The Tragedy of Our Trajectory

In this project, I argue that the trajectory of Western European civilization has resulted in increasingly tragic predicaments that are not to be taken as given features of being human. Though both Ancient Western and Eastern wisdom traditions concur that suffering is a part of life, the point of living is not to suffer but to learn to overcome it and flourish. But because the purported successes of Western “progress” necessarily depend on structural oppression, and oppression produces superfluous sufferings that interfere with our capacities to actualize our freedom and flourish, they ultimately make us all worse-off. Reflecting on such an imbalance–one where life’s struggles overwhelm us without commensurate benefit or relief–led Arthur Schopenhauer to conclude that life must be inherently tragic. Putting Schopenhauer in conversation with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I argue that this tragedy is not so much an intrinsic feature of life (even if suffering is), but a contingent consequence of how pernicious power systems have created existential imbalances in a destructive direction, the karmic consequences of which the oppressed are unfairly and ceaselessly forced to bear. I trace out my explanation of how structural oppression harms us, then take up three contemporary examples of tragic portrayal that Schopenhauer considered endemic to the human experience to show that even tragic circumstances with biologically-deterministic features are made worse when lived out within oppressive systems that structurally deny us the freedom they purport to protect. I conclude that overcoming the tragic predicaments of oppression requires us to think critically and anew about the meaning of the good life–the chief aim of the practice of philosophy–and to create different relational processes that transcend the reduction of our lives into exploitable subjects. Among other things, this requires resurrecting the power of the Erotic–which Audre Lorde describes as a specifically feminine epistemology–that Eurocentric power systems have demonized and misappropriated, to ignite our liberatory potential and re-harmonize with the multiplicity of Being that oppression has set off-balance.