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PARERGA AND PARALIPOMENA: SHORT PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS |
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[b]CHAPTER 10: On the Doctrine of the Indestructibility of our True Nature by Death[/b]
§ 134
Although I have dealt with this subject consistently and fully in my chief work, I still think that a further short selection of isolated observations will always throw some light on that discussion and will not be without value to many a reader.
One must read Jean Paul's Selina to see how an exceedingly eminent mind wrestles with the absurdities of a false conception which obtrude themselves on him, and how he will not give it up because he has set his heart on it and yet is always disturbed by the inconsistencies he is unable to digest. I refer to the conception of the continued individual existence of our entire personal consciousness after death. It is just that wrestling and struggling of Jean Paul's which show that such notions, made up of what is false and true, are not wholesome errors as is maintained; they are, on the contrary, decidedly harmful and pernicious. For the true knowledge, based on the contrast between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, ofthe indestructibility of our real nature-a nature that is untouched by time, causality, and change-is rendered impossible by the false contrast between body and soul as also by raising the whole personality to a thing-in-itself that is said to last for ever. Not only is this the case, but also that false conception cannot even be definitely regarded as the representative of truth because our faculty of reason constantly rebels at the absurdity that underlies it, and in so doing has also to give up the truth that is amalgamated with it. For in the long run, what is true can exist only in all its purity; mixed with errors, it partakes of their weakness, just as granite disintegrates when its feldspar is decayed, although quartz and mica are not subject to such decay. The substitutes of truth are, therefore, in a bad way.
§ 135
If in daily intercourse we are asked, by one of the many who would like to know everything but who will learn nothing, about continued existence after death, the most suitable answer and above all the most correct would be: 'After your death you will be what you were before your birth.' For it implies the absurdity of the demand that the kind of existence which has a beginning ought to be without an end; but in addition it contains the hint that there may be two kinds of existence and accordingly two kinds of nothing. However, we could also reply: 'Whatever you will be after your death, and it might be nothing, will then be just as natural and appropriate to you as is your individual organic existence to you now; and so at most you might have to fear the moment of transition. Indeed, as a mature consideration of the matter leads to the result that complete nonexistence would be preferable to an existence such as ours, the thought of a cessation of our existence, or of a time when we shall no longer exist, cannot reasonably disturb us any more than can the idea that we might never have come into existence. Now as this existence is essentially personal, the end of the personality is accordingly not to be regarded as a loss.'
On the other hand, the man who had followed the plausible thread of materialism on the objective and empirical path, and now turned to us in terror at the total destruction through death which stared him in the face, would probably derive from us some consolation in the briefest manner and in keeping with his empirical way of thinking, if we pointed out to him the difference between matter and the metaphysical force that is always temporarily taking possession thereof. For instance, we could show him how, as soon as the proper temperature occurs, the homogeneous formless fluid in the bird's egg assumes the complex and precisely determined shape of the genus and species of its bird. To a certain extent, this is indeed a kind of generatio aequivoca; and it is exceedingly probable that the ascending series of animal forms arose from the fact that, once in primeval times and at a happy hour, it jumped to a higher type from that of the animal to which the egg belonged. At all events, something different from matter most definitely makes its appearance here, especially as, with the smallest unfavourable circumstance, it fails to appear. In this way, it becomes obvious that, after an operation that is completed or subsequently impeded, this something can also depart just as unimpaired from matter. This suggests a permanence of quite a different kind from that of the persistence of matter in time.
§ 136
No individual is calculated to last for ever; it is swallowed up in death; yet in this way we lose nothing, for underlying the individual existence is one quite different whose manifestation it is. This other existence knows no time and so neither duration nor extinction.
