In the present age, which is intellectually impotent and remarkable for its veneration of what is bad in every form—­a condition of things which is quite in keeping with the coined word “Jetztzeit” (present time), as pretentious as it is cacophonic—­the pantheists make bold to say that life is, as they call it, “an end-in itself.”  If our existence in this world were an end-in-itself, it would be the most absurd end that was ever determined; even we ourselves or any one else might have imagined it.

Life presents itself next as a task, the task, that is, of subsisting de gagner sa vie.  If this is solved, then that which has been won becomes a burden, and involves the second task of its being got rid of in order to ward off boredom, which, like a bird of prey, is ready to fall upon any life that is secure from want.

So that the first task is to win something, and the second, after the something has been won, to forget about it, otherwise it becomes a burden.

That human life must be a kind of mistake is sufficiently clear from the fact that man is a compound of needs, which are difficult to satisfy; moreover, if they are satisfied, all he is granted is a state of painlessness, in which he can only give himself up to boredom.  This is a precise proof that existence in itself has no value, since boredom is merely the feeling of the emptiness of life.  If, for instance, life, the longing for which constitutes our very being, had in itself any positive and real value, boredom could not exist; mere existence in itself would supply us with everything, and therefore satisfy us.  But our existence would not be a joyous thing unless we were striving after something; distance and obstacles to be overcome then represent our aim as something that would satisfy us—­an illusion which vanishes when our aim has been attained; or when we are engaged in something that is of a purely intellectual nature, when, in reality, we have retired from the world, so that we may observe it from the outside, like spectators at a theatre.  Even sensual pleasure itself is nothing but a continual striving, which ceases directly its aim is attained.  As soon as we are not engaged in one of these two ways, but thrown back on existence itself, we are convinced of the emptiness and worthlessness of it; and this it is we call boredom.  That innate and ineradicable craving for what is out of the common proves how glad we are to have the natural and tedious course of things interrupted.  Even the pomp and splendour of the rich in their stately castles is at bottom nothing but a futile attempt to escape the very essence of existence, misery.

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That the most perfect manifestation of the will to live, which presents itself in the extremely subtle and complicated machinery of the human organism, must fall to dust and finally deliver up its whole being to dissolution, is the naive way in which Nature, invariably true and genuine, declares the whole striving of the will in its very essence to be of no avail.  If it were of any value in itself, something unconditioned, its end would not be non-existence.  This is the dominant note of Goethe’s beautiful song: