North American Philosophical Publications

North American Philosophical Publications

Hegel on Madness and Tragedy

Author(s): Daniel Berthold-Bond
Source: History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 71-99
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of North American Philosophical
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History of Philosophy Quarterly
Volume 11, Number 1, January 1994
HEGEL ON MADNESS AND TRAGEDY

Daniel Berthold-Bond
[N]ow the awful dirge begins,

the fiend, the fury,
singing, wailing in me now,
shrieking madness!
H 11. 683-86.1
Ajax, ill to cure,

Sits by, and holy madness is his consort....
Better if he
Were hidden in Hades, now his mind is gone.
Aj 11. 610, 635.
[W]hat madness came upon you!

OK 1. 1300.
I. INTRODUCTION
FREUDorder
proposed as aatbasic
to arrive whatprinciple
is normal of
andhis psychoanalytic
apparently theory
so simple, that
we shall "in
have
to study the pathological with its distortions and exaggerations."2 An exami
nation of Hegel's generally overlooked theory of madness (Verr?cktheit) re
veals a similar position. Hegel holds that "insanity [is] an essential...[and]
necessarily occurring form or stage...in the development of the soul"?not, of
course, in the sense that we are all inevitably destined to derangement, but
rather because madness represents a constantly threatening and yet seductive
possibility prepared for by our encounter with the fundamentally alienating
character of life. Further, there are certain essential "contradictions" and
"oppositions" that Hegel sees as inherent in madness which are "still pre
served" and mirrored in the rational mind (PM ?408 Z)3?for example, the
contradictions between the unconscious and the conscious, between nature and
spirit, and between the inner world of desire and the outer world of "otherness"
which stands opposed to our private desires. These contradictions are ineluc
table features of all mind, and since they appear much more vividly in madness,
a study of madness affords us a particularly illuminating perspective from
which to view the "normal."4
But it is not only a study of madness which allows us to look at what Freud
calls the "distortions and exaggerations" of psychic life in order to gain insight
71
72 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY
into the "normal." Hegel's philosophy is one which emphasizes the inherently
alienating character of life: human history is a "slaughterbench" of happiness
(RH 27); the path of development of consciousness is one of loss, doubt, and
despair (PS 49); and the life of spirit is continually confronted by "the tremen
dous power of the negative," or more starkly put, by "devastation" {Verw?s
tung) (PS 19/PG 36). As such, consciousness is delivered over to a state of
yearning for wholeness, for peace, for redemption from discord, without ever
being able to achieve it in any lasting way. This leads to the construction of
strategies for realizing harmony which often become desperate. This is in fact
the origin of many forms of madness, according to Hegel, when consciousness
"reverts" or "sinks back" into disease in response to the devastation of its
desires. But there are what we might call "transitional" or "borderline" strate
gies as well, desperate to be sure, yet still located by Hegel within the terrain
of the "normal" or rational consciousness. These are extreme forms of alienated
existence which still cling to rationality but which struggle with the alluring
promise of release that madness offers.5
The forms of consciousness which occupy positions on the borderline between
the "normal" and the "deranged" offer sufficient "distortions and exaggera
tions" in their own right to provide, along with madness, the desired goal of a
point of access to the "normal" through the distortion of the normal. But more,
their peculiar positioning within the between-space of the rational and mad
souls promises a unique vantage point from which to examine the intersection
of rationality and madness, a psychical interstice in which we are forced to ask
the question of what really separates the two.
A clear example of such a transitional or borderline state of being is despair,
or the "unhappy consciousness." The unhappy consciousness is the "grief and
longing" of the self which yearns for unity but experiences only inner division
and estrangement (PS 456f), and shares with madness the characteristic of a
double personality, "the duplication of self-consciousness within itself which
is experienced only as "self-contradiction" (PS 126).6 Many other examples
occur in Hegel's Phenomenology as well: "scepticism" is described as an "un
conscious, thoughtless rambling" {bewu?tlose Faselei) (PS 125/PG 162), and
Faselei is a subcategory ofBl?dsinn, one of the three main categories in Hegel's
typology of insanity; the "law of the heart," when pushed to its extreme, is
characterized as "derangement" {die Verr?cktheit des Bewu?tseins) (PS
225/PG 280); the attitude of "virtue" is an internal contradiction which culmi
nates in madness (Verr?cktheit) (PS 229/PG 285); the standpoint of "absolute
freedom and terror" (PS 359) is explicitly diagnosed in the Encyclopaedia as a
form of "frenzy" {Wahnsinn, a major category of madness, PM ?408 Z); and the
"beautiful soul" is a "lost soul" consumed by a yearning for unity which it cannot
attain, finally becoming "disordered to the point of madness" {zur Verr?cktheit
zerr?ttet) (PS 407/PG 491).
The present essay will explore a comparison of madness with yet another
Hegelian theme which exists on the border of madness, a theme which not only
HEGEL ON MADNESS AND TRAGEDY 73
plays a key role in his phenomenological project, but also has a larger meta
physical and aesthetic significance: that of tragedy. Like despair, skepticism,
the law of the heart, and the other forms of consciousness which exist in the
between-space of madness and rationality, tragic action, while not pathological
in principle, shares many of the same mental structures and strategies as
madness. It is striking, indeed, to see how frequently the language of madness
is evoked on the tragic stage. As Bennett Simon notes of the ancient Greek
stage, not only "madness in metaphorical terms...is extremely common in the
plays of the three great tragedians,.. .but frank clinical madness, complete with
hallucinations and delusions,...is also rather common."7 While Hegel does not
draw out the connections between madness and tragedy, either in his phenome
nology or in his aesthetics, the two in fact share a large constellation of themes
which are critical to his philosophy as a whole.
The purpose of this article is to explore several of the most important of these
themes. It will be shown that both madness and tragic action involve ontologies
of disunion?both are inwardly divided, "doubled" forms of consciousness?and
as such highlight Hegel's elaboration of an ontology of alienation at the center
of his phenomenology. Further, within this divided state, both exhibit what
Hegel calls the "double center of reality," the reality of the inner world and that
of the outer world, in particularly poignant ways: outer reality is experienced
as the dreadful world of an alien fate, and in their confrontations with fate,
both the mad and tragic selves recenter their desires and designs around an
inner reality which is essentially dislocated from the outer world. This recen
tering in turn uncovers a world of constant inversion, reversal, and peripety, a
world and a way of acting which is perpetually inscribed within double mean
ings and ambiguous implications. Additionally, it is just this inwardly divided
and inverted world which enables the phenomena of madness and tragic action
to reveal the human struggle with guilt and the nature of evil in especially
dramatic ways. And finally, madness and tragedy each involve an intimate
relation to "nature," to the domain of feeling, passion, and unconscious drives,
and allow us to see how Hegel develops a "depth psychology" to explore the
dynamics of unconscious mental life.
As an investigation of these connections between madness and tragedy, this
essay will also serve to lay the foundation for a fresh look at Hegel's anatomy
of the "normal" mind. For again, madness and tragedy are not so much opposite
ways of being to that of the fully rational consciousness, as they are distorted
images of it. This is what allows Sophocles' Odysseus to look upon Ajax's
madness and see there his own "dim shape" and "shadow" (Aj 1. 126). As such,
madness and tragedy highlight in a graphic way basic features of the everyday
world of "normal" experience: we are all inwardly divided and doubled selves;
we all exist within a double center of reality and must struggle with the sense
of an alien fate; we all act within a world of double meanings, of ambiguity,
inversion and reversal; we are all subjects of guilt in our very being; and we
are all creatures of nature as well as spirit, of unconscious motives and drives
as well as conscious intentions.
ii. the ontology of disunion and the

Double Center of Reality
Both tragedy and madness are responses to what Hegel calls in his Aesthetics
the "contradictions of the broken and confused medley of earthly existence,"
contradictions which ensure that spirit cannot, "in this divided world," avoid
"the ill fortune [Ungl?ck] and ill health [Unheil] that cling to finite existence"
(FA I 240/W 10.1: 228). Of course, to experience the world as a divided and
broken place is not itself peculiar to madness or tragedy. Indeed, Hegel believes
that "all existing reality [is] unstable and disunited" (RH 38), which creates
the possibility for all mind to "submit to infinite pain" (PM ?382). Human
consciousness is a "craving for...unity" (PM ?379), a profound desire to become
"conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself (PS 263)?a sort
of nostalgic yearning for that "oceanic
es
feeling" of oneness which Freud ?nter
pr?ts as our most primordial wish. Yet this yearning is perpetually frustrated
by the encounter with discord, opposition, and estrangement. The world is
never a simple mirror of our inner desires, but throws them into question,
setting them in opposition to the desires and values of others, and revealing
the disparity between the merely personal and the social character of being,
between our interior lives and our confrontation with otherness.
Further, the broken and divided character of the world effects a similar inner
division of consciousness. The "gulf between "inward strivings and external
reality" (HP I 52) means that satisfaction can only be achieved momentarily,
that fulfillment is ephemeral, that desire is constantly rekindled, and that
consciousness experiences itself as inwardly torn between its desire for whole
ness and its feeling of being dispossessed. The whole course of Hegel's Phe
nomenology may be read as an account of different therapeutic efforts on the
part of consciousness to heal the wounds of the spirit, to struggle for a sense
of reconciliation of its inner division.
But while madness and tragedy fall within the universal experience of a
broken world, and share with all forms of consciousness the struggle to heal
their inner disunity, they are extreme cases, and thus greatly magnify the
contours of Hegel's phenomenological landscape of alienation. Abrief sketch of
some of the key ideas in Hegel's definitions of madness and tragedy will allow
us to see the central place of the ontology of disunion in these two dramatic
forms of alienation.
Hegel's only detailed discussion of madness is worked out in the "Anthropol

