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 but 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.

• Offers a secular alternative to religious traditions regarding the nature of tragedy and how to cope with it • Posits an interpretation of the relevance of Greek thought to ethics that goes back to Homer as more fundamental than Plato or Aristotle • Offers another view of the idea of progress and the trajectory of history

An aesthetic prelude; 1. The problem of tragedy; 2. The dubious ubiquity of reason; 3. Nihilism; 4. Pessimism; 5. Monism: an epitaph; 6. Moralism and the inconstancy of value; 7. Moralism and the impurity of value; 8. Best life pluralism and reason’s regret; 9. Tragic pluralism and reason’s grief; 10. Postscript on the future: the idea of progress and the avoidance of despair.