For Common Things
Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today
"Mein Buch ist die Antwort auf eine ironische Zeit. Ironie ist bei uns zu einem Zeichen von Weltläufigkeit und Reife geworden. Der ironische Mensch pflegt einen Sprach- und Verhaltensstil, der jeden Schein von Naivität meidet ..." Jedediah Purdy erkennt...
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"Mein Buch ist die Antwort auf eine ironische Zeit. Ironie ist bei uns zu einem Zeichen von Weltläufigkeit und Reife geworden. Der ironische Mensch pflegt einen Sprach- und Verhaltensstil, der jeden Schein von Naivität meidet ..." Jedediah Purdy erkennt einen Wert darin, Hoffnungen auszusprechen, auch wenn sie sich nicht sofort umsetzen lassen. Seine Absicht beim Schreiben dieses Buches war, Hemmungen ernst zu nehmen und zu fragen, wessen es bedarf, um sie zu überwinden.
Klappentext zu „For Common Things “
Jedediah Purdy calls For Common Things his "letter of love for the world's possibilities." Indeed, these pages--which garnered a flurry of attention among readers and in the media--constitute a passionate and persuasive testament to the value of political, social, and community reengagement. Drawing on a wide range of literary and cultural influences--from the writings of Montaigne and Thoreau to the recent popularity of empty entertainment and breathless chroniclers of the technological age--Purdy raises potent questions about our stewardship of civic values.Most important, Purdy offers us an engaging, honest, and bracing reminder of what is crucial to the healing and betterment of society, and impels us to consider all that we hold in common.
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This book is a response to an ironic time. Irony has become our marker of worldliness and maturity. The ironic individual practices a style of speech and behavior that avoids all appearance of naivete -- of naive devotion, belief, or hope. He subtly protests the inadequacy of the things he says, the gestures he makes, the acts he performs. By the inflection of his voice, the expression of his face, and the motion of his body, he signals that he is aware of all the ways he may be thought silly or jejune, and that he might even think so himself. His wariness becomes a mistrust of language itself. He disowns his own words.In answer to all that, this book is a plea for the value of declaring hopes that we know to be fragile. It is an argument that those hopes are no less necessary for their fragility, and that permitting ourselves to neglect them is both reckless and impoverishing. My purpose in writing is to take our inhibition seriously, and to ask what would be required to overcome it, to speak earnestly of uncertain hopes.
To do so requires understanding today's ironic manner. There is something fearful in this irony. It is a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping, or caring too much will open us to these. Irony is a way of refusing to rely on such treacherous things. However, there is also something perceptive about irony, and sometimes we must wonder whether the ironist is right. The ironist expresses a perception that the world has grown old, flat, and sterile, and that we are rightly weary of it. There is nothing to delight, move, inspire, or horrify us. Nothing will ever surprise us. Everything we encounter is a remake, a re-release, a ripoff, or a rerun. We know it all before we see it, because we have seen it all already.
What has so exhausted the world for us? For one, we are all exquisitely self-aware. Around us, commercials mock the very idea of commercials, situation comedies make being a sitcom
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their running joke, and image consultants detail the techniques of designing and marketing a personality as a product. We can have no intimate moment, no private words of affection, empathy, or rebuke that we have not seen pronounced on a thirty-foot screen before an audience of hundreds. We cannot speak of atonement or apology without knowing how those words have been put to cynical, almost morally pornographic use by politicians. Even in solitary encounters with nature, bicycling on a country road or hiking on a mountain path, we reluctant ironists realize that our pleasure in these places has been anticipated by a thousand L. L. Bean catalogues, Ansel Adams calendars, and advertisements promising a portion of the rugged or bucolic life. So we sense an unreal quality in our words and even in our thoughts. They are superficial, they belong to other people and other purposes; they are not ours, and it may be that nothing is properly ours. It is this awareness, and the wish not to rest the weight of our hopes on someone else's stage set, that the ironic attitude expresses.
Irony is a response to something else as well. In roughly the past twenty-five years, politics has gone dead to the imagination. It has ceased being the site of moral and historical drama. It has come to seem petty, tedious, and parochial.
This change would signify less if politics had mattered less than it has in recent decades. However, for more than two hundred years, politics has been among the great sources of inspiration and purpose, giving shape to many lives. From the radical period of the French Revolution onward there has stood the promise that politics can change the human predicament in elemental ways. Politics, on this promise, could erase all the foolish, cruel, maddening accretions of history and replace them with fair and humane arrangements where for the first time people would live as free as they are born. For both the revolutionaries whose ambitions co
Irony is a response to something else as well. In roughly the past twenty-five years, politics has gone dead to the imagination. It has ceased being the site of moral and historical drama. It has come to seem petty, tedious, and parochial.
This change would signify less if politics had mattered less than it has in recent decades. However, for more than two hundred years, politics has been among the great sources of inspiration and purpose, giving shape to many lives. From the radical period of the French Revolution onward there has stood the promise that politics can change the human predicament in elemental ways. Politics, on this promise, could erase all the foolish, cruel, maddening accretions of history and replace them with fair and humane arrangements where for the first time people would live as free as they are born. For both the revolutionaries whose ambitions co
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Autoren-Porträt von Jedediah Purdy
A Harvard graduate who was home schooled in rural West Virginia until he was fourteen, Jedediah Purdy is the author of four other books, Being America, The Meaning of Property, and A Tolerable Anarchy, After Nature. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and is currently the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Jedediah Purdy
- 2000, 256 Seiten, Maße: 20,066 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Deutsch
- Verlag: Vintage, New York
- ISBN-10: 0375706917
- ISBN-13: 9780375706912
Pressezitat
"Beautifully written, erudite, unpretentious and, most of all, earnest."--Newsday"Purdy deserves high praise for vindicating the belief that civic engagement can still be meaningful, important and authentic."--Boston Book Review
"The kind of book one finds recommending unreservedly to friends, colleagues, and neighbors."--The Christian Science Monitor
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