Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

By: Simon Critchley

Narrated by: John Lee

From the moderator of The New York Times philosophy blog "The Stone," a book that argues that if we want to understand ourselves we have to go back to theater, to the stage of our lives

Tragedy presents a world of conflict and troubling emotion, a world where private and public lives collide and collapse. A world where morality is ambiguous and the powerful humiliate and destroy the powerless. A world where justice always seems to be on both sides of a conflict and sugarcoated words serve as cover for clandestine operations of violence. A world rather like our own.

The ancient Greeks hold a mirror up to us, in which we see all the desolation and delusion of our lives but also the terrifying beauty and intensity of existence. This is not a time for consolation prizes and the fatuous banalities of the self-help industry and pop philosophy.

Tragedy allows us to glimpse, in its harsh and unforgiving glare, the burning core of our aliveness. If we give ourselves the chance to look at tragedy, we might see further and more clearly.

Enjoyable

I enjoyed this excursion through Greek tragedy and how it took in Gorgias, Socrates, Athenian history, and the great playwrights as well as the history of contemporary philosophy and it's reception of Aristotle's Poetics. Critchley should have thought more about family life and children. He ignores children. if tragedy doesn't speak to us as mom's and dads, it doesn't speak to us. I enjoyed the scholarship and the accessibility but I won't take in any of its points.

Painful style and narration.

While the subject matter and the ideas are good, the style is really terrible. The writer revels in using highfalutin language. He would repeat the same statement over and over using different words. To complicate matters even further, the narrator speaks in a faux British accent as if he still lives in 1920. Nobody in England speaks like that anymore.