The World as Will and Idea
Arthur Schopenhauer
2,809 passages indexed from The World as Will and Idea (Arthur Schopenhauer) — Page 7 of 57
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The World as Will and Idea, passage 2232
The will of the first breaks through the limits of the assertion of will of another, because the individual either destroys or injures this other body itself, or else because it compels the powers of the other body to serve _its own_ will, instead of the will which manifests itself in that other body.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1419
For the Idea and the pure subject of knowledge always appear at once in consciousness as necessary correlatives, and on their appearance all distinction of time vanishes, for they are both entirely foreign to the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms, and lie outside the relations which are imposed by it; they may be compared to the rainbow and the sun, which have no part in the constant movement and succession of the falling drops.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1216
This distinction between man and brute is outwardly expressed by the difference of the relation of the head to the body. In the case of the lower brutes both are deformed: in all brutes the head is directed towards the earth, where the objects of its will lie; even in the higher species the head and the body are still far more one than in the case of man, whose head seems freely set upon his body, as if only carried by and not serving it.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2756
30 Cf. Ch. xx. of the Supplement, and also in my work, “_Ueber den Willen in der Natur_,” the chapters on Physiology and Comparative Anatomy, where the subject I have only touched upon here is fully discussed.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2241
Further, wrong shows itself in the subjugation of another individual, in forcing him into slavery, and, finally, in the seizure of another’s goods, which, so far as these goods are regarded as the fruit of his labour, is just the same thing as making him a slave, and is related to this as mere injury is to murder.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1743
Music is as _direct_ an objectification and copy of the whole _will_ as the world itself, nay, even as the Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the _copy of the will itself_, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2350
Thus it cannot, like temporal justice, admit of respite and delay, and require time in order to triumph, equalising the evil deed by the evil consequences only by means of time. The punishment must here be so bound up with the offence that both are one.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1549
§ 47. Because beauty accompanied with grace is the principal object of sculpture, it loves nakedness, and allows clothing only so far as it does not conceal the form. It makes use of drapery, not as a covering, but as a means of exhibiting the form, a method of exposition that gives much exercise to the understanding, for it can only arrive at a perception of the cause, the form of the body, through the only directly given effect, the drapery. Thus to a certain extent drapery is in sculpture what fore-shortening is in painting. Both are suggestions, yet not symbolical, but such that, if they are successful, they force the understanding directly to perceive what is suggested, just as if it were actually given.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 188
There is, however, one other possible origin of this question, quite different from the purely speculative one which we have considered, a specially empirical origin, though the question is always raised from a speculative point of view, and in this form it has a much more comprehensible meaning than it had in the first. We have dreams; may not our whole life be a dream? or more exactly: is there a sure criterion of the distinction between dreams and reality? between phantasms and real objects?
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2035
If we cannot make up our minds to this, but, like children at the fair, snatch at everything that attracts us in passing, we are making the perverse endeavour to change the line of our path into an extended surface; we run in a zigzag, skip about like a will o’ the wisp, and attain to nothing.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1078
Thus knowledge generally, rational as well as merely sensuous, proceeds originally from the will itself, belongs to the inner being of the higher grades of its objectification as a mere μηχανη, a means of supporting the individual and the species, just like any organ of the body. Originally destined for the service of the will for the accomplishment of its aims, it remains almost throughout entirely subjected to its service: it is so in all brutes and in almost all men.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 32
My work will not speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile tongue; for, if it does not sound too vain, I might express the opinion that each one of the individual and disconnected aphorisms which make up the Upanishads may be deduced as a consequence from the thought I am going to impart, though the converse, that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads, is by no means the case.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1470
This he does by cleverly adapting them in a variety of ways to the arbitrary ends in view, and by rightly judging which form of æsthetical architectonic beauty is compatible and may be associated with a temple, which with a palace, which with a prison, and so forth. The more a harsh climate increases these demands of necessity and utility, determines them definitely, and prescribes them more inevitably, the less free play has beauty in architecture.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1745
I recognise in the deepest tones of harmony, in the bass, the lowest grades of the objectification of will, unorganised nature, the mass of the planet. It is well known that all the high notes which are easily sounded, and die away more quickly, are produced by the vibration in their vicinity of the deep bass-notes.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1037
Thus the arm falls which for a while, overcoming gravity, we have held stretched out; thus the pleasing sensation of health, which proclaims the victory of the Idea of the self-conscious organism over the physical and chemical laws, which originally governed the humours of the body, is so often interrupted, and is indeed always accompanied by greater or less discomfort, which arises from the resistance of these forces, and on account of which the vegetative part of our life is constantly attended by slight pain.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2031
But the case is otherwise, and although a man is always the same, yet he does not always understand himself, but often mistakes himself, till he has in some degree acquired real self-knowledge.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2353
Now that such an eternal justice really lies in the nature of the world will soon become completely evident to whoever has grasped the whole of the thought which we have hitherto been developing.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 717
