We have now completed the two discussions whose insertion was necessary; namely that about the freedom of the will in itself simultaneously with the necessity of its phenomenon; and that about its fate in the world that reflects its inner nature, on the knowledge of which it has to affirm or deny itself. We can now bring to greater clearness this affirmation and denial, which above we expressed and stated only in general terms. This we can do by describing the modes of conduct in which alone they find their expression, and considering them according to their inner significance.
The affirmation of the will is the persistent willing itself, undisturbed by any knowledge, as it fills the life of man in general. For the body of man is already the objectivity of the will, as it appears at this grade and in this individual; and thus his willing that develops in time is, so to speak, the paraphrase of the body, the elucidation of the meaning of the whole and of its parts. It is another way of exhibiting the same thing-in-itself of which the body is already the phenomenon. Therefore, instead of affirmation of the will, we can also say affirmation of the body. The fundamental theme of all the many different acts of will is the satisfaction of the needs inseparable from the body’s existence in health; they have their expression in it, and can be reduced to the maintenance of the individual and the propagation of the race. But indirectly, motives of the most various kinds in this way obtain power over the will, and bring about acts of will of the most various kinds. Each of these is only a pattern, an example, of the will which appears here in general. The nature of this example, and what form the motive may have and impart to it, are not essential; the important points are only that there is a willing in general, and the degree of intensity of this willing. The will can become visible only in the motives, just as the eye manifests its visual faculty only in light. The motive in general stands before the will in protean forms; it always promises complete satisfaction, the quenching of the thirst of will. But if this is attained, it at once appears in a different form, and therein moves the will afresh, always according to the degree of the will’s intensity and to its relation to knowledge, which in these very patterns and examples are revealed as empirical character.
From the first appearance of his consciousness, man finds himself to be a willing being, and his knowledge, as a rule, remains in constant relation to his will. He tries to become thoroughly acquainted only with the objects of his willing, and then with the means to attain these. Now he knows what he has to do, and does not, as a rule, aim at other knowledge. He proceeds and acts; consciousness keeps him always working steadfastly and actively in accordance with the aim of his willing; his thinking is concerned with the choice of means. This is the life of almost all men; they will, they know what they will, and they strive after this with enough success to protect them from despair, and enough failure to preserve them from boredom and its consequences. From this results a certain serenity, or at any rate composure, that cannot really be changed by wealth or poverty; for the rich and the poor enjoy, not what they have, since, as we have shown, this acts only negatively, but what they hope to obtain by their efforts. They press forward with much seriousness and indeed with an air of importance; children also pursue their play in this way. It is always an exception, when such a life suffers an interruption through the fact that either the aesthetic demand for contemplation or the ethical demand for renunciation proceeds from a knowledge independent of the service of the will, and directed to the inner nature of the world in general. Most men are pursued by want throughout their lives, without being allowed to come to their senses. On the other hand, the will is often inflamed to a degree far exceeding the affirmation of the body. This degree is then revealed by violent emotions and powerful passions in which the individual not merely affirms his own existence, but denies and seeks to suppress that of others, when it stands in his way.
The maintenance of the body by its own powers is so small a degree of the will’s affirmation that, if it voluntarily stopped at this, we might assume that, with the death of this body, the will that appeared in it would also be extinguished. But the satisfaction of the sexual impulse goes beyond the affirmation of one’s own existence that fills so short a time; it affirms life for an indefinite time beyond the death of the individual. Nature, always true and consistent, here even naive, exhibits to us quite openly the inner significance of the act of procreation. Our own consciousness, the intensity of the impulse, teaches us that in this act is expressed the most decided affirmation of the will-to-live, pure and without further addition (say of the denial of other and foreign individuals). Now, as the consequence of the act, a new life appears in time and the causal series, i.e., in nature. The begotten appears before the begetter, different from him in the phenomenon, but in himself, or according to the Idea, identical with him. It is therefore by this act that every species of living thing is bound to a whole and perpetuated as such. In reference to the begetter, procreation is only the expression, the symptom, of his decided affirmation of the will-to-live. In reference to the begotten, procreation is not the ground or reason of the will that appears in him, for the will in itself knows neither reason nor consequent; but, like every cause, this procreation is only the occasional cause of this will’s phenomenon, at a given time and in a given place. As thing-in-itself, the will of the begetter is not different from that of the begotten, for only the phenomenon, not the thing-in-itself, is subordinate to the principium individuationis. With that affirmation beyond one’s own body to the production of a new body, suffering and death, as belonging to the phenomenon of life, are also affirmed anew, and the possibility of salvation, brought about by the most complete faculty of knowledge, is for this time declared to be fruitless. Here is to be seen the profound reason for the shame connected with the business of procreation. This view is mythically expressed in the dogma of the Christian teaching that we all share the sin of Adam (which is obviously only the satisfaction of sexual passion), and through it are guilty of suffering and death. In this respect, religious teaching goes beyond the consideration of things according to the principle of sufficient reason; it recognizes the Idea of man. The unity of this Idea is re-established out of its dispersion into innumerable individuals through the bond of procreation that holds them all together. According to this, religious teaching regards every individual, on the one hand, as identical with Adam, with the representative of the affirmation of life, and to this extent as fallen into sin (original sin), suffering, and death. On the other hand, knowledge of the Idea also shows it every individual as identical with the Saviour, with the representative of the denial of the will-to-live, and to this extent as partaking of his self-sacrifice, redeemed by his merit, and rescued from the bonds of sin and death, i.e., of the world (Rom. v, 12-21).
