Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation Audiobook (Free)

Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the final great Chief from the Crow Nation, told his story-up to a certain point. ‘When the buffalo went apart the hearts of my people dropped to the bottom,’ he said, ‘and they cannot lift them up once again. After this nothing at all happened.’

It really is precisely this point-that of the people faced with the end of their method of life-that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Wish. In Jonathan Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’s tale raises a serious about Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation moral issue that transcends his period and challenges people: how should one face the possibility that one’s tradition might collapse?

That is a vulnerability that affects us all-insofar as we all have been inhabitants of the civilization, and civilizations are themselves susceptible to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any feeling of facing up to such challenging courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes throughout their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the storyplot of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questions-and these questions as they bear upon our own put in place the world.