History and Catastrophe: Tragedy and Reconciliation in Schiller and Hegel

Abstract

To what extent is it possible be reconciled with a tragic past? Could historical narration or dramatic performance help to get over the traumatic event indeed? Or do they just ascertain its constitutive contradictions, the split and the rift from a pain wich is impossible to sublimate? Is the mourning experience based on the recovery of a feeble balance between the opposite drives, emotions and feelings from the will? Or does it depend on the synthetic assimilation of that opposition into another way of life? This essay travels hand in hand with Schiller and Hegel across the space opened by those questions. It starts from the dissatisfaction generated in the young Hegel by his reading of Schiller’s Wallenstein and it analyzes his different conceptions of the ethic pathos, as well as his uneven perspective about the function of the chorus in the Attic tragedy