შოთა რუსთაველი უტილიტარისტების წინააღმდეგ

აბსტრაქტი

სტატიიდან აღებული ავტორის ინგლისურენოვანი რეზიუმე:

Key words: Rustaveli, utilitarians, happiness, joy, woe, balance.

In this paper three aphorisms from Shota Rustaveli’s epic poem “The knight in the panther’s skin” are analyzed: 1) “Who then can harvest joy who hath not first travailed with woe?” (Translation by Marjory Scott Wardrop). 2) “Then is joy pleasant, when a man hath passed through grief” (Translation by Marjory Scott Wardrop). 3) “A man unacquainted with sorrow cannot find pleasure in joy” (Translation of Marjory Scott Wardrop). The meaning of these aphorisms can be summarized in this way: joy cannot be fully enjoyed, unless you have experienced woe (grief, sorrow). Or: if it is even possible to come to joy (to obtain joy) without hard work or grief, it is anyway better to come to it in overcoming the woe because only in that case can we fully enjoy it.

This point of view opposes the utilitarian understanding of happiness, which is thus defined: “Happiness is maximization of pleasure and minimization or, even better, elimination of pain”. This view, that was invented in the 18th century by one of the founders of utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, appears to be right at the first glance and has still today great influence on the way of life of people. But if observed closely, it does not stand up to criticism, as we can see in the work about happiness by the German philosopher Wilhelm Schmid (Wilhelm Schmid. Glück. Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2007). According to the contemporary German philosopher, the new founder of the philosophy of life, Wilhelm Schmid: “Unfortunately, this definition has crucial weak points: The essential characteristic of pleasure is that it does not last; everyone can experience this in their own life.

Wanting to maximize the pleasure until everything just “makes pleasure” has only one consequence: to miss it more and more to the point of being unable to find pleasure. And the other part of the definition of the modern happiness is also problematic: wanting to consistently switch off pain results not only in your no longer knowing the contrast to pleasure, but also losing orientation in life – because pain is the sting that time and again makes us to think about the entire life.” (Wilhelm Schmid. Schule der Lebenskunst. Tbilisi: 2003). The above cited aphorisms of “The knight in the panther’s skin” inspire a most important idea, namely, that life can only be really beautiful, if the joy and the woe balance each other.

Let us see now the point of view of Wilhelm Schmid about what kind of life can be called beautiful: “The real power of beauty does not lie in perfecting, superficially smoothing and harmonizing existence, but in the possibility of affirming it. Not only can the pleasant, pleasurable or, as it was often called in the late 20th century, “positive” be affirmative, but also the unpleasant, painful, “negative” – because it can give us a deeper experience that takes us further. The beautiful also includes the failure, it is crucial whether life as a whole appears to be affirmative.” (Wilhelm Schmid. Schule der Lebenskunst. Tbilisi: 2003). As we can see, the difficult question of relationship between woe and joy, that is even more relevant today than it was in the past, is at Rustaveli solved in exactly the same way, as is demanded by the modern progressive philosophical thinking.

Wilhelm Schmid uses fulfilled life (“erfülltes Leben”) as synonym of beautiful life and he defines it as follows: “Happiness of a fulfilled life, which means a comprehensive experience of fullness: It is not necessarily what is called an easy life, but rather one that is full of difficulties that have to be overcome; full of resistance, complications, deprivation, conflicts that are to be fought out or endured – everything that is not generally considered good life and happiness. This happiness is an attempt to balance the life, not to maximize pleasure, but to realize the measure that is thriving and not ruinous for the self and its relationship with others; not to eliminate every pain, but to accept some of them too; moreover, to bring pain and pleasure to one another in relation and to balance them, not in every moment of life, but throughout the life.” (Wilhelm Schmid.

Schule der Lebenskunst. Tbilisi: 2003). In this very important discussion, that is about the managing of woe and joy by humans, the modern philosopher uses, as we have seen, the term of “balancing” – “to bring pain and pleasure to one another in relation and to balance them”. Rustaveli uses the old Georgian equivalents exactly of the same terms in the discussion about the same question (gaatavne, shevatsone). Very important is the remark of Tamaz Vasadze, a researcher of “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin”, that “the point of view of Avtandil about woe is different from the traditional religious point of view, according to which the highest value after the death – the paradise is to be gained by the sin cleaning pain.

In the poem of Rustaveli the woe is not the way to free oneself from sins and to gain the paradise, but the way to gain the happiness in this world; it is the price for worldly happiness”. Thus, the concept of Rustaveli about the relationship of woe and joy matches exactly the point of view of Wilhelm Schmid. The point of view of the poet of the 12th century opposes the conviction of the utilitarians exactly in the same way, as the point of view of our contemporary philosopher does.

გამოქვეყნებულია ჟურნალში „სჯანი“, ტ. 21 (2020), გვ. 190–198. ნაშრომის გახსნა