Three Tragedies of the Unexamined Life

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines in detail some cases that are powerfully instructive concerning the kinds of human tragedy that ensue from insufficient self-knowledge (first, of a kind resulting from a walled-in denial of both self and other acknowledgment—Don Giovanni; second, of a kind resulting from an encompassing mindfulness of the structure and content of one’s life too long delayed—Henry James’s character Dencombe; and third, of a kind resulting from a presupposition that language is just an instrument for the naming and blunt description of externalities—King Lear). In seeing how these three cases bring out in high relief what a self-draughtsman (or self-composer on a musical analogy) can sometimes tragically and always regrettably obscure, minimize, or leave out entirely, we see three foundational elements that are necessary for the substantial sense of selfhood that this book examines in Chapters 5 and 6.