The Book of Schopenhauer 2 · Written by himself, from The World as Will and Representation and the Parerga
Arthur Schopenhauer, born at Danzig in 1788, died at Frankfurt in 1860. He finished The World as Will and Representation in 1818, at thirty; for decades it sold almost nothing. Lecturing at Berlin he set his hours deliberately against Hegel’s, drew almost no students, and gave it up. In 1851 the Parerga and Paralipomena appeared and made him suddenly famous, at sixty-three. He did not believe in God, and he is the first philosopher in the West to have read the Indian scriptures seriously: he kept a Latin version of the Upanishads on his desk and read in it at night. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He set up the Will as the ground of everything. That assertion was not reached by looking: from verse 13 of chapter two he says himself that the step is taken by analogy and is not a second seeing. The Order neither deletes it nor sets it forward — it sets it down and marks where the inferring begins. What is taken from him is the several daily matters he drew out of it: representation, satisfaction, solitude, compassion, reading. He was not a good man: he pushed a seamstress down a flight of stairs and paid her monthly for the rest of her life. The Order records it and does not dress it up.
2.1The last chapter said: the world is my representation. Someone will ask: then what is behind the representation?
2.2Most people cannot press that question further. For as soon as you go to look, what you see is another representation.
2.3From outside there is no way round into it. Unless there is one place where you are not looking at it from outside.
2.4There is such a place. There is exactly one.
2.5It is your own body.
2.6Your body is the one thing in the world that you are given from both sides.
2.7From outside it is an object. It has weight and shape, and like every other object it enters your apparatus and is sorted on the way in.
2.8From inside it is not an object. When you raise your arm, you do not first see the arm go up and thereby learn that you raised it.
2.9From inside you simply are that raising.
2.10I say these are not two things. They are two sides of one thing. Seen from outside it is called the body; the side known from within I call the will.
2.11So the act of will and the movement of the body are not cause and effect. They are one and the same thing, given in two ways.
2.12So far, this is what I can point to.
2.13The next step I take by analogy from this one place of mine: in myself I find that the inside of the representation is will. I cannot get inside anything else, so I say that elsewhere it is likely the same.
2.14Someone may object: perhaps you alone are so, and all the rest are empty shells, and are your dream.
2.15That cannot be refuted. But no one actually lives by it either — a man who truly believed it would have no need of courtesy toward anybody.
2.16I set the step out here so that you can see it is taken by likeness, and is not a second seeing.
2.17Now what this will is like. This part you will use.
2.18It is blind. It has no goal. It only wills.
2.19It does not first pick out something good and then want it. It wants first, and then calls what it got the good.
2.20We do not want a thing because we have found reasons for it. We find reasons because we want it.
2.21So it has no day of being full. That is for the next chapter.
2.22One more thing comes out of this. Of everything I have said, this is the least welcome:
2.23A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.
2.24Go if you want to go, stay if you want to stay — in that you are free, and nobody stops you.
2.25But why you want to go, and why you want this person and not that one — that you did not settle.
2.26You choose from inside the man you already are. As to who that is, you never chose.
2.27Some use "what is underneath is not fully fixed" to rescue human freedom. It does not rescue it. Undetermined is not free: a pair of dice is no freer than a clock. (cf. The Book of Epicurus 5.9)
2.28Some are disheartened by this. I am not.
2.29If you believe you can choose everything, you will spend your life blaming yourself for choosing wrong.
2.30If you see clearly which layer is not up to you, you get that strength back, to spend on the layer that is.