The term “tragic” has always referred to some aspect
of man's concrete involvement with evil and with his
effort to comprehend it and to deal with it. As theory
is to data, so the theory of evil might be thought to
be related to tragedy. But a caution must be sounded,
for evil is not an objective datum, as it were, presented
for our inspection and understanding. It is also subjec
tive; man himself is involved in it in a manner different
from the theorist's impersonal study of the datum. This
complexity may be expressed by observing that the
struggle against evil may become ironic. For the evil
is often in one's self; or it may be identified with the
world to which one owes one's being, or with an
unnamed and mysterious power in the world. Tragic
action in its generic sense is an ironic struggle with
evil.
Irony is understood here to be ambiguity in speech
or human action used for purposes of communication.
An evil event becomes ironic when its ambiguous
character is perceived and used. The peculiar tragic
character of the protagonist's struggle turns upon his
perception of evil and upon his possible creative use
of it. Therefrom follows the characteristic salvation of
the tragic hero, his victory in defeat. This use of the
evil in the struggle against it was recognized by
Aristotle in his account of the function of tragedy as
the catharsis of pity and terror by means of pity and
terror (Poetics, 1449b 25-30). Hegel suggests the same
recognition when he remarks that the tragic hero
plucks for himself the fruit of his own deeds.
The most notable Western interpretations of the evil
involved in dramatic encounter are the Tragic, the
Orphic, and the Christian. The first of these, as the
title suggests, has become standard or typical. The
diversified forms of the tragic can be regarded as
envisaging human action, according to a characteristic
pattern or form, in the several contexts which are
determined by these three ways of understanding evil.
