Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination

Preface

Preface The General Concerns of this Book This book concerns shapes of self-consciousness and their roles in the tricky interface between reality and drama. Shakespeare’s plots and characters are used to shed light on Hegelian dialectic and Hegel’s Aesthetics and Phenomenology of Spirit (among other of his works) to shed light on Shakespeare’s dramas. The focus is on normative action and on how interpretations of drama and history constrain it. For example: How much luck and necessity drive a character’s actions? Is Coriolanus a better individual to use (than Antigone) in Hegel’s account of the Kinship-State conflict? What disorients us and makes us morally stuck? What is a good or a bad sovereign self? Is there a moral pragmatics of wit? What is the relationship between law, tragedy, and comedy? Once one has reached “Absolute Knowing,” what is one’s relationship to all previous forms of consciousness? Are the previous stages theatrical scenes? Must morality give way to something higher? En route, we trace the development of deleterious concepts such as Fate, Anti-Aufhebung, crime, evil, and hypocrisy, as well as helpful concepts such as wonder, judgment, forgiveness, and justice. The chapters of this book are a collection of essays on a variety of topics that come out of studying Hegel and Shakespeare side by side. In the Introduction , I do look briefly at Hegel’s many discussions of Shakespeare (mostly in his Aesthetics) and at the German reception of Shakespeare at the time of Hegel. But this is just to set the context. The book is not primarily concerned with this history. The chapters are discussion pieces on the topic of moral imagination in Hegelian philosophy and Shakespearean drama. This said, themes have nevertheless emerged which run through multiple chapters. And Parts II and III can be read together as a progressive investigation of stages in the relation of the sovereign self and justice. I summarize the chapters and these themes later in this Preface. First, let me dispense with an apparent problem with the project of the book. xi xii Preface Anachronisms The project of this book involves several anachronisms. First, we discuss Hegel’s quintessentially modern ethical theory (late 18th –19th C.) alongside Elizabethan Shakespearean morality (later 16th C.). Hegel’s theory of morality (with his distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit (Ethical Life)) relies on modern developments from Descartes through to Kant. But Shakespeare does not span this period: Shakespeare was thirty-two years old when Descartes was born, and by then Shakespeare had written three History plays and Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare was a contemporary of Francis Bacon’s (Shakespeare b. 1564, Bacon b. 1561). Their Renaissance world, on the cusp of the scientific revolution, was still awash in medieval Aristotelianism and the influence of the Church. Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium had just appeared (1543)—more than two centuries before the “Copernican Revolution” of Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, a philosophical revolution without which Hegel’s theory of morality is unthinkable. The anachronism deepens when we consider that the historical period from which Shakespeare draws his History plays is earlier than Shakespeare’s time. For example, Henry V ruled from 1413–1422. This is further complicated by Shakespeare’s own anachronisms in his plays. For example, in Henry V, Shakespeare has the medieval archbishop express a Protestant view that no miracles occurred after scriptural times (“It must be so, for miracles are ceased”1 ). Furthermore, there is Shakespeare’s notorious lack of concern for unity of time in dramatic action. For example, in Cymbeline, he places ancient Roman scenes alongside medieval Italian bar scenes. How then can one compare Hegel’s nineteenth-century moral theory with moral issues in Shakespeare’s dramas? To take but one example: How do we overcome the anachronisms involved in comparing the character of Falstaff, in Henry IV, with Hegel’s discussion, in his1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, of Diderot’s character Rameau (in Rameau’s Nephew, written circa 1773)?2 Hegel’s concept of Spirit (Geist) is, generally speaking, the “I” that is a “we.” It is a self-interpreting social consciousness. One answer to the problem of anachronism is to take Hegel’s account of the development of Spirit over history as the rule, and then plot into that history the stage of ethical consciousness present during Shakespeare’s time, and then to further plot in, elsewhere on Hegel’s time line, the stages of consciousness of characters...