We recall from the second book that in the whole of nature, at all grades of the will’s objectification, there was necessarily a constant struggle between the individuals of every species, and that precisely in this way was expressed an inner antagonism of the will-to-live with itself. At the highest grade of objectification, this phenomenon, like everything else, will manifest itself in enhanced distinctness, and can be further unravelled. For this purpose we will first of all trace to its source egoism as the starting-point of all conflict.
We have called time and space the principium individuationis, because only through them and in them is plurality of the homogeneous possible. They are the essential forms of natural knowledge, in other words, knowledge that has sprung from the will. Therefore, the will will everywhere manifest itself in the plurality of individuals. This plurality, however, does not concern the will as thing-in-itself, but only its phenomena. The will is present, whole and undivided, in each of these, and perceives around it the innumerably repeated image of its own inner being; but this inner nature itself, and hence what is actually real, it finds immediately only in its inner self. Therefore everyone wants everything for himself, wants to possess, or at least control, everything, and would like to destroy whatever opposes him. In addition, there is in the case of knowing beings the fact that the individual is the bearer of the knowing subject, and this knowing subject is the bearer of the world. This is equivalent to saying that the whole of nature outside the knowing subject, and so all remaining individuals, exist only in his representation; that he is conscious of them always only as his representation, and so merely indirectly, and as something dependent on his own inner being and existence. With his consciousness the world also necessarily ceases to exist for him, in other words, its being and non-being become synonymous and indistinguishable. Every knowing individual is therefore in truth, and finds himself as, the whole will-to-live, or as the in-itself of the world itself, and also as the complementary condition of the world as representation, consequently as a microcosm to be valued equally with the macrocosm. Nature herself, always and everywhere truthful, gives him, originally and independently of all reflection, this knowledge with simplicity and immediate certainty. Now from the two necessary determinations we have mentioned is explained the fact that every individual, completely vanishing and reduced to nothing in a boundless world, nevertheless makes himself the centre of the world, and considers his own existence and well-being before everything else. In fact, from the natural standpoint, he is ready for this to sacrifice everything else; he is ready to annihilate the world, in order to maintain his own self, that drop in the ocean, a little longer. This disposition is egoism, which is essential to everything in nature. But it is precisely through egoism that the will’s inner conflict with itself attains to such fearful revelation; for this egoism has its continuance and being in that opposition of the microcosm and macrocosm, or in the fact that the objectification of the will has for its form the principium individuationis, and thus the will manifests itself in innumerable individuals in the same way, and moreover in each of these entirely and completely in both aspects (will and representation). Therefore, whereas each individual is immediately given to himself as the whole will and the entire representer, all others are given to him in the first instance only as his representations. Hence for him his own inner being and its preservation come before all others taken together. Everyone looks on his own death as the end of the world, whereas he hears about the death of his acquaintances as a matter of comparative indifference, unless he is in some way personally concerned in it. In the consciousness that has reached the highest degree, that is, human consciousness, egoism, like knowledge, pain, and pleasure, must also have reached the highest degree, and the conflict of individuals conditioned by it must appear in the most terrible form. Indeed, we see this everywhere before our eyes, in small things as in great. At one time we see it from its dreadful side in the lives of great tyrants and evildoers, and in world-devastating wars. On another occasion we see its ludicrous side, where it is the theme of comedy, and shows itself particularly in self-conceit and vanity. La Rochefoucauld understood this better than anyone else, and presented it in the abstract. We see it in the history of the world and in our own experience. But it appears most distinctly as soon as any mob is released from all law and order; we then see at once in the most distinct form the bellum omnium contra omnes169 which Hobbes admirably described in the first chapter of his De Cive. We see not only how everyone tries to snatch from another what he himself wants, but how one often even destroys another’s whole happiness or life, in order to increase by an insignificant amount his own well-being. This is the highest expression of egoism, the phenomena of which in this respect are surpassed only by those of real wickedness that seeks, quite disinterestedly, the pain and injury of others without any advantage to itself; we shall shortly speak about this. With this disclosure of the source of egoism the reader should compare my description of it in my essay On the Basis of Morality, § 14.
A principal source of the suffering that we found above to be essential and inevitable to all life, is, when it actually appears in a definite form, that Eris, the strife of all individuals, the expression of the contradiction with which the will-to-live is affected in its inner self, and which attains visibility through the principium individuationis. Wild-beast fights are the barbarous means of making it directly and strikingly clear. In this original discord is to be found a perennial source of suffering, in spite of the precautions that have been taken against it; we shall now consider it more closely.