In Search of Schopenhauer's Cat: Arthur Schopenhauer's Quantum-Mystical Theory of Justice

9. The Inner Conflict

Chapter 9 The Inner Conflict The world reflects the inner nature of the “will.” In the human being, “will” comes to know its reflected nature. With this knowledge , “will” is, for the first time, called upon to do something—to react . In the human, “will” has to either affirm itself or deny itself. It of course affirms itself. But think—it affirms itself at the level of the individual human being. It is not affirming itself in itself, undifferentiated , unindividuated. At the level of the human being, the “will” or the will to live (Schopenhauer calls the “will to live” a mere “pleonasm,” that is, a redundancy, of the “will”)1 comes into conflict with itself. Because every knowing individual is the whole will to live, every knowing individual, in a sense, makes himself the center of the world psychologically.2 And this making of one’s self the center of the world, this egoism, results in “the expression of the contradiction with which the will-to-live is affected in its inner self.”3 This inner conflict or contradiction of the will is a necessity.4 68 1. WWR-1, 275. 2. WWR-1, 332. 3. WWR-1, 333. 4. “[T]he will must live on itself, since nothing exists besides it, and it is a hun- We see this pursuit—this striving, hunting, endless becoming—at the nonhuman level of living things, as the so-called “law of the jungle ” or the “survival of the fittest.” Animals and plants work to advance the will to live that is in them, and a destruction no less so than a survival comports with the will to live, because at the deep level of true reality, victim and predator are one. The one great will is feeding on itself, because there is nothing else to feed on; all is the will. When all this is transferred to the human level, Schopenhauer’s theory of justice begins, and with it his understanding of the psychological and moral constitution of the human being, that is, his theory of right and wrong. Right and Wrong Schopenhauer’s treatment of the moral concepts of right and wrong is essential to a correct understanding of his oft-misunderstood and therefore oft-ignored doctrine of the denial of the will to live. His theory of right and wrong is, moreover, important in its own context. It leads directly into his theories of property, of law, and of the state. Characteristically, Schopenhauer’s theory of right and wrong is based squarely in his main metaphysical thesis that the world, that is, all of reality, is “will” and is also “representation.” Recall his assertion that the noumenal underlying reality of the “will” is present whole and entire in each of its phenomena or manifestations, that is, in each individual: [T]he will will everywhere manifest itself in the plurality of individuals . This plurality, however, does not concern the will as thing-in-itself, but only its phenomena. The will is present, whole and undivided, in each of these, and perceives around it The Inner Conflict 69 gry will. Hence arise pursuit, hunting, anxiety, and suffering.l.l.l. [T]he will in itself .l.l. is an endless striving.l.l.l. Eternal becoming, endless flux, belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will.” WWR-1, 154, 164. the innumerably repeated image of its own inner being; but this inner nature itself, and hence what is actually real, it finds immediately only in its inner self.5 In other words, the whole “will,” the supremely inflated “will,” is present in each of us, but not at the conscious level. This leads to the inflated egoism that we find rampant both in our selves (if we are honest enough to admit it) and in the world around us. Thomas Hobbes was correct: The world in which we find ourselves, stripped of civilizing law, is a bellum omnium contra omnes.6 All that being so, Schopenhauer reasons, it is easy for the will, individuated in a human being, affirming itself as it does in a given individual , to go beyond mere self-affirmation and into a denial of that very same will in others. Because of its inherent egoism and because of the fact that the individuated will is not immediately conscious of...