Hegel: Tragedy

In Tragedies of Spirit, Theodore D. George engages Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to explore the philosophical significance of tragedy in post-Kantian continental thought. George follows lines of inquiry originally developed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida, and takes as his point of departure the concern that Hegel’s speculative philosophy forms a summit of modernity that the present historical time is called to interrogate. Yet, George argues that Hegel’s larger speculative ambitions in the Phenomenology compel him to turn to the resource (...) of tragedy in order to give voice to issues of incommensurability, discontinuity, otherness, strife, and crisis. From this standpoint, Hegel’s interest in the tragic proves to be more pervasive and to run deeper than has previously been recognized. The author shows that Hegel’s reliance upon the tragic not only stretches and tests assumptions of speculative philosophy, but also illuminates original insights into human finitude. While situating Hegel’s approach to tragedy as part of a broader response to Kant, George also contextualizes Hegel’s interest in tragedy with reference to figures in German Idealism and Romanticism, such as Schelling, Hölderlin, and Schlegel. (shrink)

This dissertation provides a careful interpretation of Hegel's conception of political community in the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is often accepted by commentators that for Hegel in this text the highest achievements of community life are to be associated with the realization of 'absolute spirit' and 'the concept.' The author of this dissertation, however, develops a conception of political community based not upon this view, but instead upon a number of crucial, if somewhat oblique, passages within the Phenomenology dedicated to (...) the poetic genera of tragic drama. In light of these remarks, Hegel, perhaps contrary to his own thematic position, suggests that tragic drama can serve as a schema or model for the accomplishment of political community itself. The determination of community exhibited in this view entails a sense of political togetherness which, though a form of unity, nevertheless works to embrace forms of irreconcilable conflict, otherness and difference which lie at the heart of all political affiliation. ;Although the dissertation focuses ultimately on the conception of tragic community elaborated in Chapter VII of the Phenomenology, "Religion in the Form of Art," the author interprets this conception of tragic political unity in conjunction with two other crucial discussions in the text imbued with allusions to tragedy: one found in Hegel's oblique reference to the Antigone of Sophocles in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology on Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, the other indicated by Hegel's reference to 'reversal' in his discussion of mastery and servitude in Chapter IV. In contrast with the Philosophy of Right where Hegel's account is concerned with the establishment of right in the institutions and practices of the modern state, the form of community achieved in tragic drama in the Phenomenology is constituted by means of a communally shared, aesthetic experience. In this dissertation, the author turns not only to the Phenomenology , but relies upon the Philosophy of Right, Lectures on Aesthetics , and interpreters of Hegel in the continental tradition, such as Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida. (shrink)

Towards the very end of his wide-ranging lectures on the philosophy of art, Hegel unexpectedly expresses a preference for comedy over tragedy. More surprisingly, given his systematic claims for his aesthetic theory, he suggests that this preference is arbitrary. This essay suggests that this arbitrariness is itself systematic, given Hegel’s broader claims about unity and necessity in art generally and his analysis of ancient as opposed to modern drama in particular. With the emergence of modern subjectivity, tragic plots lose their (...) necessity and so their redemptive conclusions; comic plots disintegrate into mockery and entertainment. In many cases, the dramas in question consequently fail to be art. This does not, however, mean that art ends: insofar as it inspires humans to a better understanding of their unity with the divine, it will continue to meet its mandate. But the lack of necessity in modern drama means we are free to prefer happy endings. Hegel’s seemingly arbitrary preference is, in the end, systematically justified. (shrink)

Hegel thought Sophocles' Antigone was the finest tragedy, and he put drama atop his hierarchy of the arts, precisely at the point where his system transitions from aesthetics to the philosophy of religion. Hegel concluded his Aesthetics by writing, "Of all the masterpieces of the classical and modern world, the Antigone seems to me to be the most magnificent and satisfying work of art."1The Antigone owes its place in Hegel's hierarchy to its focus on Antigone's uncanny self-certainty. Positioned at the (...) juncture between Hegel's aesthetics and his philosophy of religion, it has at its centre a funeral rite, the most ancient and universal of all religious rituals. Antigone's perception of what she is called upon to .. (shrink)

I maintain that Hegel’s reading of the Antigone underestimates the power of the negativity to which Antigone’s action is dedicated. I argue that the negativity of death and the sacred cannot, contrary to Hegel, to be sublated and thus incorporated into the progression of Spirit. Bataille’s treatment of the sacred better characterizes the unworldly force and the otherness with which Antigone and Creon are confronted when their actions bring the divine and the human into conflict. Antigone’s obedience to what she (...) understands to be her divine obligation is a devotion to a negativity which exceeds and subverts all dialectical comprehension. Although her action brings the divine and the human political sphere into a moment of identity, allowing for the sublation of the ethical world, Antigone’s action is a transgression in Bataille’s sense of the term, and it points toward the limits of reason. The Antigone narrative thus exceeds Hegel’s use of it and is ultimately more consistent with Bataille’s understanding of the sacred. (shrink)