Tragedy, Finitude, and the Value-Expressive Dimension

Abstract

Philosophers since the time of Aristotle have tried to explain what is sometimes called the “tragic paradox” — the fact that in watching a tragedy we positively want to experience the gut-wrenching feelings of grief and pain that we hope will be so intense as to move us to tears. A similar phenomenon also extends beyond drama to real life: We want to look at the picture of a deceased loved one so that we can grieve, to revisit the park where we spent time with a lost love, so that we can weep, to get the pianist to play the sad song again so that we can again reflect on how much sadness inevitably pervades life. Some might wish merely to write off such tendencies as symptoms of “clinical depression,” but labelling a phenomenon does not ensure that we have understood it. Labelling the desire for the tragic experience in this way would serve the same purpose that it serves for those introductory philosophy students who insist that we all seek only our own happiness; when confronted with counter-examples, they simply assert that people who do not seek only their own happiness are “abnormal,” as though this designation somehow blunted the force of the counter-examples.