Eduard von Hartmann

"As the suffering of the world has increased with the development of organisation from the primitive cell to the origin of man, so will it further increase with the progressive development of the human spirit until one day the goal is attained. It was a childish short-sightedness when Rousseau, from the perception of increasing suffering, drew the conclusion: the world must, if possible, turn back—back to the age of childhood. As if the childhood of humanity had not been misery! No; if once backwards, then farther, ever farther, to the creation of the world! But we have no choice. We must forwards, even if we desire it not. It is not, however, the golden age that lies before us, but the iron; and the dreams of the golden age of the future prove still more empty than those of the past. As the burden becomes heavier to the bearer the longer the road on which he carries it, so will also the suffering of mankind and the consciousness of its misery increase and increase until it is insupportable. We may also employ the analogy with the ages of the individual. As the individual at first as child lives for the moment, then as youth revels in transcendent ideals, then as man strives after glory, and subsequently possessions and practical science, until, finally, as old man, perceiving the vanity of all endeavour, he lays to rest his weary head, longing for peace, so, too, Humanity. We see nations arise, mature, and perish; we find also in Humanity the clearest symptoms of growing older. Why should we doubt that, after the energetic activity of manhood, for it, too, one day old age will come, when, consuming the practical and theoretical fruits of the past, it enters upon a period of ripe contemplation, when with melancholy sorrow it overlooks at a single glance all the sufferings so unthinkingly of its past life-career, and comprehends the whole vanity of the previously supposed goals of its endeavour."

"If we glance at the judgments of the greatest minds of all ages, we find those, who have at all found occasion to express their opinion on the subject, pronouncing the condemnation of life in very decided terms. Plato says in the “Apology”: “Now, if death is without all sensation, a dreamless sleep, as it were, it would be indeed a wonderful gain. For I think if any one selected a night in which he had slept so soundly as to have had no dream, and then compared this night with the other nights and days of his life, and after serious consideration declared how many days and nights he had spent better and more pleasantly than this one, that not merely an ordinary mortal, but the great king of Persia himself, would find these but few in number as compared with all his other days and nights.” More clearly and picturesquely it would hardly be possible to state the advantage which, on the average, non-being possesses over being."

"Finally, also, the competency or assurance against want and privation cannot be regarded as a positive gain or enjoyment, but only as the conditio sine qua non of bare life, which has to wait for its enjoyable fulfilment. To endure hunger, thirst, frost, heat, or damp is painful; protection from these evils by needful dwelling, clothing, and food cannot be called positive good (enjoyment in eating does not belong to this category). Were, namely, the bare life assured in its conditions of existence already a positive good, mere existence in itself must fill and satisfy us. The contrary is the case: the assured existence is a torment, unless a filling up of the same is added. This torment, which is expressed in ennui, may be so insupportable that even pains and ills are welcome to escape it."

"For him, who has grasped the idea of development, it cannot be doubtful that the end of the contest between consciousness and the will, between the logical and the non-logical, can only lie at the goal of evolution, at the issue of the world-process; for him who before all holds fast to the universality and unity of the Unconscious, the redemption, the turning back of willing into non-willing, is also only to be conceived as act of each and all, not as individual, but only as cosmic-universal negation of will, as the act that forms the end of the process, as the last moment, after which there shall be no more volition, activity, or time (Rev. x. 6). That the cosmic process cannot be thought without an end in time, cannot be of endless duration, is presupposed; for if the goal lay at an infinite distance, a finite duration of the process, however long, would bring no nearer the goal, that would still remain infinitely remote. The process would thus no longer be a means for reaching the goal, consequently it would be purposeless and aimless. As little as it would comport with the notion of development to ascribe an infinite duration in the past to the world-process, because then every conceivable development must be already traversed, which yet is not the case, just as little can we allow to the process an endless duration for the future; both would abolish the idea of development towards a goal, and would put the world- process on a level with the pouring of water into a sieve of the daughters of Danaus. The complete victory of the logical over the alogical must therefore coincide with the temporal end of the world-process, the last day."

"Schelling says (Werke, i. 7, p. 399): “Hence the veil of sadness that is spread over all Nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life.” He has, moreover (Werke, i. 10, pp. 266–268), a very beautiful passage which should be read in its entirety; here I can only quote a few fragments: “Certainly it is a painful way the Being which lives in Nature traverses in his passage through it; to that the line of sorrow, traced on the countenance of all Nature, on the face of the animal world testifies. … But this misfortune of existence is hereby annulled that it is accepted and felt as non-existence, in that man seeks to bear up in the greatest possible freedom from it. … Who will trouble himself about the common and ordinary mischances of a transitory life that has apprehended the pain of universal existence and the great fate of the whole?” “Anguish is the fundamental feeling of every living creature” (i. 8, 322). “Pain is something universal and necessary in all life. … All pain only comes from being” (i. 8, 335). “The unrest of unceasing willing and desiring, by which every creature is goaded, is in itself unblessedness” (ii. 1, 473; comp. also i. 8, 235–236; ii. 1, 556, 557, 560). I shall content myself with these citations; a few more will be found in Schopenhauer’s “World as Will and Idea,” ii. chap. 46."

"Whether humanity will be capable of so high an enhancement of consciousness, or whether a higher race of animals will arise on earth, which, continuing the work of humanity, will attain the goal, or whether our earth altogether is only an abortive attempt to reach such goal, and it will only be reached, when our little planet has long been reckoned to the frozen celestial bodies, on a planet invisible to us of another fixed star under more favourable conditions, is hard to say. Thus much is certain, wherever the process may come to an end, the goal of the process and the contending elements will always be the same in this world. If really humanity is able and called to bring the world-process to a final issue, it will at all events have to do this at the height of its development under the most favourable circumstances of the earth’s habitableness, and therefore we do not need for this case to trouble about the scientific perspective of a future congelation and refrigeration of the earth, since then long before the occurrence of such a terrestrial refrigeration the world-process altogether would have been arrested, and the existence of this kosmos with all its world-lenses and nebulæ have been abolished."