Arthur Schopenhauer

“ He may be compared to a man who measures the height of a tower by its shadow, while I am like him who applies the measuring-rule directly to the tower itself. Therefore, for him philosophy is a science of conceptions, but for me it is a science in conceptions, drawn from knowledge of perception, the one source of all evidence, and comprehended and made permanent in general conceptions. He passes over this whole world of perception which surrounds us, so multifarious and rich in significance, and confines himself to the forms of abstract thinking ”

“ The two kinds of philosophy are, indeed, radically different. Thus it is that with me there is no compromise and no fellowship, that no one reaps any benefit from my works but the man who seeks the truth alone, and therefore none of the philosophical parties of the day; for they all follow their own aims, while I have only insight into truth to offer, which suits none of these aims, because it is not modelled after any of them. If my philosophy is to become susceptible of professorial exposition, the times must entirely change. ”

“ Accordingly, when Kant brought philosophy again into repute, it had soon to become the tool of political aims from above, and personal aims from below; although, strictly speaking, not philosophy itself, but its ghost, that passes for it. This should not really astonish us; for the incredibly large majority of men are by nature quite incapable of any but material aims, indeed they can conceive no others. Thus the pursuit of truth alone is far too lofty and eccentric an endeavour for us to expect all or many, or indeed even a few, faithfully to take part in. ”

“ And now that I have allowed myself the jest to which in this two-sided life hardly any page can be too serious to grant a place, I part with the book with deep seriousness, in the sure hope that sooner or later it will reach those to whom alone it can be addressed; and for the rest, patiently resigned that the same fate should, in full measure, befall it, that in all ages has, to some extent, befallen all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, to which only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial. ”

“ Therefore, so far, it is like a sum that comes out right, yet by no means in the sense that it leaves no problem over to solve, no possible question unanswered. To assert anything of that sort would be a presumptuous denial of the limits of human knowledge in general. Whatever torch we may kindle, and whatever space it may light, our horizon will always remain bounded by profound night. For the ultimate solution of the riddle of the world must necessarily be concerned with the things in themselves, no longer with the phenomena. But all our forms of knowledge are adapted to the phenomena alone ”

“ The will, as the thing in itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man; in itself, however, it is unconscious. For consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being; for it is a function of the brain, which, together with the nerves and spinal cord connected with it, is a mere fruit, a product, nay, so far, a parasite of the rest of the organism; for it does not directly enter into its inner constitution, but merely serves the end of self-preservation by regulating the relations of the organism to the external world. ”

“ On the other hand, all causality is in the understanding alone, and for the understanding. The whole actual, that is, active world is determined as such through the understanding, and apart from it is nothing. This, however, is not the only reason for altogether denying such a reality of the outer world as is taught by the dogmatist, who explains its reality as its independence of the subject. We also deny it, because no object apart from a subject can be conceived without contradiction. The whole world of objects is and remains idea, and therefore wholly and for ever determined by the subject ”

“ In this first book, then, we consider the world only from this side, only so far as it is idea. The inward reluctance with which any one accepts the world as merely his idea, warns him that this view of it, however true it may be, is nevertheless one-sided, adopted in consequence of some arbitrary abstraction. And yet it is a conception from which he can never free himself. The defectiveness of this view will be corrected in the next book by means of a truth which is not so immediately certain as that from which we start here ”

“ The view of things as above stated,—that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series [Pg 270] of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike;—this theory, I say, was of course known long before Kant; indeed, it may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. [2] There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies [Pg 271] enshrined; ”

“ "Individuation is merely an appearance, born of Space and Time; the latter being nothing else than the forms under which the external world necessarily manifests itself to me, conditioned as they are by my brain's faculty of perception. Hence also the plurality and difference of individuals is but a phaenomenon, that is, exists only as my mental picture. My true inmost being subsists in every living thing, just as really, as directly as in my own consciousness it is evidenced only to myself." This is the higher knowledge: ”

“ As saints learn humility by gazing up at infinite holiness above them, so sages acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discoveries appear but as the pebbles which the child gathers by the shore. But the philosophers who are so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely belong to the antiquated type of either a Socrates or a Newton. The pride and conceit of Arthur Schopenhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood, and seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of old age. ”

“ In philosophy nothing would be gained by such a reference, as one member of the series is just as external to it as another; and, moreover, that kind of connection is just as much a problem for philosophy as what is joined together by it, and the latter again is just as much a problem after its combination has been explained as before it. For, as we have said, just what the sciences presuppose and lay down as the basis and the limits of their explanation, is precisely and peculiarly the problem of philosophy, which may therefore be said to begin where science ends. ”

