Abstract
Hegel’s philosophical system turns to a species of the laughable at three critical junctures of his dialectic: comedy appears both at the conclusion of classical art and of Hegel’s discussion of poetry, and romantic art ends with humor. But we misunderstand these transitional moments unless we recognize that Hegel did not use comedy and humor synonymously. Comedy refers to a dramatic genre with a 2000-year-old history; humor was a relatively recent aesthetic phenomenon that had become central to philosophizing about art in Hegel’s generation. Hegel also differentiated between subjective humor, which he associated with the novelist Jean Paul’s eccentric excesses, and objective humor. Focusing on the surprising examples Hegel offers of objective humor— from epigrams to Persian poetry to the obscure novels of T.G. von Hippel—I argue that we better understand Hegel’s “end of art” thesis by tracing ways both comedy and humor can end. By understanding those endings, we also come closer to imagining how art can continue.
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Notes
- 1.
The work known as Hegel’s Aesthetics is a compilation of Hegel’s lectures published by his student Heinrich Gustav Hotho in 1835. Philological issues undermining the authority of Hotho’s edition have been well known for several decades, prompting some scholars to defer instead to more recently published student notes from individual lecture cycles. See Gethmann-Siefert 2005, 17–18 and Moland 2017, 561–2. The available editions of student lecture notes are Hegel 1995, 2003, 2004a, b, and 2017. In this essay, references to the standard version of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics are abbreviated Ä followed by the German page number (Hegel 1970) and then the English page number (Hegel 1975). References to lecture notes by his students are indicated by publication year; translations of these texts are my own.
- 2.
- 3.
See Moland 2016, 2017. Some of the following discussion is summarized from Moland 2016. I contextualize the claims made here and in previous publications within Hegel’s entire philosophy of art in Moland forthcoming. For another recent analysis of Hegel on comedy, see Donougho 2016.
- 4.
- 5.
See also Schneider (1995, 86).
- 6.
Within this era, Hegel discusses one period in which comedy explicitly resurfaces, namely in late Renaissance parodies of medieval chivalric poetry. Both Cervantes ’ Don Quixote and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the examples Hegel cites, take the crusades as the point of departure for their comic escapades. This is no coincidence: the crusades, Hegel says, were themselves a self-negating enterprise since they sought a geographical location for a religion that by its own definition needed none. The comic potential provided by this self-negating goal is then amplified by the mismatched means and ends of protagonists such as Don Quixote. Other similarities with Old Comedy are also notable: like Strepsiades, Don Quixote remains at least provisionally cheerful when his aims fail; he also negates his own rebellion at the end, renouncing the reforms he endeavored to enact.
Cervantes’ novels also resemble Aristophanes’ comedies in that they reveal the contradictions in a dominant religious worldview. Clouds exposed the gods as humans’ creation; Don Quixote’s fantastical adventures disclose the crusades’ contradictory claims. By extension, on Hegel’s view, they also expose the Catholic Church’s illegitimate monopoly on truth. As Hegel points out elsewhere, Cervantes’ era was shaped in other parts of Europe by the Reformation’s claim that each individual has direct access to the divine, unmitigated by church authority. This again counts as progress for Hegel since it more closely correlates to his version of metaphysical reality: spiritual truth is not to be found in external authority but in our own recognition of divinity within us.
- 7.
Donougho (1982) traces Hegel’s use of this phrase to Goethe.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
See Thayer 1905, 40.
- 11.
Treating comedy and humor as different aesthetic categories in light of this history is not tendentious on Hegel’s part: several of his contemporaries wrote of humor in similarly philosophical terms, generally agreeing that the modern age had given birth to humor as a way of expressing humans’ new subjectivity. Novalis described humor as “a result of the free combination of the conditional and the unconditional” and claimed that “through humor, the particular conditional achieves general interest and receives objective worth.” Friedrich Schlegel wrote: “Humor deals with being and nonbeing, and its true essence is reflection.” Karl Solger claimed that in the “infinite variety” of humor “the most sensuous and secular often contains all the force and significance of the divine.” See Mohr 2007, 304; Schlegel 1971, 206; Solger 1984, 135–6. For a comprehensive treatment of this topic, see Preisendanz 1963 and Preisendanz and Warning 1976. These and other authors, such as Heinrich Heine and E.T.A. Hoffmann, who philosophized about and through humor would merit further study in English-language scholarship. See also Paolo Diego Bubbio’s chapter on Solger in this volume.
- 12.
This disavowal was entitled “Erklärung wegen der v. Hippelschen Autorschaft.” See Beck 1987, 102–103.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
See Casey 1992, 30.
- 16.