ogy" section of his Encyclopaedia. While he is concerned to show throughout
this discussion that madness incorporates many of the same psychological
mechanisms as the fully rational consciousness, he describes insanity as a final
capitulation in the face of the alienating character of existence, where the mind
"reverts back" to and becomes "engrossed" in a more primitive way of being,
the "life of feeling" {Gef?hlsleben). More will be said in the next two sections
about the "feeling soul," where the role of nature, the body, and the unconscious
dominates. For now, a general statement of Hegel's definition of madness will

suffice to indicate the nature of the ontological disunion which underlies it. His
general view of madness is of a state of withdrawal of the mind into itself, a
"sinking inward," where the relation to reality becomes severed:
[madness is] a state in which the mind is shut up within itself, has sunk into itself,
whose peculiarity...consists in its being no longer in immediate contact with
actuality but in having positively separated itself from it. (PM ?408 Z).
The motive for this movement of withdrawal and separation is to heal the
sense of alienation by effectively removing the external world, which is expe
rienced as the theater of infinite pain. Very much in anticipation of the
Freudian theory of mental illness, Hegel sees the mad self as replacing reality
with a substitute formation, a subjectively projected reality, a "shadow cast by
the mind's own light" (PM ?385 Z). Again prefiguring Freud, Hegel draws a
connection between this gesture of projective wish-fulfillment and dreams:
madness, in fact, is described as a sort of "dreaming while awake" (PM ?408
Z), where the insane self projects its inward dreams of unity onto the world
and treats them as real.9
It might seem as though madness successfully solves the problem of aliena

tion, since in displacing its connections with the external world, it achieves the
desired state of self-reunification through a projective dream life which directly
expresses its desires. But although Hegel again foreshadows Freud in seeing
madness as a therapeutic attempt,10 he also anticipates Freud's view that the
attempt is doomed to fail. This is no more a moral judgment on Hegel's part
than it is on Freud's: neither takes the position that just because madness is
pathological, it must be condemned as a failure on ethical grounds.11 Rather,
Hegel argues that the effort of madness utterly to remove external reality,
completely to obliterate what Freud calls the "laws of the ego" and the "reality
principle," and fully to replace the discourse of rationality with a competing,
pre-rational discourse of fantasy, cannot be achieved. Madness can go a long
way in this project, but reality and rationality can at most be radically dislo
cated and displaced, never fully effaced: the "rational nature" of the insane
cannot be "entirely destroyed" (PM ?408 Z).
For Hegel, madness is a reversion of the healthy, rational consciousness back
into disease, and as such insanity has the healthy consciousness "for its
presupposition." We must therefore "keep in view the truth that insanity is
not a...loss of reason...but only derangement, only a contradiction in a still
subsisting reason?just as physical disease is not a...total loss of health." To
deny the subsistence of reason in the insane is to dehumanize them, and to
justify all the brutalities of Bedlam (PM ?408 & Z).
But since rationality remains, albeit in a deranged form, and with it an at
least tenuous connection with reality, the condition of alienation remains as
well: madness remains inwardly divided. There are in fact two centers of
reality within madness, the displaced, only dimly present (as in a dream) center
of objective externality, and the constructed, projected center of subjective

interiority. The mad self is "imprisoned in a particular, merely subjective
idea,...driven out of its mind, shifted out from the center of its actual world
and, since it also still retains a consciousness of this world, has two centers"
(PM ?408 Z)?the decentered but still recollected trace of its rationality, and
the new center of its deranged consciousness.
It is in this sense that Hegel refers to madness as a double personality. The

insane self
is aware of the disruption of his consciousness into two mutually contradictory
modes;...here we see the soul in the more or less despairing effort to overcome [its]
discord...and to restore its...self-identity; the insane subject is therefore in com
munion with himself in the negative of himself...but knows himself [only as]...a
subject disrupted into two different personalities. (PM ?408 Z).
A similar intensification of the ontology of disunion, with the resulting

doubling of the center of reality, is present in Hegel's account of tragic
action. Unlike the relatively self-contained nature of Hegel's discussion of
madness, his treatment of tragedy is much more wide-ranging, from the
systematic analysis of Greek and modern tragic literature in his Lectures on
Aesthetics, to the account of the tragic character of certain forms of ethical
action and religious experience in his Phenomenology, with briefer comments in
his early essay on Natural Law {Ueber die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten
des Naturrechts), in his Philosophy of Right, and in his Berlin lecture cycles
on the Philosophy of History, the Philosophy of Religion, and the History
of Philosophy }2
Throughout his various discussions of tragic action, the theme of ontological
disunion is paramount. Tragedy is a form of "collision" of opposites, a scene of
conflict and contradiction between equally justified principles. In ancient
Greek tragedy, these principles are "substantial ethical powers"?for example,
those of private conscience and social custom, the religious and the secular,
family and the state, love and duty, nature and culture?which are embodied
in individual actors whose characters directly express these larger, cosmic
forces (FA IV 295ff). In modern (or Romantic) tragedy, where emphasis is placed
much more strongly on the "personal intimacy of character" (FA IV 331), the
conflict "essentially abides within the character itself (FA IV 335).13 But in all
cases, the tragic stage is a theater of the doubling of reality through the collision
of unreconciled oppositions: the world is "rent asunder" in tragic action (PS 265).
This double center of reality is evident in both of the basic forms of ancient
tragic collision Hegel identifies, represented by Sophocles'Antigone and Oedipus
the King, respectively. In the Antigone the opposition is between the demands of
social-political life and those of the family; between the divinities of light and
darkness, the "daylight" gods of the state and the "nether" gods of instinct, feeling,
and blood-ties; and between what Hegel configures as the masculine and the
feminine powers of life (FAI, 293; FAII, 215; FAIV, 318; PS 267ff, 284). In Oedipus
the King the collision is between the principles of consciousness and the uncon
scious, between what is open and what is hidden, between volitional and unin
tentional acts (FA I 276; FA IV 319; PS 283f, 446-48; LR 354n).
More will be said about these two plays later, but already some similarities
between the ontology of disunion in tragic action and madness are discernible.
Just as madness presents a world which is doubled between the desires of
internal reality and the relentlessly alienating force of external reality, tragic
action is situated in a world which is divided against itself, between the tragic
actor's "pathos"14?that is, the "power of the emotional life," or "the essential
cravings of the human heart" (FA I 308f, 292)?and the opposing authority of
external reality which is experienced as "the eternal necessity of a dreadful
fate" (PS 279). Just as madness "clings to itself and has its objectivity within
itself," recentering reality within the "fixed idea" of its own interior life (PM
?408 Z), the tragic actor has the "center of unity" within his or her own "pathos"
(FA I 321)?Antigone, for example, in the "pathos" of family, of instinct, of the
gods of the underworld, and Oedipus in the "pathos" of the dominion of
consciousness, the sovereignty of what is open to sight. And just as madness
cannot escape alienation, but is haunted by the trace of reality and ration
ality it seeks so desperately to efface, the tragic actor is undone by the
center of existence which opposes it?Antigone by light, Oedipus by dark
ness, Antigone by the power of the political state, Oedipus by the power of
the unconscious.
Similarly, just as it was shown that the doubling of the center of reality in
madness effected a corresponding splitting of consciousness into a double
personality, the collisional nature of reality in tragedy also reveals an inward
duality of character. Given Hegel's claim that modern, or Romantic tragedy
locates the conflict of powers within the character itself, while in ancient
tragedy, "the tragic character possesses a definite type, a single fully self-con
sistent pathos" (FA I 321, and see IV 310, 335), this double personality of the
tragic actor is in principle more clearly present in modern tragedy?for exam
ple, in Hamlet's spirit of revenge and his debilitating inertia; in MacBeth's
commitment to evil and his simultaneous revulsion by it, in his inclination to
brutality and his desire to resist it; in Othello's powerful faith and the doubt
which unhinges it, in his great love and the corrosive jealously which
destroys it; in Caesar's wisdom and self-deception, in his courage and
superstition; in Cleopatra's paradoxical nature as both harlot and goddess,
simultaneously corrupt and holy; and in Iago's lament that "I am not what
I am" (Othello I, i).
And yet it is possible to see this doubleness in all tragic figures?certainly
in Oedipus, who is torn between what he knows and what he is, who is the
subject of a "double striking curse," with "darkness on his eyes, that now have
such straight vision," who knows not "where he lives, nor whom he lives with"
(OK 11. 414-19), whose mother/wife Jocasta invokes the gods to "keep you from
the knowledge of who you are" (OK 1. 1068).15 And Antigone too is a double
self, a self divided between her past history and the self so transformed by the
crisis of her brother's unburied corpse, the self who was betrothed to Haemon
and the self who goes to the "marriage chamber" of her tomb (A 1. 891).
Indeed, while Hegel says that ancient tragic characters "adhere to the one
ethical state of pathos which alone corresponds to their own already formed
personality" (FA IV 335), these characters are tragic precisely because they are
engaged in intimate struggle with their opposite. Oedipus "adheres" tena
ciously to the rights of consciousness, but his very actions solicit the opposite
power, that of the unconscious, which finally destroys him. Antigone unbudg
ingly clings to the pathos of blood-ties, but her character is equally defined by
her "other," by her confrontation with the laws of social and political reality
which circumscribe her destiny. Again, this is analogous to the situation in
madness, where the insane, despite their imprisonment within a "fixed idea,"
are nevertheless double personalities precisely because of the continued rela
tion to otherness, to what surrounds, as a sort of constantly encroaching
negative space, the fixity of their internal dream lives.
The kinship of madness and tragedy through their related ontologies of
disunion can also be seen in their shared affinity with the state of despair, or the
"unhappy consciousness." Hegel sees despair as a continually present possibility,
indeed as the "center" and "birthpang" of all the shapes of spirit (PS 456f),
expressing the fundamental fact of consciousness'inner division {Entzweiung).
The unhappy consciousness is the pain of the failure to reach self-unity, the
experience of "self-duplication" and "self-contradiction" (PS 126). This self is
torn between the sense of its own finitude, of being caught up in the consuming
fire of change?"bound upon a wheel of fire," as Lear says (IV, vi)?in a world
of accident and caprice, and its desire for self-identity, for immutability, for
completeness?the desire, ultimately, for the divine. "The unhappy conscious
ness," Hegel writes, "is the tragic fate of the... self that aims to be absolute" (PS
455)?the age-old longing of human beings to become God, to become complete
and whole, to overcome the sense of estrangement from our world. It is in this
sense that Hegel sees Goethe's Faust as an "absolutely philosophical tragedy,"
showing "the tragic quest for harmony between the Absolute...and the
individual's knowledge and will" (HA II 1224). Despair reflects the sense of
loss of the divine, the forfeiture of a world redeemed from alienation and
protected from the irrational force of contingency. It is the "grief which ex
presses itself in the cruel words that 'God is Dead'" (PS 455).
The "cruel words" of despair are encountered many times in the language of
tragedy.16 Euripides, a contemporary of Thucydides and Plato, and like them
deeply suspicious of the nostalgic invocation of a pantheon of gods whose
irrationality and arbitrariness had become embodied in the destructive mad
ness of the Peloponnesian Wars, is perhaps the most stark in his expression of
this language of despair. His Hecuba perfectly represents Euripides' sense of
the tragic absence of the divine:
O Zeus, what can I say?

