On the Indestructibility of our True Nature at Death by Arthur Schopenhauer
When in daily intercourse it is asked by one of those many people who wish to know everything, but do not want to learn anything, as to continued existence after death, the most suitable and indeed, in the first instance, the most correct answer is: “After your death you will be what you were before your birth.” For it implies the wrong-headedness of the demand that a species of existence which has a beginning shall be without end, besides containing the implication that there may be two kinds of being and two kinds of nothing according with it. Similarly one might answer, “Whatever you will be after your death, even if it be nothing, will be just as natural and suitable to you as your individual organic existence is now, thus you will have at most to fear the moment of transition. Yes, since a mature consideration of the matter affords the result, that complete non-existence would be preferable to an existence such as ours. Thus the thought of the cessation of our existence, or of a time when we shall no longer be, ought, as far as reason goes, to trouble us as little as the thought of the time when we were not. But since the existence is essentially a personal one the end of the personality is not to be regarded as a loss.”
To him, on the contrary, who on the objective and empirical path had pursued the plausible clue of materialism, and now full of alarm at complete destruction by death which confronts him therein, turns to us, we should perhaps procure for him satisfaction in the shortest way and one most suited to his empirical mode of thought, if we demonstrated to him the distinction between matter and the metaphysical force which is always temporarily taking possession of it; as, for example, in birds, where the homogeneous formless fluidity as soon as it attains the requisite temperature, assumes the complicated and exactly determined shape of the genus and species of its bird. This is indeed, to a certain extent, a kind of
generatio aequivoca, and it is exceedingly probable that the hierarchical series of animal forms arose from the fact that once in primitive times and in a happy hour it overleapt the type of animal to which the egg belonged, to a higher one. At all events something distinct from matter appears here most prominently, especially in that by the least unfavourable circumstance it comes to nothing. In this way it becomes explicable that after an operation that has been completed or subsequently prevented it can deviate from it without injury, a fact which points to a totally different permanence than that of the persistence of matter in time.
If we conceive of a being which knew, understood, and saw everything, the question whether we endure after death would probably have no meaning for such a one, since beyond our present temporal individual existence enduring and ceasing would have no significance, and would be indistinguishable conceptions. And accordingly neither the concept of destruction nor that of continuance, would have any application, since these are borrowed from
time, which is merely the form of the phenomenon. In the meantime we can only think of the indestructibility of this core of our phenomenon as a continuance of it, and indeed, properly speaking, only according to the
schema of matter which under all changes of its form maintains itself in time. If we deny it this continuance we regard our temporal end as an annihilation according to the
schema of form which vanishes when the matter in which it inheres is taken away from it. Both are nevertheless metábasis eis állo génos, that is, a transference of the forms of the phenomenon to the thing-in-itself. But of an indestructibility which would be no continuance we can hardly form even an abstract idea, since all perception by which we might confirm it fails us. In truth however the constant arising of new beings and the perishing of those already existent is to be regarded as an illusion produced by the apparatus of two polished lenses (brain-functions), by which alone we can see anything. They are called space and time, and in their reciprocal interpenetration—causality. For all that we perceive under these conditions is mere phenomenon; but we do not know the things as they may be in themselves, that is independently of our perception. This is properly the kernel of the Kantian philosophy which, together with its content, one cannot too often call to mind in a period when venal charlatanry has by its stupefying process driven philosophy from Germany with the willing assistance of people for whom truth and intelligence are the most indifferent things in the world, and wage and salary the most important.
How can we suppose on beholding the death of a human being that a thing-in-itself here comes to nothing? That a phenomenon in time, that form of all phenomena, finds its end without the thing-in-itself being thereby affected is an immediate intuitive cognition of every man; hence men have endeavoured to give utterance to it at all times, in the most diverse forms and expressions, but these are all derived from the phenomenon in its special sense and only have reference thereto. Everyone feels that he is something different from a being who has once been created from nothing by another being. In this way the assurance arises within him that although death can make an end of his life it cannot make an end of his existence. Man is something else than an animated nothing; and the animal also. He who thinks his existence is limited to his present life regards himself as an animated nothing. For thirty years ago he was nothing and thirty years hence he will be again nothing.
