Page 21 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV
P. 21
it is best to let her depart Ilium. So immeasurably powerful is Helen’s negative beauty 3⁄4 emblem of the terrible sublime 3⁄4 that she is capable of launching a thousand ships, and burning the walls of Ilion, as Marlowe sings in his eloquent verse.64
Whereas Helen’s terrible physical beauty wrecks Troy, Margareta’s ideological terrible beauty wrecks Europe. Margareta’s classical and romantic ideological beauty seduced Nazism, not to the genuine, luminous ascent towards Rousseau’s genuine common good that seeks not to harm, or the really real beautiful Form of Beauty of Diotima’s and Plato’s sublime ideal of the Good, but to an abysmal descent, returning Europe to Bacchus’ double seeing: the unscrupulous distortion of Diotima’s positive, Beautiful Beauty. Thus, led astray, humanism tragically plummeted to Nietzsche’s whim, will, and woe.65 The omnipotent despot was no longer Yahweh, nor K’s prosecutor, but double-seeing Dionysus and his supporting actors, the Nazi Holocaust party members, who posed as pseudo-philosopher kings.
Just as Job and Joseph K were unjustly accused, the Form of Beauty and the genuine Philosopher King were unjustly persecuted for Europe’s plummeting fall. In time, this injustice nullified Diotima’s lofty mysteries, Plato’s and Milton’s meritocracies, and the inculcation of perennial classical virtues necessary to sustain society.66
64 Marlowe, Christopher. Dr. Faustus. New York: W.W.W. Norton, 2004. 99- 118
65 “Whim, will, and woe” are the English translations of the German “Wahn, Wille, Wehe.” Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy, posits that these are the mothers of tragedy, that is, by means of them we descend to the Dionysian. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Edmund Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Chapter 20. 75b.
66 To Milton, “untrained minds are, therefore, naturally vicious, permitting wretched rulers. When human beings are irrational, they can neither discern good from evil, nor a good King from a tyrant King and justice flees away; it becomes
21
