"It is a question here not of ethical guilt (how could the child acquire it?) but rather of the natural kind, which befalls human beings not by decision and action but by negligence and celebration. When they turn their attention away from the human and succumb to the power of nature, then natural life, which in man preserves its innocence only so long as natural life binds itself to something higher, drags the human down. With the disappearance of supernatural life in man, his natural life turns into guilt, even without his committing an act contrary to ethics."
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Walter Benjamin, "Goethe's Elective Affinities," Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926 (1996), p. 308.
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Original sin
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