The Sixfold Suffering Caused by the Blind Will-to-Live
盲目生命意志所造就的六种苦难
In fact, the blind will-to-live condemns human beings not just to these two forms of suffering, death and the sense of meaninglessness caused by knowing one will die, but to what might be itemised as six forms of suffering in total. Firstly we suffer through our own basic bodily needs. Hunger, thirst and sexual desires are experienced by us, Schopenhauer argues, as “lacks”. When we are thirsty, for example, this is a suffering that signals to us that the body lacks liquids:
事实上，盲目的生命意志将人类判入的苦难，远不止死亡与因预知死亡而生的虚无感这两种。它加诸我们的，总共可归为六种苦难。第一种苦难，来自我们基本的肉体需求。叔本华认为，饥饿、干渴、性欲都被我们体验为一种匮乏。譬如口渴，便是身体发出的匮乏信号，而匮乏本身就是痛苦。
“一切意欲皆源于匮乏、源于欠缺，因而源于痛苦。满足可令此痛苦暂告终结；但每实现一个愿望，便至少有十个愿望遭到拒绝……”
But even if we could, for the space of a moment, have all our wishes and needs fulfilled, we suffer secondly from the constant recurrence of these needs. Every meal, every act of sexual intercourse, affords us only a brief “pause to catch our breath”, a satisfaction lasting just an hour or a day at most, before the same needs and drives make themselves felt once again:
第二种苦难，即便我们的愿望与需求在某一刻全然满足，它们也会不断复现。一餐饱食、一次欢爱，至多换来一小时或一天的短暂喘息，转瞬之间，同样的需求与冲动便会卷土重来。
“…… 一个愿望刚得满足，便立刻为新的愿望腾出位置……任何被实现的意欲对象，都无法给予一种持久而不再衰减的满足；它始终如同施舍给乞丐的救济，不过是让他今日暂得喘息，却将他的苦难延长至明日。”
The blind will-to-live, then, condemns us to a constant longing, a constant restlessness and disquiet:
盲目的生命意志，就这样把我们困在永不停歇的渴望、躁动与不安之中。
“…… 我们从未获得过持久的幸福与安宁。…… 意欲的主体…… 就如同丹尼亚斯的女儿们，永无止境地用筛子汲水……”
This image of “the sieve of the Danaids” is one which Schopenhauer drew from classical mythology. According to the ancient myth, the fifty daughters of King Danaus all murdered their husbands on their wedding nights and were condemned, therefore, by Zeus to spending eternity in Hades carrying water to a pot not in buckets but in sieves, so that, each time they reached their goal, they no longer had any water in their receptacle and had to go back and begin all over again. The blind will, suggests Schopenhauer, is like this “sieve of the Danaids”, because it demands constantly to be “filled” with some form of satisfaction but is always “empty” again, and demanding to be “filled” once more, within moments of “satisfaction”’s being accorded it.
叔本华借用古希腊神话中的达那伊得斯之筛，形容这一宿命：达那俄斯的五十位女儿在新婚之夜弑夫，被罚在冥界用筛子盛水，永远无法填满，只能徒劳往返。生命意志正是如此，它不断要求被“填满”，可满足稍纵即逝，旋即重归空虚，再度索求。
Here, indeed, one might raise an objection and ask: “Is it not rather a good thing that hunger, thirst and sexual desire recur again and again? Does this not ensure that human beings likewise again and again experience the pleasure of satisfying these needs and desires?” But Schopenhauer repudiates this objection extremely vehemently:
有人或许反驳：饥渴与性欲反复出现，难道不是好事？我们不就能一次次体验满足的快乐吗？ 叔本华对此予以激烈驳斥：
“若有人想扼要验证「世间快乐多于痛苦」或至少「苦乐二者彼此抵消」这类断言，不妨去对比一下：正吞噬他者的动物，与正被它吞噬的动物，两者的感受究竟如何。”
Thirdly, we suffer from the fact of the blind will-to-live’s having “individuated itself” into the great plurality of individual living beings. Because, having been “individuated” in this way, these many separate organisms necessarily end up becoming involved in a constant existential struggle with one another, a “war of all against all”:
第三种苦难，源于生命意志个体化为无数独立生命。意志分裂为彼此分离的个体，便注定陷入无休止的生存之争，一场一切人对一切人的战争。
“于是我们在自然中随处看见争斗、冲突与胜负起伏。我们由此认清：意志的本质，便是自我分裂。意志客体化的每一层级，都在为物质、空间与时间彼此厮杀。”
This, the will’s fighting for “matter, space and time” goes on constantly between the millions of plants, animals and human beings into which it has “individuated itself”. Plants which grow up too closely together “fight for space” in the sense that one tends to block the sunlight from another, until the latter withers and dies. Animals, in their turn, consume plants, and also other animals, in order to maintain themselves. But the most brutal fight of all is conducted by Man, who has subjugated the whole of Nature and turned much of it into a kind of factory commodity. Man raises plants and vegetables in such artificial constructions as greenhouses and shuts up living animals in pens and stalls:
