The World as Will and Idea. Arthur Schopenhauer
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through mere knowledge, completely, or nearly so, of the sorrows and miseries of every kind of which his life is full. They held that it was not in keeping with the prerogative of reason that the nature given with it, which by means of it comprehends and contemplates an infinity of things and circumstances, should yet, through the present, and the accidents that can be contained in the few years of a life that is short, fleeting, and uncertain, be exposed to such intense pain, to such great anxiety and suffering, as arise from the tempestuous strain of the desires and the antipathies; and they believed that the due application of reason must raise men above them, and can make them invulnerable. Therefore Antisthenes says: Δει κτασθαι νουν, η βροχον (aut mentem parandam, aut laqueum. Plut. de stoic. repugn., c. 14), i.e., life is so full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it. It was seen that want and suffering did not directly and of necessity spring from not having, but from desiring to have and not having; that therefore this desire to have is the necessary condition under which alone it becomes a privation not to have and begets pain. Ου πενια λυπην εργαζεται, αλλα επιθυμια (non paupertas dolorem efficit, sed cupiditas), Epict., fragm. 25. Men learned also from experience that it is only the hope of what is claimed that begets and nourishes the wish; therefore neither the many unavoidable evils which are common to all, nor unattainable blessings, disquiet or trouble us, but only the trifling more or less of those things which we can avoid or attain; indeed, not only what is absolutely unavoidable or unattainable, but also what is merely relatively so, leaves us quite undisturbed; therefore the ills that have once become joined to our individuality, or the good things that must of necessity always be denied us, are treated with indifference, in accordance with the peculiarity of human nature that every wish soon dies and can no more beget pain if it is not nourished by hope. It followed from all this that happiness always depends upon the proportion between our claims and what we receive. It is all one whether the quantities thus related be great or small, and the proportion can be established just as well by diminishing the amount of the first as by increasing the amount of the second; and in the same way it also follows that all suffering proceeds from the want of proportion between what we demand and expect and what we get. Now this want of proportion obviously lies only in knowledge, and it could be entirely abolished through fuller insight.24 Therefore Chrysippus says: δει ζῃν κατ᾽ εμπειριαν των φυσει συμβαινοντων (Stob. Ecl., L. ii. c. 7, p. 134), that is, one ought to live with a due knowledge of the transitory nature of the things of the world. For as often as a man loses self-command, or is struck down by a misfortune, or grows angry, or becomes faint-hearted, he shows that he finds things different from what he expected, consequently that he was caught in error, and did not know the world and life, did not know that the will of the individual is crossed at every step by the chance of inanimate nature and the antagonism of aims and the wickedness of other individuals: he has therefore either not made use of his reason in order to arrive at a general knowledge of this characteristic of life, or he lacks judgment, in that he does not recognise in the particular what he knows in general, and is therefore surprised by it and loses his self-command.25 Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction; and, moreover, every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour. All pain rests on the passing away of such an illusion; thus both arise from defective knowledge; the wise man therefore holds himself equally aloof from joy and sorrow, and no event disturbs his αταραξια.
In accordance with this spirit and aim of the Stoa, Epictetus began and ended with the doctrine as the kernel of his philosophy, that we should consider well and distinguish what depends upon us and what does not, and therefore entirely avoid counting upon the latter, whereby we shall certainly remain free from all pain, sorrow, and anxiety. But that which alone is dependent upon us is the will; and here a transition gradually takes place to a doctrine of virtue, for it is observed that as the outer world, which is independent of us, determines good and bad fortune, so inner contentment with ourselves, or the absence of it, proceeds from the will. But it was then asked whether we ought to apply the words bonum and malum to the two former or to the two latter? This was indeed arbitrary and a matter of choice, and did not make any real difference, but yet the Stoics disputed everlastingly with the Peripatetics and Epicureans about it, and amused themselves with the inadmissible comparison of two entirely incommensurable quantities, and the antithetical, paradoxical judgments which proceeded from them, and which they flung at each other. The Paradoxa of Cicero afford us an interesting collection of these from the Stoical side.
Zeno, the founder, seems originally to have followed a somewhat different path. The starting-point with him was that for the attainment of the highest good, i.e., blessedness and spiritual peace, one must live in harmony with oneself (ὁμολογουμενους ξῃν; δ᾽ εστι καθ᾽ ἑνα λογον και συμφωνον ξῃν.—Consonanter vivere: hoc est secundum unam rationem et concordem sibi vivere. Stob. Ecl. eth. L. ii., c. 7, p. 132. Also: Αρετην διαθεσιν ειναι ψυχης συμφωνον ἑαυτῃ περι ὁλον τον βιον. Virtutem esse animi affectiomem secum per totam vitam consentientem, ibid., p. 104.) Now this was only possible for a man if he determined himself entirely rationally, according to concepts, not according to changing impressions and moods; since, however, only the maxims of our conduct, not the consequences nor the outward circumstances, are in our power, in order to be always consistent we must set before us as our aim only the maxims and not the consequences and circumstances, and thus again a doctrine of virtue is introduced.
But the ethical principle of Zeno—to live in harmony with oneself—appeared even to his immediate successors to be too formal and empty. They therefore gave it material content by the addition—“to live in harmony with nature” (ὁμολογουμενως τῃ φυσει ζῃν), which, as Stobæus mentions in another place, was first added by Kleanthes, and extended the matter very much on account of the wide sphere of the concept and the vagueness of the expression. For Kleanthes meant the whole of nature in general, while Chrysippus meant human nature in particular (Diog. Laert., 7, 89). It followed that what alone was adapted to the latter was virtue, just as the satisfaction of animal desires was adapted to animal natures; and thus ethics had again to be forcibly united to a doctrine of virtue, and in some way or other established through physics. For the Stoics always aimed at unity of principle, as for them God and the world were not dissevered.
The ethical system of Stoicism, regarded as a whole, is in fact a very valuable and estimable attempt to use the great prerogative of man, reason, for an important and salutary end; to raise him above the suffering and pain to which all life is exposed, by means of a maxim—
“Qua ratione queas traducere leniter œvum:
Ne te semper inops agitet vexetque cupido,
Ne pavor et rerum mediocriter utilium spes,”
and thus to make him partake, in the highest degree, of the dignity which belongs to him as a rational being, as distinguished from the brutes; a dignity of which, in this sense at any rate, we can speak, though not in any other. It is a consequence of my view of the ethical system of Stoicism that it must be explained at the part of my work at which I consider what reason is and what it can do. But although it may to a certain extent be possible to attain that end through the application of reason, and through a purely rational system of ethics, and although experience shows that the happiest men are those purely rational characters commonly called practical philosophers—and rightly so, because just as the true, that is, the theoretical philosopher carries life into the concept, they carry the concept into life—yet it is far from the case that perfection can be attained in this way, and that the reason, rightly used, can really free us from the burden and sorrow of life, and lead us to happiness. Rather, there lies an absolute contradiction in wishing to live without suffering, and this contradiction is also implied in the commonly used expression, “blessed life.” This will become perfectly clear to whoever comprehends the whole of the following exposition. In this purely rational system of ethics the contradiction reveals itself thus, the Stoic is obliged in his doctrine of the way to the blessed