Abstract

This study is rooted in my contention that in post-Idealist German philosophy there emerges for the first time a philosophy of tragic heroism, one that escapes more definitively than could the work of Schelling or Hegel the dominance of what has been called the poetics of tragedy, according to which the meaning of tragedy inheres in effects produced by the structure of dramatic poetry. To be sure, the break from the poetics of tragedy is anticipated in poetry, and I read Milton's Samson Agonistes as a reflection on the core meaning of heroism, and his preface to that poem as the site of a critique of Aristotle, one that implicitly locates the meaning of tragedy in the heroism of the hero. Because Milton's work concerns the possibility of religious tragedy, it serves as an exemplary introduction to the philosophy of tragic heroism, which in interrogating the ground of heroism is itself indebted to both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian traditions. A reading of literary and philosophical investigations of both biblical figures such as Samson and Abraham, and classical heroes such as Oedipus and Antigone; a reinterpretation of the phenomenological unveiling of authentic existence as a theory of heroism; and an analysis of the explicit commentaries of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin on the tragic, together allow me to elucidate the concept of the uncanny, reticent, anxious hero, whose secrecy and separation are marks of a radical individualization, and who above all is constant. ;The study challenges the persistent tendency to base interpretation of heroism on generic distinctions whose viability depends ultimately on neglecting the characteristic silence and separation of the hero. It confronts also the problem of the implication of philosophy's own self-understanding in its fascination with the heroic, a problem particularly salient in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose philosophical communication is always veiled in secrecy, even as it engages in the project of unveiling. The study concludes with an attempt to determine the place of tragic heroism in deciding the fate of a philosophy marked by such fascination even as it tends towards its self-overcoming