Papers on concepts

Title: Tragedy

Publication: Analysis, Volume 70, Issue 4, pages 632–638

Date: 8 September 2010

Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anq076

Abstract: We demand our money back if a rogue theatre director has Desdemona alive at the end of Othello – not merely because it contradicts Shakespeare’s intentions, but because it seems dramatically wrong. At the same time, and for the same people, her death is deeply upsetting. While we want the fiction to go a certain way, and certainly to include the death of Desdemona, we don’t, it seems, want Desdemona to die. We are, as Hume said, ‘pleased in proportion as [we] are afflicted’. Put generally:

1. We desire the fiction to be such that something, E, occurs in it, while
2. we react in ways which make it tempting to say that we desire E not to occur.

I’ll call such a combination of states a tragic response, and the fiction to which it is a response tragic or a tragedy. Is the tempting thing to say the right thing? No. The right thing to say is we desire-in-imagination that E not occur. I argue that other proposals concerning the right thing to say fail. I offer a principled ground for distinguishing desires from desires-in-imagination.