If we picture to ourselves a being who knew, understood, and took in at a glance everything, the question whether we continued to exist after death would probably have for him no meaning at all, since beyond our present, temporal, individual existence duration and cessation would no longer have any significance and would be indistinguishable concepts. Accordingly, neither the concept of extinction nor that of duration would have any application to our true nature, or to the thing-in- itself manifesting itself in our phenomenal appearance, since such concepts are borrowed from time that is merely the form of the phenomenon. However, we can picture to ourselves the indestructibility of that core of our phenomenon only as a continued existence of it and really in accordance with the schema of matter as that which persists and continues in time under all the changes of forms. Now if we deny to that core this continued existence, then we regard our temporal end as an annihilation in accordance with the schema of form that vanishes when the matter carrying it is withdrawn from it. Yet both are a [x], [1] a transference of the forms of the phenomenon to the thing-in-itself. But we can hardly form even an abstract notion of an indestructibility that would not be a continuance, because we lack all intuitive perception for verifying such a notion.
In point of fact, however, the constant arising of new beings and the perishing of those that exist are to be regarded as an illusion, produced by the apparatus of two polished lenses (brain-functions) through which alone we are able to see something. They are called space and time and, in their mutual interpenetration, causality. For all that we perceive under these conditions is mere phenomenon; but we do not know how things may be in themselves, that is, independently of our perception. This is really the core of the Kantian philosophy; and we cannot too often call to mind that philosophy and its contents, after a period in which mercenary charlatanry had by its process of obscurantism driven philosophy from Germany with the willing help of those for whom truth and intellect are the least important matters in the world, whereas salaries and fees are the weightiest.
This existence, which is in no way concerned with the death of the individual, does not have time and space as its forms, but everything that for us is real appears therein; and so to us death manifests itself as an annihilation.
§ 137 Everyone feels that he is something different from a being whom another once created out of nothing. From this there arises for him the assurance that death may bring to an end his life but not his existence.
By virtue of the cognitive form of time, man (i.e. the affirmation of the will-to-live at the highest stage of its objectification) appears as a race of human beings who are always being born afresh and then dying.
Man is something different from an animated nothing; and so too is the animal.
How can we imagine, on seeing the death of a human being, that here a thing-in-itself becomes nothing? On the contrary, that only a phenomenon comes to an end in time, this form of all phenomena, without the thing-in-itself being thereby affected, is the immediate intuitive knowledge of everyone. Therefore at all times, attempts have been made to state it in the most varied forms and expressions all of which, however, are taken from the phenomenon in its proper sense and merely refer thereto.
Whoever imagines that his existence is limited to his present life considers himself to be an animated nothing; for thirty years ago he was nothing and thirty years hence he will again be nothing.
If we had a complete knowledge of our own true nature through and through to its innermost core, we should regard it as ridiculous to demand the immortality of the individual, since this would be equivalent to giving up that true inner nature in exchange for a single one of its innumerable manifestations, or fulgurations.
§ 138
The more clearly conscious a man is of the frailty, vanity, and dreamlike nature of all things, the more clearly aware is he also of the eternity of his own true inner nature. For really only in contrast thereto is that dreamlike nature of things known; just as we perceive the rapid motion of the ship we are in only by looking at the fixed shore and not at the ship itself.
§ 139
The present has two halves, an objective and a subjective. The objective half alone has as its form the intuition of time and therefore rolls on irresistibly; the subjective half stands firm and is, therefore, always the same. From this arise our vivid recollection of what is long past and the consciousness of our immortality, in spite of the knowledge of the fleeting nature of our existence.
From my initial proposition: 'the world is my representation', we have, to begin with, the proposition: 'first I am and then the world'. We should stick firmly to this as an antidote to confusing death with annihilation.
Everyone thinks that his innermost core is something that contains and carries about the present moment.
