Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy by Mark Alznauer;

Author:Mark Alznauer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Comedy beyond Ancient Comic Drama

Hegel’s approach to comedy in the Phenomenology has been to unearth the significance of comic consciousness as it emerges at a specific moment in the reconstruction of the experience of religious consciousness. By way of conclusion, I would like to return to the fact that Socrates and Aristophanes arise together, after tragedy, in this reconstruction. What can we extrapolate from this about the “fate” of comedy, beyond Hegel’s more narrow concentration on comic drama? And what does this say about comic consciousness as such, about a genuinely comic disposition toward the world? To begin addressing these questions, I will follow the lead of Bergson in his Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) and turn to the three observations that he thinks are fundamental for guiding an investigation into the “comic spirit”:35

“the absence of feeling … usually accompanies laughter.”

“Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.”

“the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.”36

Let us consider these in the following order:

1.The detachment of comedy. Aristophanes and Socrates come on the scene when fate was completing “the depopulation of Heaven,” and they both respond to this with detachment. The mimetic spell is broken. Nowhere is this more evident in Old Comedy than when the chorus addresses the audience directly in the parabases; and Socrates’s arguments against mimesis are well known, as is the fact that Plato’s presentation of Socrates in the dialogues resides somewhere between art and life.37 It is precisely this detachment, this emotional disinvestment, this absence of divine pathos, that characterizes comic elevation. Bergson writes, “the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart.”38 It demands the stance of the disinterested observer. Insofar as it is empathy or compassion that is anesthetized, this detachment certainly opens the door to the cruelty that can be expressed through laugher. Yet Hegel’s great admiration for Aristophanes’s comedy, as we have seen, stems in part from the playwright’s ability to convey a sense of levity that undercuts this threat of cruelty. We see, then, a kinship with the stance of the Socratic philosopher: both are invested in the polis while also removed from it. That is to say, comedy shares with philosophy a disinterested, ultimately cognitive relation to itself and the world. Socrates is not overcome by the pathos of tragedy but is known, of course, for detached reflection and ironic distance.39 And in the same way that this depopulation was, according to Hegel, the condition of the possibility of the frank, self-consciously critical dimension of Aristophanic comedy, it also opens the space for Socrates to replace fate with the practice of philosophy.

2.The sociality of comedy. As the moment in “art religion” when art comes to a self-consciousness of itself as art, comedy is for Hegel a vehicle for the collective enterprise of self-reflection and insight that is a unifying trait of the moments of Absolute Spirit. But what can we say about the object of this collective reflection?

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