The more clearly one is conscious of the transience, nothingness and dream-like nature of all things, by so much the more clearly is one conscious also of the eternity of one's own inner nature. For only in opposition to this is the foregoing structure of things known, as the rapid motion of the ship one is on, is only perceived when one looks towards the fixed shore and not when one looks at the ship itself.
The present has two halves, an objective and a subjective. The objective alone has the perception of time for its form, and hence rolls ceaselessly forward. From this arises our vivid recollection of what is very long past, and the consciousness of our imperishability, in spite of our knowledge of the transience of our existence.
Everyone thinks that his innermost core is something that the present contains and carries about with it. Whenever we may happen to live we always stand with our consciousness in the centre of time, never at its terminations; and we might assume from this that everyone bore within himself the immovable centre of infinite time. This is, moreover, at bottom what gives him the confidence with which he lives on without continual fear of death. But whoever by virtue of the strength of his memory and imagination can recall the most vividly the long past of his own life, will become more clearly conscious than others of the
identity of the now in all time. Perhaps, indeed, this proposition is more correct taken conversely. But at all events such a clearer consciousness of the identity of all now is an essential requirement of the philosophic mind. By means of it we apprehend that which is most fleeting— the now—as the only persistent. He who is in this intuitive way aware that the present moment, which is the only form of all reality in the narrowest sense, has its source in us, and springs, that is, from within and not from without, cannot doubt of the indestructibility of his own nature. He will rather understand that by his death the objective world, indeed, with the medium of its presentment, the intellect, perishes for him, but that this does not touch his existence, for there was as much reality within as without. He will say with complete understanding: EGO EIMI PAN TO GEGONOS, KAI ON, KAI ESOMENON (“Stob. Floril. Tit.” 44, 42; vol. ii. p. 201).
He who does not admit this to be true must maintain the opposite, and say: “Time is something purely objective and real, which exists quite independently of me. I am only accidentally thrown into it, have only become participant in a small portion of it, whereby I have attained to a transient reality like thousands of others before me who are now no more, and I shall also very soon be nothing. Time, on the contrary, is the Real. It goes further without me.”
In accordance with all this, life may certainly be regarded as a dream and death as an awakening. But then the personality, the individual, belongs to the dreaming and not to the waking consciousness, for which reason death presents itself to the former as annihilation. It is still, at all events from this standpoint, not to be regarded as the transition to a state entirely new and strange to us, but rather only as the return to our original one, of which life was only a short episode. If in the meantime a philosopher should, perhaps, think that he would find in dying a consolation peculiar to him alone, or at least a diversion, and that then a problem would be resolved for him which had so frequently occupied him, we can only say that it will probably fare with him as with one, who as he is about to find what he is seeking, has his lantern blown out.
For in death the consciousness assuredly perishes, but not by any means that which till then had produced it. The consciousness namely rests immediately on the intellect, but the latter on the physiological process. For it is obviously the function of the brain, and hence conditioned by the co-operation of the nerve and cellular system, though more directly by the brain, which is nourished, animated, and continuously agitated by the heart. It is by the artistic and mysterious construction of the brain as described by anatomy, but which physiology does not understand, that the phenomenon of the objective world and the trend of our thoughts is brought about. An individual consciousness, that is, a consciousness as such, cannot be conceived in an incorporeal being, since knowledge, the condition of every consciousness, is necessarily brain-function—for the simple reason that the intellect objectively manifests itself as brain. Now as intellect appears physiologically—that is, in empirical reality or in the phenomenon—as a secondary, as a result of the process of life, so it is also psychologically secondary in opposition to the Will which is alone the primary and ever the original. The organism itself is really only the Will displaying itself perceptually and objectively in the brain, and therefore in its forms of space and time, as I have often explained, especially in “Will in Nature,” and in my chief work (vol. ii. chap. xx.). Since, then, the consciousness is not immediately dependent upon the Will, but this is conditioned by the intellect, and this again by the organism, there remains no doubt that consciousness is extinguished by death, as also by sleep and swoons. [It would certainly be very pleasant if the intellect did not perish with death: one would then bring the Greek which one had learnt in this world all ready with one into the other.] But let us be consoled! For what kind of a consciousness is this? A cerebral, an animal