Tragic Feeling

The term ‘tragic feeling’ occupies a productive fault-line in the depth-psychology corpus, drawing together aesthetics, affect theory, and the phenomenology of suffering. Its most pointed theoretical articulation comes from Nietzsche, who — as transmitted through Campbell — explicitly rejects Aristotle’s cathartic reading and the pessimistic tradition by identifying tragic feeling with an orgiastic psychology of overflowing vitality: pain here functions as stimulant, and the tragic emotion becomes an affirmation rather than a lament. This Nietzschean axis runs against the Aristotelian current represented by Nussbaum and Konstan, for whom pity and fear — eleos and phobos — constitute the emotional grammar of tragedy, requiring conditions of undeserved suffering and structural similarity between spectator and sufferer. Padel’s anthropological archaeology of the Greek tragic self introduces a third register: tragic feeling as something inflicted from without, a daemonic assault on the innards (splanchna, phrenes) rather than a subjective state. Auerbach historicizes the problem, tracing how Christian figural theology suppressed the tragic by subordinating earthly suffering to a transcendent schema, and how the tragic re-emerged as the drama of the individual will in modernity. Campbell’s synthesis integrates all these strands under the figure of the hero’s willed destiny. Together these voices reveal a field in which tragic feeling is simultaneously an aesthetic category, a physiological metaphor, a cultural construction, and a measure of the self’s capacity for affirmation.

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the psychology of the orgiastic as of an overflowing feeling of life and power in which even pain has the effect of a stimulant, provided me with the key to the concept of the tragic feeling, which has been misunderstood as well by Aristotle as, particularly, by our modern pessimists.

Nietzsche (via Campbell) defines tragic feeling as an affirmative, overflowing vitality in which pain serves as stimulus rather than occasion for pessimism, directly contesting both Aristotelian catharsis and Schopenhauerian resignation.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

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the will — that paradoxical object which begins in reality and ends in the ideal, since one only wants what is not — is the tragic theme; and an epoch for which the will does not exist, a deterministic and Darwinian epoch, for example, cannot be interested in tragedy.

Campbell, drawing on Ortega, locates tragic feeling in the willed pursuit of destiny against necessity, arguing that the voluntarist dimension of selfhood is the ontological precondition for any genuine tragic emotion.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

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the Christian figural view of human life was opposed to a development of the tragic. However serious the events of earthly existence might be, high above them stood the towering and all-embracing dignity of a single event, the appearance of Christ, and everything tragic was but figure or reflection of a single complex of events.

Auerbach argues that Christian figural theology historically suppressed the conditions necessary for tragic feeling by subsuming earthly suffering into a redemptive meta-narrative that negated its irreducible finality.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis

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for the Middle Ages the tragic was contained in the tragedy of Christ. But now the tragic appears as the highly personal tragedy of the individual, and moreover, compared with antiquity, as far less restricted by traditional ideas of the limits of fate.

Auerbach traces the historical emergence of tragic feeling as a distinctly modern, individuated experience freed from the cosmological and theological frameworks that had previously constrained it.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting

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Pity, as response, is distinct from moral censure or blame: it requires the belief that the person did not deserve the suffering. He claims, and I think correctly, that where we judge that the suffering is brought on by the agent’s own bad choices, we (logically) do not pity.

Nussbaum reconstructs Aristotle’s claim that tragic feeling — specifically pity — is structurally dependent on a cognitive judgment of undeserved suffering, distinguishing it from moral censure and from mere sympathy.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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Tragic emotion is represented essentially, therefore, as other in self. A destructive other, sent to change and hurt innards; a god’s most effective weapon.

Padel argues that in the Greek tragic imagination, feeling is not a subjective interior state but an alien force — daemonic and external — that invades and damages the body’s inner organs, constituting the self as a site of violent occupation.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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the only subject-matter of Greek tragedy, in its earliest form, was the sufferings of Dionysos, and that for a long time the only hero present on the stage was, accordingly, Dionysos.

Nietzsche grounds tragic feeling in the primordial Dionysiac suffering from which all tragic heroism derives, suggesting that the emotion of tragedy is ultimately metaphysical identification with the god of dismemberment and renewal.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872supporting

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the radical separation of the tragic from the realistic, of which the Baroque forms with their tendency to exalt the tragic personage are only a particularly striking symptom.

Auerbach shows how French classicism institutionalized tragic feeling by cordoning it off from the comic and realistic, creating an aristocratic aesthetics of pure tragic elevation that intensified the emotion through stylistic segregation.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting

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the misfortunes that occur in tragedy may inspire fear, as opposed to pity, even if they seem to be merited, insofar as we are vulnerable to such calamities. It is, we may say, the non-moral side of our response to tragedy.

Konstan identifies a non-moral dimension of tragic fear — distinct from pity — arising from the spectator’s recognition of universal vulnerability, which constitutes a second emotional register in the tragic experience beyond undeserved suffering.

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting

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A dramatic story of such a deserved reversal, he tells us in the Poetics, will be benevolent and uplifting (philanthro’pon), but not tragic.

Konstan underscores Aristotle’s insistence that tragic feeling requires the condition of unmerited reversal: where suffering is earned, the emotional response shifts from tragic pity to a moralizing benevolence that cancels the tragic register entirely.

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting

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Ideas of a sea of troubles, of misfortune’s ‘waves,’ suggest a flood rushing in from outside but are intensified by the idea of an inner storm that swamps the phren.

Padel demonstrates how Greek tragic imagery maps feeling onto the physiology of inner flooding, so that the emotional experience of catastrophe is rendered as a literal inundation of the mind’s organ.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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Tragedy, unlike earlier types of poetry, is not so much interested in events, whose representation may be either true or false, but in human beings. They appear in a completely new light.

Snell situates the tragic mode as a decisive shift in Greek representational art from event to character, implicitly grounding tragic feeling in the newly discovered interiority of the human subject.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside

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In most of the plays which have a generally tragic tenor there is an extremely close interweaving of the tragic and the comic, the sublime and the low.

Auerbach notes that Shakespeare’s practice of mixing tragic and comic registers complicates any pure phenomenology of tragic feeling by embedding it within a heterogeneous stylistic field.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside

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