Ancsel Éva: Éthos, knowing, history (Budapest, 1996)
Part I - Chapter One. On the strength and weakness of éthos
experience is the only one that, even though it is only a part, it still signifies the whole. “Die unruhigen, störenden Lebenerscheinungen in der Tragödie eine erhabene methaphysische Notwendigkeit gewinnen”.20 My substantive objection is directed precisely against this; against the “consecrating” recasting of the disquietingly hurtful phenomena of life. Maybe, the phenomena of everyday life are not grand enough to merit a place in tragedies. However, it is worth nothing if the “elevating” effect rather means passing by proudly or getting beyond good and evil, and beyond the world of the socalled “ordinary” life in general. This can hardly be called catharsis. This is a more complex catharsis, with a more complicatedly negative direction than that which Lukacs speaks of when writing about the danger that the cathartic effect can suddenly turn into pure moral negativity, furnishing a basis for the postulation of bad maxims. The receiver’s experience is also negative if the distorted “private catharsis” provided by art excuses the individual from changing his life. In this case, what it is all about is not merely the postulation of bad maxims, but that art as collective self-consciousness and collective self-conscience turns into its reverse: the “look-out tower” called the height of mankind becomes residence of private conceit of those whose aim is not to excel in but to escape from, to put it roughly, the hated everyday life. Art should not assist this “catharsis vegetating on a good middle-class diet”.21 The work of art which does assist this sins against its own purpose, even if individuals with distorted needs are capable of utilizing every work of art as means of the attitude described above. And in my view this marks out the deviding lines between the world—like works of art valuable to the core, and decadence. Decadent works are characterized precisely by their justifying a 20 Ibid., I, 1, p. 52. 21 József Attila válogatott levelezése (Attila József, Selected Correspondence), Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1976, p. 43. 26