“Come on pretty boy
Can't you show
me nothing but surrender”
Economists call it the Ultimate Game. James Surowiecki gives
a good description of it:
“Take two people. Give them a hundred dollars to split. One person (the
proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (fifty-fifty,
seventy-thirty, or whatever) and makes the other person a take-it-or-leave-it
offer. If he accepts the deal, both players get their share of the money. If he
rejects it, both players walk away empty-handed.
The rational thing for the second person to do is to accept the offer, whatever
it is, since even one dollar is better than nothing. But in practice this
rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers are almost always rejected. Apparently,
people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too
much. Other experiments illustrate the same idea. Essentially, people are
willing to pay to punish those they think are free-riding or acting unfairly,
even when doing so brings them no material benefits.”
The Ultimate Game has been known since the beginning of civilization. Among
other things, the Iliad might be considered to be a poem about the Ultimate
Game. Naturally, it is presided over by a divinity, in this case, the goddess
Nemesis.
It is curiously stirring that Herder turned to Nemesis-Adrastea in 1787, two
years before the French Revolution (of which he was, at the beginning, an
ardent supporter – and continued, even after the Terror, to feel was a
necessary and ultimately good thing), at the very peak of the culture of
enlightened hedonism.
Classicists today still find Nemesis a puzzling figure. She was a double
goddess, or a goddess with two aspects. Herder’s essay on Nemesis is an attempt
to understand this mystery – and to understand it on behalf of bright Nemesis,
the fair goddess, mother of Helen.
The psycho-social heart of his essay is about happiness and indifference. He
tries to understand how one deals with another’s happiness and unhappiness. In
particular, why is it that “we sympathize more immediately and strongly with
the unhappy than the happy”?
“And so the lightest kind of Nemesis was born, that is actually not envy, not
jealousy, but a kind of indifference, that allows us no pleasing fusion with
another. By raw spirits this breaks out in cold repulsion [Unwillen]; and the
more the other shows off his happiness, the less he understands how to put a
pleasing disguise over his advantages, the more he arouses, when not envy, yet
repulsion against himself. For even those who would grant him his happiness,
become indignant over the fact that he doesn’t enjoy it more wisely and know
how to be measured in his enjoyment. This Nemesis lies in all hearts; it was
even, as the Greek idioms show, the first that the language and mythology
observed. It is, when it wildly breaks out, a daughter of the night, the
companion of quarrels, hatred and schadenfreude; in brief, the Nemesis, who
Hesiod describes in his Theogony as an evil Goddess. In noble spirits on the
other hand, just this cold observation of the ethos of others in their happier
hours preserves its pure essnce, and since it mixes neither with pain [Leide]
or with pity [Mitleiden], it thus becomes the sharpest point in their scale of
judgment. This is the good Nemesis, that looks on, cold and indifferent; but it
also must be assuaged or reconciled, then it is an incorruptible judge of
virtue and truth.
And how does one most honorable reconcile it? No otherwise than that one makes
oneself the observer of one’s happiness and ethos; look there, the goddess with
the measuring rod and bridle, who drives away black envy. She drives it away
since she hats all passionate presumption and binds the presumptions of men
with her bridle; and in this way alone does the good Nemesis defeat the evil
one.” [141]
His biographer, Haym, writing in the 1880s, calls this essay an “archaeology of
antiquity”. As LI has already pointed out, the appearance of an essay on
Nemesis in the time period that saw the first fine extension of happiness from
a mere passing feeling to both a norm concerning one’s total life and a norm
concerning the political and economic arrangements of the social life already
signals a certain dissent. This is Haym’s judgment:
“There is nothing so distinctive as the fact that just at this time, in the
80s, Herder was mightily grasped by this symbol. It is the symbol for the
beautiful equilibrium into which with his being he committed his activity and
art as a writer. This symbol could not have been predicted by the writing of
his earlier period. After the thrusting and enthusiasm, the numerous incidents
that lacked measure and that stepped over the line, in which his views, his
appearance, his ambitious striving, his unbridled hate and love itself, his
style, the whole way of being and art in which he moved, he was now at the
point of recognizing the mean, adherence to noble forms, submission to
necessity, to decorum, like Goethe, and expressed this with the appropriate
words, as Goethe did with other words. He had to pay homage to Nemesis after
his Sturm und Drang period had passed as Goethe had already, after traveling
through Switzerland in 1779, wanted to erect an altar to Fortuna, Genius and
Terminus.” (329)
The realistic
narratives of the great novelists of the 19th century are all
written under the sign of Nemesis, which is a mark of their insight into the myth
of realism – which floats within our uncertain emotional vocabularies.
Nemesis, I
feel sure, will outlast us.
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