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PARERGA AND PARALIPOMENA: SHORT PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS |
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[b]CHAPTER 11: Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Vanity of Existence[/b]
§ 142
This vanity finds its expression in the whole form of existence; in the infinite nature of time and space as opposed to the finite nature of the individual in both; in the transitory and passing present moment as reality's sole mode of existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constant becoming without being; in constant desire without satisfaction; in the constant interruption of efforts and aspirations which constitutes the course of life until such obstruction is overcome. Time and the fleeting nature of all things therein, and by means thereof, are merely the form wherein is revealed to the will-to-live, which as the thing-in-itself is imperishable, the vanity of that striving. Time is that by virtue whereof at every moment all things in our hands come to naught and thereby lose all true value.
§ 143
What has been, no longer is; it as little exists as that which has never been. But everything that is, is the next moment already regarded as having been. And so the most insignificant present has over the most significant past the advantage of reality, whereby the former is related to the latter as something to nothing.
To his astonishment, a man all of a sudden exists after countless thousands of years of non-existence and, after a short time, must again pass into a non-existence just as long. The heart says that this can never be right, and from considerations of this kind there must dawn even on the crude and uncultured mind a presentiment of the ideality of time. But this, together with the ideality of space, is the key to all true metaphysics because it makes way for an order of things quite different from that which is found in nature. This is why Kant is so great.
Of every event in our life, only for one moment can it be said that it is; for ever afterwards we must say that it was. Every evening we are poorer by a day. Perhaps the sight of this ebbing away of our brief span of time would drive us mad, if in the very depths of our being we were not secretly conscious that the inexhaustible spring of eternity belongs to us so that from it we are for ever able to renew the period of life.
On considerations such as the foregoing, we can certainly base the theory that to enjoy the present moment and to make this the object of our life is the greatest wisdom because the present alone is real, everything else being only the play of thought. But we could just as well call it the greatest folly; for that which in the next moment no longer exists, and vanishes as completely as a dream, is never worth a serious effort.
§ 144
Our existence has no foundation to support it except the ever-fleeting and vanishing present; and so constant motion is essentially its form, without any possibility of that rest for which we are always longing. We resemble a man running down hill who would inevitably fall if he tried to stop, and who keeps on his legs only by continuing to run; or we are like a stick balanced on a finger tip; or the planet that would fall into its sun if it ceased to hurry forward irresistibly. Thus restlessness is the original form of existence.
In such a world where there is no stability of any kind, no lasting state is possible but everything is involved in restless rotation and change, where everyone hurries along and keeps erect on a tightrope by always advancing and moving, happiness is not even conceivable. It cannot dwell where Plato's 'constant becoming and never being' is the only thing that occurs. In the first place, no one is happy, but everyone throughout his life strives for an alleged happiness that is rarely attained, and even then only to disappoint him. As a rule, everyone ultimately reaches port with masts and rigging gone; but then it is immaterial whether he was happy or unhappy in a life which consisted merely of a fleeting vanishing present and is now over and finished.
However, it must be a matter of surprise to us to see how, in the human and animal worlds, that exceedingly great, varied, and restless motion is produced and kept up by two simple tendencies, hunger and the sexual impulse, aided a little perhaps by boredom, and how these are able to give the primum mobile I to such a complicated machine that sets in motion the many-coloured puppet-show.
Now if we consider the matter more closely, we first of all see the existence of the inorganic attacked at every moment and finally obliterated by chemical forces. On the other hand, the existence of the organic is rendered possible only through the constant change of matter which requires a continuous flow and consequently assistance from without. Thus in itself, organic life already resembles the stick which is balanced on the hand and must always be in motion; and it is, therefore, a constant need, an ever-recurring want, and an endless trouble. Yet only by means of this organic life is consciousness possible. All this is accordingly finite existence whose opposite would be conceivable as infinite, as exposed to no attack from without, or as requiring no help from without, and therefore as [x], [2] in eternal rest and calm, [x], [3] without change, without time, without multiplicity and diversity, the negative knowledge of which is the keynote of Plato's philosophy. Such an existence must be that to which the denial of the will-to-live opens the way.
