The Mechanics of Virtue, aphorism 182

182

Evil eludes definition because the truth-speaker is asked to recuse himself for having removed the link of ignorance from the moral chain.  And he often obliges the request, for he suffers from his own conscience to a greater degree than the moralists suffer from theirs.  

The mechanist struggles with an honest introspection that appears to others as a lack of confidence, because it is.  He trespasses over his own morality to describe its machinery, but does not thereby escape from being the function of this machinery.  Guilt and lack of confidence, as a rule, accompany a fearlessly honest inspection of morality.  And all the while, the good ... the confident ... the complacently ignorant hold up their own smooth conscience as the solid evidence that convicts the wavering mechanist.

Popular posts from this blog

A valuable book, A Human Strategy, aphorism 387

387 A valuable book may be torn to pieces without diminishing the human spirit, just so long as the words have already been read and understood.  To feel the loss of the book — at its material destruction, even though one had already digested its contents fully and had aligned oneself toward its overall direction — is evidence that one values the non-human being over human becoming , the static thing over the dynamic process .  In response to the fear of our unknowable future we would rather freeze ourselves into a single stage of growth at the expense of the entire metamorphosis. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism
Read more
The Ascetic Impulse: We think we deliberately hurt ourselves when it is simply that we do know which version of ourselves will satisfy our needs more fully. We try on a personality as if trying on new clothes. Bizarrely, the self we beat up has heretofore been a complete stranger.
Read more