Jenes Lichtbild: The Possibility of a Theory of Tragedy

ing from all questions regarding the coherence of Sartre’s metaphysics, the point which is important for present purposes is the strength prima facie of Sartre’s candidacy for an adequate internal theory of tragedy: Sartre identifies the structure of human subjectivity with tragic form, and grounds this identification in a comprehensive metaphysical system. The point can be brought out by a contrast with the postKantian, pre-Hegelian German idealist metaphysics which Sartre’s system in many ways resembles. The notion that the human subject is bound to aim at a metaphysically-defined end which it cannot realise because its realisation would be inconsistent with the finitude which defines human, as opposed to divine, subjectivity appears in Fichte, early Schelling, and much writing of the Frühromantik. Sartre’s difference from these early post-Kantian authors is that, on his account, not even an infinite approximation, unendliche Annäherung, is possible on the contrary, on Sartre’s account the end constitutive of human subjectivity, viz., attaining the status of en-soi-pour-soi, recedes with every step that we might 25 Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, tr. Hazel E. Barnes, London 1995, 615; L’Être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris 1943, 708. 26 The theme is highlighted and explored by M. Frank in: Unendliche Annäherung. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik, Frankfurt 1997, partially translated as The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, tr. E. Millan-Zaibert, Albany 2004.