![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
Kristin Gjesdal
Department of Philosophy
University of Oslo
Box 1020 Blindern
N‐0315 Oslo
Norway
E‐mail: [email protected]
I would like to thank the two anonymous Angelaki reviewers for their sharp and thoughtful suggestions, and Michael Forster for his many helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 11.
Ibid. 11.
Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995) 3: 551.
In light of this maturity, it applies that as far as factual information is concerned, “what used to be the important thing is now but a trace.” Thus previous times are likened by Hegel to “exercises, and even games for children.” Phenomenology of Spirit 16.
Ibid. 17. Or, as Hegel also puts it, its testing of knowledge is now “not only a testing of what we know, but also a testing of the criterion of what knowing is” (ibid. 55). For a clear account of how this position critically carries on the perspective of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology. The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 191–93.
With regard to the history of philosophy, Hegel concomitantly claims that “Ancient philosophy is to be reverenced as necessary, and as a link in this sacred chain [spirit's development], but all the same nothing more than a link.” Furthermore, he reasons that “throughout all time there has been only one Philosophy” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy 3: 547, 552).
Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975) 1237. See also Phenomenology of Spirit 7.
Phenomenology of Spirit 492.
Ibid. 9.
In Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, the emergence of Cartesian philosophy is retrieved in the following terms: “Here, we may say, we are at home, and like the mariner after a long voyage in a tempestuous sea, we may now hail the sight of land” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy 3: 217).
Ibid. 224.
Ibid. 217.
Ibid. 218.
This is how Hegel defines idealism: as a direction of thought that “proceeds from what is inward; according to it everything is in thought, mind itself is all content” (ibid. 163).
Ibid. 166.
In fact, since the human being is not just spirit, but body as well, this is a problem of human self‐understanding. Hegel asks how we understand the unity of soul and body when “The former belongs to thought, the latter to extension; and thus because both are substance, neither requires the Notion of the other, and hence soul and body are independent of one another and can exercise no direct influence upon one another” (ibid. 250–51).
According to Terry Pinkard's biography, Hegel had been given Shakespeare's collected works at the age of eight, and while visiting Paris in 1827 he watched Shakespeare being staged at the English Theatre. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel. A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 5, 551.
Aesthetics 288. See also ibid. 190.
Ibid. 1225.
Ibid. 1226.
The complexity of the ghost scene is elaborated in Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), esp. chapters 4 and 5.
Aesthetics 1228.
Pinkard clarifies this point by contrasting the groundedness of the Greek form of life with the groundlessness of the early modern world. Hegel's Phenomenology 188.
Aesthetics 1228.
Ibid. 1229.
Ibid. 1231.
Phenomenology of Spirit 17.
Goethe quoted in Wolfgang Stellmacher, Herders Shakespeare‐Bild. Shakespeare‐Rezeption im Sturm und Drang: dynamisches Weltbild und bürgerliches Nationaldrama (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1978) 110.
Gottsched, Beiträge zur critischen Historie der Deutschen Sprache (1741) in Roy Pascal, Shakespeare in Germany 1740–1815 (New York: Octagon, 1971) 38–39.
Gottsched, Beiträge in Pascal 39.
See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F.C.A. Koelln and J.P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979) 334.
H.W. von Gerstenberg, Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur (1766) in Pascal 55–56. Rehearsing the German adoption of Shakespeare, Friedrich Gundolf offers a more positive evaluation of Wieland's translation. Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1914) 161.
Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur in Pascal 56.
Ibid. 65–67.
“Shakespear (Erster Entwurf)” in Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767–1781, Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, eds. Ulrich Gaier et al., vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 1985–) 523.
“Shakespear (Erster Entwurf)” 523.
Ibid. 524.
Ibid. 525.
Ibid. 526.
Ibid. 533, 535.
Ibid. 545.
This view of Greek society and Greek tragedy, later echoed in Schiller's contrast between naive and sentimental poetry, now seems far too simplistic. For a more nuanced account of Greek tragedy and life, see Jean‐Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal‐Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris: François Maspero, 1972) and Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne deux (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1986).
“Shakespear (Zweiter Entwurf)” 545.
Ibid. 548.
See Herder, Kritischen Wälder zur Ästhetik, esp. Viertes Wäldchen (1769). Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767–1781.
See John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002) 234–37.
“Shakespeare” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, ed. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 167.
Ibid. 164.
Ibid. 162.
Ibid. 172.
Interestingly, Kant's discussion of the misunderstanding of creative genius – as it is represented by the “charlatans” who “speak and decide like a genius even in matters that require most careful rational investigation” – entails a criticism of Herder. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (London: Hackett, 1978) sect. 47, 310; and also John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) 34. Kant's remarks seem unjustified, however, in particular when taking into account how Herder claims that mixing thinking and aesthetic practice, even within the realm of aesthetics, easily ends in “a monstrosity” in aesthetics (“ein Ungeheuer von Ästhetik”). Herder, Kritischen Wälder zur Ästhetik, Viertes Wäldchen 182. See also Robert E. Norton, Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 182.
According to John Zammito, it applies that “For Herder, the uniqueness of an author was always a function of his historical situatedness” (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology 340).
This Too a Philosophy of History in Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 283.
Older Critical Forestlet in Philosophical Writings 258.
Ibid. 258.
Ibid. 259.
Ibid. 259.
Ibid. 258.
See Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994) 277–85.
Thus Gadamer, although basically Hegelian in his orientation, sets out “to restore to a place of honor what Hegel had termed ‘bad infinity’ [schlechte Unendlichkeit],” reformulated in terms of the (Platonic) idea of the “unending dialogue of the soul with itself.” Hans‐Georg Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” trans. Richard E. Palmer, in The Philosophy of Hans‐Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997) 37. See also Truth and Method 369.
Indeed, throughout the early 1940s, Gadamer discusses Herder's potential for a contemporary hermeneutics, but, importantly, he does not turn to the young Herder's hermeneutics but to the later Herder's attempt to rescue the notion of Volk from its democratic interpretation. Herder, he claims, was the visionary of a new fundamental force in the public sphere; this is the life of the folk. He perceives the reality first in the voice of the people in songs; he recognizes the supportive and nurturing power of the mother tongue, he traces in this the imprinting force of history that fuses with the natural conditions of blood, climate, landscape and so on. Thus, through him, the word “folk [Volk]” achieves in Germany a new depth and a new power entirely remote from that political catchword, a world apart from the political slogans of “democracy.” Quoted from Georgia Warnke, Gadamer. Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987) 71. See also Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Volk und Geschichte in Denken Herders (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1942) 22ff.
“Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism 160.
This Too a Philosophy of History 293.
As John Zammito puts it, “The crucial innovation in Herder's hermeneutics is recognizing the openness of the subject, not simply of the object, of interpretation” (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology 339).