Page 33 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV
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gaze, they become Masters of negative Beauty and Death, denying Plato’s and Rousseau’s ways.
Plato’s salvation was a genuine ascent out of the den of false eidolons posing as the Form of Beauty: the terrible, imperfect beauties cast in Hitler’s Malefic Theatre. Whatever Hitler thought the Form of Beauty was, he debased it, turning it into a terrible beauty bound to blindly oppress 3⁄4 a madness and infatuation 3⁄4 as bewildering as ἄτη, for which Ilium, and Nazi Germany were destined to fall. Troy falls for Lady Helen’s sake, and for the irrational obduracy of Paris and the incompetence of King Priam. They descend to a festival of cruelty, just as Hitler descends to his carnival of cruelty. King Priam and Paris preserve the terrible sublime beauty of lovely-haired Helen, at Troy’s scorching cost, just as Hitler preserves the dreadfully sublime gaze of golden-haired Margareta, at Europe’s cost: the crematoria, and a dark memory that shall never perish in the Fall of the Western humanism, and its irreparable carnage.
What argument shall defend that Paris, or Hitler, certainly, not Hecuba’s, that humanity genuinely ascended in Diotima’s dulcet ladder towards a grander sphere of being, the wondrous Form of Beauty itself by paying heed, and loving the genuine Form of Beauty itself, wondrous in sublimity, in their cult of extremisms? A sunflower’s? Instead, in a perverse and twisted way, humanity descended into another abyss in ignorance of the intrinsic Good, the very dangers Rousseau, too, perceived. Diotima’s lovely ladder collapsed, and a chasm, beneath Lady Beauty’s terrible sublime gaze, opened up the chthonian. The imposture of Lady Beauty is the imposture of Kafka’s The Trial’s Lady Justice, a Huntress, whose terrible gaze is a bellicose feastism, carnavalism and houndism.
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