The World as Will and Idea
Arthur Schopenhauer
2,809 passages indexed from The World as Will and Idea (Arthur Schopenhauer) — Page 38 of 57
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The World as Will and Idea, passage 1283
The logical method of mathematics is also antagonistic to genius, for it does not satisfy but obstructs true insight, and presents merely a chain of conclusions in accordance with the principle of the ground of knowing. The mental faculty upon which it makes the greatest claim is memory, for it is necessary to recollect all the earlier propositions which are referred to.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2001
Thus he uses his prerogative of reason to the greatest possible advantage. Independent of the present, he neither chooses nor avoids the passing pleasure or pain, but reflects on the consequences of both. In most cases, setting aside quite insignificant actions, we are determined by abstract, thought motives, not present impressions.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1955
If, as both Kant’s doctrine and the whole of my system necessitates, the will is the thing-in-itself outside time and outside every form of the principle of sufficient reason, not only must the individual act in the same way in the same circumstances, and not only must every bad action be the sure warrant of innumerable others, which the individual _must_ perform and _cannot_ leave, but, as Kant said, if only the empirical character and the motives were completely given, it would be possible to calculate the future conduct of a man just as we can calculate an eclipse of the sun or moon.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2388
All the pains which the myth threatens it supports with perceptions from actual life, through suffering creatures which do not know how they have merited their misery, and it does not require to call in the assistance of any other hell. As a reward, on the other hand, it promises re-birth in better, nobler forms, as Brahmans, wise men, or saints.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2317
For just as we found that from its nature it would not forbid the doing of a wrong which involved no corresponding suffering of wrong on the part of another, and prohibits all wrong-doing only because this is impossible; so conversely, in accordance with its tendency towards the well-being of all, it would very gladly take care that every benevolent action and work of human love should be _experienced_, if it were not that these also have an inevitable correlative in the _performance_ of acts of benevolence and works of love, and every member of the state would wish to assume the passive and none the active rôle, and there would be no reason for exacting the latter from one member of the state rather than from another.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 506
The number of the first principles to which all the rest are subordinated, varies greatly in the different sciences, so that in some there is more subordination, in others more co-ordination; and in this respect, the former make greater claims upon the judgment, the latter upon the memory.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2371
For the knowledge that sees through the _principium individuationis_, a happy life in time, the gift of chance or won by prudence, amid the sorrows of innumerable others, is only the dream of a beggar in which he is a king, but from which he must awake and learn from experience that only a fleeting illusion had separated him from the suffering of his life.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 8
A _system of thought_ must always have an architectonic connection or coherence, that is, a connection in which one part always supports the other, though the latter does not support the former, in which ultimately the foundation supports all the rest without being supported by it, and the apex is supported without supporting. On the other hand, a _single thought_, however comprehensive it may be, must preserve the most perfect unity.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1502
For it will be asked, how is he to know that just these forms and not others are beautiful? We also see what kind of success attended the efforts of the old German painters to achieve the beautiful by imitating nature. Observe their naked figures.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 479
All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox, and therefore by unexpected subsumption, whether this is expressed in words or in actions. This, briefly stated, is the true explanation of the ludicrous.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2660
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.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1859
And if here we are always content to retain the form without lamenting the discarded matter, we ought to bear ourselves in the same way if in death the same thing happens, in a higher degree and to the whole, as takes place daily and hourly in a partial manner in excretion: if we are indifferent to the one, we ought not to shrink from the other.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2715
It is further an original and evangelical doctrine of Christianity—which Augustine, with the consent of the leaders of the Church, defended against the platitudes of the Pelagians, and which it was the principal aim of Luther’s endeavour to purify from error and re-establish, as he expressly declares in his book, “_De Servo Arbitrio_,”—the doctrine that _the will is not free_, but originally subject to the inclination to evil. Therefore according to this doctrine the deeds of the will are always sinful and imperfect, and can never fully satisfy justice; and, finally, these works can never save us, but faith alone, a faith which itself does not spring from resolution and free will, but from the work of grace, without our co-operation, comes to us as from without.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 73
Hence the necessity of presenting my work in two halves supplementary to each other may be compared to the necessity in consequence of which a chromatic object-glass, which cannot be made out of one piece, is produced by joining together a convex lens of flint glass and a concave lens of crown glass, the combined effect of which is what was sought.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1545
48-53) makes Mars and Minerva shriek horribly, without derogating from their divine dignity or beauty. The same with acting; Laocoon on the stage would certainly have to shriek. Sophocles makes Philoctetus cry out, and, on the ancient stage at any rate, he must actually have done so. As a case in point, I remember having seen in London the great actor Kemble play in a piece called Pizarro, translated from the German. He took the part of the American, a half-savage, but of very noble character.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1526