That you look on man
and care?
Or do we, holding that the gods exist,
deceive ourselves with unsubstantial dreams
and lies, while random careless chance and change
alone control the world? (H 11. 488-92).
0 gods! Do I call upon those gods for help?

1 cried to them before now, and they would not hear.
Come then, hurl ourselves into the pyre. Best now
to die in the flaming ruins of our father's house! (TW 11. 1280-83).
Hecuba looks at a world divested of divine compassion, seeing only a "ruined

land,/ashes and smoke, wasted,/wilderness of war," and hearing only the "ring
ing echo of terror" which haunts the godless world (H 11. 480, 1110). In such a
world, the overlapping of tragedy and madness becomes complete: "our for
tune's course/of action is the reeling way a madman takes" (TW 11. 1204-5).
Madness is a central theme of Euripides' Heracles, Orestes, and the Bacchae
as well.
Euripides?Hegel's least favorite Greek tragedian, incidentally17?is not
alone in illustrating how central the theme of a disparity between the human
and divine was to the Greek tragic stage. It is Sophocles' Antigone, after all,
which Hegel takes as the prototype for the collision between "human law" and
"divine law" that he sees as the central opposition of Greek tragedy. There are
also Sophocles' Oedipus, who had always accounted himself blessed by the
gods, but is revealed as "the most accursed, whom God too hates/above all men
on earth" (OK 1.1345); and Ajax, who is made insane by Athena, and hears the
fiendish "sweet laughter" of the gods reverberating over the blood-drenched
stage of human action (Aj 1.79); and Heracles, who encounters the divine in
terms of torture and madness: "Torture, torture is all [Zeus] gives me!.../this
inexorable flowering of madness," without prospect of any healer, any "crafts
man surgeon" (WT 11. 995-1001). Similarly, Aeschylus presents the theme of
dislocation from the divine, resulting in illness: a "sickness that fights all
remedy" (LB 1.470), where, as Cassandra says, all is "useless; there is no god
of healing in this story" (Ag 1. 1248). Like madness, the tragic experience of a
world divested of any rational order begets a struggle with illness and a forlorn
yearning for healing.
As for madness, Hegel's description directly appropriates the language he
uses to define the unhappy consciousness. Hegel's portrayal of despair as "the
duplication of self-consciousness within itself which is experienced only as
"self-contradiction," and his parallel description of madness as a "disruption of
consciousness into two mutually contradictory modes," have already been
noted. Madness, like tragedy, is an intensification of the despairing response
to a god-forsaken world. Indeed, Hegel sees religious disillusionment as a
powerful cause of madness, when "the individual is plunged into absolute
uncertainty whether God's grace has been granted to him," effecting a "de
rangement of [the] person's individual world" (PM ?408 Z). Madness is an
attempt at self-empowerment where the power of the divine is experienced as

either absent or irrational, an attempt to become god in a fantastic effort to fill
the void expressed by the cruel words of despair, that "God is dead." This
attempt at empowerment and self-deification is seen in the mad self's negation
of the external world, the scene of god-forsaken fate, and in the internalization
and reconstruction of reality through dreams, by which madness seeks to
create and rule a world of its own.
This dream-project of madness goes beyond what is found in tragedy, insofar

as the forces represented by the tragic actor's "pathos" are universal ethical
principles and not fantasies. Still, how tragedy lies on the border of madness
is comprehensible when it is considered how the tragic actor, like the mad self,
tends to negate the reality of the world which confronts him or her: the tragic
actor has "drowned in [a] Stygian water...all independence of the objective,
actual world" (PS 281), so that the reality he or she is in collision with
"vanishes" into "oblivion" (PS 448). To cite but two examples: Clytaemestra,
standing over the bloody corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra, seeks to
obliterate the guilt of her act when she says to the chorus,
You can praise or blame me as you wish;

it is all one to me. That man is Agamemnon,
my husband; he is dead; the work of this right hand
that struck in strength of righteousness. And that
is that. (Ag 11. 1403-1406).
Similarly, Antigone says impatiently to Creon:
Why are you waiting [to pronounce my doom]? Nothing that you say
fits with my thought. I pray it never will.
Nor will you ever like to hear my words. (A 11. 499-501).
By erasing all justification of the opposing center of reality, tragedy effects

a decentering of reality which is analogous to that of madness, resulting in a
similar attempt to remake the world, to project the tragic actor's own vision of
reality onto existence. And just as with madness, the decentering project of
tragic action is never conclusive, never complete, never capable of perfectly
eliminating the force of reality which stands over against it; it is destined to
remain in collision with its antithesis, ordained to a double center of existence
and an ontology of disunion.
III. SUBMERSION, DARKNESS, AND THE

INFERNAL POWERS OF NATURE
The action of decentering reality in response to the alienating character of the

world leads to a further point of comparison between madness and tragedy:
the way in which this decentering enterprise involves a motion of withdrawal
and submersion of consciousness into itself. Both madness and tragic action
share with despair the "pain of the Spirit that wrestle[s], but without success,
to reach out into objectivity" (PS 410)?both yearn for but fail to achieve a
coinciding of their inner desires with the course of the world. As a result, both
initiate a movement of internalizaron of reality. Madness is directly described

by Hegel as a "sinking of the soul into its inwardness," where consciousness
"contemplates its individual world not outside, but within itself (PM ?406 Z).
And tragic action involves a "withdrawal from [the] truth...[of] the real world,"
a "mourn[ing] over the loss of its world" which leads to the creation of a reality
"which is raised above the real world" (PS 425, 426).
The movement of withdrawal can take many forms, both in tragedy and in
madness. For example, the elaborate typology of madness Hegel presents in
his "Anthropology" categorizes insanity very largely according to specific
shapes of withdrawal: the mind may withdraw into a relatively indeterminate,
"vacuous" state (as in cretinism, or "natural idiocy" [der Bl?dsinn]); or into
"distractedness" (die Zerstreutheit), where it becomes so absorbed by a certain
feeling or idea that it is unaware of the course of events outside it; or into
"rambling" (die Faselei), where it cannot concentrate its attention on anything,
but sinks into a "perfect type of chaos"; or into a particular period of the past;
or into an obsession with a specific delusion (that one is God, or a king, or a
grain of barley, or is made of glass); and so on (PM ?408 Z).
In tragedy, one of Hegel's central examples of withdrawal is Hamlet, who
exemplifies the intensified version of a common state of being, that of the noble
spirit or "the beautiful soul" (die sch?ne Seele, PG 484). The beautiful soul
lives in dread of acting: "it flees from contact with the actual world," and
becomes absorbed in a state of "self-willed impotence" (PS 400). Hamlet, the
tragic representative of the beautiful soul, has, like the mad self, sunken into
himself (in sich versunken) (W 10.2: 204), and "persists in the inactivity of a
beautiful, introspective [innerlichen] soul, which can neither realize its aims
nor make itself at home in the conditions of actual life" (FA II 364; and see FA
IV 335).
The particular shape of withdrawal which holds the most interest for a
comparison of madness with tragedy is the sinking inward and submersion of
consciousness into what Hegel calls nature. Without launching an excursion
into the elaborate and serpentine dialectics of Hegel's Naturphilosophie, it
may be said that within the context of his psychology of madness and tragic
action, "nature" refers to the basically pre-rational level of mental life, the "life
of feeling" (Gef?hlsleben) which Hegel associates with darkness: the domain
of the unconscious, of instinct, of the body. The feeling soul (die f?hlende Seele)
"is the stage of [mind's] darkness," where the "light" of consciousness is not yet
explicit (PM ?404), and Gef?hlsleben is the "dull stirring, the inarticulate
breathing, of the spirit through its unconscious and unintelligent [pre-rational]
individuality" (in seiner bewu?t- und verstandlosen Individualit?t) (PM ?400).
The withdrawals of the mad and tragic selves into nature thus will be
voyages into those "infernal regions" referred to in the lines of Virgil which
Freud takes as the motto for his Interpretation of Dreams: "if I cannot bend
the higher powers, I will move the infernal regions"?the higher powers cir
cumscribing the sphere of consciousness and rationality, and the infernal

