interpretation of the differences in human character, of the warring forces that tend to disrupt the nature of each individual, and, on the other hand, of the one indivisible unity wherein all differences are effaced and all conflicts quieted—is he analyzing the concrete conduct of man? Does Kant's critic himself actually cleave to experience, as he professes to do? Schopenhauer approaches the problem of the basis of morality with an epistemology and metaphysics completely formulated twenty years previously. The thing-in-itself , which for the writer of the Critique of Pure Reason remained a Weissnichtwas, is for Schopenhauer no enigma, but rather the most direct and certain of all certainties. He finds the kernel of reality in that striving, grasping, eternally craving Trieb, which characterizes the flux of all existence, and which he calls 'Will,' after its most highly developed manifestation in human consciousness.[1] The never-satisfied character of the Will is at the root of all the wretchedness of existence; struggling humanity is the ever-thirsty Tantalus; aspiring manhood is the slave of its own desires, and all its illusory pleasures are but the passing cessation of pain. The hour of man's intensest happiness is but the natal hour of future pain and sorrow, the offspring of ceaseless desire. Deluded by the multiplicity of the veil of Mâyâ, the average man pushes on to the achievement of his own purposes, not realizing the empty vanity of his endeavor. The elect souls, however, who pierce through the veil of Mâyâ, and, in recognizing the kernel of their own nature, also realize the fatuity of individual striving, renounce all selfish conduct, and by denying the will-to-live in themselves achieve the truly moral excellence and the higher knowledge of the Real.[2]
But Schopenhauer himself admits that this metaphysical experience in which the essence of all sympathetic, all truly moral conduct, lies, is an immediate matter which only they can understand who have denied "this our world ... with all its stars and milky ways."[3] He begins by professing to study actual human
- ↑ G., I, pp. 163ff; II, p. 229; HK., I, pp. 143ff; II, p. 407.
- ↑ G., II. pp. 707 ff; HK., III, p. 417. Cf. Volkelt, op. cit. p. 297: "Die Liebe ist also unmittelbares Gefühl der metaphysischen Einheit aller Menschen."
- ↑ G., I, p. 527; HK., I, p. 532. Cf. Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik in der neueren Philosophie, Vol. II (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 236.
