The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3)

Collections of such biographies have been made at various times, such as Tersteegen's “Leben heiliger Seelen,” Reiz's “Geschichte der Wiedergeborennen,” in our own day, a collection by Kanne, which, with much that is bad, yet contains some good, and especially the “Leben der Beata Sturmin.” To this category very properly belongs the life of St. Francis of Assisi, that true personification of the ascetic, and prototype of all mendicant friars. His life, described by his younger contemporary, St. Bonaventura, also famous as a scholastic, has recently been republished. “Vita S. Francisci a S. Bonaventura concinnata” (Soest, 1847), though shortly before a painstaking and detailed biography, making use of all sources of information, appeared in France, “Histoire de S. François d'Assise, par Chavin de Mallan” (1845). As an Oriental parallel of these [pg 497] monastic writings we have the very valuable work of Spence Hardy, “Eastern Monachism; an Account of the Order of Mendicants founded by Gotama Budha” (1850). It shows us the same thing in another dress. We also see what a matter of indifference it is whether it proceeds from a theistical or an atheistical religion. But as a special and exceedingly full example and practical illustration of the conceptions I have established, I can thoroughly recommend the “Autobiography of Madame de Guion.”

To become acquainted with this great and beautiful soul, the very thought of whom always fills me with reverence, and to do justice to the excellence of her disposition while making allowance for the superstition of her reason, must be just as delightful to every man of the better sort as with vulgar thinkers, i.e., the majority, that book will always stand in bad repute. For it is the case with regard to everything, that each man can only prize that which to a certain extent is analogous to him and for which he has at least a slight inclination. This holds good of ethical concerns as well as of intellectual. We might to a certain extent regard the well-known French biography of Spinoza as a case in point, if we used as a key to it that noble introduction to his very insufficient essay, “De Emendatione Intellectus,” a passage which I can also recommend as the most effectual means I know of stilling the storm of the passions. Finally, even the great Goethe, Greek as he is, did not think it below his dignity to show us this most beautiful side of humanity in the magic mirror of poetic art, for he represented the life of Fräulein Klettenberg in an idealised form in his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” and later, in his own biography, gave us also an historical account of it. Besides this, he twice told the story of the life of St. Philippo Neri.

The history of the world, will, and indeed must, keep silence about the men whose conduct is the best and only adequate illustration of this important point of our investigation, [pg 498] for the material of the history of the world is quite different, and indeed opposed to this. It is not the denial of the will to live, but its assertion and its manifestation in innumerable individuals in which its conflict with itself at the highest grade of its objectification appears with perfect distinctness, and brings before our eyes, now the ascendancy of the individual through prudence, now the might of the many through their mass, now the might of chance personified as fate, always the vanity and emptiness of the whole effort. We, however, do not follow here the course of phenomena in time, but, as philosophers, we seek to investigate the ethical significance of action, and take this as the only criterion of what for us is significant and important. Thus we will not be withheld by any fear of the constant numerical superiority of vulgarity and dulness from acknowledging that the greatest, most important, and most significant phenomenon that the world can show is not the conqueror of the world, but the subduer of it; is nothing but the quiet, unobserved life of a man who has attained to the knowledge in consequence of which he surrenders and denies that will to live which fills everything and strives and strains in all, and which first gains freedom here in him alone, so that his conduct becomes the exact opposite of that of other men.

In this respect, therefore, for the philosopher, these accounts of the lives of holy, self-denying men, badly as they are generally written, and mixed as they are with superstition and nonsense, are, because of the significance of the material, immeasurably more instructive and important than even Plutarch and Livy.

It will further assist us much in obtaining a more definite and full knowledge of what we have expressed abstractly and generally, according to our method of exposition, as the denial of the will to live, if we consider the moral teaching that has been imparted with this intention, and by men who were full of this spirit; [pg 499] and this will also show how old our view is, though the pure philosophical expression of it may be quite new. The teaching of this kind which lies nearest to hand is Christianity, the ethics of which are entirely in the spirit indicated, and lead not only to the highest degrees of human love, but also to renunciation. The germ of this last side of it is certainly distinctly present in the writings of the Apostles, but it was only fully developed and expressed later. We find the Apostles enjoining the love of our neighbour as ourselves, benevolence, the requital of hatred with love and well-doing, patience, meekness, the endurance of all possible injuries without resistance, abstemiousness in nourishment to keep down lust, resistance to sensual desire, if possible, altogether. We already see here the first degrees of asceticism, or denial of the will proper. This last expression denotes that which in the Gospels is called denying ourselves and taking up the cross (Matt. xvi. 24, 25; Mark viii. 34, 35; Luke ix. 23, 24, xiv. 26, 27, 33).