regions encompassing the unconscious domain of the body and instinct. Thus
in insanity, where "the natural self...gains mastery over the objective, ra
tional... consciousness," the "earthly element" {das Irdische) of nature is liber
ated?"the dark, infernal powers of the heart are set free" (PM ?408 and Z).
And in tragedy, Hegel believes, we are continually confronted by a collision of
the laws of the "upper," "daylight" world of consciousness with the laws of the
"lower," "nether" world of instinct and passion. Antigone, to cite Hegel's favorite
example of this, reveres "the Dei inferi of Hades, the instinctive powers of
feeling, love and kinship, not the daylight gods of free and self-conscious, social
and political life" (FA II 215).19
A closer examination of this imagery of darkness in Hegel's discussions of
madness and tragedy will help to reinforce the connections between the two.
Turning first to madness, Hegel appropriates a very common eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century linkage of insanity with "the nocturnal aspect" of the
soul,20 and the related construction of madness as a dreaming while awake.21
As Michel Foucault puts it, madness tended to be seen as "the night of the
mind" in which the self is "confiscated" by the dream-image.22 Hegel in fact
defines nature as "mind asleep" (PR ?258 Z), and regards the submersion of
the mind into nature in madness as a "veiling" of the world of daylight (PM
?406).
Madness is thus a sort of darkening of the world, where the more primitive,
"earthly elements" of the soul which hold dominion over the world of sleep are
emancipated, and where the language of conscious rationality is replaced by
the language of dream life. This is much like Freud's view that mental illness,
like dreaming, entails an escape from the external world and a corresponding
liberation of repressed unconscious drives. For Hegel, too, madness effects a
displacement of the mechanisms of consciousness by the vicissitudes of the
unconscious, where the laws of rationality give way to the laws of the body.
Indeed, it is the body which becomes the true subject, or self, of madness. This
is why Hegel insists, no less than Nietzsche or Freud after him, that "mental
illness is not merely to be compared with physical illness, but is more or less
bound up with it" (PM ?406 Z). This also explains Hegel's preoccupation with
sleep, dreams, instincts, and the "life of feeling" in his anatomy of madness?all
are features of the underground or underworld of the psyche, requiring a
unique psychology, a depth-psychology, or, to borrow Nietzsche's phrase, a
"physio-psychology."23
In a sense, madness is a return to origins, to that "eternal basic text of homo
natura" Nietzsche speaks of as lying beneath all the "masks" and "cloaks" and
"surfaces" of consciousness.24 The infernal regions of nature are prior even to
time?to genuinely human time, or history. World history begins in the form
of "nature, as an innermost, unconscious instinct {der innereste bewu?tlose
Trieb)" and progresses through a process of "bringing [this unconscious in
stinct] into consciousness" (RH 30/W 9:31). So too, individual human life begins
in nature, and individual history is inaugurated only with the transformation

of unconscious nature through labor. Hence in his discussion of the biblical
story of the Fall, Hegel describes the "natural unity" of the Garden, where
Adam and Eve are "creatures of nature," as the originary scene of unconscious
life, a pre-reflective and pre-historical absorption in the life of the instincts,
awaiting the "awakening of consciousness" through labor (SL ?24 Z).25 Mad
ness, the reversion of mind into nature, is thus a return to the darkness of our
origins, and as such effects an abandonment of history, a paralysis of our ability
to transform nature through labor. Or more exactly, it is a substitution of a
purely internal "history," a dream-history, and a labor of fantasy, in place of the
social character of history and labor which characterizes the enterprise of
rationality.
Hegel's theory of tragedy also emphasizes the role of a reversion to nature,
with the associated nocturnal imagery of darkness. To this end, he exploits the
tragic theatre's preoccupation with a dissonance between physis (nature) and
nomos (custom, culture, convention, law), and the recurring theme of the tragic
actor's alienation from the outer world of custom and corresponding identifi
cation with the internal world of nature. We may note that this theme is often
directly linked in tragedy with the anatomy of madness, as in Lear, and, on the
Greek stage, in Medea and Ajax and in the frequent dramatizations of posses
sion, either by Dionysian frenzy (for example, Pentheus) or by the infecting
power of the Erinys (for example, Eteocles, Clytaemestra and Orestes).26
While Hegel is most interested in this tragic dissonance between culture and
nature as it occurs in Greek drama, it is also clearly present in modern tragedy.
MacBeth, for example, though he may "look like the innocent flower," preserv
ing the mask of civilization, is really "the serpent under't" (I, v), and the famous
"damned spot" of blood may serve as an emblem of his reversion to nature.
Similarly, Hamlet is drawn to "some vicious mole of nature" within his soul (I,
iv), and Lear's exile from his Kingdom into the "all-shaking thunder" of nature
(III, ii)?an exile which coincides with his madness?also discloses the process
of dislocation of nomos by physis.
On the ancient Greek stage, the tension between culture and nature provides
the dialectical backdrop for nearly all the surviving tragedies. For example,
the thematic framework of Aeschylus' Oresteia is the conflict between a yearn
ing for some rational order of custom and the persistent undermining of this
desire by the descent into the blood-rites of nature. And Euripides' character
of Medea embodies, as William Arrowsmith puts it, "the blinding force of life
itself, stripped of any mediating morality or humanizing screen; naked, unim
peded, elemental eros; intense, chaotic, and cruel; the primitive, pre-moral,
pre-cultural condition of man and the world."27
It is really the tragedies of Sophocles, however, which most draw Hegel's

attention to this theme. The Oedipus the King will be discussed in the next
section, and the Ajax and the Antigone in this section. The Ajax is interesting
because of the direct association between the movement of withdrawal into

nature and the theme of madness. As Michael Davis points out in his essay on
"Politics and Madness," there is an important relationship in the Ajax between
the language of "inside" and "outside" and the categories of sanity and mad
ness.28 On the surface, it is when someone is "outside" himself that he is mad,
out of his mind. And yet with Ajax there is a certain reversal of the usual
relation between inner and outer. The sane Ajax appears to entirely lack an
inside: he is all outer, everything must be directly visible to be real to him, and
no distinction is acknowledged between the way things appear on the outside
and the way things are. It is thus paradoxically the sane Ajax who is "out of
his mind." Athena's act of revenge on Ajax is precisely to bestow upon him an
interior, and hence to force him into himself. Ajax's acquisition of an interior
throws him back into the previously denied world of nature, a world, like that
of madness, of darkness: Ajax's vision is "darkened," he exists now under the
"terrible yoke of blindness," and he is forced to speak of the "darkness that is
my light" (Aj 11. 85, 123, 394). He becomes a "dim shape" and "weightless
shadow" (Aj 11. 121-26), like the ethereal shapes of dream images.
Indeed the nature to which Ajax reverts is not simply like the world of
madness; for him, the two coincide. For Ajax there is no possibility of integra
tion of inner and outer, nature and culture, body and spirit. The reversal and
inversion of his self is so abrupt, so unprepared for, and exposes a region of
being which had been so thoroughly repressed, that his delivery over tophysis
is immediately a deliverance to madness. Ajax was so much a stranger to
himself, so convinced that his own nature could only coincide with his (equally
blunt) conception of custom and law, that the move inward to a previously
opaque, more elemental region of nature, left him without defense?he who in
the outer world was the most brilliant of defensive warriors.
This language of darkness associated with the tragic figure's reversion to

nature is worked out most fully by Hegel in his discussion of the Antigone,
where the central tragic collision is between the forces of human and divine
law. Recall that Hegel defines "human law" as the law of the state, which he
associates with daylight, openness to view, the upper world of culture. "Divine
law" is the law of individual conscience, tied in Antigone to family-relations,
and associated with darkness, hiddenness, the underworld of nature. Hegel's
descriptions of Antigone's tragic position as representative of divine law reca
pitulate almost exactly the language he uses to describe the sinking of the self
into madness: Antigone's "pathos," her defining character, is her identification
with Gef?hlsleben, the life of feeling, the heart, intuition, instinct, and dream,
with the associated primal images of earth, blood, the underworld, and night
time.
It is true that Creon, who remains in the daylight world, is also a tragic figure
for Hegel. Hence submersion into nature is by no means a necessary feature
of tragic action. Rather, Creon is destroyed precisely because of his unwilling
ness to acknowledge the justice of the netherworld, his opposite. But while
Hegel insists, against readings which see Creon as simply a tyrant who acts
unjustly,29 that Creon too is a genuinely tragic figure, he focuses his attention
much more fully on the psychology of Antigone. Creon is in some respects more
like Ajax, whose tragedy (and madness) results from an inability to come to
terms with the interior world of "nature." Antigone, on the other hand, is in
essence all interior for Hegel. Her "pathos" coincides with that more primordial
region of the psyche which most of us have repressed. She is the other of
culture, its underground woman, so to speak, who is denied only at great cost
to the health of communal life. Hence her tragic situation promises to teach us
more about ourselves than Creon's situation does, more about the domain of
the unconscious, of instinct, of nature, which Hegel sees as the "presupposition"
of all spirit, the originary scene of life which is gradually sublimated, and hence
lost from view and darkened over in the developmental progression of spirit.30
Here too, as in the case of madness, it is through acquaintance with what lies
on the outside, or the underside, of the everyday, that we are able to learn more
fully about the contours of the "normal."
It must be said, however, that what Antigone teaches is made problematic
by Hegel's persistent tendency to move beyond the general psychological prin
ciples entailed by her immersion in nature, to make claims about gender. In
Hegel's reading, it is not accidental that the human law is represented in the
tragedy by a man, Creon, but is essentially male; and the divine law is not
merely coincidentally represented by a woman, Antigone, but is essentially
female. Thus Hegel associates the opposing principles of human and divine,
culture and nature, light and darkness, with essential gender distinctions. As
such, the concerns of a literary and psychological theory of tragic action are
superseded as the argument shifts to the terrain of social and political com
mentary on gender. Antigone's "pathos," her identification with the "infernal
regions of nature," her position of otherness in relation to the privileged laws
of culture, take on the weight of the "nature of woman" in contest with the
"nature of man" (PR ?166; PS 267ff). While the son eventually passes from the
bonds of the family (blood-ties, emotion, nature) to the sphere of human law
(the universal, rational, political), the daughter is never able to transcend
nature (PS 275). Hence there is a "natural antithesis" of man and woman (PS
276), and "womankind in general" is the "internal enemy" and "everlasting
irony" of the state, culture, the laws of the political community (PS 288).
This reading of the Antigone clearly opens itself to feminist critique.

