The World as Will and Idea: Complete One Volume Edition. Arthur Schopenhauer

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СКАЧАТЬ of all organised productions of nature, which, indeed, we presupposed a priori, when considering and investigating them.

      This teleology is of a twofold description; sometimes an inner teleology, that is, an agreement of all the parts of a particular organism, so ordered that the sustenance of the individual and the species results from it, and therefore presents itself as the end of that disposition or arrangement. Sometimes, however, there is an outward teleology, a relation of unorganised to organised nature in general, or of particular parts of organised nature to each other, which makes the maintenance of the whole of organised nature, or of the particular animal species, possible, and therefore presents itself to our judgment as the means to this end.

      Inner teleology is connected with the scheme of our work in the following way. If, in accordance with what has been said, all variations of form in nature, and all multiplicity of individuals, belong not to the will itself, but merely to its objectivity and the form of this objectivity, it necessarily follows that the will is indivisible and is present as a whole in every manifestation, although the grades of its objectification, the (Platonic) Ideas, are very different from each other. We may, for the sake of simplicity, regard these different Ideas as in themselves individual and simple acts of the will, in which it expresses its nature more or less. Individuals, however, are again manifestations of the Ideas, thus of these acts, in time, space, and multiplicity. Now, in the lowest grades of objectivity, such an act (or an Idea) retains its unity in the manifestation; while, in order to appear in higher grades, it requires a whole series of conditions and developments in time, which only collectively express its nature completely. Thus, for example the Idea that reveals itself in any general force of nature has always one single expression, although it presents itself differently according to the external relations that are present: otherwise its identity could not be proved, for this is done by abstracting the diversity that arises merely from external relations. In the same way the crystal has only one manifestation of life, crystallisation, which afterwards has its fully adequate and exhaustive expression in the rigid form, the corpse of that momentary life. The plant, however, does not express the Idea, whose phenomenon it is, at once and through a single manifestation, but in a succession of developments of its organs in time. The animal not only develops its organism in the same manner, in a succession of forms which are often very different (metamorphosis), but this form itself, although it is already objectivity of will at this grade, does not attain to a full expression of its Idea. This expression must be completed through the actions of the animal, in which its empirical character, common to the whole species, manifests itself, and only then does it become the full revelation of the Idea, a revelation which presupposes the particular organism as its first condition. In the case of man, the empirical character is peculiar to every individual (indeed, as we shall see in the Fourth Book, even to the extent of supplanting entirely the character of the species, through the self-surrender of the whole will). That which is known as the empirical character, through the necessary development in time, and the division into particular actions that is conditioned by it, is, when we abstract from this temporal form of the manifestation the intelligible character, according to the expression of Kant, who shows his undying merit especially in establishing this distinction and explaining the relation between freedom and necessity, i.e., between the will as thing-in-itself and its manifestations in time.{38} Thus the intelligible character coincides with the Idea, or, more accurately, with the original act of will which reveals itself in it. So far then, not only the empirical character of every man, but also that of every species of animal and plant, and even of every original force of unorganised nature, is to be regarded as the manifestation of an intelligible character, that is, of a timeless, indivisible act of will. I should like here to draw attention in passing to the naïveté with which every plant expresses and lays open its whole character in its mere form, reveals its whole being and will. This is why the physiognomy of plants is so interesting; while in order to know an animal in its Idea, it is necessary to observe the course of its action. As for man, he must be fully investigated and tested, for reason makes him capable of a high degree of dissimulation. The beast is as much more naïve than the man as the plant is more naïve than the beast. In the beast we see the will to live more naked, as it were, than in the man, in whom it is clothed with so much knowledge, and is, moreover, so veiled through the capacity for dissimulation, that it is almost only by chance, and here and there, that its true nature becomes apparent. In the plant it shows itself quite naked, but also much weaker, as mere blind striving for existence without end or aim. For the plant reveals its whole being at the first glance, and with complete innocence, which does not suffer from the fact that it carries its organs of generation exposed to view on its upper surface, though in all animals they have been assigned to the most hidden part. This innocence of the plant results from its complete want of knowledge. Guilt does not lie in willing, but in willing with knowledge. Every plant speaks to us first of all of its home, of the climate, and the nature of the ground in which it has grown. Therefore, even those who have had little practice easily tell whether an exotic plant belongs to the tropical or the temperate zone, and whether it grows in water, in marshes, on mountain, or on moorland. Besides this, however, every plant expresses the special will of its species, and says something that cannot be uttered in any other tongue. But we must now apply what has been said to the teleological consideration of the organism, so far as it concerns its inner design. If in unorganised nature the Idea, which is everywhere to be regarded as a single act of will, reveals itself also in a single manifestation which is always the same, and thus one may say that here the empirical character directly partakes of the unity of the intelligible, coincides, as it were, with it, so that no inner design can show itself here; if, on the contrary, all organisms express their Ideas through a series of successive developments, conditioned by a multiplicity of co-existing parts, and thus only the sum of the manifestations of the empirical character collectively constitute the expression of the intelligible character; this necessary co-existence of the parts and succession of the stages of development does not destroy the unity of the appearing Idea, the act of will which expresses itself; nay, rather this unity finds its expression in the necessary relation and connection of the parts and stages of development with each other, in accordance with the law of causality. Since it is the will which is one, indivisible, and therefore entirely in harmony with itself, that reveals itself in the whole Idea as in act, its manifestation, although broken up into a number of different parts and conditions, must yet show this unity again in the thorough agreement of all of these. This is effected by a necessary relation and dependence of all the parts upon each other, by means of which the unity of the Idea is re-established in the manifestation. In accordance with this, we now recognise these different parts and functions of the organism as related to each other reciprocally as means and end, but the organism itself as the final end of all. Consequently, neither the breaking up of the Idea, which in itself is simple, into the multiplicity of the parts and conditions of the organism, on the one hand, nor, on the other hand, the re-establishment of its unity through the necessary connection of the parts and functions which arises from the fact that they are the cause and effect, the means and end, of each other, is peculiar and essential to the appearing will as such, to the thing-in-itself, but only to its manifestation in space, time, and causality (mere modes of the principle of sufficient reason, the form of the phenomenon). They belong to the world as idea, not to the world as will; they belong to the way in which the will becomes object, i.e., idea at this grade of its objectivity. Every one who has grasped the meaning of this discussion—a discussion which is perhaps somewhat difficult—will now fully understand the doctrine of Kant, which follows from it, that both the design of organised and the conformity to law of unorganised nature are only introduced by our understanding, and therefore both belong only to the phenomenon, not to the thing-in-itself. The surprise, which was referred to above, at the infallible constancy of the conformity to law of unorganised nature, is essentially the same as the surprise that is excited by design in organised nature; for in both cases what we wonder at is only the sight of the original unity of the Idea, which, for the phenomenon, has assumed the form of multiplicity and diversity.{39}

      As regards the second kind of teleology, according to the division made above, the outer design, which shows itself, not in the inner economy of the organisms, but in the support and assistance they receive from without, both from unorganised nature and from each other; its general explanation is to be found in the exposition we have just given. For the whole world, СКАЧАТЬ