consciousness—one a little more highly developed than that of the beasts, in so far as we have it as regards all essentials in common with the whole series of animals although it attains its summit in us. It is the same, as I have sufficiently demonstrated, with respect to its purpose and origin—a mere MHCHANH/mechane of nature, a means of knowing how to help the animal nature to its requirements. The state, on the contrary, into which death throws us back is our original state—that is, it is the state peculiar to our nature, whose original force displays itself in the production and maintenance of the life that is now ceasing. It is, in short, the state of the thing-in-itself in opposition to the phenomenon. Now in this primal state such an assistance as the cerebral, a cognition so extremely mediate, and for this reason merely supplying phenomena, is without doubt entirely superfluous; hence we lose it. Its disappearance is the same as the cessation of the phenomenal world for us, of which it was the mere medium, and can serve for nothing else. If in this our original state the retention of the animal consciousness were even offered us, we should reject it as the lame man who is cured does the crutch. He therefore who bemoans the loss in question of this cerebral consciousness, which is merely phenomenal and adapted to the phenomenal, is to be compared to the converted Greenlanders who did not wish for heaven when they heard that there were no seals there.
Moreover, all that is here said rests on the assumption that we cannot even conceive of a now-conscious state except as a knowing one, which therefore bears the root-form of all knowledge—the separation of subject and object, of a knowing and a known. But we have to consider that this entire form of knowing and being known is conditioned merely by our animal, and hence very secondary and derived, nature, and is thus in no way the original state of all being and all existence, which may therefore be quite different, and yet not without consciousness. If then our own present nature, so far as we are able to trace it to its core, is mere Will; and this in itself is a knowingless thing; when through death we sacrifice the intellect, we are only thereby transplanted into our original consciousless state, which is therefore not simply consciousless, but rather above and beyond this form—a state in which the antithesis of subject and object disappears, because here that which is to be known would be really and immediately one with the knowing, and thus the fundamental condition of all knowing (which is precisely this opposition) would be wanting. Herewith may be compared by way of elucidation “The World as Will and Presentment,” vol. ii. p. 273 (3rd ed. 310). The utterance of Giordano Bruno (ed. Wagner, vol. i. p. 287): “La divina mente, e la unità assoluta, senza specie alcuna è ella medesimo lo ch'e intende, e loch'e inteso.”
Perhaps every one is now and then aware in his innermost heart of a consciousness that would be suited to an entirely different kind of existence than this so unspeakably beggarly, timely, individual one, occupied as it is altogether with misery; on which occasions he thinks that death might lead him to such a one.
If we now in opposition to this mode of contemplation which is directed inwards, again turn our attention outwards and apprehend the world displaying itself objectively, death will then certainly appear to us a passage into nothing: But birth also none the less as a proceeding out of nothing. The one like the other, however, cannot be unconditionally true since it only has the reality of the phenomenon. That in some sense we should survive death is really no greater miracle than that of generation which we daily see before our eyes. What dies goes hence, where all life comes from, its own included. In this sense the Egyptians called Orchus Amanthus, which, according to Plutarch (“de Is. et Osir,” c. 29), signifies “the taker and giver,” in order to express that it is the same source into which everything returns and from which everything proceeds. From this point of view our life might be regarded as a loan received from death; sleep would then be the daily interest on this loan. Death announces itself without any concealment as the end of the individual, but in this individual lies the germ of a new being. Hence nothing of all that dies, dies for ever. But neither does anything that is born receive a fundamentally new existence. The dying perishes but a germ remains over from which proceeds a new being which now enters into existence without knowing whence it comes and why it is exactly such as it is. This is the mystery of the Palingenesis for the explanation of which the 42nd chapter of the 2nd volume of my chief work may be consulted. It appears from this that all beings at this moment living contain the true germ of all that will live in the future, which are thus to a certain extent already there. Similarly every animal existing in its full perfection seems to cry out to us: “Why dost thou complain of the perishability of the living? How could I exist if all those of my species which were before me had not died?” However much, therefore, the pieces and the masks on the stage of the world change, the Actors remain the same in all. We sit together and talk and excite each other and eyes gleam and voices become louder; exactly so others have sat thousands of years ago; it was the same, and they were the same. Just so will it be thousands of years hence. The arrangement owing to which we are not aware of this, is time.
One might very well distinguish Metempsychosis as the passage of the entire so-called soul into another body—and Palingenesis as the decomposition and reformation of this individual, inasmuch as his Will persists and assuming the shape of a new being receives a new intellect. Thus the individual decomposes like a neutral salt, the basis of which combines itself with another acid into a new salt. The difference between Metempsychosis and Palingenesis which Servius the commentator of Virgil assumes, and which is shortly indicated in “Wernsdorffii dissertat de Metempsychosi,” p. 48, is obviously fallacious and nugatory.
From Spencer Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism” (pp. 394-96 with which may be compared pp. 429, 440, 445, in the same book), also from Sangermano’s “Burmese Empire” as well as from the “Asiatic Researches,” vol. vi., p. 179, and vol. ix., p. 256, it appears that in Buddhism an exoteric and esoteric doctrine obtains regarding continuance after death. The former is Metempsychosis as in Brahminism but the latter is a Palingenesis much more difficult of comprehension, which is very much in agreement with my doctrine of the Metaphysical existence of the Will, of the merely physical structure of the intellect, and the perishability which accords with it. PALIGGENESIA occurs in the Old Testament.
But if, in order to penetrate deeper into the mystery of Palingenesis we seek aid from the 43rd chapter of the 2nd vol. of my chief work, the matter, more closely considered, will appear to be that throughout all time the male sex has been the bearer of the Will, the female of the Intellect of the human race, whereby it receives perpetual subsistence. Every one, therefore, has a paternal and a maternal element, and as these are united in generation they are also separated in death, which is thus the end of the individual. This individual it is whose death we so much deplore with the feeling that it is really lost, since it was a mere combination which irrevocably ceases. But we must not forget in all this, that the transmissability of the Intellect of the mother is not so decided and unconditioned as that of the Will of the father, on account of the secondary and merely physical nature of the intellect and its complete dependence on the organism, not only in respect of the brain but also otherwise, as has been shown by me in the chapter in question. I may mention here by the way that I so far agree with Plato in that he also distinguishes in his so-called soul, a mortal and an immortal part. But he comes into diametrical opposition with me and with the truth, in that he, after the manner of all philosophers who have preceded me, regards the intellect as the immortal, and the Will, that is, the seat of the appetites and passions, as the mortal part; as may be seen from the “Timaeus” (pp. 386, 387, 395, ed. Bip.). Aristotle has the same idea." [In the “De Anima” (I. 4, p. 408), his real opinion escapes accidentally at the beginning that the NOUS is the true and immortal soul—which he confirms with fallacious assertions. Hatred and love belong not to the soul, but to their organ the perishable part.]
But though the physical may strangely and wonderfully rule things by procreation and death, together with the visible combination of individuals out of Will and Intellect and their subsequent dissolution, yet the metaphysical principle lying at its basis is of so entirely heterogeneous a nature that it is not affected by it, so on this point we may be consoled.
One can accordingly conceive every man from two opposite points of view: from the one, he is an individual beginning and ending in time, fleeting and transitory, SKIAS ONAP besides being heavily burdened with failings and pains. From the other, he is the indestructible original being which objectivises itself in everything existent, and may, as such, say, like the statue of Isis at Sais: EGO EIMI PAN TO GEGONOS, KAI ON, KAI ESOMENON. Such a being might indeed do something better than manifest itself in a world like this. For this is the finite world of sorrow and of death. What is in it, and what comes out of it must end and die. But what is not of it, and what never will be of it, pierces through it, all-powerful like a flash of lightning, which strikes upward, and knows neither time nor death. To unite all these antitheses is properly the theme of my philosophy.
