Page 33 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

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the knight of faith renounces the universal to express the individual. Or what amouts to the same: ‘the tragic hero does not know the terrible responsibility of solitude.”109
Ì Max Scheler to Hume. Your theory is good, but it has a minor glitch. All your cheerful and benevolent characters are tragic too. Their virtue and visions usually transcend the limits of common vision. Hence, they cannot be content and satisfied.110
Ì Hume to everyone. I understand that morality cannot reject tragedy’s spectacle. If morality is to reject tragedy, then we are back, once again, to Platonism. Perhaps we need to work out what makes us deliberate one way as opposed to another. I still think that partiality can be more dangerous than egoism. But we are so sensitive to the evaluation of others; we are mirrors of one another.
Ì Byron to Hume.
Nonsense, Hume! Sheer nonsense! You are an elitist and far too conservative! In thy universe my beloved Manfred could not exist! Nor my Childe Harold! Nor any of my radical liberators of men. My precious social misfits, self-exiles and non-conformists “most unfit to herd with Man...untaught to submit thoughts to spirits against whom their own rebel...” who “proud though in desolation... find a life within themselves, to breathe without mankind.”111 Why dare thou speak to us of a pleasing me-they mirror when there is evidence to the contrary? Preposterous! Haven’t thou noticed that the Looking Glass is shattered? Cans’t not thou see the real nature of the human breast?
“Even as a broken Mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies 3⁄4 and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same 3⁄4 and still the more, the more it breaks; And thus the heart will do which not forsakes, Living in shattered guise; and still, and cold,
And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without is old,
Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.”
(Childe Harold, Canto III, XXXIII)
109 Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.
110 Max Scheler. This is akin to Wolf’s argument on Moral Saints, particularly the Rational Saint.
111 Byron. Childe Harold. Canto III. XII. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Byron. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
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