No Greater Powers Than We Can Contradict

[I]n the conflict of human freedom with the power of the objective world . . . the mortal necessarily had to succumb if the power was a superior power—a fatum. And yet, since he did not succumb without a fight, he had to be punished for this very defeat. The fact that the criminal who only succumbed to the superior power of fate, was punished all the same—this was a recognition of human freedom, an honor owed to freedom. It was by allowing its hero to fight against the superior power of fate that Greek tragedy honored human freedom. . . . It was a great thought: to willingly endure punishment even for an unavoidable crime, so as to prove one's freedom precisely through this loss of freedom and perish with a declaration of free will.

—Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism¹

Is it e'en so? Then I defy you stars!

—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet²

As its inventor G. W. F. Hegel seems to have conceived of it, at least, phenomenology shares a common procedure with tragedy, so much so that the dialectic employed in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has been said to have a tragic structure.

Very crudely stated, Hegel's phenomenological procedure involves, first, identifying and staging limit situations in which we find ourselves, pursuant to certain objective, worldly circumstances, and, second, showing how the experience of these limits invariably leads to particular kinds of crises, suffering, loss, or defeat in light of which the situation itself starts to look unlivable, unsustainable. Thus, each loss, each defeat, brings into relief both a sufferer—a particular subject, we might say—and a situation, an objective state of affairs, such that a certain (subjective) kind of suffering or loss is seen to correspond to a certain (objective) kind of situation. Furthermore, if subjective experiences are shown to spring from particular objective situations, then the objectivity of our natural or social situations is most fully expressed as a subjective experience or suffering. Thus, phenomenology is the way in which we are brought to see the deep interrelation between that which had seemed, at least initially, indifferently related or even opposed: subjective experience and objective reality.³

In this short essay, I will begin by further outlining this coincidence of phenomenology and tragedy, starting with its origins in the romantic thought of Friedrich Schelling and the coincidence of dialectics and the tragic in Hegel. I will then turn to Shakespeare in order to suggest ways in which Shakespeare's vision of tragic subjectivity differs from Hegel and the Romantics, by whom his work was so admired, in order to sketch ways in which Shakespeare's phenomenology—or, what we typically call his dramaturgy—signals a breakdown of the coincidence of dialectics and the tragic.

I

According to Peter Szondi, it is the interpretation of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex offered by the young Friedrich Schelling in my first epigraph that "commences the history of the theory of the tragic." Ever since Schelling— and his university roommate and erstwhile friend G. W. F. Hegel—first wrote about the tragic in this way, modern philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin have understood the "tragic" to be essential to the modern understanding of human subjectivity and free self-determination.⁴

In a letter written by Schelling to Hegel in this same period, Schelling alludes to the importance of the "striving for immutable selfhood, unconditional freedom, and unbounded activity."⁵ Schelling understands this striving to take a fundamentally tragic form:

. . . to know that there is an objective power which threatens to destroy our freedom and, with this firm and certain conviction in our hearts, to fight against it, to summon up all our freedom and thus to perish.⁶

The tragic structure of subjective freedom, then, has two sides: first, the absolute assertion of the subject's own freedom in the face of what objectively comes its way, and, second, the way in which this assertion comes to light through the subject's being made to suffer by...