Aphoristic Writings, Notebook, and Letters to a Friend, by Otto ...

The other possibility is that the person falls into Nothingness; he dissolves into
nothing but material atoms: the absolute criminal. The preparations for this mental
disintegration have already been made by the criminal over the course of his life. Hell
is the good person’s fear of evil, for fire is the agent to expel and vaporise that which
has been formed. But there is no hell: the good person creates himself, the evil one
destroys himself.
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A person physically comes into existence through father and mother, spiritually
through the demand of Something, of the Absolute, for Nothingness. Myth of Uranus
and Gaia. To this extent we are children of God and sons of dust (matter) at the same
time. Man can also spiritually take after the father or the mother: after the father, in
that he becomes God, after the mother, in that he mentally goes to ruin. Thus, man
comes to be through a higher sort of inheritance than the animals; he returns to the
father if he denies original sin, he submerges himself in the seclusion of the mother’s
lap if he affirms it.
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Is epilepsy not the loneliness of the criminal? Does he not fall because he has
nothing more he can hold on to?
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One can recognize from the following how much a mental phenomenon differs
from a physical one. Suppose it were established that an immoral impulse was always
associated with a certain bodily movement, a certain feeling in the heart, and a moral
impulse always connected with another gesture, another bodily sensation, and the type
and localization of these accompanying physical symptoms were known quite
precisely to science or a particular person, and he could recognize them. It would thus
be absolutely, to the very highest degree unmoral, if this person wanted to use the
accompanying sensations as a standard by which to judge whether his mental
impulses were moral or not.
Here lies the real difference between the mental and the physical. The mental must
be more immediately known than the physical – that is a demand of ethics. We have
even yet another measuring standard and organ of perception and judgement for that
which we do, think and feel ourselves, than for external phenomena. And that is why
simple introspection can yield true results: philosophy and art are nothing but
different modes of a deepened introspection.
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