Is there a science of
goodness and happiness?--that is the question. Do justice and goodness
depend upon any particular religion? How are men to be made free,
honest, just, and good?--there is the point.
On my way through the book I perceived many new applications of my law
of irony. Every epoch has two contradictory aspirations which are
logically antagonistic and practically associated. Thus the philosophic
materialism of the last century was the champion of liberty. And at the
present moment we find Darwinians in love with equality, while Darwinism
itself is based on the right of the stronger. Absurdity is interwoven
with life: real beings are animated contradictions, absurdities brought
into action. Harmony with self would mean peace, repose, and perhaps
immobility By far the greater number of human beings can only conceive
action, or practice it, under the form of war--a war of competition at
home, a bloody war of nations abroad, and finally war with self. So that
life is a perpetual combat; it wills that which it wills not, and wills
not that it wills. Hence what I call the law of irony--that is to say,
the refutation of the self by itself, the concrete realization of the
absurd.
Is such a result inevitable? I think not. Struggle is the caricature of
harmony, and harmony, which is the association of contraries, is also a
principle of movement.
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