Empty volition is thus actual so far as it struggles after its realisation, but it is not actual so far as it cannot attain this realisation of itself without the accession of an external circumstance. As mere form it can only become actually existential when it has attained its fulfilment; this fulfilment it can, however, not find in itself because it is only form and nothing more. Whilst, therefore, the endeavour of definite volition has the realisation of its content (its assertion against opposite endeavours) for goal, the effort of the empty willing has no other goal than this, to realise itself, itself as form, to obtain possession of itself, to be, or, what is the same thing, to will, i.e., to come to itself.
Another tendency than this, to emerge from the vacuity of the pure not yet existent form, cannot be at all imagined in the absolutely idealless and blind Will. One might say its content or goal is the negation of its want of content, if this were not self-contradictory and at the same time materially false, so far as by that a notional, i.e., ideal, content was indicated, so that the empty volition would then again have an ideal content, and would be capable of existence through this alone. The relation is rather a positive one; the potentiality contains in itself the formal element of the act as abstract being, not yet posited, and the initiative strives also to posit it as that which it intrinsically is, i.e., as pure form of the act, which, however, never could succeed as long as the other equally indispensable, namely, material moment of the act is wanting. Thus it remains, so far as the latter is not added to the empty volition, in an unceasing preparedness to spring, without ever coming to the point; it remains at the stage of a becoming, from which nothing becomes, in which nothing emerges. The willing-to-will pines for fulfilment,and yet the form of the will cannot be realised till it has grasped a content; as soon and as far as it has done this, volition is again no longer empty volition, no longer willing to will, but definite willing, willing something. The state of pure volition is therefore an eternal pining for fulfilment, which can only be given to it through the idea, i.e., it is absolute unblessedness, pain without pleasure, even without pause. So far as empty volition is only momentary impulse, that immediately, at the same moment at which it emerges, grasps the idea as content (identical with it, therefore not able to withdraw from it), so far it does not attain realiter to the separate existence of such an ante-mundane unblessedness, although the latter is the condition of the origin of the world, thus natura prius. But undoubtedly it also attains realiter an extra- mundane unblessedness of empty willing beside the satisfied world-will. For the Will is potentially infinite, and in the same sense its initiative, empty volition, is infinite. The Idea, however, is finite in its notion (although in itself capable of infinite perfection), so that also only a finite part of empty volition can be satisfied by it (and only a finite world can arise). There remains, therefore, an infinite excess of the hungry vacant willing besides and beyond the satisfied world-will, which in fact, until the return of the total will to pure potentiality, falls irretrievably into unblessedness. The reader may remember that, according to Chap. iii. C., every non-satisfaction of a will eo ipso begets consciousness. The sole content of this single extra-mundane consciousness is, as we saw above (vol. ii. pp. 257–258), not exactly an idea, but absolute pain and unblessedness, whilst in the world (in the fulfilled volition) there exists only a relative pain, i.e., an excess of pain over pleasure.
Will and Presentation, both of which were before the commencement of the real process, something pre-existent, or, as Schelling says, “super-existent,” are therefore united in the (partial) fulfilment of empty volition through the (whole) idea into fulfilled volition or the willed idea,wherewith the act is attained as real existence. We may call this combination of willing and picturing to form existing filled volition, which, regarded from the side of the will, is an educing and seizing of the idea, by the same right from the side of the presentation a surrendering to the will; for devotion also is an altogether passive fact which demands no positive activity, but only excludes all negative activity, all resistance. It appears here very clearly that Will and Idea are related to one another as male and female, for the truly feminine never goes beyond an unresisting passive devotion. If we would carry the image further, the Idea is before being (as purely being) in the state of blessed innocence; but the Will, that has put itself into the state of unblessedness through elevation from pure potentiality into empty volition, drags the Presentation or Idea with it into the whirlpool of being and the torment of the process, and the Idea gives itself up to it, sacrifices its maiden innocence, as it were, for the sake of its final redemption, that it cannot find in itself. In that the Idea is not at all capable of an active resistance to the Will, and that the blind roving Will cannot at all avoid seizing this, because it is the only thing seizable, and lies before its nose, as it were; in a word, in that the essential identity of the Will and the Idea makes a non-concurrence of both, after the impulse has once been given, impossible, nothing is changed in that relation of the two to one another. What was before an unintelligible fact is now elevated into the sphere of necessity, and thereby at the same time the proof of the above assertion is given that an interval of empty volition between the moment of the initiative and the real world-process is impossible, because the Idea necessarily sees itself in the first moment of the initiative of the will dragged into the vortex of the process, so that the beginning of the vague, time posited by empty volitive is likewise the commencement of the time determined by the Idea. From this embrace of the two super-existent principles, of the being-able-to-be that decides to be and of the purely being is therefore being engendered; as we already know, it has from the father its “That,” from the mother its “What and How.”
