ABSTRACT
Thought about the relation between tragedy and morality is divided into two schools. The one, which dominates writing on tragedy, assumes a fundamental compatibility between tragedy and morality. There is on the contrary a dissociation or discrepancy, or in stronger terms, a mutual antagonism, between tragedy and morality. The notion of an antagonism between tragedy and morality is highly plausible, for reasons that are in the spirit of Nietzsche and entirely consistent with our experience of tragedy. This chapter provides some preliminary criticism of the moral view of tragedy, and tries to give positive reason for thinking that the perspectives of tragedy and morality conflict. This argument is intended to stand on its own, but it receives additional support from the metaphysical account of tragedy. But in so far as we remain within the perspective of tragedy – in so far as the experience of tragedy is treated as a sufficient datum to extrapolate a metaphysics – the contradiction exists.
