Troy Polidori

In this essay, I build on a theory of tragedy (that tragedy involves the inhospitality of the world to what matters) to explore how tragedy’s beauty can be understood more robustly than through the traditional functional conceptions of tragedy from Aristotle, Hume, and others. Part of tragedy’s beauty is the unique frame it places on its constituent values lost. It is only because something matters that its loss due to the world’s inhospitality can be registered as tragic. This makes tragedy an indirect window into what matters. Artistic representations of tragedy can be appreciated along this measure: the unique and creative ways they represent their values lost, providing through this representation a novel and enriching perspective on what matters. How does this view of the beauty of tragedy has consequences outside the realm of aesthetics? Specifically, how do we to understand the role of the tragic emotions in real-life tragedies.

This dissertation is centered around explaining the nature of tragedy and its relation to moral life. My thesis is that the fundamental nature of tragedy is the world’s inhospitality to what matters. This provides insight into moral life by illuminating the tragic aspect of moral dilemmas. In these dilemmas, individuals often believe that they are left with no morally acceptable option. I argue that this belief is characteristically a rational response to the tragic aspect of the dilemma, but that this does not make moral obligations in these situations incoherent. This is because moral tragedy does not entail inevitable moral failure, but the world’s inhospitality to what matters more generally. This conception of tragedy additionally provides insight into other areas of practical life, including the peculiar aesthetic features of tragedy such as its beauty.

Tragedies, as real-world phenomena, are independent of their literary genre and are suitable for philosophical analysis. My analysis focuses on a type of tragedy that emerges in the practical lives of individuals in a broad sense. Tragedies often manifest in mundane, everyday situations. However, the fact that a situation is tragic does not mean that any unfortunate event that happens to an individual qualifies as a tragedy, nor does it imply that any practical pursuit is a tragic candidate. Instead, these practical tragedies occur when the world obstructs pursuits that are fundamentally valuable. Tragedies are frequently dramatized in specific contexts such as moral dilemmas and historical calamities. Yet, these are merely instances of how the world can oppose what matters more universally.