Whether one looks to post-modern feminist theories (such as those of Luce
Irigary, Julia Kristeva, and H?l?ne Cixous), or to object-relations theories
within the feminist psychoanalytic movement (for example, D. W Winnicott,
James Masterson, Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein), Hegel's Antigone
carries with her the burden of a patriarchal reduction of the feminine to the
status of other. Here, maturity is viewed as a male prerogative (only the son
will truly grow up and emerge into the daylight world of culture), where
maturity is defined as independence from the immanence of the female, the
body, and nature in general. Woman comes to represent the enticements of

nature which are seen as distractions from, or even threats to, the purity and
autonomy of spirit, mind, and civilization. The whole series of dualisms Hegel's
interpretation of the Antigone presents?of woman/man, earth/spirit,
body/mind, lower/upper, feeling/reason, subjectivity/objectivity, dark
ness/light, and nature/culture?configures woman as the space into which the
male projects his own abandoned qualities, his rejected otherness, localizing
all that is feared and repressed and in need of transcendence.31
To the extent that feminist critique is called for in response to Hegel's account
of the Antigone, it might seem that it could be extended to a critique of his
theory of madness itself, given that Antigone's situation so closely parallels
Hegel's description of madness. By this interpretation, Hegel's anatomy of
madness would be seen as a patriarchal inscription of derangement as para
digmatically feminine, much as the fifteenth century Inquisitor's manual, the
Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), strongly associated demonic
collusion with "female nature."32
While this line of interpretation deserves further exploration, it is unclear

how far it would lead, for three reasons. First, Hegel never refers to the
withdrawals into nature characteristic of madness as a "retreat to the femi
nine"; indeed, his account of the various forms of madness is virtually devoid
of references to gender, and as already noted, he insists that "nature" is the
presupposition of all spirit.33 Of course, his emphasis on rationality over
feeling, and of spirit over nature, need not be explicitly framed in the vocabu
lary of gender to be seen as basically recapitulating traditional gender distinc
tions. But it should be remarked that Hegel's notions of "Reason" and "Spirit"
tend substantially to dislocate traditional concepts: he emphasizes such char
acteristics as organicity, mediation, and community, while unmercifully cri
tiquing the "logic of the understanding" with its fixed and rigid categories, as
well as of the expression of desire in terms of the domination or mastery of the
other.
The second point to be made is that the equation of a withdrawal into nature
with the feminine which we see in his reading of the Antigone is not an
equation Hegel extends (at least in any explicit way) to his readings of other
tragedies. And third, the tragic figure Hegel most often compares with Antigone
is not even a woman, but that paragon of the purportedly "masculine" values
of rationality, "wisdom, discretion, temperance, moderation, justice, courage,
inflexibility,...[and] sobriety" (HP I 394)?Socrates. Socrates, like Antigone,
represents "the tragedy of Greece itself for Hegel?namely, the irreconcilable
collision of two opposed formulations of law, the divine and the human, the
principle of individual conscience as opposed to the privileged "legalized con
science" of the state (HP I 443-47). Just as Antigone is the "everlasting irony"
of the state, Socratic irony represents a direct challenge to the status quo.
True, Socrates is not tied to the underworld gods as Antigone is. Indeed he
is guilty of creating new gods, "rational" gods. Nor is he tied to the family, but
represents a "disrespect to parents" (HP I 445) insofar as he challenges tradi

tional wisdom. The fact remains, however, that Socrates shares with Antigone
her defining characteristic, the principle of "inward subjectivity" or individual
conscience in opposition to the daylight world of accepted, legalized norms. In
this, Antigone is no more necessarily "feminine" than Socrates, nor Socrates
any more essentially "masculine" than Antigone. The condition for their par
allel tragic situations is their withdrawal from the outer world of law into an
inward world which stands related to the daylight world as other, to be denied,
repressed, and hidden from sight. Thus while Hegel's interpretation of the
Antigone invites, even demands, feminist critique, it seems less plausible to
extend this critique to the more general principles of his theories of madness
and tragic action.
One further point deserves mention before the current discussion of the
theme of withdrawal into nature is closed: the way in which the tragic actor's
submersion into nature effects a negation of time and history, reminiscent of a
similar negation in madness. It has already been noted that Hegel understands
madness as a sort of return to origins, to that "eternal basic text of homo
natura" which lies before historical time. To the extent that tragic action also
incorporates the movement of withdrawal into nature, it shares with madness
this opposition to history. Froma Zeitlin argues very persuasively on the
detemporalization of tragic action in her essay "Thebes: Theater of Self and
Society in Athenian Drama."34 Thebes, the city which all three of the great
Greek dramatists choose as the "tragic terrain" for many of their plays, is a
"city of myth as opposed to a city of history"; "a world that obeys the law of the
Eternal Return in contrast to one where history can unfold"; a city "closed back
upon itself as the circular walls that are the city's most distinctive architectural
feature in space"; a place where change, development, and transformation are
negated by a perpetually regressive turn back to the past.35 Antigone's very
name?literally, "generated in place of another"?may be interpreted as "an
tigeneration,"36 just as Ajax's name is tied to "aei," always: Ajax wishes to be
always the same and "must therefore hate time."37 And Oedipus is on a quest
for origins whose historical location is hidden by the mystery of his birth;
further, his act of incest is "the quintessential act of return,... the paradigmatic
act that destroys time by collapsing the necessary temporal distinctions be
tween generations."38
Just as Hegel sees classical Greek sculpture as the idealized representation
of figures "in whom we can detect no taint of Time or mortality" (FA III 133f),
the ancient tragic poet's affinity for mythological rather than historical repre
sentation serves the purpose of a negation of time. Here Aristotle's famous
contrast between poetry and history is pertinent: history merely describes
what has occurred, the singular, while poetry is "something more philosophic
and of graver import" because it represents the universal (Poetic 1451a36
145lb7).39 For Hegel, the universal which is portrayed in tragic poetry?the
"universal ethical powers" which enter into collision with each other?are
always embodied in the pre-historical "pathos" of individual actors. Thus the

gods and furies of Greek tragedy are only symbolically external, and hence only
symbolically "historical": they are in fact "inward spiritual forces," "immanent
in... [the] spirit and character" of the actor (FA I 302); "all the powers which are
scattered throughout the heaven of the gods are enclosed within [the human]
breast." In this vein, Hegel approvingly cites the words of "one of old": "Out of
thine own passions, O man, hast thou created the gods" (FA I 315).
The tragic universal is thus ultimately the human heart itself, the domain
of nature, which is prior to historical time. This is the same universal to which
the self withdraws in madness, and while the particular symptoms of madness
and tragic action will require different typologies, both madness and tragedy
lead us back to the domain of psychic origins, the "infernal regions" of nature,
whose dynamics entail a suspension of ordinary time.
IV. INVERSION, AMBIGUITY, AND GUILT
Anumber of similarities between Hegel's portraits of madness and tragic action

have been established: their characteristically double centers of reality, their
affinities with the unhappy consciousness, their tendencies to withdraw into
nature, and their negations of history. In this final section, two points of contact
remain for consideration: the way in which the decentered realities of madness
and tragedy evoke a world of inversion and double meanings, and how they
serve to illuminate Hegel's theory of guilt.
Both madness and tragic action involve particularly dramatic enactments of
a form of experience Hegel sees as a recurring encounter of "normal" conscious
ness: the experience of the "inverted world" {die verkehrte Welt). In the chapter
on "Understanding" of the Phenomenology Hegel argues that consciousness is
inevitably confronted by the "turning upside down" of the world of common
sense, resulting in a convolution and reversal of meanings. The common
categories of reality and appearance, inner and outer, essence and accident,
things in themselves and things for-consciousness, the world "behind the
scenes" and the world open to view, are discovered to be tenuous, to collapse
into each other, to "turn round" their meanings (PS 96-98).
There is nothing pathological about this process of inversion and reversal of
meanings. Indeed, Hegel says in an 1812 letter to his Dutch friend Peter van
Ghert that his own philosophical standpoint, that of absolute idealism or
speculative philosophy, must appear "[t]o the uninitiated...as the upside-down
world, contradicting all their accustomed concepts and whatever else appeared
valid to them according to so-called sound common sense."40 More generally,
the process of inversion is unavoidable within the very nature of the under
standing {Verstand), insofar as the common sense perspective that "the appar
ent is the real" is unstable, undermined by the repeated exposure of the merely
apparent character of what is held to be real.41
But while this is a perfectly ordinary, if undoubtedly frustrating and un
canny, experience of consciousness, in madness and tragedy the encounter with

inversion and double meanings takes on a much deeper existential signifi
cance. While the "normal" understanding's experience of the inverted world is
ultimately a lesson in epistemology?indeed the subtext of the "inverted world"
section of the Phenomenology is Hegel's critique of Kant's epistemology?in
madness and tragic action the inverted world becomes a way of being, and we
must move from logic to psychology in order to account for this. Put differently,
there is an essentially epistemological or logical resolution of the under
standing's dilemma of the inverted world in the Phenomenology: reason (die
Vernunft) comes to see that the "two worlds" of appearance and reality are in
fact a dialectically united harmony: in knowing appearance (Erscheinung), we
are already knowing the way in which reality shows (scheint) itself; there is
no "curtain" of appearance intervening between knowing and being.42 But in
madness and tragedy, the decentering of reality essential to them both prevents
any such resolution?they resist any logic of reconciliation and are left to live
the consequences of an inverted, convoluted world.
In madness, the doubling of the center of reality effects a basic inversion of

