The ancient Greek agon and the experience of rivalry

The idea of "taking care of the self' and the ancient Greek agon are closely related. The situation of rivalry needs to be rationed. But the formation of "self-culture" also contains an agonizing element of competition with oneself. Friedrich Nietzsche's position and his analysis of Homeric competition are important to understand the nature of the ancient Greek agon. The ancient system of aristocratic education included physical training and agonism. The best person was selected by a competition. Greeks understood enmity and envy, which were usual in a competition, as valor. A person can get two important lessons from Nietzsche's analysis. Agon abounds in passionate states. In addition, competition includes different development possibilities: rivalry can be joyful and creative, but also can degenerate into a mutual and bloody torment. The analysis of the passionate, dark soul states proposed by Nietzsche on the material of ancient agonism was inherited by Max Scheler. Ignoring Nietzsche's idea of the connection of ressentiment with Christian ethics, Scheler paid attention to the very nature of ressentiment as a complex set of negative experiences. There are three important features here. Firstly, it is intense experience that can become the center of all the inner life of the individual. Secondly, it is deferred experience, revenge that waits for its place and hour. Thirdly and most importantly, it is res-sentiment arising from the feeling of impotence, physical or spiritual weakness that makes a person restrain negative emotions. The nature of the shadow aspects of rivalry and its manifestations is un-rootedness in being and the value-built universe. Ressentiment as a pathology of the value sphere and a moral disease is able to acquire the character of an epidemic. Scheler's ideas about the painful manifestations of interaction in a society based on a "competition system" are relevant for studying the situation of the growing violence and aggression in the modern world. Special attention should be paid to the phenomenon of cruelty as a specific manifestation of human aggression. Clearly visible in the modern cultural space, it becomes a problem for philosophers, sociologists, criminologists. One of the most important questions of modern culture is how to develop a lifestyle in a competitive environment, how to learn to live with dignity without turning rivalry into a situation of conflict, confrontation, war. Manifestations of aggressiveness and cruelty are not self-sufficient. The study of cultural dynamics shows a certain rhythm that preserves the historical life: the archaic demonstrates the abyss of hatred, but the experience of the higher religious life on the cultural level of archetypes retains its own "musical" sounds. In the ethical sense, the highest values are salvific. Scheler cites Goethe's words: "Against the great superiority of another there is no remedy but love."

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