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

only the mental become unconscious, “gone into the body”; just as it is raised into
consciousness, the sickness is cured.
In general, the criminal does not get sick; his original sin is different. If I were to
seek to represent this quite obviously to myself, it would go something like this: the
criminal, when he turns his back on God, falls in the moment of the Fall from heaven
to earth, to the point upon which he could stand, yet well heeds. The other, the sick
person (neurasthenic 19 , madman) falls with face and countenance raised suppliantly to
God, and without being conscious of, or attending to, where he might come to rest. If
the ultimate danger of the latter is the plant, and that of the former the animal, then
this fits well: the plant grows from the centre of the earth straight up toward the sky;
the animal’s gaze is directed toward the earth. (The plant can never serve as an antimoral
symbol, as so many animals can).
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Every person can always conceive himself merely as quality; only through
comparison with others does he draw nearer to quantitative considerations. Number
and time.
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A good musician is one whose melodies have, above all, long breath.
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History and society: people who are in a space together always form a community
against newcomers.
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Gratitude and revengefulness are one and the same: a feeling of the single moment
as real belongs to both: grateful as revengeful is the sadist, not the masochist.
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19 Weininger makes frequent reference to neurasthenia. Dictionaries define it as “an emotional and
psychic disorder that is characterized esp. by easy fatigability and often by lack of motivation, feelings
of inadequacy, and psychosomatic symptoms.” [Trans]
20