The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 by Arthur Schopenhauer

Author:Arthur Schopenhauer [Schopenhauer, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780486130934
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-07T13:00:00+00:00

SUPPLEMENTS TO THE THIRD BOOK.

Et is similis spectatori est, quod ab omni separatus spectaculum videt.

Oupnekhat, Vol. I, p. 304.

[“And he is like a spectator, because, separated from everything, he beholds a drama.”—Tr.]

CHAPTER XXIX228

On Knowledge of the Ideas

The intellect, which hitherto had been considered only in its original and natural condition of servitude under the will, appears in the third book in its deliverance from that servitude. Here, however, it must at once be observed that it is not a question of a lasting emancipation, but merely of a brief hour of rest, of an exceptional, and in fact only momentary, release from the service of the will. As this subject has been dealt with in sufficient detail in volume one, I have to add here only a few supplementary remarks.

Thus, as we explained in § 33 of volume one, the intellect in its activity in the service of the will, that is, in its natural function, really knows mere relations of things, primarily their relations to the will itself, to which it belongs, whereby they become motives of the will, but also, with a view to the completeness of this knowledge, the relations of things to one another. This latter knowledge first appears in some volume and significance in the human intellect; in the case of animals, on the other hand, it appears only within very narrow limits, even where their intellect is already considerably developed. Clearly the apprehension of the relations that things have to one another takes place only indirectly in the service of the will. It therefore forms the transition to the purely objective knowledge that is entirely independent of the will; it is scientific knowledge, the latter being artistic knowledge. Thus, if many and varied relations of an object are immediately apprehended, its peculiar and proper nature then appears from these more and more distinctly, and is thus gradually constructed out of mere relations, although it itself is entirely different from them. With this method of apprehension, the subjection of the intellect to the will at the same time becomes more and more indirect and limited. If the intellect has strength enough to gain the ascendancy, and to abandon entirely the relations of things to the will, in order to apprehend instead of them the purely objective nature of a phenomenon that expresses itself through all relations, then, simultaneously with the service of the will, it also forsakes the apprehension of mere relations, and with this also really that of the individual thing as such. The intellect then freely soars aloft and no longer belongs to a will. In the particular thing, it knows merely the essential, and therefore its whole species; consequently, it now has for its object the Ideas, in my sense, which agrees with the original Platonic meaning, of this grossly misused word. Thus it has the permanent, unchangeable forms, independent of the temporal existence of individual beings, the species rerum, which really constitute the purely objective element of phenomena. An Idea thus

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