the normal ordering of the world. The mad consciousness "communes merely
with its interior states" (PM ?402 Z), which are regarded as essential reality,
while the external, objective world is seen as merely apparent, accidental, and
insubstantial, emerging as a mere "shadow cast by the mind's own light" (PM
?385 Z). In madness, the "logic" of dreaming displaces the laws of the under
standing and the reality principle, reversing the categories of subjective and
objective, apparent and real, darkness and light.
A good example of this process of inversion is seen in Hegel's analysis of the
"law of the heart," a perfectly normal form of consciousness which, however,
descends into madness (Verr?cktheit) when carried to its extreme. The law of
the heart is that perspective which views all value as stemming from the
individual's own passions, and views the external world as an "alien necessity"
to be remade in its own image (PS 221). But this consciousness becomes
"entangled" in (sich verwickeln in, PS 223/PG 277) the consequences of its
actions: in attempting to bring about a reality which would correspond to its
own personal, subjective value, and therefore convert the intuition of its heart
into a genuinely universal significance, it ironically denies the merely personal
character ofthat value, which was precisely the source of its purity and worth
for the heart. Thus the law of the heart's act "has the reverse significance" (die
verkehrte Bedeutung) of what was intended, and it "reveals itself to be [the]
inner perversion (innere Verkehrung) of itself, to be a deranged consciousness"
(die Verr?cktheit des Bewu?tseins), equally "perverted" (Verkehrte) and "per
verting" (Verkehrende) (PS 225, 226/PG 280, 281).
The inverted world is equally a feature of Hegel's theory of tragic action. The
tragic stage depicts a world "rent asunder" (die zerrissene Welt) and "shat
tered" (zersprungen) (PS 265, 289/PG 327, 354) into mutually hostile powers:
human and divine laws, public and private spheres, culture and nature, light
and darkness, consciousness and the unconscious. Central to Hegel's analysis
of tragedy is his view that each power, in being put into action, becomes
destroyed by its opposite. The significance of the tragic act is to solicit its
opposite, revealing an inversion or reversal {Verkehrung) of meaning.
"[T]hrough the deed a transition of opposites" occurs "in which each proves
itself to be the non-reality, rather than the authentication, of itself (PS 279).
This is because each side of the tragic collision is ultimately "linked in the
essence with its opposite," so that "the fulfillment of the one evokes the
other,...calls it forth as a violated and now hostile entity demanding revenge"
(PS 283). Agamemnon's act calls forth the furies of his slain daughter; Clytae
mestra's justice evokes the justice of her son; Orestes' honor is converted into
shame by "the Furies that rise out of the shadow of his action" (FA I 377); Creon
and Antigone are equally one-sided and their deeds elicit the mutual destruc
tion of each other; and Oedipus' insistence on his own lucidity can only tempo
rarily conceal the power of the unconscious which, when revealed, unhinges
him.
The tragic stage is thus explicitly defined as an inverted world: tragic action
is "this inversion {diese Verkehrung) of the known [that is, of the "pathos"
which the tragic actor identifies with] into its opposite,...the changing-round
(das Umschlagen) of the Tightness based on character [pathos]...into the
Tightness of the very opposite..." (PS 447/PG538). All tragic action is funda
mentally ambiguous and double in meaning. What is intended, the expression
of the purity of the character's own "pathos," inevitably reveals its own one
sidedness and the justice of its opposite. Thus Hyllus explains his mother
Deianira's crime to his skeptical father Heracles: "In all that she did wrong she
had intended good" (WT 1. 1136). And the chorus of Euripides' Orestes ex
presses its bewilderment at the double meaning of the actors' deeds, and the
inverted world they beget:
Just the act, crime unjust.

Right and wrong confounded
in a single act... .
And what had seemed so right,
as soon as done, became
evil, monstrous, wrong! (O 11. 193, 818).43
In large measure, there is nothing new about Hegel's portrait of the tragic
stage as an "inverted world." It is a commonplace, after all, of aesthetic theory
to emphasize the fundamental role of peripety or reversal in tragedy. What is
distinctively Hegelian is the way he works out his theory of equally justified
universal "powers," embodied in the "pathos" of individual actors, "soliciting"
or "evoking" their opposites when put into action. More generally, this theory
perhaps goes further than others in not merely emphasizing peripety on the
level of character?the fate of individual actors to realize "How strange in their
reversals are our lives" (H 1. 846)?but in expanding the idea of reversal or
inversion to characterize the world of tragedy itself. When the chorus in
Euripides' Medea, for example, calls out desperately, "Flow backward to your
sources, sacred rivers,/And let the world's great order be reversed" (11. 41?11),
it is expressing a sense of the world itself being out of joint, inverted, a place
of "poisonous" demonic madness and fury. It is this larger sense of inversion,
above and beyond the reversals of fortune that befall individual actors, which
interests Hegel. Finally, it is really not Antigone or Creon or Oedipus as
characters that preoccupy Hegel?much less even than they do Aristotle, who
emphasizes plot over character?but what their acting out of the collision
between cosmic forces tells us about "the broken and confused" world (die
zerrissene verworrene Welt) (Wl: 228) in which these collisions occur.
Apart from questions of Hegel's contribution to an understanding of reversal
in tragedy, what is germane here is how this portrait of the inverted world of
tragic action may be linked in an important way to the inverted world of
madness. Essential to Hegel's anatomy of inversion in madness is his psychol
ogy of the regressive turn into nature, where the logic of the unconscious
supplants and enters into opposition with the logic of rationality. The role of
the unconscious with respect to Antigone has already been discussed, and now
it may be added that Hegel proposes as one of the main forms of tragic collision
the conflict between consciousness and the unconscious (FA I 284f, IV 319-21).
In this "antithesis of the conscious and the unconscious" (PS 280), the act brings
out into consciousness what was hidden in the unconscious, an opposite power
"that conceals itself and lies in ambush" (PS 446). This power is really "nature"
itself, the domain of instinct, passion, and unconscious drives, the life of the
"feeling soul" which is the primordial center of existence in madness.
Oedipus and Ajax are Hegel's favorite examples of this conflict. Both "stand
in the power of the unconscious" (LR 354n), so that an explicit dichotomy arises
between intended action?Oedipus killing a "stranger," Ajax slaughtering the
"Greek leaders"?and the real44 act which remains unconscious?Oedipus has
killed his father, and Ajax has really slaughtered the Greeks' cattle. Reality
and appearance are here completely inverted, when consciousness, the world
of lucidity and light, is revealed as a mere surface, veiling the deeper reality
of the unconscious, the world of concealment and darkness. Both Oedipus and
Ajax are forced to confront their darker, hidden selves: "this darkness is my
world," Oedipus says (OK 1. 1325), and Ajax sings a haunting song to his new
homeland, Darkness:
O
Darkness that is my light,
Murk of the underworld, my only brightness,
Oh, take me to yourself to be your dweller,
Receive and keep me. (Aj 11. 395-7).
And for both, this new, dark underworld of the unconscious is the homeland of
madness:
Madness has seized our noble Ajax;
He has come to ignominy in the night.
...Insanity stands here revealed indeed! (Aj 11. 215-16, 355).
Darkness!
Horror of darkness enfolding, resistless, unspeakable...
madness and stabbing pain and memory
of evil deeds I have done! (OK 11. 1314-17).
Oedipus'linking of the unconscious with madness, and of his madness with

the "memory of evil deeds," brings us to our final point: Hegel's conception of
evil and guilt in his accounts of madness and tragic action. Oedipus has
undergone a process of discovery analogous in some respects to the course of
psychoanalytic therapy, of gradually uncovering relevant unconscious memo
ries.45 His "memory of evil deeds" occurs when he has finally revealed the true
meaning of his act, which lay hidden in the unconscious. This revelation is a
"link[ing] together," Hegel says, of "the unconscious and the conscious.... The
deed is brought out into the light of day as...what is one's own." And the
recognition of one's ownership of the deed?Oedipus'recollection that this was
his act?entails his guilt: the actor "cannot deny his guilt":
Guilt is not an indifferent, ambiguous affair, as if the deed as actually seen in the
light of day could, or perhaps could not, be the action of the self, as if...there could
be...something external and accidental that did not belong to it, from which aspect,
therefore, the action would be innocent. On the contrary,...[i]nnocence...is merely
non-action, like the mere being of a stone.... (PS 282-3).
And indeed Oedipus accepts his guilt: after initially blaming the gods, he
finally refuses this as an excuse and declares that "[t]o this guilt I bore witness
against myself (OK 1. 1384). And just as Oedipus appropriates the whole
weight of his deed, identifying himself with his unconscious, so too does Ajax:
while Ajax's conscious intention was not to slaughter the cattle, he refuses the
fatalistic option of Teucer, that "this was the gods' contrivance" (Aj 1. 1037),
and accepts Tecmessa's harsh claim that it is "you yourself and no one else"
that is responsible; he stands "naked" in his guilt (Aj 11. 261, 463).
In his Aesthetics, Hegel makes a great deal of "our modern"-day "repug
nance" to the idea that someone might take responsibility for an act which he
or she did not intend due to ignorance of the circumstances, or acting under a
delusion or in madness. The Greek tragic hero, however, "adheres simply to all
the consequences" of his or her action, "and makes good his personal responsi
bility for the whole" (FA I 252). "We moderns" tend to "throw guilt into the
background as far as possible" (FA I 253), but we must learn "above all to place
on one side the false notion of guilt or innocence" we cling to, which leads us
to see tragic actors as innocent because, after all, they didn't know what they
were doing: "one can in fact urge nothing more intolerable against a hero of
this type than by saying that he has acted innocently. It is a point of honor with
such great characters that they are guilty" (FA IV 320-21).46
What then is guilt for Hegel? A little patience is required here, since an initial
response suggesting that Hegel simply incorporates a highly moralistic reading
of the Christian notion of original sin is misleading. It will turn out, however,
that Hegel's position is characteristically idiosyncratic, and that nothing could
be farther from the truth than to cast Hegel's interpretation of the guilt of
madness and tragic action in a moralistic or orthodoxly Christian light.
In his discussion of madness, Hegel characterizes the reversion to the un

