K's central point in this essay is that tragedy depends on a certain degree of innocence on the part of the hero. The hero falls due to his own actions, but those actions are not wholly free. They are constrained (in ancient tragedy, at least) by “the substantial categories of family, state, and destiny”1 in which the hero is bound. So, watching the hero fall, we (the audience) feel not only pain but sorrow. The more the hero is responsible for his actions, the more we feel pain; the more he is innocent, the more we feel sorrow. (K does not define these two emotions, and the words “pain” and “sorrow” are of course translations of Danish words that I don’t know, but the distinction is evocative enough.)
The tragic, K claims, depends on this mixture, this “collision,” of innocence and responsibility, of pain and sorrow. The person destroyed by forces entirely outside of him is not a tragic hero, only a sufferer. The person who falls by his own choices alone is not a tragic hero, only a screw-up.
But this, Kierkegaard claims, is precisely what the modern age insists on: that the hero “stands and falls on his own deeds,” that the individual is "responsible for his own life, without further ado. So if he goes to the dogs it isn’t tragic but bad.”
Central to all of this is a distinction between ethical and aesthetic categories. To the extent that a person is responsible for his action; to the extent, that is, that a person’s life is his own doing; he must be judged ethically: he is either good or bad. But to the extent that his action is constrained, to the extent that his life is a sequence of events that take place and cannot be otherwise, the ethical is suspended. And because the ethical is partly suspended—because we cannot entirely judge—we can relate to such actions and such lives aesthetically: we can find them tragic. If there is only innocence, presumably (K does not spell this out), then we can react only with pity; the aesthetic collapses into the sentimental and maudlin. The tragic becomes possible in the interaction of aesthetic and ethical categories, when the warm flesh of the one finds form on the bones of the other.
The absolute freedom that the modern age imputes on its people is not real, says K. “[This insistence on individual responsibility] leads you to think this must be a kingdom of gods, this generation in which I too have the honor to live. However this is by no means the case; the energy, the courage which would thus be the creator of its own fortune, yes, the creator of itself, is an illusion and in losing the tragic the age gains despair.”
Gabriel Josipovici, in an otherwise excellent overview of “The Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern,” interprets this despair as overwhelming guilt: “Now [i.e. in the modern world] man, feeling fully responsible for what happens to him, is riven by feelings of guilt at not having acted otherwise than he has."2 This interpretation is consistent with the logic of the essay (innocence=>sorrow/guilt=>pain), but the reason K’s work is so resistant to summary and to incorporation into any "philosophical movement” is that his ideas always seem to run beyond his logic, his thought always seems to contain something more that cannot be subsumed in his argument—and, it seems to me, that the “despair” in the line quoted above suggests something other than overwhelming guilt. Maybe it is K’s snarkiness in the preceding sentence (“this kingdom of gods, in which I too have the honor to live”), maybe it is what I know of his view of his own epoch from other writings, but I feel that overwhelming guilt is too dignified a calamity; that by "despair" K means something more degraded. Or maybe I'm just projecting. But consider:
In losing the tragic, the age has gained despair. It is not the tragic hero nor the audience of the play nor theater itself but the age which has gained despair. It is we who have gained despair. For, in losing our sense of our lives as a sequence of events in which we are caught, a story within which we have a mixture of innocence and responsibility, of suffering and guilt, we have lost the capacity to relate aesthetically to ourselves, to find the tragic beauty in our own failures. We are forced to judge ourselves constantly, absolutely on ethical grounds—as failures or successes; as having made the right choices or the wrong; as “lost” or as “on-track.” Even the categories of happy and unhappy take on a gloomy moral weight, because they are now only proxies for success and failure.
This renders us not only intolerably cruel in our self-judgments, but, correspondingly, insufferably self-justifying, desperate as we are to escape the judgment that is in store for us if we are ever forced to admit to misfortune. And like all judgments, we apply this attitude to those around us as readily as to ourselves: hence the relentless affirmations that we shower on our friends; hence the breathtaking nastiness with which we dismiss those we dislike; hence, ironically, the disintegration of anything that might properly be called ethics in favor of self-affirmation and group solidarity.
In losing our capacity to relate aesthetically to our lives, we have lost everything, even the category of the ethical to which our aesthetic relation was sacrificed.
1 This and all subsequent quotes (except where indicated) are from the Penguin Classics Either/Or, translated by Alastair Hannay, edited by Victor Eremita; all of the lines I have quoted are from pages 142-144
2 Gabriel Josipovici, On Trust, Yale University Press, p. 28