Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination

12. Absolute Infections and their Cure

Chapter 12 Absolute Infections and their Cure Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit: All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit. —Edmund, King Lear1 But no perfection is so absolute / That some impurity doth not pollute. —Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece2 [O]ur erected wit maketh us know what perfection is and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. —Sidney3 The imperfect is our paradise. —Wallace Stevens4 Yet nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean. So over that art / Which you say adds to nature is an art / That nature makes. —Polixenes, Winter’s Tale5 Introduction Universal Wit is what I have called the absolute standpoint in Hegel and Shakespeare. It is that which works best for the benefit of one and all. Its counterpart is what I call “Universal Sovereign Will.” In the Winter’s Tale, the jealous King Leontes is such a will. He terrorizes his kingdom. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Universal Sovereign Will is the “Pure Insight” of the Enlightenment. It leads to the Terror of the French Revolution. 271 272 Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination In both the Winter’s Tale and in the Phenomenology of Spirit, what I am calling the Universal Sovereign Will is expressed by Shakespeare and Hegel as “an infection.” I argue below that it is an absolute infection: The will that is infected considers the self to be absolutely sovereign; that self universalizes its viewpoint; and the effects of the self’s infection are felt by everyone. The infections in question result in deaths. In the Winter’s Tale, the pregnant Queen is imprisoned and her first son (Mamilius) dies of grief; the husband of the Queen’s friend is killed by a bear as he seeks to follow the King’s command to destroy the newborn daughter. By the end of the tragic first half of the play, it is reported that the Queen herself, upon hearing of the death of her son, has died. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes Pure Insight as an infection permeating society. The infection eventually destroys superstition. On its way, it also destroys what are to it cultural pathogens: First it destroys royalty, then all that stands in the way of Enlightenment self-understanding. The lineage of wit, turned pure insight, turned utility, ends with the rolling of heads. Thus the revolution through humor that is suggested in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit account of the Enlightenment6 turns out to be the bloody and serious revolution by guillotine.7 It does, first, because the negative principle of subjectivity, the infinite negative judgment of the Enlightenment, becomes the abstract social negative of Terror. Second, this development does not coincide with a development of ethical institutions capable of controlling that negative. In other words, wit as pure insight has not developed the ethical institutions within which it will be contained. The Terror is wit (with all its performative naivety) as a pervasive, social phenomenon. As we shall see, Pure Insight is the social expansion of (Hal’s) wit that has cut itself off from the body (of differences ); that infection reaches its fever in the Terror.8 In earlier chapters, without expressing it as such, we traced the mechanisms of infection. We did so when we discussed anti-Aufhebung, genius, Fate, and mere negation of negative infinite judgment (as opposed to its sublation). We also discussed the forces opposing the infection, such as Aufhebung, wonder, wit, sublation; we traced their development into the social structures of forgiveness and justice as expressed by Universal Wit. We now leave aside the various mechanisms of infection (in the various kinds of consciousness and societies) in order to look at the source of infection. We have discussed how negation (in relation to an immediacy that is apparently given) is the moment of difference. In the dialectic that develops from this moment, differences proliferate. Our concern in this chapter is with this proliferation in the sense of the fecundity of body and of Spirit; in particular, we are concerned with biological and conceptual progeny. We have seen that a hallmark of Universal Wit is a healthy though turbulent self-knowing in and through difference. The hallmark of infection, of Universal Sovereign Willing, is a narcissism that is necessary and internal to conception (conception in terms 273 Absolute Infections and Their...