The struggle of good against evil, weaknesses of good
15
Jul
The evil in Augustine of Hippo in book VII of the Confessions, is the absence of
good, just as the entire universe is ordered, although now we discover a universe with energy and dark mass, black holes, semi-new and galaxies disappearing and appearing, and many laws new in astrophysics, even so, there is a hierarchy, where some things stand out from others, and that is what Augustine drew attention to, and there was already in Augustine the question of free will.
But a tough lesson even for religious like Augustine, who abandoned the Manichean philosophy, is the struggle between good and evil, and this still dominates part of the philosophical dualism, where being inferior is not being evil, there are inferior good things and things more superiors, so the important thing is the loss of sense of what is good or bad, what Hanna Arendt called “The banality of evil” (Companhia das Letras, 1999), so someone can do something “inferior” without being “evil ”.
Those who want to give life pure delight, or who claim that it makes sense in a life well lived if we are “productive” and “active”, inspired by myths like a superior IQ or fortuitous inheritance, fortune in the Greek sense is different, even if this is done by oppressive means, where arguably the racial argument is the most disgusting of all, but where do these myths come from.
One of the great myths that has arisen since antiquity is Odyssey of Odyssey and Iliad (chants VIII of Odyssey and IX of Iliad), which means a symbol of man’s ability to overcome adversity, although there is the character Odysseus (the Greek name of Ulysses), would be born in Ithaca, son of King Laerte, who reigned in Anticléia.
Although James Joyce’s Ulysses, written from 1914 to 1921, speaks of a character Leopold Blum, considered by the author to be a modern man who is both strong and weak, cautious and rash, hero and coward, in an attempt to create a human being representative of humanity, however, is actually the modern lonely hero, an exquisite Don Quixote.
The contextualization of the Greek epic hero and the modern “hero” are, however, different, so to read Ulysses by Joyce it is necessary almost a script, which even some were made.
It was the psychologist Carl Yung who called attention to the “monologue” aspect of Joyce’s Ulysses, although he looks like an “ordinary” man, he is a single man and his “struggle”, warned Yung: “What is so scary about Ulysses it is the fact that, behind a thousand veils, nothing is hidden; of being neither turned to the mind nor to the world, but, as cold as the moon seen from the cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being and decay to take its course ”, this is the modern myth.
The heroes who appeared in the pandemic are not heroes of “war” or immortal myths, they are not immune to the pandemic themselves and live with fear, and even family isolation, what they should think about is the life worth living. for everyone, for the planet and for health.
JUNG, Carl Gustav. Ulysses: A Monologue, UK: Haskel House, 1977.
