An exploration of the idea of the tragic in the writings of Georg Simmel: Peripeteia and modernity

Abstract

Highlighting the lack of critical attention directed to the tragic as a distinct concept in Simmel’s thought, this paper seeks to elucidate the tragic as a specific dialectical process and to draw attention to the grounding of this concept in the German philosophical tradition that Peter Szondi has identified as ‘the philosophy of the tragic’. In the course of the argument care is taken to illuminate Simmel’s understanding through reference to tragic drama itself, thus emphasizing the properly aesthetic context of the tragic as a distinct philosophical idea relevant to socio-cultural life. In recovering Simmel’s definition of the tragic, the author seeks to counter the common conflation of Simmel’s use of the tragic concept in his understanding of socio-cultural life with a normative position akin to ‘cultural pessimism’, and to elucidate the way in which the tragic ultimately indicates a form of affirmation, albeit one replete with nihilistic implications.