Can philosophy deal with tragedy? Can we consider any tragic aspect of our lives philosophically?
How?
Life is tragic. When you love someone but your expressions of love only hurts that person, such as ‘enabling’ a drug addict. When you are inspired and work for decades to suceed at, say, a certain job only to find that all that effort only took you farther away from the satisfaction, security, comfort, etc… you were trying to gain. When a desire draws you away from a person and you loose everything finding that it was that person who gave you the desire to begin with.
Philosophy can only exist within the tragic structure of life. It can only play a role in tragedies. It cannot wrap itself around tragedy and comprehend, work with, or even interrogate it. It cannot in any way cushion or reconcile the impact, the trauma, of tragedy.
It could do so if it played a determinate role on our conception of the world; if it was a belief or a faith. But the distinguishing characteristic of philosophy from belif and faith is that it tries to take a step back and examine itself. This is the unconditional love in the love of knowing. In doing so it does not allow itself to hold onto any one thing refusing to accept something else. Philosophy is a flud in its own nature. Tragedy is hard, absolutely dismissive of everything other than the circumstances of its existence. It demands that you feel it and only it. It is persistent, not a book you can close.
What can philosophy provide other than words of consolation and distraction from things that are relentlessly painfully true?
We can try using the framework of Ethics. Or even the freedom of the human will (commonly called “free will”).
Nicely said. I think philosophy is a continuing investigation of questions that have been attempted in the past. There is absolutely nothing wrong in re-doing and repeating things in philosophy: in fact it is the nature of philosophy to continually re-visit answers that have been provided, no matter how sound and stable they may seem.
According to my definition, the tragic element is the choice between two competing forces either of which will lead to pain, etc… For example, in the enabling the addict example, you love the person so you desparately want to help them through extremely hard times. But if you do, you know that it will only encourage / enable them to go harder. On the other hand, if you watch them self destruct, you’re turning against your human descency and desire to help, which, in itself, is painful. It’s not a easy thing to force your heart to be hard. And, this has the added twist that if they die you’re left wondering how much a role your cold shoulder played in their self-destruction. So whichever we choose, it hurts. And, by ‘you’, here, I mean ‘me.’
I don’t see how ‘free will’ can be ‘used’ here. It seems that when tragic things are afoot, free will is at an all time low.
My idea of free will is that it can only exist within a societal context that provides underlying guidelines. From within such a system, people are free to move toward certain goals, embody values, etc… These goals are transparent elements of culture, however, so the people are actually choosing what to do. Freedom, as with all ideals of humanity, requires a societal backdrop to support it. Freedom, as in ‘everyone is free to choose what they want’ is a model that will quickly undermine itself and fall into chaos. Most people who go around saying that they’re free are chasing an idea of freedom that they’ve been sold on from an external source. More times than not they are not free even by their own definitions.
Yeah, at first it seems the connection isn’t there. I kinda dropped a “thesis” ( that we could look at the “free will” explanation), then, crossed my fingers and wished I could find the pieces to put together: theory or thesis first, details later. Okay, I’m fishing.
But anyway, is there a connection? Absolutely. At least in the free will arguments. You alluded to choice or “two competing forces” and I take it to mean you have a sense of deliberation and decision that would allow you to know the best course of action. This to me is part of the explanation of what it is to have a sense of free will. This sense of “I could act by enabling the drug addict, or I could act otherwise” and there is nothing that could stop me from deciding one over the other or vice versa, is what we refer to as having a sense of free will. Of course, the distinction should be made between there is free will and such a thing as sense of free will. I say we have the latter. And so, we aren’t really in disagreement when you say:
