The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
they, on the contrary, are only the objects of an opinion based on sensation (So^a fier aKrOtjaern'i a^oyow).
So long as we are confined to tiie^erceptipn of these^ are iike men who sit in a dark cave, bound so fast that they caSnot turn ' their heads, and who see nothing but the shadows of real things which pass between them and a fire burjiing behind them, the light of which casts the shadows on the wall opposite them j and even of themselves an^r~6r each other they see only the shadows on tEe^ wall.
Their wisdom would thus consist in predicting the order of the shadows learned from experience. The real archetypes, on the other hand, to which these shadows correspond, the eternal Ideas, the original forms of all things, can alone be said to have true being {ovrcat op), because they always are, but never become nor pass away.
To them belongs no multiplicity ; for each of them is according to its nature only one, for it is the archetype itself, of which all particular transitory things of the same kind which are named after it are copies or shadows.
They have also no coming into being nor pasdng away, ioT they are truly being, never becoming no£^ yanishir^, like their fleeting shadows. (It is necessarily presupposed, however, in these two negative definitions, that time, space, and casuality have no significance or validity for these Ideas, and that they do not exist in them.) Of these only can there be true knowledge, for the object of such knowledge can only be that which always and in every respect (thus in-itself) is ; not that which is and again is not, according as we look at it.
This is Plato’s doctrine. It is clear, and requires no further proof that the inner meaning of both doctrines is entirely the same; Oiat both explain the visible world as a manifestation, which in itself is nothing, and which <miy has meaning and a borrowed reality through that wKicbT expresses itself .in it (in the one case the thing-inself, in the other the li^a}. ' To this last, which has true being, all the forms of that phenomenal existence, even the most universal and essential, are, according to both doctrines, entirely foreign. In order to disown these forms Kant has directly expressed them even in abstract terms, and distinctly refused time, space, and casuality as mere forms of the phenomenon to the thing-in-itself.
Plato, on the other hand, did not attain to the fullest expression, and has only distinctly refused these forms to his Ideas in that he denies of the Ideas what is only possible through these forms, multiplicity of similar things, coming into being and passing away. Though it is perhaps superfluous, I should like to illustrate this remarkable and important agreement by an example.
There stands before us, let us suppose, an animal in the full activity of life. Plato would say, “ This animal has no true existence, but merely an apparent existence, a constant becoming, a relative existence which may just as well be called non-being as being.
Only the Idea which expresses itself in that animal is truly ‘ being,’ or the animal in-itself {avTO to Orjpiov), which is dependent upon nothing, but is in and for itself {xad’ iavro, aei w? avTO)<i) ; it has not become, it will not end, but always is in the same way (aet op, xai /j-TjSeTrore ovre <yiyvoiJ,epov OVT6 a-TToWp/Mevop).
If now we recognise its Idea in this animal, it is all one and of no importance whether we have this animal now before us or its progenitor of a thousand years ago, whether it is here or in a distant land, whetlier it presents itself in this or that manner, position, or action ; whether, lastly, it is this or any other individual of the same species; all this is nothing, and only concerns the phenomenon; the Idea of the animal alone has true being, and is the object of real knowledge.
So Plato ; Kant would say something of this kind, “ This animal is a phenomenon in time, space, and casuality, which are collectively the conditions a priori of the possibility of experience, lying in our faculty of knowledge, not determinations of the thing-in-itsef. Therefore this animal as we perceive it at this definite point of time, in
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THE WORLD AS IDEA.
BK. IIL
this particular place, as an individual in the connection of experience (i.e., in the chain of causes and effects), which has come into beings ^nd will, just as^necessarily ^s is not a thing^n-jdself^ but a p_h^^ which only exists in relation to our knowledge. To know it as what it may be in itself, that is to say, independent of all the determinations which lie in time, space, ^3 casuality, would demand another kind of knowledge tKan^ that which is possible for us through the senses and the understanding.”
liTbrdeFTo "bring Kant’s mode of expression nearer the Platonic, we might say : Time, space, and causality are that arrangement of our intellect by virtue of which the one being of each kind which alone really is, manifests itself to us as a multiplicity of similar beings, constantly appearing and disappearing in endless succession. The apprehension of things by means of and in accordance with this arrangement is immanerU knowledge ; that, on the other hand, which is conscious of the true state of the case, is transcendental knowledge. The latter is obtained m abstracto through the criticism of pure reason, but in exceptional cases it may also appear intuitively. This last is an addition of my own, which I am endeavouring in this Third Book to explain.
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