Publication Details

Abstract

Coordinates of Jaspers’s position in that part of human cognition and expressing of the world, where philosophical thinking and literary creation penetrate each other, are determined by the standing of the tragic as a philosophical concept which characterizes human existence and tragedy as poetic writing whose subject-matter is the tragic. Karl Jaspers unsettled traditional conceptions of the tragical conflict as a contest of two contrary moral norms, eventually of the tragic hero as a fighter for an idea out any sphere of time. Instead, he gave prominence of the tragic as a moment of „wreckshipped being“. He characterized the tragic hero as a bearer of qualities which transcend individual being and drew attention to significance of „inescapable situation“.