Supplements To The Second Book

Chapter XXI. Retrospect and More General View

If the intellect were not of a subordinate nature, as the two preceding chapters show, then everything which takes place without it, i. e., without intervention of the idea, such as reproduction, the development and maintenance of the organism, the healing of wounds, the restoration or vicarious supplementing of mutilated parts, the salutary crisis in diseases, the works of the mechanical skill of animals, and the performances of instinct would not be done so infinitely better and more perfectly than what takes place with the assistance of intellect, all conscious and intentional achievements of men, which compared with the former are mere bungling. In general nature signifies that which operates, acts, performs without the assistance of the intellect. Now, that this is really identical with what we find in ourselves as will is the general theme of this second book, and also of the essay, “Ueber den Willen in der Natur.” The possibility of this fundamental knowledge depends upon the fact that in us the will is directly lighted by the intellect, which here appears as self-consciousness; otherwise we could just as little arrive at a fuller knowledge of it within us as without us, and must for ever stop at inscrutable forces of nature. We have to abstract from the assistance of the intellect if we wish to comprehend the nature of the will in itself, and thereby, as far as is possible, penetrate to the inner being of nature.

On this account, it may be remarked in passing, my direct antipode among philosophers is Anaxagoras; for he assumed arbitrarily as that which is first and original, from which everything proceeds, a νους, an intelligence, a subject of ideas, and he is regarded as the first who promulgated such a view. According to him the world existed earlier in the mere idea than in itself; while according to me it is the unconscious will which constitutes the reality of things, and its development must have advanced very far before it finally attains, in the animal consciousness, to the idea and intelligence; so that, according to me, thought appears as the very last. However, according to the testimony of Aristotle (Metaph., i. 4), Anaxagoras himself did not know how to begin much with his νους, but merely set it up, and then left it standing like a painted saint at the entrance, without making use of it in his development of nature, except in cases of need, when he did not know how else to help himself. All physico-theology is a carrying out of the error opposed to the truth expressed at the beginning of this chapter – the error that the most perfect form of the origin of things is that which is brought about by means of an intellect. Therefore it draws a bolt against all deep exploration of nature.

From the time of Socrates down to our own time, we find that the chief subject of the ceaseless disputations of the philosophers has been that ens rationis, called soul. We see the most of them assert its immortality, that is to say, its metaphysical nature; yet others, supported by facts which incontrovertibly prove the entire dependence of the intellect upon the bodily organism, unweariedly maintain the contrary. That soul is by all and before everything taken as absolutely simple; for precisely from this its metaphysical nature, its immateriality and immortality were proved, although these by no means necessarily follow from it. For although we can only conceive the destruction of a formed body through breaking up of it into its parts, it does not follow from this that the destruction of a simple existence, of which besides we have no conception, may not be possible in some other way, perhaps by gradually vanishing. I, on the contrary, start by doing away with the presupposed simplicity of our subjectively conscious nature, or the ego, inasmuch as I show that the manifestations from which it was deduced have two very different sources, and that in any case the intellect is physically conditioned, the function of a material organ, therefore dependent upon it, and without it is just as impossible as the grasp without the hand; that accordingly it belongs to the mere phenomenon, and thus shares the fate of this, – that the will, on the contrary, is bound to no special organ, but is everywhere present, is everywhere that which moves and forms, and therefore is that which conditions the whole organism; that, in fact, it constitutes the metaphysical substratum of the whole phenomenon, consequently is not, like the intellect, a Posterius of it, but its Prius; and the phenomenon depends upon it, not it upon the phenomenon. But the body is reduced indeed to a mere idea, for it is only the manner in which the will exhibits itself in the perception of the intellect or brain. The will, again, which in all other systems, different as they are in other respects, appears as one of the last results, is with me the very first. The intellect, as mere function of the brain, is involved in the destruction of the body, but the will is by no means so. From this heterogeneity of the two, together with the subordinate nature of the intellect, it becomes conceivable that man, in the depths of his self-consciousness, feels himself to be eternal and indestructible, but yet can have no memory, either a parte ante or a parte post, beyond the duration of his life. I do not wish to anticipate here the exposition of the true indestructibility of our nature, which has its place in the fourth book, but have only sought to indicate the place where it links itself on.

