(Article, 'Hegel,' first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
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| Jakob Schlesinger: Portrait of G.W.F. Hegel, 1831 |
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (b. Stuttgart, 27 Aug. 1770; d. Berlin, 14 Nov. 1831,
Berlin) Philosopher, studied alongside Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling at Tübingen, taught at Jena, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg. In
1818, he succeeded Fichte as Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Berlin, his lectures attracting students from across Europe. Schopenhauer scheduled clashing Berlin
lectures, an empty hall awaiting. A conflict embodied in Wagner’s oeuvre had
already been dramatized.
As Aristotle stands to
Plato, Hegel does to Kant. Hegel’s philosophy restored dynamism to neo-Aristotelian
ontology (philosophy of being), long encumbered by scholastic encrustation. At
the heart of Hegel’s system lies the dialectical method, owing something to Fichte
and instantiated in Phenomenology of
Spirit. As Hegel worked on it in Jena in 1806, Napoleon entered the city,
the Consul-Emperor a model for Hegel’s “world-historical” individual,
unconscious vehicle of Spirit itself. Whereas mathematics depend upon the
principle of non-contradiction, Hegel’s ontology proclaims that contradiction
exists, thereby going beyond Kant. Hegel’s dialectic places conflict between
subject and object at the heart of being, expressed in history – revelation in
time of God/Spirit – through alienation of mind. The vulgar Hegelian
thesis-antithesis-synthesis has nothing to do with Hegel’s philosophy, which
posits objects growing through necessary self-negation
into their full potentiality. Contradiction lies within; it is not applied from
without. That radical dialectical method, rather than his accommodationist “positive
philosophy” – though one should distinguish Hegel’s ideal, rational state from
its empirical counterpart – proved Hegel’s greatest legacy to radical
successors: first “Young” or “Left” Hegelians such as David Friedrich Strauss,
Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and
Max Stirner; thereafter, figures such as Wagner, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, and beyond. Others,
for instance, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche,
revolted, yet always consciously.
Wagner’s acquaintance with
Hegel(-ianism) may be categorized as follows: (i) what we know he read; (ii)
what he may have read; (iii) what he learned second-hand: from Bakunin, Georg Herwegh, et al., general intellectual milieu; (iv) internal evidence from dramas and writings such as Oper
und Drama, themselves a significant contribution to Hegelian aesthetics.
From the mid-1850s, following Schopenhauer, Wagner tended to disparage Hegel, minimizing
his influence. Yet Wagner’s works, Parsifal and the late “regeneration writings” included, speak
differently: Hegel, Schopenhauer, and other intellectual currents coexist,
modify, transform, even do battle, no one “side” claiming victory.
Hegel’s Philosophy of History was the sole work of
modern philosophy in Wagner’s Dresden
library – though we know that he read others, including Hegel’s Phenomenology. The latter’s
identification of transformations in consciousness with historical eras is
replicated in Wagner’s prose writings, especially those written in Zurich exile, for instance in Wagner’s
typology of Greek state and tragedy, Christian negation and subjectivity
(cloister replacing amphitheatre), and modern imperative to reconciliation (the
artwork of the future). Hegelian
contradiction forms the material of Wotan’s
Walküre
monologue – better, dialectical self-dialogue. Negation of Wotan’s original
political intent, a monarchical state under rule of law, is revealed as
implicit in that state’s founding, yet revelation may only, in Hegelian spirit,
come historically, contradictions having became apparent.
“The owl of Minerva only takes flight at the onset of dusk,” that Dämmerung prophetic of Götterdämmerung itself (“die Eule der
Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug,” Hegel, 7:28).
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is proclaimed with thoroughgoing anarchism: “Lord
through contracts, now am I enslaved to those contracts” (Walküre Act II, scene 2).
Hegel was unwilling to
negate the principle incarnate in the Rechtstaat
(legal state); Leftist successors, Wagner and Bakunin
amongst them, prepared to forge and to wield swords of anarchism. Wagner’s
world-historical individual, Siegfried,
re-forger of Notung and rebel without
a consciousness, serves both as
celebration and critique not only of the revolutions
of 1848-9, but of the Hegelianism in which Wagner conceived his chronicle. Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene
interpretative wisdom, voiced as ravens take flight, dawns only at twilight:
hers, the Ring’s, societal. We cannot
predict what that final scene’s “watchers” will (re-)build, yet one day, it
will be understood in light of what they saw on the Rhine, Minerva’s owl once
again spreading its wings.
The conflict between
individual and totality inherent in Hegel’s system – or, as Marx argued,
inherent in its engendering bourgeois capitalism – is, consciously or
otherwise, dramatized in verbal and musical terms in Wagner’s dramas. Dynamic
material resists and yet is molded by demands of the whole: a prelude to
subsequent analytical controversies, which might fruitfully be probed for
socio-political and philosophical meaning – and vice versa.
Mark Berry, “Is it here
that Time becomes Space? Hegel, Schopenhauer, History, and Grace in Parsifal,” The Wagner Journal 3.3 (2009): 29-59.
Georg
Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Grundlinen der
Philosophie des Rechts, in: Werke,
20 vols, eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1969-72).
