Tragedy and Ethical Agency: Remarks on Hegel’s Early Essay on The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate

Resumo

In recent years much attention has been devoted to Hegel’s interpretation of Greek tragedy. To be sure, authors dealing with Hegel’s understanding of tragedy have adopted different perspectives. However they do share one common basic assumption, namely, that tragedy plays a crucial role in shaping some key features of Hegel’s philosophy. This article pursues along these lines, and demonstrates that tragedy, or some aspects of tragedy, reinterpreted and reformulated, inform Hegel’s theory of ethical agency. It performs this task on the basis of a reading of Hegel’s early essay The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate.