Page 27 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
poor lad to die, wound festered, in an abandoned Lemnos for ten years because he could be no longer of any use to them. This instance and many others are enough to refute Hume’s theory. There is something atrocious about reducing a human being to utility, to being disposable and a mere cog in the wheel.
True. He was only rescued, years later, because he was to be useful in Little Troy, thus bringing joy to all the warriors. Yet he did not avenge.
Let’s not forget that it took the moral decency and ingenuity, remember, of an Aeschylus in his fabled Oresteia, and what plays those were, O the good old Golden days of the Dionysia, for how he choked up his spectators! Do you remember how he strangled each one of his spectators with this most unnatural of new notions, and this, pay heed, all of you, was achieved purely by intellectual characterization and argument. Yes, this most ephemeral of notions that the Aeropagus instilled, that revenge is not restorative and that it creates more hatred and more violence, causing havoc. Did you hear about it? The shocked spectators puzzled over how could this be when eye-for-and-eye and tooth-for-a- tooth, since that most ancient of law codes, Hammurabi, pleased them to no end boasting such utility as healing and restorative powers from the felicity of sweet revenge, creating a perfect balance in their lives! Well, of course, the spectators at the end where suspect.
But how could they not be? All they had known, outside of the Aeropagus was a hideous reality.
Are you thinking of the fabled words that gained Silenus his release?
Precisely. “O King Midas, the best thing is not to be born at all, and the next best is to die as soon as possible!”
All too pessimistic, so fatalist, but so loved by Schopenhauer and my mother, too, whose fondness for it was taught by darkness:
“O baleful night [that] gave birth to resentment and affliction, deceit and intimacy and accursed old age. How strife bore painful toil, neglect, starvation, and tearful pain, battles, combats, bloodshed and slaughter, quarrels, lies, pretences and arguments, disorder, disaster, neighbors to each other, and Oath who ost harms men on earth, when someone knowingly swears false.”88
88 Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Trans. M.L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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