Page 30 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
I do! Spectators’ approbation and disapprobation, compassion and sympathy, I see, but fear?
Where is Kierkegaard?
Still writing Victor Eremite.
Quiet! Quiet! Let’s not digress. As I was saying, the excitement of these sentiments, pity and fear, purgates or catharts100 them.
Really? We doubt this in the 20th Century! In tragedy, spectators can never cathart. Let it suffice to ask whether the Jews or the world could ever cathart after the horrid spectacle of the holocaust.
“To write a poem after Auschwitz” was seen as “barbaric.”101
After the failure of the humanities, “we had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the "tabula rasa." At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.”102
“The generation I belong to was born into a world divested of supports for those with a heart as well as a brain. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no stability in the everyday sphere, and no political tranquility. We were born right into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquietude. Inebriated with external formulas and abstract processes of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith for their Biblical criticism...reducing the gospels and the earlier sacred writings to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Inebriated with a hazy notion they called positivism, these generations criticized all morality and scrutinized all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was certainty of none of them and grief over there being no certainty. A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a political victim of its own chaos, and so it was that we
100 Aristotle. Ibid. On katharsis. Do see 1449 b 27 in Aristotle’s Poetics.
101 Adorno, Theodore. Jay, M. The Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1973) by M Jay, p. 279.
102 Tzara, Tristan. Dadaism’s Manifesto. 1918. Motherwell, Robert. The Dada painters and poets; an anthology. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951.
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