The Experience of the Tragic
Series: The Tragic
Publisher: Ridero
Published: 09/30/2025
Place of publication: Moscow
Language: eng
Translated from: rus
Translation of: Опыт трагического
Number of pages: 302
ISBN-13: 9785006745506
First sentence: Introduction: This present work continues the philosophical line associated with the investigation of the tragic as a limit cognitive and ontological condition. It grew out of translating and research activity directed at introducing into the Russian- language context the works of Peter Wessel Zapffe — a Norwegian pessimist philosopher whose thought remained almost unknown outside Scandinavia for eighty years. In 2024, my first complete translation of his book Om det tragiske (On the Tragic) was completed; access was later obtained to the complete collected works in ten volumes from the National Library of Norway. After lengthy searches, rejections, and difficulties with copyright, the first Russian editions of Zapffe's works, through collaboration with the publishing house Totenburg, appeared in Russia for the first time in 2025 — already after the completion of work on this book. This material became the foundation for a critical rethinking of the limits of the philosophy of the tragic in the context of contemporary ontological, cognitive, and neuropsychological approaches. The text is written in the voices of two figures — Professor N. and Professor P. This mode of presentation was chosen in order to underscore that consciousness is not a fixed entity. The division into Professor N. and Professor P. is an attempt to show the full inner complexity and inconstancy of a mind that can never fully master itself, because it is itself a process. At the center of Professor N.'s position stands constructive nihilism, ethical abstention, and a consistent refusal of metaphysical justifications. He regards human thought as a system of predictive coding, compelled to operate under conditions of permanent informational incompleteness and environmental uncertainty. For him, the tragic is above all a cognitive problem: the gap between what the mind expects from the world and what the world actually provides it. Professor P. subjects both Professor N.'s position and Zapffe's philosophy in its normative part to critique. His pessimistic position is grounded in the introduction of the processual category of differentiating experience as the ontologically primary level of reality. In his interpretation, experience is an irreducible interaction of a system with actuality — one that precedes any attempt at comprehension. Experience encompasses both cognitive and affective components and cannot be reduced to perception, meaning, or narrative structure. Within this logic, all forms of philosophical response — nihilism, Stoicism, existentialism, even pessimism itself as a doctrine — are secondary in relation to the experience that conditions them, while itself remaining inexhaustible with respect to them. Experience is never fully reducible to its interpretations. Professor P.'s position may be characterized as an ontologically oriented pessimism, free from aestheticized melancholy (characteristic of Emil Cioran and Albert Caraco) and from romanticized negativity. Unlike Ligotti, Professor P. excludes the aestheticization of alienation, concentrating on the analytical fixation of the fact that no model can exhaust the structure of reality, since the latter is always already given in irreversible experience. The final part of the book is written in my own voice in the form of a review and draws together all the preceding arguments. The work begins its examination of the tragic as an ontological problem not only of human life but of the world as a whole. The central expression of this cosmic dimension of the tragic is Weltschmerz — world-sorrow, which no longer belongs to the human alone and points to the fundamental structure of reality as a process fundamentally oriented toward destruction.
Description: The Experience of the Tragic — the first part of the dilogy The Tragic. This foundational work investigates the core tragedy of the human condition through a rigorous re-examination of Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe’s ideas. It achieves this by introducing two pivotal concepts: discriminating experience as an ontological foundation of reality, and liminal acceptance as a mode of coexisting with the existential boundaries of reason.