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“that for which the speech of reason has as yet no name but the Anesthetic Revelation.”

The following is from a letter written by the poet Doug Oliver to the novelist Iain Sinclair, which Iain reproduced in his novel “White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.” Hopefully it will have some relevance here.

“Eliphas Levi was fond of the thought that great evil demands as great a soul as does great good. I disagree. On the visionary level it is perhaps true because the quality of the vision elevates what it deals with. At certain points of the “dialectic” it is perhaps also true: fear can call for a “grand soul” to overcome it. Also, seen in a vision of a coincidence of contraries, it may again seem true. Yet still I disagree: my own experience of good and evil is that the former ennobles and the latter diminishes the perpetrator in stature. The reason is, in a sense, dialectical: in their “fall” from the visionary ontology into human action it is the nature of evil to limit and depress and disgust – to be small-minded and furious – and it is the nature of good, in its fall, to enlarge and make sunny and bring wider acceptance. Cosmologically, it’s the nature of “evil” to be small and furious, and of good to expand “in love” as the neo-Platonists used to say. We cannot deny the universality of dark/light. But we have no referent for value unless our ontology works towards the good – takes that as direction.

We do need to explore the cosmology on its dark side, to make our vision unflinching and accurate. But we also need to see that the allure of the cruel is a false allure: that it only holds as grand when seen in its transcendental form (for in transcendence, in their “eternal” phantasm, all things look grand, though our joy and fear tell us so immediately the difference). The more evil becomes precise, personalized and located, however, the more it belittles itself: Brady and Hindley listening to those appalling tape recordings (such a small bestiality); Gilles de Rais fondling children (such a stupid cruelty); the affinity of the Belsen pictures with the rubbish dump; the cruel schoolboy in Amin or in the Krays; the fact that the schizoid is, in a sense, a smaller psyche. All this compared with the grandeur of any small act of kindness in a concentration camp. It is, of course what Iris Murdoch calls “The Sovereignty of Good,” and I believe that the phenomenology, so to speak, of good and evil, in their declension from angel/demon transcendent phantasms, separates into the much-in-little and little-in-much. Great evil is a grand conception by our common terms: that is its allure.

In act, it is the implosion into nothing whereas good is the simultaneous fructification of nothing. They are utterly interdependent dynamically and yet good is the sovereign just as “all we have” is sovereign over “all that we shall not have.” Unless there is the gradient of value – unless the very coincidence of contraries in the Blakeian sense has itself this gradient – I can explain neither our actions or our words.

I’m hostile to all literatures which think there’s a standing from which the self phantasm can disappear. That is, the self phantasm must be fully awakened into a more universal dynamic but the law is that in all higher awareness hte lower forms of awareness persist: they are simultaneously present within the higher awareness. That is why the self and its phantasms must be recognized before self-“disappearing” can enter the simultaneity of true knowing.

I shall say, therefore, that grand evil is macro-petty because it scares us stiff into smallness and protection of the self. It is also petty, because, seeing the coincidence of good and evil in the true dynamic, it rejects the coincidence (which is, I think, joyful) and chooses the obviously worse of the alternatives. We cannot fail to choose because, short of being gods, we must otherwise vegetate. Only by choosing the good, because it is expansive, can we begin to accept the dynamic in its duality and yet make a choice. It more truly reflects life process to see that it is creative rather than destructive, at least while time’s arrow points in the direction it does and our universe expands: for if evil were sovereign nothing would exist.”

As a side note to John’s post, notice in war and strategy there is this interplay between contraries and contradictories. Edward Luttwak’s Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace is a book length treatment of this “logic of war,” where seemingly paradoxical behavior can lead to tactical, operational, and strategic victory (mostly because of the surprise of doing things the opponent does not suspect). See also The Thirty-Six Stratagems from Chinese military history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Six_Stratagems

Apart from the obvious physical, psychological, and moral aspects of war, these paradoxical and surprising behaviors might also be generators for horror in the minds of people.