The overture to Faustus so entirely ignores Polyphony, that it seems a virtual denial of its effectiveness and importance in orchestral composition.
Richard Wagner will never become a composer of instrumental music, but in his operas he has opened a new avenue, and his creations therein are something grand and sublime.
SCHOPENHAUER’S DOCTRINE OF THE WILL.
Translated from the German, by C. L. Bernays.
[We print below a condensed statement of the central doctrine of Arthur Schopenhauer. It is translated from his work entitled “Ueber den Willen in der Natur,” 2d ed., 1854, Frankfort—pp. 19-23, and 63. To those familiar with the kernel of speculative truth, it is unnecessary to remark that the basis of the system herewith presented is thoroughly speculative, and resembles in some respects that of Leibnitz in the Monadology, printed in our last number. It is only an attempt to solve all problems through self-determination, and this in its immediate form as the will. Of course the immediateness (i. e. lack of development or realization) of the principle employed here, leads into difficulty, and renders it impossible for him to see the close relation he stands in to other great thinkers. Hence he uses very severe language when speaking of other philosophers. If the Will is taken for the “Radical of the Soul,” then other forms of self-determination, e. g. the grades of knowing, will not be recognized as possessing substantiality, and hence the theoretical mind will be subordinated to the practical;—a result, again, which is the outcome of the Philosophy of Fichte. But Leibnitz seizes a more general aperçu, and identifies self-determination with cognition in its various stages; and hence he rises to the great principle of Recognition as the form under which all finitude is cancelled—all multiplicity preserved in the unity of the Absolute.—Editor.]
The idea of a soul as a metaphysical being, in whose absolute simplicity will and intellect were an indissoluble unity, was a great and permanent impediment to all deeper insight into natural phenomena. The cardinal merit of my doctrine, and that which puts it in opposition to all the former philosophies, is the perfect separation of the will from the intellect. All former philosophers thought will to be inseparable from the intellect; the will was declared to be conditioned upon the intellect, or even to be a mere function of it, whilst the intellect was regarded as the fundamental principle of our spiritual existence. I am well aware that to the future alone belongs the recognition of this doctrine, but to the future philosophy the separation, or rather the decomposition of the soul into two heterogeneous elements, will have the same significance as the decomposition of water had to chemistry. Not the soul is the eternal and indestructible or the very principle of life in men, but what I might call the Radical of the soul, and that is the Will. The so-called soul is already a compound; it is the combination of will and the νοῦς, intellect. The intellect is the secondary, the posterius in any organism, and, as a mere function of the brain, dependent upon the organism. The will, on the contrary, is primary, the prius of the organism, and the organism consequently is conditioned by it. For the will is the very “thing in itself,” which in conception (that is, in the peculiar function of the brain) exhibits itself as an organic body. Only by virtue of the forms of cognition, that is, by virtue of that function of the brain—hence only in conception—one’s body is something extended and organic, not outside of it, or immediately in self-consciousness. Just as the various single acts of the body are nothing but the various acts of the will portrayed in the represented world, just so is the shape of this body as a totality the image of its will as a whole. In all organic functions of the body, therefore, just as in its external actions, the will is the “agens.” True physiology, on its height, shows the intellect to be the product of the physical organization, but true metaphysics show, that physical existence itself is the product, or rather the appearance, of a spiritual agens, to-wit, the will; nay, that matter itself is conditioned through conception, in which alone it exists. Perception and thought may well be explained by the nature of the organism; the will never can be; the contrary is true, namely, that every organism originates by and from the will. This I show as follows:
I therefore posit the will as the “thing in itself”—as something absolutely primitive; secondly, the simple visibility of the will, its objectivation as our body; and thirdly, the intellect as a mere function of a certain part of that body. That part (the brain) is the objectivated desire (or will) to know, which became represented: for the will, to reach its ends, needs the intellect. This function again pre-supposes the whole world as representation; it therefore pre-supposes also the body as an object, and even matter itself, so far as existing only in representation, for an objective world without a subject in whose intellect it stands, is, well considered, something altogether unthinkable. Hence intellect and matter (subject and object) only relatively exist for each other, and in that way constitute the apparent world.
Whenever the will acts on external matter, or whenever it is directed towards a known object, thus passing through the medium of knowledge, then all recognize that the agens, which here is in action, is the will, and they call it by that name. Yet, that is will not less which acts in the inner process that precedes those external actions as their condition, which create and preserve the organic life and its substrate; and secretion, digestion, and the circulation of the blood, are its work also. But just because the will was recognized only while leaving the individual from which it started, and directing itself to the external world, which precisely for that purpose now appears as perception, the intellect was regarded as its essential condition, as its sole element, and as the very substance out of which it was made, and thereby the very worst hysteron proteron was committed that ever happened.
Before all, one should know how to discriminate between will and arbitrariness (Wille und Willkühr), and one should understand that the first can exist without the second. Will is called arbitrariness where it is lighted by intellect, and whenever motives or conceptions are its moving causes; or, objectively speaking, whenever external causes which produce an act are mediated by a brain. The motive may be defined as an external irritation, by whose influence an image is formed in the brain, and under the mediation of which the will accomplishes its effect, that is, an external act of the body. With the human species the place of that image may be occupied by a concept, which being formed from images of a similar kind, by omitting the differences, is no longer intuitive, but only marked and fixed by words. Hence as the action of motives is altogether independent of any contact, they therefore can measure their respective forces upon the will, on each other, and thereby permit a certain choice. With the animals, that choice is confined to the narrow horizon of what is visibly projected before them; among men it has the wide range of the thinkable, or of its concepts, as its sphere. Those movements, therefore, which result from motives, and not from causes, as in the inorganic world, nor from mere irritation, as with the plants, are called arbitrary movements. These motives pre-suppose knowledge, the medium of the motives, through which in this case causality is effected, irrespective of their absolute necessity in any other respect. Physiologically, the difference between irritation and motive may be described thus: Irritation excites a reaction immediately, the reaction issuing from the same part upon which the irritation had acted; whilst a motive is an irritation, which must make a circuit through the brain, where first an image is formed, and that image then originates the ensuing reaction, which now is called an act of the free will. Hence the difference between free and unfree movements does not concern the essential and primary, which in both is the will, but only the secondary, that is, the way in which the will is aroused; to-wit, whether it shows itself in consequence of some real cause, or of an irritation, or of a motive, that is, of a cause that had to pass through the organ of the intellect.
Free will or arbitrariness is only possible in the consciousness of men. It differs from the consciousness of animals in this, that it contains not only present and tangible representations, but abstract concepts, which, independent of the differences of time, act simultaneously and side by side, permitting thereby conviction or a conflict of motives; this, in the strictest sense of the word, is called free will. Yet this very free will or choice consists only in the victory of the stronger motive over a weaker in a given individual character, by which the ensuing action was determined, just as one impulse is overpowered by a stronger counter impulse, whereby the effect nevertheless appears with the same necessity as the movement of a stone that has received an impulse. The great thinkers of all times agree in this decidedly; while, on the contrary, the vulgar will little understand the great truth, that the mark of our liberty is not to be found in our single acts, but in our existence itself, and in its very essence. Whenever one has succeeded to discriminate will from free will, or the arbitrary, and to consider the latter as a peculiar species of the former, then there is no more room for any difficulty in discovering the will also in occurrences wherein intelligence cannot be traced.