Title: Williams, Robert W., Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche
Abstract: WILLIAMS, Robert W. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xi + 410pp. Cloth. $99.00--Nietzsche remarked that seeking to mediate between two bold thinkers displays mediocrity, sign of weak eyesight (Gay Science). Yet that invites the (Nietzschean) rejoinder, He would say that, wouldn't he! What Daniel Breazeale dubbed the Hegel-Nietzsche discerns surprising commonalities--on Greek tragedy and culture, master-slave, death of God, critique of Kant, freedom, and so forth. The problem is whether comparison reveals authorial myopia, or hermeneutic insight into deeper interests (however defined). Williams joins those who identify a rapprochement between the two, though admittedly his book has (Dionysian) Nietzsche end up speaking more in the voice of (Apollonian) Hegel than vice-versa. Both thinkers are taken to be metaphysical even in critiquing metaphysics. Here Williams takes sides in the recent debate over a nonmetaphysical Hegel, opposing those (Pippin, Pinkard, Brandom) beating a post-Kantian path. His own metaphysical take on Hegel he calls panentheism: God is present in all things, yet his being isn't exhausted by the finite world. Fackenheim (1967), with his emphasis on the middle--likewise inspired by Ivan Il'in's ground-breaking 1918 work on Hegel (God as concrescent being)--anticipated Williams here. Others (Malcolm Clark, Robert Wallace) have also focussed on how Hegel's Logic bears on his philosophy of religion. What sets this book apart is its meticulous attention to tragedy and the death of God, using Nietzsche as a tool to bring out the irrational moment to be factored into Hegel's speculative whole. Williams surveys huge and controversial territories; the reader can easily lose sight of the forest for the trees. We begin with a topic incisively treated in Williams's previous books. Absent from Kant and arguably from Nietzsche too, it finds full expression in the Phenomenology's for recognition, that is, for mastery; a struggle that culminates in Spirit, the I that is We ..., as Hegel famously put it. Chapter two measures such recognition against Aristotle and Nietzsche on friendship and on magnanimity--a virtue that in Nietzsche seems to exclude others (Daniel Hearn's recent The Smile of Tragedy gives a more generous reading). Williams contrasts a Nietzschean self--life experiments or joyful dissolution in eternal recurrence--with the earlier model of Greek agon, developed with his Basel friend Burckhardt. Williams prefers this more Hegelian model. Part Two considers tragedy, first in Hegel (chapter four) then Nietzsche (chapter five). Hegel's Natural Law essay saw culture as tragic in form, and history itself as fateful, whereas the Phenomenology examines normative conflict within culture and its putative resolution in religious and philosophical consciousness Individuality is rescued, finds a destiny beyond fate, whereas Nietzsche dissolves it, in Dionysian chaos or in religious ecstasy. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-10-30
Language: en
Type: article
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