But now that, in an expression which is certainly one-sided, yet from our standpoint true, the body is called a mere idea depends upon the fact than an existence in space, as something extended, and in time, as something that changes, and more closely determined in both through the causal-nexus, is only possible in the idea, for all those determinations rest upon its forms, thus in a brain, in which accordingly such an existence appears as something objective, i. e., foreign; therefore even our own body can have this kind of existence only in a brain. For the knowledge which I have of my body as extended, space-occupying, and movable, is only indirect: it is a picture in my brain which is brought about by means of the senses and understanding. The body is given to me directly only in muscular action and in pain and pleasure, both of which primarily and directly belong to the will. But the combination of these two different kinds of knowledge of my own body afterwards affords the further insight that all other things which also have the objective existence described, which is primarily only in my brain, are not therefore entirely non-existent apart from it, but must also ultimately in themselves be that which makes itself known in self-consciousness as will.

Chapter XXII.¹ Objective View of the Intellect

There are two fundamentally different ways of regarding the intellect, which depend upon the difference of the point of view, and, much as they are opposed to each other in consequence of this, must yet be brought into agreement. One is the subjective, which, starting from within and taking the consciousness as the given, shows us by what mechanism the world exhibits itself in it, and how, out of the materials which the senses and the understanding provide, it constructs itself in it. We must look upon Locke as the originator of this method of consideration; Kant brought it to incomparably higher perfection; and our first book also, together with its supplements, are devoted to it.

The method of considering the intellect which is opposed to this is the objective, which starts from without, takes as its object not our own consciousness, but the beings given in outward experience, conscious of themselves and of the world, and now investigates the relation of their intellect to their other qualities, how it has become possible, how it has become necessary, and what it accomplishes for them. The standpoint of this method of consideration is the empirical. It takes the world and the animal existences present in it as absolutely given, in that it starts from them. It is accordingly primarily zoological, anatomical, physiological, and only becomes philosophical by connection with that first method of consideration, and from the higher point of view thereby attained. The only foundations of this which as yet have been given we owe to zootomists and physiologists, for the most part French. Here Cabanis is specially to be named, whose excellent work, “Des rapports du physique au moral,” is initiatory of this method of consideration on the path of physiology. The famous Bichat was his contemporary, but his theme was a much more comprehensive one. Even Gall may be named here, although his chief aim was missed. Ignorance and prejudice have raised against this method of consideration the accusation of materialism, because, adhering simply to experience, it does not know the immaterial substance, soul. The most recent advances in the physiology of the nervous system, through Sir Charles Bell, Magendie, Marshall Hall, and others, have also enriched and corrected the material of this method of consideration. A philosophy which, like the Kantian, entirely ignores this point of view for the intellect is one-sided, and consequently inadequate. It leaves an impassable gulf between our philosophical and our physiological knowledge, with which we can never find satisfaction.

Although what I have said in the two preceding chapters concerning the life and the activity of the brain belongs to this method of consideration, and in the same way all the discussions to be found under the heading, “Pflanzenphysiologie,” in the essay, “Ueber den Willen in der Natur,” and also a portion of those under the heading “Vergleichende Anatomie,” are devoted to it, the following exposition of its results in general will be by no means superfluous.

