The Drama Viewed from Elsewhere

Abstract

In their contributions to this volume Mervyn Frost and Ned Lebow (and with qualification, James Mayall and Kamila Stullerova) propose that the agonistic moment of tragedy might be understood as a cathartic one through which crusading forces discover that the pursuit of a particular ethic must not be mistaken for the realization of a universal truth. In various ways, Peter Euben, Chris Brown, and Nicholas Rengger all critique this ‘optimistic’ viewpoint by pointing to another core aspect of the tragic tradition, namely, the disjuncture it asserts between understanding and action leading to the possibility that knowledge of the self in the world is irreducibly fractured by the contingent character of that world. The debates reveal how pluralistic readings of the tradition of tragic thought can be (a point developed well by Catherine Lu in the previous chapter). However, at the heart of the conversations lie both epistemological and ontological questions about the constitution of ‘tragedy’ itself: is it an art-form representing life, or is it life itself? And most importantly, can tragedy be filtered into a philosophical form of reasoning mobilized for prescriptive use?