Page 29 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
ÌSchelling to Hume. Or the ideal and the real!95
Whose character doesn’t weather and becomes deformed by it. Why, as you say, the
masses do not like dejected Spirits? Why?
But did you not see Whitman’s angelic semblance in his last years? Wasn’t that the face of sheer beauty?
Pythagoras would agree.
Indeed, he seems to have overcome all his tensions, perhaps he had grasped Hegel like no one else. Surely, he must have experienced the Absolute Idea.
ÌSoler to Hume. I am with Schelling! This tension, this contradiction! As soon as we enter reality, the ideal has an inner tragic conflict.96
ÌHegel to Hume. I disagree, Hume, I disagree! Tragedy! Tragedy! What type of tension is it? For me, it is the struggle between eternal justice and the contingent and particular actions of men. I resolve this tension with Platonism. Remember the Theatetus? The only way to end the tragic conflict is to infuse the universal in the particular.
ÌJohannes Volkelt to Hegel and Hume. No, Hegel! It goes further, further than that! It is psychological-analytical. There is projection or endopathy.97
ÌAristotle to Everyone.
Let’s study my enquiry! After all, I lived in the Golden Age of Classicism and sat in many a play! O the theater! Indeed, on this, my authority says that tragedy “imitates a serious action that is complete and whole;”98 hence, it cannot exist without action. It is the actions that arouse pity and fear.99 Hume does understand this, in some sense.
95 Schelling. He adds, to the Greek notion of tragedy, the idea of tension between the ideal to the real.
96 Solger. Lecturas sobre Estética. 1829. Germany: K.W.L. Heyse, 1829.
97 Volkelt, Johannes. La Estética de lo Trágico. Aesthetik des Tragischen, 1897: 2nd Edition, 1906, 4th Edition, 1923.
98 Aristotle. Poetics. 1450-15
99 Aristotle. Ibid. 1450b 30
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