The Idea of the Tragic at the Origins of German Idealism: Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel

Abstract

To the ancient Greeks we owe the tragedy as an artistic genre, but they have ignored the tragic as an aesthetic or philosophical category. This concept is rather a modern acquisition, which was imposed at the end of the eighteenth century thanks mainly to Schiller and the philosophers of the first romantic generation. But how and why did the idea of the tragic arise? The hypothesis that the article wants to explore is that it was born in the effort to overcome the dualisms that the critical system of Kant bequeathed to philosophical thought and in particular to Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel. The origins of the tragic as a philosophical category are therefore intimately connected with those of German idealism.