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.

But is this enough for the wisdom of life? Is life a cognitive division? Is life only knowledge? Is life only an opposition?

Life is life – this is what many who have discussed this topic do not understand. Knowledge itself is only the result of life. Knowledge itself is caused by the needs of life. It is not we who know, but the reality itself in us that knows itself. After all, it is not we who live, but the common world life lives in us. We are only splashes on the common sea of existence, only streams of a single and universal stream, only waves of the immeasurable ocean of the universe. What is our cognition? These are only individual flowers, leaves, trunks, individual blades of grass in the incomprehensible meadow of universal life; and all this goes into the soil, into the dark bowels, nourishes in its roots by the shapeless, hidden from view, obscure and misty.

Before there can be division, there must be unity. Before thinking can exist, there must be being itself. Before there is knowledge, there must be life and reality. Knowledge is first an act of life, and only then a mental, perceptible, and generally semantic one. Knowledge first fulfills a vital, existential function, it is at first a stream of life itself, a product of reality itself; and only then is it division, distinction and comparison. Knowledge is knowledge of the general; the general, life, is dissected in itself, and it is the product of this dismemberment that knowledge is.

What is common to knowledge is not external; it is not that which may or may not be in it. It is always in him. And it is not only always and necessarily there. It is in him the most intimate, the most desirable, the most desired. Life as a general, as a certain general element, is the very core of knowledge; it is the very umbilical cord of knowledge, its goal and meaning.

People who are spoiled by books often think that only this singular and separate thing is real, that only these isolated sensible things are the present. Such things are usually called real; they are also called specific. What can be felt or smelled is what is real and concrete.

Life is not like that. Life is always the most intimate touch of the common; it is the most intimate realisation not of this particular, partial, and fragmented, but always of the general, always of that which goes very far beyond the limits of each particular particular.

Let us take the elementary forms of life, let us take biological life, and, more concretely, the life of sex. The entire animal world (and partly flora) is embraced by the element of sex. Everywhere in the animal world, the male strives to impregnate the female and the female strives to conceive and give birth to offspring. Now ugly, now beautiful, now hidden and mysterious, now openly and impudently, now cleverly, now stupidly, now in the form of a direct and unaccountable instinct, now consciously, deliberately, measuredly and systematically — everywhere and always, from birth to death, the animal organism (and hence the human organism) is permeated with this implacable and despotic passion to generate, and this passion is the deepest, most intimate, the most desirable, no matter how it is evaluated, no matter what periods of rise or fall it passes through in the organism and no matter how it encounters this or that resistance (physical, moral, social or other). And what happened? This is the desire for the common. It is a passion to assert one's race, to assert oneself not in one's own separateness, but in one's community with one's race. This is the fulfillment of generic tasks. This kind asserts itself in the body. This is nothing else than precisely the assertion of oneself by the common in the individual. The animal creates the will of the common, but at the same time it is its most intimate and desirable intention. A person is completely entangled in the rules of morality and society, the laws of science and law, customs, traditions and "common sense". But sex has always been and remains in him, that which is most general in him and at the same time most intimate in him, that which is the result of some generic, absolutely supra-individual and seemingly impersonal will, and which at the same time is his absolutely personal, vitally vital, intolerably imperative will, feeling, attraction and thought. his personality, his inescapable and self-screaming desire and passion. It is not the individual who lives here, but the species that lives in the individual; And it is not the individual who here opposes himself to the genus, and in this opposition enters into communion with it, but the individual himself appears for the first time as a function and product of the genus, and it is precisely his true and real, his (let us use our favorite philosophical terms here) genuinely real, genuinely concrete, and genuinely substantial, genuinely vital life.