Reason's Grief An Essay on Tragedy and Value [Paperback]

This book explores the view that we only live when we conceive life as a tragedy.This book 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. We must accept an ethical perspective that avoids fantasies about redemption yet finds a way to think and act with both passion and hope.This book 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. We must accept an ethical perspective that avoids fantasies about redemption yet finds a way to think and act with both passion and hope.Reason's Grief 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. Harris 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.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. Harris is not nihilistic. He vociferously argues that tragic pluralism leads away from nihilism, which he describes as 'pseudo-intellectual, a theory of valul3Û