Arthur Schopenhauer

“ Complete liberation and separation of the intellect from the will and its bondage is the prerogative of genius, as I have fully shown in the æsthetic part of my chief work. Genius is objectivity. The pure objectivity and distinctness with which things present themselves in intuitive perception—that fundamental and most substantial source of knowledge—actually stands every moment in inverse proportion to the interest which the will has in those things; and knowing without willing is the condition, not to say the essence, of all gifts of æsthetic intelligence. ”

“ It nevertheless merely consists in the strongest motive for a given individual character overcoming the others and thus determining the act, just as an impact is overcome by a stronger counter-impact, the result thus ensuing with precisely the same necessity as the movement of a stone that has been struck. That all great thinkers in all ages were decided and at one on this point, is just as certain, as that the multitude will never understand, never grasp, the important truth, that the work of our freedom must not be sought in our individual actions but in our very existence and nature itself. ”

“ Hatred against Kant, hatred against me, hatred against truth, all however in majorem Dei gloriam, is what inspires these worthies who live on philosophy. Who can be so blind as not to see that University philosophy is the enemy of all true, serious philosophy, whose progress it feels bound to withstand? For a philosophy which deserves the name, is pure service of truth, therefore the most sublime of all human endeavours ”

“ The power of such a will is so great, that it always achieves its end. It is no naked will deprived of its clothing, or power; on the contrary, it brings with it an irresistible omnipotence, which enables it to uproot, to plant, to put to death and to bring to life, to bind and to loose, to heal and to injure, which power will be collected and concentrated in its entirety in the royal, free-born will. ”

“ For assuredly he who makes love to this nude beauty, to this fascinating syren, to this portionless bride, will have to forego the good fortune of becoming a Government and University professor. He may even congratulate himself if he becomes a garret-philosopher. On the other hand, his audience will consist, not of hungry undergraduates anxious to turn their learning to account, but rather of those rare, select thinkers, thinly sprinkled among the countless multitude, who arise from time to time, almost as a freak of Nature. ”

“ No other explanation or assumption enables us nearly as well to understand either the complete suitableness to purpose and to the external conditions of existence I have here shown in the skeleton, or the admirable harmony and fitness of internal mechanism in the structure of each animal, as the truth I have elsewhere firmly established: that the body of an animal is precisely nothing but the will itself of that animal brought to cerebral perception as representation—through the forms of Space, Time and Causality—in other words, the mere visibility, objectivity of Will. ”

“ All animals, even down to the very lowest, must have Understanding—that is, knowledge of the causal law, although they have it in very different degrees of delicacy and of clearness; at any rate they must have as much of it as is required for perception by their senses; for sensation without Understanding would be not only a useless, but a cruel gift of Nature. No one, who has himself any intelligence, can doubt the existence of it in the higher animals. ”

“ Above all the thought of making the will he found within him rule over Nature, was so bold, that people would have been alarmed by it: therefore it was made to rule over fictitious beings, supposed by the prevailing superstition to have command over Nature, in order through them to obtain at least indirect mastery over Nature. Every sort of god or demon moreover, is always a hypostasis, by which believers of all sects and colours bring to their own comprehension the Metaphysical, that which lies behind Nature, that which gives her existence and consistence and consequently rules over her. ”

“ For that diamond in Kant's crown, Transcendental Æsthetic, never has existed for these gentlemen—it is tacitly set aside, as non-avenue. I wonder what they think Nature means by producing the rarest of all her works, a great mind, one among so many hundreds of millions, if the worshipful company of numskulls are to be able at their pleasure and by their mere counter-assertion to annul the weightiest doctrines emanating from that mind, let alone to treat them with disregard and do as if they did not exist. ”

“ Now, from this point of view, a system which places the reality of all existence and the root of the whole of Nature in the Will, and in this will places the root of the world, must undeniably carry with it, to say the least, a strong prejudice in its favour. For, by a direct and simple way, it reaches, nay, already holds in its hand before coming to Ethics, what other systems try to reach by roundabout, ever dubious by-paths. ”