§ 145
The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic which produce no effect if we stand close to them, but which must be viewed at a distance if we are to find them beautiful. Therefore to obtain something that was eagerly desired is equivalent to finding out how empty and insubstantial it was, and if we are always living in expectation of better things, we often repent at the same time and long for the past. On the other hand, the present is accepted only for the time being, is set at naught, and looked upon merely as the path to the goal. Thus when at the end of their lives most men look back, they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim; they will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life, precisely that in the expectation of which they lived. And so the course of a man's life is, as a rule, such that, having been duped by hope, he dances into the arms of death.
In addition, there is the insatiability of the individual will by virtue whereof every satisfaction creates a fresh desire and its craving, eternally insatiable, goes on for ever. At bottom, however, it is due to the fact that, taken in itself, the will is lord of the worlds to whom everything belongs; and so no part could give it satisfaction, but only the whole which, however, is endless. Meanwhile, it must awaken our sympathy when we consider how very little this lord of the world obtains in its individual phenomenon; usually only just enough to maintain the individual body. Hence the profound woe and misery of the individual.
§ 146
In the present period of intellectual impotence which is distinguished by its veneration for every species of inferiority and describes itself most appropriately by the homemade word Jetztzeit, [4] as cacophonous as it is pretentious, as if its Now were the Now [x], [5] the Now for whose production alone all previous Nows have existed-in such a period even the pantheists have the effrontery to say that life is, as they call it, an 'end in itself'. [6] If this existence of ours were the final aim and object of the world, it would be the silliest that had ever been laid down, whether by ourselves or anyone else.
Life presents itself primarily as a task, namely that of gaining a livelihood, de gagner sa vie. When this problem is solved, what has been gained is a burden, and there comes the second problem of how to dispose of what we have got in order to ward off boredom. Like a bird of prey on the watch, this evil pounces on every life that has been made secure. The first problem, therefore, is to acquire something and the second is to prevent it from making itself felt after it has been acquired, otherwise it is a burden.
If we attempt to take in at a glance the whole world of humanity, we see everywhere a restless struggle, a vast contest for life and existence, with the fullest exertion of bodily and mental powers, in face of dangers and evils of every kind which threaten and strike at any moment. If we then consider the reward for all this, namely existence and life itself, we find some intervals of painless existence which are at once attacked by boredom and rapidly brought to an end by a new affliction.
Behind need and want is to be found at once boredom, which attacks even the more intelligent animals. This is a consequence of the fact that life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion. But as soon as this comes to a standstill, the utter barrenness and emptiness of existence become apparent.
That human existence must be a kind of error, is sufficiently clear from the simple observation that man is a concretion of needs and wants. Their satisfaction is hard to attain and yet affords him nothing but a painless state in which he is still abandoned to boredom. This, then, is a positive proof that, in itself, existence has no value; for boredom is just that feeling of its emptiness. Thus if life, in the craving for which our very essence and existence consist, had a positive value and in itself a real intrinsic worth, there could not possibly be any boredom. On the contrary, mere existence in itself would necessarily fill our hearts and satisfy us. Now we take no delight in our existence except in striving for something when the distance and obstacles make us think that the goal will be satisfactory, an illusion that vanishes when it is reached; or else in a purely intellectual occupation where we really step out of life in order to contemplate it from without, like spectators in the boxes. Even sensual pleasure itself consists in a constant striving and ceases as soon as its goal is attained. Now whenever we are not striving for something or are not intellectually occupied, but are thrown back on existence itself, its worthlessness and vanity are brought home to us; and this is what is meant by boredom. Even our inherent and ineradicable tendency to run after what is strange and extraordinary shows how glad we are to see an interruption in the natural course of things which is so tedious. Even the pomp and splendour of the great in their luxury and entertainments are at bottom really nothing but a vain attempt to get beyond the essential wretchedness of our existence. For after all, what are precious stones, pearls, feathers, red velvet, many candles, dancers, the putting on and off of masks, and so on? No man has ever yet felt entirely happy in the present, for he would have been intoxicated.