We become most vividly conscious of the glaring contrast between the two methods of considering the intellect opposed to each other above if we carry the matter to the extreme and realise that what the one, as reflective thought and vivid perception, directly assumes and makes its material is for the other nothing more than the physiological function of an internal organ, the brain; nay, that we are justified in asserting that the whole objective world, so boundless in space, so infinite in time, so unsearchable in its perfection, is really only a certain movement or affection of the pulpy matter in the skull. We then ask in astonishment: what is this brain whose function produces such a phenomenon of all phenomena? What is the matter which can be refined and potentiated to such a pulp that the stimulation of a few of its particles becomes the conditional supporter of the existence of an objective world? The fear of such questions led to the hypothesis of the simple substance of an immaterial soul, which merely dwelt in the brain. We say boldly: this pulp also, like every vegetable or animal part, is an organic structure, like all its poorer relations in the inferior accommodation of the heads of our irrational brethren, down to the lowest, which scarcely apprehends at all; yet that organic pulp is the last product of nature, which presupposes all the rest. But in itself, and outside the idea, the brain also, like everything else, is will. For existing for another is being perceived; being in itself is willing: upon this it depends that on the purely objective path we never attain to the inner nature of things; but if we attempt to find their inner nature from without and empirically, this inner always becomes an outer again in our hands, – the pith of the tree, as well as its bark; the heart of the animal, as well as its hide; the white and the yolk of an egg, as well as its shell. On the other hand, upon the subjective path the inner is accessible to us at every moment; for we find it as the will primarily in ourselves, and must, by the clue of the analogy with our own nature, be able to solve that of others, in that we attain to the insight that a being in itself independent of being known, i. e., of exhibiting itself in an intellect, is only conceivable as willing.

If now, in the objective comprehension of the intellect, we go back as far as we possibly can, we shall find that the necessity or the need of knowledge in general arises from the multiplicity and the separate existence of beings, thus from individuation. For suppose there only existed a single being, such a being would have no need of knowledge: because nothing would exist which was different from it, and whose existence it would therefore have to take up into itself indirectly through knowledge, i. e., image and concept. It would itself already be all in all, and therefore there would remain nothing for it to know, i. e., nothing foreign that could be apprehended as object. In the case of a multiplicity of beings, on the other hand, every individual finds itself in a condition of isolation from all the rest, and hence arises the necessity of knowledge. The nervous system, by means of which the animal individual primarily becomes conscious of itself, is bounded by a skin; yet in the brain that has attained to intellect it passes beyond this limit by means of its form of knowledge, causality, and thus there arises for it perception as a consciousness of other things, as an image of beings in space and time, which change in accordance with causality. In this sense it would be more correct to say, “Only the different is known by the different,” than as Empedocles said, “Only the like is known by the like,” which was a very indefinite and ambiguous proposition; although points of view may certainly also be conceived from which it is true; as, for instance, we may observe in passing that of Helvetius when he says so beautifully and happily: “Il n'y a que l'esprit qui sente l'esprit: c'est une corde qui ne frémit qu'à l'unison,” which corresponds with Xenophon's “σοφον ειναι δει τον επιγνωσομενον τον σοφον” (sapientem esse opportet eum, qui sapientem agniturus sit), and is a great sorrow. But now, again, from the other side we know that multiplicity of similars only becomes possible through time and space; thus through the forms of our knowledge. Space first arises in that the knowing subject sees externally; it is the manner in which the subject comprehends something as different from itself. But we also saw knowledge in general conditioned by multiplicity and difference. Thus knowledge and multiplicity, or individuation, stand and fall together, for they reciprocally condition each other. Hence it must be inferred that, beyond the phenomenon in the true being of all things, to which time and space, and consequently also multiplicity, must be foreign, there can also be no knowledge. Buddhism defines this as Pratschna Paramita, i. e., that which is beyond all knowledge (J. J. Schmidt, “On the Maha-Jana and Pratschna Paramita”). A “knowledge of things in themselves,” in the strictest sense of the word, would accordingly be already impossible from the fact that where the thing in itself begins knowledge ceases, and all knowledge is essentially concerned only with phenomena. For it springs from a limitation, by which it is made necessary, in order to extend the limits.