-
6. Falstaff and the Politics of Wit Negative Infinite Judgment in a Culture of Alienation
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter 6 Falstaff and the Politics of Wit Negative Infinite Judgment in a Culture of Alienation1 Introduction: Wit’s Compass We recall Hegel’s remarkable claim about Shakespeare’s ability: . . . the more Shakespeare proceeds to portray on the infinite breadth of his “world-stage” the extremes of evil and folly, all the more . . . does he precisely plunge his figures who dwell on these extremes into their restrictedness; of course he equips them with a wealth of poetry but he actually gives them spirit and imagination, and, by the picture in which they can contemplate and see themselves objectively like a work of art, he makes them free artists of their own selves. . . .2 The character of Jack Falstaff, in Henry IV Part I, appears in his wittiness to be the free artist of more than just himself. For example, his playful soliloquy about honor provides a deep reflection about how the world works. Indeed Falstaff’s wit seems to embody what Hegel, in discussing wit, calls a “negative infinite judgement.” This needs explaining, but we can prefigure it here with Falstaff’s exclamation: “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”3 Why (Falstaff’s) Wit Matters within Considerations about Moral Imagination Epistemologically, wit, like imagination, occupies a middle ground. Like jokes and slips of the tongue, wit arises between reason and unreason, between the ego and the unconscious, between normal and irregular uses of language, between acceptable and censurable speech. 137 138 Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination Politically, wit occupies ambiguities, it laughs at all seriousness; it sits on the fence between vassals and kings, poking fun at presumed authority on either side. In every field of social thought, wit takes its departure from the murky limits between normally established differences. For example, it revels in the difference between the polite and the impolite, the beautiful and the ugly, the wise and the ignorant, the good and the bad. Indeed, because of Falstaff’s wit, Harold Bloom writes that Falstaff rises clear above morality.4 There is a third way in which wit and imagination are similar. In Hegel, every dialectical movement has three stages. The second is always negative. Both imagination and wit occur in the second, negative stage in their respective dialectics. Thus, in Hegel’s psychology, the imagination is in the second (and thus negative) moment in the dialectical development from intuition to thought. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, wit lies within the second moment of a dialectical development that is itself the second moment of a larger dialectical moment. That is, wit is in the middle of the dialectic called “The World of Self-Alienated Spirit” in a section called “Culture and its Realm of Actuality.” And that world of self-alienated spirit is the middle moment between “True Spirit: The Ethical Order” and “Spirit that is Certain of Itself. Morality.” In short, according to Hegel, wit is the self-conscious play of negation that arises in an alienated culture. I argue that Falstaff exemplifies wit’s recovery from the alienating effects of the social mirror (of the “I” that is a “We”). Falstaff’s wit is an advance over Richard II’s naïve royal “we” and the alienation to which that gave rise. It is also an advance over the final insight Richard II may have had at the end of Richard II, namely that the sovereign self is generated or destroyed by social forces. As we shall see in more detail below, Falstaff’s wit rises above all earnest declaration about identity and its origins. But does Falstaff rise above morality, as Harold Bloom claims? I argue below that Hegel’s account of wit must lead us to conclude that, while Falstaff’s wittiness is the beginning of enlightened social self-consciousness, without further development, it remains self-centered. Nonetheless, wit must be retained as a necessary element of ethics. Key to understanding this is grasping the “crimes” of witty Falstaff as negative infinite judgments. In what follows, I read Falstaff through Hegel’s concept of wit in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I also argue that Falstaff expresses a form of what Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right and Encyclopedia Logic, calls “negative infinite judgments.”5 Hegel’s Treatment of Falstaff Hegel mentions Falstaff only three times in the Aesthetics, each time to illustrate a general point about Shakespeare’s character development. In the first passage, Hegel writes that: [44.222.142.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:06...