We saw that the Will is insatiable; however much it has it always wants more, for it is potentially infinite; and yet its satisfaction can never be infinite, because a satisfied or completed infinity would be a realised contradiction. Strictly it is therefore quite indifferent whether that piece of the empty volition which has found a fulfilment in the Idea is great or small, i.e., whether the world is great or small (in the intensive sense), for the satisfied volition will always be related to empty volition, as something finite to an infinite, which is possible because it is related to it as actuality to potentiality. Since accordingly empty volition is and remains infinite, it is also altogether indifferent for the infinite absolute unblessedness of this empty volition whether, besides its infinite unblessedness mitigated by no pleasure, however slight, a world of pain and pleasure exists or not.
We certainly detect none of that extra-mundane unblessedness of the void willingly, for we belong to the world, to the fulfilled willing. Lastly, we can by no means adopt the opinion that the will furnished with an ideal content, e.g., the atomic forces, is not obliged to endure considerable non-satisfactions and painful sensations, although we can say with certainty that before the origin of the organic consciousness it can feel no satisfaction as pleasure. According to all this the infinite unblessedness would be perpetuated if the possibility of a radical redemption were not given.
This possibility exists, however, as we know, in the emancipation of the Idea from the Will through consciousness. The latter certainly demands in the course of the process still greater sacrifices; for although it indeed enables pleasure to be felt, it also renders pain the more oppressive through reflection, so that the intra-mundane pain, as we have seen, does not fall, but rises with the enhancement of consciousness on the whole; but through the final redemption this enhancement of pain becomes purposive. This ultimate redemption is perfectly compatible with our principles, for although at the end of the world only the satisfied will is directly brought to turn round, yet this is the only actual and existential will, and is consequently related as regards its real power to the mere empty willing struggling for existence as an actual to a non-actual, as a something to a nothing, although of perfectly homogeneous nature. If, then, the existential volition suddenly becomes nothing throu
gh an existential willing-not-to-will, the willing in this manner itself determines itself to the willing-no-more, in that the whole volition parting into two equal and opposite directions swallows up itself, thus as a matter of course also the empty willing-to-will (not-being-able-to-will) ceases, and the return to the pure independent potentiality is accomplished, the Will is again what it was before all volition, will able to will and not to will;—for the being able to will is certainly not in any way to be taken from it.
To wit, there is in the Unconscious neither an experience nor a memory; the Unconscious can therefore also not be altered through the accomplished world-process; it can neither have acquired anything that it did not possess before, nor have lost anything formerly possessed; it can neither have filled its former ante-mundane emptiness with the memory of the wealth of the process passed through nor receive any instruction through the experience had in the same, to guard itself henceforward from the repetition of its former faux pas (for for all this reminiscence and memory, nay, even reflection would be required); in a word, it is in no other situation than before the first commencement of that process. Is this so, however, and in the impossibility of maintaining a memory in the Unconscious must the flattering illusion of the hope of final peace rejoicing perhaps in its finality after the close of the world - process be set aside as a pious delusion (cp. pp. 89—90), the possibility undoubtedly remains open that the potentiality of the Will decides once again to will, whence then the possibility immediately follows that the world-process may often have played the same tune before. Let us pause for a moment in order to determine the degree of the probability.
The Will able to will and not-will, or the potentiality which can determine itself to being or not, is the absolutely free. The Idea is by its logical nature condemned to a logical necessity; volition is the potentiality that has lost itself, which has forfeited its liberty to be able not-to-will; only potentiality before the act is free, is the determined and determinable by no reason, that abyss that is itself the abyss of all. As little as its freedom is limited outwardly so little is it inwardly; it only becomes limited inwardly at the moment when it is also annihilated,—when the potentiality itself externalises itself. We see at once that this absolute freedom is the stupidest thing that one can imagine; which is quite in accordance with the circumstance that it is only conceivable in the Alogical.
If, now, there is nothing at all that determines volition or non-volition, it is mathematically speaking accidental whether at this moment the potentiality wills or does not will, i.e., the probability = . Only when the probability of each of the possible cases is = , only where absolute chance comes into play, only then is absolute freedom conceivable. Freedom and chance are, as absolute notions, notions, i.e., deprived of all relations, identical. In the same manner Schelling conceives the relation when he says (ii. 1, p. 464), “Volition, that is for us the commencement of another world posited outside the idea … is the primitively accidental,—the primitive chance itself.”
Now, were the potentiality in time, the probability would, as time is infinite, be = 1, i.e., certainty, that the potentiality resolves in time once again to become actual; but, as the potentiality is outside time, which indeed the actual first creates, and this extra-temporal eternity is not at all distinguished in temporal reference from the moment (as great and small are not distinguished as regards colour), so is also the probability that the potentiality determines itself to volition in its extra-temporal eternity equal to this, that it determines itself thereto instantaneously, i.e., = . It follows from this that the redemption from volition can be regarded as no final one, but that it only reduces the pain of volition and being from the probability 1 (which it has during the world-process) to the probability , thus always affords a gain not to be despised in practice.
Of course, the probability of future events cannot be influenced by the past, consequently the co-efficient of probability of for the repeated emergence of the willing from potentiality cannot thereby be diminished, that the latter had already once before resolved to will, but when one a priori considers the probability that the emergence of volition from potentiality repeat itself with the whole world-process n times, it is manifestly = just as the a priori probability of throwing heads n times in succession with a coin.
