Hegel and Tragedy

ID:120205952 PHI6450 Hegel & His Critics 00/00/14

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‘Misadventured Piteous Overthrows’ – Chance, Tragic Spirit, and Romeo and Juliet

‘It is of the highest importance’, Hegel informs us, ‘to ascertain and understand rightly the

nature of Dialectic. Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything

is carried into effect in the actual world, there Dialectic is at work’.1 And tragedy, according

to Houlgate, ‘enacts the immanent dialectic, the intrinsic rationale of self-destruction, within

man’s own self-oriented actions. The eternal justice… in tragedy is nothing other than this

immanent dialectic of human action’.2 But for Hegel ‘truly tragic action necessarily

presupposes either a live conception of individual freedom and independence or at least an

individual’s determination and willingness to accept freely and on his own account the

responsibility for his own act and its consequence’.3 For the tragic hero, reconciliation is

achieved not ‘without struggle, but on the contrary, only when a deeper breach has rent the

subject’s inner life and his whole existence. For even if the heroes of tragedy… are so

portrayed that they succumb to fate, still the heart of the hero recoils into simple unity with

itself, when it says: “It is so”’.4

‘Is it even so?’ asks Romeo, on being informed that Juliet’s ‘body sleeps in Capel's

monument/And her immortal part with angels lives’. ‘Then I defy you, stars!’5 For the

heroes of a modern tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet, whereby the ‘star-crossed lovers’ are

undone by ‘misadventured piteous overthrows’,6 it is the qualities and functions of chance

that seemingly work as the instruments of their fate, although, as Hegel explains:

1 William Wallace, The Logic of Hegel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), p. 148. 2 Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1986), p. 214. 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 1205. 4 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1975), p.158. 5 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (London: The New Penguin Shakespeare, 1967). Act 5, Scene 1, lines

18 – 19, 24, p 153. 6 Ibid., the Prologue, lines 6 - 7, p. 53.


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In a dreadful way too they resolve the endless contradiction between their inner life and the unfortunate

circumstances in which they see themselves involved, and by this means bring about what elsewhere an

external fate does – ….in Romeo and Juliet… external accidents frustrate the cleverness and artfulness of

the go-between Friar and bring about the death of the lovers.7

In such modern tragedies, Paolucci argues, ‘we have to attribute the catastrophe not to any

kind of justice, but to unhappy circumstances and outward accidents. And then we can only

feel that the individual whose merely personal ends are thwarted by mere particular

circumstances and chances, pays the penalty that awaits existence in a scene of contingency

and finitude…and if the hero is a noble soul, it may become the impression of a dreadful

external necessity’.8 If this is so then necessity, or tragic fate, according to Houlgate, has to

be ‘self-imposed rather than inflicted on something from the outside. Consequently, there is

a degree of tragedy in the demise of every finite thing, since each thing is consigned to

destruction by its own finitude even when the specific agent of its destruction lies outside it.9

Tragedy in the fullest sense, however, is generated by freely self-determining, heroic human

individuality’.10 Or, as Roche puts it, ‘any Hegelian tragedy implies alternatives; the hero of

internal collision knows of these alternatives…the weighing of ends and means, of duties and

obligations, the totality of conflicting claims…even when two individuals collide and

recognize only their own ethical values, in violating the other and destroying self and other,

they gain a late recognition of the validity of the contrasting ethical power. For Hegel tragic

7 Ibid. 4, pp. 584 – 585. 8 Anne and Henry Paolucci (eds.), Hegel on Tragedy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1962), p. 376. 9 ‘Finite things… are negatively self-related’. (G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst:

Humanity Books, 1999), p. 129). 10 Stephen Houlgate, Hegel and the Arts (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), note 5, p. 170.


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fate is rational;11 reason does not allow the individuals to hold onto their positions in their

one-sidedness’.12

I argue, however, that tragedy presents a more pitiable vision of the human condition than

all of these accounts allow, that the aforementioned chance, or randomness, an unknown that

encompasses the situations depicted within a tragic narrative, or the capriciousness of

circumstances described therein, incorporates a non-rational element into tragic fate,13 and the

role of tragic spirit in the larger scheme of things, rather than presented as an instrumental

factor in its own reconciliation, is markedly reduced, however much the protagonists in a

tragedy may have the resources to make a mark on their surroundings. But as the tragic

movement in Romeo and Juliet is dialectical,14 a thinking through of its tragic experience by

tragic spirit, a process of its learning to think through contradictions and oppositions,15 this

essay will thereby trace this movement within the play, as tragic spirit attempts to come to an

understanding of itself through grasping its own movement, only ultimately to be overthrown

by chance. As Friar Laurence is to tell Juliet: ‘A greater power than we can contradict/Hath

thwarted our intents’;16 the irrational power of chance or randomness.

