Meta-ethical and liberatory dimensions of tragedy

a Schutzean portrait

Lewis R. Gordon

pp. 169-180

in: Lester Embree (ed), Alfred Schutz's "sociological aspect of literature", Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

Tragedy is an ideal typification of a number of aesthetic mixed types. This ideal mixture affords a correlated mixture in the antisocial world of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Investigated from a tragic perspective, the meta-ethical question of the relevance of ethics emerges, which decenters ethical discourse in such a world. Schutz's phenomenological sociology offers important conceptual tools with which to articulate some radical dimensions of this meta-ethical turn — e.g., the call for an egalitarian everyday world with room for nonideological understanding of mundane and extraordinary experience.

Cited authors

Schütz Alfred