0521863287 cambridge university press reasons grief an essay on tragedy and value jul 2006

This page intentionally left blank Reason’s Grief An Essay on Tragedy and Value In Reason’s Grief, George Harris takes W B Yeats’s comment that we begin to live only when we have conceived life as tragedy as a call for a tragic ethics, something the modern West has yet to produce He argues that we must turn away from religious understandings of tragedy and the human condition and realize that our species will occupy a very brief period of history, at some point to disappear without a trace We must accept an ethical perspective that avoids pernicious fantasies about ultimate redemption, one that sees tragic loss as a permanent and pervasive aspect of our daily lives yet finds a way to think, feel, and act with both passion and hope Reason’s Grief takes us back through the history of our thinking about value to find our way The call is for nothing less than a paradigm shift for understanding both tragedy and ethics George W Harris is Chancellor Professor of Philosophy at the College of William and Mary He is the author of Dignity and Vulnerability and Agent-Centered Morality, and he has contributed to The Journal of Philosophy, Nous, The Monist, American Philosophical Quarterly, Public Affairs Quarterly, and other journals He is a Distinguished Member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars and a receipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities Reason’s Grief An Essay on Tragedy and Value GEORGE W HARRIS College of William and Mary    Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521863285 © George W Harris 2006 This publication is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press First published in print format 2006 - - ---- eBook (EBL) --- eBook (EBL) - - ---- hardback --- hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate To the memory of my parents, Mary O and Theron J Harris, and to Patty, Rachel, and Jenny Contents Acknowledgments page ix An Aesthetic Prelude The Problem of Tragedy 18 The Dubious Ubiquity of Practical Reason Nihilism Pessimism 42 63 86 Monism: An Epitaph Moralism and the Inconstancy of Value Moralism and the Impurity of Value Best Life Pluralism and Reason’s Regret 110 151 174 199 Tragic Pluralism and Reason’s Grief 10 Postscript on the Future: The Idea of Progress and the Avoidance of Despair 262 Bibliography 289 Index 297 vii 231 286 Reason’s Grief with another object, the Earth will die as a result of a slow process, a process that will see for a short time a gradual warming trend, then a period of glaciation, followed by rising temperatures that will first destroy all plant life and then all animal life, returning the Earth to a second microbial age before even this form of life is eliminated by temperatures that will dissipate the oceans As the sun expands, it will suck what is left of the Earth into its own death throes, vaporizing the remains of our planet before the sun itself is transformed by its own chemical processes into a white dwarf Although they purposely avoid speculating about when human life will end on the planet, Ward and Brownlee predict that if animal life ends because of the process just described, the age of animals, including the most primitive and adaptive to high temperatures, is likely not to extend another billion years During most of that time biological conditions are going to deteriorate significantly regardless of what humans do, creating problems for human values, for what we care about, that we have never faced before Whether we can expect to extend civilized history as long as it has lasted thus far is anything but clear In the meantime, we should consider just how fortunate we are Most of our history as a biological species has been literally uncivilized and brutally demanding in terms of sheer survival But somewhere between six and nine thousand years ago – a very brief period of our own species history and not even a blink in Earth’s history – civilization began During that time, human values have enlarged considerably, in no small part due to the fact that we were freed from the simple calculations necessary to meet the demands of a primitive environment to care about other things Contrary to Rousseau, the appearance of culture was an enormous relief We were freed to care in more elaborate ways about a wider variety of things Thus began the history of human culture, the history of our attempts at coming to grips with the conflicts among our values and the losses we have incurred along with the goods we have gained For most of that history, religion has been our guide Indeed, much of the age of humanity can be characterized as the age of superstition However, within Western civilization, something started to change in a significant way about five hundred years ago Secularism began to emerge as an alternative Postscript on the Future 287 culture itself The growth in knowledge and lives liberated from otherworldly constraints has given rise to secularized forms of religion and ways of life that are freed of the more calloused forms of fear and prejudice That, at its best, is the culture of the West and its promise It began with hopes of utopia as a replacement for hopes of heaven But utopian experiments have put that part of our history behind us Utopia is not to be For reasons already given, all attempts to fit our values into a utopian formula are bound to distort those values We are left, then, with either giving up our secularism or constructing a nonutopian conception of the future in which we know that there will be a decline in what we can expect That is why the issue for us should be about how to construct a life that is on balance good, a life that, however far from utopian, contains more good than bad Moreover, we should see our point in history as one in which that is still possible So how fortunate are we? We are living within a marvelous biological and cultural window of opportunity for the possibility of good human lives, lives that can be on balance good, though riddled with much pain and sorrow That itself is a remarkable, highly improbable fact It should be good news and greeted as such Indeed, it should be celebrated That the universe or the planet produced even one opportunity for a meaningful life should itself be viewed as amazing But we are living within a period in which much more than that is possible We should not say no to our one and only lives and our one and only history because of an inability to face the tragedy that goes with those lives and that history, even in the full realization that those lives and that history are not going to be good forever In all probability the future will at some point bring with it a return to more primitive cultural expressions of fear and prejudice as conditions worsen Very primitive religious attitudes and practices might well reappear to worsen our lives But for now and for the foreseeable future, we still have the opportunity to live lives that are enriched by all the human joys and sorrows and to appreciate them for what they are while they last To this, we must understand, along with the joy, the regret and grief our values involve There are families, and friendships, and communities yet to nurture Excellences to be achieved, knowledge to be gained, and beauty to be perceived and produced This will not always be so How long depends 288 Reason’s Grief in part on us, in part on the blind forces of nature Some day a more tragic era will begin, and after that the era beyond tragedy, the era of nothing Understanding this and the conditions under which we balance the good against the bad within the window of opportunity uniquely before us is the greatest progress we can make It is progress toward understanding the crucial insight into what is true in what Yeats said: “We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.” Bibliography Anderson, Elizabeth Value in Ethics and Economics Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993 Annas, Julia The Morality of Happiness New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 Anscombe, G E M “Modern Moral Philosophy.” In his Collected Philosophical Papers, 26–42 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981 Anton, John P., and Anthony Preus, eds Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983 Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics Translated by Martin Ostwald Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962 Aristotle The Poetics Vol II of The Complete Works of Aristotle, translated by Ingram Bywater, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2317–40 Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984 Aristotle The Politics Translated by Benjamin Jowett, edited by Stephen Everson Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 Associated Press “Gene Links Deep Depression and Traumatic Stress.” Daily Press (Newport News, Virginia), July 18, 2003, A:4 Baier, Annette C Moral Prejudices Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995 Baron, Marcia Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995 Becker, Lawrence C A New Stoicism Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998 Bentham, Jeremy An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation New York: Hafner, 1948 Berlin, Isaiah The Crooked Timber of Humanity Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990 289 ... intentionally left blank Reason’s Grief An Essay on Tragedy and Value In Reason’s Grief, George Harris takes W B Yeats’s comment that we begin to live only when we have conceived life as tragedy. .. constributions to Reason’s Grief, I am grateful to many Tony Cunningham, Paul Davies, Robert Fudge, Danny Statman, and anonymous referees for Cambridge University Press read different versions... and its worth.8 Given the dominance of Aristotle in the history of aesthetics, this omission is startling until reflection on the structure and content of Kant’s view of the human condition and