Page 28 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
Did she forget the ambrosia of Apollo’s maxim, “know thyself and you shall know the gods?”
Who can attain that? In what world? Who can truly claim to know himself? Are you out of your mind?
Ì Nietzsche’s last moral breath. He is! To all of you, pretenders of knowledge, “o how unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and for a good reason... each is furthest from himself.”89 So, please! To you and to those English psychologists of morals and ‘gloomy idealists,’90 what could be more natural than this sentiment of unity and utility... these unegoistic actions praised and called good from the perspective of spectators...” Unity did I hear? What unity?
Ì Hume on Unity. Doesn’t it smack of idealism’s dove? Where is his serpent and wolf? Has anyone ever seen unity in a hero? Aren’t there just too many incidents in a man’s life to be reduced to unity? Aren’t there too many identities, the self and the other, yes, this existential selfing and othering, O Borges and his other I! “My life is a kind of fugue, and a falling away and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.”91 Even Aristotle knew this! It was the error of poets to think that Herakles was indeed one man!92
ÌAristotle to Hume. That’s enough, boys, that’s enough! Never forget that the spectacle of a bad man from adversity to prosperity, is ‘alien to the spirit of tragedy.’ Thus, it does not satisfy moral sense.93 And how, may I ask, is this pity or ελεος aroused? Only from a sense of misfortune.94
But this is what I say!
Yes, but you have forgotten how our lives are tragic by nature: not benevolent, not sympathetic! There is no human being, not one, that does not experience the tension between necessity and liberty
89 Nietzsche. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Douglas Smith. USA: Oxford University Press, 1996. Preface.
90 Nietzsche. First Treatise. Genealogy of Morals. 9.
91 Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. “Borges and I” New York, USA: The Penguin Group. Viking. 1998. 324
92 Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 8. There is a unity of Plot and Unity of Hero.
93 Aristotle. Ibid. 18 65
94 Aristotle. Ibid. 8
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