204 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
small in comparison with the sum of pain that life is joy-
less, and nonbeing is preferable to being.
But, while it is immediately obvious that the interfer-
ence of ambition deceives us into false calculations con-
cerning pleasure, what has been said about recognizing
the illusory character of pleasure’s objects must still be
challenged. It would be an error to remove from the cal-
culation of life’s pleasure all feelings of pleasure attached
to real or supposed illusions. For the ambitious man has
really enjoyed the admiration of the masses, regardless of
whether he himself, or someone else, later recognizes this
admiration as illusory. This process does not in the least
diminish the feeling of pleasure that was enjoyed. Elimi-
nation of all such “illusory” feelings from life’s balance
does not set right our judgment about feelings, but rather
erases from life feelings that were really present.
And why should those feelings be eliminated? Who-
ever has these feelings experiences pleasure through
them; whoever has conquered them experiences through
that conquest (not through feeling, in a self-satisfied
way, “What a wonderful person I am!” but through the
objective sources of pleasure that lie within the conquest
itself) a pleasure that is spiritualized, to be sure, but no
less significant. If feelings are struck from the pleasure
column because they attach to objects that turn out to be
illusory, then the value of life is made dependent on not
the quantity but the quality of pleasure, and that, in turn,
is made dependent on the value of the things that cause
the pleasure. However, if I want to determine the value
of life only from the quantity of pleasure or pain, then I
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