“ If it were true that according to the essential laws of reason the Idea of God proceeds from the disjunctive syllogism under the form of an Idea of the most real being, this Idea would also have existed in the philosophy of antiquity; but of the ens realissimum there is nowhere a trace in any of the ancient philosophers, although some of them certainly teach that there is a Creator of the world, yet only as the giver of form to the matter which exists without him, δεμιουργος, a being whom they yet infer simply and solely in accordance with the law of causality. ”

“ However, here also, in this solution of the antinomy, it is said with truth that the empirical character of man, like that of every other cause in nature, is unalterably determined, and therefore that his actions necessarily take place in accordance with the external influences; therefore also, in spite of all transcendental freedom (i.e., independence of the will in itself of the laws of the connection of its manifestation) , no man has the power of himself to begin a series of actions, which, however, was asserted by the thesis. Thus also freedom has no causality ”

“ In accordance with what has been said, the ineradicable falseness of materialism primarily consists in the fact that it starts from a petitio principii, which when more closely considered turns out indeed to be a πρωτον φευδος. It starts from the assumption that matter is something absolutely and unconditionally given, something existing independently of the knowledge of the subject, thus really a thing in itself. It attributes to matter (and consequently also to its presuppositions time and space) an absolute existence, i.e., an existence independent of the perceiving subject ”

“ In it we do not recognise the copy or repetition of any Idea of existence in the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly noble art, its effect on the inmost nature of man is so powerful, and it is so entirely and deeply understood by him in his inmost consciousness as a perfectly universal language, the distinctness of which surpasses even that of the perceptible world itself, that we certainly have more to [pg 331] look for in it than an exercitum arithmeticæ occultum nescientis se numerare animi,62 which Leibnitz called it. ”

“ And since, further, we ourselves would be parts, modes, attributes, or accidents of such an absolute substance, which would be the only thing that, in any sense, could ever or anywhere exist, our and its existence, together with its properties, would necessarily be very far from presenting itself to us as remarkable, problematical, and indeed as an unfathomable and ever-disquieting riddle, but, on the contrary, would be far more self-evident than that two and two make four. For we would necessarily be incapable of thinking anything else than that the world is, and is, as it is ”

“ Thus, in order to increase his own well-being, he will not inflict suffering upon others, i.e., he will commit no crime, he will respect the rights and the property of others. We see that for such a just man the principium individuationis is no longer, as in the case of the bad man, an absolute wall of partition. We see that he does not, like the bad man, merely assert his own manifestation of will and deny all others; that other persons are not for him mere masks, whose nature is quite different from his own ”

“ For the historian must accurately follow the particular event according to [pg 317] life, as it develops itself in time in the manifold tangled chains of causes and effects. It is, however, impossible that he can have all the data for this; he cannot have seen all and discovered all. He is forsaken at every moment by the original of his picture, or a false one substitutes itself for it, and this so constantly that I think I may assume that in all history the false outweighs the true. The poet, on the contrary, has comprehended the Idea of man from some definite side which is to be represented ”

“ Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no [Pg 214] one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. On the other hand, if we try to say: "This man is virtuous, but he is a stranger to Compassion"; or: "he is an unjust and malicious man, yet very compassionate;" ”

“ To philosophy they are assigned with their wives and children, and in spite of Petrarch's povera e nuda vai filosofia, they have staked everything upon it. Now my philosophy is by no means so constituted that any one can live by it. It lacks the first indispensable requisite of a well-paid professional philosophy, a speculative theology, which—in spite of the troublesome Kant with his Critique of Reason—should and must, it is supposed, be the chief theme of all philosophy, even if it thus takes on itself the task of talking straight on of that of which it can know absolutely nothing. ”

“ Now this cannot be ascribed to chance, for on the one hand the number of mad persons is relatively very small, and on the other hand a person of genius is a phenomenon which is rare beyond all ordinary estimation, and only appears in nature as the greatest exception. It will be sufficient to convince us of this if we compare the [pg 248] number of really great men of genius that the whole of civilised Europe has produced, both in ancient and modern times, with the two hundred and fifty millions who are always living in Europe, and who change entirely every thirty years. ”

“ Perception is not only the source of all knowledge, but is itself knowledge κατ ̓ εξοχην, is the only unconditionally true, genuine knowledge completely worthy of the name. For it alone imparts insight properly so called, it alone is actually assimilated by man, passes into his nature, and can with full reason be called his; while the conceptions merely cling to him. In the fourth book we see indeed that true virtue proceeds from knowledge of perception or intuitive knowledge ”

“ In boundless space countless shining spheres, about each of which, and illuminated by its light, there revolve a dozen or so of smaller ones, hot at the core and covered with a hard, cold crust, upon whose surface there have been generated from a mouldy film beings which live and know—this is what presents itself to us in experience as the truth, the real, the world. Yet for a thinking being it is a precarious position to stand upon one of those numberless spheres moving freely in boundless space without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one of innumerable similar beings who throng and press and toil, ceaselessly and quickly arising and passing away in time, which has no beginning and no end; ”