这种争夺在千万植物、动物与人类之间永不停歇。植物密生则争夺阳光，一方遮蔽，另一方便枯萎；动物以植物与其他动物为食以维系自身；而最残酷的争斗，发生在人类之中——人类征服整个自然，将其变为自己的原料工厂。
“由此可见，生存意志大体上以自身为食，以种种不同形态互为滋养，直至人类最终征服了其他一切存在，便将自然视作专为自身所用的造物。……（然而）正是人类自身，以可怖的清晰性揭示了意志内部的这场冲突、意志与自身的对立 —— 于是我们便得到了「人对人是狼」这一箴言。”
最终人类征服万物，自以为自然专为己所用。可人类自身也以可怖的方式，展现着意志的自我冲突：人对人是狼。
Schopenhauer alludes here to the famous saying of the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes: “Man is a wolf to Man”. Because, in Schopenhauer’s observation as in Hobbes’s, human beings had been involved, throughout the whole of history, as nations and collectives in struggles for fertile land and territory but also as individuals with one another for their private gains and advantages. Schopenhauer could look back, for evidence of this, to all the wars of the past and also to such recently-abolished practices as slavery; but he saw sufficient evidence, indeed, in the social realities of his own day, such as the mass exploitation of Man by Man in the factories of 19th-century Europe, where men, women and even children were obliged to “perform the same mechanical work” for ten, twelve or fourteen hours a day for almost no money:
叔本华在此处援引了英国哲学家托马斯・霍布斯的名言：“人对人是狼”。因为在叔本华与霍布斯的观察中，整个人类历史里，人们既以国家与集体的身份，为争夺肥沃土地与疆域而厮杀；也以个体的身份，为谋求私利与优势而彼此倾轧。为佐证这一点，叔本华既可回溯过往所有战争，也可指向奴隶制这类新近才被废除的制度；而在他所处时代的社会现实中，这类证据更是俯拾皆是 —— 比如 19 世纪欧洲工厂里人对人的大规模剥削：男人、女人乃至孩童都被迫日复一日地 “从事同一种机械劳作”，每天工作十、十二乃至十四小时，所得报酬却微乎其微。
“可这，便是千百万人的命运……”
Since all living beings are dependent on the basic metabolic processes, such as breathing, eating and drinking, and need constantly to be appropriating whatever is needed for these processes to continue, there is simply no way out of that mutual cannibalism that is the basic structure of our universe. Everything devours everything else:
一切生命都依赖呼吸、饮食等代谢过程，必须不断攫取资源才能存续。宇宙的基本结构，便是这种相互吞噬，无人能逃脱。
“究其根本，意志必须以自身为食，因为它之外空无一物。它是饥饿的意志。追逐、狩猎、焦虑、苦难，皆由此生。”
Schopenhauer provides us with a whole series of striking and gruesome examples of how this “hungry will” manifests itself on our planet. He describes, for example, certain kinds of spider in whom the female of the species devours the male after this latter has fertilized her eggs; or insects that project their eggs into members of other insect species, so that the emerging larvae eat their way out of their hosts in order to be born. He also writes of giant turtles which, coming up onto land from the sea to lay their eggs,
叔本华举出大量触目惊心的自然实例：雌蜘蛛在交配后吞食雄蜘蛛；昆虫将卵产在其他昆虫体内，幼虫孵化后啃食宿主而出；海龟上岸产卵，无数幼龟在奔向大海的途中惨遭捕杀。
But perhaps the most impressive example of the “self-individuation” of the blind and “hungry” will, and of the cruel struggle that it gives rise to, is given by Schopenhauer in the form of his description of the bulldog-ant:
而最刺眼的例子，是澳大利亚的斗牛蚁：被切成两半后，头部与尾部竟会开战。头部以颚撕咬，尾部以螫针反击，通常缠斗半小时，直至一方死亡或被拖走。
即便被分裂为二，意志的自私争斗仍不停止。
Schopenhauer cites, in fact, a large number of natural phenomena and events which seem to bear witness to the fact that the will-to-live, once it has “individuated” itself into some singular form or figure of life, begins immediately to assert itself in this form of life in the most blind and ruthless way. Indeed, in the just-cited case of the ant cut in two, the will-to-live continues to stage its egotistical struggle even between two halves of a being which had formerly been just one. We observe, it is true, in both human and animal communities certain forms of essentially social behaviour, such as the collective parenting behaviour known as “brood care”.
