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Артур Шопенгауэр
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)

It would be most beneficial to both kinds of metaphysics that each of them should remain clearly separated from the other and confine itself to its own province, that it may there be able to develop its nature fully. Instead of which, through the whole Christian era, the endeavour has been to bring about a fusion of the two, for the dogmas and conceptions of the one have been carried over into the other, whereby both are spoiled. This has taken place in the most open manner in our own day in that strange hermaphrodite or centaur, the so-called philosophy of religion, which, as a kind of gnosis, endeavours to interpret the given religion, and to explain what is true sensu allegorico through something which is true sensu proprio. But for this we would have to know and possess the truth sensu proprio already; and in that case such an interpretation would be superfluous. For to seek first to find metaphysics, i. e., the truth sensu proprio, merely out of religion by explanation and interpretation would be a doubtful and dangerous undertaking, to which one would only make up one's mind if it were proved that truth, like iron and other base metals, could only be found in a mixed, not in a pure form, and therefore one could only obtain it by reduction from the mixed ore.

Religions are necessary for the people, and an inestimable benefit to them. But if they oppose themselves to the progress of mankind in the knowledge of the truth, they must with the utmost possible forbearance be set aside. And to require that a great mind – a Shakspeare; a Goethe – should make the dogmas of any religion implicitly, bonâ fide et sensu proprio, his conviction is to require that a giant should put on the shoe of a dwarf.

Religions, being calculated with reference to the power of comprehension of the great mass of men, can only have indirect, not immediate truth. To require of them the latter is as if one wished to read the letters set up in the form-chase, instead of their impression. The value of a religion will accordingly depend upon the greater or less content of truth which it contains under the veil of allegory, and then upon the greater or less distinctness with which it becomes visible through this veil, thus upon the transparency of the latter. It almost seems that, as the oldest languages are the most perfect, so also are the oldest religions. If I were to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I would be obliged to concede to Buddhism the pre-eminence over the rest. In any case it must be a satisfaction to me to see my teaching in such close agreement with a religion which the majority of men upon the earth hold as their own; for it numbers far more adherents than any other. This agreement, however, must be the more satisfactory to me because in my philosophising I have certainly not been under its influence. For up till 1818, when my work appeared, there were very few, exceedingly incomplete and scanty, accounts of Buddhism to be found in Europe, which were almost entirely limited to a few essays in the earlier volumes of “Asiatic Researches,” and were principally concerned with the Buddhism of the Burmese. Only since then has fuller information about this religion gradually reached us, chiefly through the profound and instructive essays of the meritorious member of the St. Petersburg Academy, J. J. Schmidt, in the proceedings of his Academy, and then little by little through several English and French scholars, so that I was able to give a fairly numerous list of the best works on this religion in my work, “Ueber den Willen in der Natur,” under the heading Sinologie. Unfortunately Csoma Körösi, that persevering Hungarian, who, in order to study the language and sacred writings of Buddhism, spent many years in Tibet, and for the most part in Buddhist monasteries, was carried off by death just as he was beginning to work out for us the results of his researches. I cannot, however, deny the pleasure with which I read, in his provisional accounts, several passages cited directly from the Kahgyur itself; for example, the following conversation of the dying Buddha with Brahma, who is doing him homage: “There is a description of their conversation on the subject of creation, – by whom was the world made? Shakya asks several questions of Brahma, – whether was it he who made or produced such and such things, and endowed or blessed them with such and such virtues or properties, – whether was it he who caused the several revolutions in the destruction and regeneration of the world. He denies that he had ever done anything to that effect. At last he himself asks Shakya how the world was made, – by whom? Here are attributed all changes in the world to the moral works of the animal beings, and it is stated that in the world all is illusion, there is no reality in the things; all is empty. Brahma, being instructed in his doctrine, becomes his follower” (Asiatic Researches, vol. xx. p. 434).

I cannot place, as is always done, the fundamental difference of all religions in the question whether they are monotheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic, or atheistic, but only in the question whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, that is, whether they present the existence of the world as justified by itself, and therefore praise and value it, or regard it as something that can only be conceived as the consequence of our guilt, and therefore properly ought not to be, because they recognise that pain and death cannot lie in the eternal, original, and immutable order of things, in that which in every respect ought to be. The power by virtue of which Christianity was able to overcome first Judaism, and then the heathenism of Greece and Rome, lies solely in its pessimism, in the confession that our state is both exceedingly wretched and sinful, while Judaism and heathenism were optimistic. That truth, profoundly and painfully felt by all, penetrated, and bore in its train the need of redemption.