Another mythical description of our view of sexual satisfaction as the affirmation of the will-to-live beyond the individual life, as a falling into life first brought about in this way, or, so to speak, as a renewed assignment to life, is the Greek myth of Proserpine. A return from the nether world was still possible for her, so long as she had not tasted the fruits of the lower world; but she was wholly buried there through eating the pomegranate. The meaning of this is very clearly expressed in Goethe’s incomparable telling of this myth, especially when, immediately after she has tasted the pomegranate, the invisible chorus of the three Parcae joins in and says:
“You are ours!
Fasting you could return:
The bite of the apple makes you ours!”
[Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, IV]
It is noteworthy that Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, iii, c. 15) describes the matter through the same image and expression: Oἱ µὲν εὐνoυχίσανϰντες ἑαυτoὺς ἀπò πάσης ἁµαρτίϰς, δiὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν oὐρανῶν, µαϰάριoι oὗτoί εἰσιν, oἱ τoῦ ϰóσµoυ νηστεύoντες. (Qui se castrarunt ab amni peccato propter regnum coelorum, ii sunt beati, A MUNDO JEJUNANTES.)166
The sexual impulse is proved to be the decided and strongest affirmation of life by the fact that for man in the natural state, as for the animal, it is his life’s final end and highest goal. Self-preservation and maintenance are his first aim, and as soon as he has provided for that, he aims only at the propagation of the race; as a merely natural being, he cannot aspire to anything more. Nature too, the inner being of which is the will-to-live itself, with all her force impels both man and the animal to propagate. After this she has attained her end with the individual, and is quite indifferent to its destruction; for, as the will-to-live, she is concerned only with the preservation of the species; the individual is nothing to her. Because the inner being of nature, the will-to-live, expresses itself most strongly in the sexual impulse, the ancient poets and philosophers—Hesiod and Parmenides—said very significantly that Eros is the first, that which creates, the principle from which all things emerge. (See Aristotle, Metaphysica, i, 4.) Pherecydes said: Eἰς ἔρωτα µεταβεβλῆσθϰι τòν Δία, µέλλoντα δηµιoυργειν. (Jovem, cum mundum fabricare vellet, in cupidinem sese transformasse.)167 Proclus ad Platonis Timaeum, Bk. iii. We have recently had from G. F. Schoemann, De Cupidine Cosmogonico, 1852, a detailed treatment of this subject. The Maya of the Indians, the work and fabric of which are the whole world of illusion, is paraphrased by amor.
Far more than any other external member of the body, the genitals are subject merely to the will, and not at all to knowledge. Here, in fact, the will shows itself almost as independent of knowledge as it does in those parts which, on the occasion of mere stimuli, serve vegetative life, reproduction, and in which the will operates blindly as it does in nature-without-knowledge. For generation is only reproduction passing over to a new individual, reproduction at the second power so to speak, just as death is only excretion at the second power. By reason of all this, the genitals are the real focus of the will, and are therefore the opposite pole to the brain, the representative of knowledge, i.e., to the other side of the world, the world as representation. The genitals are the life-preserving principle assuring to time endless life. In this capacity they were worshipped by the Greeks in the phallus, and by the Hindus in the lingam, which are therefore the symbol of the affirmation of the will. On the other hand, knowledge affords the possibility of the suppression of willing, of salvation through freedom, of overcoming and annihilating the world.
At the beginning of this fourth book, we considered in detail how the will-to-live in its affirmation has to regard its relation to death. We saw that it is not troubled by death, because death exists as something already included in and belonging to life. Its opposite, namely generation, completely balances it, and, in spite of the death of the individual, ensures and guarantees life for all time to the will-to-live. To express this, the Indians gave the lingam as an attribute to Shiva, the god of death. We also explained there how the man who has perfect awareness and occupies the standpoint of a decided affirmation of life, faces death fearlessly. Therefore nothing more will be said about this here. Without clear awareness, most people occupy this standpoint, and continue to affirm life. The world stands out as the mirror of this affirmation, with innumerable individuals in endless time, and endless space, and endless suffering, between generation and death without end. Yet no further complaint of this can be made from any direction, for the will performs the great tragedy and comedy at its own expense, and is also its own spectator. The world is precisely as it is, because the will, whose phenomenon is the world, is such a will as it is, because it wills in such a way. The justification for suffering is the fact that the will affirms itself even in this phenomenon; and this affirmation is justified and balanced by the fact that the will bears the suffering. Here we have a glimpse of eternal justice in general; later on we shall also recognize it more clearly and distinctly in the particular. We must first, however, speak of temporal or human justice.168