conscious as a return to the "infernal regions" of nature and a liberation of "the
dark, infernal powers of the heart" (PM ?408 Z). Now Hegel identifies these
"earthly elements" of the unconscious with "that evil which is always latent
in the heart," and says that "the evil genius of man...gains the upper hand in
insanity" (PM ?408, emphasis added). It is thus the unconscious?or the more
generally, nature?which is identified with evil for Hegel, and is the source of
guilt. So too, with Oedipus and Ajax it is the domain of nature and the
unconscious which harbors their guilt, and with Antigone, whom Hegel calls
an example of pure guilt (PS 284), it is her perfect coinciding (as Hegel sees it)
with nature, her association with the Dei inferi of Hades, situating her in direct
collision with the laws of the upper world, which defines her guilt.
Guilt, then, arises through the reversion and submission to "nature," the
feeling soul, the domain of instinct and passion and the heart. In his Ency
clopaedia Logic, Hegel directly ties this notion of guilt to "the theological dogma
that man's nature is evil, tainted with what is called Original Sin." And he says
that he "accepts this dogma," since
the very notion of spirit is enough to show that man is evil by nature, and it is an
error to imagine that he could ever be otherwise. To such extent as man is and acts
like a creature of nature, his whole behavior is what it ought not to be. (SL ?24 Z).
Yet all is not what it seems. Appearances to the contrary, Hegel never falls
into the stance of contrasting "nature" and "spirit" on moralistic grounds, nor
ever suggests that the goal of spiritual life is to seek to distance oneself as fully
as possible from the body, nor ever claims that the "good life" is to be found in
a denial of the instincts. Elsewhere Hegel's theory of the sublimation of nature
and the unconscious has been discussed,47 showing that he is no more a
"slanderer of nature," to use Nietzsche's phrase,48 than is Nietzsche himself.
The point to be made here is that Hegel avoids all moralistic interpretations
of guilt and evil for the unimpeachable reason that guilt and evil are not
essentially moral phenomena for him at all! They are ontological terms. Hegel
thus anticipates Heidegger's idea that human beings uare guilty in the very
basis of their Being," so that "'Being-guilty'cannot be defined by morality, since
morality already presupposes [guilt] for itself."49
"Evil," for Hegel, means finitude, incompletion, and disunity (see, e.g., SL
?24 Z; HP III 5; PS 468-74). This is why nature is "evil," because it awaits the
"awakening of consciousness," the "education and culture" (Bildung) of spirit,
to complete it (SL ?24 Z). It is "evil" because it is embryonic, a mere beginning,
not yet subject to the historical enactment of "the labor of its own transforma
tion" (PS 6). And given this understanding of evil, guilt for Hegel is an
inescapable ontological feature of human existence, our being grounded in
nature and hence our being eternally subject to incompleteness.
The guilt of tragedy and madness shows this state of disharmony in poignant
and extreme ways. But it is seriously wrong to condemn morally the tragic hero
or the insane. Tragic figures are guilty, but their guilt shows us not a lack of
moral integrity, not "evil" in the common ethical sense. Hegel explicitly asserts
that the depiction of evil in this sense is "inartistic," something "merely
repulsive" which could never serve as the subject of tragedy (FA I 295). Rather,
the tragic actor's guilt exposes the existential fact of a world in which funda
mental collisions of value are unavoidable, a world inwardly divided between
culture and nature, consciousness and the unconscious, the "upper" and "lower"
aspects of our being.
And the insane are guilty too for Hegel, but their guilt is not an ethical guilt.
While Hegel follows the French physician Phillippe Pinel's call for a "moral
treatment" of the insane,50 he makes it clear that the assumptions of this
treatment are not that the insane are suffering from a moral lapse, but that
we must treat them morally, and presuppose that they are moral beings (PM
?408 Z). The guilt of madness is, like that of the tragic actor, an extreme
expression of the ontology of disunion which characterizes us all, a particularly
dramatic constituting of the double center of reality which is incipient in all
human experience. Ours is a broken world, a world where every achievement
of harmony is evanescent and subject to collapse into the experience of loss,
despair, and alienation.
For Hegel, every human being must struggle with this "negativity" of exist
ence, and every pursuit of self-realization must ultimately risk the "pathway
of doubt" and "way of despair" (PS 49). While there are many different strate
gies Hegel sees open to meet this challenge, the prospects of tragedy and
madness are constantly real possibilities. This is perhaps why Hegel charac
terizes what he calls the "absolute position" of spirit as itself intrinsically
tragic, and writes of "the tragedy which the Absolute eternally enacts with
itself (NL 108,104). The tragedy spoken of here is the unavoidable "surrender"
of spirit to self-separation and -division, and "the Absolute" is explained as the
ultimately "doubled-nature" {gedoppelte Natur) of spirit, its constant striving
for unity, reconciliation, and self-harmonization, and yet its perpetual "self
othering" or "place[ment] outside itself (sich gegen?berstellen) (NL 104-9/W
1: 386-91).
Jean Hyppolite makes an analogous claim for the role of madness in Hegel's
philosophy: "the essence of man is to be mad [for Hegel], that is, to be himself
in the other, to be himself by this very otherness."51 But Hyppolite is working
with too broad a sense of "madness" here, and Hegel would resist seeing the
human essence as inherently insane.52 Still, Hegel does say, as remarked at
the very outset of this essay, that "insanity [is] an essential... [and] necessarily
occurring form or stage...in the development of the soul." For "all existing
reality [is] unstable and disunited" (RH 38), so that consciousness will be
forever confronted with the lure of withdrawal from reality into a communing
with the more primordial harmony of the "feeling soul." In the extreme case,
where this withdrawal amounts to a severing of the connections with the outer
world, and reality is reduced to a shadow of the mind's own projection, our
attempt at healing the wounds of spirit will have led directly to madness.
Madness and tragedy are in this way not so much the opposites of "normality"
or "rationality" or "health," their antipodes, as they are extreme potentialities
of our entirely normal encounter with alienation. They are mirrors?broken,
perhaps, and darkened, but mirrors nonetheless?of our normal selves.
Bard College
Received April 2, 1993
NOTES
1. All citations from Greek tragedies are from The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed.
David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959-60),
4 vols. References will be abbreviated as follows:
AESCHYLUS:
Ag Agamemnon, tr. Richmond Lattimore
LB Libation Bearers, tr. Richmond Lattimore
E Eumenides, tr. Richmond Lattimore
SOPHOCLES:
A Antigone, tr. Elizabeth Wyckoff
Aj Ajax, tr. John Moore, Jr.
OK Oedipus the King, tr. David Greene
WT Women ofTrachis, tr. Michael Jameson
EURIPIDES:
B Bacchae, tr. William Arrowsmith
H Hecuba, tr. William Arrowsmith
O Orestes, tr. William Arrowsmith
TW Trojan Women, tr. Richmond Lattimore
2. All references to Freud will be to the Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho
logical Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth,
1953ff). The present citation is from the metapsychological paper "On Narcissism," SE
vol. 14, p. 82.
3. References to Hegel will be given parenthetically and abbreviated. Abbreviations
are as follows:
FA The Philosophy of Fine Art, 4 vols., tr. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell,
1920)
HA Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975)
HP Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., tr. E. S. Haldane and F. H.
Simson (New York: Humanities Press, 1974)
LR Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (The Lectures of 1827), ed. Peter
Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
NL Essay on Natural Law, tr. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Penn
sylvania Press, 1975)
PG Ph?nomenologie des Geistes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus
Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970)
PH Philosophy of History, 3 vols., tr. J. Sibree (New York: Willey, 1900)
PM Philosophy of Mind, tr. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978)?vol.
3 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences IEnzyklop?die der
philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, ed. Friedhelm Nicolin
and Otto P?ggeler (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1959)
References to the Encyclop dia IEnzyklop?die are to sections (?), and "Z" following
section numbers designates editors' additions (Zus?tze) to the original text (see note
below).
PR Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press,
1976)
PS Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977)
RH Reason in History, tr. Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1953)?the Introduction to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History
SC "The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate," in T. M. Knox, ed., Early Theo
logical Writings (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977)
SL Logic ("shorter" Logic), tr. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975)?
vol. 1 of the Encyclop dia
W Hegel's Werke, ed. D. Hotho (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1837)
A word about the Zus?tze to the Enzyklop?die is in order. These passages were added
to the Enzyklop?die after Hegel's death by a variety of editors (Leopold von Henning,
Karl Ludwig Michelet, Ludwig Boumann), based on Hegel's lecture manuscripts and
the detailed notes they and other students (K G. J. von Greisheim, H. Hotho, H. von
Kehler, and others) had taken on the lectures. There has been considerable debate about
the value of these additions, but the view that they are largely reliable reflections of
Hegel's lectures is made persuasively by M. J. Petry in his Introduction to Hegel's
Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 3 vols. (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1979), Vol. 1,
pp. cx-cxv. Similarly, T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris, translators of
Hegel's Encyclopaedia Logic (Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), conclude that "there is no
serious doubt that we have a generally reliable record of what Hegel said" (p. viii). See
also J. N. Findlay's Foreword to Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, tr. William Wallace
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), pp. vi-vii.
4. Dietrich von Engelhardt makes a similar point when he says that for Hegel,
"illnesses show the structure of reality in especially sharp relief, more so than does
health." "Hegel's Philosophical Understanding of Illness," in Robert Cohen and Marx
Wartofsky, eds., Hegel and the Sciences (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1984), p.
130.
5. As Hegel notes in one of the last of his Berlin lectures on the History of Philosophy,
"the extravagances of subjectivity constantly pass into madness [VerriicktheitT (HP III
510).
6. Compare PM ?408 Z for the double personality of madness. And see p. 76 below.
7. Bennett Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece: The Classical Roots of
Modern Psychiatry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 101.
8. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, SE vol. 21, pp. 64-72. To be precise, while
Freud rejects the hypothesis of his friend Romain Rolland that the "oceanic feeling" is
a religious sensation of eternity, he argues that some such feeling does exist as a
primitive narcissistic desire.
9. I discuss Freud's theory of projection in "Freud's Critique of Philosophy," Metaphi
losophy, vol. 20 (1989), pp. 285-86.
10. See Freud's notion of "secondary gain" and "the need for illness": Introductory
Lectures, SE vol. 15, pp. 382?T; The Ego and the Id, SE vol. 19, p. 49; Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety, SE vol. 20, pp. 99f.
11. See, for example, Freud's distaste for the moralistic attitude of clinical psychiatry
towards neurotics:
Psychiatry insists that those who suffer from these symptoms are 'degenerates'.
This gives small satisfaction; in fact it is a judgment of value?a condemnation
instead of an explanation. (Introductory Lectures, SE vol. 15, p. 260)
12. Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. I, pp. 240ff, vol. II, pp. 229ff, vol. IV, 238ff; Phenome
nology, pp. 267-89, 443ff; Essay on Natural Law, pp. 104f, 108; Philosophy of Right,
pp. 81, 102, 112, 115, 140; Lectures on the Philosophy of History, pp. 237ff; Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion, pp. 330?T; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol.
I, pp. 426ff.
13. For discussions of Hegel's distinction between ancient and modern, see Stephen
Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1987),
pp. 166-78; A. C. Bradley's now classic essay, "Hegel's Theory of Tragedy," in his Oxford
Lectures on Poetry (London, 1950), pp. 69-95; and Walter Kaufmann, "Hegel's Ideas
About Tragedy," in Warren E. Steinkraus, ed., New Studies in Hegel's Philosophy (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 201-20.
14. The German Pathos means "passionate commitment," or as Hegel says, "the
power of the emotional life." It must not be confused with the English meaning of the
word as "pitifulness." For this reason I will leave "pathos" in quotes.
15. These lines are virtually identical to the words of Dionysus to Pentheus in
Euripides'Bacchae: 'You do not know/what you do. You do not know who you are" (B 1. 506).
16. I should note that while Hegel sees despair as the "center" and "birthpang" of all
the shapes of spirit, within the chronological account of his Phenomenology, he locates
the unhappy consciousness within the Christian era (see PS 454ff).
17. See FA IV 321, 338. For discussions of Hegel's reservations about Euripides, see
Bungay, pp. 172f, and Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of
Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 199.
18. This citation comes from the "Kunstreligion" section of the Phenomenology,
where Hegel is referring to the general principle of all of the arts of ancient Greece?sculp
ture, the religious cults and festivals, and epic and comic literature as well as tragedy.
19. Hegel refers to Antigone 1. 451: "that Justice who lives with the gods below [did
not]/mark out such laws to hold among mankind" (emphasis added).
20. See M. J. Petry's historical notes in his translation of Hegel's Philosophy of
Subjective Spirit (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), Vol. 2, p. 503.
21. Kant, for example, writes that "der Verr?ckte ist also ein Tr?umer im Wachen."
Versuch ?ber die Krankheiten des Kopfes (1764), in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin:
Georg Reimer, 1905), Vol. 2, p. 265.
22. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Random
House, 1973), p. 94 (see also pp. 93-104).
23. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of
Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 221.
24. Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 350-51.
25. I discuss Hegel's interpretation of the Fall and Original Sin in "Evolution and
Nostalgia in Hegel's Theory of Desire," Clio, vol. 19 (1990), pp. 367-88.
26. The infliction of madness is indeed one of the specialties of the furies:
Over the beast doomed to the fire
this is the chant, scatter of wits,
frenzy and fear, hurting the heart,
song of the Furies
binding brain and blighting blood
in its stringless melody. (E 11. 328-33 and 341-46 [repeated])
27. William Arrowsmith, "A Greek Theater of Ideas," Arion, vol. 2 (1963), p. 50.
28. Michael Davis, "Politics and Madness," in Greek Tragedy and Political Theory,
ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkeley: U California P, 1986), pp. 142-61. The following remarks
on the Ajax y and particularly the idea that the sane Ajax lacks an "inside," are indebted
to this essay.
29. Stephen Bungay, for example, challenges Hegel's view that "Creon is not a tyrant,
but also an ethical power," which Hegel sees as necessary for having the status of tragic
figure. Bungay cannot agree with Hegel that Creon is as much in the right as Antigone,
and hence has difficulty seeing Creon's situation as fully tragic. Beauty and Truth, pp.
166-69. See also, e.g., A. J. A. Waldock, Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1966), pp. 30-31: Creon does not represent the "justified power"
of the state, he is simply a tyrant, and simply "morally wrong."
On the other hand, Hegel is equally opposed to commentators like H. D. F. Kitto who
read the play as "primarily the tragedy of Creon." Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1954), p. 132.
30. Thus Hegel could not be further from someone like Kitto who says that Antigone's
situation is "terrible," to be sure, and her part in the tragedy is "impressive and affecting
enough," but insists that Creon's role "has the wider range and is the more elaborate"
and "significant." Kitto, pp. 130, 131.
31. For a few of the many discussions of the idea of "rationality" as transcendence of
the feminine, see Mary Field Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill
Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Alison Jagger and
Susan Bordo, Gender I Body I Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and
Knowing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U P, 1991); and Genevi?ve Lloyd, The Man of
Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984).
32. Thomas Szasz quotes several appropriate passages from the Malleus: "[it is
women who are] chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions"; "All witchcraft comes from
carnal lust, which is in women insatiable"; "Blessed be the Highest who has so far
preserved the male sex from so great a crime." Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness:
A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (New York:
Harper & Row, 1970), p. 8.
The Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1486, implementing a Papal bull of 1484.
33. On nature as the presupposition of spirit, see Herbert Marcuse, Hegel's Ontology
and the Theory of Historicity, trans. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1987), pp. 312-14.
34. Froma I. Zeitlin, "Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama," in
Euben, op. cit., pp. 101-41.
35. Zeitlin, pp. 126-28.
36. Zeitlin, p. 126, citing Seth Bernadete, "A Reading of Sophocles' Antigone: I"
Interpretation,vol. 4 (1975), p. 156.
37. Zeitlin, pp. 154-55.
38. Zeitlin, p. 128.
39. Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House,
1941), p. 1464.
40. Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), letter 215, p. 591 (emphasis added).
41. For commentaries on Hegel's discussion of the "inverted world" in the "Under
standing" section of the Phenomenology, see Joseph Flay, Hegel's Quest for Certainty
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), pp. 77-79; Quentin Lauer, A Reading of Hegel's Phenome
nology of Spirit (New York: Fordham U P, 1976), pp. 84-87; Robert Solomon, In the
Spirit of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1985), pp. 376-85; Stanley Rosen, Hegel: An
Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp.
140-50; and Murray Greene, "Hegel's Notion of Inversion," International Journal of
the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1 (1970), pp. 161-75.
42. See also the "Appearance" chapter of the Encyclop dia Logic (??13Iff): "The
Essence must appear or shine forth.... Essence accordingly is not something beyond or
behind appearance..." (?131); "The appearance shows nothing that is not in the essence,
and in the essence there is nothing but what is manifested" (?139).
43. I discuss the role of intentionality in Hegel's theory of madness in "Intentionality
and Madness in Hegel's Psychology of Action," International Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 32 (1992), pp. 427-41.
44. See FA I 125: "the unconscious act was the reality in its full significance."
45. Freud himself draws this analogy in his Introductory Lectures, SE vol. 16, p.
330.
46. For further discussions by Hegel of the theme of tragic guilt and innocence, see
HP I 445f (Socrates' tragic situation is that it is his very "innocence which is guilty"),
and SC 233 (the "most exalted form of guilt" is "the guilt of innocence").
47. Daniel Berthold-Bond, "Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud on Madness and the Uncon
scious," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 5 (1991), pp. 193-213.
48. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House,
1974), sect. 294.
49. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 332.
50. Pinel (1745-1826) was head physician at the Hospice de la Salp?tre in Paris, which
had a six-hundred bed ward for the mentally ill, from 1795 until his death. He published
his Trait? m?dico-philosophique sur l'ali?nation mental in 1801.
51. Hyppolite, "Hegel's Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis," tr. Albert Richer, in
Warren Steinkraus, ed., New Studies in Hegel's Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1971), p. 64, emphasis added.
52. I discuss my reservations about Hyppolite's claim in "The Decentering of Reason:
Hegel's Theory of Madness," forthcoming in International Studies in Philosophy.

