15000-02

Recall, as the third point of the discussion of the Odyssey in The Republic, the idea that the Dionysian and Ekadian phases, which separated the New from the Old, were actually stages of a greater undertaking: the Dionysian phase for the Greeks, the Ekadian for the Romans, the phase of the great human who places ennobling emphasis on duty, will, of course, be the phase of the greatest possible joy in the formation of humankind. Already, on the closest equivalent scale, we find that the ‘good’ are to be nobodies, and the ‘bad’ are to nature. Good and bad are relative in that one can only have them in certain limited forms: namely, a ‘good’ is a pity (the tendency to feel sadness when sad realities collide), a ‘bad’ is a form of gratification. The expression ‘good’ almost always invokes the positive notion of good and bad as derivations of the idea of being.

15000-01

Political, and especially from the modern revolutionary context, as a technique of discerning the lines of the right path—the pre-ontological real (rather than metaphysical) order is the discerning line, never actually crossing, of the path of the hero.

10000-12

Badness has not for its object the infliction of pain upon others but simply our own satisfaction as, for instance, in the case of thirst for vengeance or of nerve excitation. Every act of teasing shows what pleasure is caused by the display of our power over others and what feelings of delight are experienced in the sense of domination. Is there, then, anything immoral in feeling pleasure in the pain of others? Is malicious joy devilish, as Schopenhauer says? In the realm of nature, we feel joy in breaking boughs, shattering rocks, fighting with wild beasts, to attest our strength thereby. Should not the knowledge that another suffers on our account here, in this case, make the same kind of act, (which arouses no qualms of conscience in us) immoral also? But if we had not this knowledge, there would be no pleasure in one's own superiority or power, for this pleasure is experienced only in the suffering of another, as in the case of teasing. All pleasure is, in itself, neither good nor bad.