The Beauty of Tragedy

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.