This tendency soon developed itself more and more, and was the origin of hermits, anchorites, and monasticism—an origin which in itself was pure and holy, but for that very reason unsuitable for the great majority of men; therefore what developed out of it could only be hypocrisy and wickedness, for abusus optimi pessimus. In more developed Christianity, we see that seed of asceticism unfold into the full flower in the writings of the Christian saints and mystics. These preach, besides the purest love, complete resignation, voluntary and absolute poverty, genuine calmness, perfect indifference to all worldly things, dying to our own will and being born again in God, entire forgetting of our own person, and sinking ourselves in the contemplation of God. A full exposition of this will be found in Fénélon's “Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure.” But the spirit of this development of Christianity is certainly nowhere so fully and powerfully [pg 500] expressed as in the writings of the German mystics, in the works of Meister Eckhard, and in that justly famous book “Die Deutsche Theologie,” of which Luther says in the introduction to it which he wrote, that with the exception of the Bible and St. Augustine, he had learnt more from it of what God, Christ, and man are than from any other book. Yet we only got the genuine and correct text of it in the year 1851, in the Stuttgart edition by Pfeiffer.

The precepts and doctrines which are laid down there are the most perfect exposition, sprung from deep inward conviction of what I have presented as the denial of the will. It should therefore be studied more closely in that form before it is dogmatised about with Jewish-Protestant assurance. 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. Finally, the New Testament might be regarded as the first initiation, the mystics as the second,—σμικρα και μεγαλα μυστηρια.

We find, however, that which we have called the denial of the will to live more fully developed, more variously expressed, and more vividly represented in the ancient Sanscrit writings than could be the case in the Christian Church and the Western world. That this important ethical view of life could here attain to a fuller development and a more distinct expression is perhaps principally to be ascribed to the fact that it was not confined by an element quite foreign to it, as Christianity is by the Jewish theology, to which its sublime author had necessarily to adopt and accommodate it, partly consciously, partly, it may be, unconsciously. Thus Christianity [pg 501] is made up of two very different constituent parts, and I should like to call the purely ethical part especially and indeed exclusively Christian, and distinguish it from the Jewish dogmatism with which it is combined. If, as has often been feared, and especially at the present time, that excellent and salutary religion should altogether decline, I should look for the reason of this simply in the fact that it does not consist of one single element, but of two originally different elements, which have only been combined through the accident of history. In such a case dissolution had to follow through the separation of these elements, arising from their different relationship to and reaction against the progressive spirit of the age. But even after this dissolution the purely ethical part must always remain uninjured, because it is indestructible. Our knowledge of Hindu literature is still very imperfect.

Yet, as we find their ethical teaching variously and powerfully expressed in the Vedas, Puranas, poems, myths, legends of their saints, maxims and precepts,85 we see that it inculcates love of our neighbour with complete renunciation of self-love; love generally, not confined to mankind, but including all living creatures; benevolence, even to the giving away of the hard-won wages of daily toil; unlimited patience towards all who injure us; the requital of all wickedness, however base, with goodness and love; voluntary and glad endurance of all ignominy; abstinence from all animal food; perfect chastity and renunciation of all sensual pleasure [pg 502] for him who strives after true holiness; the surrender of all possessions, the forsaking of every dwelling-place and of all relatives; deep unbroken solitude, spent in silent contemplation, with voluntary penance and terrible slow self-torture for the absolute mortification of the will, torture which extends to voluntary death by starvation, or by men giving themselves up to crocodiles, or flinging themselves over the sacred precipice in the Himalayas, or being buried alive, or, finally, by flinging themselves under the wheels of the huge car of an idol drawn along amid the singing, shouting, and dancing of bayaderes. And even yet these precepts, whose origin reaches back more than four thousand years, are carried out in practice, in some cases even to the utmost extreme,86 and this notwithstanding the fact that the Hindu nation has been broken up into so many parts.

