Abstracts

Troy Polidori (Bio)

The Beauty of Tragedy

In this paper, I build on a theory of tragedy (that tragedy involves the inhospitality of the world to what matters) to explore how tragedy’s beauty can be understood more robustly than through the traditional functional conceptions of tragedy from Aristotle, Hume, and others. I argue that part of tragedy’s beauty is the unique frame it places on its constituent values lost. It is only because something matters that its loss can be registered as tragic. This makes tragedy an indirect window into what matters. Artistic representations of tragedy can be appreciated along this measure: the unique and creative ways they represent their values lost, providing through this representation a novel and enriching perspective on what matters. I conclude with some brief observations on how this view of the beauty of tragedy has consequences outside the realm of aesthetics, particularly in terms of how to understand the role of tragic narrative conceptions of self and community.