Chapter XL. Preface.
The supplements to this fourth book would be very considerable if it were not that two of its principal subjects which stand specially in need of being supplemented—the freedom of the will and the foundation of ethics—have, on the occasion of prize questions being set by two Scandinavian Academies, been fully worked out by me in the form of a monograph, which was laid before the public in the year 1841 under the title, “The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.” Accordingly I assume an acquaintance on the part of my readers with the work which has just been mentioned, just as unconditionally as in the supplements to the second book I have assumed it with regard to the work “On the Will in Nature.” In general I make the demand that whoever wishes to make himself acquainted with my philosophy shall read every line of me. For I am no voluminous writer, no fabricator of compendiums, no earner of pecuniary rewards, not one whose writings aim at the approbation of a minister; in a word, not one whose pen is under the influence of personal ends. I strive after nothing but the truth, and write as the ancients wrote, with the sole intention of preserving my thoughts, so that they may be for the benefit of those who understand how to meditate upon them and prize [pg 248] them. Therefore I have written little, but that little with reflection and at long intervals, and accordingly I have also confined within the smallest possible limits those repetitions which in philosophical works are sometimes unavoidable on account of the connection, and from which no single philosopher is free; so that by far the most of what I have to say is only to be found in one place. On this account, then, whoever wishes to learn from me and understand me must leave nothing unread that I have written. Yet one can judge me and criticise me without this, as experience has shown; and to this also I further wish much pleasure.
Meanwhile the space gained by the said elimination of two important subjects will be very welcome to us. For since those explanations, which every man has more at heart than anything else, and which therefore in every system, as ultimate results, form the apex of its pyramid, are also crowded together in my last book, a larger space will gladly be granted to every firmer proof or more accurate account of these. Besides this we have been able to discuss here, as belonging to the doctrine of the “assertion of the will to live,” a question which in our fourth book itself remained untouched, as it was also entirely neglected by all philosophers before me: it is the inner significance and real nature of the sexual love, which sometimes rises to a vehement passion—a subject which it would not have been paradoxical to take up in the ethical part of philosophy if its importance had been known.
Chapter XLI.[27] On Death And Its Relation To The Indestructibility Of Our True Nature.
Death is the true inspiring genius, or the muse of philosophy, wherefore Socrates has defined the latter as θανατου μελετη. Indeed without death men would scarcely philosophise. Therefore it will be quite in order that a special consideration of this should have its place here at the beginning of the last, most serious, and most important of our books.
The brute lives without a proper knowledge of death; therefore the individual brute enjoys directly the absolute imperishableness of the species, for it is only conscious of itself as endless. In the case of men the terrifying certainty of death necessarily entered with reason. But as everywhere in nature with every evil a means of cure, or at least some compensation, is given, the same reflection which introduces the knowledge of death also assists us to metaphysical points of view, which comfort us concerning it, and of which the brute has no need and is incapable. All religious and philosophical systems are principally directed to this end, and are thus primarily the antidote to the certainty of death, which the reflective reason produces out of its own means. Yet the degree in which they attain this end is very different, and certainly one religion or philosophy will, far more than the others, enable men to look death in the face with a quiet glance. [pg 250] Brahmanism and Buddhism, which teach man to regard himself as himself, the original being, the Brahm, to which all coming into being and passing away is essentially foreign, will achieve much more in this respect than such as teach that man is made out of nothing, and actually begins at birth his existence derived from another. Answering to this we find in India a confidence and a contempt for death of which one has no conception in Europe. It is, in fact, a hazardous thing to force upon a man, by early imprinting them, weak and untenable conceptions in this important regard, and thereby making him for ever incapable of taking up correct and stable ones. For example, to teach him that he recently came out of nothing, and consequently through an eternity has been nothing, but yet for the future will be imperishable, is just the same as to teach him that although he is through and through the work of another, yet he will be held responsible through all eternity for his actions. If, then, when the mind ripens and reflection appears, the untenable nature of such doctrines forces itself upon him, he has nothing better to put in its place, nay, is no longer capable of understanding anything better, and thus loses the comfort which nature had destined for him also, as a compensation for the certainty of death. In consequence of such a process, we see even now in England (1844), among ruined factory hands, the Socialists, and in Germany, among ruined students, the young Hegelians, sink to the absolutely physical point of view, which leads to the result: edite, bibite, post mortem nulla voluptas, and so far may be defined as bestialism.
However, after all that has been taught concerning death, it cannot be denied that, at least in Europe, the opinion of men, nay, often even of the same individual, very frequently vacillates between the conception of death as absolute annihilation and the assumption that we are, as it were, with skin and hair, immortal. Both are equally false: but we have not so much to find a correct mean as [pg 251] rather to gain the higher point of view from which such notions disappear of themselves.