Devil's Whisper, Song of Life: Truth Blooming in Pain

A second review of Dancing with the Devil. Written by an author who majored in philosophy and classics at the University of North Carolina. He is a professor at the University of North Carolina, focusing on American humanities and pure science. His past book is "Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life." Today, I carefully read Chapter 3, "Make Room for the Devil." This book is not a book that can be read quickly. It is a book that makes you underline a lot and evokes thoughts. Chapter 3 talks about the ego, Nietzsche, and Satan. Refuting the argument that the ego does not exist in the first place, as in Buddhist studies, he says that self-love is not bad. The explanation of the ego in Buddhism is that it creates its own suffering because it believes that the ego exists. It is not excessive self-love but wrong self-love that is the problem, and the saints see the former as something to overcome human imperfection, and the author says that humans begin to get sick from here. Humans, the ego, are inherently flawed, inconsistent, weak-willed, and do not recognize their shortcomings well, but the belief that they should be despised and rejected and saved by God's grace, science, reason, and art degrades humans, who do not need salvation in the first place, into beings that must be saved. Albert Camus' "The Stranger" and Yang Gui-ja's "Contradiction" came to mind a lot. Pain is essential to living life vividly, and it is a message that you can realize what is important in your life through it. He goes on to argue that you should feel emotions but not act emotionally. The excerpted sentence is as follows. "The great theme of Montaigne's work is the imperfection of human nature. We make mistakes, are inconsistent, weak-willed, and do not recognize our shortcomings well. Montaigne acknowledges all of this but does not despair. He loves life, himself, and humanity despite his flaws. The reason we do bad things because of emotions is that we don't know how to let ourselves feel bad emotions. Justifying bad emotions is usually just another way of refusing to feel them."

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