#good evil

[wiirocku]

Isaiah 5:20 (NKJV) - Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

[wearevillains]

Vicious by VE Schwab // Heroes by David Bowie // Well, You Needn't by William Matthews

[revolutionoftenderness]

“The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free. An evil choice destroys freedom.We can never choose evil as evil: only as an apparent good. But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.Perfect spiritual freedom is a total inability to make any evil choice. When everything you desire is truly good and every choice not only aspires to that good but attains it, then you are free because you do everything that you want, every act of your will ends in perfect fulfillment.Freedom therefore does not consist in an equal balance between good and evil choices but in the perfect love and acceptance of what is really good and the perfect hatred and rejection of what is evil, so that everything you do is good and makes you happy, and you refuse and deny and ignore every possibility that might lead to unhappiness and self-deception and grief. Only the man who has rejected all evil so completely that he is unable to desire it at all, is truly free.God, in Whom there is absolutely no shadow or possibility of evil or of sin, is infinitely free. In fact, he is Freedom.” — Thomas Merton, “What Is Liberty?”, New Seeds of Contemplation  [Ad Parnassum - Paul Klee]

• Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. More: http://merton.org/chrono.aspx  

• Ad Parnassum (1932) is considered to be  the best example of Paul Klee’s pointillist style; it is also one of his most finely worked paintings. Ad Parnassum was created in the Dusseldorfer period. More: https://www.paulklee.net/ad-parnassum.jsp 

[grandpasessions]

It is crucial to follow here Hegel’s entire line of argumentation and, not to miss the audacity of his point, to read this passage together with the one in which he asserts that subjective knowledge is not just the possibility to choose evil or good, “it is the consideration or the cognition that makes people evil, so that consideration and cognition themselves are what is evil, and that therefore such cognition is what ought not to exist because it is the source of evil.” In short, what makes us divine is our very fall (into Evil) since thinking is both at the same time, evil and reconciliation. Hegel is clear here: thinking not only opens up the choice between Good and Evil, thinking as such is evil since the reflexivity that it implies makes it operate at a distance from immediate substantial unity – when we think, we abstract, we tear up the unity of the object of thought. Simultaneously, this reflexive distance implied in thinking implies freedom (in our thoughts we are free – formally, at least). This is how one should understand Hegel’s dictum from his Phenomenology that Evil is the gaze itself which perceives Evil everywhere around it: the gaze which sees Evil excludes itself from the social Whole it criticizes, and this exclusion is the formal characteristics of Evil. And Hegel’s point is that the Good emerges as a possibility and duty only through this primordial/constitutive choice of Evil: we experience the Good when, after choosing Evil, we become aware of the utter inadequacy of our situation.

Hegel In a Wired Brain // Zizek

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Elizabeth Hawes, Camus, A Romance

[tonyloon]

Good / Evil switch AU

[wiirocku]

Isaiah 5:20 (ESV) - Woe to those who call evil good   and good evil, who put darkness for light   and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet   and sweet for bitter!