Tragedies usually do not “warm and lighten the heart.” Tragedies may move; they may encourage us to reconsider and to rethink what we thought we knew. In Hannah Arendt’s letter to Karl Jaspers, written on May 29, 1963, we encounter this strange notion of tragedy: “Ich kann nicht sagen, wie mich Deine Zustimmung zum Revolutionsbuch gefreut hat! … Jedes Wort, das Du schreibst, trifft in den Kern des von mir Gemeinten. Eine Tragödie, bei der es einem froh und warm ums Herz wird, weil so Einfaches und Großes auf dem Spiel steht.” Arendt was responding to two enthusiastic letters in which Jaspers reported how he had read her book On Revolution. At first he had felt discouraged by the fact that it was written in English, a language in which he was not fluent. But then he learned to read the book as if it were not written in this language so foreign to German intellectuals born before the First World War. On May 16, 1963 he wrote: “Auf dem Wege Deiner Darstellung ermutigt das viele Große, das Du zum Sprechen bringst, das Ganze ist am Ende Deine Vision einer Tragödie, die Dich nicht verzweifeln läßt: ein Element der Tragödie des Menschen.”

Unlike Arendt, Jaspers provided us with systematic reflections on tragedy and the tragic. His book Von der Wahrheit, published just after the war, presents in the third and last part a subchapter on “tragisches Wissen,” entitled “Wahrheit im Durchbruch.” Nowhere in this text would we find a notion of a “Tragödie des Menschen,” a notion that begs for misunderstanding. What is at stake here is not an attempt at defining the tragedy of mankind; this would only be possible in the framework of a religion or other kind of metaphysics. Jaspers’s book rejects each and every concept that would provide us with such a notion. His emphasis on what he calls the “Weg Deiner Darstellung” (course of your presentation) allows for a better understanding of his remarks. “Das tragische Wissen ist selbst ein offenes, nicht wissendes Wissen,” he writes. It is not the fixed knowledge of something but rather an endless movement, driven by questions without answers.