11 ‘Neither is the necessity of the outcome a blind fate, a merely irrational, unintelligible destiny… but a rational

one’. (Ibid.3, p. 1216). 12 Mark W. Roche, ‘The Greatness and Limits of Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy’, in A Companion to Tragedy,

edited by Rebecca Bushnell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), p. 57. 13 A non-rational element, or contingency, is evident at least in the workings of nature, but also in erring tragic

spirit, if somewhat differently, as Hegel explains: ‘The superiority of its conforming to its eternal laws

through all its contingency is attributed to nature, but that is also the case in the realm of self-consciousness.

Even faith acknowledges that a providence guides human events. Should we regard the determinations of this

providence in the field of human events as merely contingent and irration al? If spiritual contingency or caprice

goes forth into evil, that which goes astray is still infinitely superior to the regular movement of stars, or the

innocent life of the plant, because that which errs is still spirit’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy

of Nature, Vol. 1: Introduction, Foreward and Mechanics, translated by M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and

Unwin, 1970), p. 210).

14 Dialectic, Szondi explains, is ‘…the law of the world and method of knowledge’, and ‘… is also the tragic

(and the overcoming of the tragic…Elevated to the status of a world principle, the dialectic knows no realm that

remains closed off to it. Hegel… recognizes the fundamental, tragic conflict as precisely the conflict that

necessarily arises between the origin of the dialectic and the realm from which it distanced itself in its coming to

be’. (Peter Szondi, An Essay on Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 21). 15 ‘Experience’ Hegel defines as ‘this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself, and which

affects both its knowledge and its object’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit,

translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §86, p. 55). 16 Ibid. 5, Act 5, Scene 3, lines 153 – 154, p. 162.


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The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet can therefore be investigated from the perspective of

chance and accident, and the nature and details of tragic spirit developed, using the dialectical

method17 that Hegel used in the Science of Logic. As against Hume, who claimed that ‘it is

universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when

strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has

anywhere a being in nature’,18 chance can be shown to operate dialectically ‘wherever there

is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world’.19 It operates in Romeo

and Juliet, in the manipulation of the course of action in two directions by random events,

and it operates in certain stages in the development of spirit, including tragic spirit, as Hegel

outlines in The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which ‘consciousness itself is the absolute

dialectic unrest’,20 or is ‘the unconscious, thoughtless rambling…the contingent

consciousness that is both bewildered and bewildering…[that] recognises that its freedom lies

in rising above all the confusion and contingency of existence’.21 It operates in the dearth of

rational coherence in dreams,22 or it emerges out of the stirrings within the deep ‘night-like

pit’23 of the unconscious.24 And the manipulation of the details of Romeo’s ostensibly

17 That is, though the subject is chance, the category of ‘chance’ is not thereby settled on at the outset by chance,

nor is any random methodology that appeals to the fancy to be chosen by chance. 18 David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 95. 19 See note 1. 20 Ibid. 15, §205, p. 124. 21 Ibid., p. 125. 22 ‘I dreamt a dream tonight’, Romeo warns Mercutio, as an explanation for why ‘’tis no wit to go’ to the

masque where he sees Juliet for the first time. (Ibid. 5, Act 1, Scene 4, lines 27 – 29, p. 74). Though dreams, as

Mercutio correctly observes, are ‘the children of an idle brain,/Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;/Which is as

thin of substance as the air,/And more inconstant than the wind…’. (Ibid., Act 1, Scene 4, lines 97 – 100, p. 75). 23 ‘To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and

representations’, Hegel wrote, ‘yet without being in consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal

postulate which bids us treat the notion as concrete… from the other point of view intelligence is to be

conceived as this subconscious mine, i.e., as the existent universal in which the different has not yet been

realized in its separations. And it is indeed this potentiality which is the first form of universality offered in

mental representation’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, translated by William Wallace

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §453, p. 204). That is, the unconscious is construed as a possible source of

random possibilities. 24 Although dialectic is also at work in the unconscious, ‘whereby it generates its own oppositions and

transcends itself within itself’, as Mill explains, and ‘unconscious spirit is the structural foundation of the self, as

pure activity always in flux and in a state of psychic turbulence’. (Jon Mills, The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s


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laudable exploits in the pursuit of his beloved, or the accidental events that allow for his

assumption of the role as quintessential lover, (‘Call me but love, and I’ll be new

baptized./Henceforth I never will be Romeo’),25 thoroughly undercut all of his endeavours,

including his suicide for the sake of his putatively deceased beloved.

