Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/472

430 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. iv. to be essential and inevitable to all life is, when it really appears in a definite form, that Eris, the conflict of all individuals, the expression of the contradiction, with which the will to live is affected in its inner self, and which attains a visible form through the principium individuationis. Wild-beast fights are the most cruel means of showing this directly and vividly. In this original discord lies an unquenchable source of suffering, in spite of the precautions that have been taken against it, and which we shall now consider more closely.

§ 62. It has already been explained that the first and simplest assertion of the will to live is only the assertion of one's own body, i.e., the exhibition of the will through acts in time, so far as the body, in its form and design, exhibits the same will in space, and no further. This assertion shows itself as maintenance of the body, by means of the application of its own powers. To it is directly related the satisfaction of the sexual impulse; indeed this belongs to it, because the genitals belong to the body. Therefore voluntary renunciation of the satisfaction of that impulse, based upon no motive, is already a denial of the will to live, is a voluntary self-suppression of it, upon the entrance of knowledge which acts as a quieter. Accordingly such denial of one's own body exhibits itself as a contradiction by the will of its own phenomenon. For although here also the body objectifies in the genitals the will to perpetuate the species, yet this is not willed. Just on this account, because it is a denial or suppression of the will to live, such a renunciation is a hard and painful self-conquest; but of this later. But since the will exhibits that self-assertion of one's own body in innumerable individuals beside each other, it very easily extends in one individual, on account of the egoism peculiar to them all, beyond this assertion to the denial of the same will appearing in another individual The will of the first breaks through the limits of the assertion of will of another, because the individual either destroys or injures