Accounting for Hegel’s preference for Hippel over Jean Paul is sometimes difficult. A survey of the secondary literature reveals critics praising Jean Paul for reasons resembling Hegel’s praise for Hippel and criticizing Hippel for faults Hegel attributes to Jean Paul. Jean Paul’s theoretical works show him to share some of Hegel’s basic commitments, such as the realization that modern life requires an exchange of religion’s certainty for human-generated meaning. The root of the disagreement, as William Coker points out in his contribution to this volume, was likely Hegel’s emphasis on reconciliation as compared to Jean Paul’s insistence on incommensurability. For further discussion, see Beck 1987, 10, Koepke 1988, 194, Vieweg 2005a and 2005b.
- 17.
- 18.
Rutter catalogs some of this discontent at Rutter 2010, 229. Terry Pinkard writes that “objective humor” is “almost certainly the wrong term to use” and suggests instead that we think of what Hegel refers to as a kind of “ironic intimacy” (2012, 179–80). It seems to me, by contrast, that for reasons described below, Hegel’s desire to distinguish this kind of humor from Jean Paul’s makes “objective humor” exactly the right term. Given Hegel’s much different attitude towards irony, associating objective humor with irony would also, I think, be misleading. This is not to deny that Hegel’s definition and criticism of irony as the Romantics understood it is tendentious and almost certainly unfair. See for instance Rush 2016, ch. 2, although I disagree with Rush’s conclusion that Hegel means to include romantic irony under the heading of subjective humor (192).
- 19.
As we will soon see, Hegel praises Goethe’s West-östliche Divan as a paradigmatic example of objective humor: Rutter describes the Divan’s stanzas as being able to “stand independently” as epigrams (2010, 235).
- 20.
Hegel’s reference to Petrarch at this late stage of romantic art’s conceptual progress is, in my opinion, evidence that the developmental story of art—from symbolic to classical to romantic—given in Part II of Hegel’s lectures is not primarily chronological. Art ends conceptually in imitation and subjective humor, but resources for overcoming this development existed long before. I make this argument more comprehensively in Moland forthcoming.
- 21.
Hegel also discusses Persian poetry at ÄII, 473ff/368ff.
- 22.
Apparently these characters represent Goethe and Marianne von Willemer, a woman with whom Goethe had a particularly intense relationship during this time (Rutter 2010, 238). Hegel also in this context briefly mentions the poet Friedrich Rückert , another of his contemporaries, who was best known for his translations of Indian and Arabian poetry. Rückert’s own poetry was deeply influenced by his interactions with those cultures and by Goethe’s Divan as well.
- 23.
In the 1828 lectures, Hegel differentiates the Divan from an earlier poem, “Wilkommen und Abschied,” which he says has only prosaic content and so presumably does not count as an instance of objective humor. Rutter gives an analysis of Hegel’s criticism of this poem at Rutter 2010, 232 as well as an effective model for reading the Divan as an example of objective humor at Rutter 2010, 241ff.
- 24.
Gethmann-Siefert , as Rutter points out, interprets humor as a “form of self-reflexiveness.” Insofar as intensive interaction with the object prompts new knowledge of the self, this may be true, but I agree with Rutter that Gethmann-Siefert’s analysis generally is too focused on the historical significance of Goethe’s engagement with a foreign culture. See her comments in the introduction to Hegel 2004a, b, xxviii.
- 25.
Rutter in fact calls objective humor “genre painting in words” (Rutter 2010, 222).
- 26.
I present an argument for this claim in Moland forthcoming.
- 27.
If Hotho is to be believed, Hegel says as much: “Yet such an intimacy [of objective humor] can only be partial and can perhaps be expressed only within the compass of a song or only as a part of a greater whole” (ÄII, 240/609). Although his understanding of what Hegel means by objective humor differs from mine in significant ways, Kirk Pillow also suggests that Hegel’s isolating objective humor as an aesthetic phenomenon is “remarkably prophetic” since it is a feature of artworks ranging from Robert Altman films to Thomas Pynchon novels (2000, 296–7).
- 28.
Knox translates “Wohltätigkeit des Gemüts,” which I have translated here “beneficient disposition,” as “good humor.” Given Hegel’s particular definition of humor, which would not entail the sense of “Gemüt,” a modified translation seems in order.
- 29.
Symbolic art ends when it becomes too imitative in descriptive poetry or too pedantic in didactic poetry (ÄI, 541/43/421–424); classical art ends when its sculptures too closely depict everyday human activity and it becomes simply agreeable (ÄII, 106/500); dramas of Hegel’s generation cease to be art when they are too naturalistic or too allegorical (ÄII, 225/597).
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Moland, L.L. (2018). Reconciling Laughter: Hegel on Comedy and Humor. In: Moland, L. (eds) All Too Human. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91331-5_2
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