life of mankind. The error is there as before: development and progress in
infinity can have no aim or direction, and, as far as my question is
concerned, no answer is given.
In truly abstract science, namely in genuine philosophy -- not in that which
Schopenhauer calls "professorial philosophy" which serves only to classify
all existing phenomena in new philosophic categories and to call them by
new names -- where the philosopher does not lose sight of the essential
question, the reply is always one and the same -- the reply given by
Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, and buddha.
"We approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life", said Socrates
when preparing for death. "For what do we, who love truth, strive after in
life? To free ourselves from the body, and from all the evil that is caused by
the life of the body! If so, then how can we fail to be glad when death
comes to us?
"The wise man seeks death all his life and therefore death is not terrible to
him."
And Schopenhauer says:
"Having recognized the inmost essence of the world as will, and all its
phenomena -- from the unconscious working of the obscure forces of
Nature up to the completely conscious action of man -- as only the
objectivity of that will, we shall in no way avoid the conclusion that
together with the voluntary renunciation and self-destruction of the will all
those phenomena also disappear, that constant striving and effort without
aim or rest on all the stages of objectivity in which and through which the
world exists; the diversity of successive forms will disappear, and together
with the form all the manifestations of will, with its most universal forms,
space and time, and finally its most fundamental form -- subject and object.
Without will there is no concept and no world. Before us, certainly, nothing
remains. But what resists this transition into annihilation, our nature, is only
that same wish to live -- Wille zum Leben -- which forms ourselves as well
as our world. That we are so afraid of annihilation or, what is the same