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The Comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of Modern Philosophy1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
Abstract
The general ground for comedy is therefore a world in which man as subject or person has made himself completely master of everything that counts to him otherwise than the essential content of what he wills and accomplishes, a world whose purposes are therefore destroyed because of their unsubstantiality. Nothing can be done, for example, to help a democratic nation where the citizens are self-seeking, quarrelsome, frivolous, bumptious, without faith or knowledge, garrulous, boastful and ineffectual: such a nation destroys itself by its own folly.
Hegel is keen to distinguish the merely laughable from the comical in the sequel to this passage from page one thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine of the English translation of his Aesthetics. We may laugh at any contrast between subjective caprice and insubstantial action, while vice and evil are not in themselves comic: “There is also the laughter of derision, scorn, despair, etc. On the other hand, the comical as such implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of his aims and achievements.” (Is this condition of serenity, I wonder, attained by effort or by grace?) In comedy, “the ruling principle is the contingency and caprice of subjective life” whose nullity and self-destructive folly displays the abused actuality of substantial life. The aberration of the passions that rage in the human heart are drawn from “the aberrations of the democracy out of which the old faith and morals have vanished” (as Hegel describes Aristophanes's comedies). While in tragedy the powers which oppose each other as pathos in individuals are hostile, in comedy, “they are revealed directly as inwardly self-dissolving.” Comedy, as much as tragedy, is always divine comedy, “the Divine here in its community, as the substance and aim of human individuality, brought into existence as something concrete, summoned into action and put in movement.”
- Type
- Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
- Information
- Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 15 , Issue 1: number 29 , Spring/Summer 1994 , pp. 14 - 22
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1994
Footnotes
1
This paper was originally prepared for the Conference on Modernism: Politics, Poetics, Practice, King's College, Cambridge, July, 1993.
References
2 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. Knox, T.M., Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1974-1975, vol. II tr. amendedGoogle Scholar.
3 Ibid., p. 1200.
4 Ibid, p. 1180, p. 1202.
5 Ibid, p. 1163.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid, p. 1162.
8 I refer here to Nietzsche's argument that “complete nihilism is the necessary consequence of the ideals entertained hitherto”; it involves the active transvaluating of values as opposed to passive and incomplete nihilism, “its forms: we live in the midst of it.” (See The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann, Walter and Hollingdale, R.J., New York, Vintage, 1968, Book OneGoogle Scholar: European Nihilism, §§ 22, 28).
9 I employ here Freud's distinction between “Mourning and Melancholia” (See The Penguin Freud Library, vol.11 On Metapsychology, Harmondsworth, 1984, pp. 245-68.Google Scholar)
10 For aberrated mourning, see Rickels, Laurence A., Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1988 Google Scholar; for inaugurated mourning, compare the inaugurated eschatology of Climacus, John, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Luibheid, Colm and Russell, Norman, London, SPCK, 1982 Google Scholar.
11 This subsequently became the opening essay of History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923), trans. Livingstone, Rodney, London, Merlin, 1971, pp. 1–26 Google Scholar.
12 See Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Bennington, Geoffrey and Bowlby, Rachel, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1989 Google Scholar.
13 Ibid, p. 107.
14 See “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Cardozo Law Review, “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice” (vol.11 July-Aug. 1990, no.5-6), pp. 919–1045 Google Scholar.
15 Ibid, pp. 919-73.
16 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, trans. Zohn, Harry, London, Collins, 1973, pp. 255-66Google Scholar.
17 Cardozo Law Review (vol.11 1990), pp. 973–1039 Google Scholar.
18 1928, trans. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Osborne, John, London, New Left Books, 1977.Google Scholar
19 Glas remains Derrida's most sustained engagement with Hegel's thought, but not from the perspective of the relation between Marx and the Hegelian dialectic (see Glas [1974], trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, and Richard Rand, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
20 See Hegel, , Aesthetics, vol 11, pp. 1234-6Google Scholar.