Since with the end of one world-process time ceases till the beginning of the next there is no time-pause; but the state of affairs is precisely the same as if the potentiality had at the moment of the annihilation of its former act externalised itself anew into act. It is, however, clear that n increasing, the probability becomes so small that it is practically sufficient for consolation.
3. The Presentation or Idea. —Let us now pass to the other super-existent, Presentation, and once more take particular notice of its relation to the Platonic idea.
Aristotle calls the Platonic ideas , a term that Plato himself to our knowledge never employed, which at any rate with Aristotle means something altogether different from what we now understand by “substance,” and which would be best translated by “entities.” For Plato himself one can hardly assert more than that he conceived the Ideas as objective existences, and denied that they are only in the mind, that they are mere knowledge of some person; further, indeed, he did not go in the discussion of their nature, but he is contented with opposing them to the perishable flux of the sensible world as the truly being , as the independent being and the unchangeable If Aristotle strives after more precise definition by calling the Ideas , the later Platonists and the Neo-Platonic school on the other hand conceived the Ideas as eternal thoughts of the Deily.
Both interpretations it is probable were in the mind of Plato himself; for although the eternal thoughts of the Deity cannot be substances in the modern sense of the phrase, yet it is no contradiction at all to call them oύσίαι in the Aristotelian sense, just because they are eternal thoughts of the Deity, therefore have an essential being for ever self-identical.
Certainly Plato would never have allowed that they are a knowledge, that they are conscious thoughts of Deity, for thereby they would be altogether deprived of their objectivity, which was the chief point to him. When Plato identifies the Idea with the Divine Reason, this can only mean that, by a very explicable license of speech, he identified the essential being with its sole eternal activity.
It is clear, therefore, that we have to understand by the Platonic ideas eternal unconscious thoughts (of an impersonal Being), where the “eternal” does not mean an endless duration, but that which is out of time, elevated beyond all time. For us too the unconscious presentation is an extra-temporal, unconscious, intuitive Thought, which represents to consciousness an altogether objective essentiality. The main difference between the Platonic and our view lies in the meaning which he assigns to the word “being,” namely, whilst after the precedent of Parmenides, he regards unchangeableness as the criterion of true being, unchangeableness appears now to us indifferent for being, but on the contrary we demand unconditionally that true being should have reality.
Thus Plato comes to declare the Idea to have being in the most proper sense, whereas we are obliged to regard it as somewhat non-being, of which more hereafter.
With Plato there takes place such an interpenetration in the abstract realm of ideas, that all are contained in One Idea. I, too, have repeatedly pointed to the mutual interpenetration of the presentations in the Unconscious, and their coinherence (e.g., of end and means), a state that simply follows from the non-temporal character of the unconscious presentation, where the moments of thought separated in time in discursive thought must necessarily be found in one another. But whereas Plato denotes the coinherence of the whole world of ideas in the peculiar Pythagorean abstract fashion as the One, and then determines this One materially as the Good, we shall not be able to rest content with any of these determinations. Since the notion of the Good in the ethical sense, as already often remarked, must not be referred to the All-One existence, which Plato too seems to
feel, we shall be obliged to interpret the good itself in the Platonic sense as the higher logical end, as the final end determining all the intermediate ends and means, that the all-wise World-Eeason assigns to itself. Thus understood, we too may appropriate the Platonic unity of the Idea. The Idea actualised in every moment of the world-process is one embracing in itself all the separate ideas to be simultaneously realised as integral elements, and the uniting point of this collective Idea is the self-identical world-end unchanged from the beginning to the end of the process, or true end of the world-process, which indeed is only implicitly thought in each single moment, but which teleologically determines the whole content of the intuition of each instant as means to it. The end is posited by the Idea itself, and the determination of the special matter of intuition of the All-One is again logically determined by the end; accordingly the total content of the intuition of the All-One is from the beginning to the end of the process pure self-determination of the Idea.
We can, however, not stop here, but must further ask, why does the Idea determine itself in this way and not otherwise? If this self-determination is a necessary one, following from its own nature, as we must assume, the question is properly only how to perceive the peculiar nature of the Idea, in consequence of which it sees itself compelled to determine itself thus and not otherwise. When we have perceived this inmost nature of the Idea, we possess that from which the whole content of the Idea necessarily follows in virtue of its pre-formed self-determination; we have gained the most precise expression for the principle that we hitherto have called Idea, but which in strictness is only Idea when and so far as it has entered into being, i.e., become content of a will. The required determination for the inmost nature of the Idea now can no longer be a material one, for it must indeed also hold good beyond all ideal content (before the beginning of the world - process); the matrix of the unfolding of the whole material wealth of the world of ideas, the ground of the self-determination of the Idea to this and no other content, can only be a formal, no longer a material principle; it must be the same immanent formal principle of the Idea that is manifested in its self-determination of the ideal means to the ideal end, i.e., the logical formal principle.
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