“ Now this is quite to the taste of my gentlemen 'of the philosophical trade.' It does not stand in the way of earning a honest livelihood; it allows one to subsist; whereas such a thing as Kant's "Critique of all Speculative Theology," makes one's hair stand on end. Kant is consequently a wrong-headed man and one to be set aside. Vivat Leibnitz! Vivat the 'philosophical trade!' Vivat old woman's philosophy! These gentlemen really imagine that, according to the standard of their own petty aims, they can obscure what is good, disparage what is great, and accredit what is false. ”

“ Plants have no self-consciousness because they have no power of locomotion; for of what use would self-consciousness be to them unless it enabled them to seek what was salutary and flee what was noxious to them? And conversely, of what use could power of locomotion be to them, as they have no self-consciousness with which to guide it. The inseparable duality of Sensibility and Irritability does not yet appear therefore in the plant; they continue slumbering in the reproductive force which is their fundament, and in which alone the will here objectifies itself. ”

“ It is this immediate apprehension of one's own volition which has been called the inner sense. In itself the will is without apprehension, and remains so in the inorganic and vegetable kingdoms. Just as the world would remain in darkness, in spite of the sun, if there were no bodies to reflect its light; or as the mere vibration of a string can never become a sound without air or even without some sort of sounding-board: so likewise does the will first become conscious of itself when knowledge is added to it. ”

“ For Kant's view takes the subjective for its standpoint and considers consciousness as given. But from consciousness itself and its law and order, given à priori, that view arrives at the conclusion, that all which appears in that consciousness can be nothing more than mere phenomenon. From our realistic, exterior standpoint, on the contrary, which assumes the objective—all that exists in Nature—to be absolutely given, we see what the intellect is, as to its aim and origin, and to which class of phenomena it belongs, and we recognise (so far à priori) that it must be limited to mere phenomena. ”

“ For, with me, the will is not, as has hitherto been assumed, an accident of cognition and therefore of life: but life itself is manifestation of will. Knowledge, on the contrary, is really an accident of life, and life of Matter. But Matter itself is only the perceptibility of the phenomena of the will. Therefore we are compelled to recognise volition in every effort or tendency which proceeds from the nature of a material body, and properly speaking constitutes that nature, or manifests itself as phenomenon by means of that nature ”

“ Lichtenberg too says: "If one thinks much oneself, one finds a good deal of wisdom deposited in language. It is hardly likely that we have laid it all there ourselves, but rather that a great deal of wisdom really lies there."
In many, perhaps in all, languages, the action even of those bodies which are without intellect, nay of inanimate bodies, is expressed by the words to will, so that the existence of a will in these bodies is thus taken for granted; but they are never credited with a faculty for knowing, representing, perceiving or thinking: I know of no expression which conveys this. ”

“ Above all, my truth-seeking young friends, beware of letting our professors tell you what is contained in the Critique of Pure Reason. Read it yourselves, and you will find in it something very different from what they deem it advisable for you to know.—In our time a great deal too much study is generally devoted to the History of Philosophy; for this study, being adapted by its very nature to substitute knowledge for reflection, is just now cultivated downright with a view to making philosophy consist in its own history. ”

“ It is quite exclusively out of this connection that our comprehension of Nature, and of our own selves arises; but then the inner side of Nature is disclosed to our intellect, which by itself alone can never reach further than to the mere outside; and the mystery which philosophy has so long tried to solve, lies open before us. ”

“ But when all the others have completed their demonstrations to the song of the best of worlds, quite at the last, at the background of the system, like a tardy avenger of the monster, like a spirit from the tomb, like the statue in Don Juan, there comes the question as to the origin of evil, of the monstrous, nameless evil, of the awful, heartrending misery in the world:—and here they are speechless, or can only find words, empty, sonorous words, with which to settle this heavy reckoning. ”