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Hegel on Madness and Tragedy

University of Illinois Press, North American Philosophical Publications are collaborating

HEGEL ON MADNESS AND TRAGEDY

[N]ow the awful dirge begins,

Ajax, ill to cure,

[W]hat madness came upon you!

ii. the ontology of disunion and the

Hegel's only detailed discussion of madness is worked out in the "Anthropol

dominates. For now, a general statement of Hegel's definition of madness will

It might seem as though madness successfully solves the problem of aliena

of objective externality, and the constructed, projected center of subjective

It is in this sense that Hegel refers to madness as a double personality. The

A similar intensification of the ontology of disunion, with the resulting

O Zeus, what can I say?

0 gods! Do I call upon those gods for help?

Hecuba looks at a world divested of divine compassion, seeing only a "ruined

attempt at self-empowerment where the power of the divine is experienced as

This dream-project of madness goes beyond what is found in tragedy, insofar

You can praise or blame me as you wish;

Similarly, Antigone says impatiently to Creon:

By erasing all justification of the opposing center of reality, tragedy effects

III. SUBMERSION, DARKNESS, AND THE

The action of decentering reality in response to the alienating character of the

initiate a movement of internalizaron of reality. Madness is directly described

cumscribing the sphere of consciousness and rationality, and the infernal

in nature, and individual history is inaugurated only with the transformation

It is really the tragedies of Sophocles, however, which most draw Hegel's

because of the direct association between the movement of withdrawal into

This language of darkness associated with the tragic figure's reversion to

This reading of the Antigone clearly opens itself to feminist critique.

body, and nature in general. Woman comes to represent the enticements of

While this line of interpretation deserves further exploration, it is unclear

represents a "disrespect to parents" (HP I 445) insofar as he challenges tradi

always embodied in the pre-historical "pathos" of individual actors. Thus the

IV. INVERSION, AMBIGUITY, AND GUILT

Anumber of similarities between Hegel's portraits of madness and tragic action

But while this is a perfectly ordinary, if undoubtedly frustrating and un

canny, experience of consciousness, in madness and tragedy the encounter with

In madness, the doubling of the center of reality effects a basic inversion of

Just the act, crime unjust.

Oedipus'linking of the unconscious with madness, and of his madness with

In his discussion of madness, Hegel characterizes the reversion to the un

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