I turn to a general consideration of the other kind of metaphysics, that which has its authentication in itself, and is called philosophy. I remind the reader of its origin, mentioned above, in a wonder concerning the world and our own existence, inasmuch as these press upon the intellect as a riddle, the solution of which therefore occupies mankind without intermission. Here, then, I wish first of all to draw attention to the fact that this could not be the case if, in Spinoza's sense, which in our own day has so often been brought forward again under modern forms and expositions as pantheism, the world were an “absolute substance,” and therefore an absolutely necessary existence. For this means that it exists with so great a necessity that beside it every other necessity comprehensible to our understanding as such must appear as an accident. It would then be something which comprehended in itself not only all actual but also all possible existence, so that, as Spinoza indeed declares, its possibility and its actuality would be absolutely one. Its non-being would therefore be impossibility itself; thus it would be something the non-being or other-being of which must be completely inconceivable, and which could therefore just as little be thought away as, for example, space or time. 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; and therefore we would necessarily be as little conscious of its existence as such, i. e., as a problem for reflection, as we are of the incredibly fast motion of our planet.

All this, however, is absolutely not the case. Only to the brutes, who are without thought, does the world and existence appear as a matter of course; to man, on the contrary, it is a problem, of which even the most uneducated and narrow-minded becomes vividly conscious in certain brighter moments, but which enters more distinctly and more permanently into the consciousness of each one of us the clearer and more enlightened that consciousness is, and the more material for thought it has acquired through culture, which all ultimately rises, in minds that are naturally adapted for philosophising, to Plato's “θαυμαζειν, μαλα φιλοσοφικον παθος” (mirari, valde philosophicus affectus), that is, to that wonder which comprehends in its whole magnitude that problem which unceasingly occupies the nobler portion of mankind in every age and in every land, and gives it no rest. In fact, the pendulum which keeps in motion the clock of metaphysics, that never runs down, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence. Thus, then, the Spinozistic view of it as an absolutely necessary existence, that is, as something that absolutely and in every sense ought to and must be, is a false one. Even simple Theism, since in its cosmological proof it tacitly starts by inferring the previous non-existence of the world from its existence, thereby assumes beforehand that the world is something contingent. Nay, what is more, we very soon apprehend the world as something the non-existence of which is not only conceivable, but indeed preferable to its existence. Therefore our wonder at it easily passes into a brooding over the fatality which could yet call forth its existence, and by virtue of which such stupendous power as is demanded for the production and maintenance of such a world could be directed so much against its own interest. The philosophical astonishment is therefore at bottom perplexed and melancholy; philosophy, like the overture to “Don Juan,” commences with a minor chord. It follows from this that it can neither be Spinozism nor optimism. The more special nature, which has just been indicated, of the astonishment which leads us to philosophise clearly springs from the sight of the suffering and the wickedness in the world, which, even if they were in the most just proportion to each other, and also were far outweighed by good, are yet something which absolutely and in general ought not to be. But since now nothing can come out of nothing, these also must have their germ in the origin or in the kernel of the world itself. It is hard for us to assume this if we look at the magnitude, the order and completeness, of the physical world, for it seems to us that what had the power to produce such a world must have been able to avoid the suffering and the wickedness. That assumption (the truest expression of which is Ormuzd and Ahrimines), it is easy to conceive, is hardest of all for Theism. Therefore the freedom of the will was primarily invented to account for wickedness. But this is only a concealed way of making something out of nothing, for it assumes an Operari that proceeded from no Esse (see Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, p. 58, et seq.; second edition, p. 57 et seq..) Then it was sought to get rid of evil by attributing it to matter, or to unavoidable necessity, whereby the devil, who is really the right Expediens ad hoc, was unwillingly set aside. To evil also belongs death; but wickedness is only the throwing of the existing evil from oneself on to another. Thus, as was said above, it is wickedness, evil, and death that qualify and intensify the philosophical astonishment. Not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a wretched world, is the punctum pruriens of metaphysics, the problem which awakens in mankind an unrest that cannot be quieted by scepticism nor yet by criticism.

