Page 16 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

sake. Indeed, Paris and King Priam war to preserve what Menelaus and Hitler yearn to recover: lovely-haired Helen of Argos and golden-haired Margareta of Germany, respectively.
Helen and Margareta’s terrible sublime beauties bewilder. They seduce humankind not to a luminous ascent towards bliss, but to a dark descent towards an abyss. Thus led astray, humankind plummets into Nietzsche’s tragic realm of whim, will, and woe.23 Paris’ attraction to Helen’s beautiful body, and Hitler’s feverish adoration of his ideological Margareta, his Romantic German and Grecian ideal 3⁄4 the latter as emblem of Plato’s form of Beauty itself 3⁄4 nullifies Diotima’s highest mysteries. Neither Paris, nor Hitler, nor humanity ascends to Diotima’s dulcet ladder towards a grander sphere of being, the wondrous Form of Beauty itself by paying heed, and loving beautiful bodies first. Instead, they descend to a pit. Diotima’s lovely ladder collapses, just as time and space, and a chasm, beneath Lady Beauty’s sublime dreadful gaze, opens up into chthonian darkness: the infrahuman. Lady Beauty’s dual gaze is a bellicose threat. To recklessly pursue her aesthetic physical and ideological sublimity leads to the fatal consequences of extremisms.
Essay. Of the manifold forms of irresistible beauty ascribed to Helen in post-Homeric Grecian texts and fragments, erotic or Aphrodisiac (Berlin Papyrus 219), divine
23 “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.
· 16 ·