Mere Christianity

“When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”

Mere Christianity

“Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.”

The Brothers Karamazov

“Oh, we are spontaneous, we are good and evil in an astonishing blend, we are lovers of enlightenment and Schiller and at the same time we go rampaging around the inns and tearing out the beards of the drunken sots, our boon companions. Oh, we too are good and beautiful, but only when we ourselves feel good and beautiful. Indeed, we are positively tempested – yes, tempested – by the most noble ideals, but only upon condition that they be attained of themselves, fall down upon our tables from the sky, and above all that they be gratis, gratis, so that nothing must be paid for them. Paying is something we dislike horribly, while on the other hand we love to receive, and this in everything. Oh, give us, give us every possible blessing of life (it must be every possible one, for more cheaply we will not be reconciled) and in particular do not hinder our disposition in any way, and then we too shall demonstrate that we are able to be good and beautiful.”

Meditations

“Neither want of power nor want of skill could have led Nature into the error of allowing good and evil to be visited indiscriminately on the virtuous and the sinful alike. Yet living and dying, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and so forth are equally the lot of good men and bad. Things like these neither elevate nor degrade; and therefore they are no more good than they are evil.”

Meditations

“Again, it is a sin to pursue pleasure as a good and to avoid pain as an evil. It is bound to result in complaints that Nature is unfair in her rewarding of vice and virtue; since it is the bad who are so often in enjoyment of pleasures and the means to obtain them, while pains and events that occasion pains descend upon the heads of the good. Besides, if a man is afraid of pain, he is afraid of something happening which will be part of the appointed order of things, and this is itself a sin; if he is bent on the pursuit of pleasure, he will not stop at acts of injustice, which again is manifestly sinful. No; when Nature herself makes no distinction – and if she did, she would not have brought pains and pleasures into existence side by side – it behooves those who would follow in her footsteps to be like-minded and exhibit the same indifference. He therefore who does not view with equal unconcern pain or pleasure, death or life, fame or dishonour – all of them employed by Nature without any partiality – clearly commits a sin.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 114

“Through the heroic act of world creation and division of opposites, the ego steps forth from the creative magic circle of the uroboros and finds itself in a state of loneliness and discord.  With the emergence of the fully fledged ego, the paradisal situation is abolished; the infantile condition, in which life was regulated by something ampler and more embracing, is at an end, and with it the natural dependence on that ample embrace.  We may think of this paradisal situation in terms of religion, and say that everything was controlled by God; or we may formulate it ethically, and say that everything was still good and that evil had not yet come into the world.  Other myths dwell on the ‘effortlessness’ of the Golden Age, when nature was bountiful, and toil, suffering, and pain did not exist; others stress the ‘everlastingness,’ the deathlessness, of such an existence.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 113

“Nor, as we have said, is the division between good and evil present in the beginning.  Man and world have not yet been divided into pure and impure, good and bad; there is at most the difference between that which works, is pregnant with mana and loaded with taboo, and that which does not work.  But what works is pre-eminent, beyond good and evil.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 112

“Man’s original hermaphroditic disposition is still largely conserved in the child.  Without the disturbing influences from outside which foster the visible manifestation of sexual differences at an early date, children would just be children; and actively masculine features are in fact as common and effective in girls as are passively feminine ones in boys.  It is only cultural influences, whose differentiating tendencies govern the child’s early upbringing, that lead to an identification of the ego with the monosexual tendencies of the personality and to the suppression, or repression, of one’s congenital contrasexuality.

The split between inside and outside in archaic man and the child is no more complete than that between good and evil.  The fancied playmate is real and unreal at once, like everything else, and the image in the dream as real as the reality outside.  Here the true ‘Reality of the Soul’ still holds sway, that versatile make-believe of which the wizardry of art and fairy tale is a reflection.  Here each of us can be all things, and so-called external reality has not yet made us forget the equally powerful reality within.”

This Is It

“A baby is put in a play pen to keep it from getting at the matches or falling downstairs, and though the intention of the pen is to keep the baby closed in, parents are naturally proud when the child grows strong enough to climb out.  Likewise, a man can perform actions which are truly moral only when he is no longer motivated by the fear of hell, that is, when he grows into union with the Good that is beyond good and evil, which, in other words, does not act from the love of rewards or the fear of punishment.”

This Is It

“The man of deep spiritual wisdom is irrelevant to this society.  This has not just recently come to be so; it has been so for centuries, because – for centuries – society has consisted precisely of those human beings who are so deluded by the conventions of words and ideas as to believe that there is a real choice between the opposites of life – between pleasure and pain, good and evil, God and Lucifer, spirit and nature.  But what is separable in terms, in words, is not separable in reality, in the solid relationship between the terms.  Whoever sees that there is no ultimate choice between these opposites is irrelevant because he cannot really participate in the politician’s and the ad-man’s illusion that there can be better and better without worse and worse, and that matter can yield indefinitely to the desires of mind without becoming utterly undesirable.”