The method to be used in this enquiry into the operation of chance, and conversely of fate

or of necessity, in tragedy is that of speculative logic, but any term that is to be used in a logic

has first to be defined. Aristotle defined ‘chance’ in terms of incidental causes:

197a11: It is necessary… that the causes of what comes to pass by chance be indefinite; and that is why

chance is supposed to belong to the class of the indefinite and to be inscrutable to man, and why it might be

thought that, in a way, nothing occurs by chance. For all these statements are correct, because they are well

grounded. Things do, in a way, occur by chance, for they occur incidentally and chance is an incidental

cause. But strictly it is not the cause – without qualification – of anything…26

Aristotle’s example is that of a man ‘engaged in collecting subscriptions for a feast. He

would have gone to such and such a place for the purpose of getting the money, if he had

known. He actually went there for another purpose, and it was only incidentally that he got

his money by going there; and this was not due to the fact that he went there as a rule or

necessarily, nor is the end effected (getting the money) a cause present in himself - it belongs

to the class of things that are intentional and the result of intelligent deliberation. It is when

these conditions are satisfied that the man is said to have gone “by chance”’.27 And thus ‘a

difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor

Anticipation of Psychoanalysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 11). As Hegel puts it, ‘it

is just this unrest that is the self’. (Ibid.17, §22, p. 12.) 25 Ibid. 5, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 50 - 51, p. 86. 26 Aristotle, ‘Physica’, in The Works Of Aristotle, Vol. II: Physica/De Caelo/De Generatione et Corruptione ,

edited by W. D. Ross, translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 196b –

197a. 27 Ibid., p. 196b.


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because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of

necessity’.28

The simultaneous occurrence of two events that seems to indicate a connection between

them is a coincidence, or the outcome of luck, according to Aristotle, if the circumstance is

rare, or not the outcome of design. Given that the events were going to occur, the

coincidence inevitably occurred, and for Aristotle coincidences are exceptional, for if

everything in nature occurred at random it would thereby be ‘inscrutable to man’. But this is

to confuse two senses of ‘chance’, that is, the accidental pairing of two events, and the

occurrence of events that are causally undetermined. If a man goes to a busy market and

meets his debtor, who then pays him what he owes, two separate (human) events are

accidentally paired, though the events themselves may be causally determined. An event

satisfying chance in the former sense, a sense that is neutral on the question of determinism,29

does not undermine the view that nature is intelligible,30 though it may operate itself as a

cause, interrelated in some manner with probability, and is the sense of ‘chance’ to be

understood in this essay.31

28 Ibid, p. 198a. 29 That is, that the laws of physics being what they are, the past and the present necessarily determine the future,

that every occurrence is the inevitable result of prior events. 30 Though ‘chance’ in this sense it still presents a problem concerning the intelligibility of religion, if not of

science, as Stanislaw Lem explains: ‘both religion and science started out with models of deterministic nature;

yet in the course of its development under the pressure of experimental data, science underwent a conversion

which led to its gradual renunciation of strict determinism. In contrast, religious faith, indifferent to empirical

experiment and factual duplication, has been conducive to the reinforcement of determinism… it never could

happen in Christianity that, due to a chance ‘error’, Providence might send to paradise someone whom it had

intended to go to hell. The reckoning of religious faith is deterministic in its essence. I do not know if anybody

ever tried to investigate, for example, Greek mythology (e.g., the Olympic sagas) from the perspective of

accident and chance, but the idea would seem worth the effort’. (Stanislaw Lem, ‘Lem in a Nutshell (Written

Interview with Stanislaw Lem, July 1994)’, in A Stanislaw Lem Reader, edited by Peter Swirski (Illinois:

Northwestern University Press, 1997), pp. 93 – 118, p. 100). 31 And, like Lem therefore, composing his autobiography: ‘I am aware of two opposed principles that guide my

pen’. That is, ‘one of those two extremes is chance; the other is order that gives shape to life. Can all the

factors that were responsible for my coming into the world and enabled me, although threatened by death many

times, to survive unscathed in order finally to become a writer – moreover, one who carelessly strives to

reconcile contradictory elements of realism and fantasy – be regarded only as the result of long chains of

chance?’. (Stanislaw Lem, ‘Reflections on My Life’, in Microworlds, edited by Franz Rottensteiner (London:

Mandarin, 1985), (pp. 1 – 30), p. 1). The threat posed by probability theory to the human situation is

exemplified fully in ‘De Impossibilitate Vitae’, which traces the chance occurrences that led to the birth of

Professor Kouska, an account that asserts that his origins go back to a meteor that fell 2.5 million years ago, and


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As for ‘fate’, or ‘necessity’,32 for Hegel this had an important role in both ancient and

modern tragedy:

In Shakespeare we find no justification, no condemnation, but only an observation of the universal fate;

individuals view its necessity without complaint or repentance, and from that standpoint they see everything

perish, themselves included, as if they saw it all happening outside themselves.33

