The negative sublime

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Does the distinctive character of this past century’s tragic endings and this present century’s ominous beginnings raise fresh questions about what is the central subject matter for ethics? Making use of detailed case studies from the twentieth century’s distinctive experiences of warfare and its various echoes in the twentieth century’s poetry, this philosophical study shows that these profoundly unsettling matters freshly challenge ethics today to rethink its central subject. Again, as in the companion volume, When Famine Returns: Ethics, Identity, and the Deep Pathos of Things, the author uses the tentative and indirect resources of the short, classical essay rather than the form of the substantial impersonal monograph. Peter McCormick argues that a cardinal concern for any philosophical ethics today must be the negative sublime, the reflective and responsive consciousness of both the inexorable necessity for and yet the strict incapacity of philosophical understanding alone to articulate rightly the overwhelming magnitudes of human suffering and moral evil.