Abstract

The thesis that I uphold in this dissertation is double: I start from the idea that there is a special kind of feeling that I call tragic and that belies both what I call “natural” feeling and the current experience thereof, an experience that implicates a return to a selfish or narcissist conception of individuality. To prove this, I shall divide the dissertation in three sections: in the first one, I meditate on the phenomenological framework of feeling, music and history that leads to a tragic experience of time; in the second section, I set out in broad outline how tragedy opposes metaphysics, Christianity and romanticism so as to make comprehensible why man is essentially a weak or rather an insubstantial being that gets his identity beyond the would-be natural or egotistic identity of his; in the third section, I dwell upon some events of the last century that are supposed to symbolise a radical change in the perception of humanity and I choose one of them for the reasons that I give there so as to confirm the precedent approach. This way, the phenomenological exposition provides the indispensable thread to weave the cultural interpretation and vice versa. In a brief colophon, I epitomise the whole conceptual development to emphasise that this is not an exegesis of Nietzsche’s thought (which is moreover obvious in view of the freedom wherewith I move through the initial and the last phases of its development) but an application thereof to the understanding of the present sense of man through the notions of feeling and weakness that I use both in an ontological and a critical sense.