What is left of tragedy?

Tragic characters fight battles they cannot possibly win. That is what makes heroes out of them. However classical and modern tragedies display ontological differences whose fault line is to be found in the philosophical shift from the rationalist principle of sufficient reason to that of insufficient reason. Hence, life ceases to be a necessity imposed by the wrath of the gods and becomes the ordinary outcome of man’s failure. Given that, this paper will consider the nature of the shift and its conceptual impact on the Greek term hamartia. Modernity comes with a redefinition of Weltanschauung: it does not have the cosmic range of the classics, and thus it is less about fate than it is about guilt.