Promethian Aspirations

Reflecting on our humanities lecture on Readings in German Literature, I realize one thing. All the ‘pseud’ writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century share a lot of common attributes: A tryst with ‘suicide’ which they however manage to circumvent by penning down their feelings (‘Purging your feelings through the pen is the motif of literature’ as the professor put it), early ‘romanticist’ leanings, an insatiable desire to rebel (fueled by the circumstances of youth that seem to be too common between these people which makes it almost hard to believe that this was not a coincidence’) ,a phase of illness at some point of life that is almost inevitably a transitionary phase and of course numerous affairs with the most beautiful creatures on earth.

Digressing from here, there’s one thing I would like to mention: There was an interesting question raised in class that I was pondering during the course of the day: What is the fundamental source of this phenomenon of the creation of the ‘rebel’ in the human psyche? My argument is there’s this seed of conflict of morals or values in the rebel that is probably the purest embodiment of the principles of his rebellion. But as his ideas take a more concrete shape, the imposition of the ego or the self corrupts the ideals that form the basis of his metamorphosis. In other words, what spurs this whole concept of rebellion is the trace of impurity in the crystallization of ideas in previous such endeavors that have led to the establishment of a certain ‘state’. Every rebel passes through a phase of ‘anarchy’ where he is first left confused and distraught and then slowly begins to see light at the end of the tunnel, where his ideas for change nucleate. At this stage of consciousness, his ideas are pristine and untouched by ‘human’ influence. By passing through the grey phase, he can now make a distinction between the black and the white. But as every such rebel has to come down to the degenerate level of human existence to advocate and exemplify the effectiveness of his principles to the society, the ‘human’ contact often unknowingly imposes itself on these ideals to pollute them. If this could be avoided, then the utopia envisaged by the Marxist philosophers would not be far from achievement. So it’s a vicious circle as Ogden Nash would call it: Rebels motivate rebellion. Is this hard to understand? No, it isn’t.