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The Philosophy of the Unconscious: Complete and Unabridged (Living Time World Thought)
The Philosophy of the Unconscious Complete and Unabridged - Living Time World Thought Author:Eduard Von Hartmann Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: are given for attaining, under the most favourable circumstances conceivable in one's life, an excess of pleasure over pain. As the field to be viewed is too vas... more »t for a simultaneous survey, a solution will be facilitated by considering separately the sum of pleasure and pain according to the main directions of life. But during the future considerations the reader must always keep in mind these premised general observations, since the circumstances mentioned are continually acting as essentially limiting co-efficients of pleasure, whilst, on the contrary, they either leave the pain unaffected or even increase it. 2. Health, Youth, Freedom, and a Competence as Conditions of the Zero-point of Feeling, and Contentment.—The states mentioned are mostly claimed as the highest goods of life, and not without reason ; nevertheless they fail to afford positive pleasure, save when they have just arisen by transition from the opposite states of pain. During their undisturbed continuance, however, they represent only the zero-mark of sensation, and by no means a positive elevation above it; the building-ground on which the expected enjoyments of life are to be erected. It is iu accordance with this that the persistence of the states awakes as little a feeling of pleasure as of pain, since at the zero-point in general there is nothing to be felt, but that every fall from this level into sickness, old age, bondage, and distress is painfully felt. These goods have thus, in fact, the purely privative character that Leibniz would ascribe to evil; they are the privation of age, sickness, servitude, and distress, and are intrinsically incapable of being raised above the zero-point of sensation on the side of pleasure, thus incapable of producing a pleasure, unless by remission of an antecedent pain...« less