Therefore the representation which aims at beauty, as sculpture principally does, will yet always modify this (the character of the species), in some respect, by the individual character, and will always express the Idea of man in a definite individual manner, giving prominence to a special side of it. For the human individual as such has to a certain extent the dignity of a special Idea, and it is essential to the Idea of man that it should express itself in individuals of special significance.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2363
He sees the ills and he sees the wickedness in the world, but far from knowing that both of these are but different sides of the manifestation of the one will to live, he regards them as very different, and indeed quite opposed, and often seeks to escape by wickedness, _i.e._, by causing the suffering of another, from ills, from the suffering of his own individuality, for he is involved in the _principium individuationis_, deluded by the veil of Mâyâ.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1329
The condition under which both these constituent parts appear always united was found to be the abandonment of the method of knowing which is bound to the principle of sufficient reason, and which, on the other hand, is the only kind of knowledge that is of value for the service of the will and also for science.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 307
Besides this he forgot that all _a priori_ deduction, indeed all demonstration in general, must rest upon some necessity, and that all necessity is based on the principle of sufficient reason, because to be necessary, and to follow from given grounds are convertible conceptions.(10) But the principle of sufficient reason is just the universal form of the object as such.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 433
§ 12. _Rational knowledge_ (_wissen_) is then all abstract knowledge,—that is, the knowledge which is peculiar to the reason as distinguished from the understanding. Its contradictory opposite has just been explained to be the concept “feeling.” Now, as reason only reproduces, for knowledge, what has been received in another way, it does not actually extend our knowledge, but only gives it another form.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 569
For it is only after we have learned from this great man that the intuitions or perceptions of space and time are quite different from empirical perceptions, entirely independent of any impression of the senses, conditioning it, not conditioned by it, _i.e._, are _a priori_, and therefore are not exposed to the illusions of sense; only after we have learned this, I say, can we comprehend that Euclid’s logical method of treating mathematics is a useless precaution, a crutch for sound legs, that it is like a wanderer who during the night mistakes a bright, firm road for water, and carefully avoiding it, toils over the broken ground beside it, content to keep from point to point along the edge of the supposed water.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 748
As we proceed we shall see always more clearly that these ideas of the first class obtain their explanation and solution from those of the fourth class given in the essay, which could no longer be properly opposed to the subject as object, and that, therefore, we must learn to understand the inner nature of the law of causality which is valid in the first class, and of all that happens in accordance with it from the law of motivation which governs the fourth class.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 128
These comprehend the whole visible world, or the sum total of experience, with the conditions of its possibility.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2586
Tauler’s “Nachfolgung des armen Leben Christi,” and also his “Medulla Animæ,” are written in the same admirable spirit, though not quite equal in value to that work. In my opinion the teaching of these genuine Christian mystics, when compared with the teaching of the New Testament, is as alcohol to wine, or what becomes visible in the New Testament as through a veil and mist appears to us in the works of the mystics without cloak or disguise, in full clearness and distinctness.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1196
The Idea is for us rather the direct, and therefore adequate, objectivity of the thing-in-itself, which is, however, itself the _will_—the will as not yet objectified, not yet become idea.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 880
And conversely, the more there is in it which must be conceived as mere chance, and the more it impresses us as given merely empirically, the more proper objectivity and true reality is there in such knowledge, and at the same time, the more that is inexplicable, that is, that cannot be deduced from anything else.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1709
Thus poetry objectifies the Idea of man, an Idea which has the peculiarity of expressing itself in highly individual characters.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 856
On the other hand, the phenomena of the forces of nature illustrate the opposite extreme. They act according to universal laws, without variation, without individuality in accordance with openly manifest circumstances, subject to the most exact predetermination; and the same force of nature appears in its million phenomena in precisely the same way.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 627
Therefore explanation can never go further than to show two ideas standing to each other in the relation peculiar to that form of the principle of sufficient reason which reigns in the class to which they belong. If this is done we cannot further be asked the question, _why_: for the relation proved is that one which absolutely cannot be imagined as other than it is, _i.e._, it is the form of all knowledge.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 208
But this abstraction, this one-sided treatment, this forcible separation of what is essentially and necessarily united, is only adopted to meet the demands of our argument; and therefore the disinclination to it must, in the meantime, be suppressed and silenced by the expectation that the subsequent treatment will correct the one-sidedness of the present one, and complete our knowledge of the nature of the world.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 755
But it has now become clear that what enables us consciously to distinguish our own body from all other objects which in other respects are precisely the same, is that our body appears in consciousness in quite another way _toto genere_ different from idea, and this we denote by the word _will_; and that it is just this double knowledge which we have of our own body that affords us information about it, about its action and movement following on motives, and also about what it experiences by means of external impressions; in a word, about what it is, not as idea, but as more than idea; that is to say, what it is _in itself_.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2308
