Jennifer Bates

Hegel’s “Absolute Knowing” and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida are tragi-comic consternations. They are theatres of ethical panentheism: they present dramatic “absolute” ethical interpretations and actions, each of which is at once ungrounded and completely seeded. I start with the etymology of “consternation.” Then I discuss the comic vs. tragic interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, arguing it is a consternating tragi-comedy. I analyze the predicate “absolute” in terms of consternations, in a few passages of the book. I elaborate especially upon phenomenological reasoning’s Sache selbst. In the Phenomenology, reason develops by thinking the absolute thing through culture, politics, morality, and religion, reaching completion in “Absolute Knowing.” That absolute is reason’s comprehensive insight into its phenomenological absolutes, and its own absolute sublating. Northrop Frye’s cited claim about myth can be understood in this phenomenological way. With all this in hand, Hegel’s science of experience is formally complete. But the experience of Absolute Knowing is still consternation. To capture the consternating essence of sublation – a consternation by which experience becomes something it was not before – I season this formal science with Shakespeare’s “comedy” Troilus and Cressida, revealing its structural roots to be consternations.

Part I discusses what kind of ‘advances’ occur in Hegel's works, particularly his Philosophy of Nature. I then discuss evolution and extinction in relation to these advances. I summarize Errol Harris' view that Hegel's advances are consistent with current evolutionary theory and then critique this view using articles by Cinzia Ferinni and Alison Stone. I discuss an alternative, post-Kantian Hegelianism which dialectically unites the nature of our cognition with us as subjects that cognize (spirit). For that, I draw on Hegel's claim that ‘The True is just as much Substance as Subject’, and I show how that claim is complicated in a helpful way when applied to the multiple kinds of ‘subjects’ in the Philosophy of Nature. Part II highlights the implications of biological mass extinction for these differing Hegelian theories. Part III brings the above post-Kantian dialectical Hegelianism together with the final chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit in order to align Hegelian terminology with current solutions for mass extinction: ‘Absolute Knowing’ is a self-sacrificing and a recollecting that reinstates the subject in and through nature; such knowing generates dialectically holistic logics of survival. This recollection of life produces neither abstract spiritual self-consciousness nor a mere ‘gallery’ of extinct life forms. It is philosophical responsibility, identity through natural differences, Absolute Spirit ‘tarrying’ with its world. 21st century Hegelians should be environmentalists on Hegel's terms, a surprising conclusion given that Hegel did not anticipate environmental problems. Hegel's Philosophy of Nature may in turn help environmentalists argue against unacknowledged and badly conceived philosophies of nature. Hegel's work is not reducible to either naturalism or metaphysical idealism: reading Hegel's Philosophy of Nature in conjunction with his Phenomenology of Spirit reveals ways in which a subject, widely and complexly defined at different levels (including different species), is dialectically inseparable from substance, equally widely and complexly defined. This helps us to understand the natural depths of Spirit, which we are at risk of losing

A Hegelian reading of good and bad luck -- In Shakespearean drama (phen. of spirit, King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, a Midsummer night's dream) -- Tearing the fabric: Hegel's Antigone, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and kinship-state conflict (phen. of spirit c. 6, Judith Butler's Antigone, Coriolanus) -- Aufhebung and anti-aufhebung: geist and ghosts in Hamlet (phen. of spirit, Hamlet) -- The problem of genius in King Lear: Hegel on the feeling soul and the tragedy of wonder (anthropology and psychology in the encyclopaedia, Philosophy of mind, King Lear) -- Richard II's mirror and the alienation of the Universal Will (of the I that is a We) (Richard II, phen. of spirit c. 5) -- Falstaff and the politics of wit: negative infinite judgment in a culture of alienation (Henry IV parts I & II, phen. of spirit c. 6, philosophy of right) -- Henry V's unchangeableness: his rejection of wit and his posture of virtue reinterpreted in the light of Hegel's theory of virtue (philosophy of right, Henry V) -- Hegel's theory of crime and evil: (re)tracing the rights of the sovereign self (aesthetics, phen. of spirit, phil. of right, Richard II through to Henry V) -- Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth and Henry V: conscience, hypocrisy, self-deceit and the tragedy of ethical life (phil. of right, Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V) -- Negation of the negative infinite judgment versus sublation of it: punishment vs. pardon (phil. of right, phen. of spirit c. 6 and Henry VIII) -- Universal wit : the absolute theater of identity (phen. of spirit c. 6 and 8, Pericles, the Tempest) -- Absolute infections and their cure (phen. of spirit c. 6, the Winter's tale).