A Philosophy of Tragedy by Christopher Hamilton

Author:Christopher Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Part of what we are longing for when we long for virtue and happiness to go together is for the world to be, in the end, in some way, even if we cannot fully understand it, as it ought to be. We are longing for a moral world order. Of course, when we act morally we act in some local way, seeking to improve the world in some very specific respect. But, implicitly or explicitly, what we want is not simply that we succeed here, at the local level, but that our efforts somehow have an impact in making the world as such what we think it ought to be, for that is another expression of our longing for a moral world order. For those who believe in the Christian God that hope can be justified because history is, in the Christian perspective, teleological and is working towards a redemptive goal in which there will be a final triumph of a moral world order through God’s agency. This is, indeed, why hope is one of the theological virtues: through it the Christian can trust that his local moral efforts contribute to making the world as it ought to be. But for those who do not have such belief, the longing does not go away. It is just that it cannot be answered by any idea about the Christian God.

What we put in his place is the idea of modernity as a site or place of increasing and inevitable moral progress, a kind of progress that redeems history. The theological virtue of hope is replaced by the secular optimism of a belief in progress. We are helped to see part of what is at stake here by one of the great reflections on modern moral consciousness, Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas, based on the true story of one man’s longing for justice.29

Kohlhaas, who is described as a man with a sense of justice ‘as fine as a gold balance’, is a horse dealer in Brandenburg and one day, while leading a team of horses to market in Saxony, he is stopped by an official of Junker Wenzel von Tronka who tells him he does not have the necessary legal documents to continue. This is news to Kohlhaas, who has passed this way many times, and he manages to persuade the official to let him continue on condition that he leave two of his horses on the Junker’s estate, along with one of his young employees who is charged with looking after the horses. Kohlhaas later discovers that the official’s claim that he needed such papers was wholly false, and he is enraged when he discovers that his employee has been beaten and his horses exhausted by being put to work in the Junker’s fields. This sets in train Kohlhaas’s attempt to obtain justice and, finding himself frustrated at every turn, as well as having to endure the death of his wife, who is killed accidentally while seeking to plead her husband’s case,

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