Animus 14 (2010) www.swgc.mun.ca/animus THE TRAGIC TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS Marinus Ossewaarde University of Twente m.r.r.ossewaarde@utwente.nl Introduction In several recent presidential addresses of the American Sociological Association, it has been argued that sociologists should regenerate and get involved in what public sociologists call the ‘publics’, in order to promote critical and reflective discourses (Gans 1989; Adams 1998: 20-21; Piven 2004; Burawoy 2005a). A public, according to C.Wright Mills’ definition, is an arena in which the required physical (communication facilities) and intellectual (ability to think and argue) conditions for democratic debates are present (Ossewaarde 2007). These discussions result in well-informed opinions, which in turn find an outlet for effective action, even against the prevailing system of authority, if necessary (Mills 1956: 303-4). Through such conversions and ‘reflexive self- examination’ (Gouldner 1976: 215), people, like students, media representatives, citizens and so on, can better comprehend social patterns of oppression and delusion, and also act accordingly. Publics are ‘webs of critical discourse’ which contribute towards the formation of the democratic will of ‘lay citizens’, who can directly and competently get involved in the political process of determining the paths along which the world is to develop (Emirbayer and Sheller 1998). The hope of public sociology is, in Mills’ words (1956: 299), ‘that truth and justice will somehow come out of society as a great apparatus of free discussion.’ The Socratic tradition to which public sociology belongs is criticized by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche, the fundamental weakness of what he calls ‘Socratism’ is the assumption that reality, including social reality, has a rational (that is, causal, functional, or meaningful) foundation, which is discoverable through reason or science. Hence, contrarily to Socrates and similarly to Heraclites, he maintains that reality, including social life, must instead be understood as a painful and absurd flux of passing phenomena. In Nietzsche’s Heraclitean perspective, the world is a fluid entity that cannot be corrected or improved through (sociological) knowledge and intellectual dialectics. Nietzsche’s concern is not so much about the good, just or beautiful order, – one in which people can encounter each other in truth – since the perpetual flux makes the very existence of such an order very improbable. Instead, the urgent question, for him, is how to confront the existential pain caused by the endless stream of things that go and come, with the greatest human dignity, as a real hero or, what he calls, the ‘good European’ (Parkes 1993; Martin 1995; Krell 1997; Szakolczai 2007; Emden 2008; Andler 2009).