Whenever we may happen to live, we always stand with our consciousness in the centre of time, never at its extremities; and from this we might infer that everyone carries within himself the immovable centre of the whole of infinite time. At bottom, it is this that gives him the confidence with which he goes on living without the constant dread of death. Now whoever is able most vividly to conjure up in his own mind, by virtue of the strength of his memory and imagination, that which is long past in the course of his life, becomes more clearly conscious than others of the identity of the now in all time. Perhaps even the converse of this proposition is more correct. But at all events, such a more vivid consciousness of the identity of all now is an essential requirement for a philosophical turn of mind. By means of it, we apprehend that which is the most fleeting of all things, the Now, as that which alone persists. Now whoever is aware in this intuitive way that the present moment, the sole form of all reality in the narrowest sense, has its source in us and thus springs from within and not from without, cannot have any doubt about the indestructibility of his own true nature. On the contrary, he will grasp that, with his death, the objective world together with the intellect, the medium of its presentation, certainly does perish for him, but that this does not affect his existence; for there was just as much reality within as without. He will say with perfect understanding: [x]. [2] (See Stobaeus, Florilegium, tit. 44,42; vol. i, p. 201.)
Whoever refuses to admit all this, must assert the contrary and say: 'Time is something purely objective and real, existing quite independently of me. I am thrown into it only accidentally, have got possession of a small portion of it, and have thus arrived at a transient reality just as did thousands of others before me who are now no more, and I too shall very soon be nothing. Time, on the other hand, is that which is real; it then goes on without me.' I think that the fundamental absurdity of such a view is obvious from the definite way in which it has been expressed.
In consequence of all this, life may certainly be regarded as a dream and death as an awakening. But then the personality, the individual, belongs to the dreaming and not to the waking consciousness; and so death presents itself to the former as annihilation. Yet at all events, from this point of view death is not to be regarded as the transition to a state that to us is entirely new and strange, but rather only as the return to our own original state, of which life was only a brief episode.
If, however, a philosopher should perhaps imagine that in dying he would find a consolation peculiar to him alone, or at any rate a diversion in the fact that for him a problem would be solved on which he had been so often engaged, then probably he would be no better off than the man whose lamp is blown out when he is just on the point of finding the thing he has been looking for.
For in death consciousness assuredly perishes, but certainly not that which had till then produced it. Thus consciousness rests primarily on the intellect, but this on a physiological process. For it is obviously the function of the brain and, therefore, conditioned by the co-operation of the nervous and vascular systems, more specifically by the brain that is nourished, animated, and constantly agitated by the heart. It is through the ingenious and mysterious structure of the brain which anatomy describes but physiology does not understand, that the phenomenon of the objective world and the whole mechanism of our thoughts are brought about. An individual consciousness and thus a consciousness in general is not conceivable in an immaterial or incorporeal being, since the condition of every consciousness, knowledge, is necessarily a brain-function really because the intellect manifests itself objectively as brain. Therefore just as the intellect appears physiologically and consequently in empirical reality, that is, in the phenomenon, as something secondary, as a result of the life-process, so too psychologically it is secondary, in contrast to the will that is alone the primary and everywhere the original thing. Even the organism itself is really only the will manifesting itself intuitively and objectively in the brain and consequently in the brain-forms of space and time, as I have often explained especially in the essay On the Will in Nature and in my chief work, volume ii, chapter 20. Therefore as consciousness is not directly dependent on the will, but is conditioned by the intellect, the latter being conditioned by the organism, there is no doubt that consciousness is extinguished by death, as also by sleep and every fainting fit.* But let us take courage! for what kind of a consciousness is this? A cerebral animal consciousness, one that is somewhat more highly developed, animal in so far as we have it essentially in common with the whole animal kingdom, although in us it reaches its summit. As I have shown often enough, as regards its origin and purpose, this consciousness is a mere [x] of nature, a remedy or expedient for helping our animal essence to satisfy its needs. On the other hand, the condition into which death returns us is our original state, that is, the one peculiar to our true nature whose primary force manifests itself in the production and maintenance of the life that is now ceasing. Thus it is the condition or state of the thing-in-itself in contrast to the phenomenon. Now in this original state, such an expedient as cerebral knowledge, as being extremely mediate and therefore furnishing mere phenomena, is without doubt entirely superfluous; and so we lose it. Its disappearance is identical with the cessation for us of the phenomenal world, whose mere medium it was, and it can serve no other purpose. If in this original state of ours the retention of that animal consciousness were even offered to us, we should reject it, just as a lame man who had been cured would scorn to use crutches. Therefore whoever deplores the impending loss of this cerebral consciousness that is merely phenomenal and adapted to the phenomenal, is comparable to the converted Greenlanders who did not want heaven when they heard that no seals were there.