§ 147
The most perfect phenomenon of the will-to-live, which manifests itself in the exceedingly ingenious and complex mechanism of the human organism, must crumble to dust, and thus its whole essence and efforts are in the end obviously given over to annihilation. All this is the naIve utterance of nature, always true and sincere, that the whole striving of that will is essentially empty and vain. If we were something valuable in itself, something that could be unconditioned and absolute, it would not have non-existence as its goal. The feeling of this also underlies Goethe's fine song:
[quote]High upon the ancient tower Stands the hero's noble spirit.[/quote]
The necessity of death can be inferred primarily from the fact that man is a mere phenomenon, not a thing-in-itself and thus not [x]. [7] If he were, he could not perish. But that the thing-in-itself at the root of phenomena of this kind can manifest itself only in them, is a consequence of its nature.
What a difference there is between our beginning and our end! the former in the frenzy of desire and the ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction of all the organs and the musty odour of corpses. The path from birth to death is always downhill as regards well-being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully dreaming childhood, light-hearted youth, toilsome manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it not look exactly as if existence were a false step whose consequences gradually become more and more obvious ?
We shall have the most accurate view of life if we regard it as a desengano, a disillusionment; everything points to this clearly enough.
Our life is of a microscopical nature; it is an indivisible point that we see drawn apart by the two powerful lenses of space and time, and thus very considerably magnified.
Time is a contrivance in our brain for giving the utterly futile existence of things and ourselves a semblance of reality by means of continuance and duration.
How foolish it is to regret and deplore the fact that in the past we let slip the opportunity for some pleasure or good fortune! For what more would we have now? Just the shrivelled-up mummy of a memory. But it is the same with everything that has actually fallen to our lot. Accordingly, the form if time itself is precisely the means well calculated to bring home to us the vanity of all earthly pleasures.
Our existence and that of all animals is not something standing fast and remaining firm, at any rate temporally; on the contrary it is a mere existentia fluxa which continues only through constant fluctuation and change and is comparable to a whirlpool. It is true that the form of the body has a precarious existence for a while, but only on condition that matter constantly changes, the old being evacuated and the new assimilated. Accordingly, the principal business of all those beings is to procure at all times matter that is suitable for this influx. At the same time, they are conscious that such an existence as theirs can be maintained only for a while in the aforesaid manner and so with the approach of death, they endeavour to carry it forward to another being that will take their place. This striving appears in self-consciousness in the form of sexual impulse and manifests itself, in the consciousness of other things and thus in objective intuitive perception, in the form of genital organs. We can compare this impulse to the thread of a pearl necklace where those rapidly succeeding individuals would correspond to the pearls. If in our imagination we accelerate this succession and always see in the whole series as well as in the individuals only the form permanent, but the substance or matter constantly changing, we then become aware that we have only a quasi-existence. This interpretation is also the basis of Plato's doctrine of Ideas that alone exist and of the shadowlike nature of the things that correspond to them.
That we are mere phenomena as distinct from things-in-themselves, is illustrated and exemplified by the fact that the conditio sine qua non of our existence is the constant excretion and accretion of matter, as nourishment the need for which is always recurring. For in this respect, we resemble phenomena which are brought about through smoke, flame, or a jet of water and which fade away or stop as soon as the supply fails.
It can also be said that the will-to-live manifests itself simply in phenomena that become absolutely nothing. But this nothing together with the phenomena remains within the will-to-live and rests on its ground. This is, of course, obscure and not easy to understand.
If from contemplating the course of the world on a large scale and especially from considering the rapid succession of generations of people and their ephemeral mock-existence we turn and look at human life in detail, as presented say by the comedy, then the impression this now makes is like that of a drop of water, seen through a microscope and teeming with infusoria, or that of an otherwise visible little heap of cheese-mites whose strenuous activity and strife make us laugh. For, as in the narrowest space, so too in the briefest span of time, great and serious activity produces a comic effect.
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[b]Notes:[/b]
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