Abstract
The drive to comprehend, to grasp, to explain is one of humankind’s strongest instincts. It is one of the human being’s innate responses to his or her reality. Like the drive for food and water, the need for meaning is fundamental. Victor Frankl has identified this drive as the “will toward meaning.”1 It animates human beings, calling from the very void of the need itself the cultural worlds that both organize a person’s reality and define his or her place within it. Cultures differ at this level. This is true; but then, so do diets. The need to eat in spite of the differences, however, remains universal.
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Notes
See Irene Smith Landsman, “Crisis of Meaning in Trauma and Loss,” in Loss of the Assumptive World: A Theory of Traumatic Loss, ed. Jeffrey Kaufman (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2002), 13, 20–21.
Paul Tillich, “Anxiety-Reducing Agencies in Our Culture,” in The Meaning of Health: Essays in Existentialism, Psychoanalysis, and Religion (Chicago: Exploration Press, 1984), 58.
Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning,” in The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 5.
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 50.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 101–102. The implicit distinction in Berger and Luckman’s formulation between the institutional order and the symbolic universe complements the more recent and self-consciously psychological approach of Irene Smith Landsman to give articulation to the same basic experience. She draws the distinction between “ordinary” and “extra-ordinary” or “existential meaning” (see Landsman, “Crisis of Meaning: 14–15).
Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History (Princeton, NJ: 1974, 96–98.
William Storm, After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 75.
Murray Krieger, Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature, vol. 1, The Tragic Vision: The Confrontation of Extremity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), 2–3.
Terry Heller, The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 3. I am following Heller’s usage of Edward Bullough’s concept. Aesthetic distance “is the utmost decrease of distance without its disappearance.”
John G. Jackson, “Egypt and Christianity,” Egypt Revisited, Journal of African Civilizations 4, no. 2 (Reprint of November 1982): 65–80.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 49.
M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Kitty Ferguson, The Music of Pythagoras: How an Ancient Brotherhood Cracked the Code of the Universe and Lit the Path from Antiquity to Outer Space (New York: Walker and Company, 2008).
Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in The Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (New York: The Humanities Press, 1976), 52.
Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 143.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 100.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 98.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, in Melville: Redburn, White Jacket, Moby Dick (New York: The Library of Americas, 1983), 973–974.
Max Scheler, “On the Tragic,” trans. B. Stambler, in Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed. R.M. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965) 10 (Get Book site).
See also Melvin J. Lerner, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion (New York: Plenum Press, 1980), 18.
J.-P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greek, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 33.
Michelle Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 14.
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 14–15.
George Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1974), 103.
Silke-Maria Weineck, The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Holderlin and Nietzsche (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 1–2. This is particularly relevant to eschatological visions, which, particularly in Christianity, always imply the present endurance of an ordeal.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of The Faith of the Fathers,” The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1969), 212.
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© 2010 Matthew V. Johnson
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Johnson, M.V. (2010). Seeing through the Dark: Elements of the Tragic Vision. In: The Tragic Vision of African American Religion. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109117_2
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