What is the legacy of German Idealism for the theory of tragedy? This is a question that calls not only for an exploration of the specific development of the new philosophical importance that tragedy as such came to have in the post-Kantian period, but also for an examination of the context in which the philosophy of tragedy more broadly is discussed.

From what perspective, then, are we to assess the theory of tragedy as it develops among the German Idealists? There are indeed many perspectives from which we may view this question: the emergence of a philosophy of ‘the tragic’ as distinct from a philosophy of tragedy; the tragic role of opposition, which Kantian antinomies, Hölderlinian original separation and Hegelian dialectic all play; the struggle between Fichtean freedom and Spinozist necessity; the ‘tragedy of the ethical’, as some of Hegel's early writings suggest. I propose to focus primarily on the legacy of Idealism with respect to tragedy as a dramatic genre in terms of the reconceived notions of art and the human image that underlie the systematic efforts of Hegel and Schelling in their respective Lectures on the Philosophy of Art.