On Germans and Other Greeks

In this illuminating work, Dennis J. Schmidt examines tragedy as one of the highest forms of human expression for both the ancients and the moderns. While uncovering the specifically Greek nature of tragedy as a representation of how to live an ethical life, Schmidt shows that it was the beauty of Greek tragic art that led Kant and other German thinkers and writers to appreciate the relationship between tragedy and ethics. Thus, Greek tragedy became one of the guiding themes of German philosophy after Kant. Through the Greeks, the Germans were able to reflect on the enigmas of ethical life and ask innovative questions about how to live an ethical life outside the typical assumptions and restrictions of traditional Western metaphysics. Schmidt's penetrating engagements with Schelling, Hegel, Halderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger show how German philosophical appropriations of Greek tragedy conceived of ethics as moving beyond the struggle between good and evil toward the discovery of community truths. Enlisting a wide range of literary and philosophical texts, some translated into English for the first time, Schmidt reveals that contemporary notions of tragedy, art, ethics, and truth are intimately linked to the Greeks.