Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us - Simon Critchley

Written by Simon Critchley
Read by John Lee
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: April 16, 2019
Duration: 08:41:44

From the curator of The New York Times’s “The Stone,” a provocative and timely exploration into tragedy–how it articulates conflicts and contradiction that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in.

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.

John Lee gives an excellent narration of this “erudite reconsideration” of Greek tragedy and how it holds up a mirror on human nature. The reason we still read the classics is that they show humans as they are–noble and ignoble at the same time. As much as one wishes that human nature had improved over the millennia, little has changed in what makes us human and how we act. Lee’s British accent gives this production an academic and authoritative tone. His diction is clear, and his pacing, while somewhat quick, is still easy to follow. Overall, his delivery sounds like that of a professor lecturing on a topic about which he is passionate. M.T.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2019,

February 25, 2019
New School philosophy professor Critchley (What We Think About When We Think About Soccer) takes on ancient Greek tragedy’s philosophical implications in this dense, demanding study. … Informing readers unfamiliar with classical literature that in ancient Greek plays “tragedy requires some degree of complicity on our part,” he points to the “highest exemplar of tragedy,” Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, in which the protagonist, seeking to defy a prophecy that he will commit patricide and incest, unknowingly commits both. In this way, the play shows how “we both know and don’t know at one and the same time,” and how free will allows people to follow a preordained fate. These aren’t easy ideas, and this book is not one to be read casually. …. Dedicated readers will have the sense of being at a thoughtful scholar’s side as he works through an intractable intellectual problem. —Publishers Weekly