be truths’; much the same as ‘I am what I am;’ but it is a poor neighbourhood where such truths can be considered as making the fortune of a philosopher. They are not worthless, because they call attention to a form which may have been left or thrust out of sight; but, as anything more than a form, they are more than worthless; they are positively misleading. ‘No object without subject’ as a form is not worthless; the forgetting of it, or the endeavour to suppress it, leads and must lead to innumerable errors; but ‘no object without subject’ is a mischievous snare when used as a cover for the statement of some dogmatic preconception of our own on the nature of the subject and object, on the nature of experience, on the nature of the motive and the will. What ‘I’ means, what my object is, what ‘experience’ is to stand for, what it is that I do want, and what we are to say about the self that wants it—these are questions to which answers can be conjured by no barren formula; they are questions which, if left unanswered, make our theories on these subjects futile, and which are not answered when a formula is used but to distract the attention of the spectator from the surreptitious introduction of the ready-to-hand result .
And, in particular, to the man who believes that action involves desire, ‘I do what I want’ says no more than ‘I want what I want,’ or ‘I do what I do.’ It is a fatal objection against negative morality, against the dream of action without desire or pleasure which asceticism cherishes. For while life lasts and action continues, desire is not destroyed; the ascetic may change the object, but he suppresses his wants so far only as he suppresses life in general; while he is (an ascetic) he desires, and he does what he wants; if he desires to destroy desire, yet still that is his desire; if he wills annihilation of his will, yet he wills until with himself his will is annihilated; and the whole question here, as everywhere else, is as to the object of his desire, whether his end is the right end, and whether his means are its means. But it is not our business to discuss this here. To return to the general question, when we are told that we do nothing but that which we want, we answer ‘yes, for to us that is a tautology.’
But this was not all. ‘We do what we want, and we do it because we want to do it.’ What are we to say to this? We say
