Word: evil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...near future. Nevertheless, one cannot say anything about the present human situation without having an image of the universal condition of man. It is my conviction that the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, of true and false, of creative and destructive forces-both individual and social. Sometimes I have the feeling that the American irony, including the style of TIME, shows some awareness of the ambiguity of life-as long as it does not degenerate into mere cynicism. The awareness of the ambiguity...
...more voluntary form healthy-mindedness becomes an abstract way of conceiving things as good. It deliberately rejects evil from its perceptual field, holding the good as the essential aspect of being. James maintains that the emotional state of happiness carries with it blindness and insensibility to opposing facts as an instinctive device of self-protection. Yet he recognizes that healthy-mindedness can be employed as a conscious religious policy, and he takes pains to give it a fair hearing...
...Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace to adopt this...
...James could never qualify as an ultimately satisfactory credo. "It seems to me," he writes, "that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against...
...breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth...