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October 1, 2006 12:01 AM

Philosopher-Filter: I lost the source to something Schopenhauer once said...

Philosopher-Filter:
I lost the source to something Schopenhauer once said
about the conditions necessary to achieve tragedy. It came off more as a witty epigram, but I believe it was part of a larger essay, perhaps dealing with irony.

posted by archae to religion & philosophy (2 comments total)

"The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general and when only its most significant features are emphasised, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail, it has the characteristics of a comedy." via Wikiquote
posted by paulsc at 12:24 AM on October 1, 2006

Check the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Schopenhauer, to see if any of the descriptions of books there rings a bell. I didn't find "tragedy" on a cursory search of the page.

The page also has links at the bottom to searchable archives.

Another possibility is that it's not a quote from Schopenhauer but from someone borrowing some of his ideas. There are a lot of people who were inspired by him... the SEP page lists a bunch of dramatists etc as having been "inspired by Schopenhauer's sense of the world's absurdity, either regarded in a more nihilistic and gloomy manner, or regarded in a more lighthearted, absurdist and comic manner."

The first thing your quote made me think of was a quote from the Jean Anouilh play Antigone about the requirement of a tragedy being its total unswerving inescapability. The best version I was able to find online goes like this, though I'm not sure how accurate this is:

"Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope ... has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped. The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is to shout. Don't mistake me, I said "shout"; I did not say groan, whimper, complain. That, you cannot do. But you can shout aloud: you can say all those things said that you never thought you'd be able to say, And you don't say these things because it will do any good to say them; you know better than that. You say them for their own sake; you say them because you learn a lot from them."
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:20 PM on October 1, 2006