ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the considerations promises to be the most serious; it concerns the actions of human beings. It is indeed that to which all else is to be referred, in accord with the nature of a human being that, in any systematic investigation. Virtue cannot be taught, no more than genius; indeed, concepts are as unfruitful for it as for art and of use only as tools. We would thus be just as foolish to expect that our moral systems and ethics might awaken the virtuous, and saintly as that our aesthetics might awaken poets, sculptors, and musicians. To depict both sorts of phenomena and bring them to the level of distinct rational cognizance can be my only purpose The opposite of this, denial of the will for life, shows itself when willing comes to an end in response to that cognizance, in that the individual phenomena of which one is cognizant are then no longer effectual as motives for willing.
