I have never published anyonelse's words here verbatim before; but this seems to have a lapidary clarity that deserves to shared.
"As Wagner was aware, we distinguish people who are evil from those who are merely bad. Bad people are like you or me, only worse. They belong in the community, even if they behave badly towards it. We can reason with them, improve them, come to terms with them and sometimes accept them. Even if they wreak destruction, like Siegfried, it tends to be because, through deception or manipulation, matters have slipped from their control. But evil people are not like that. They do not belong in the community, even when residing within its territory. Their bad behaviour may be too secret and subversive to be noticeable, and any dialogue with them will be, on their part, a pretence. There is, in them, no scope for improvement, no path to acceptance, and their faults are not of the normal, remediable human variety, but have another and more metaphysical origin. They are visitors from another sphere, incarnations of the Devil. Even their charm - and it is a recognized fact that evil people are often charming - is only further proof of their Otherness. They are, in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing that they seek to destroy. Their presence in the community involves a mingling of elements that do not belong together, and their charm is sorcery: they are, indeed, the most potent form of pollution.
That characterization of evil is summarized in the famous line that Goethe gives to Mephistopheles:
Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint
[I am the spirit that for ever negates]
Whereas the bad person is guided by self-interest, to the point of ignoring or overriding the others who stand in his path, the evil person is profoundly interested in others, has almost selfless designs on them. His aim is not to use them, as Faust uses Gretchen, but to rob them of themselves. Mephistopheles hopes to steal and destroy Faust's soul and, en route to that end, to destroy the soul of Gretchen. Nowadays we might use the word 'self' instead of 'soul'. But this word is only another name for the same metaphysical mystery around which our lives are built –- the mystery of the 'I', which is the centre of consciousness and the origin of choice. Evil people are not necessarily threats to the body; but they are threats to the self. They open the deepest spiritual wounds in order to fill them with poison. Such is Klingsor in his abuse of Kundry. His failure to belong to the community does not lead to resignation or despair. It lead s to an insightful, almost intimate destruction of the woman whom he tortures, and through whom he also brings destruction to those who have enjoyed the blessedness that he vainly longs for. The world of the evil person is a loveless world, in which intimacy takes the form of domination. To be close to an evil person is to be in his power, since he tolerates no other relationship; hence every intimacy that he achieves merely reinforces his utter loneliness, the metaphysical vacuum of the I that has never said 'thou'. To live without the I/Thou relationship is to lose the benefit of love: it is to relate to others by spells and sorcery, thus by-passing their humanity for the sake of a purely self-centred control.
Encountering evil of the Klingsor kind we sense the existence of a contest between being and nothingness, creation and destruction, and that we are involved in that contest and are saved or jeopardized by our own behaviour. Seen as part of this contest our faults can weigh us down: we seek exoneration, without knowing the human person to whom an appeal for forgiveness can be made. We exist as though suspended above a chasm, ready at any moment to fall. This is what is meant by original sin, and indeed Schopenhauer rewrote the idea of original sin so that it became 'the crime of existence itself – ‘die Schuld des Daseins,’ the guilt of existing as an individual, in free relations with our kind.
Such feelings prompt the great yearning that finds a voice in tragic art and which engages with our most urgent loves and fears in this world: the yearning for the blessing that relieves us of our guilt- guilt that is the inevitable result of our free dealings with others. Glimpses of this blessing are afforded by such liminal experiences as falling in love, recovering from illness, becoming a parent, and encountering in awe the sublime works of nature. At these moments we stand at the threshold of the transcendent, reaching out to what cannot be attained or known. And that to which we reach must be understood in personal terms, since only then does it offer an answer to the unspoken question of our being: the question why? It is the soul of the world, which smiles from the meadows at Monsalvat on Good Friday."
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