
yet regards the matter from an entirely universal point of view.
A very noble character we always imagine with a certain trace of quiet
sadness, which is anything but a constant fretfulness at daily annoyances
(this would be an ignoble trait, and lead us to fear a bad disposition),
but is a consciousness derived from knowledge of the vanity of all
possessions, of the suffering of all life, not merely of his own. But such
knowledge may primarily be awakened by the personal experience of
suffering, especially some one great sorrow, as a single unfulfilled wish
brought Petrarch to that state of resigned sadness concerning the whole of
life which appeals to us so pathetically in his works; for the Daphne he
pursued had to flee from his hands in order to leave him, instead of
herself, the immortal laurel. When through some such great and irrevocable
denial of fate the will is to some extent broken, almost nothing else is
desired, and the character shows itself mild, just, noble, and resigned.
When, finally, grief has no definite object, but extends itself over the
whole of life, then it is to a certain extent a going into itself, a
withdrawal, a gradual disappearance of the will, whose visible
manifestation, the body, it imperceptibly but surely undermines, so that a
man feels a certain loosening of his bonds, a mild foretaste of that death
which promises to be the abolition at once of the body and of the will.
Therefore a secret pleasure accompanies this grief, and it is this, as I
believe, which the most melancholy of all nations has called “the joy of
grief.” But here also lies the danger of _sentimentality_, both in life
itself and in the representation of it in poetry; when a man is always
mourning and lamenting without courageously rising to resignation. In this
way we lose both earth and heaven, and retain merely a watery
sentimentality. Only if suffering assumes the form of pure knowledge, and
this, acting as a _quieter of the will_, brings about resignation, is it
worthy of reverence. In this regard, however, we feel a certain respect at
the sight of every great sufferer which is akin to the feeling excited by
virtue and nobility of character, and also seems like a reproach of our
own happy condition. We cannot help regarding every sorrow, both our own
and those of others, as at least a potential advance towards virtue and
holiness, and, on the contrary, pleasures and worldly satisfactions as a
retrogression from them. This goes so far, that every man who endures a
great bodily or mental suffering, indeed every one who merely performs
some physical labour which demands the greatest exertion, in the sweat of
his brow and with evident exhaustion, yet with patience and without
murmuring, every such man, I say, if we consider him with close attention,
appears to us like a sick man who tries a painful cure, and who willingly,
and even with satisfaction, endures the suffering it causes him, because
he knows that the more he suffers the more the cause of his disease is
affected, and that therefore the present suffering is the measure of his
cure.
According to what has been said, the denial of the will to live, which is
just what is called absolute, entire resignation, or holiness, always
proceeds from that quieter of the will which the knowledge of its inner
conflict and essential vanity, expressing themselves in the suffering of
all living things, becomes. The difference, which we have represented as
two paths, consists in whether that knowledge is called up by suffering
which is merely and purely _known_, and is freely appropriated by means of
the penetration of the _principium individuationis_, or by suffering which
is directly _felt_ by a man himself. True salvation, deliverance from life
and suffering, cannot even be imagined without complete denial of the
will. Till then, every one is simply this will itself, whose manifestation
is an ephemeral existence, a constantly vain and empty striving, and the
world full of suffering we have represented, to which all irrevocably and
in like manner belong. For we found above that life is always assured to
the will to live, and its one real form is the present, from which they
can never escape, since birth and death reign in the phenomenal world. The
Indian mythus expresses this by saying “they are born again.” The great
ethical difference of character means this, that the bad man is infinitely
far from the attainment of the knowledge from which the denial of the will
proceeds, and therefore he is in truth _actually_ exposed to all the
miseries which appear in life as _possible_; for even the present
fortunate condition of his personality is merely a phenomenon produced by
the _principium individuationis_, and a delusion of Mâyâ, the happy dream
of a beggar. The sufferings which in the vehemence and ardour of his will
he inflicts upon others are the measure of the suffering, the experience
of which in his own person cannot break his will, and plainly lead it to
the denial of itself. All true and pure love, on the other hand, and even
all free justice, proceed from the penetration of the _principium
individuationis_, which, if it appears with its full power, results in
perfect sanctification and salvation, the phenomenon of which is the state
of resignation described above, the unbroken peace which accompanies it,
and the greatest delight in death.(90)
§ 69. Suicide, the actual doing away with the individual manifestation of
will, differs most widely from the denial of the will to live, which is
the single outstanding act of free-will in the manifestation, and is
therefore, as Asmus calls it, the transcendental change. This last has
been fully considered in the course of our work. Far from being denial of
the will, suicide is a phenomenon of strong assertion of will; for the
essence of negation lies in this, that the joys of life are shunned, not
its sorrows. The suicide wills life, and is only dissatisfied with the
conditions under which it has presented itself to him. He therefore by no
means surrenders the will to live, but only life, in that he destroys the
individual manifestation. He wills life—wills the unrestricted existence
and assertion of the body; but the complication of circumstances does not
allow this, and there results for him great suffering. The very will to
