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

Abstract

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 and-rather than use it for nostalgia or ersatz mimesis-project 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. © 2009 The Author(s).