On morals and related matters
Today it feels like someone just pulled a big heavy coat off my shoulders. I keep polishing myself between ages and different ranks of individuals. Out of the answers arise new questions, probabilities, beliefs, presumptions, to shape my own blooming world, like a secret garden, just as I was born, tense, unbreakable, ready for something new, for something even more difficult, like a bow which all trouble only serves always to pull tighter. My dreams majestically expand the arena of what is possible, how seductive this notion is. I also know how cruel reality often can be, and I wonder even if delusion is not more comforting. Because of a quirk in my own nature, I like doing things that go against my nature, a quirk which came into my life early, in such contradiction to my age, to my surroundings, the examples around me. I don’t settle too many habits at once, I question the value of what I’m doing and doubt the accepted ways of doing it, I am always ready to take fresh paths, to venture into fields where I am by no means expert. Marx was not an expert in interpreting history in economic terms. Neither was Freud an expert psychoanalyst; before Freud wrote there was no such thing; he created the standards by which psychoanalysts are judged expert, nor Darwin an expert in evolutionary biology. If we were meant, simply and purely, to be expert and contented in a particular task we wouldn’t be able to innovate; Marx would have remained a philosopher, Freud a neurologist, Darwin a field naturalist. That’s why classical Utopias, and the modern dystopias which ironically incorporate their ideals, are static.
I am skeptical in some areas but fortunately not in others. War is a man's game, for many years they have been trying to transform this wonderful planet into a cemetery, that condition which has more than two thousand year old history behind it and which we no longer notice because it has triumphed. War rends, war tears, war rips open, eviscerates, war dismembers, war ruins, this is what war does. What do the meanings of “morality” as manifested in different languages really mean? I found that all of them lead back to the same fundamental idea out of which “good” necessarily establish a process which always runs in parallel with that other one which finally transforms “common,” “vulgar,” and “low” into the concept “bad.” Part of what I mean (or what I think I mean) is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby cruel. I was given a hint of the right direction by some questions: Love for what? Hope for what? Belief in what?