Hamilton - A Philosophy of Tragedy

A PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY

A Philosophy of Tragedy

Christopher Hamilton

REAKTION BOOKS

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Reaktion Books Ltd
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First published 2016

Copyright Christopher Hamilton 2016

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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Printed and bound in Great Britain
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library

eISBN: 9781780236223

Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.
W. B. Yeats

For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce
life early and the human race come to an end.
Joseph Conrad

Contents

ONE
Ontology

TWO
Pollution

THREE
Suffering

FOUR
Virtue, Happiness and Morality

FIVE
Among the Ruins

SIX
Some Final Thoughts

Preface

H uman beings are born to suffer. All human lives are marked by pain and guilt, by loss and failure, by disappointment and compromise. All of us go through life confused, and need in the end to acknowledge that life itself damages us, often profoundly and always irreparably. Human endeavour is fragile and human beings have only limited control of their own lives. Here and there, there may be progress in one or more senses moral, political, technological and so on for some periods, but there is no inevitability about the continuation of such progress. Human nature is not perfectible and happiness is not to be dreamed of or, rather, is only to be dreamed of even if there are moments in which we feel happy or content. Our desires are often in conflict with each other, and our reason is a fragile instrument that is largely driven by blind urges and needs. There is no moral world order; the wicked often flourish while the good are crushed and perish. Most of the time we do not really understand what we are doing, and there is no goal or purpose to history and no redemption for our pain and suffering. Human beings think they long for contentment, but when they get it they often destroy it because they are creatures who are deeply divided against themselves. And however excellent or morally good a life one has led, it ends in death, which is final, and from which there is no release or redemption.

If human life is as I have just described it then the human condition is tragic. This is the point of view that I offer in this book.

There are other ways of thinking of tragedy: there is that which we find in the tragic theatre in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, of Shakespeare and Racine, and in the modern tragedies of, say, Bchner and Chekhov; and there is the notion we have in mind when we say that the death of the little girl in the swimming pool was a tragedy, or the sudden and unexpected collapse of the athlete while running was a tragedy. I shall draw on such notions of tragedy in this book, but my focus will be on tragedy in the sense of something that describes our fundamental condition.

It will be clear from what I have said that, from this point of view, human beings are not at home in the world: we are like wanderers on the face of an earth wholly indifferent to us. This has always been so, but this homelessness speaks with special clarity to certain ages, ages in which old ways of dealing with, of making sense of, the tragic condition of human beings seem increasingly implausible or incredible. Ours is such an age. It is so because, for many, it is no longer possible to believe in an overarching moral-metaphysical system that makes sense of our life, such as Christianity my focus here, though what I say also applies in various ways to many other forms of religious faith which can only appear, from the present perspective, as a kind of elaborate system of denial of the truth about our condition.

For, after all, Christianity claims that, rightly understood, we are at home in the world, even if world here includes a goal or end point that stretches beyond our earthly existence. As the philosopher Rush Rhees remarked:

Christianity of which there are many varieties, not always in agreement with each other says, at least in certain of its central manifestations, that there is a moral world order, that, in the final analysis, the good will flourish and be happy and the wicked will be punished or otherwise reap the reward of their wickedness. It offers a vision of (moral) progress which issues in redemption for individuals and human beings as such. It tells us that we are fallen creatures, fundamentally broken in some deep metaphysical and psychological sense, tainted by original sin, and that we are in this sense in conflict with ourselves, but it claims that there is a final redemption from this in Gods forgiving love. So, even if we are born to suffer, as Christianity has often acknowledged, this suffering has a meaning and a purpose, the central image of which is Jesus on the cross. It says that, even if we often lack self-knowledge, God knows us completely and cares for us. And it claims that, even if human beings (often) lack control over their lives, God ultimately has a plan for the course of human history and for each human life, such that individual lives and human history possess an order which God can see clearly and we can discern darkly.

But for many these claims are no longer credible. The discoveries of Darwin, the advance of scientific knowledge of human beings and our understanding of the planet we live on, the unspeakable barbarities that took place during the twentieth century, the historicized consciousness of the modern mind, and other things besides, give force to the idea, articulated by Max Weber, that we live in a world that is entzaubert, disenchanted. This is why I think of a book on tragedy as timely.

This book, then, aims to explore this tragic condition of humanity and it does so from a philosophical point of view. What I try to do in this book is explore a number of connected themes that illuminate this condition. In doing so I aim to provide what one might call a hermeneutic of the tragic: the project is to articulate a specific perspective on the world that, while seeking to express something fundamental about our permanent condition, might nonetheless speak especially to the modern sceptical spirit. The tragic perspective offered here is, in the light of the collapse of the old metaphysical and moral certainties, culturally available to us in an especially clear way, and may resonate for many who reflect on their hitherto not fully articulated sense of how things hang together (or fail to do so) for them. In this sense, this book is an attempt to take seriously Nietzsches idea of the death of God: what, it asks, does the world look like if one seeks fully to accept that idea, not simply as a philosophical or intellectual puzzle, but as a real existential question?

It should be clear from even the little that I have said so far that I do not share the view of the so-called new atheists who think of religion, and Christianity in particular, as some kind of historical error, a confused, pre-scientific attempt to understand the world, which has now been replaced by science and modern moral thinking and from which we are lucky to be free. I do not think Christianity is foolish or childish and I believe that it saw the tragedy of our condition clearly. To this extent, it tells the truth. However, its proferred solutions to that tragedy are no longer, in my view, credible, for the reasons I have already given. If science contributes to this, it is not because science disproves Christianity. It is because it forms just part of a massive cultural shift that makes Christianity implausible to many. For although there are, no doubt, parts of science that are in conflict with Christianity, Auschwitz, in my view, gives more reason than any scientific advance or discovery to disbelieve in God.