Tragedy, History, and the Form of Philosophy in Either/Or

Authors

  • Leonardo F. Lisi Johns Hopkins University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.7.0.3673

Abstract

Kierkegaard’s essay “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” makes two basic claims of far-reaching consequences for the theory of the tragedy and for philosophy more generally. The first is the claim that the essence of tragedy in all its historical manifestations consists in the representation of an irreducible contradiction between two qualitatively distinct principles: substantial determinants and individual agency. The second is Kierkegaard’s contention that, within this essence, the difference between the genre’s ancient and its modern forms rests on the different relations to that contradiction, on whether it is accepted as an objective fact or as a reflexive possibility. In the present article I elucidate Kierkegaard’s argument in terms of these two claims and point to some of their larger implications. With respect to the first, I show that it introduces a significant challenge to the conception of historical time on which our category of modernity depends. As concerns the second, I argue that it constitutes an engagement with what Kant calls as the modality of judgments (whether an object is possible, actual, or necessary), which Kierkegaard here attacks in the version given to it by the young F.W.J. Schelling. Kierkegaard’s rejection of Schelling’s argument on this point goes to the heart of the idealist project and ultimately questions what the form of philosophy should be.

Author Biography

Leonardo F. Lisi, Johns Hopkins University

Leonardo F. Lisi is Associate Professor in the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. His research and teaching focus on European literature of the long nineteenth century, with a particular attention to the relation of literary form and German idealist aesthetics. He is the author of Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce (Fordham UP 2013), as well as numerous articles on Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Strindberg, Rilke, W. H. Auden, Conrad, and European and Scandinavian modernism more broadly. Currently he is working on a book-long project entitled The Fate of Suffering: Form, Philosophy, History in Modern Tragedy, under contract with Fordham UP.

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Published

2015-08-23

How to Cite

Lisi, L. F. (2015). Tragedy, History, and the Form of Philosophy in Either/Or. Konturen, 7, 97–125. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.7.0.3673