We find physics also (in the widest sense of the word) occupied with the explanation of the phenomena in the world. But it lies in the very nature of its explanations themselves that they cannot be sufficient. Physics cannot stand on its own feet, but requires a metaphysic to lean upon, whatever airs it may give itself towards the latter. For it explains the phenomena by something still more unknown than they are themselves; by laws of nature, resting upon forces of nature, to which the power of life also belongs. Certainly the whole present condition of all things in the world, or in nature, must necessarily be explicable from purely physical causes. But such an explanation – supposing one actually succeeded so far as to be able to give it – must always just as necessarily be tainted with two imperfections (as it were with two sores, or like Achilles with the vulnerable heel, or the devil with the horse's hoof), on account of which everything so explained really remains still unexplained. First with this imperfection, that the beginning of every explanatory chain of causes and effects, i. e., of connected changes, can absolutely never be reached, but, just like the limits of the world in space and time, unceasingly recedes in infinito. Secondly with this, that the whole of the efficient causes out of which everything is explained constantly rest upon something which is completely inexplicable, the original qualities of things and the natural forces which play a prominent part among them, by virtue of which they produce a specific kind of effect, e. g., weight, hardness, impulsive force, elasticity, warmth, electricity, chemical forces, &c., and which now remain in every explanation which is given, like an unknown quantity, which absolutely cannot be eliminated, in an otherwise perfectly solved algebraical equation. Accordingly there is no fragment of clay, however little worth, that is not entirely composed of inexplicable qualities. Thus these two inevitable defects in every purely physical, i. e., causal, explanation show that such an explanation can only be relative, and that its whole method and nature cannot be the only one, the ultimate and thus the sufficient one, i. e., cannot be the method of explanation that can ever lead to the satisfactory solution of the difficult riddle of things, and to the true understanding of the world and existence; but that the physical explanation in general and as such requires further a metaphysical explanation, which affords us the key to all its assumptions, but just on this account must necessarily follow quite a different path. The first step to this is that one should bring to distinct consciousness and firmly retain the difference of the two, hence the difference between physics and metaphysics. It rests in general on the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and thing in itself. Just because Kant held the latter to be absolutely unknowable, there was, according to him, no metaphysics, but merely immanent knowledge, i. e., physics, which throughout can speak only of phenomena, and also a critique of the reason which strives after metaphysics. Here, however, in order to show the true point of connection between my philosophy and that of Kant, I shall anticipate the second book, and give prominence to the fact that Kant, in his beautiful exposition of the compatibility of freedom and necessity (Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, p. 532-554; and Critique of Practical Reason, p. 224-231 of Rosenkranz's edition), shows how one and the same action may in one aspect be perfectly explicable as necessarily arising from the character of the man, the influence to which he has been subject in the course of his life, and the motives which are now present to him, but yet in another aspect must be regarded as the work of his free will; and in the same sense he says, § 53 of the “Prolegomena:” “Certainly natural necessity will belong to every connection of cause and effect in the world of sense; yet, on the other hand, freedom will be conceded to that cause which is not itself a phenomenon (though indeed it is the ground of phenomena), thus nature and freedom may without contradiction be attributed to the same thing, but in a different reference – in the one case as a phenomenon, in the other case as a thing in itself.” What, then, Kant teaches of the phenomenon of man and his action my teaching extends to all phenomena in nature, in that it makes the will as a thing in itself their foundation. This proceeding is justified first of all by the fact that it must not be assumed that man is specifically toto genere radically different from the other beings and things in nature, but rather that he is different only in degree. I turn back from this premature digression to our consideration of the inadequacy of physics to afford us the ultimate explanation of things. I say, then, everything certainly is physical, but yet nothing is explicable physically. As for the motion of the projected bullet, so also for the thinking of the brain, a physical explanation must ultimately be in itself possible, which would make the latter just as comprehensible as is the former. But even the former, which we imagine we understand so perfectly, is at bottom as obscure to us as the latter; for what the inner nature of expansion in space may be – of impenetrability, mobility, hardness, elasticity, and gravity remains, after all physical explanations, a mystery, just as much as thought. But because in the case of thought the inexplicable appears most immediately, a spring was at once made here from physics to metaphysics, and a substance of quite a different kind from all corporeal substances was hypostatised – a soul was set up in the brain. But if one had not been so dull as only to be capable of being struck by the most remarkable of phenomena, one would have had to explain digestion by a soul in the stomach, vegetation by a soul in the plant, affinity by a soul in the reagents, nay, the falling of a stone by a soul in the stone. For the quality of every unorganised body is just as mysterious as the life in the living body. In the same way, therefore, the physical explanation strikes everywhere upon what is metaphysical, by which it is annihilated, i. e., it ceases to be explanation. Strictly speaking, it may be asserted that no natural science really achieves anything more than what is also achieved by Botany: the bringing together of similars, classification. A physical system which asserted that its explanations of things – in the particular from causes, and in general from forces – were really sufficient, and thus exhausted the nature of the world, would be the true Naturalism. From Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus down to the Système de la Nature, and further, to Delamark, Cabanis, and to the materialism that has again been warmed up in the last few years, we can trace the persistent attempt to set up a system of physics without metaphysics, that is, a system which would make the phenomenon the thing in itself. But all their explanations seek to conceal from the explainers themselves and from others that they simply assume the principal matter without more ado. They endeavour to show that all phenomena, even those of mind, are physical. And they are right; only they do not see that all that is physical is in another aspect also metaphysical. But, without Kant, this is indeed difficult to see, for it presupposes the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself. Yet without this Aristotle, much as he was inclined to empiricism, and far as he was removed from the Platonic hyper-physics, kept himself free from this limited point of view. He says: “Ει μεν ουν μη εστι τις ἑτερα ουσια παρα τας φυσει συνεστηκυιας, ἡ φυσικη αν ειη πρωτη επιστημη; ει δε εστι τις ουσια ακινητος, αὑτη προτερα και φιλοσοφια πρωτη, και καθολου οὑτως, ὁτι πρωτη; και περι του οντοσ ᾑ ον, ταυτης αν ειη θεωρησαι.” (Si igitur non est aliqua alia substantia, prœter eas, quœ natura consistunt, physica profecto prima scientia esset: quodsi autem est aliqua substantia immobilis, hœc prior et philosophia prima, et universalis sic, quod prima; et de ente, prout ens est, speculari hujus est), “Metaph.,” v. 1. Such an absolute system of physics as is described above, which leaves room for no metaphysics, would make the Natura naturata into the Natura naturans; it would be physics established on the throne of metaphysics, yet it would comport itself in this high position almost like Holberg's theatrical would-be politician who was made burgomaster. Indeed behind the reproach of atheism, in itself absurd, and for the most part malicious, there lies, as its inner meaning and truth, which gives it strength, the obscure conception of such an absolute system of physics without metaphysics. Certainly such a system would necessarily be destructive of ethics; and while Theism has falsely been held to be inseparable from morality, this is really true only of metaphysics in general, i. e., of the knowledge that the order of nature is not the only and absolute order of things. Therefore we may set up this as the necessary Credo of all just and good men: “I believe in metaphysics.” In this respect it is important and necessary that one should convince oneself of the untenable nature of an absolute system of physics, all the more as this, the true naturalism, is a point of view which of its own accord and ever anew presses itself upon a man, and can only be done away with through profound speculation. In this respect, however, all kinds of systems and faiths, so far and so long as they are accepted, certainly serve as a substitute for such speculation. But that a fundamentally false view presses itself upon man of its own accord, and must first be skilfully removed, is explicable from the fact that the intellect is not originally intended to instruct us concerning the nature of things, but only to show us their relations, with reference to our will; it is, as we shall find in the second book, only the medium of motives. Now, that the world schematises itself in the intellect in a manner which exhibits quite a different order of things from the absolutely true one, because it shows us, not their kernel, but only their outer shell, happens accidentally, and cannot be used as a reproach to the intellect; all the less as it nevertheless finds in itself the means of rectifying this error, in that it arrives at the distinction between the phenomenal appearance and the inner being of things, which distinction existed in substance at all times, only for the most part was very imperfectly brought to consciousness, and therefore was inadequately expressed, indeed often appeared in strange clothing. The Christian mystics, when they call it the light of nature, declare the intellect to be inadequate to the comprehension of the true nature of things. It is, as it were, a mere surface force, like electricity, and does not penetrate to the inner being.

