Tag: behavior

It is always a great challenge to balance conflicting tensions when a predominant tendency manifests itself in the spirit, either compelling externalization or internalization. The personality often reveals this difficulty, the main problem of which is not to follow or move away from the innate tendency, but to deal with the opposite, which often presents itself as a duty. A duty, then, to act against one’s nature, to continually do the most painful thing, under constant threat of condemnation by one’s conscience! Perhaps this is the greatest usefulness of biographies: to record the sprouts of this conflict in the lives of those for whom living is opposed to doing work.

Of all the characteristics of the modern intellectual, as conceived by Paul Johnson, perhaps none causes more strangeness—or is it shame?—than this inordinate vanity, which is not limited to the high concept that the intellectual has of himself, but pretends to be an innate debt that others owe him. What is there to say? There are no words for this pretension, well illustrated by the amusing “begging letters”. There is nothing unusual about the affliction caused by the lack of means, which generates a feeling of injustice, as experienced by Raskólnikov. But at least he acts; even if recklessly, he seeks through his own actions what he thinks he deserves. A delirium, it is true, but the use of force denotes an awareness of the ineffectiveness of the argument, of the nonsense that would be trying to convince someone of a debt because of his superiority. This is such a detachment from reality that it can only go back to the most elementary questions of raising…

Despite seeming non-existent today after decades of systematic and vehement relativization, common sense remains the most solid moral beacon for ordinary man. It is not the law that guides him, it is not the law that he thinks about when he acts or refrains from acting. If he does not kill, if he does not steal, it is because common sense prescribes it, whether or not there is a law. The effect of the law, moreover, thanks to the modern state, is to always make him more or less of an infringer. In other words: if the law does not correspond to common sense, it cannot be seen as fair, and its effect can never be educational, as it is theoretically intended to be. And the most curious thing about all this is that the day will come when someone will have to notice it, will have to notice the failure of modern law in the face of age-old common sense. And then, if it is to be legally transcribed, it will no longer be possible—unless religion is admitted once again.