Comments on Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope (Harvard: 2006)

Hubert L. Dreyfus 0 0 H. L. Dreyfus (&) Department of Philosophy, University of California , 314 Moses Hall 2390, Berkeley 94720-2390, CA, USA Cultural devastation, and the proper response to it, is the central concern of Radical Hope. I address an uncertainty in Lear's book, reflected in a wavering over the difference between a culture's way of life becoming impossible and its way of life becoming unintelligible. At his best, Lear asks the radical ontological question: when the cultural collapse is such that the old way of life has become not only impossible but retroactively unimaginable,--when nothing one can do (or did) makes sense anymore,--how can one go on? In raising this question, Lear's book is a remarkable breakthrough; it comes close to raising the crucial ontological question of how to deal with the total collapse of a culture, and it may well become a classic by starting a conversation on the question: How should we live when our own culture is in the process of actually collapsing? Lear suggests that [w]hat would be required would be a new Crow poet: one who could take up the Crow past andrather than use it for nostalgia or ersatz mimesisproject it into vibrant new ways for the Crow to live and to be. (p. 51) Later Heidegger had a similar suggestion for us and I try to spell it out briefly. - This article was written in collaboration with Sean D. Kelly. Cultural devastation, and the proper response to it, is the central concern of Radical Hope. By cultural devastation, Jonathan Lear means something radical. At the extreme it is the loss of a cultures very way of life: a loss of its ability to do what is meaningful and admirable, the organizing practices that motivate the ambitions and despairs of its people, its unexamined sense of what constitutes a life well-lived. Lear addresses the problem of cultural devastation through the case of the Crow Indians, who faced the destruction of their way of life at the hands of the American government in the mid to late 19th century. But the book is important for us today not just as a study of what happened to the Crow. Indeed, Lear claims that it is a transcendental truth about all cultures that they are vulnerable to the disaster to which the Crow nearly succumbed. Lear says, rightly, that the loss of a whole way of life is deeper and more devastating than the loss of any particular set of practices or values. He would presumably agree that when Athens succumbed to Sparta after nearly 30 years of wasting war, and its direct democracy was suspended in favor of an oligarchical rule of tyrants, this was not yet a loss on the order which Lear envisages. Likewise, when Lincolns Union States finally overcame the Confederacy, the South was faced with the challenge of continuing life in the absence of what were arguably some of their most cherished social practices and distinctions. But what was at stake in that conflict too was not a loss of the radical kind in question. In both these cases cultures suffered great devastation, and it was only with courage and determination that they were able to rebuild functioning and healthy societies. But what they did not face is the complete loss of meaning of the sort that Lear describes, a loss so total that in the words of the Crow Chief, Plenty Coups, After that, nothing happened. In a word, which Lear borrows from Heidegger, the loss is ontological rather than merely political or social. According to Lear, what it meant to be a Crow had become unintelligible. As he puts it, planting a coup-stick lost intelligibility.1 But there seems some uncertainty in Lears book as to how total the annihilation was. This is reflected in a wavering over the difference between a cultures way of life becoming impossible and its way of life becoming unintelligibleI will call this the difference between cultural devastation and cultural collapse. A dramatic case of finding a way of life impossible would be losing the person you love; whereas a case of unintelligibility would be falling out of love and so finding it incomprehensible that you ever found the person you once loved loveable. Since the old practices still make sense, the victims of the first type of case risks succumbing to nostalgiait was so great being together, if only I could get her back;whereas the second type of case would make getting the loved one back an embarrassment. Lear notes a related ambiguity when he introduces his important idea of impossibility but he immediately covers it up by equivocating on the notion of a practice ceasing to make sense. He tells us that: everything in tribal life was organized around hunting and warbut hunting and war had become impossible. There is crucial ambiguity in this claim that 1 John Lear, Radical Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 51). All subsequent is easily overlooked. When we say It is no longer possible to go to war or It is no longer possible to hunt buffalo we might mean either: The very acts themselves have ceased to make sense (p. 38). Here is how Lear explains the ambiguity: By the way of analogy, consider a person who goes into her favorite restaurant and says to the waiter, Ill have my regular, a buffalo burger medium rare. The waiter says, Im sorry madam, it is no longer possible to order buffalo; last week you ate the last one. There are no more buffalo. Im afraid a buffalo burger is out of the question. Now consider a situation in which the social institution of restaurants goes out of existence. For a while there was this historical institution of restaurantspeople went to special places and paid to have meals made and served to thembut for a variety of reasons people stopped organizing themselves in this way. Now there is a new meaning to it is no longer possible to order buffalo: no act could any longer count as ordering. (p. 38) What Lears distinction covers up is that both the above cases are forms of impossibility. Neither is a case of unintelligibility. One can see this by noting that in both of Lears cases one can long nostalgically for the good old days when there were buffalo, buffalo burgers, and restaurants to serve them. For the case to become one of unintelligibility, which is the case relevant to culture collapse, one would have had to have been a buffalo burger devotee building ones life around buffalo burgers and then be born again as a crusading vegetarian who finds it disgusting, indeed, inconceivable that anyone should want to order a buffalo burger. The question is: on Lears interpretation, when Plenty Coups dramatically buries his coup-sticksymbol of the old warlike virtuesin the grave of the unknown soldier, is he saying that a life of heroic fighting is no longer possible, or has it become unintelligible to him why anyone would fight over territory and, in the process, try to humiliate their fellow human beings by scalping them? In the case of the impossibility of the old way of life, we can imagine that Plenty C (...truncated)