人类与动物社群中虽有抚育、协作等社会性行为，但总体而言：
世界的状况极为糟糕。蛮荒时代人相食，文明时代人相欺。这便是所谓的世道。
The fourth major dimension of suffering to which the will-to-live condemns human beings is worry and anxiety about the future. This suffering is indeed peculiar to human beings, since neither plants nor even animals know such things as fear of hardship in old age or worry about other threats which might emerge only in the future:
第四种苦难，是对未来的忧虑与焦虑。这是人类独有的痛苦。植物与动物不会担忧晚年困苦，不会恐惧尚未到来的威胁。
动物是当下的化身，它完全安住于此刻。
If an animal has had its fill of eating and drinking, it will simply sit there radiating peace and contentment. A human being, on the other hand, will, even with a full belly, be worrying about where tomorrow’s meal is coming from. A human being will tend also always to have one principal care or worry that weighs on him quite especially, be it an unfulfilled wish or an anxiety regarding poverty or sickness:
动物饱食之后，便平静满足；而人类即便饱腹，仍会忧心明日的食粮。人总有挥之不去的牵挂，未竟的愿望、贫穷的恐惧、疾病的阴影。
一种忧虑刚被解除，新的忧虑立刻取而代之，仿佛从未退位。
And even if the matter that is causing care and anxiety in this new case is, when considered soberly and objectively, much more trivial than the care one has just been relieved of
The fifth major dimension of suffering, however, is, remarkably, one which tends to arise precisely at times when a person is not beset by any care or worry. The head of a family may, for example, have arrived in a position of such wealth and power that he can see to all the needs and wishes of himself, his wife and all his children for all the foreseeable future. Just at this point, however, he is likely to be afflicted by a new form of suffering: namely, boredom. The danger in boredom consists in the fact that one’s energies are no longer occupied. Existence no longer has any concrete goal set for it and is driven back upon itself. Where there had previously been an agitated round of problems to deal with and solve, there now arises an uncanny rest and stillness. Time seems no longer to be passing at all.
第五种苦难，恰恰出现在人无忧无虑之时。一个人若富足安稳，衣食无虞，反而会陷入新的痛苦——无聊。
无聊之危险，在于生命能量失去用武之地，存在失去具体目标，被迫退回自身。曾经躁动的问题悉数解决，取而代之的是诡异的静止。
我们在无聊时才感知时间的流逝，欢愉时则不然。这证明：我们对存在的感知越少，便越幸福。由此可知：不曾存在，本会更好。
Human existence here makes the painful discovery that the only “meaning of life” consists in the strenuous, wearisome maintaining of life itself and that, once this strain is removed, it has no “meaning” at all:
人类痛苦地发现：生命唯一的“意义”，不过是费力维持生命本身。一旦这种紧绷解除，生命便毫无意义。
匮乏与需求之后，无聊立刻降临，即便较聪慧的动物也不能免。
这足以证明：生命并无真实的内在价值。
动物园里无需觅食的动物会变得神经质、冷漠；人类也常恐惧退休后的空闲，用各种事务填满日程，只为逃避无聊。
一旦欲求停止，存在的彻底空洞与荒芜便显露无遗。
Schopenhauer’s observation here regarding “the more intelligent animals” is quite correct. It does indeed often occur that animals kept in a zoo, who no longer have to see to their own day-to-day survival, become neurotic or apathetic. For similar reasons, human beings often fear the day on which they will reach an age where they no longer have to go to work every day. Some, indeed, begin to feel this panic in the face of “free time” long before the age of retirement and try to make sure, by filling their daily schedules with every sort of social engagement above and beyond their professional ones, that they never have to feel threatened by boredom at all:
叔本华断言：
若生命本身具有正面价值与真实的内在意义，便不可能存在无聊。
我们永远在痛苦与无聊之间摆荡，无路可逃。
生命如钟摆，在痛苦与无聊之间来回摆动。
The suffering involved in this experience of “the utter barrenness and emptiness of existence” is, for Schopenhauer, yet another indication that life, just in itself, has no value and is something that is driven on just by a blind will-to-live:
就连诗人赞颂的爱情之乐，也无法真正解脱。叔本华说，爱情不过是诱人的幻象：
一切情爱皆根植于性冲动，无论它如何伪装得高雅。
而性冲动的核心目的，只是种族延续。婚姻不过是生命悲喜剧中的一出小闹剧。
第六种，也是最沉重的苦难：死亡。
我们的一生，都在面对不断逼近、从未缺席的死亡。
我们所做的一切，都因此变得可疑。无论成就与否，我们都在“赊账”活着，生命的期限日复一日消耗。
童年时我们感受不到这份重负，如同坐在剧院幕布前，满心欢喜等待开幕。
我们不知未来真相，反而是一种恩赐。
青年时的轻快与昂扬，部分源于我们正攀登生命之峰，看不见山脚下的死亡。
而到三十六岁，我们便越过峰顶，从此越来越清晰地看见，山脚下等待我们的是什么。
叔本华将人的一生比作航船：满怀希望扬帆出海，追寻新土、权力与荣誉，最终抵达港口时，早已樯倾楫摧。
无论一生幸福或不幸，都只是转瞬即逝的当下，最终归于虚无。
人被希望欺骗，最终舞入死亡的怀抱。
总结：六种苦难
盲目的生命意志，以六种方式注定我们受苦：
- 我们永远在拼命追逐需求的满足；
- 需求无休止地重复出现；
- 我们始终为未来的需求忧心忡忡；
- 个体化的意志，将我们拖入一切人对一切人的战争；
- 生命在焦虑与无聊之间永不停摆；
- 死亡笼罩着意志所创造、所维系的一切。
要不要我把这六种苦难提炼成一段简短、好记、能让你瞬间放下内耗的定心版总结？
