What should be said of tragedy today?

What conclusions can we draw indeed? Since Plato, philosophers have struggled with the claims of tragedy. From the outset, a sort of competition defined the relationship between philosophy and tragedy, and the effort by philosophers to take up the claims of tragedy has long been characterized more as critique than interpretation. Above all, the question of the right life - of the good life and the character of human life - has determined the stakes of this struggle between philosophy and tragedy. Since Aristotle, we have sought to gather the challenges of these claims into an idea, to account for it in a theory. But the stuff of tragedy, as philosophers repeatedly need to learn (even if only to forget once again), is complex. One might even say that it is complexity and enigma that one faces in tragedy. It will never be a simple matter or simply a matter of an idea. Yet if we want to speak to the question, a legitimate, even pressing question, of what conclusions we can draw from tragedy for philosophy, for theory, then we need to begin be speaking of its roots, of that which gives rise to the possibility, even the necessity, of tragedy. These roots of tragedy belong to each of us from birth.