Tragedy is the experience of moral ambiguity. The right is always on both sides and invariably also wrong. Justice is conflict which means that justice is divided. Justice is not one, but at least two [sides].
There is one way of understanding Aristotle’s theme of hamartia, not as a tragic flaw but as a basic experience of human fallibility and ontological limitedness. The belief in autonomy is the moment of hybris that precedes tragic ruination, or ate.
Euripides is the most tragic of the tragic poets [according to Aristotle] —arguably shows most powerfully, the mood of ancient tragedy is skeptical; it is about the dissolution of all the markers of certitude that finds expression in the repeated question “What shall I do?” Such questions are not the beginning of an experience of rational argumentation, but reason’s terminus. This skeptical mood is also common in modern tragedy, most obviously in Shakespeare, which implies that the distinction between ancient and modern tragedy, and, consequently, antiquity and modernity, is not as secure and stable as one might imagine or wish. Tragedy means giving up any theology or metaphysics of history based on the distinction of ancients and moderns.
Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen argues that language is all-powerful, that Helen has been seduced by Paris' speech like the power of a drug has over the body and mind. Socrates, Plato's puppet, argues that the ideal polis [city-state] would and ought to ban poets and poetry from their affairs for this very reason.
Critchley argues: "Tragedy is a symptom of the fifth-century linguistic turn that placed enormous value on rationality, argumentation, and persuasion. Reason is essential to the experience of tragedy and [is] not some epiphenomenon [mental by-product] to an allegedly more authentic experience of myth or ritual. Tragedy is not some Dionysian celebration of the power of ritual and the triumph of myth over reason." Critchley opposes this latter idea.
Critchley states: "In the language of tragedy, particularly in Euripides but it is also present in Aeschylus and Sophocles, there is a willful manipulation of the founding, legitimating myths that the city has inherited. Tragedy "charts the way in which the self-aware modernity of the democratic polis is formulated in relation to Homeric and other narratives of the past." The complex and multiform relations between past and present in tragedy and especially its bold anachronism, where gods from the archaic past engage in sophistical, legal debate, show that the old stories [the myths and legends] are no longer sufficient for life in the city. Ancient tragedy is not ancient. It is quintessentially modern.
Critchley says "We need to go back to the theatre. Rather than philosophizing about the tragic on the basis of some universalistic model of aesthetic exemplarity or freezing the essence of the tragic in a philosophical system like a lark’s tongue in aspic, we need to see tragedy itself as a dialectical mode of experience that can teach us something important and importantly nontranslatable into philosophy as it is commonly understood. It is not that tragedy is nonphilosophical or antiphilosophical—far from it—but that it is a specific mode of presenting the human situation and inviting us to ponder it, a dramatic, dialectical mode that does not claim to eliminate ambiguity, but might enable us to see the contours of that ambiguity a little more sharply and clearly."
Simon Critchley: Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us - Youtube
Tragedy's Philosophy, Simon Critchley
Simon Critchley - Other Youtube videos
“Why does tragedy exist?” – On Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides; translated and with an introduction by Anne Carson – Other Sashas
tr Anne Carson (29 May 2015). Antigonick. New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-2293-8.
tr. Anne Carson (13 March 2015). Antigone. Oberon Books. ISBN 978-1-78319-874-0.
Euripides; tr Anne Carson (23 December 2025). Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides. New York Review Books. ISBN 978-1-59017-557-6
Sophocles; tr Anne Carson (19 April 2001). Electra. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-972647-9.
William Musgrave Calder (2005). Theatrokratia: Collected Papers on the Politics and Staging of Greco-Roman Tragedy. G. Olms. ISBN 978-3-487-12855-9.
tr Anne Carson (29 May 2015). Antigonick. New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-2293-8.
tr. Anne Carson (13 March 2015). Antigone. Oberon Books. ISBN 978-1-78319-874-0.
Euripides; tr Anne Carson (23 December 2025). Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides. New York Review Books. ISBN 978-1-59017-557-6
Sophocles; tr Anne Carson (19 April 2001). Electra. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-972647-9.
S. Sara Monoson (18 August 2013). Plato's Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15858-7.
Tony Fisher; Eve Katsouraki (20 January 2017). Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy. Simon Critchley Chapter 2: Tragedy's Philosophy: Springer. pp. 25–. ISBN 978-1-349-95100-0.
The Greeks Aren’t Done with Us: Simon Critchley on Tragedy - The Millions
The Death of the Character
Page duBois
International Journal of the Classical Tradition
Vol. 21, No. 3 (OCTOBER 2014), pp. 301-308 (8 pages)
Published by: Springer
Stable URL https://www.jstor.org/stable/24716644
Simon Critchley; Jacques Derrida; Ernesto Laclau (2 September 2003). Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-80769-7
Gorgias - Wikipedia
Tony Fisher; Eve Katsouraki (20 January 2017). Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy. Simon Critchley Chapter 2: Tragedy's Philosophy: Springer. pp. 25–. ISBN 978-1-349-95100-0.
The Greeks Aren’t Done with Us: Simon Critchley on Tragedy - The Millions
Page duBois
International Journal of the Classical Tradition
Vol. 21, No. 3 (OCTOBER 2014), pp. 301-308 (8 pages)
Published by: Springer
Stable URL https://www.jstor.org/stable/24716644
Simon Critchley; Jacques Derrida; Ernesto Laclau (2 September 2003). Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-80769-7
Gorgias - Wikipedia