The insufficiency of pure naturalism appears, as we have said, first of all, on the empirical path itself, through the circumstance that every physical explanation explains the particular from its cause; but the chain of these causes, as we know a priori, and therefore with perfect certainty, runs back to infinity, so that absolutely no cause could ever be the first. Then, however, the effect of every cause is referred to a law of nature, and this finally to a force of nature, which now remains as the absolutely inexplicable. But this inexplicable, to which all phenomena of this so clearly given and naturally explicable world, from the highest to the lowest, are referred, just shows that the whole nature of such explanation is only conditional, as it were only ex concessis, and by no means the true and sufficient one; therefore I said above that physically everything and nothing is explicable. That absolutely inexplicable element which pervades all phenomena, which is most striking in the highest, e. g., in generation, but yet is just as truly present in the lowest, e. g., in mechanical phenomena, points to an entirely different kind of order of things lying at the foundation of the physical order, which is just what Kant calls the order of things in themselves, and which is the goal of metaphysics. But, secondly, the insufficiency of pure naturalism comes out clearly from that fundamental philosophical truth, which we have fully considered in the first half of this book, and which is also the theme of the “Critique of Pure Reason;” the truth that every object, both as regards its objective existence in general and as regards the manner (forms) of this existence, is throughout conditioned by the knowing subject, hence is merely a phenomenon, not a thing in itself. This is explained in § 7 of the first volume, and it is there shown that nothing can be more clumsy than that, after the manner of all materialists, one should blindly take the objective as simply given in order to derive everything from it without paying any regard to the subjective, through which, however, nay, in which alone the former exists. Samples of this procedure are most readily afforded us by the fashionable materialism of our own day, which has thereby become a philosophy well suited for barbers' and apothecaries' apprentices. For it, in its innocence, matter, assumed without reflection as absolutely real, is the thing in self, and the one capacity of a thing in itself is impulsive force, for all other qualities can only be manifestations of this.