It is evident that as an historian has very wittily been called an inverted prophet, the professor of law is an inverted moralist, and therefore law itself, in its proper sense, _i.e._, the doctrine of the _right_, which we ought to maintain, is inverted ethics in that chapter of it in which the rights are laid down which we ought not to violate.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 22
But even there these conceptions only occur because as yet I had never really entered deeply into them, therefore only by the way and quite out of connection with the principal matter. The correction of such passages in that essay will consequently take place of its own accord in the mind of the reader through his acquaintance with the present work.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 481
Either, we have previously known two or more very different real objects, ideas of sense-perception, and have intentionally identified them through the unity of a concept which comprehends them both; this species of the ludicrous is called _wit_.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 162
But as with the rising of the sun the visible world appears, so at one stroke, the understanding, by means of its one simple function, changes the dull, meaningless sensation into perception. What the eye, the ear, or the hand feels, is not perception; it is merely its data.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1263
This explains the activity, amounting even to disquietude, of men of genius, for the present can seldom satisfy them, because it does not fill their consciousness.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 740
Every true, genuine, immediate act of will is also, at once and immediately, a visible act of the body. And, corresponding to this, every impression upon the body is also, on the other hand, at once and immediately an impression upon the will. As such it is called pain when it is opposed to the will; gratification or pleasure when it is in accordance with it. The degrees of both are widely different.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1286
The fact that up to the present day, nearly half a century after the appearance of Goethe’s theory of colours, even in Germany the Newtonian fallacies still have undisturbed possession of the professorial chair, and men continue to speak quite seriously of the seven homogeneous rays of light and their different refrangibility, will some day be numbered among the great intellectual peculiarities of men generally, and especially of Germans.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2283
It cannot, however, in a state of nature, assert itself in all cases, and outwardly upon other individuals, and prevent might from reigning instead of right. In a state of nature it depends upon every one merely to see that in every case he _does_ no wrong, but by no means to see that in every case he _suffers_ no wrong, for this depends on the accident of his outward power.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2763
Indeed, the living toads found in limestone lead to the conclusion that even animal life is capable of such a suspension for thousands of years, if this is begun in the dormant period and maintained by special circumstances.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1288
This is very naïvely expressed in the well-known anecdote of the French mathematician, who, after having read Racine’s “Iphigenia,” shrugged his shoulders and asked, “_Qu’est ce que cela prouve?_” Further, as quick comprehension of relations in accordance with the laws of causality and motivation is what specially constitutes prudence or sagacity, a prudent man, so far as and while he is so, will not be a genius, and a man of genius, so far as and while he is so, will not be a prudent man.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1791
So also the seriousness which is essential to it, which excludes the absurd from its direct and peculiar province, is to be explained by the fact that its object is not the idea, with reference to which alone deception and absurdity are possible; but its object is directly the will, and this is essentially the most serious of all things, for it is that on which all depends.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 320
This is the power of truth; its conquest is slow and laborious, but if once the victory be gained it can never be wrested back again.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2228
§ 62. It has already been explained that the first and simplest assertion of the will to live is only the assertion of one’s own body, _i.e._, the exhibition of the will through acts in time, so far as the body, in its form and design, exhibits the same will in space, and no further. This assertion shows itself as maintenance of the body, by means of the application of its own powers.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2466
This disposition, however, may be quite the same when its outward manifestation is very different. With an equal degree of wickedness, one man may die on the wheel, and another in the bosom of his family. It may be the same grade of wickedness which expresses itself in one nation in the coarse characteristics of murder and cannibalism, and in another finely and softly in miniature, in court intrigues, oppressions, and delicate plots of every kind; the inner nature remains the same.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 622
That the man who errs should proceed in this way is due either to haste, or to insufficient knowledge of what is possible, on account of which he does not know the necessity of the induction that ought to be made. Error then is quite analogous to illusion.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1242
Therefore, the history of the human race, the throng of events, the change of times, the multifarious forms of human life in different lands and countries, all this is only the accidental form of the manifestation of the Idea, does not belong to the Idea itself, in which alone lies the adequate objectivity of the will, but only to the phenomenon which appears in the knowledge of the individual, and is just as foreign, unessential, and indifferent to the Idea itself as the figures which they assume are to the clouds, the form of its eddies and foam-flakes to the brook, or its trees and flowers to the ice.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2499
Thus, though others have set up moral principles which they give out as prescriptions for virtue, and laws which it was necessary to follow, I, as has already been said, cannot do this because I have no “ought” or law to prescribe to the eternally free-will.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2642
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.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1302
In the meantime, however, I will explain as briefly as possible my view of the purely intellectual ground of the relation between genius and madness, for this will certainly assist the explanation of the real nature of genius, that is to say, of that mental endowment which alone can produce genuine works of art. But this necessitates a brief explanation of madness itself.(50)