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

Lastly, the knowledge which I have of my will, though it is immediate, cannot be separated from that which I have of my body. I know will, not as a whole, not as a unity, not completely, according to its nature, but I know it only in its particular acts, and therrfore .iii.t|me, which is tlie form of the phenomenal aspect of my body, aTof every object. Therefore the body is a condition of the knowledge of my will. Thus, I cannot really imagine this will ^p,qrt from . my b.ody. In the essay on the principle of sufiicient reason, the will, or rather the subject of willing, is treated as a special cla.ss of ideas or objects. But even there we saw this object become one with the subject; that is, we saw it cease to be an object. We there called this union the miracle kut f^o'xrjv, and the whole of the present work is to a certain extent an explanation of this. So far as I know my will specially as object, I know it as body. But then I am again at the first class of ideas laid down in that essay, i.e., real objects. As we proceed we shall see always more clearly that these ideas of the first class obtain their explanation and solution from those of the fourth class given in the essay, which could no longer be properly opposed to the subject as object, and that, therefore, we must learn to understand the inner nature of the law of causality which is valid in the first class, and of all that happens in accordance with it from the law of motivation which governs the fourth class.

The identity of the will and the body, of which we have now given a cursory explanation, can only be proved in the manner we have adopted here. We have proved this identity for the first time, and shall do so more and

THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THE WILL.

p. 133

more fully in the course of this work. By “proved” we mean_raised from the immediate consciousn^, fram knowledgein the concrete to abstract kncmiedge of the reason, or "carried over into abstract knowledge. On tlic oHier hand, from its very nature it can never be demonstrated, tharii, deduced as indirect khowledgelfrom some other more direct knowledge, just because it is itself the most direct knowledge; and if we do not apprehend it and stick to it as such, we shall expect in vain to receive it again in some indirect way as derivative knowledge. It is knowledge of q^uite a special Jind,.wliQaaJa3i^ therefore properly be brought under any .of. .the. four rubrics under which I have classified all truth in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, ^ 29, the logical, the empirical, the metaphysical, and the metalogical, for it is not, like all these, the relation of an abstract idea to another idea, or to the necessary form of perceptive or of abstract ideation, but it is the relation of a judgment to the connection which an idea of per- ^ption, the body, has to that which is not an idea , at all, but something toto genere different, will. I should like therefore to distinguish this from all other truth, and call it /ear’ phUosophical truth. We can turn the expression of this truth in different ways and say ; My body and my will are one ; — or. What as an idea of perception I call my body, I call my will, so far as I am cdnscibus of it in an entirely different way which cannot be_compared to any other ; — or, My body is the objectivity of my~wlll; — ^^or. My body considered apart from the fact that it is my idea is still my will, and so forth.^

§ 1 9. In the first book we were reluctantly driven to explain the human body as merely idea of the subject which knows it, like all the other objects of this world of perception. But it has now become clear that what enables us consciously to distinguish our own body from all other objects which in other respects are precisely the ^ Cf. Ch. xviii. of the Supplement.

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THE WORLD AS WILL.

BK. II.

same, is that our body appears in consciousness in quite another way toto ffenerc different from idea, and this we denote by the word will ; and that it is just this double knowledge which we liave of our own body that affords us information about it, about its action and movement following on motives, and also about what it experiences by means of external impressions; in a word, about what it is, not as idea, but as more than idea ; that is to say, what it is in itself. None of this information have we got directly with regard to the nature, action, and experience of other real objects.