XI. On Good and Evil
GA 90c/1903-10-20/p013
·1903-10-20
·
English
MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach bruchstückhaften Notizen und Mitschriften» (From fragmentary notes and transcripts). Rudolf Steiner Verlag Gesamtverzeichnis 2022, volume subtitle. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
The principle of kamic in a criminal nature clearly shows that people are thereby guided in the wrong way by the intellectual principle. Evil is thus a straying from the actual task of our cosmos, a straying from love. Love consists in sacrificing the individual physical-pranic for the higher purpose. Every predominant selfish urge stems from the fact that the person concerned feels more related to the physical than is right. There has been too deep an affinity with the physical. The point of equilibrium between the physical and the physiological is love. Misguided, it is driven into hyper-egoism.
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