Moreover, all that is said here rests on the assumption that we cannot even picture to ourselves a not unconscious state except as one of knowing which consequently carries within itself the fundamental form of all knowledge, the separation into subject and object, into a knower and a known. But we have to bear in mind that this entire form of knowing and being known is conditioned merely by our animal, and therefore very secondary and derived, nature and is thus by no means the original state of all essence and existence, a state that may, therefore, be quite different and yet not without consciousness. However, in so far as we are able to pursue our own present nature to its innermost core, even it is mere will, but this in itself is something without knowledge. Now if through death we forfeit the intellect, we are thereby shifted only into the original state which is without knowledge, but is not for that reason absolutely without consciousness; on the contrary, it will be a state that is raised above and beyond that form where the contrast between subject and object vanishes because that which is to be known would here be actually and immediately identical with the knower himself; and thus the fundamental condition of all knowing (that very contrast) is wanting. By way of elucidation, this may be compared with World as Will and Representation, volume ii, chapter 22. Giordano Bruno's statement is to be regarded as another expression of what is said here and in that work: La divina mente, e la unita assoluta, senza specie alcuna e ella medesima lo che intende, e lo ch'e inteso. [3] (Ed. Wagner, vol. i, p. 287.)
From time to time, everyone will perhaps feel in his heart of hearts a consciousness that an entirely different kind of existence would really suit him rather than this one which is so unspeakably wretched, temporal, transient, individual, and preoccupied with nothing but misery and distress. On such an occasion, he then thinks that death might lead him back to that other existence.
§ 140
Now if, in contrast to this method of consideration which is directed inwards, we again look outwards and apprehend quite objectively the world that presents itself to us, then death certainly appears to be a passing into nothing; but, on the other hand, birth is apparently a proceeding out of nothing. Yet the one like the other cannot be unconditionally true, since it has only the reality of the phenomenon. That in some sense we should survive death is certainly not a greater miracle than that of generation which we daily see before us. That which dies passes away to the source whence all life comes, its own included. In this sense, the Egyptians called Orcus Amenthes which according to Plutarch (De Isis et Osiris, chap. 29), signifies [x], 'the taker and the giver', in order to express that it is the same source whither everything returns and whence everything proceeds. From this point of view, our life might be regarded as a loan received from death; sleep would then be the daily interest on that loan. Death openly proclaims itself as the end of the individual, but in him there dwells the seed for a new being. Accordingly, of all that dies, nothing dies for ever; but also nothing that is born receives an entirely and fundamentally new existence. That which dies perishes, but a seed is left behind out of which a new being proceeds; and this now enters existence without knowing whence it comes and why it is precisely as it is. This is the mystery of palingenesis and chapter 41 of volume ii of my chief work may be regarded as its explanation. It is accordingly clear to us that all beings living at this moment contain the real kernel of all that will live in the future; and so to a certain extent these future beings already exist. Similarly, every animal standing before us in the prime of life seems to exclaim to us: 'Why do you complain of the fleeting nature of all those who are alive? How could I exist if all those of my species who existed before me had not died?' Accordingly, however much the plays and masks may change on the world's stage, the actors in all of them nevertheless remain the same. We sit together, talk, and excite one another; eyes gleam and voices grow louder. Thousands of years ago, others sat in just the same way; it was the same and they were the same. It will be just the same thousands of years hence. The contrivance that prevents us from becoming aware of this is time.
