Unit 9

English 201:    Masterpieces of Western Literature

Desire/libido: Libido is the psychic energy that impels our life.  It is first manifest in the id or unconscious where it is ambivalent in regard to any object.  That means that what it loves can suddenly switch polarities to become precisely what it hates.  It also works the other way around.  How about that girl/boy you professed to "hate" in junior high?  What is important about libido is intensity, not polarity.
     Remember that reason & logic are features of the ego, which is a tertiary structure, resulting from the tension between the 2 earlier & more fundamental psychic (temporal) structures of the super-ego (Oedipal displacement) & the id (dreams).  Aeschylus' characters trace or follow this libidinal pattern:

• Desire conjures an object whose name is Beauty.
• Desire becomes the will-to-power.  The project is to possess Beauty: I would give my life, "only let me lie beside the pale-golden one [Love/Aphrodite]!" (ODY 8.358).
• Dukkha/disappointment: time cannot be stopped, the object cannot be possessed.  The value (beauty) of the object was ascribed or projected.  It is an illusion or infatuation.  It is a subjective experience, not an empirically objective "thing."  The id isn't capable of such understanding.  What it "knows" is rage & fury when laughter's darling dances away; tantalizingly, infuriatingly just beyond reach.
• Ying mutates to yang; gentleness becomes aggression; cooing changes to bellowing.  Love becomes hate; Beauty morphs into Ares.  Now, AK says, I would give my life, if only I can annihilate you!  "Would god my passion drove me to slaughter you & eat you raw"! (Iliad 22.412).
• Heaven becomes hell.  Innocent Iphigeneia becomes Helen.  We started out in reverence to cherish innocence & end trampling down the fragile, the lovely.  We hoped to nurture life & end up with a corpse in our arms?  What happened?

• We are serene, floating in the warm sea of logos.
• We stumble on outrage (hubris).
• We burn with righteousness & justice.
• We lynch the outrage.
• We taste ashes.  Instead of feeling the anticipated pride in establishing justice, we feel guilt.  What went wrong?

Leadership: Tragic drama offers negative moral instruction.  Do we want -- or can we even survive -- leaders like AG, KLY, or Aegisthus?  When they are not simply narcissists, they believe that they are the instruments of destiny or that they are doing God's will that always requires someone's blood; the blood of innocence (Iphegeneia).  Why is it so difficult to find a leader that we will be happy with?  Because 2 area of the psyche are in conflict.  We want what we want.  The id is fickle; it is ambivalent.  What we want morphs into what we don't want, what we can no longer stand.  Libido in the id can never find stability, permanence, or even compromise.  Leaders are simply movie stars or fashion models to be replaced by whimsy.  They also operate in the world of objective power, the world of the super-ego.  We don't desire a saint so much as need an able general, a prudent economist, a decisive judge -- even if we aren't charmed by the person.  Objective standards are preferable to the emotional depth of AG, KLY, or Aegisthus.  Thus the play ends in celebrating an institution rather than a personality.  This promises, ultimately, something like the separation of church & state.  We will accept a state that is functional in supporting private life.  We do not require it to be virtuous but to be just.  Justice is much easier to satisfy, as the Furies illustrate when they say:
(Eum) 313    Hold out your hands,  if they are clean
                   no fury of ours will stalk you
                   you will go through life unscathed.

Virtue aspires to a higher standard than not to be indicted for a crime.  Virtues are many & the place to pursue them is private life, which ceases to be private when your demands encroach on your fellow citizens.

Blood vs. Oath: The primal blood relationship is parent-child.  We recognize (even if we do not always condone) that many standards for moral behavior are suspended when our son or mother is attacked.  Because we love them, we indulge or overlook their defects.  In the context of the family this does not present difficult social problems.  Some implicit form of matriarchy finds stability, as in the extend family structure of India.  Conflicts quickly arise when many families share the same civic space.  By 500 bce Athens is a city of 40,000 people.  If justice is left to families, we get something like the Mafia where justice becomes one vendetta after another, prompting Apollo to say to the Furies in disgust:
(Eum) 183    Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out,
                    where Justice & bloody slaughter are the same

An encampment, a hamlet or village may be ruled by a patron or a family without problems.  When a city is the possession of a family, it is not really a city.  It is a police state or a tyranny.  The civic bond is not blood (blood relatives), but oaths (commitment, devotion, dedication).  The model for the bond of citizenship is marriage when 2 strangers mutually vow to cherish each other.  Such a bond produces blood relations & so we avoid asking which relationship is more fundamental.  In the context of nurturing a city, we must ask this question & we must answer in only one way, recognizing that the oath relationship nurtures civic friendship.  Apollo decrees:
(Eum) 215    Marriage of man & wife is Fate itself,
                    stronger than oaths, & Justice guards its life.

In the foxhole, I am indifferent to your color, your family, & even to your gender.  The only thing that counts is whether we are comrades together who defend each other & our fellow citizens.

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