live finds itself so much hampered in this particular manifestation that
it cannot put forth its energies. It therefore comes to such a
determination as is in conformity with its own nature, which lies outside
the conditions of the principle of sufficient reason, and to which,
therefore, all particular manifestations are alike indifferent, inasmuch
as it itself remains unaffected by all appearing and passing away, and is
the inner life of all things; for that firm inward assurance by reason of
which we all live free from the constant dread of death, the assurance
that a phenomenal existence can never be wanting to the will, supports our
action even in the case of suicide. Thus the will to live appears just as
much in suicide (Siva) as in the satisfaction of self-preservation
(Vishnu) and in the sensual pleasure of procreation (Brahma). This is the
inner meaning of the unity of the Trimurtis, which is embodied in its
entirety in every human being, though in time it raises now one, now
another, of its three heads. Suicide stands in the same relation to the
denial of the will as the individual thing does to the Idea. The suicide
denies only the individual, not the species. We have already seen that as
life is always assured to the will to live, and as sorrow is inseparable
from life, suicide, the wilful destruction of the single phenomenal
existence, is a vain and foolish act; for the thing-in-itself remains
unaffected by it, even as the rainbow endures however fast the drops which
support it for the moment may change. But, more than this, it is also the
masterpiece of Mâyâ, as the most flagrant example of the contradiction of
the will to live with itself. As we found this contradiction in the case
of the lowest manifestations of will, in the permanent struggle of all the
forces of nature, and of all organic individuals for matter and time and
space; and as we saw this antagonism come ever more to the front with
terrible distinctness in the ascending grades of the objectification of
the will, so at last in the highest grade, the Idea of man, it reaches the
point at which, not only the individuals which express the same Idea
extirpate each other, but even the same individual declares war against
itself. The vehemence with which it wills life, and revolts against what
hinders it, namely, suffering, brings it to the point of destroying
itself; so that the individual will, by its own act, puts an end to that
body which is merely its particular visible expression, rather than permit
suffering to break the will. Just because the suicide cannot give up
willing, he gives up living. The will asserts itself here even in putting
an end to its own manifestation, because it can no longer assert itself
otherwise. As, however, it was just the suffering which it so shuns that
was able, as mortification of the will, to bring it to the denial of
itself, and hence to freedom, so in this respect the suicide is like a
sick man, who, after a painful operation which would entirely cure him has
been begun, will not allow it to be completed, but prefers to retain his
disease. Suffering approaches and reveals itself as the possibility of the
denial of will; but the will rejects it, in that it destroys the body, the
manifestation of itself, in order that it may remain unbroken. This is the
reason why almost all ethical teachers, whether philosophical or
religious, condemn suicide, although they themselves can only give
far-fetched sophistical reasons for their opinion. But if a human being
was ever restrained from committing suicide by purely moral motives, the
inmost meaning of this self-conquest (in whatever ideas his reason may
have clothed it) was this: “I will not shun suffering, in order that it
may help to put an end to the will to live, whose manifestation is so
wretched, by so strengthening the knowledge of the real nature of the
world which is already beginning to dawn upon me, that it may become the
final quieter of my will, and may free me for ever.”
It is well known that from time to time cases occur in which the act of
suicide extends to the children. The father first kills the children he
loves, and then himself. Now, if we consider that conscience, religion,
and all influencing ideas teach him to look upon murder as the greatest of
crimes, and that, in spite of this, he yet commits it, in the hour of his
own death, and when he is altogether uninfluenced by any egotistical
motive, such a deed can only be explained in the following manner: in this
case, the will of the individual, the father, recognises itself
immediately in the children, though involved in the delusion of mistaking
the appearance for the true nature; and as he is at the same time deeply
impressed with the knowledge of the misery of all life, he now thinks to
put an end to the inner nature itself, along with the appearance, and thus
seeks to deliver from existence and its misery both himself and his
children, in whom he discerns himself as living again. It would be an
error precisely analogous to this to suppose that one may reach the same
end as is attained through voluntary chastity by frustrating the aim of
nature in fecundation; or indeed if, in consideration of the unendurable
suffering of life, parents were to use means for the destruction of their
new-born children, instead of doing everything possible to ensure life to
that which is struggling into it. For if the will to live is there, as it
is the only metaphysical reality, or the thing-in-itself, no physical
force can break it, but can only destroy its manifestation at this place
and time. It itself can never be transcended except through knowledge.
Thus the only way of salvation is, that the will shall manifest itself
unrestrictedly, in order that in this individual manifestation it may come
to apprehend its own nature. Only as the result of this knowledge can the
will transcend itself, and thereby end the suffering which is inseparable
from its manifestation. It is quite impossible to accomplish this end by
physical force, as by destroying the germ, or by killing the new-born
child, or by committing suicide. Nature guides the will to the light, just
because it is only in the light that it can work out its salvation.
Therefore the aims of Nature are to be promoted in every way as soon as
the will to live, which is its inner being, has determined itself.