The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy

The Fragility of Goodness is an important book. Throughout this massive work, whose three major divisions concern tragedy, Plato, and Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum explores one central question: to what extent is a good human life vulnerable to the contingencies of the external (and internal) world? Correspondingly, to what extent can human reason protect life from the vulnerability brought upon it by such contingency? Nussbaum's work has much to commend it. She shows, first and foremost, how classical Greek texts can be as powerfully informative of our lives today as ever before. Her book is a model o f how these texts can be extracted from the hands of the specialist and made accessible to the general reader without loss of scholarly rigor. Her work should thus invigorate each of the three major subjects she treats. More specifically, Nussbaum demonstrates the significance of classical tragedy for ethical thought. Through her reading of the Agamemnon, Antigone, and Hecuba, she carefully shows that the vision o f a tragic world is a coherent one rich in philosophical significance. She forces us to ask whether, almost paradoxically, we might not find in our tragic vulnerability to a world beyond our rational control the true source of human beauty and goodness. Nussbaum is superb on Artistotle. By this I do not mean she is simply helpful as she reads texts such as the Poetics..Helpful here she surely is; but her real achievement is to reveal more comprehensively what kind of thinker Aristotle is. For Nussbaum, he is the exquisitely sensitive observer, and protector, of appearances. He is the ultimate phenomenologist, a "professional human being" (~6 l) who can "show us the way back to the ordinary a n d . . , make it an object of interest and pleasure" (~6o). Her commentary here is informed by love; she reads Aristotle as a living teacher, and not simply as the venerable inventor of logic. The Fragility of Goodness has a straightforward thesis. Greek tragedy discloses a conception of human life as vulnerable, necessarily precarious, and beautiful. It is a conception Nussbaum thinks is probably true. In his early and middle dialogues Plato attacks the tragic view. He proposes a practical techn~, a systematic mode of knowledge which would eliminate from life the ravages of tych~ (chance), the passions, and the body. In his later works, chiefly the Phaedrus, Plato modifies this theoretical optimism. Nevertheless, throughout her book Nussbaum refers to the Platonic view as her, and tragedy's, opponent. In contrast, Aristotle affirms tragedy. He "gives it a place o f