A religion which demands the greatest sacrifices, and which has yet remained so long in practice in a nation that embraces so many millions of persons, cannot be an arbitrarily invented superstition, but must have its foundation in the nature of man. But besides this, if we read the life of a Christian penitent or saint, and also that of a Hindu saint, we cannot sufficiently wonder at the harmony we find between them. In the case of such radically different dogmas, customs, and circumstances, the inward life and effort of both is the same. And the same harmony prevails in the maxims prescribed for both of them. For example, Tauler speaks of the absolute poverty which one ought to seek, and which consists in giving away and divesting oneself completely of everything from which one might draw comfort or worldly pleasure, clearly because all this constantly affords new nourishment to the will, which it is intended to destroy entirely. [pg 503] And as an Indian counterpart of this, we find in the precepts of Fo that the Saniassi, who ought to be without a dwelling and entirely without property, is further finally enjoined not to lay himself down often under the same tree, lest he should acquire a preference or inclination for it above other trees. The Christian mystic and the teacher of the Vedanta philosophy agree in this respect also, they both regard all outward works and religious exercises as superfluous for him who has attained to perfection.

So much agreement in the case of such different ages and nations is a practical proof that what is expressed here is not, as optimistic dulness likes to assert, an eccentricity and perversity of the mind, but an essential side of human nature, which only appears so rarely because of its excellence.

I have now indicated the sources from which there may be obtained a direct knowledge, drawn from life itself, of the phenomena in which the denial of the will to live exhibits itself. In some respects this is the most important point of our whole work; yet I have only explained it quite generally, for it is better to refer to those who speak from direct experience, than to increase the size of this book unduly by weak repetitions of what is said by them.

I only wish to add a little to the general indication of the nature of this state. We saw above that the wicked man, by the vehemence of his volition, suffers constant, consuming, inward pain, and finally, if all objects of volition are exhausted, quenches the fiery thirst of his self-will by the sight of the suffering of others. He, on the contrary, who has attained to the denial of the will to live, however poor, joyless, and full of privation his condition may appear when looked at externally, is yet filled with inward joy and the true peace of heaven. It is not the restless strain of life, the jubilant delight which has keen suffering as its preceding or succeeding condition, in the experience of the man who loves life; but it is a [pg 504] peace that cannot be shaken, a deep rest and inward serenity, a state which we cannot behold without the greatest longing when it is brought before our eyes or our imagination, because we at once recognise it as that which alone is right, infinitely surpassing everything else, upon which our better self cries within us the great sapere aude. Then we feel that every gratification of our wishes won from the world is merely like the alms which the beggar receives from life to-day that he may hunger again on the morrow; resignation, on the contrary, is like an inherited estate, it frees the owner for ever from all care.

It will be remembered from the Third Book that the æsthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists in great measure in the fact that in entering the state of pure contemplation we are lifted for the moment above all willing, i.e., all wishes and cares; we become, as it were, freed from ourselves. We are no longer the individual whose knowledge is subordinated to the service of its constant willing, the correlative of the particular thing to which objects are motives, but the eternal subject of knowing purified from will, the correlative of the Platonic Idea. And we know that these moments in which, delivered from the ardent strain of will, we seem to rise out of the heavy atmosphere of earth, are the happiest which we experience. From this we can understand how blessed the life of a man must be whose will is silenced, not merely for a moment, as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but for ever, indeed altogether extinguished, except as regards the last glimmering spark that retains the body in life, and will be extinguished with its death. Such a man, who, after many bitter struggles with his own nature, has finally conquered entirely, continues to exist only as a pure, knowing being, the undimmed mirror of the world. Nothing can trouble him more, nothing can move him, for he has cut all the thousand cords of will which hold us [pg 505] bound to the world, and, as desire, fear, envy, anger, drag us hither and thither in constant pain.

He now looks back smiling and at rest on the delusions of this world, which once were able to move and agonise his spirit also, but which now stand before him as utterly indifferent to him, as the chess-men when the game is ended, or as, in the morning, the cast-off masquerading dress which worried and disquieted us in a night in Carnival. Life and its forms now pass before him as a fleeting illusion, as a light morning dream before half-waking eyes, the real world already shining through it so that it can no longer deceive; and like this morning dream, they finally vanish altogether without any violent transition. From this we can understand the meaning of Madame Guion when towards the end of her autobiography she often expresses herself thus: “Everything is alike to me; I cannot will anything more: often I know not whether I exist or not.” In order to express how, after the extinction of the will, the death of the body (which is indeed only the manifestation of the will, and therefore loses all significance when the will is abolished) can no longer have any bitterness, but is very welcome, I may be allowed to quote the words of that holy penitent, although they are not very elegantly turned: “Midi de la gloire; jour où il n'y a plus de nuit; vie qui ne craint plus la mort, dans la mort même: parceque la mort a vaincu la mort, et que celui qui a souffert la première mort, ne goutera plus la seconde mort” (Vie de Mad. de Guion, vol. ii. p. 13).

