Agathokakological Gilgamesh
By: Dan Mathew
Tags: Ethics, Morality, Self Help, Gilgamesh, Philisophy

Battle with the Bull of Heaven, prior to Enkidu’s death

In almost all of the character tropes of our most treasured storylines, a combination of the protagonist and an ethically immoral character set were seldom synonymous. More often than not, the protagonists are portrayed as a just and righteous person toiling for the good of society. From Harry Potter to Tanjiro, these common strains of ethical cleanliness are clearly visible. They all have some, if not all, of the virtues demanded by the particular setting of the story. Such absence of morally grey protagonists and the repeated partisan portrayal of only the moral part of the character set have, inadvertently or not, set on ourselves a utopian expectation, rather than a paradigm, of human behaviour. It failed to redress our inherent capacity for vice and destruction. Consequently, we found ourselves in a tug of war between the expected goodness and inherent immorality within us. It is this animalistic nature that we need to understand and cope up with.

It is in this respect that all the ideologies proposed by those stories was helpless to provide us with a solution and for me, ideologies which lack any form of pragmatic value is nothing better than a fantasy to be contemplated upon and it is in this respect too, the significance of the Epic of Gilgamesh lies.

The epic of Gilgamesh is a four millennia-old Sumerian poem which portrays the transformation of Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk, with all the grandiose elements of theatrics and exaggerated behaviours, typical in mythological literature. Gilgamesh, though the protagonist of the story, doesn’t have any heroic traits and rather is represented as an epitome of ethical immorality. Through his course of actions which ranges from abuse of power to debauchery, he is characterized as a synonym for barbarity and an apotheosis of arrogance. When we translate all this into our context of discussion it is evident that he is an exaggeration of all our animalistic nature. But the latter part of the story is much interesting as it explains his transformation into a more just and noble king.

So, as the story goes, the Goddess Aruru, in response to the prayers of the citizens, decides to curb the arrogance of Gilgamesh and for that purpose creates Enkidu, whose strength is as comparable to that of Gilgamesh. But Enkidu is primitive in nature and he is said to have lived and roamed among the wild beasts. But he is brought into the civilised life through his meeting with Shamhat and she convinces him to face Gilgamesh in combat. After a brutal brawl, quite contrary to our expectations, they become the greatest friends of all. But after this friendship, the most curious of things begin to occur — Gilgamesh decides to set out on a righteous path as is portrayed by his vehement reluctance to an immoral promiscuous tryst.

This is the first step in our quest to traverse our animalistic nature — building meaningful social contacts. It doesn’t have to be so many or so little social relationships. It just has to be meaningful such that we feel it worthy to invest our time in it. But as such this is an incomplete and also a dangerous step. Dangerous such that it leads us to believe in two fallacies. As a consequence of our improved social contacts our character, instead of being transformed sometimes becomes only constrained by the requirements of those relationships. An undesirable reaction of such an arrangement is the considerable decrease in the ethical quality of a person in his personal life and consequently leads us to be in the shambles of hypocrisy. This is the first fallacy.

And as for the second fallacy, the most dangerous one, is when, because of our social contacts, we lose track of the animalistic nature in us. We then gradually accustom ourselves as a good person. The greatest fault in such an erroneous notion is that when appropriately triggered, the animal in us takes over us.

The greatest example of such behaviour from pop culture reference is Harvey Dent from the Dark Knight series. In the movie, Nolan hints us about Harvey Dent’s neither addressed nor redressed destructive capacity for violence, which when suitably triggered by Joker caused him to transform from a district attorney who hoped for order and justice in the society to a lunatic who threatens to kill an innocent boy. What makes such behaviour dangerous is that these individuals would still be under the impression of being a righteous person, thus empowering them further for dangerous and unreasonable acts.

In this backdrop comes the second part of Gilgamesh’s transformation. After a series of events, Enkidu faces an untimely death. Overwhelmed with the loss of Enkidu’s death, he embarks on a journey to overcome grief and to attain eternal life but fails to do so and it leaves him with a much greater revelation, the realisation of his mortality.

Sometimes to accept that we are just humans can help us to vindicate ourselves from the vilification of utopian ethical expectations. To know that it’s okay to have this dualistic nature is the best we can do to exonerate ourselves. And ultimately this gives us the freedom to err and forgive ourselves. It allows us to understand that the nature of being human is not to be free of fault but to never stop trying. I cannot but resist myself from including here that verse which discusses this revelation.

“Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands”

The combination of these two steps then allows us to share and improve our understanding of life and its consequences. Only then we can comprehend another one’s pain and condition ourselves. Only then can we transform our nature to utilise it for the good of people.

As to conclude I feel it is imperative to emphasise that through this article I do not in any way mean that the definition of ethical morality should be subjected to social conventions because it would be an undoing of years of philosophical research and my own ideological anchors and would essentially lead us to the rudimentary approaches of the Sophists. Rather I intent this article to shed some light on our quest to quench and transform our inherent capacity for vice. I hope that it had served its purpose.