Page 15 - GALIET DIONYSUS´RETURN: Good and Evil Dithyrambs IV

in the best interest of their subjects, we think of Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment: how it propels freedom to shift from master to slave, who in reclaiming his freedom, becomes master. This is perhaps the same ressentiment that the Romantics feel towards their all-too-proper and frigid antagonists and predecessors: the neo-classicists. Therefore, every new movement, whether political or literary, is bound, in a Hegelian fashion, to rebel, to overcome and to transcend the inherited values of the past; particularly since justice’s subjectivity is difficult for humanity to embrace, that is, justice as defined by Socrates: “right living,” “dutiful service to others,” and doing that which is “appropriate.”
Presumably, right living for Socrates consists of doing only the highest good, yet the highest good 3⁄4 a subjectivity pretending objectivity 3⁄4 has historically led to its own vicissitudes of mass murder to defend its own ‘just’ cause, its glorious emblem, as defined primarily by “divine” self-serving, monumental ecclesiastical narratives. The third alternative to justice becomes, undoubtedly, Dionysian and Romantic in character: Glaucon argues that justice is neither a virtue nor injustice a vice.
Enter Marquis de Sade, Camus’ thunder of vice and Socrates’ shivering ice, who enslaved to his ravishing, uncensored passions and desires, represents the return of Dionysus, not its origin. Sade, as Depraved King of Debauchery and “maximum destruction,”22 revives Dionysus from an old ideology: “a
22 Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1991.
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