A Philosophy of Tragedy

Christopher Hamilton

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781780235899
• eBook ISBN: 9781780236223
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A Philosophy of Tragedy explores the tragic condition of man in modernity. Nietzsche knew it, but so have countless characters in literature: that the modern age places us squarely before the reflection of our own tragic condition, our existence characterized by utmost contingency, homelessness, instability, unredeemed suffering, and broken morality. Christopher Hamilton examines the works of philosophers, writers, and playwrights to offer a stirring account of our tragic condition, one that explores the nature of philosophy and the ways it has understood itself and its role to mankind. Ranging from the debate over the death of the tragedy to a critique of modern virtue ethics, from a new interpretation of the evil of Auschwitz to a look at those who have seen our tragic state as inherently inconsolable, he shows that tragedy has been a crucial part of the modern human experience, one from which we shouldn't avert our eyes.

FOUR

Virtue, Happiness and Morality

Throughout almost the entire history of Western thought, philosophy has been haunted by the idea that the person who is morally good might be some kind of fool or dupe. The central reason for this is that it is clear that morality is in many ways largely about various forms of renunciation: to be just to others, to take into account others’ needs and desires, clearly requires that one forego things for oneself. This is why moral injunctions are so often framed in terms of what one must or ought not to do: steal, lie, cheat, kill and so on. Examples abound. Here are three or four that happen to come to mind.

In Pedro Almodóvar’s film Tacones lejanos (1991), released in English as High Heels, Becky del Páramo, a famous singer, vain and egotistical, abandons her daughter, Rebeca, to the child’s father so that she can pursue her career. But the decent thing for her to have done would have been to renounce or limit her career to care for her daughter, as she well knows, and at the end of the film she finally acknowledges this, seeking forgiveness from her daughter. Or there is Frank Troy in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, who carries for Bathsheba Everdene the intoxicating appeal of a roving sexual energy edged with violence, which he uses to manipulate her in an expression of his own lust, desire to dominate and need to impress. Only by renouncing his own needs would he have been able to do what morality evidently required of him. Or again, in Conrad’s Lord Jim, Jim’s jump from the damaged ship, which was on the point of sinking, or so it seemed, leaving the pilgrims to their fate, was certainly cowardly. The courageous thing to do, namely, remain on the ship, might well have required him to sacrifice his life – which is precisely why he jumped. Finally, to offer one more example, Jean Genet in his Journal du voleur (Thief’s Journal) describes his early life of theft in ritualistic terms, lending to the life of the thief an almost mythic status. Yet clearly morality would have required of him that he renounce all that strange and beguiling poetic pleasure.

The fact is, morality commands us and fills our lives with obligations. It is hard. Why should I be moral? is a question that all of us will face, sooner or later, implicitly or explicitly.¹

It is obvious that those who go through life with less or little regard for moral demands can, in many ways, enjoy things that those who are encumbered by a moral conscience cannot, precisely because they do not experience the need to forego things in the way that the latter do. Their path through life is in some ways easier since morality places restrictions in our way, burdens us with demands. Speaking to an architect recently, I heard how, on two or three occasions during his career, he had been contracted to do work for clients who, when the work was finished, simply did not pay up. It would have been far too costly and distressing to pursue these clients through the courts, so the architect simply wrote off his losses, but was left, of course, with a feeling of anger and bitterness. But the clients got the work done and kept their money. In one clear and obvious sense, they were better off for being unscrupulous since, had they been otherwise, they would have paid and ended up with less. The good person who could never have done that, or who would have suffered from a terrible conscience had he not paid, is clearly worse off in some way. Of course, he is morally better; about that there is no doubt. But, one might ask, is it better to be morally upright or is that just a form of foolishness or gullibility? Is morality not in this sense some kind of a ‘fraud’, as the philosopher Philippa Foot puts it?²

It is of course true that, for the person who cares about morality, things are more complicated. The decent person who does not pay his architect will suffer from the sting of his conscience and, in that sense, will in one way be badly off. That is just a way of saying, more generally, that the person who cares about morality will find his good partly in such caring. If someone cares about virtue – as many philosophers tend to put the thought these days – then that caring will be part of his good and he will benefit from being morally decent. Moreover, it is true that human beings in some ways need the virtues ‘as bees need their stings’, as the philosopher Peter Geach puts it.³ Someone totally devoid of courage, for example, would not get far in life since at least a modicum of courage is required to do many things in life, from crossing the road in heavy traffic to taking on a new and worthwhile but difficult job. Still the fact remains that, as one might say, only the good person can suffer from a bad conscience. Of course you might say that the perfectly good person will not suffer from a bad conscience, since, in being perfectly good, he will do nothing wrong and thus not suffer in this way. But this is, surely, to abuse our notion of what we mean by a good person. Apart from the fact that there is no perfectly good person and could not be, it is also true that the good person can, and no doubt will, do much that is morally suspect. One of the things that Shakespeare was exploring in the figure of Macbeth, for example, was the case of a good man who does evil. To insist that Macbeth cannot be a good man because he does evil would be to miss the point of the play entirely.

