Theory & Event

Brian Goldstone
Critique of Abysmal Reasoning
Theory & Event - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2008

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Project MUSE - Theory & Event - Critique of Abysmal Reasoning Project MUSE Journals Theory & Event Volume 11, Issue 2, 2008 Critique of Abysmal Reasoning Theory & Event Volume 11, Issue 2, 2008 E-ISSN: 1092-311X DOI: 10.1353/tae.0.0010 Critique of Abysmal Reasoning Brian Goldstone Jonathan Lear. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 187 pages. ISBN: 0 674 023329 3. $22.95 (cloth) What would it mean for one's culture to collapse, and with it the very conceptual field by which one navigates the world? How might one respond courageously to such a prospect, when courage itself -- as it has heretofore been understood -- ceases to make sense? These are the unsettling questions posed by Jonathan Lear's most recent book, which sets out to explore how the virtues intrinsic to a particular tradition might somehow endure despite the irrevocable loss of the practices that sustained them. Though centered on the autobiographical narrative of Plenty Coups, the last traditional chief of the Crow Nation, Lear's study is avowedly philosophical -- a work of what he calls "philosophical anthropology" -- and thus primarily concerns not "what actually happened to the Crow tribe or any other group" (7), but rather the more general possibility that the form of life, or, as Lear would have it, the "civilization" one inhabits might someday be destroyed. A provocative proposition, to be sure. Yet as the book...