We might very well distinguish between metempsychosis as the transition of the entire so-called soul into another body, and palingenesis as the disintegration and new formation of the individual, since his will alone persists and, assuming the shape of a new being, receives a new intellect. The individual, therefore, decomposes like a neutral salt whose base then combines with another acid to form a new salt. The difference between metempsychosis and palingenesis which is assumed by Servius, the commentator of Virgil, and is briefly stated in Wernsdorf's Dissertatio de metempsychosi, p. 48, is obviously false and valueless.
From Spence Hardy's Manual of Budhism (pp. 394-6, to be compared with pp. 429, 440, and 445 of the same book) and also from Sangermano's Burmese Empire, p. 6, as well as the Asiatic Researches, vol. vi, p. 179 and vol. ix, p. 256, it appears that there are in Buddhism, as regards continued existence after death, an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine. The former is just metempsychosis as in Brahmanism, but the latter is a palingenesis which is much more difficult to understand and is very much in agreement with my doctrine of the metaphysical permanence of the will in spite of the intellect's physical constitution and fleeting nature in keeping therewith. [x] occurs even in the New Testament. [4]
Now if, to penetrate more deeply into the mystery of palingenesis, we make use of my chief work, volume ii, chapter 43, the matter, more closely considered, will then appear to be that, throughout all time, the male sex has been the guardian or keeper of the will of the human species, the female sex being the guardian of the intellect, whereby the human species then obtains perennial existence. Accordingly, everyone now has a paternal and a maternal element; and just as these were united through generation, so are they disintegrated in death; and so death is the end of the individual. This individual it is whose death we deplore so much, feeling that he is actually lost because he was a mere combination which irretrievably ceases. Yet in all this we must not forget that the inheritableness of the intellect from the mother is not so decided and absolute as is that of the will from the father, on account of the secondary and merely physical nature of the intellect and of its entire dependence on the organism, not only in respect of the brain, but also otherwise. All this has been discussed in the above-mentioned chapter of my chief work. Incidentally, it may be mentioned here that I am in agreement with Plato in so far as he distinguishes in the so-called soul between a mortal and an immortal part. But he is diametrically opposed to me and to truth when, after the manner of all philosophers prior to me, he regards the intellect as the immortal part, the will, on the contrary, that is, the seat of the appetites and passions, as the mortal. We see this in the Timaeus, pp. 386, 387, and 395, ed. Bip. Aristotle states the same thing.*
But however strangely and precariously the physical may prevail through generation and death, together with the obvious constitution of individuals from will and intellect and the subsequent dissolution of these, the metaphysical underlying the physical is of a nature so entirely different that it is not affected by this and we may take courage.
Accordingly, every man can be considered from two opposite points of view; from the one, he is an individual, beginning and ending in time, fleeting and transitory, [x], [5] besides being afflicted with pangs and failings; from the other, he is the indestructible primary being that objectifies itself in every existing thing and as such can say like the statue of Isis at Sais: [x]. [6] Such a being, of course, might do something better than manifest itself in a world such as this. For it is the world of finiteness, suffering, and death. What is in it and comes out of it must end and die. But what is not out of it and will not be out of it, pierces through it, all-powerful like a flash of lightning which strikes upwards and then knows neither time nor death. To reconcile all these antitheses is really the theme of philosophy.*
§ 141
Short concluding Diversion in the Form of a Dialogue
THRASYMACHOS: To be brief, what am I after my death? Now, be clear and precise!
PHILALETHES: Everything and nothing.
THRASYMACHOS: There we have it! A contradiction as the solution to a problem. The trick is played out.
PHILALETHES: To answer transcendent questions in the language created for immanent knowledge can certainly lead to contradictions.
