The meaning of these things, their inner relatedness, is more or less conscious to the human being, to the microcosm; that is why he is ashamed of the inside of his mouth. In contrast, if the theory of evolution were correct, then the animals, which are more closely related to the Balanoglossus24 (whose sexual parts still lie in the gill
24 Acorn worm [Trans]
region), would have to feel more ashamed than man.
There is an agoraphobia25, which is fear of light, and which is had by the person who feels himself to be guilty, who does not stand before God.
Birdcalls are that which announce to the same person his certain fall into ruin. (Peer Gynt, Act 226).
Jackdaws, ravens, you do not find black birds in open lit places.
Whoever surrenders himself to the blaze of the sun is himself the cypress; it is plant-like passivity and “blissfulness as a gift”. (?)
25 Fear of open places. [Trans] 26 Act 2, scene 7.
II
Last Aphorisms
Illness and loneliness are related. The slightest illness leaves one feeling more alone than before.
Everything that is reflected is vain; that is then also the sin of all light. That is why light can never be the symbol of grace (let alone morality). The stars are symbolic for those who have conquered all but vanity. There is no symbol for the Good, unlike the Beautiful, which is symbolized by the whole of nature.
They are many stars; because the problem of vanity is the problem of individuality. Kant, who was extremely vain, overcame individuality epistemologically with transcendentalism, but not ethically; since he did not conquer the “intelligible I” (vanity binds him with Rousseau).
But the “intelligible I” is only vanity, i. e. , attaching of worth to the person, the setting of the real as not real. At the same time it is identical with the problem of time: for the temporal is vain.
There is no I, there is no soul27; of the highest, most perfect reality is only the Good, which includes all individual elements within it.
Individuality emerges out of vanity; since we need onlookers and want to be seen. The vain person is also interested in other people and is a keen observer of man. And because evil is the same in everyone (“Misery loves company”), the person I stare at looks back at me; that is, he wants to be seen by me. My curiousity is his shamelessness.
There is an ethical reason why man needs a weapon (if even his hand) to take his own life. He did not give life to himself, and only God can take it from him; but the suicide belongs to the devil.
27 With that nothing is taken away from that which has been said about the I and the Soul (as the expression of the intelligible in the empirical world); only a statement about the ontological reality has been made here. [Rappaport]
To the devil, everything, and indeed his power, is only on loan. He knows that (that is why he regards God as his provider; why he revenges himself on God; all evil is annihilation of the believer; the criminal wants to kill God) and does not know it or know otherwise (this is why he is the fool on Judgement Day). At the same time, that he knows this and does not know it is his lie.
The devil, you see, is the man who has everything, and yet is not good, while totality only flows from good and only exists through good. The devil knows the whole of heaven, and wants to use God as a means to an end (he is thus essentially a hypocrite): and of course he is used as a means to the same degree.
The master of the dog is the one who has nothing of the dog in him; the dog seeks him; the master keeps a dog the way evil is contained in God: he keeps it in consciousness.
The dog comes in all animal forms (snake, lion, etc); but is itself the slave.
The whirlpool is the vanity of water, and its circle-egoism.
The danger for the river is becoming a swamp. Gnats and fever are there.
Malaria is a symbol of an inner swamp; the person sick with malaria seeks to set lights when he gets heady. (Wine sparkles. )
Even individual immortality is vanity, or fame-egoism.
The swamp is a false completion of the river, and a merely apparent triumph over itself. It arises through the crossing of water with earth (the masculine seeps through the pores of the feminine).
The lake is a station of the river, its contemplative hour. It too is a false completion.
The old man is a false eternity: age. The Good (and the true and the beautiful) is forever-young. That was also what Wagner knew as his own imperfection; he was Wotan. Siegfried and Parsifal has not yet appeared. The completely good person (Jesus) has to die young.
The stars no longer laugh; they are no longer related to desire; only to bliss and joy. But they twinkle, they are vain. So they can fall. The sun’s sin is pleasure–pain, instead of worth–worthlessness: it does laugh (but it pierces, glows, burns, blinds, smokes like a fire).
Individuality is the fall of man, and its symbol is the falling star.
Lava is the earth’s excrement.
As the sun darkened, Christ’s spirits fell; then he spoke: “God, why hast thou forsaken me?”28
The profound thing in The Master Builder is the unity of evil through space and time. My evil desire is matched by an evil (and a fear) somewhere else. He who fears the murderer, posits him; he who intends to murder, posits him who fears the murderer.
When fly-likeness (Jewishness?) is unconscious in me– i. e. I have fly-like “qualities”, I am herein unfree – there is the appearance of the fly against which I, as a feeling, am unfree: yet space is there in the same moment. So I demonstrate the problem of externalisation, of projection, of space, as the other side of the problem of animal psychology, of natural symbology.
The criminal hallucinates the poisonous fly and perishes from mistaken fear through heart attack. It is the fly in himself which has triumphed.
The neurasthenic (the person who fears outward death) is stung by the same fly that has shaped his misfortune and fear over his entire life, in the same moment where he gives reality to it, when he says: now it comes.
Sickness is a special case of neurasthenia. Sickness is neurasthenia in the body.
The transition from neurasthenia to sickness must form skin disease.
8 Matthew 27: 45-6; Mark 15: 33-4; Luke 23: 45. [Trans]
The neurasthenic’s sin is namely space; the criminal’s (ongoing) time. That is why time is always the problem29 of the criminal, space always the problem of the neurasthenic.
Space arises with the body. Here is the expression of the end in itself (Nietzsche). The neurasthenic’s sin is his body: he hates it. His sin is style.
Pleasure is physical, joy mental. The neurasthenic’s sin is wanting to become good only through suffering.
The interior of the body is very criminal.
Neurasthenia = Space30 = externalisation = duplicity = insanity = flawed logic (logic is spatial rather than temporal) = becoming unfree through external sensation = positing the not-real as real.
Crime = time = lie (from cowardice) = directed against God = positing the real as not-real.
Shortsightedness = idiocy? = fish?
Space is the completely outwardly fragmented I.
29 the main issue, or primary dilemma. [Trans]
30 The same thing which manifests itself psychologically as neurasthenia and crime externalises itself transcendentally as space and time. [Rappaport]
All animals are symbols of criminal, all plants symbols of neurasthenic phenomena in the psyche.
The uniformly accelerated Fall is the tendency of sin to continually increase itself (habit).
The Indian’s peril is stupidity; the Buddha incarnated against this.
Jesus against Jewishness (the moral correlate of what stupidity is to the intellectual), and hence the “poor in spirit” are loved; and so the lamb has become a Christian symbol.
Jewishness is as much more wicked than stupid, as morality stands above logic.
The Jew is not at all stupid and is therefore the castigator of the stupid, who fear him (the German “Michael”31; Wagner as anti-Semite like Christ; Indo-Germans).
The artist is in awe of the philosopher because in the great work of art, chance is eliminated without understanding the law of nature.
31 From a German play called “Das Kalte Herz”. “The deutsche Michel” is the plain, honest, much-enduring, but slow German. [Trans]
The Devil takes revenge on God for being created by Him.
He is the person who smugly takes pleasure in his existence and influence, without believing that this influence is only serving the Good.
Judaism is the greatest evil of all.
The criminal is impotent like the saint; he is only mentally sexual, he couples. The neurasthenic is always strongly potent, because his evil is physical, spatial.
The complete criminal is, in the wider sense, more evil than the neurasthenic and finally also falls ill.
The
