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

If a man is always disposed to do torong whenever the opportunity presents itself, and there is no extemtd power to restrain him, we call him bad. According to our doctrine of wrong, this means that such a man does not merely assert the will to live as it appears in his own body, but in this assertion goes so far that he denies the will which appears in other individuals. This is shown by the fact that he desires their powers for the service of his own will, and seeks to destroy their existence when they stand in the way of its efforts. The ultimate source of this is a high degree of egoism, the nature of which has been already explained. Two things are here apparent. In the first place, that in such a man an excessively vehement will to live expresses itself, extending far beyond the assertion of his own body ; and, in the second place, that his knowledge, entirely given up to the principle of sufficient reason and involved in the principium individuationis, cannot get beyond the difference which this latter principle establishes between his own person and every one else. Therefore he seeks his own well-being alone, completely indifferent to that of aU others, whose existence is to him altogether foreign and divided from his own by a wide gulf, and who are indeed regarded by him as mere masks with no reality behind them. And these two qualities are the constituent elements of the bad character.

This great intensity of wUl is in itself and directly a constant source of suffering. In the first place, because all volition as such arises from want ; that is, suffering. (Therefore, as will be remembered, from the

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Third Book, the momentary cessation of all volition, which takes place whenever we give ourselves up to aesthetic contemplation, as pure wOl-less subject of knowledge, the correlative of the Idea, is one of the principal elements in our pleasure in the beautiful.) Secondly, because, through the causal connection of things, most of our desires must remain unfulfilled, and the will is oftener crossed than satisfied, and therefore much intense volition carries with it much intense suffering.

For all suffering is simply unfulfilled and crossed volition ; and even the pain of the body when it is injured or destroyed is as such only possible through the fact that the body is nothing but the will itself become object.

Now on this account, because much intense suffering is inseparable from much intense volition, very bad men bear the stamp of inward suffering in the very expression of the countenance ; even when they have attained every external happiness, they always look unhappy so long as they are not transported by some momentary ecstasy and are not dissembling.

From this inward torment, which is absolutely and directly essential to them, there finally proceeds that delight in the suffering of others which does not spring from mere egoism, but is disinterested, and which constitutes vncTcedness proper, rising to the pitch of cruelty. For this the suffering of others is not a means for the attainment of the ends of its own will, but an end in itself.

The more definite explanation of this phenomenon is as follows : — Since man is a manifestation of will Uluminated by the clearest knowledge, he is always contrasting the actual and felt satisfaction of his will with the merely possible satisfaction of it which knowledge presents to him.

Hence arises envy : every privation is infinitely incretised by the enjoyment of others, and relieved by the knowledge that others also suffer the same privation. Those ills which are conunon to all and inseparable from human life trouble us little, just as those which belong to the

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THE WORLD AS WILL.

BK. IV.

climate, to the whole country. The recollection of greater sufferings than our own stills our pain ; the sight of the sufferings of others soothes our own. If, now, a man is filled with an exceptionally iMense pressure of will,—" iPwitli burning eagerness he seeks to accui]^ate..eYerytfimg Id sTake^^e tKirst ol his egoism, and thus experiences^ as he fneTita^Iy ‘must,IhUra3r^j^^ac^ ipefel^ apparent, that the attained end never fidfils the promise of the desired object, the En^ appeasing of ths„J^^ pressure~ of“wIIIj Tut that when fulfilled the wish pn^ changes' iis form^ and "how torments him in a .ueOTL.fifte and” indeed that if at last all wxshe3_..iixe- exhaustedthe pressure of will itself remains without any conscious motiver and makes itserf * known to him with fearful pain as a feeling of terrible desolation and emptiness ; if from all this, which in the case of the ordinary degrees of volition is only felt in a small measure, and only produces the ordinary ^gree pf m^ancholyTlp^^^^ case o?"Tim who is a manifestatjon of wil^reaching tEe"poinFm extraordinary wickedness, there necessarily sprm^'~an'“excessrve tiiward misery,* an eternal imrest, an mcnraTIe"pain ; he seeks Indirectly tlie alleviation which directly is denied him. — seeks to mitigate his own~Ti3fering by the sight of thfi...auffftriag...Qf otheis, ^Emir~ar tEe same time he recogmses as an expression of his powerT" "The "sufiering of others now becomes for him an end in itself, and is a spectacle in which he delights ; and thus arises the phenomenon of pure cruelty, blood-thirstiness, which history exhibits so often in the Neros and Domitians, in the African Deis, in Kobespierre, and the like.