The force itself which manifests itself, the inner nature of the phenomena which appear in accordance with these laws, remains always a secret to it, something entirely strange and unknown in the case of the simplest as well as of the most complex phenomena.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2431
From this inward torment, which is absolutely and directly essential to them, there finally proceeds that delight in the suffering of others which does not spring from mere egoism, but is disinterested, and which constitutes _wickedness_ proper, rising to the pitch of _cruelty_. For this the suffering of others is not a means for the attainment of the ends of its own will, but an end in itself.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1146
This question rests, like so many others, upon the confusion of the thing-in-itself with the manifestation. The principle of sufficient reason, of which the law of motivation is also a form, extends only to the latter, not to the former. It is only of phenomena, of individual things, that a ground can be given, never of the will itself, nor of the Idea in which it adequately objectifies itself.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1996
This is the complete _choice_ or power of deliberation which man has as distinguished from the brutes, and on account of which freedom of the will has been attributed to him, in the belief that his willing is a mere result of the operations of his intellect, without a definite tendency which serves as its basis; while, in truth, the motives only work on the foundation and under the presupposition of his definite tendency, which in his case is individual, _i.e._, a character.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1868
But in truth, only the point of contact of the object, the form of which is time, with the subject, which has no mode of the principle of sufficient reason as its form, constitutes the present, as is shown in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason. Now all object is the will so far as it has become idea, and the subject is the necessary correlative of the object.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 552
We ask that every logical proof shall be traced back to an origin in perception; but mathematics, on the contrary, is at great pains deliberately to throw away the evidence of perception which is peculiar to it, and always at hand, that it may substitute for it a logical demonstration.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2383
It is expressed in various ways, but especially by making all the beings in the world, living and lifeless, pass successively before the view of the student, and pronouncing over every one of them that word which has become a formula, and as such has been called the Mahavakya: Tatoumes,—more correctly, Tat twam asi,—which means, “This thou art.”(77) But for the people, that great truth, so far as in their limited condition they could comprehend it, was translated into the form of knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 385
Logic is, therefore, without practical utility; but it must nevertheless be retained, because it has philosophical interest as the special knowledge of the organisation and action of reason. It is rightly regarded as a definite, self-subsisting, self-contained, complete, and thoroughly safe discipline; to be treated scientifically for itself alone and independently of everything else, and therefore to be studied at the universities.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1957
The assertion of an empirical freedom of the will, a _liberum arbitrium indifferentiæ_, agrees precisely with the doctrine that places the inner nature of man in a _soul_, which is originally a _knowing_, and indeed really an abstract _thinking_ nature, and only in consequence of this a _willing_ nature—a doctrine which thus regards the will as of a secondary or derivative nature, instead of knowledge which is really so.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2489
He recognises directly and without reasoning that the in-itself of his own manifestation is also that of others, the will to live, which constitutes the inner nature of everything and lives in all; indeed, that this applies also to the brutes and the whole of nature, and therefore he will not cause suffering even to a brute.(81)
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1531
Because beauty is obviously the chief aim of sculpture, Lessing tried to explain the fact that the _Laocoon does not cry out_, by saying that crying out is incompatible with beauty. The Laocoon formed for Lessing the theme, or at least the text of a work of his own, and both before and after him a great deal has been written on the subject. I may therefore be allowed to express my views about it in passing, although so special a discussion does not properly belong to the scheme of this work, which is throughout concerned with what is general.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2731
It is no thought of the reason, but it is not on that account an absolute nothing; for it is a combination of words; it is an example of the unthinkable, which is necessary in logic in order to prove the laws of thought. Therefore if for this end such an example is sought, we will stick to the nonsense as the positive which we are in search of, and pass over the sense as the negative.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1729
Now that we have considered all the fine arts in the general way that is suitable to our point of view, beginning with architecture, the peculiar end of which is to elucidate the objectification of will at the lowest grades of its visibility, in which it shows itself as the dumb unconscious tendency of the mass in accordance with laws, and yet already reveals a breach of the unity of will with itself in a conflict between gravity and rigidity—and ending with the consideration of tragedy, which presents to us at the highest grades of the objectification of will this very conflict with itself in terrible magnitude and distinctness; we find that there is still another fine art which has been excluded from our consideration, and had to be excluded, for in the systematic connection of our exposition there was no fitting place for it—I mean _music_.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2745
6 Mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et consuetudo sermonis antiqui quædam efficacissimis notis signat. _Seneca_, epist. 81.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1154
Indeed, the constant renewal of the matter of every organism is also to be regarded as merely the manifestation of this continual pressure and change, and physiologists are now ceasing to hold that it is the necessary reparation of the matter wasted in motion, for the possible wearing out of the machine can by no means be equivalent to the support it is constantly receiving through nourishment. Eternal becoming, endless flux, characterises the revelation of the inner nature of will.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2029
Besides the intelligible and the empirical character, we must mention a third which is different from them both, the _acquired character_, which one only receives in life through contact with the world, and which is referred to when one is praised as a man of character or censured as being without character.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1744
Since, however, it is the same will which objectifies itself both in the Ideas and in music, though in quite different ways, there must be, not indeed a direct likeness, but yet a parallel, an analogy, between music and the Ideas whose manifestation in multiplicity and incompleteness is the visible world. The establishing of this analogy will facilitate, as an illustration, the understanding of this exposition, which is so difficult on account of the obscurity of the subject.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1169
If now the will is for us the _thing-in-itself_, and the Idea is the immediate objectivity of that will at a definite grade, we find that Kant’s thing-in-itself, and Plato’s Idea, which to him is the only οντως ον, these two great obscure paradoxes of the two greatest philosophers of the West are not indeed identical, but yet very closely related, and only distinguished by a single circumstance.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1834
Yet this is what is supposed whenever a “becoming,” or a “having become,” or an “about to become” enters into a theory of the nature of the world, whenever an earlier or a later has the least place in it; and in this way a beginning and an end of the world, and the path it pursues between them, is, either openly or disguisedly, both sought for and found, and the individual who philosophises even recognises his own position on that path.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1351
We can deliver ourselves from all suffering just as well through present objects as through distant ones whenever we raise ourselves to a purely objective contemplation of them, and so are able to bring about the illusion that only the objects are present and not we ourselves. Then, as the pure subject of knowledge, freed from the miserable self, we become entirely one with these objects, and, for the moment, our wants are as foreign to us as they are to them.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 492
To complete our theory it remains for us to mention a spurious kind of wit, the play upon words, the _calembourg_, the pun, to which may be added the equivocation, the _double entendre_, the chief use of which is the expression of what is obscene. Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 796
It is this application of reflection alone that prevents us from remaining any longer at the phenomenon, and leads us to the _thing in itself_. Phenomenal existence is idea and nothing more. All idea, of whatever kind it may be, all _object_, is _phenomenal_ existence, but the _will_ alone is a _thing in itself_. As such, it is throughout not idea, but _toto genere_ different from it; it is that of which all idea, all object, is the phenomenal appearance, the visibility, the objectification.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 848
Now all the movements of plants follow upon stimuli; for the absence of knowledge, and the movement following upon motives which is conditioned by knowledge, constitutes the only essential difference between animals and plants.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2348
§ 63. We have recognised _temporal justice_, which has its seat in the state, as requiting and punishing, and have seen that this only becomes justice through a reference to the _future_. For without this reference all punishing and requiting would be an outrage without justification, and indeed merely the addition of another evil to that which has already occurred, without meaning or significance.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2289
The pure doctrine of right is thus a chapter of ethics, and is directly related only to _action_, not to _suffering_; for only the former is the expression of will, and this alone is considered by ethics. Suffering is mere occurrence. Ethics can only have regard to suffering indirectly, merely to show that what takes place merely to avoid suffering wrong is itself no infliction of wrong.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 238
Deficiency of _understanding_ we call _stupidity_: deficiency in the application of _reason_ to practice we shall recognise later as _foolishness_: deficiency of judgment as _silliness_, and lastly, partial or entire deficiency of _memory_ as _madness_. But each of these will be considered in its own place.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1781
We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon. It rests upon this that we are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a perceptible representation as a pantomime, or both as an opera.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 19
Without an acquaintance with this introduction and propadeutic it is absolutely impossible to understand the present work properly, and the content of that essay will always be presupposed in this work just as if it were given with it. Besides, even if it had not preceded this book by several years, it would not properly have been placed before it as an introduction, but would have been incorporated in the first book.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 2609
Nothing can trouble him more, nothing can move him, for he has cut all the thousand cords of will which hold us bound to the world, and, as desire, fear, envy, anger, drag us hither and thither in constant pain.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 392
This is a sign of a high degree of civilisation, and indeed, is a definite stage in the culture of the ages.(14)
The World as Will and Idea, passage 67
In the case of the latter, I have chosen this form of enlarging and improving them, because the five and twenty years that have passed since they were composed have produced so marked a change in my method of exposition and in my style, that it would not have done to combine the content of the second volume with that of the first, as both must have suffered by the fusion.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1686
Yet in the lyrics of true poets the inner nature of all mankind is reflected, and all that millions of past, present, and future men have found, or will find, in the same situations, which are constantly recurring, finds its exact expression in them. And because these situations, by constant recurrence, are permanent as man himself and always call up the same sensations, the lyrical productions of genuine poets remain through thousands of years true, powerful, and fresh.
The World as Will and Idea, passage 1574
But it was especially a great misfortune for the Italian painters of genius in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that, in the narrow sphere to which they were arbitrarily driven for the choice of subjects, they were obliged to have recourse to miserable beings of every kind. For the New Testament, as regards its historical part, is almost more unsuitable for painting than the Old, and the subsequent history of martyrs and doctors of the church is a very unfortunate subject.