Amiel's Journal

 

Amiel’s spirit oscillates between rapture and dejection and having the thinker’s mental review of all perspectives finds multiple viewpoints a delamination of motive.  How is one to act when the moral instinct is weakened.  To act now at once.  Can we say that the good man has no interest in ethics?

“We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the work of creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity is unconscious, you have simple action; when it is conscious, intelligent and moral action. At bottom this is nothing more than the proposition of Hegel: [“What is rational is real; and what is real is rational;”] but it had never seemed to me more evident, more palpable. Everything which is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought. The human intelligence is but the consciousness of being. It is what I have formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? of mind.”

Indeed, just so.  Amiel seems to me at his best when his heart grasps a truth that is free from the oppression of the apodeictic.

December 2, 1851.—Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are conscious of something new—thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being—do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow, and not a word of your happiness to any one! Sacred work of nature as it is, all conception should be enwrapped by the triple veil of modesty, silence and night.

Looking coldly at the phenomenon of Jacobinism, a perennial fallacy that confuses the nature of equity he writes:

“The modern leveler, after having done away with conventional inequalities, with arbitrary privilege and historical injustice, goes still farther, and rebels against the inequalities of merit, capacity, and virtue. Beginning with a just principle, he develops it into an unjust one. Inequality may be as true and as just as equality: it depends upon what you mean by it. But this is precisely what nobody cares to find out. All passions dread the light, and the modern zeal for equality is a disguised hatred which tries to pass itself off as love.

 

 

Liberty, equality—bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice, and justice toward the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.”

 

 

Amiel’s Journal, available on gutenberg.org , reminds me of Woody Allen’s quip about the boy who failed a philosophy exam because he was caught looking into another boy’s soul.