“ Accordingly, it is only so long as we limit ourselves to this sphere—that is to say, only when we have before us mere representation, mere form without empirical content—that our comprehension is complete and thorough: that is, in the à priori sciences, Arithmetic, Geometry, Phoronomy and Logic. Here everything is in the highest degree comprehensible; our insight is quite clear and satisfactory: it leaves nothing to be desired, since we are even unable to conceive that anything could be otherwise than it is. This comes from our having here exclusively to do with the forms of our own intellect. ”

“ No; for here we have to do with no change, consequently with no effect which must have a cause.—Is it merely a logical reason? No; for the equality of the angle is not only a proof of the equality of the sides, it is not only the foundation of a judgment: mere conceptions alone would never suffice to explain why the sides must be equal, because the angles are so; for the conception of the equality of the sides is not contained in that of the equality of the angles. Here therefore we [29] have no connection between conceptions and judgments, but between sides and angles. ”

“ The growing difficulty of the comprehension of the causal nexus, at first so clear, had now become so great for perception and for the understanding—the agent in it—that, in animal actions, the very existence of that nexus seemed almost doubtful and those actions appeared to be a sort of miracle. But, just at this point, the observer receives from his own inner self the direct information that the agent in them is the will—that very will, which he knows better and more intimately than anything that external perception can ever supply. ”

“ Now, although I grant that Kant first gave rise to this false assumption, I am, nevertheless, bound to add, that those who want to dance are not long in finding a piper. For it is surely as though a curse lay on mankind, causing them, in virtue of a natural affinity for all that is corrupt and bad, to prefer and hold up to admiration the inferior, not to say downright defective, portions of the works of eminent minds, while the really admirable parts are tolerated as merely accessory. Very few in our time know wherein the peculiar depth and true grandeur of Kant's philosophy lies ”

“ Meanwhile my honest and kindly advice to the young generation is, not to waste any time with University philosophy, but to study Kant's works and my own instead. I promise them that there they will learn something substantial, that will bring light and order into their brains: so far at least as they may be capable of receiving them. It is not good to crowd round a wretched farthing rushlight when brilliant torches are close by; still less to run after will o' the wisps. ”

“ Thus we see, that although infinite divisibility and infinite extension are common to both Time and Space, these two forms of empirical representations differ fundamentally, inasmuch as what is essential to the one is without any meaning at all for the other: juxtaposition having no meaning in Time, succession no meaning in Space. The empirical representations which belong to the orderly complex of reality, appear notwithstanding in both forms together; nay, the intimate union of both is the condition of reality which, in a sense, grows out of them, as a product grows out of its factors. ”

“ The general meaning of the Principle of Sufficient Reason may, in the main, be brought back to this: that every thing existing no matter when or where, exists by reason of something else. Now, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is nevertheless à priori in all its forms: that is, it has its root in our intellect, therefore it must not be applied to the totality of existent things, the Universe, including that intellect in which it presents itself. ”

“ The appearance of every animal therefore presents a totality, a unity, a perfection and a rigidly carried out harmony in all its parts which is so entirely based upon a single fundamental thought, that even the strangest animal shape seems to the attentive observer as if it were the only right, nay, only possible form of existence, and as if there could be no other than just this very one. ”

“ Where animal life ceases, there knowledge proper, with whose essence our own experience has made us familiar, disappears; and henceforth analogy is our only way of making that which mediates between the influence of the outer world and the movements of beings intelligible to us. The will, on the other hand, which we have recognised as being the basis and kernel of every existing thing, remains one and the same at all times and in all places. ”

“ The eyes of the public are gradually opening to the mystification by which it has been duped for the last forty years under the name of philosophy, and this will be more and more the case. The day of reckoning is at hand, when it will see whether all this endless scribbling and quibbling since Kant has brought to light a single truth of any kind. ”

“ Our professors of philosophy have thought fit to do away with the name which had hitherto been given to that faculty of thinking and pondering by means of reflection and conceptions, which distinguishes man from animals, which necessitates language while it qualifies us for its use, with which all human deliberation and all human achievements hang together, and which had therefore always been viewed in this light and understood in this sense by all nations and even by all philosophers. ”