Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy

New Essays

Mark Alznauer

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438483368, 9781438483375
• eBook ISBN: 9781438483382
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Explores the full extent of Hegel's interest in tragedy and comedy throughout his works and extends from more literary and dramatic issues to questions about the role these genres play in the history of society and religion.

No philosopher has treated the subject of tragedy and comedy in as original and searching a manner as G. W. F. Hegel. His concern with these genres runs throughout both his early and late works and extends from aesthetic issues to questions in the history of society and religion. Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy is the first book to explore the full extent of Hegel's interest in tragedy and comedy. The contributors analyze his treatment of both ancient and modern drama, including major essays on Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Goethe, and the German comedic tradition, and examine the relation of these genres to political, religious, and philosophical issues. In addition, the volume includes several essays on the role tragedy and comedy play in Hegel's philosophy of history. This book will not only be valuable to those who wish for a general overview of Hegel's treatment of tragedy and comedy but also to those who want to understand how his treatment of these genres is connected to the rest of his thought.

I

Tragedy

Chapter One

The Beauty of Fate and Its Reconciliation

Hegel’s The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate and Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris1

Douglas Finn

Oh! the grievous necessity of such violations of the holy! The deepest, holiest, sorrow of a beautiful soul, its most incomprehensible riddle, is that its nature has to be disrupted, its holiness sullied.2—FRIEDRICH HEGEL

OVER THE COURSE OF MANY YEARS and several publications, Walter Kaufmann analyzed Hegel’s early writings with a view toward better understanding the philosopher’s mature thought. While scholars searching for the sources of Hegel’s philosophy tend to emphasize Kant’s influence, Kaufmann highlights the impact of poets like Goethe and Schiller—but especially Goethe—on Hegel’s thought. Kaufmann sees that influence manifested in several ways. He credits Goethe with leading Hegel to think more holistically and dynamically. With Goethe’s help, that is, Hegel comes to recognize that one cannot understand theory apart from practice or thinking subject apart from thought object. Opposing positions, moreover, must be grasped in their relation to each other so that the limitations of each stance on its own might be made known and thereby overcome. In that way, Hegel insists with Goethe that each viewpoint represents a stage in the development of spirit. Thus, in reading Hegel’s extensive lectures on history and on the history of aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, we do not merely trace a sequence of changing events, cultures, or ideas across time. Rather, we come to learn of the human mind in its very becoming.3

Beyond this more general influence, Kaufmann claims multiple times to have uncovered a more explicit connection between Goethe and the young Hegel.4 He identifies Hegel’s early work The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate as a turning point in the philosopher’s development, in particular through the explicit critique of Kantian Moralität by means of the Sittlichkeit articulated by Jesus. Kaufmann here points to the influence of Goethe’s play Iphigenia in Tauris. He argues, “Hegel, who had previously put Kant’s Moralität into the mouth of Jesus, now makes Jesus the prophet of the Sittlichkeit represented by Goethe’s Iphigenia.”5 On Kaufmann’s reading, Hegel has adopted Goethe’s understanding of the human being as a harmonious ethical whole, in contrast to Kant’s sundering of reason and the inclinations. Furthermore, Hegel’s Jesus articulates a nontranscendent concept of faith that is basically “the love and trust between two free spirits.”6 Goethe’s Iphigenia, for her part, shows such humanistic faith toward her brother Orestes, who is thereby freed from the torments of his conscience and his fate, and toward King Thoas. By that latter faith, Iphigenia atones the fate of her ancestral house.

Yet the theme of fate alerts us to ways that, in fact, Goethe’s Iphigenia differs notably from Hegel’s depiction of Jesus in The Spirit of Christianity. Both texts describe a distinctive figure—the beautiful soul—who struggles against his or her fate. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century moral thought, the beautiful soul was an important figure that emerged in response to the need to establish a new system of ethics based not on Christianity but on human reason. Yet many thinkers realized that reason alone might not suffice to ensure moral action, so they also invoked the notion of beauty. The virtuous soul became beautiful, exhibiting such features as balance, proportion, and harmony. On this view, beauty, based as it was on universal principles but appealing also to the emotions, could unite human reason and sensuality into a harmonious whole.7 By the time of Goethe and Hegel, however, the figure of the beautiful soul was strained and beginning to succumb to its eventual fate. This fate is exemplified in the contrast between Goethe’s Iphigenia and Hegel’s Jesus. Whereas Iphigenia is able, through her love and humanity, to achieve a reconciliation with her fate and with those around her, the story Hegel tells of Jesus is a tragic one. The Galilean’s beauty of soul clashes with the subservient nature of his surrounding Jewish culture and ultimately leads him and the Christian Church after him to fall victim to their fate.

In this chapter, my primary objective is to show the limits of the identification Kaufmann makes between Goethe’s Iphigenia and Hegel’s Jesus. Then I would like to gesture briefly toward the ways Goethe’s play reappears in Hegel’s mature thought, especially in relation to Hegel’s reinterpretation of Jesus and Christianity. In that regard, we will see how Hegel thinks the Christian religion surpasses the aesthetic in the cultivation of Sittlichkeit and a humanity at home with itself, society, and the world.

Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris

Kaufmann credits Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, written and reworked several times between 1779 and 1787,8 with helping the young Hegel move beyond the Moralität of Kant toward his mature concept of Sittlichkeit. “Like nobody before him,” Kaufmann claims,

Goethe succeeded at one blow in bringing the Greeks to life in eighteenth- and nineteenth century Germany. Winckelmann and Lessing had talked about the Greeks and taught their countrymen, including Goethe, to think about them in a different way, but Goethe made a new generation, including Hegel and Hölderlin, see and hear them. Suddenly, Sophocles’ Antigone ceased to be merely the heroine of a tragedy written in the fifth century B.C.; her spirit was present even now and represented a live option and an alternative to Kant’s Moralität.9

The Greek playwright Euripides had written a play of the same name in 412 BCE, and the differences between his work and that of Goethe are instructive. In Euripides’s play, Iphigenia, Orestes, and Pylades deceive King Thoas and spirit away the statue of the goddess Artemis—a requirement set forth by Apollo so that Orestes might atone for killing his mother Clytemnestra. When Thoas seeks revenge, Athena appears and instructs him to yield to the divine will. In Goethe’s play, by contrast, Iphigenia reconciles with Thoas through honesty and love. These prove, moreover, to be the sufficient human means of solving the dilemmas that arise in the story. Let us examine these features of Goethe’s work in greater detail.

At the beginning of the play, Iphigenia bemoans her empty, lonely existence. Her father, the Greek king Agamemnon, had been underway to Troy with his armies when the winds became unfavorable, and their ships stalled at Aulis. The goddess Diana declared that if Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia she would be placated and allow the winds to carry the Greek ships onward to Troy. Before the sacrifice could be completed, however, Diana rescued Iphigenia and bore her off to serve as her priestess in the barbarian land of Tauris. Iphigenia thus tells Arkas, messenger of the Taurian king Thoas, that an alien curse has befallen her, and she has been separated from her family and nation. Now, she claims, she is nothing but a shadow of her former self.10

Since, moreover, it was the goddess herself who allegedly took Iphigenia from her family and enlisted her as a priestess in Tauris, Iphigenia’s relationship to the deity appears ambivalent. Iphigenia acknowledges that Diana saved her from death on the altar, but the consequence of that salvation is now an existence of servitude in a land far from her home at Mycenae. In her opening monologue, Iphigenia laments that even after a long tenure of service her spirit feels strange and unaccustomed to the goddess’ sacred forest.11 She is ashamed to admit that she serves the deity reluctantly, although she still places her hopes in Diana for a second rescue—a return to her home in Greece.12 Throughout the monologue, Iphigenia maintains an attitude of reverence; she will not contend with the gods. Nonetheless, she makes clear that in contrast to a man, who is able to help himself in a strange place, “The lot of women is a piteous thing. … But how wretched / If hostile fate drives her to alien lands!”13 Already in the first scene, it is unclear whether one can attribute fate to divine or human agency. Iphigenia first claims that she is held in Scythia by “a high will,” to which she submits herself.14 But later, immediately after decrying the difficulty of a hostile fate for a woman, she says, “Thus Thoas holds me here, a noble man, / In solemn, sacred bonds of slavery.”15

When Iphigenia subsequently recounts to Thoas her blighted pedigree, fate more clearly emerges as the consequence of human actions. The fate that plagues Iphigenia’s household stems from the action of its progenitor, Tantalus. The gods had invited him to dine with them, and he stole some of their ambrosia and shared it—and some divine secrets—with mortals. Iphigenia mitigates the grievousness of the crime to an extent by arguing that it is natural for humans to become dizzy and act out of character when communing with the gods.16 Nevertheless, a curse was placed upon Tantalus’s house, and thereafter his descendants perpetuated their own fates by repeated acts of deceit and murder.

Although this narrative of accursed internecine bloodshed plays out prior to the events that motivate the dramatic conflict in Iphigenia, it still bears upon the immediate dilemma facing Iphigenia. Thoas, the Taurian king, wishes to marry her in order to secure his dynasty and avert revolution by his discontented subjects.17 But Iphigenia longs to return home and consequently declines.18 Spurned, Thoas threatens to reinstate a custom that had been suspended ever since Iphigenia appeared on Scythia’s shores: the practice of sacrificing all stranded foreigners to Diana.19 Iphigenia is to offer up to the goddess two recent captives who turn out to be Iphigenia’s brother Orestes and his companion Pylades. She is now torn. On the one hand, she feels that she owes kindness and gratitude to Thoas,20 who spared her life and even halted the practice of human sacrifice on her account.21 On the other hand, if she refuses Thoas, as she is inclined to do, she will have to kill her brother and his friend, thereby extending fate’s claim over her household.22

In her anguished deliberations, Iphigenia struggles to find a point of orientation. Arkas, Thoas, and Pylades each advocate a course of action that would accentuate division and hinder reconciliation: the former two say she should marry the king,23 whereas the latter encourages deception and theft.24 Thoas and Pylades, though endorsing incompatible paths forward, both insist that Iphigenia listen to reason.25 But the fact that their adherence to reason would only aggravate division—by either separating Iphigenia from her people or by stoking the animosity between Thoas and the Greeks—suggests that Goethe indeed sees the predominance of reason over the inclinations as an injurious form of heteronomy.26

The contrast between reason and the inclinations further relates to Goethe’s concept of the divine as found in the drama. Iphigenia and the other characters strive to ascertain the divine will: does Diana will that Iphigenia return to Mycenae?27 Does she want human sacrifices?28 Pylades insists that he and Orestes were instructed by Apollo to recover the statue of Diana from the temple in Tauris. When Orestes questions whether his friend is not confusing his own wishes with the divine will, whether he is not merely following his own inclinations, Pylades contends that human intelligence provides sufficient...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Tragedy
• II. Comedy
• III. History
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover