2 loose ends

1. On the nature of evil. To say that evil is what's inappropriate in a given situation is well enough. But if one single spiritual danger should be awarded the title, then in my opinion it's the disregard for the notion of what's holy.

This disregard allows man to become a mere object to his fellow man and thus makes man a victim of his own ingenuity. That's how the age of works collects the harvest of the age of guarding. These matters, that I dealt with in the article Die Grundzüge der Zeitalter der Werke, Wunder und Wacht, are the most far reaching implications of the Biblical passage about the recurrence of evil:

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

Also, this disregard destroys the sense that a man attaches to his life. And in this state of lacking sense man goes from depression to the hope of having found a way out of it, but most of the time he walks in between these two points in a state of ill will that I've described in the article The pre-Christian Saxon notion of empty-heartedness. This perceived lack of sense was a normal occurrence to the Saxons and in their philosophy the root of evil, for it created the ill will, and this ill will accompanies with its desire to destroy the tribulations at the height of the institutionalised disregard of the Holy, becoming the soul of evil, as I've called it in the article Die Seele des Bösen.

Good, in these last days of the age of works, means to steer the ire, place it where it belongs and thus allow the reawakening to the divine nature of existence, pretty much like through the help of a defibrillator. And evil is the abyss below the tightrope in this undertaking.

2. On the ability to recognise the fullness of the ideal. The impairment of the knowledge of one's soul that I was talking about in the article Seelenkenntnis is, more precisely, the inability to measure the degree to which any ideal is being fulfilled, i.e. the affected people have no notion of how close they are to an appropriate state of affairs, but only a sense of the direction, in which change should occur.

Because of this they are neither determined nor undetermined by their own standards like the rest of us, who either know that they have a lot to do in order to establish them or that their contribution isn't essential.

Instead such a person would simply consider himself morally invested. In an independent person this investment takes on the form of helpfulness, neither minding the length nor the shortness of the way still ahead, and in a dependent one the form of fanaticism, unable to gauge the gravity of the offense.

A collective of such people, that is a people without any notion of the fullness of its ideals, will almost certainly make a mockery out of the religion it adheres to, and I think that the Philippines and Indonesia illustrate this. An individual person without this notion does on the other hand stand a good chance to adorn her faith, like Jeanne d'Arc here, in my estimation.

(I met one such man during my time in the army. The look on Jeanne d'Arc's face is characteristic. Feel free to compare it with arbitrary Filipinos and Indonesians. Not saying that all of them are like that, but likely the majority, with the higher percentage probably amongst Indonesians.)