With naturalism, then, or the purely physical way of looking at things, we shall never attain our end; it is like a sum that never comes out. Causal series without beginning or end, fundamental forces which are inscrutable, endless space, beginningless time, infinite divisibility of matter, and all this further conditioned by a knowing brain, in which alone it exists just like a dream, and without which it vanishes – constitute the labyrinth in which naturalism leads us ceaselessly round. The height to which in our time the natural sciences have risen in this respect entirely throws into the shade all previous centuries, and is a summit which mankind reaches for the first time. But however great are the advances which physics (understood in the wide sense of the ancients) may make, not the smallest step towards metaphysics is thereby taken, just as a plane can never obtain cubical content by being indefinitely extended. For all such advances will only perfect our knowledge of the phenomenon; while metaphysics strives to pass beyond the phenomenal appearance itself, to that which so appears. And if indeed it had the assistance of an entire and complete experience, it would, as regards the main point, be in no way advantaged by it. Nay, even if one wandered through all the planets and fixed stars, one would thereby have made no step in metaphysics. It is rather the case that the greatest advances of physics will make the need of metaphysics ever more felt; for it is just the corrected, extended, and more thorough knowledge of nature which, on the one hand, always undermines and ultimately overthrows the metaphysical assumptions which till then have prevailed, but, on the other hand, presents the problem of metaphysics itself more distinctly, more correctly, and more fully, and separates it more clearly from all that is merely physical; moreover, the more perfectly and accurately known nature of the particular thing more pressingly demands the explanation of the whole and the general, which, the more correctly, thoroughly, and completely it is known empirically, only presents itself as the more mysterious. Certainly the individual, simple investigator of nature, in a special branch of physics, does not at once become clearly conscious of all this; he rather sleeps contentedly by the side of his chosen maid, in the house of Odysseus, banishing all thoughts of Penelope (cf. ch. 12 at the end). Hence we see at the present day the husk of nature investigated in its minutest details, the intestines of intestinal worms and the vermin of vermin known to a nicety. But if some one comes, as, for example, I do, and speaks of the kernel of nature, they will not listen; they even think it has nothing to do with the matter, and go on sifting their husks. One finds oneself tempted to call that over-microscopical and micrological investigator of nature the cotquean of nature. But those persons who believe that crucibles and retorts are the true and only source of all wisdom are in their own way just as perverse as were formerly their antipodes the Scholastics. As the latter, absolutely confined to their abstract conceptions, used these as their weapons, neither knowing nor investigating anything outside them, so the former, absolutely confined to their empiricism, allow nothing to be true except what their eyes behold, and believe they can thus arrive at the ultimate ground of things, not discerning that between the phenomenon and that which manifests itself in it, the thing in itself, there is a deep gulf, a radical difference, which can only be cleared up by the knowledge and accurate delimitation of the subjective element of the phenomenon, and the insight that the ultimate and most important conclusions concerning the nature of things can only be drawn from self-consciousness; yet without all this one cannot advance a step beyond what is directly given to the senses, thus can get no further than to the problem. Yet, on the other hand, it is to be observed that the most perfect possible knowledge of nature is the corrected statement of the problem of metaphysics. Therefore no one ought to venture upon this without having first acquired a knowledge of all the branches of natural science, which, though general, shall be thorough, clear, and connected. For the problem must precede its solution. Then, however, the investigator must turn his glance inward; for the intellectual and ethical phenomena are more important than the physical, in the same proportion as, for example, animal magnetism is a far more important phenomenon than mineral magnetism. The last fundamental secret man carries within himself, and this is accessible to him in the most immediate manner; therefore it is only here that he can hope to find the key to the riddle of the world and gain a clue to the nature of all things. The special province of metaphysics thus certainly lies in what has been called mental philosophy.