prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This case of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency … which we call the ‘levelling down’ of all possibilities of Being…. The ‘they’ is there alongside everywhere, but in such a manner that it has always stolen away whenever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the ‘they’ presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability.

The ideal situation, on the contrary, is rather to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity’. This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’. (331) Will and reason then are not entirely separate faculties in the moral agent....As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection. (332)

Goodness and beauty are not to be contrasted, but are largely part of the same structure. Plato, who tells us that beauty is the only spiritual thing which we love immediately by nature, treats the beautiful as the introductory section of the good. So that aesthetic situations are not so much analogies of morals as cases of morals. (332)

Art presents the most comprehensible examples of the almost irresistible human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy and also of the effort to resist this and the vision of reality which comes with success. Success in fact is rare. Almost all art is a form of fantasy-consolation and few artists achieve the vision of the real. The talent of the artist can be readily, and is naturally, employed to produce a picture whose purpose is the consolation and aggrandisement of its author and the projection of his personal obsessions and wishes. To silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline. A great artist is, in respect of his work, a good man, and, in the true sense, a free man. The consumer of art has an analogous task to its producer: to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it, and not to ‘use it as magic.’ The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only (for all its difficulties) the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just analogy of) the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real. Of course great artists are ‘personalities’ and have special styles; even Shakespeare occasionally, though very occasionally, reveals a personal obsession. But the greatest art is ‘impersonal’ because it shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all. (352) ... It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. (353) ... If, still led by the clue of art, we ask further questions about the faculty which is supposed to relate us to what is real and thus bring us to what is good, the idea of compassion or love will be naturally suggested. It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love. (354) ... Good art “affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent.” (370) ... “An understanding of any art involves a recognition of hierarchy and authority.... We surrender ourselves to [good art’s] authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish. (372)

Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love. With it goes the idea of grace, of a supernatural assistance to human endeavor which overcomes empirical limitations of personality. What is this attention like, and can those who are not religious believers conceive of profiting by such an activity? (344)

Private property is not a matter of justice, for it is not according to nature, which has brought forth all good things for all in common. God has created everything in such a way that all things are to be possessed in common. Nature therefore is the mother of common right, usurpation the mother of private right. It is not from your own property that you give to the poor. Rather, you make return from what is theirs. For what has been given as common for the use of all, you have appropriated to yourself alone. The earth belongs to all, not to the rich. Therefore you are paying a debt, not bestowing a gift. How far, O you rich, do you push your mad desires? “Shall you alone dwell upon the earth?” (Isa. 5:8) The earth was made in common for all.…Why do you arrogate to yourselves, you rich, an exclusive right to the soil? Nature, which begets all people as poor, cannot recognize the rich. For we are neither born with raiment nor begotten with gold and silver. Naked the earth brings people into the light, in need of food, clothing, and drink; naked the earth receives those whom it has brought forth; it does not know how to include the boundaries of an estate in a tomb. “He scattered abroad and gave to the poor, his justice endures forever” (2 Cor. 9:9).…his mercy, therefore, is called justice because the giver knows that God has given all things to all in common – that the sun rises for all, his rain falls on all, and he has given the earth for all. On that account the giver shares with those who do not have the abundance of the earth.…They are just, therefore, who do not retain anything for themselves alone, knowing that everything has been given to all.