Desire, Beauty, Homer and the Revolution

A few nights ago, I read this passage by Montaigne:

I find, after all, that Love is nothing else but the thirst of enjoying the object desired, or Venus any other thing than the pleasure of discharging one’s vessels, just as the pleasure nature gives in discharging other parts, that either by immoderation or indiscretion become vicious. According to Socrates, love is the appetite of generation by the mediation of beauty.

It stroke me as a particular irony that we are so capable of relativise and abstract but when it comes to beauty. We can understand that sexual attraction depends from our need “of discharging our vessels”, and still we drape our desire in beauty. We even see the stars as the décor of the stage whereupon we perform our dramas. We know that our place in the Universe is so small and irrelevant, and there are countless worlds, each maybe generating its own forms of life. Yet we cannot fail to admire the beauty of a human body, and love, etc.

For some reasons, this passage by Montaigne reminded me of a famous quote by Marx from the introduction to the Grundrisse:

From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?
But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naive’, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?

Clearly, the scientific socialist is puzzled. He, who described slavery as the material presupposition of Greek freedom and ethicity, helplessly acknowledges that only the deeds of the aristocratic Achilles are for him the subject of true poetry. And beauty is to blame.

In 1967, a group of schoolboys from the Tuscan mountainous countryside, with the help of the priest who was their schoolmaster,  published A letter to a teacher, a short tract where they denounced the social conservativism of the traditional school system, the way it left behind thousands of boys and girls from the milieux defavorisés. The letter is still a touching document of the schoolboys will to set themselves free and obtain the education they deserved.

At some point, they protest against the elitist character of the very culture that the school tries to inculcate in their heads. They refuse a culture which is not helpful, which is severed from their life. And they complain that they are taught the meaningless loves of ancient deities. While Homer represented for Marx the inexhaustible charm of the early childhood of nations, the schoolboys of Barbiana and their priest are ready to set aside the ancient myths.

Well, I might understand that a catholic priest could easily accept that the liberation of the rural masses required a new culture, attached to the real life of these humble people, and finally freed from the remnants of the aristocratic culture of ancient Greece, but I am with Homer, with beauty, with the unequalled depth of the ancient stories. Maybe beauty is a fetish, and mine an Irrtum, but I cannot see a liberation without the verses of the ancient poets.