Perhaps no memory of our state prior to birth is possible because we have sunk so low through being born: we have lost consciousness, and demand entirely instinctively to be born, without rational decision and without knowledge, and that is why we know nothing at all of this past.
Murder is a self-justification of the criminal; through it he seeks to prove to himself that nothing exists.
People should also not want to determine themselves causally in such a way: I will now make myself good through an action, and through this become good once and for all, and do good by nature, because I could not then do anything else. For through this one denies the freedom which can in each moment negate all the past and to that extent is opposed to passive (Heringian) memory. One makes himself into an object when one establishes causality in that way; for a morality to which I have been compelled is already not a morality.
Must it not be that the more lust and sensual greed there is in the relationship of man to woman, the lower the children stand ethically? The more of the criminal there is in the son, the more of the prostitute there is in the daughter?
One loves one’s biological parents; this may well be an indication that one has chosen them.
The state of human childhood is so much more pitiable than that of the newborn animal and plant, and only for that reason must man alone be raised and nurtured, because here the soul has so lost itself. That is why the human child is so helpless and weak and (child mortality!) so much nearer to fatal danger than the adult, and why man suffers from childhood illnesses, which animals and plants do not know.
Had man not lost himself through being born, he would not have to seek and find himself again.
“The world is my representation” – there must be a reason why this is eternally true and cannot be refuted. All these things I see are not the whole truth, they always conceal the highest being from my view. But when I came into being, I required this self-deception and this appearance. When I wanted to enter this world, I renounced wanting only the truth. All things are only appearances, i. e. , they always reflect only my own subjectivity back to me.
As man relates to each of the smallest and most insignificant stirrings of his psyche, so does God to man. Both seek to reveal and realize themselves in them.
It is pleasing to the criminal when there are many criminal people around. Since he seeks those to share in the guilt, he has no need of a judge; he wants to remove the judge and the Good from the world, and give reality to Nothingness alone. That is why he feels himself released and unburdened of contradiction when the other person is also like he is.
The criminal is the polar opposite of the man who feels guilty. For the latter takes his guilt upon himself, while the criminal gives it to another. He takes revenge upon and punishes the other for himself: That is how murder is explained.
The noble man goes by himself into death, if he feels that he is ultimately becoming evil; the base person must be forced into death by the sentence of a judge. To the noble man, the sense of his immorality is equal to a death sentence; he does not even recognise his right to the space he takes up, he slinks away, makes himself
smaller, folds himself up, would like to fade away, to shrivel up to a point. Morality, on the contrary, recognises as its right eternal life and the greatest space, i. e. spacelessness or omnipresence.
Crime and punishment are not two, but one.
Every sickness is crime and punishment; all medicine must become psych-iatry10, care-of-the-soul. It is something immoral, i. e. , unconcious, that leads to sickness; and every sickness is healed as soon as it is inwardly recognized and understood by the sick person himself.
The old view of things is very profound, which leaves the sick person and leper to ask what they might have done, that God should punish them so.
That is why man is ashamed of illness; woman never.
We also seek to always better understand the laws of logic, not only those of ethics, according to their true sense, and want to learn to express them ever more correctly.
Imagination and adornment11,
Imagination and art,
Imagination and play,
Imagination and love,
Imagination and creation,
Imagination and form,
Imagination and adornment.
10 Weininger hyphenates “psych-iatry” (German: “Psycho-therapie”) to expose its etymological roots: “soul-care”. [Trans]
11 Perhaps this arrangement is related to the concept of “cosmos”? [Rappaport]
Art creates, science destroys the sensory world; that is why the artist is erotic and sexual, the scientist asexual. Optics destroys light.
The discontinuity in the passage of time is what is immoral in it.
The relationship of finality to causality cannot be determined without resolving the problem of time.
Cause- Effect ) Time
Means- End ) Inversion of time
Whoever makes the end into a means and treats the effect as a cause, inverts time; and the inversion of time is evil.
Mistrust of oneself is a condition for all other mistrust.
Judges are people with much evil. “Judge not, that ye not be judged!”12 He who sits in judgement upon others seldom looks within himself. There is a great deal of the hangman in the judge. He is enraged at himself in the way that he is severe against others.
Monarch as organ and monarch as symbol.
If all love is an attempt to find oneself in another, and all that is created is created through love alone, then cannot the creation of man by God be seen as the attempt of
12 Matthew 7:1. [Trans]
God to find himself in man? So then does the idea of divine sonship acquire meaning also. Mankind and its correlate – the world – is the love of God become visible. Moral law is this will of God to find himself in man: God’s will as man’s command (Fechner). And at the same time, God is through theoretical reason (the norms of logic) the teacher of mankind (teacherhood as the other side of fatherhood).
The murderer is deterred from his intent, i. e. opposed, by every sign of life in the person who would become his victim; that is why he most preferably seeks the old woman, because she does not oppose the inner intention of his murder; for she herself is the most dead.
The angel in man is the immortal in him; the devil in him is only that which perishes.
That a person becomes insane is only possible through his own fault.
A person can inwardly perish through nothing other than a lack of religion.
Why are Something and Nothing always drawn to each other? Why are people born, why does man want woman? The problem of love, as we see here, is the problem of the world, the problem of life, the deepest, most insoluble problem, the urge of form to form matter, the urge of the timeless to time, of the spaceless to space. We meet this problem everywhere: it is the relationship of freedom to necessity. The dualism in the world is the inconceivable: the motif of original sin is the mystery, basis, meaning and purpose of the fall from timeless being, from eternal life into non-being, into the life of the senses, into earthly temporality; the fall of the guilt-free into guilt. I am never able to comprehend why I committed the original sin, how the free could become unfree. And why?
Because I can only recognize a sin when I am no longer committing it. Therefore I cannot comprehend life so long as I am living it, and time is the mystery because I have not yet overcome it. Only death can teach me the meaning of life. I stand in time and not above it, I still posit time, still long for non-being, still desire material life; and because I remain in this sin, I am not capable of comprehending it. What I know,
I already stand outside of. I cannot comprehend my sinfulness, because I am still sinful.
The criminal and the insane live discontinuously.
A person lives until he enters either into the Absolute or into Nothingness. In freedom he himself determines his future life; he chooses God or Nothingness. He annihilates himself or creates himself unto eternal life. For him a double progress is possible: one toward eternal life (to perfect wisdom and holiness, to a condition fully adequate to the idea of the True and the Good) and one toward eternal annihilation. However, he continually advances in one of these two directions; there is no third.
Because time is uni-directional, we are less interested in the state before our birth. Our birth sets something new, begins a new sequence.
Science is asexual because it absorbs; the artist is sexual, because he emanates.
Dualism lies in the fact that we do not create the sensations about which we think.
The idealism of all philosophy: “the world is my representation”, most clearly illustrates the absorption of things through the I of the philosopher. For the artist, man is instead a part of the world; he draws nearer to things and so removes the difference of level between man and nature.
Because the mental creates the physical, man must die. Death finds its explanation thus: Either man has become like the Absolute and entered into eternal life, then he
cannot exist in material form, bounded in space and matter. He will, if there is a psycho-physical parallelism, receive a body that has become one with
