Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part IV: Purity

  Part IV of a seven-part series

 "However it may have been, my boy, the detailed and impartial research I made on the spot brought to light the following: "When that idea had gradually taken on this maleficent form, it became for the psyche of your favorites what is called a 'determining factor' for the crystallization of data in their common presence for the fantastic notion that there exist, as it were, outside of them objective sources of 'Good' and 'Evil' which act upon their essence.

Here we come to what is perhaps the most salient point in Gurdjieff’s perspective: human beings assign these properties of “good” and “evil” to objects, events, circumstances, and conditions outside of themselves. This is problematic from multiple points of view; but the most important problem it poses us is that it becomes an immediate denial of the very agency that human beings are meant to exercise as mediators of the reconciling factor. It is an abrogation of duty; and that simple fact in itself carries a great weight in light of Gurdjieff’s tremendous emphasis on being – duty.

This action outsources the responsibility for what takes place to others. It creates, among other things, a world of blame; it is a refusal to accept one’s own responsibility and one’s own agency, and action most typical of little children. Yet of course we don’t fully outgrow that in a lifetime; and in that regard, perhaps we are reminded of St. Paul’s comment on what it means to become a human being in 1 Corinthians 13:

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. “

It’s no coincidence that this passage is embedded in the Corinthians passage about love, which Gurdjieff mentions in the meaning of life as “that which can lead us to the miraculous.”

Take note that Gurdjieff does not say good and evil don’t exist; his suggestion is that they don’t have an objective existence outside us. We are fully and wholly responsible for the good and bad that is done; yet our assignment of that quality to something outside ourselves excuses us from the need to struggle with our own question about what is good and bad. We might note that the “inner evil God of self calming” consists, among other things, of exactly this passive suggestibility:

This strange trait of their psyche, that of being satisfied with whatever Smith or Brown says without trying to know more, became rooted in them long ago, and now they no longer make the least effort to know anything that can be understood solely by their own active reflection. (from Beelzebub’s Tales, chapter 13.)

Beelzebub extends the paradigm even further:

From then on, other peculiar data began to be crystallized in their general psyche—at first spontaneously and later owing to their strange consciousness—which engender the conviction, through automatic being-associations, that the causes of all their manifestations, both good and bad, are not to be found in themselves, in their own criminal essence-egoism, but in some external influence not depending on them at all. 

There is a certain naïveté implicit in this worldview, to be sure; but I think we can agree that in the absence of serious inward, self-directed critical examination, every human being is prone to exactly this kind of attitude. The whole point of Gurdjieff’s self observation is, among other things, to see this.

"The fundamental harm ensuing from this fantastic idea for all these unfortunates is that, thanks as always to the abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves, data cease to be crystallized in them for engendering what is called a 'being-world-view with diverse aspects', and instead of this a 'world-view' is formed in them based exclusively on that maleficent idea of external Good and Evil. 

What we end up with is a polarized perspective. Without being aware of it, we narrow the range of our critical intelligence into a single channel unable to appreciate the diverse and changing nature of the world that we live in and the inner nature of our own being. This actually cripples our agency; we become machines, slaves.

Once internalized, this becomes the basis for every kind of self abuse, since we develop an inner mirror reflecting our ideas about the outer world. This is a reciprocal process; once it crystallizes, it is nearly impossible to escape the reflexive action which blames everything but how we are unto ourselves.

"And indeed at the present time, your favorites base all questions without exception—those about ordinary being-existence as well as those about self-perfecting and about 'philosophies' and 'sciences' of every kind, and of course their innumerable 'religious teachings,' not to mention their notorious 'morals,' 'politics,' 'laws,' 'ethics,' and so on— exclusively on that fantastic and for them in the objective sense pernicious idea.

This last passage presents us with more of a dilemma. It tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater; and begins in several disturbing ways to represent some of the rants which Gurdjieff embeds in his texts. He does, after all, endorse any number of actions in these same spheres as long as they conform to what he calls objective consciousness, objective law, or objective science; so it isn’t the activities themselves which he condemns. It’s the nature of their arising, the source of their content.

It would be easy to mistake otherwise; it sounds like he is dismissing everything we do in these areas. Yet what he is dismissing is our subjectivity in these matters, not the matters themselves. There is a need for philosophy, science, morality, politics, law, and ethics; but the need is an objective one, and our subjectivity, our selfishness, and our refusal to accept responsibility for our own being and action in these areas is what corrupts them. A closer reading of the essay The Meaning of Life will remind the reader that he said exactly this in that piece: 

“There can be any impersonal envy; for example, envy of one who has conquered himself. An impersonal hate: the hate of injustice, of brutality. Impersonal anger — against stupidity, hypocrisy… love of science can be pure, or mixed with personal profit… the same is true in art, literature, etc. The love of activity is a worthy sentiment when it is pure. But what happens, invariably, is that it becomes mixed… Pride, vanity, personal ambition enter in.”

Gurdjieff, in other words, is not and never was and iconoclast of ordinary institutions, ordinary activity. He was not a denier of the existence of objective good. What he was an iconoclast of was subjectivity; of egoism. And this is a very different thing indeed.

Our institutions, our societies, and our attitudes are built out of the selfsame subjectivities, which arise from the outsourcing of personal responsibility for thinking critically, for not believing every other person who comes along selling snake oil. Our inner attitude arises from our assumptions and what we have been told; not what we discover for ourselves through conscious labor and intentional suffering. 

The evil inner God of self calming, in other words, is an outsourcing of responsibility for what Gurdjieff would have called active being-mentation. This is the role that third force takes on in life; and it calls for a diversity of thinking, a flexibility. His very use of the word crystallization implies a rigidity that does not allow for further development; and our outward ideas of good and evil are catalysts for that action.

We must become inwardly responsible for good and evil, within ourselves; and that is a tall order indeed.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.