198 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
disperse His infinite pain. The pain that each one of us
suffers is only a drop in the infinite ocean of God’s pain.^3
Human beings must steep themselves in the awareness
that the quest for individual satisfaction (egoism) is fool-
ish. All they need to do is dedicate themselves through
selfless devotion to the world process—the redemption of
God. Thus, in contrast to Schopenhauer’s pessimism,
Hartmann’s pessimism leads to devoted activity in a lofty
task.
But what about the claim that this view is based on ex-
perience?
To strive for satisfaction is to reach, in one’s life activ-
ity, beyond life’s given content. A creature is hungry: that
is, when the furtherance of its organic functions requires
new life-content in the form of nourishment, it strives to
be filled. To strive for honor means to regard one’s per-
sonal actions and omissions as valuable only when they
are recognized from without. The striving for knowledge
arises when, before we have understood it, something
seems missing from the world we see, hear, and so on.
Fulfillment of striving creates pleasure in the striving in-
dividual; lack of fulfillment creates pain. It is important
to note here that pleasure or pain depend only on the ful-
fillment or nonfulfillment of striving. Striving itself can
in no way count as pain. If it turns out that, in the moment
one striving is fulfilled, a new striving immediately ap-
pears, I cannot say that, for me, pleasure has given birth
- Cf. Hartmann,Die Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins,
pp. 866 ff. (Author’s note)
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