Critical Response I Playing with the Dead: A Response to Jonathan Lear Paul A. Kottman Jonathan Lear takes Cora Diamond’s use of John Updike’s phrase “‘the difficulty of reality’” to mark “challenges to the mind’s ability to encom- pass the reality it seeks to comprehend.”“These,” writes Lear, “are not dif- ficulties in the ordinary sense of the term, meaning problems to be solved or resolved” (Jonathan Lear, “Gettysburg Mourning,” Critical Inquiry 45 [Au- tumn 2018]: 97). Rather, they are “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way” (quoted on p. 97). Lear treats the famous Civil War battle and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettys- burg Address as difficult realities of this special kind—as confounding our “normal forms of explanation” and challenging contemporary American political life, whose coherence depends on a shared grasp of Gettysburg’s meaning (p. 98). The issues are unquestionably important. But Lear’s way of raising them is itself significant because, for him, the issues remain murky if assessed only on the basis of established facts or beliefs or opinions. We need some- thing other than historical knowledge or moral judgment—an addition Lear calls “ethical imagination”—in order to better grasp the issues at stake (p. 119). The view that thinking about our reality can require us to exercise a power for ethical imagination, or speculative thinking, beyond available theoretical and practical resources is now under tremendous pressure in Thanks to Omri Boehm, Adam Rosen-Carole, and Gregg Horowitz for helpful discussions. Critical Inquiry 46 (Autumn 2019) © 2019 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/19/4601-0010$10.00. All rights reserved.