The fact remains that morality involves renunciation, even if it is true that being morally good forms part of the well-being of the decent person. That is why philosophers have been haunted by the idea that the morally good person might be some kind of fool. If morality involves renunciation, then why care about it at all? If someone who does not care about morality is likely, for that very reason, to be able to get more of the good things in life, to find life less encumbered with demands, than the person who does care, then it seems that the morally good person really is some kind of fool.

For this reason countless philosophers have sought to show that being morally good is more important than other things, such as having one’s cake and eating it, as in the case of the architect’s dishonest clients. What stops the honest client from being a fool, it is claimed, is that, in being honest, he is, after all, better off than the dishonest client with his redesigned house and his money. It is more important to be honest, so the thought goes. Appearances are misleading: it seems that morality is about renunciation, but it is not, because, looked at correctly, it turns out that being morally good is a form of obtaining – is, indeed, the central way of obtaining – something that we all want.

That is a way of saying that the importance of morality has to be something that shows up in the life of the good person, something that the good person possesses that the bad person does not. And it cannot show up simply as his being honest, since the dishonest person will just say: ‘For sure, he is honest; but he is a fool nevertheless, because his honesty stops him from getting some good things, complicates and burdens his life.’ It shows nothing, after all, to say that the honest person is better off being honest because he cares about being honest. We know that. The issue is: why should he care about being honest at all?

Philosophers who have sought to answer that question have therefore often attempted to show that there is some kind of reason to care about being honest – and, more generally, being morally good – that could show that the morally disreputable person is missing something crucial about what makes for a good life. Some have tried to show that that thing is rationality, in the sense that it is irrational to be wicked: if being morally disreputable is irrational, so the thought goes, then the wicked person is the victim of something from which the good person is free, namely, irrationality. On this view, the wicked person is in a mess because he lives irrationally, while the good person lives rationally and thus better than the wicked. Others have resorted to the idea that God will reward the good and punish the wicked, so the good are, after all, better off. Still others have claimed that the reason to be morally good lies in the idea that being such contributes to peaceful cooperation and, because we each have need of this, it is in the interest of each of us to be morally good: moral goodness is a kind of enlightened self-interest. But I do not wish to explore any of these thoughts. There is another version of the idea that the morally disreputable person is missing out on something crucial – crucially good – in life that I want to explore here. On this line of thought, what he is missing is precisely that something that we can all be presumed to want: happiness.

A very common way of proceeding these days is to draw on the writings of Aristotle who claimed that the virtuous life was central to the happy life. More exactly, Aristotle claimed that the life of ἀρετή (aretē) was necessary for the life of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimoniā). These Greek terms are often translated as ‘virtue’ and ‘happiness’ respectively. The latter is also often translated as ‘well-being’ or ‘flourishing’. Hence it might be argued that the morally good life is the truly happy or flourishing life such that someone who is not morally good cannot be (truly) happy or cannot (truly) flourish. This might be so even if, as Aristotle granted, we also need things other than morality to be happy, such as health, certain material goods and the like. As Rosalind Hursthouse, a leading philosopher in the neo-Aristotelian revival in moral philosophy, often known as ‘virtue ethics’, puts it: ‘All the usual versions of virtue ethics agree that living a life in accordance with virtue is necessary for eudaimonia.’⁴

On this view, the virtues are constitutive elements of eudaimonia or contribute to it in some necessary way. For example, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s view of these things,⁵ the virtues enable their possessor to take part in what he calls ‘practices’, by which he means, roughly speaking, socially established cooperative human activities that require and foster particular forms of human excellence, such as farming, the inquiries of the sciences, or the work of a painter or musician. Engagement in such activities gives rise to particular satisfactions which, accordingly, can be had only by those who possess the virtues. On this understanding of things, the virtues benefit their possessor. Hursthouse lists the following as virtues at various points in her book On Virtue Ethics: justice, honesty, charity or benevolence, courage, practical wisdom, generosity, loyalty, temperance, kindness and integrity.⁶ The list is deliberately open-ended, and she may consider other traits of character to be virtues. Other virtue theorists consider the same kinds of character traits to be virtues. They are what one might call from this point of view ‘common-sense moralists’, taking their list of virtues from those kinds of traits of character that contemporary people in the West by and large tend to value.

However, what is at issue is not simply that for a life to be one of eudaimonia it must manifest some virtues, for just about any life does that, including some manifestly unhappy lives. After all, virtually everyone has at least some modicum of some of the virtues on the list – that is, virtually everyone is, to a greater or lesser extent, honest or loyal or kind or whatever, at least to some people in some contexts. Rather, the claim must be that for a life really to possess eudaimonia it must be in some overall sense dedicated to virtue or embody virtue as the central thing in life, manifesting these virtues in some striking or especially clear way. Otherwise, the claim is uninteresting for it puts no substantive constraints on what counts as a virtuous life: any person who did not in general lie, steal, cheat, kill and the like, and who was minimally kind or generous, would count as living in accord with virtue. This is quite contrary to Aristotle’s view and, indeed, to that of mainstream moral philosophy since the Greeks, that the possession of virtue is a rare and difficult achievement.

