The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

§ 62. It has already been explained that the first and simplest assertion of the will to live is only the assertion of one’s own body, i.e., the exhibition of the will through acts in time, so far as the body, in its form and design, exhibits the same will in space, and no further. This assertion shows itself as maintenance of the body, by means of the application of its own powers. To it is directly related the satisfaction of the sexual impulse ; indeed this belongs to it, because the genitals belong to the body. Therefore voluntary renunciation of the satisfaction of that impulse, based upon no motive, is already a denial of ^Eie will to live, is a voluntary self-suppression of it, upon the entrance of knowledge which acts m a quieter. Accordingly such denial of one’s own body exhibits itself as a contradiction by the will of its own phenomenon. For although here also the body objectifies in the genitals the will to perpetuate the species, yet this is not willed. Just on this account, because it is a denial or suppression S wiU to liye^such a renunciation is a hard and paigful self-conquest; but of this later. But since the will exhibits that self-assertion of one’s own body in innumerable individuals beside each other, it very easily extends in one individual, on account of the egoism peculiar to them aU, beyond this assertion to the denial of the same wiU appearing in another individual The will of the first breaks through the limits of the assertion of will of another, because the individual either destroys or injures

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this other body itself, or else because it compels the powers of the other body to serve its own will, instead of the will which manifests itself in that other body.

Thus if, from the will manifesting itself as another body, it withdraws the powers of this body, and so increases the power serving its own will beyond that of its own body, it consequently asserts its own will beyond its own body by means of the negation of the will appearing in another body. This breaking through the limits of the assertion of will of another has always been distinctly recognised, and its concept denoted by the word wrong.

For both sides recognise the fact instantly, not, indeed, as we do here in distinct abstraction, but as feeling. He who suffers wrong feels the transgression into the sphere of the assertion of his own body, through the denial of it by another individual, as a direct and mental pain which is entirely separated and different from the accompanying physical suffering experienced from the act or the vexation at the loss.

To the doer of wrong, on the other hand, the knowledge presents itself that he is in himself the same will which appears in that body also, and which asserts itself with such vehemence in the one phenomenon that, transgressing the limits of its own body and its powers, it extends to the denial of this very will in another phenomenon, and so, regarded as will in itself, it strives against itself by this vehemence and rends itself.

Moreover, this knowledge presents itself to him instantly, not in dbstracto, but as an obscure feeling ; and this is called remorse, or, more accurately in this case, the feeling of wrong committed.

Wrong, the conception of which we have thua analysed in its most general and abstract form, expresses itself in the concrete most completely, peculiarly, and palpably in cannibalism. This is its most distinct and evident typo, the terrible picture of the greatest conflict of the will with itself at the highest grade of its objectification, which NexFto'3us^T^r^prSses" ItiSFmost distinctly

♦3a the world AS WILL. BK. IV.

in murder; and therefore the committal of murder is followed instantly and with fearful distinctness by remorse, the abstract and dry significance of which we have just fflven, which inflicts a wound on our peace of mind that a lifetime cannot Tieal. For our horror at the murder committed, as also our shrinking from the committal of it, corresponds to that infinite clinging to life with which everything living, as phenomenon of the will to live, is penetrated. (We shall analyse this feeling which accompanies the doing of wrong and evil, in other words, the pangs of conscience, more fully later on, and raise its concept to distinctness.) Mutilation, or mere injury of another body, indeed every blow, is to be regarded as in its nature the same as murder, and differing from it only in degree. Further, wrong shows itself in the subjugation of another individual, in forcing him into slavery, and, finally, in the seizure of another’s goods, which, so far as these goods are regarded as the fruit of his labour, is just the same thing as making him a slave, and is related to this as mere injury is to murder.