Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> > On the assumption of "a thorough going relativity of values and ideals"
> > there can be no rational basis for preferring tolerance to sadistic
> > domination.
> >
>
> But here's the trap: the dominator always justifies domination by
> pointing out his superior morals/values/norms. So in fact domination
> is in fact imbricated with the notion that values can be hierarchically
> arranged in a nonrelativistic way. Sadistic domination is not
> (typically) a product of the "thorough going relativity of values".
>
I think Ted disagrees with me on Plato, but this has always seemed to me to be the central thrust of the _Republic_, and that Thrasymachus (perverted by Plato as his argument is) stands in that book as the defender of democracy.
There is an overwhelming human consensus against "sadistic domination," and that shared perception can be one of the unifying principles of progressive politics or even revolution.
It still seems to me, also, that unless there is a deity to adjudicate, praise and blame, acceptance and revulsion) can only emerge from a process of historic struggle.
So he [Priam] spoke, and stirred in the other a passion of grieving for his own father. He took the oldman's hand and pushed him gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. ..... he rose from his chair, and took the old man by the hand, and set him on his feet again, in pity for the grey head and the grey beard. . . .
(Iliad, Lattimore, 24: 507-16)
Then looking darkly at him spoke the swift-footed Achilleus: 'No longer stir me up, old sir. I myself am minded to give Hektor back to you. A messenger came to me from Zeus, my mother, she who bore me, the daughter of the sea's ancient. I know you, Priam, in my heart, and it does not escape me that some god led you to the running ships of the Achaians.
(24:559-64)
. . . .Therefore you must not further make my spirit move in my sorrows, for fear, old sir, I might not let you alone in my shelter, suppliant as you are; and be guilty before the god's orders.'
He spoke, and the old man was frightened and did as he told him.
(24: 568-71)
This is the same man (Achilleus) who, some hundreds of lines earlier, in the midst of a great slaughter, had paused to say to one of his victims:
So the glorious son of Priam addressed him, speaking in supplication, but heard in turn the voice without pity: 'Poor fool, no longer speak to me of ransom, nor argue it. In the time before Patroklos came to the day of his destiny then it was the way of my heart's choice to be sparing of the Trojans, and many I took alive and disposed of them. Now there is not one who can escape death, if the gods send him against my hands in front of Ilion, not one of all the Trojans and beyond others the children of Priam. So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it? Patroklos also is dead, who was better by far than you are. Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal? Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny, and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the bowstring.'
So he spoke, and in the other the knees and the inward heart went slack. He let go of the spear and sat back, spreading wide both hands; but Achilleus drawing his sharp sword struck him beside the neck at the collar-bone, and the double edged sword plunged full length inside. He dropped to the ground, face-downward, and lay at length, and the black blood flowed, and the ground was soaked with it. Achilleus caught him by the foot and slung him into the river. . . .
(21: 97-120)
Achilleus (and through him Homer's listeners) discovers that the death of an enemy can be a tragedy. Nominally Achilleus is 'merely' obeying an arbitrary order from the 'gods.' But the gods did not instruct him in his noting of the precise limits of this knew 'understanding':
Therefore you must not further make my spirit move in my sorrows, for fear, old sir, I might not let you alone in my shelter,
This is self knowledge through struggle internal and external, and self-knowledge expressed in the terms of both worlds, before and after the discovery of tragedy.
I do not see how the (arbitrary) assertion that a shared acceptance is "absolute" (or whatever the opposite term to "relative" is) establishes that acceptance any more fully than does seeing it as the achievement through struggle of unity around it, a unity _relative_ to the social relations within which it grows.
Carrol