THRASYMACHOS: What do you call transcendent, and what immanent knowledge? It is true that I know these expressions from my professor, but only as predicates of Almighty God with whom his philosophy was exclusively concerned, as is only right and proper. Thus if he is within the world, he is immanent; if he resides somewhere outside, he is transcendent. See, that is clear, that is intelligible! We then know what we have to stick to. No one any longer understands Kantian jargon. The time-consciousness of the present time, from the metropolis of German science-
PHILALETHES (aside): - German philosophical humbug-
THRASYMACHOS: - through a whole succession of great men, especially the great Schleiermacher and Hegel's gigantic mind, has been brought back from all this or rather carried so far forward that it has left it all behind and knows nothing more about it. And so what is it all about?
PHILALETHES: Transcendent knowledge is that which, going beyond all possibility of experience, endeavours to determine the nature of things as they are in themselves; immanent knowledge, on the other hand, is that which keeps within the bounds of the possibility of experience, but thus can speak only of phenomena. You as an individual end at your death; but the individual is not your true and ultimate essence, but rather a mere manifestation thereof. It is not the thing-in-itself, but only its phenomenon which manifests itself in the form of time and accordingly has a beginning and an end. On the other hand, your true essence-in-itself does not know either time, beginning, end, or the limits of a given individuality; and so it cannot be excluded from any individuality, but exists in each and all. Therefore in the first sense, you become nothing through your death; in the second, you are and remain everything. Therefore I said that after your death you would be everything and nothing. In so short a time, your question hardly admits of a more correct answer than this, which nevertheless certainly contains a contradiction just because your life is in time, but your immortality is in eternity. Therefore this can also be called an indestructibility without continuance, which again leads to a contradiction. But this is always the case when the transcendent is to be brought into immanent knowledge; for then a kind of violence is done to such knowledge because it is wrongly applied to that for which it is not born.
THRASYMACHOS: Listen, without a continuance of my individuality, I would not give a farthing for all your immortality.
PHILALETHES : Perhaps we can still bargain with you. Suppose I guaranteed you the continuance of your individuality, yet made it a condition that a completely unconscious death-sleep of three months should precede the reawakening of that individuality.
THRASYMACHOS: That would do.
PHILALETHES: Now as in a state of complete unconsciousness we have absolutely no measure of time, it is quite immaterial to us whether three months or ten thousand years elapsed in the world of consciousness while we were lying in that death-sleep. For on waking up, we must accept on faith and trust the one thing as well as the other; and so it must be a matter of indifference to you whether your individuality is given back to you after three months or after ten thousand years.
THRASYMACHOS: In the last resort, of course, that is undeniable.
PHILALETHES: Now if after the lapse of the ten thousand years, someone forgot to wake you up, I believe that such a misfortune would not be great after you had become so accustomed to that very long non-existence which followed a very brief existence. But it is certain that you could not feel anything of it; and you would be quite consoled about the matter if you knew that the mysterious mechanism, maintaining in motion your present phenomenal appearance, had not for one moment ceased during those ten thousand years to produce and set in motion other phenomenal appearances of the same kind.
THRASYMACHOS: Indeed? And in this way you mean quite furtively and imperceptibly to cheat me of my individuality? You cannot swindle me in this way. I have stipulated for myself a continuance of my individuality, and no motives and phenomena can console me for the loss thereof. It lies nearest to my heart and I will not let it go.
PHILALETHES: Then you regard your individuality as so agreeable, admirable, perfect, and incomparable that there can be none more perfect whereof it might perhaps be asserted that one could live better and more easily in it than in yours.
THRASYMACHOS: Now look, whatever my individuality may be, 1 am this.
[quote]For me there is nothing in the world like me; For God is God, and I am I.[/quote]
I, I, I, want to exist! That is of importance to me and not an existence concerning which one must first convince me by arguments that it is mine.
