The other possibility is that the person falls into Nothingness; he dissolves into nothing but material atoms: the absolute criminal. The preparations for this mental disintegration have already been made by the criminal over the course of his life. Hell is the good person’s fear of evil, for fire is the agent to expel and vaporise that which has been formed. But there is no hell: the good person creates himself, the evil one destroys himself.
A person physically comes into existence through father and mother, spiritually through the demand of Something, of the Absolute, for Nothingness. Myth of Uranus and Gaia. To this extent we are children of God and sons of dust (matter) at the same time. Man can also spiritually take after the father or the mother: after the father, in that he becomes God, after the mother, in that he mentally goes to ruin. Thus, man comes to be through a higher sort of inheritance than the animals; he returns to the father if he denies original sin, he submerges himself in the seclusion of the mother’s lap if he affirms it.
Is epilepsy not the loneliness of the criminal? Does he not fall because he has nothing more he can hold on to?
One can recognize from the following how much a mental phenomenon differs from a physical one. Suppose it were established that an immoral impulse was always associated with a certain bodily movement, a certain feeling in the heart, and a moral impulse always connected with another gesture, another bodily sensation, and the type and localization of these accompanying physical symptoms were known quite precisely to science or a particular person, and he could recognize them. It would thus be absolutely, to the very highest degree unmoral, if this person wanted to use the accompanying sensations as a standard by which to judge whether his mental impulses were moral or not.
Here lies the real difference between the mental and the physical. The mental must be more immediately known than the physical – that is a demand of ethics. We have even yet another measuring standard and organ of perception and judgement for that
which we do, think and feel ourselves, than for external phenomena. And that is why simple introspection can yield true results: philosophy and art are nothing but different modes of a deepened introspection.
Only from within himself can a person know the depth of the world: in him lie the interconnections of the world.
That we have no memory of a life before birth is so little an objection to original sin and the fall from real existence that it can hardly be otherwise, and a memory of a former life would have to form a flat contradiction to the idea of the Fall of Man. For this memory would include time; but time is not there until birth, until the Fall. That there are problems, sickness, i. e. sin, proves original sin. Being and Non-Being must not be thought of in temporal relation to one another, but next to each other.
Murder is committed by the criminal out of the most fearful despair: it is for him the means of filling the greatest inner void, since as a criminal he no longer wills, he no longer does; he sees that his life leads to no end, and that is why he wants to accomplish something. He is thereby wholly indifferent as to whom he murders; the intent to murder is never directed towards a particular individual, otherwise the desire to murder, as a psychological disposition, would not lie so deep. He just wants to murder in general, to negate.
Habituation (practice) ) Increasing of sin, function of time.
Propagation )
All sin seeks to multiply itself: all qualites of inferior life must be explained by this.
Vegetarians are just as mistaken as their opponents. If you did not want to contribute to the killing of living beings, you could only drink milk, for whoever eats fruit or eggs still kills embryos. Milk is perhaps for that reason the healthiest food, because it is the most ethical.
Man cannot even bear to look into the sun – so weak and immature is he.
Birth is cowardice: connecting to other people, because one does not have the courage to be oneself. That is why one seeks refuge in the womb.
The criminal does not even have a straight walk (crooked walk of the dog), not just an off-centre gaze (according to M. Rappaport). The criminal also always walks continually bent over (all degrees up to a true hump: the hunchback, the cripple, always seems to be evil).
Zola13 is the absolutely humorless man.
Smoke of the sun at its setting.
13 Zola, Émile (1840-1902): French novelist, critic, and political activist. Famous for the intense naturalism of his 20-novel series, Les Rougon-Jackquart. [Trans]
Loathing is related to fear as desire is to worth.
The fixed stars signify the angel in man. That is why man orients himself by them; and that is why women have no appreciation for the starry sky; because they have no sense of the angel in man.
Does Nature also have a history? Is time also arranged for the events of Nature as a whole (the inorganic included)? Insofar as that were the case, there would be truth in the theory of evolution (paleontology). Is there an evolution of storms, of weather (perhaps corresponding to human history and symbolic of it?)?
The strange thing about time is that despite eternal change everything in it remains the same (“everything has happened before”, “nothing new under the sun”). Boredom = conformity to law = causality. Newness = freedom. The overcoming of time leads to the idea of the “Eternal Youth” (Wagner). Nature is eternally young. For here indeed nothing changes, and yet everything is always new. People who have little that transcends time, like the Jews, always feel world-weary and bored, because in time everything remains the same; Siegfried, on the other hand, is “eternally young”.
The present is as spaceless as it is timeless; and the goal of humanity can be defined as mere-prescence, as omnipresence (one usually understands omnipresence only as freedom from space, instead of understanding it as also including the absorption of past and future, of everything unconscious in the conscious present). The narrowness of consciousness should contain the universe: only then is man “eternally young” and perfected.
Pleasure is to be defined even more generally then than the feeling of creation. It can only be defined unequivocally as the feeling of life, as becoming conscious of existence; pain as the feeling of some kind of death (thus is sickness painful).
We can thus note this much against eudaemonism, that the goal of the striving must not be mistaken for the feeling that arises at the goal (which I can know from experience). When I strive for the higher life, I strive for something whose accompanying phenomenon is higher pleasure, but not for pleasure itself. Likewise, man longs for woman, and woman for man, not directly for pleasure.
All words that are connected to a certain extent with the word life, have the letter “L”:
Life, love, pleasure, voluptuous, laugh, lightness, lightly, lisp, light, luxury, liberty (lubet, Latin), volo (I will = βούλομαι), bloom, lighten, lax, liven, loose, large, flux, flute, lily, lynx, limber, slippery, sleek, glide, guile, γλυxύς, μέλι, lotus, relieve, λαμπω, lux, lumen, λύχνος, lick, lambent, lappet (soft linen), lamb and glue, because λ is the most frictionless consonant and the most strongly opposed to the friction of the totality and uniformity (Rappaport).
Against this can certainly be cited:
Load, leather, learning, lame, letum, languish, left.
Core trait of all that is human: seeking for reality. Where reality is sought and found establishes all differences between people.
What man experiences are elements respectively lifted out of an infinite, temporal, spatial, material, colourful, aural diversity. For this reason there are primarily two things possible: he seeks reality as a whole, in the totality of the universe and its infinite connexion; or for him, reality is every discrete, so to speak punctuated element of the universe. It is exactly the same world, quantitatively identical, equally infinite; but for the one, a part is always just a part, and only real insofar as it is created collectively with everything else. The other embraces the same world, but every discrete element exists for him as real in itself, and he seeks the part with the greatest reality of all.
Applied to the religious (since both types can be pious): to the latter, the sun itself or an historical figure itself, or the Madonna herself, can be the Divine in and of itself. For the other, a discrete thing will always only become God so far as it is symbolic for the whole, and the more so, the more things hang together in it.
Applied to the sexual: to the one, the individual woman is real; he is the sadist: The sadist is very attractive to women because she is the greatest conceivable reality for him (cf. Sex and Character, 1st ed. pp. 397-401) To the masochist, on the other hand, the individual woman is never real, he always seeks for something other than the woman in her. That is why he is not attractive to women.
The sadist lives discontinuously in individual moments of time, he never understands himself: for him, every moment already has reality in itself; that is why he makes decisions easily, while
