Page 24 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
Ì The Eternal Attic Junta: Homer, Ancient and Modern Philosophers and Tragedians to Hume.
Let’s be Real! Sympathy! Self-Esteem! Where? In what Odeon? But tragedy arouses pity!
Sympathy as moral’s prime mover? Laughter! How we wish it were so! But all we have is treachery, petty jealousies, deceit, and vanity. Why would Homer have deemed the Erinyes, those chthonic furies and spiteful death spirits, surely the same that haunted Dostoevsky’s Man in the Underground, whom, ironically, yes, ironically, Homer baptized as the “the kindly ones,” to stand for the natural principle of blood feud? Yes, natural I say, do you hear?
O these natural avengers of bloodguilt! O how shameful, shameful, but so true, so true! Apollo could only purify the polluted man, murderer and king of μιασμα, a social outcast! All because of his hubris, yes, hubris! Indeed! His transgression. Let’s applaud our most ancient heritage, the most natural reciprocity laws, yes; these are indeed the truest mirrors of human nature and reality! The rest is to wear the perpetual mask of discontent!
Is it in this light that we are to see ancient Greece’s most reciprocal, and natural of ethical maxims? O Yes, dear citizen of the most flourishing and noblest empire, yes, you, who by nature love your friends and hate your enemies! O most true of heroic principles of Φιλια and εκθρια!
Hume, Hume, how does this stand with you? You who loves literature? Can thou say that order and civilization has improved human nature? Before you answer, remember this above all! To thine own self be true! And it must follow, as the night the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man!79
O Rousseau. Rousseau. Where are you now?
I think Hume needs to ask: “Is something good because we favor it or do we favor it because it is good?80
No! What Hume needs to ask is whether there are any natural values at all! Have you forgotten? “From now on all things of life are so ordered that the priest is everywhere indispensable...at all the natural events of life... there appears the holy parasite to denaturalize them – in his language, to sanctify them... For one must grasp this: every
79 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
80 Plato. Complete Works. Euthrypro. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
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