The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer

The Essays Of Arthur
Schopenhauer

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Title: The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer
Release Date: January 18, 2004 [EBook #10739]
Language: English
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THE ESSAYS
OF
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
TRANSLATED BY
T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M.A.

ON HUMAN NATURE.

CONTENTS.
HUMAN NATURE GOVERNMENT FREE-WILL AND FATALISM
CHARACTER MORAL INSTINCT ETHICAL REFLECTIONS

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
The following essays are drawn from the chapters entitled Zur Ethik
and Zur Rechtslehre und Politik which are to be found both in
Schopenhauer's Parerga and in his posthumous writings. As in my
previous volumes, so also in this, I have omitted a few passages which
appeared to me to be either antiquated or no longer of any general
interest. For convenience' sake I have divided the original chapters into
sections, which I have had to name; and I have also had to invent a title
which should express their real scope. The reader will find that it is not
so much Ethics and Politics that are here treated, as human nature itself
in various aspects.
T.B.S.

HUMAN NATURE.
Truths of the physical order may possess much external significance,
but internal significance they have none. The latter is the privilege of
intellectual and moral truths, which are concerned with the
objectivation of the will in its highest stages, whereas physical truths
are concerned with it in its lowest.
For example, if we could establish the truth of what up till now is only
a conjecture, namely, that it is the action of the sun which produces
thermoelectricity at the equator; that this produces terrestrial
magnetism; and that this magnetism, again, is the cause of the _aurora
borealis_, these would be truths externally of great, but internally of
little, significance. On the other hand, examples of internal significance
are furnished by all great and true philosophical systems; by the
catastrophe of every good tragedy; nay, even by the observation of
human conduct in the extreme manifestations of its morality and
immorality, of its good and its evil character. For all these are
expressions of that reality which takes outward shape as the world, and
which, in the highest stages of its objectivation, proclaims its innermost
nature.

To say that the world has only a physical and not a moral significance
is the greatest and most pernicious of all errors, the fundamental
blunder, the real perversity of mind and temper; and, at bottom, it is
doubtless the tendency which faith personifies as Anti-Christ.
Nevertheless, in spite of all religions--and they are systems which one
and all maintain the opposite, and seek to establish it in their mythical
way--this fundamental error never becomes quite extinct, but raises its
head from time to time afresh, until universal indignation compels it to
hide itself once more.
Yet, however certain we may feel of the moral significance of life and
the world, to explain and illustrate it, and to resolve the contradiction
between this significance and the world as it is, form a task of great
difficulty; so great, indeed, as to make it possible that it has remained
for me to exhibit the true and only genuine and sound basis of morality
everywhere and at all times effective, together with the results to which
it leads. The actual facts of morality are too much on my side for me to
fear that my theory can ever be replaced or upset by any other.
However, so long as even my ethical system continues to be ignored by
the professorial world, it is Kant's moral principle that prevails in the
universities. Among its various forms the one which is most in favour
at present is "the dignity of man." I have already exposed the absurdity
of this doctrine in my treatise on the Foundation of Morality.[1]
Therefore I will only say here that if the question were asked on what
the alleged dignity of man rests, it would not be long before the answer
was made that it rests upon his morality. In other words, his morality
rests upon his dignity, and his dignity rests upon his morality.
[Footnote 1: § 8.]
But apart from this circular argument it seems to me that the idea of
dignity can be applied only in an ironical sense to a being whose will is
so sinful, whose intellect is so limited, whose