Negativism

“ But no possible good, but incalculable evil may and does arise from the too common practice of placing all conduct, the source of which we do not fully understand, to the worst of intentions. How often is the gentle, timid soul discouraged, and driven perhaps to despondency, by finding its 'good evil spoken of;' and a well-meant but mistaken action loaded with an evil design! ”

“ There is DISTRUST of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied origin, such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the market; a disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness. ”

“ Here every other man is, to the individual, hostile, inconsiderate, greedy, inhuman, avaricious, be he noble or servile; bad is the characteristic term for man, for every living being, indeed, that is recognized at all, even for a god: human, divine, these notions are tantamount to devilish, bad. Manifestations of goodness, sympathy, helpfulness, are regarded with anxiety as trickiness, preludes to an evil end, deception, subtlety, in short, as refined badness. ”

“ All these motives, however, whatever fine names we may give them, have grown from the same roots in which we believe the baneful poisons lurk. Between good and bad actions there is no difference in kind but, at most, in degree. Good acts are sublimated evil. Bad acts are degraded, imbruted good. ”

“ You want to be right in our eyes as well as in yours, and especially in yours !—and an irritable and subtle evil conscience so often incites and urges you on against your very enthusiasm. How ingenious you then grow in the outwitting and soothing of this conscience! How much you hate the honest, simple, clean souls ”

“ This shows at least a disturbance, an implicit dissatisfaction in vice. If we inquire into the grounds of it, we shall find it proceeds partly from an immediate sense of having done evil, and, partly, from an apprehension, that this inward sense shall, one time or other, be seconded by a higher judgment, upon which our whole being depends. Now, to suspend and drown this sense, and these apprehensions, be it by the hurry of business or of pleasure, or by superstition, or moral equivocations, this is in a manner one and the same, and makes no alteration at all in the nature of our case. ”

“ Oh, if we could thus trace out the unreasonableness of vice, how often should we find that, when it has attained its object, it discovers it is not what it seemed! Why is there this cruel haste to corrupt innocence, to make, a victim of a young creature whom we ought to protect, one who is dragged by this first false step into a gulf of misery from which only death can release her? Brutality, vanity, folly, error, and nothing more. This pleasure itself is unnatural; it rests on popular opinion, and popular opinion at its worst, since it depends on scorn of self. ”

“ We look too much at the consequences of vice,—too little at the vice itself. It is vice which is the chief weight of what we call its consequences,—vice, which is the bitterness in the cup of human woe. ”

“ What afflicted and terrified him far more than all this, was the perversion of all ideas, this fearful evil, the corrupting of all notions; vice, in truth, is taken for virtue, virtue counted for vice. ”

“ Should not one wish that consummation with all one's strength?—will it one's self? demand it one's self? He who at this juncture begins, like my readers, to reflect, to think further, will have difficulty in coming quickly to a conclusion,—ground enough for me to come myself to a conclusion, taking it for granted that for some time past what I mean has been sufficiently clear, what I exactly mean by that dangerous motto which is inscribed on the body of my last book: Beyond Good and Evil—at any rate that is not the same as "Beyond Good and Bad." ”

“ As evil, it appears as involved in positive existence. But the negativity which is present for itself and independently, and not in another which is regarded as having independent existence of its own, the negativity which reflects itself into itself, the inward, infinite negativity which is object to itself, is just the “Ego.” In this self-consciousness, and in its own inner movement, finiteness definitely appears, and self-contradiction is thus incident in it. ”

“ It is quite possible that a negative may yet cost me my life. But your adjective 'morbid' is quite out of place, apart from being commonplace. I simply want to make a collection of examples of every conceivable human emotion as betrayed by the human countenance. And, as I said, I do not exhibit the results. As regards the photographs which | have taken of you——”
“Of me!”
“——I promise to destroy prints as well as negatives after I have analysed them. ”

“ It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things--perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. ”

“ This is not that habit which incorporates us into vice, and conforms even our understanding itself to it; nor is it that impetuous whirlwind that by gusts troubles and blinds our souls, and for the time precipitates us, judgment and all, into the power of vice. ”

“ In bodies that are predisposed to vice, the stimulus of cheerful, but much more of profane society and conversation, upon the animal spirits, becomes an exciting cause, and, like the stroke of the flint upon the steel, renders the sparks of vice both active and visible. By removing men out of the reach of this exciting cause, they are often reformed, especially if they are confined long enough to produce a sufficient chasm in their habits of vice. ”

“ How it happened that the vice which inevitably attaches itself to such conduct, self-evident, gross, and glaring as it is, fatal to private morals and public virtue, odious in its practice and hellish in its consequences, how the baneful complexion of this monster vice should at first so totally escape me is more than I can declare. Hurry of thought, confusion of intellect, and eagerness of passion are the only probable conjectures I can make. ”

