On Germans and Other Greeks
Tragedy and Ethical Life
Dennis J. Schmidt
What Greek tragedy and German philosophy reveal about the
meaning of art for ethical life.
"Schmidt s investigation of tragedy is a highly significant,
powerful work, one with far-reaching consequences. It bears on our
understanding of the role of the arts and of philosophical thinking
in our culture."
Rodolphe Gasche
In this illuminating work, Dennis J. Schmidt examines tragedy as
one of the highest forms of human expression for both the ancients
and the moderns. While uncovering the specifically Greek nature of
tragedy as an exploration of how to live an ethical life, Schmidt s
elegant and penetrating readings of Greek texts show that it was
the beauty of Greek tragic art that led Kant and other German
thinkers to appreciate the relationship between tragedy and ethics.
The Germans, however, gave this relationship a distinctly German
interpretation. Through the Greeks, the Germans reflected on the
enigmas of ethical life and asked innovative questions about how to
live an ethical life outside of the typical assumptions and
restrictions of traditional Western metaphysics. Schmidt s
engagements with Schelling, Hegel, Holderlin, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger show how German philosophical appropriations of Greek
tragedy conceived of ethics as moving beyond the struggle between
good and evil toward the discovery of community truths. Enlisting a
wide range of literary and philosophical texts, some translated
into English for the first time, Schmidt reveals that contemporary
notions of tragedy, art, ethics, and truth are intimately linked to
the Greeks.
Dennis J. Schmidt is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova
University. He is author of The Ubiquity of the Finite and
translator of Ernst Bloch s Natural Law and Human Dignity.
Studies in Continental Thought John Sallis, general editor May
2001
432 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index
cloth 0-253-33868-9 $49.95 L / 38.00
paper 0-253-21443-2 $24.95 s / 18.95"
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