You see the great indifference of the gods
to these things that have happened,
who begat us and are called our fathers,
and look on such sufferings.
What is to come no one can see,
but what is here now is pitiable for us
and shameful for them,
but of all men hardest for him
on whom this disaster has fallen.
Maiden, do not stay in this house:
you have seen death and many agonies,
fresh and strange
and there is nothing here that is not Zeus.
— Sophocles, Trachiniae 1266-78

In a post I found as deeply moving as it is clarifying, Liam Kofi Bright writes of four approaches to tragedy: a “social” approach, which seeks to provide “social structures and valorised practices that will allow the individual to come to terms where that is appropriate, and make changes to avoid future instances of the loss where that is appropriate”; an approach that seeks to “dissipate” tragedy, insofar as it holds that “there is something we could teach people, which if fully and properly internalised (perhaps accompanied by appropriate changes in attitude), will allow people to see apparent tragedies as no-real-tragedy at all”; a “compensatory” approach, wherein “we recognise that the tragedy is indeed a tragedy, but can be convinced that it shall be compensated by (indeed may actively help bring about) some great good in the long run, and we overcome our loss by focusing instead on that great good”; and a “heroizing” approach, which recognizes that “tragedies are, or at least can be, indeed gratuitous and utterly unjustified, shall not be compensated (and even if it were this could never really be enough), but counsels that there is none the less dignity in the struggle against this inevitability.”

As Bright points out, his post does not seek to offer a comprehensive account of various approaches. It nevertheless led me to wonder about modes of response to tragedy that — from the perspective of canonical philosophical texts — have often been ruled as lacking or deficient in philosophical temperament. In particular, I’m wondering about those approaches to tragedy that are neither contained nor containable.

Here I have in mind diverse but related modes of response such as wrathful grief (as in Euripides’s Medea or Renato Rosaldo’s anthropological rendering of the Ilongot headhunters in the Philippines); or uncontainable, inconsolable, and seemingly endless lamentation (such as Eliza’s wailing in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave); or the type of response to tragedy dramatized in Sophocles’s Trachiniae, which wants nothing to do with theodicean, stoic, or heroic responses. These forms of grieving, then, gesture to experiences of suffering, agony, and loss that defy our abilities to come to terms with the trauma (pace “socialization”); that insist on the losses suffered as unteachable (pace “dissipation”); that refuse the possibility of compensation (pace “compensation”); that reject dignified approaches to tragedy, or even, the very notion that “struggles” with grief can be dignifying (pace “heroizing”); that give witness to how tragedy may often unravel the very fabric of the social and the self.

What could be at stake in paying greater attention to this a-philosophical, post-philosophical or even anti-philosophical forms of grieving? Bernard Williams’s remarkable and brilliant essay, “The Women of Trachis” may offer some pointers. Williams’s essay contests institutional philosophy’s attachment to dispensing “good news” – that is, the notion, as exemplified in the theodicies of Leibniz and Hegel, that ultimately horrendous suffering will be redeemed. But it may also be read as an uncompromising critique of the philosophic self, at least as has been imagined by its most celebrated practitioners from Plato to Parfit.

Against these blandishments of philosophy, Williams recommends what he calls stark fictions, by which he means accounts that carve out in the bleakest relief possible “extreme, undeserved, and uncompensated suffering.” By so doing, William continues, they offer a devastating “limitation to the tireless aim of moral philosophy to make the world safe for well-disposed people.”