aphorism209aa Ascolo Parodites 209. Damnosa hereditas. All philosophers suffer from the same defect, in that they conceive in the inhuman fixtures of 'truth,' 'purity,' or 'justice,' or even more questionable- 'beauty,' what is good, and think that they can arrive at their goal of an honest and genuine life by analyzing these. Instinctively they let their ideals hover before them as a laureum baculum gesto, a proof against all dangers, and a precaution against all spiritual corruptions. Yet, where the intense power of the nose can no longer discern the good impetus as such because it has become too noxious, in other words, too overbearing, and aggrandized- for instance, in the figure of the saint, and in his inhuman or rather all-too-human purity and solitude; in the same way that a handful of cinnamon merely infuriates the sense of smell rather than imparts its usual and magnificent hints and hues in something that has been baked with it, man posits the realm of evil and ill-will. The feeling that we have now entered upon the realm of malice excites through this ambiguity, this ultimately fantastical irritation, all those impetuses which had been previously made indiscernible by the good impetus: all of the tensions which arise in the desire for purity or for sainthood, in the defiance of all things human- that is required to achieve it. Eventually those indiscernibles are transformed into temptations: but, in the saint himself- they are transformed into virtues. All moralities are arrived at by a certain excitement achieved in the spectacle of, for instance, the saint- the virgin, a glorious warrior. 090609 what's it to you? who go blather from