This power of the intellect over the will permits of deliberate development; desire can be moderated or quieted by knowledge; and above all by a determinist philosophy which recognizes everything as the inevitable result of its antecedents. “Of ten things that annoy us, nine would not be able to do so if we understood them thoroughly in their causes, and therefore knew their necessity and true nature . . . . For what bridle and bit are to an unmanageable horse, the intellect is for the will in man.”99 “It is with inward as with outward necessity: nothing reconciles us so thoroughly as distinct knowledge.”100 The more we know of our passions, the less they control us; and “nothing will protect us from external compulsion so much as the control of ourselves.”101 Si vis tibi omnia subjicere, subjice te rationi.102 The greatest of all wonders is not the conqueror of the world, but the subduer of himself.
So philosophy purifies the will. But philosophy is to be understood as experience and thought, not as mere reading or passive study.
The constant streaming in of the thoughts of others must confine and suppress our own; and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought . . . . The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui103 from the poverty of their own minds, which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others . . . . It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves . . . . When we read, another person thinks for us; we merely repeat his mental process . . . . So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, . . . he gradually loses the capacity for thinking . . . . Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge, and very little experience, the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary.104
The first counsel, then, is Life before books; and the second is, Text before commentary. Read the creators rather than the expositors and the critics. “Only from the authors themselves can we receive philosophic thoughts: therefore whoever feels himself drawn to philosophy must seek out its immortal teachers in the still sanctuary of their own works.”105 One work of genius is worth a thousand commentaries.
Within these limitations, the pursuit of culture, even through books, is valuable, because our happiness depends on what we have in our heads rather than on what we have in our pockets. Even fame is folly; “other people’s heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man’s true happiness.”106
What one human being can be to another is not a very great deal; in the end everyone stands alone; and the important thing is, who it is that stands alone . . . . The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings . . . . The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it . . . . Since everything which exists or happens for a man exists only in his consciousness, and happens for him alone, the most essential thing for a man is the constitution of his consciousness . . . . Therefore it is with great truth that Aristotle says, “To be happy means to be self-sufficient.”107
The way out of the evil of endless willing is the intelligent contemplation of life, and converse with the achievements of the great of all times and countries; it is only for such loving minds that these great ones have lived. “Unselfish intellect rises like a perfume above the faults of follies of the world of Will.”108 Most men never rise above viewing things as objects of desire—hence their misery; but to see things purely as objects of understanding is to rise to freedom.
When some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, and delivers knowledge out of the slavery of the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively,—gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. It is the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.109
2. GENIUS
Genius is the highest form of this will-less knowledge. The lowest forms of life are entirely made up of will, without knowledge; man in general is mostly will and little knowledge; genius is mostly knowledge and little will. “Genius consists in this, that the knowing faculty has received a considerably greater development than the service of the will demands.”110 This involves some passage of force out of reproductive into intellectual activity. “The fundamental condition of genius is an abnormal predominance of sensibility and irritability over reproductive power.”111 Hence the enmity between genius and woman, who represents reproduction and the subjugation of the intellect to the will to live and make live. “Women may have great talent, but no genius, for they always remain subjective”;112 with them everything is personal, and is viewed as a means to personal ends. On the other hand,
genius is simply the completest objectivity,—i.e., the objective tendency of the mind . . . . Genius is the power of leaving one’s own interests, wishes and aims entirely out of sight, of entirely renouncing one’s own personality for a time, so as to remain pure knowing subject, clear vision of the world . . . . Therefore the expression of genius in a face consists in this, that in it a decided predominance of knowledge over will is visible. In ordinary countenances there is a predominant expression of will, and we see that knowledge only comes into activity under the impulse of the will, and is directed merely by motives of personal interest and advantage.113
Freed from will, the intellect can see the object as it is; “genius holds up to us the magic glass in which all that is essential and significant appears to us collected and placed in the clearest light, and what is accidental and foreign is left out.”114 Thought pierces through passion as sunlight pours through a cloud, and reveals the heart of things; it goes behind the individual and particular to the “Platonic Idea” or universal essence of which it is a form—just as the painter sees, in the person whom he paints, not merely the individual character and feature, but some universal quality and permanent reality for whose unveiling the individual is only a symbol and a means. The secret of genius, then, lies in the clear and impartial perception of the objective, the essential, and the universal.
It is this removal of the personal equation which leaves the genius so maladapted in the world of will-full, practical, personal activity. By seeing so far he does not see what is near; he is imprudent and “queer”; and while his vision is hitched to a star he falls into a well. Hence, partly, the unsociability of the genius; he is thinking of the fundamental, the universal, the eternal; others are thinking of the temporary, the specific, the immediate; his mind and theirs have no common ground, and never meet. “As a rule, a man is sociable just in the degree in which he is intellectually poor and generally vulgar.”115 The man of genius has his compensations, and does not need company so much as people who live in perpetual dependence on what is outside them. “The pleasure which he receives from all beauty, the consolation which art affords, the enthusiasm of the artist, . . . enable him to forget the cares of life,” and “repay him for the suffering that increases in proportion to the clearness of consciousness, and for his desert loneliness among a different race of men.”116