“ No doubt we find in irony that absolute principle of negativity, in which the subject of consciousness becomes self-centred through the annihilation of definite relations and particulars; but in this case the act of annihilation of definite relations and particulars, as we have already pointed out when discussing the principle, is not, as in comedy, essentially in its right place, simply exposing its own want of substance, but is directed quite as often against everything else excellent in itself and of sterling worth. ”

“ In order to be able to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of life—that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval—the instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. ”

“ Would these gentlemen persuade us that there is nothing evil in the universe but what exists in their imagination, but what is the product of their fervid fancy? That the world is full of nothing but their egotism, their vanity, and their hypocrisy? The world is sick of them, their egotism, their vanity, and their hypocrisy. ”

“ This may seem a paradox, and you may say to me, are there no men who make parade and ostentation of vice? I answer yes, but not of all their vices. They endeavour by their boasting to hide their confusion, and discover that part of their soul which they are unable to conceal. They place a crown on the image of vice, in order to give dignity to the figure; and although arrogant wickedness is worse than timid, the last is despised, and the first feared. ”

“ And for whom do I (the oratio obliqua is dropped, and the directa used in its place; or perhaps with this meaning does this ego) toil, and depriving my soul (with the usual meaning, ‘myself’) of good? (abstract.) Also this is a vanity and an anxiety which an evil is (emphatic) ‘indeed’ (equivalent to ‘an evil and nothing else,’ or ‘is simply an evil’; other anxieties may be beneficial, this cannot be. This is the reason why we have רע, and not רעה, the abstract, as we should have expected) .
9 ¶ Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. ”

“ Our acceptance is that Evil is the negative state, by which we mean the state of maladjustment, discord, ugliness, disorganization, inconsistency, injustice, and so on—as determined in Intermediateness, not by real standards, but only by higher approximations to adjustment, harmony, beauty, organization, consistency, justice, and so on. Evil is outlived virtue, or incipient virtue that has not yet established itself, or any other phenomenon that is not in seeming adjustment, harmony, consistency with a dominant. ”

“ Might not certain vices have the same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea has to intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul. Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with all its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with it into a moving circle of reincarnations. ”

“ It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness. ”

“ But what is kind-heartedness, refinement and genius to me, if the man with these virtues harbours indolent sentiments in belief and judgment, if the longing for certainty does not rule in him, as his innermost desire and profoundest need—as that which separates higher from lower men! In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad, intellectual conscience still betrayed itself, at least in this manner! ”

“ A specific feeling of contrariness to the good, this or that more or less solid group of associated bad habits, the formal and unreal assertion of the whole self therein, and the reflection on all evil, as what by its general opposition to the good is known as one, this is all the unity of the bad self. It is an universal in the sense of a collection of all, not in the sense of being a whole and an organic system. ”

“ Of things some are good, others bad, and yet others indifferent. Now the virtues and everything that shares in them are good, while vices and everything that shares in vice are evil, and what falls in between these, namely, wealth, health, life, death, pleasures, pain, are indifferent. ”

“ It is the steady presentation of one aspect of human life, and that the lowest, that slowly jaundices our view and that produces either a rank pessimism or else an indignation against evil so strong as to efface judgment and to paralyze reason. Day after day we see human nature presented in its worst aspects and only in its worst aspects. ”

“ Fortunately I soon learned to separate theological from moral prejudices, and I gave up looking for a supernatural origin of evil. A certain amount of historical and philological education, to say nothing of an innate faculty of psychological discrimination par excellence succeeded in transforming almost immediately my original problem into the following one:—Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those judgments of values, "Good" and "Evil"? And what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being? ”

“ Vice is not so much a cause as an effect—not so much a disease as a symptom. Vice does not make a nature weak or defective: a weak and defective nature expresses its weaknesses and defects in vice, and that expression brings about, in one way or another, the sovereign remedy of extermination. ”

“ If the slightest associated circumstance, or latent impulse connected with our actions, is to be magnified into the whole motive, merely by the microscopic acuteness which discovered it, why not complete the paradox, by resolving our vices into some pretence to virtue, which almost always accompanies and qualifies them? Or is it to be taken for granted that our vices are sincere, and our virtues only hypocrisy and affectation? ”

“ And if, as some have declared, this moral condemnation of, and dissatisfaction with, reality, is an ineradicable instinct, is it not possible that this instinct may perhaps belong to the ineradicable stupidities and immodesties of our species?—But in saying this, we are doing precisely what we deprecate; the point of view of desirability and of unauthorised fault-finding is part and parcel of the whole character of worldly phenomena just as every injustice and imperfection is—it is our very notion of "perfection" which is never gratified. ”

“ But if the second answer be the true one, if the teaching of Positivism is that nothing more can be known, let us be told so in plain words. Let no one be charmed into the Positive circle by false allurements; for of all vices treachery and hypocrisy are the most cowardly. ”