We must not, however, suppose that when, by means of the knowledge which acts as a quieter of will, the denial of the will to live has once appeared, it never wavers or vacillates, and that we can rest upon it as on an assured possession. Rather, it must ever anew be attained by a constant battle. For since the body is the will itself only in the form of objectivity or as manifestation in the world as idea, so long as the body lives, the whole [pg 506] will to live exists potentially, and constantly strives to become actual, and to burn again with all its ardour. Therefore that peace and blessedness in the life of holy men which we have described is only found as the flower which proceeds from the constant victory over the will, and the ground in which it grows is the constant battle with the will to live, for no one can have lasting peace upon earth. We therefore see the histories of the inner life of saints full of spiritual conflicts, temptations, and absence of grace, i.e., the kind of knowledge which makes all motives ineffectual, and as an universal quieter silences all volition, gives the deepest peace and opens the door of freedom. Therefore also we see those who have once attained to the denial of the will to live strive with all their might to keep upon this path, by enforced renunciation of every kind, by penance and severity of life, and by selecting whatever is disagreeable to them, all in order to suppress the will, which is constantly springing up anew.

Hence, finally, because they already know the value of salvation, their anxious carefulness to retain the hard-won blessing, their scruples of conscience about every innocent pleasure, or about every little excitement of their vanity, which here also dies last, the most immovable, the most active, and the most foolish of all the inclinations of man. By the term asceticism, which I have used so often, I mean in its narrower sense this intentional breaking of the will by the refusal of what is agreeable and the selection of what is disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen life of penance and self-chastisement for the continual mortification of the will.

We see this practised by him who has attained to the denial of the will in order to enable him to persist in it; but suffering in general, as it is inflicted by fate, is a second way (δευτερος πλους87) 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 [pg 507] 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 [pg 508] 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 [pg 509] 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 [pg 510] 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; [pg 511] 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, [pg 512] 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 [pg 513] 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 [pg 514] 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 [pg 515] 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 [pg 516] 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 [pg 517] 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 [pg 518] 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.

There is a species of suicide which seems to be quite distinct from the common kind, though its occurrence has perhaps not yet been fully established. It is starvation, voluntarily chosen on the ground of extreme asceticism. All instances of it, however, have been accompanied and obscured by much religious fanaticism, and even superstition. Yet it seems that the absolute denial of will may reach the point at which the will shall be wanting to take the necessary nourishment for the support of the natural life. This kind of suicide is so far from being the result of the will to live, that such a completely resigned ascetic only ceases to live because he has already altogether ceased to will. No other death than that by starvation is in this case conceivable (unless it were the result of some special superstition); for the intention to cut short the torment would itself be a stage in the assertion of will. The dogmas which satisfy the reason of such a penitent delude him with the idea that a being of a higher nature has inculcated the fasting to which his own inner tendency drives him. Old examples of this may be found in the “Breslauer Sammlung von Natur- und Medicin-Geschichten,” September 1799, p. 363; in Bayle's “Nouvelles de la République [pg 519] des Lettres,” February 1685, p. 189; in Zimmermann, “Ueber die Einsamkeit,” vol. i. p. 182; in the “Histoire de l'Académie des Sciences” for 1764, an account by Houttuyn, which is quoted in the “Sammlung für praktische Aerzte,” vol. i. p. 69.

More recent accounts may be found in Hufeland's “Journal für praktische Heilkunde,” vol. x. p. 181, and vol. xlviii. p. 95; also in Nasse's “Zeitschrift für psychische Aerzte,” 1819, part iii. p. 460; and in the “Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal,” 1809, vol. v. p. 319. In the year 1833 all the papers announced that the English historian, Dr. Lingard, had died in January at Dover of voluntary starvation; according to later accounts, it was not he himself, but a relation of his who died. Still in these accounts the persons were generally described as insane, and it is no longer possible to find out how far this was the case. But I will give here a more recent case of this kind, if it were only to ensure the preservation of one of the rare instances of this striking and extraordinary phenomenon of human nature, which, to all appearance at any rate, belongs to the category to which I wish to assign it and could hardly be explained in any other way. This case is reported in the “Nürnberger Correspondenten” of the 29th July 1813, in these words:—“We hear from Bern that in a thick wood near Thurnen a hut has been discovered in which was lying the body of a man who had been dead about a month. His clothes gave little or no clue to his social position. Two very fine shirts lay beside him. The most important article, however, was a Bible interleaved with white paper, part of which had been written upon by the deceased. In this writing he gives the date of his departure from home (but does not mention where his home was).