PHILALETHES: Now look! That which exclaims 'I, I, 1 want to exist' is not you alone but everything, absolutely everything, that has even only a trace of consciousness. Consequently, this desire in you is precisely that which is not individual, but is without distinction common to all. It springs not from individuality, but from existence generally, is essential to everything that exists, indeed is that whereby it exists, and accordingly is satisfied by existence in general to which alone it refers, and not exclusively through any definite individual existence. For it is certainly not directed to such individual existence, although this always appears so, because it cannot arrive at consciousness otherwise than in an individual being and therefore it always seems to refer to this alone. Yet this is a mere illusion to which indeed the individual's narrow-mindedness clings, but which reflection can destroy. We can also be freed from it by reflection. Thus what craves so impetuously for existence is merely indirectly the individual; directly and properly speaking, it is the will-to-live in general, which is one and the same in all. Now as existence itself is the will's free work, in fact is the mere reflection of the will, it cannot escape therefrom. The will for the time being is satisfied by existence in general, in so far as the eternally unsatisfied will can be satisfied. To it individualities are equal; it does not really speak of them, although to the individual who is immediately aware of it only in himself, it appears to speak of them. A consequence of this is that the will guards this its own existence more carefully than it otherwise would and thereby ensures the maintenance of the species. It follows from this that individuality is no perfection but a limitation, and that to be rid of it is, therefore, no loss, but rather a gain. Therefore give up a fear that would seem to you to be childish and utterly ridiculous if you knew thoroughly and to its very foundation your own nature, namely as the universal will-to-live, which you are.
THRASYMACHOS : You yourself and all philosophers are childish and utterly ridiculous, and it is only for amusement and pastime that a serious and sedate fellow like me embarks on a quarter of an hour's talk with fools of this sort. I have more important things to do. Goodbye and God help you!
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[b]Notes:[/b]
1 ['Transition to another genus'.]
2 ['I am all that was, and is, and will be.' (Inscription on the temple of Isis at Sais.)]
* It would, of course, be delightful if the intellect did not perish with death, for we should then bring ready and complete into the next world all the Greek we had learnt in this.
3 ['The divine mind, the absolute unity without any distinctions, is in itself that which knows and that which is known.']
* De anima (I. 4, p. 408), right at the beginning, he lets out incidentally his own opinion that the vous is the real soul and immortal, which he supports with false assertions. He says that hating and loving belong not to the soul, but to its organ, the perishable part!
4 ['Regeneration'. In the N.T. the word does not express either metempsychosis or indestructibility of the will through death. In general, it is found only in two passages, Matthew 19: 28 in the sense of' resurrection of the dead', and Titus 3: 5, in the sense of 'conversion of the old man into the new'.]
* To think that life is a romance which, like Schiller's Der Geisterseher, lacks the sequel and moreover breaks off in the middle of the context, like Sterne's Sentimental Journey, is both aesthetically and morally an idea that is impossible to digest.
For us death is and remains something negative, the cessation of life; but it must also have a positive side that nevertheless remains hidden from us because our intellect is quite incapable of grasping it. We therefore know quite well what we lose, but not what we gain through death.
The loss of the intellect which the will suffers through death, the will being the kernel of the now perishing phenomenon and as thing-in-itself indestructible, is the Lethe of just this individual will. Without it the will would recall the many phenomena whereof it had already been the kernel.
When a man dies, he should cast off his individuality like an old garment and rejoice at the new and better one which he will now assume in exchange for it, after receiving instruction.
If we reproached the World Spirit for destroying individuals after a brief existence, he would say: 'Now just look at these individuals; look at their faults, their absurdities, their vicious and detestable qualities! Am I to allow these to go on for ever? '
To the Demiurge I would say: 'Instead of ceaselessly making by half a miracle new human beings and destroying them while they are still alive, why are you not satisfied once for all with those that exist and why do you not let them go on living to all eternity?'
Probably his reply would be: 'If they want to go on making new ones, I must provide for room. Ah, if only this were not the case! Although, between ourselves, a race living and going on in this way for ever, without any further object than just to exist thus, would be objectively ridiculous and subjectively wearisome, much more than you imagine. Just picture it to yourself!'
I: 'Why, they might get on and succeed in every way.'
5 ['The dream of a shadow'.]
6 ['I am all that was, and is, and will be.']
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