"In this sense Jean Paul well says: “We do not love life because it is beautiful, but because we must love it; and hence it happens that we often draw the inverted conclusion: since we love life, it must be beautiful.” What is here called love to life is nothing else but the instinctive impulse of self-preservation, the conditio sine qua non of individuation, the negative expression of which is the avoidance and warding off of disturbances, and in the highest degree the fear of death, of which mention has been made at the beginning of Sect. B. Chap. i. Death in itself is no evil at all, for the pain connected with it falls indeed still into life, and would not be more feared than the same pain in sickness, if the cessation of individual existence were not bound up with it, which is not felt, thus cannot be any evil at all. As little then as the fear of death can be understood otherwise than from the blind instinct of self-preservation, so little the love of life."
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trans. William Chatterton Coupland, Routledge (2010), p. 619
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eduard_von_Hartmann
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