The Value of Life 199to pain, because enjoyment always creates a desire for its
repetition or for new pleasure. I can speak of pain only
when this desire hits up against the impossibility of its
fulfillment. Even when an enjoyment that I have experi-
enced creates a longing for a greater or more refined ex-
perience of pleasure, I can speak of it as pain created by
the earlier pleasure only if I lack the means to experience
that greater or more refined pleasure. Only when pain ap-
pears as a natural consequence of enjoyment (as when a
woman’s sexual pleasure is followed by the suffering of
childbirth and the cares of child rearing) can I consider
enjoyment the creator of pain. If striving by itself evoked
pain, then every reduction of striving should be accompa-
nied by pleasure. But the opposite is the case. A lack of
striving in our lives produces boredom, which is connect-
ed with displeasure. Since striving can, in the nature of
things, last a long time before receiving any fulfillment
and since, for the moment, it remains content with that
hope, it must be acknowledged that pain has nothing to do
with striving as such, but depends merely on its non-ful-
fillment. Schopenhauer, then, is certainly wrong when he
holds desire or striving in itself (the will) to be the source
of pain.
In reality, it is just the reverse. Striving (desiring), as
such, brings joy. Who does not know the enjoyment of-
fered by hope of a goal that is distant, but intensely desired?
This joy is the companion of work whose fruits will come
our way only in the future. Such pleasure is quite indepen-
dent of attaining our goal. If this goal is finally attained, the
pleasure of fulfillment is then added, as something new, to