The tragic as an ethical category

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 555-561

  Guay, Robert ^a  

^a BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 47149103987     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2006.0032     Document Type: Note

References (11)

1. For support of a similar claim, see A. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 6
2. F. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 2.2
3. See V. Gerhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche (München: Beck, 1995): "Tragedy results merely from the fact that the human being has a history and must further make history" (p. 96)
4. Contrast G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 17, for whom "the essence of the tragic" is "joy of multiplicity." Identifying the tragic with joy seems one-sided by neglecting, ironically, the Dionysian sparagmos for Dionysian rebirth or Oedipus as scapegoat for Oedipus as hero. And any one-sidedness, if the main point concerns "multiplicity," would be a substantial flaw: "joy" at "anguish and disgust" probably obliterates rather than mediates multiplicity
5. See H. White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)
6. and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)
7. E. Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 49
8. For a contrary view, see W. Dudley, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 198-205
9. Also see BGE 225, cited by David Owen, "Nietzsche, Re-Evaluation, and the Turn to Genealogy," European Journal of Philosophy 11.3 (2003): 259
10. For a similar discussion of tragic susceptibility from Aristotelian and Kantian perspectives, see R. Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 147-51 and 160-63
11. For an extended discussion of the relation of "natural facts about people" to the conditions of their agency, see David Owen and Aaron Ridley, "On Fate," International Studies in Philosophy 35 (2003): 63-78