"Actually" again! You never know what will happen "in fact"! In fact, I am also acting. But the whole question is whether it is necessary to act and for what, for whom it is necessary to act and what is the meaning of action.

Here is a conversation from which one thing is clear, at any rate: action, activity, practice, even moral actions and moral will, are not yet the wisdom of life, which would become higher than fate. It is also necessary to take the principles of action from somewhere; You also need to know exactly how to act, in the name of what to act. This "in the name" is absent in the most volitional act. In addition, any act of will sooner or later encounters resistance. Our activities are often interrupted, and in the end, they simply end once and for all. And fate settles in all its inexorability, in all its inevitability. Death is a criticism of every action.

"Are you acting?" He he! As long as he is alive! And if you don't live? He he! Yes. Fate is insurmountable by morality, just as it is irresistible by science. The wisdom of life is not captured by the external practice of man, just as it is irreducible to the abstract laws of nature.

It was not this wisdom of life that I was waiting for

There was one wisdom that was especially out of my liking to me, which, it would seem, at first glance, at least in its content, led me closest to the new that I was experiencing, but had not yet been formulated. This is the wisdom of beauty, poetry, music, art in general.

At one time it seemed to me that here I had already found the anchor of salvation. Indeed, is not wisdom – all our writers, poets, composers? Isn't it wisdom – Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky? What other wisdom do you need? Was it not necessary for all these writers to plunge deeply, deeply into the content of life and its general laws, was it not necessary to see the secret and deepest foundations of life in order to create all these great artistic images?

But this wisdom soon revealed its weakness to me. I realized that the contemplation of life, even the deepest one, can never replace life itself. I realized that the contemplation of beauty, with its apparent wisdom and depth, distances us too far from life, isolates us too much, makes us too inactive. I do not at all insist that we must necessarily and at all costs run here and there, constantly mooing and chattering. No. But the contemplation of beauty pampers us too much, makes us too lifeless, spoils us too much. The contemplation of beauty corrupts our will, relaxes the moving centers of our soul, sleeps our energy, and plunges our entire inner self into sleep, into some wonderful dream. After beauty and art, we wake up to life, as after a bountiful feast, with a sore head, with eyes as if filled with sand, with a heaviness in the chest and heart. There is a wonderful opium in art, which draws us away from the tasks of life and immerses us in beautiful visions, which are followed, however, by a difficult awakening, and unsolved and only temporarily and forcibly removed questions of life arise in a crowd.

No... Not that! This is not the true and true wisdom of life. Where is she? And what should we call it?

III

In life, in morality, in beauty, the seeds of the wisdom of life are planted, but they are developed in them one-sidedly. Before saying where wisdom is, is it not necessary to reconsider these three areas, but from a new point of view, from the point of view of their lack of independence and the partial that each of them invests in the wisdom of life?

Science is knowledge of the general. Knowledge of the individual as only singular, knowledge of the individual and accidental in its separateness and chance, is not knowledge. This is blind sensation, blind animal touch – by no one knows who and who knows what. Everything particular, separate, accidental, fluid becomes something only under the conditions of its general meaning. This is what science is rich in, and this is what there is no wisdom without. The general is what illuminates and comprehends everything particular, everything partial, everything accidental, everything solitary and separate. A general law, a general conclusion, or at least some general observation — this is where knowledge is, and this is the beginning of overcoming the vague animal chaos of sensations.

But the whole point is that the wisdom of life is not only knowledge. It is something general, but it is not only knowledge. In knowledge there is always some kind of opposition between the knower and the known. In order to know an object, it is necessary, first of all, not to be the object itself. In the future, as we learn, we can merge with it as closely and internally as we like. But in order for there to be knowledge, the one who knows must first not be what he knows. Cognition is always division, separation, opposition. In order to know an object, it is necessary to compare it with other objects; And for this it is necessary to go beyond this subject. Revolving only within the limits of the object, we cognize only its details, more or less important, but thereby we do not yet cognize the object as such, the object as a whole. So, knowledge is separation.