Aristotle’s argument for his view is long and complicated; we need not concern ourselves with all of it. Crucial for our purposes is that the problems start early on – start, indeed, with the terms Aristotle is using. We might translate ἀρετή as ‘virtue’ but really it has a meaning close to ‘excellence’, as many philosophers have pointed out. Aristotle gives us a thoroughly memorable description of the excellent person, the so-called proud or ‘great-souled’ man: this is the person who is eudaimōn, who possesses eudaimonia:

He is the sort of man to confer benefits, but he is ashamed of receiving them; for the one is the mark of a superior, the other of an inferior. And he is apt to confer greater benefits in return; for thus the original benefactor besides being paid will incur a debt to him, and will be the gainer by the transaction. [Such men] seem also to remember any service they have done, but not those they have received (for he who receives a service is inferior to him who has done it, but the proud man wishes to be superior), and to hear of the former with pleasure, of the latter with displeasure . . . It is a mark of the proud man also to ask for nothing or scarcely anything, but to give help readily, and to be dignified towards people who enjoy high position and good fortune, but unassuming towards those of the middle class; for it is a difficult and lofty thing to be superior to the former, but easy to be so to the latter, and a lofty bearing over the former is no mark of ill-breeding, but among humble people it is as vulgar as a display of strength against the weak. Again, it is characteristic of the proud man not to aim at the things commonly held in honour, or the things in which others excel; to be sluggish and to hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones. He must also be open in his hate and in his love . . . and must speak and act openly; for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar. He must be unable to make his life revolve round another, unless it be a friend; for this is slavish, and for this reason all flatterers are servile and people lacking in self-respect are flatterers. Nor is he given to admiration; for nothing to him is great. Nor is he mindful of wrongs; for it is not the part of a proud man to have a long memory, especially for wrongs, but rather to overlook them. Nor is he a gossip; for he will speak neither about himself nor about another, since he cares not to be praised nor for others to be blamed; nor again is he given to praise; and for the same reason he is not an evil-speaker, even about his enemies, except from haughtiness . . . He is one who will possess beautiful and profitless things rather than profitable and useful ones; for this is more proper to a character that suffices to itself.

Further, a slow step is thought proper to the proud man, a deep voice, and a level utterance; for the man who takes few things seriously is not likely to be hurried, nor the man who thinks nothing great to be excited, while a shrill voice and a rapid gait are the results of hurry and excitement.⁷

It is clear from this description that Aristotle’s great-souled man, the perfect exemplar of the kind of life that he takes to be eudaimōn, is someone who is, to use a term employed much later by Nietzsche, wohlgeraten (‘well turned-out’). That is clearly what Aristotle has in mind: the great-souled man is a kind of fine exemplar of the species, a magnificent tiger of a man.

We need to ask, first: is this kind of life, the life of the great-souled man, the only kind of truly excellent life? Second: is this life virtuous? Third: is this life a happy life?⁸

Even if you agree with Aristotle that the great-souled man’s life is excellent, it hardly seems true that other kinds of human life are not. There is a programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled Great Lives. Each week, a guest chooses a person whom he or she admires and discusses that person with the presenter Matthew Parris and an expert on the subject’s life. Subjects have included Byron, Gramsci, Rommel, the nineteenth-century bare-knuckle boxer Tom Spring, the soul singer James Brown, Schubert, Hemingway, the comedian Dave Allen, Brunel, Henry Purcell, Borges, Dante, Le Corbusier, Ava Gardner, the football manager Bill Shankly and numerous others. Clearly, those who choose such subjects think of their lives as excellent in various ways. Or we might think of Van Gogh, or Dostoevsky, or Beethoven, all of whom seem to me to have led excellent human lives. But in all these cases the lives in question are very different from the type of excellence that Aristotle had in mind. They are not even variants on that life, but something totally different. There are, surely, many different kinds of excellent life.

Moreover, it would be difficult to see all the lives I have mentioned as being especially virtuous. Virtue was not necessary for their excellence or the distinctive way in which they flourished. Van Gogh, for example, displayed a certain human excellence in his obsessive, tireless striving to find the artistic form that was adequate to what he wanted to create, but he was far from being a virtuous person. Again, Beethoven’s life is surely excellent by any standard, but he was, in fact, far from virtuous: stubborn, proud, dogmatic and the like. This is not to deny that Van Gogh, Beethoven and the other individuals mentioned above possessed some virtue. But they were not, in the usual way in which we might say this, ‘virtuous’ people or in some way especially dedicated to virtue. It would be more realistic to say that what made their lives excellent was that they were doing what D. H. Lawrence recommended: ‘Find your deepest impulse and follow that.’ You could, of course, deny that the individuals ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Philosophy and Tragedy: A Personal View
• ONE Ontology
• TWO Pollution
• THREE Suffering
• FOUR Virtue, Happiness and Morality
• FIVE Among the Ruins
• SIX Some Final Thoughts
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS