Page 23 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

The Byronic Hero is a Hermetic autodidact and artist, solitary and natural being that cannot attain the vocation of the individual, because he is absolutely individual and absolutely universal: he becomes, paradoxically universal in existential ambiguity and in his tragicomedy of being and not being neither fully universal nor fully individual. The Byronic Hero is a self-exiled misfit and nonconformist, a somewhat Kantian logical, aesthetic, moral and metaphysical egoist,39 yet sublime in his titanic idealism. Byronic Hero 3⁄4 subjective fugue, fleeing and scorning dissimilar and lesser others, unloving and unloved, yet enduring and40 not hating.41 ManfredicHero3⁄4whosecontemptforhisfellowmen,a counterpoise of grumbly Gremon in Meneander’s Dyskolos, leads to the wish to destroy42 himself, and soon after his demise’s reversal, what frustrated fall and hunter’s rescue from Jungfrau’s infernal summits, he is enlightened that he has fallen prey to a whispering error. His heroic mask thus drops and beneath dwells
39 Kant.Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (I&2). In Kant’s view, logical egoism maintains one’s own judgment over others. Aesthetic egoism affirms one’s own taste. Moral egoism confines itself to one’s own action. Metaphysical egoism refuses to acknowledge justification for existence.
40 Childe Harold. 54. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
41 Childe Harold. 69. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
42 Scenes at Jungfrau Summit are destructive. Natural destruction is caused by time, old age, the destruction of natural elements: avalanches and mountains, even mist become symbols of destruction and punishment. Place of self-destruction. In this place he wants to be a plunging suicide. It is a plunge of society, of despair, in contrast to the hunter’s sympathy. The hunter kills animals by nature, the hunter destroys by nature, and here, he is a rescuer. Manfred is an aristocrat, proud, free, devoted to study of mystery, alchemy and the obscure, who has never harmed anyone, yet here, he becomes a killer of self. Mixed identity between Hunter and Manfred. Despite all his knowledge, he has lost the pathway. Yet, Hunter reassures him that “we’ll find something like a pathway, which the torrent/hath washed since winter.’ Memorable lines. An analogy of Manfred. The same torrent of gloomy sentiments that washed Manfred’s pathway since his own winter.
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