This is a translation of one of my German mini-essays over at Fragmente.
The great things cannot be pinned down without them fighting back. Their weapon is metamorphosis: if you catch them, they suddenly seem entirely different, and the deception that occurs in this way leads to psychic aberrations if you allow yourself to be blinded by it.
One can escape this, of course, by immediately seeking contact with the great, the vast, the deep—that perception which is fed neither by sensory impressions alone nor by abstract thinking. It is not categories, comparisons or deductions that are needed here, nor views and visualizations, but the unfiltered impression of the cosmos as it presents itself directly to the fine skin of the soul and can bring our thinking, feeling and understanding into order.
The idea of freedom belongs to these great things. It must forever remain without definition, or else lose all power, become a chimera. By abandoning definitions, we give it, on the contrary, the necessary weight. For he who wants to be free must first of all generate inner energy—especially where soul bondage reigns, the most vicious form of slavery. Only this inner energy can break the spell and open the view of the inner core to the outer darkness, but also to that which alone is beautiful, true and good.
Freedom, in fact, always means spiritual independence from the crushing burden of the social, of the moral of Plato's "Great Beast" as the living symbol of society: in our normal state, we simply perceive everything that pacifies the beast as right and decent; and everything that provokes it and invites counter-reactions as evil and detestable. Only very few rise above this.
Now there is the aggravating fact that the moral compulsion of a society at a given time is sometimes more, sometimes less pronounced; and that the specific form sometimes presents itself more sensible, sometimes more brutal, sometimes more humiliating, sometimes more elevating. Nevertheless, even under circumstances in which an elevating morality is socially effective, every moral norm must sooner or later lead to sin: because to every rule there are many exceptions. The gall-spitting moralist is not for nothing a character despised at all times among luminous men.
No, only the development of our spiritual perception can bring us closer to the ideal of becoming morally autonomous.
If, however, the prevailing morality in sum does not have an elevating but a degrading effect, that is, if it degenerates into something like a manual for sinking to the level of animals, then the striving for inner freedom changes from mere esoteric satisfaction to a spiritual survival struggle. This is all the more urgent because under these conditions, the idiotically foaming moralists not only make life hell for the individual, but, as it were, wield their collective cudgels as a dark volonté générale, as toxic zeitgeister.