The Comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of Modern Philosophy

Abstract

Hegel is keen to distinguish the merely laughable from the comical in the sequel to this passage from page one thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine of the English translation of his Aesthetics ². We may laugh at any contrast between subjective caprice and insubstantial action, while vice and evil are not in themselves comic: “There is also the laughter of derision, scorn, despair, etc. On the other hand, the comical as such implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of his aims and achievements.”³ (Is this condition of serenity, I wonder, attained by effort or by grace?) In comedy, “the ruling principle is the contingency and caprice of subjective life” whose nullity and self-destructive folly displays the abused actuality of substantial life.⁴ The aberration of the passions that rage in the human heart are drawn from “the aberrations of the democracy out of which the old faith and morals have vanished” (as Hegel describes Aristophanes’s comedies).⁵ While in tragedy the powers which oppose each other as pathos in individuals are hostile, in comedy, “they are revealed directly as inwardly self-dissolving.”⁶ Comedy, as much as tragedy, is always divine comedy: “the Divine here in its community, as the substance and aim of human individuality, brought into existence as something concrete, summoned into action and put in movement.”⁷

The general ground for comedy is therefore a world in which man as subject or person has made himself completely master of everything that counts to him otherwise than the essential content of what he wills and accomplishes, a world whose purposes are therefore destroyed because of their unsubstantiality. Nothing can be done, for example, to help a democratic nation where the citizens are self-seeking, quarrelsome, frivolous, bumptious, without faith or knowledge, garrulous, boastful and ineffectual: such a nation destroys itself by its own folly.

This paper was originally prepared for the Conference on Modernism: Politics, Poetics,Practice, King’s College, Cambridge, July, 1993.