If this task is accomplished, what has been gained is a burden, and there then appears a second task: that of doing something with it so as to ward off boredom, which hovers over every secure life like a bird of prey. Thus the first task is to gain something and the second to become unconscious of what has been gained, which is otherwise a burden.

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence. For if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfil and satisfy us. As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something – in which case distance and difficulties make our goal look as if it would satisfy us (an illusion which fades when we reach it) – or when engaged in purely intellectual activity, in which case we are really stepping out of life so as to regard it from outside, like spectators at a play. Even sensual pleasure itself consists in a continual striving and ceases as soon as its goal is reached. Whenever we are not involved in one or other of these things but directed back to existence itself we are overtaken by its worthlessness and vanity and this is the sensation called boredom.

6

That the most perfect manifestation of the will to live represented by the human organism, with its incomparably ingenious and complicated machinery, must crumble to dust and its whole essence and all its striving be palpably given over at last to annihilation – this is nature's unambiguous declaration that all the striving of this will is essentially vain. If it were something possessing value in itself, something which ought unconditionally to exist, it would not have non-being as its goal.

Yet what a difference there is between our beginning and our end ! We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. And the road from the one to the other too goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill: happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, the torment of the last illness and finally the throes of death – does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest?

We shall do best to think of life as a desengaño, as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce.

ON THE ANTITHESIS OF THING IN ITSELF AND APPEARANCE

1

THING in itself signifies that which exists independently of our perception, that which actually is. To Democritus it was matter; fundamentally this is what it still was to Locke; to Kant it was = x; to me it is will.1

2

Just as we know of the earth only the surface, not the great, solid masses of the interior, so we know empirically of things and the world nothing at all except their appearances, i.e. the surface. Exact knowledge of this constitutes physics, taken in the widest sense. But that this surface presupposes an interior which is not merely superficies but possesses cubic content is, together with deductions as to the character of this interior, the theme of metaphysics. To seek to construe the nature of things in themselves according to the laws of appearance is an undertaking to be compared with seeking to construe stereometric bodies out of superficies and the laws that apply to them. Every dogmatic transcendental philosophy is an attempt to construe the thing in itself according to the laws of appearance, which is like trying to make two absolutely dissimilar bodies cover one another, an attempt which always fails because however you may turn them this or that corner always protrudes.

3

Because everything in nature is at once appearance and thing in itself, or natura naturata and natura naturans, it is consequently susceptible of a twofold explanation, a physical and a metaphysical. The physical explanation is always in terms of cause, the metaphysical in terms of will; for that which appears in cognitionless nature as natural force, and on a higher level as life force, receives in animal and man the name will. Strictly speaking, therefore, the degree and tendency of a man's intelligence and the constitution of his moral character could perhaps be traced back to purely physical causes, the former from the constitution of his brain and nervous system, together with the blood circulation which affects them, the latter from the constitution and combined effect of his heart, vascular system, blood, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, intestines, genitalia, etc.; which would, I grant, demand a much more exact knowledge of the laws governing the rapport du physique au moral than even Bichat and Cabanis possessed.2 Both could then be further traced back to their more remote physical cause, namely the constitution of his parents, inasmuch as these could furnish the seed only for a similar being and not for one higher or better. Metaphysically, on the other hand, the same man would have to be explained as the apparitional form of his own, utterly free and primal will, which has created for itself the intellect appropriate to it; so that all his actions, however necessarily they may be the result of his character in conflict with the motivations acting on him at any given time, and however necessarily these again may arise as a consequence of his corporeity, are nonetheless to be attributed wholly to him.

4

When we perceive and consider the existence, life and activity of any natural creature, e.g. an animal, it stands before us, everything zoology and zootomy teaches notwithstanding, as an unfathomable mystery. But must nature then, from sheer obduracy, for ever remain dumb to our questioning? Is nature not, as everything great is, open, communicative and even naïve? Can her failure to reply ever be for any other reason than that we have asked the wrong question, that our question has been based on false presuppositions, that it has even harboured a contradiction? For can it be imagined that a connexion between causes and consequences could exist in nature which is essentially and for ever undiscoverable? – No, certainly not. Nature is unfathomable because we seek after causes and consequences in a realm where this form is not to be found. We try to reach the inner being of nature, which looks out at us from every phenomenon, under the guidance of the principle of sufficient reason – whereas this is merely the form under which our intellect comprehends appearance, i.e. the surface of things, while we want to employ it beyond the bounds of appearance; for within these bounds it is serviceable and sufficient. Here, for example, the existence of a given animal can be explained by its procreation. This is fundamentally no more mysterious than the issuing of any other effect, even the simplest, from its cause, inasmuch as even in the simplest case the explanation finally strikes the incomprehensible. That in the case of procreation we lack a couple more stages in the causal connexion makes no essential difference, for even if we had them we should still stand at last before the incomprehensible, because appearance remains appearance and does not become thing in itself.

5

We complain of the darkness in which we live out our lives: we do not understand the nature of existence in general; we especially do not know the relation of our own self to the rest of existence. Not only is our life short, our knowledge is limited entirely to it, since we can see neither back before our birth nor out beyond our death, so that our consciousness is as it were a lightning-flash momentarily illuminating the night: it truly seems as though a demon had maliciously shut off all further knowledge from us so as to enjoy our discomfiture.

But this complaint is not really justified: for it arises out of an illusion produced by the false premise that the totality of things proceeded from an intellect and consequently existed as an idea before it became actual; according to which premise the totality of things, having arisen from the realm of knowledge, must be entirely accessible to knowledge and entirely explicable and capable of being exhaustively comprehended by it. – But the truth of the matter is, I fear, that all that of which we complain of not knowing is not known to anyone, indeed is probably as such unknowable, i.e. not capable of being conceived.3 For the idea, in whose domain all knowledge lies and to which all knowledge therefore refers, is only the outer side of existence, something secondary, supplementary, something, that is, which was necessary not for the preservation of things as such, the universal totality, but merely for the preservation of the individual animal being. Consequently the existence of things as a whole entered into the realm of knowledge only per accidens, thus to a very limited extent: it forms only the background of the painting in the animal consciousness, where the objectives of the will are the essential element and occupy the front rank. There then arose through this accidens the entire world of space and time, i.e.