In the Science of Logic Hegel considers such universal fate as divine retribution for

overstepping necessity, or due measure:34

Measure in its more developed, more reflected form is necessity; fate, Nemesis, was restricted in general to

the specific nature of measure, namely, that what is presumptuous, what makes itself too great, too high, is

reduced to the other extreme of being brought to nothing, so that the mean of measure, mediocrity is

restored.35

This presents a problem for speculative logic, however, as a method of deduction, for as Kant

has observed:

Many empirical concepts are employed without question from anyone. Since experience is always available

for the proof of their objective reality, we believe ourselves, even without a deduction, to be justified in

appropriating to them a meaning, an ascribed significance. But there are also usurpatory concepts, such as

fortune, fate, which, though allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence… yet from time to time

from which Kouska concludes: ‘A hypothetical observer, computing the chances of my birth… would set the

chances of my ever seeing the light of day at one in a centillion’. (Stanislaw Lem, ‘De Impossibilitate Vitae and

De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi, by Cezar Kouska’, in A Perfect Vacuum (London: Mandarin, 1979), pp. 141 –

166, p. 160. That is, ‘the existence of any man is a phenomenon of cosmic impossibility, since so improbable as

to be unforeseeable’. (Ibid., p. 161). An unhappy prognosis for an impossible life. 32 As Hegel has observed: ‘In the creed of the ancients, as we know, necessity figured as Destiny’. (Ibid 1, p.

269). 33 Ibid. 4, p. 586. 34 ‘Fate drives individuality back within its limits and destroys it if these are crossed’. (Ibid. 3, p. 1216). 35 Ibid. 9, p. 329.


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[the] demand for a deduction involves us in considerable perplexity, no clear [right], sufficient to justify their

employment, being obtainable either from experience or from reason.36

This is not to say that ‘fate’, as a ‘usurpatory concept’, is merely an empty concept, but rather

that ‘fate’ is a word in our language that has a use, but has no meaning, and fails to fulfil

Frege’s necessary condition for the possibility of its operation within a logical deduction:

Only because classes are determined by the properties that individuals in them are to have, and because we

use phrases like this: 'the class of objects that are b: only so does it become possible to express thoughts in

general by stating relations between classes; only so do we get a logic.37

A concept’s extension depends on the properties that its elements must have, in order to be

included in that extension, and empty concepts are possible, that is, there could be certain

objects that fall under the concept’s extension, it just so happens that there are none. And

when Romeo declares ‘O, I am fortune’s fool!’,38 and Juliet declares ‘O Fortune, Fortune!

All men call thee fickle’,39 ‘Fortune’ is a proper name, putatively designating a something

with arbitrary powers, but the meaning of a proper name, according to Frege, is the object

that it designates, and ‘by means of a definition we can neither create an object with any

properties we like, nor magically confer any properties we like on an empty name or symbol’,

so that ‘a proper name that designates nothing has no logical justification, since in logic we

are concerned with truth in the strictest sense of the word; it may on the other hand still be

used in fiction and fable’.40 ‘Fortune’ is an empty name, its usage deluding Romeo and Juliet

36 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan Education

Ltd., 1990), p. 120. 37 Gottlob Frege, ‘A Critical Elucidation of Some Points in R. Schroeder’s Vorlesungen Ueber Die Algebra der

Logik ’, in The Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege , edited by Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford:

Blackwell Ltd., 1980), pp. 86 – 106, (p. 104). 38 Ibid. 5, Act 3, Scene 1, l. 136, p. 111. 39 Ibid., Act 3, Scene 5, l. 60, p. 129. 40 Ibid. 36, p ?


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into the thought that something meaningful is being said, that an exchange of thoughts is

taking place, but which merely serves to fill up an empty space in their thinking. Such

declarations concerning fortune do not so much as attain the distinction of expressing

falsehoods, for although thinking is occurring, it occurs in such a manner that nothing is

being thought.

Hegel’s dialectic method is a speculative logic governed by the principle that what is actual

is intelligible from within pure conceptual thought,41 and as a logic it can only deal with

conceptual statements that express thoughts, that are grounded in the categories of thought, or

in their objective parallels; the categories of ‘chance’ and ‘necessity’, for instance, but not

‘fate’. In speculative logic everything is deduced and nothing is given, and its application in

tracing the dialectical movement of tragic spirit in Romeo and Juliet will follow three

stages,42 only the second of which is, however, true dialectic, but the first of which is a

necessary preliminary to the truths of dialectic, that is, an understanding of the subject matter

in question:

80.] (α) Thought, as Understanding, sticks to fixity of characters and their distinctness from one another:

every such limited abstract it treats as having a subsistence and being of its own.43

At this stage, concepts, or categories, are taken to be sharply defined, and any deduction from

one to another is impossible, although reflection upon such categories will disclose

41 As Stace points out: ‘It is indisputable that all knowledge is conceptual, and the ability to apply suitable

concepts to a thing constitutes knowledge of that thing’. (W. T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (U.S.A: Dover

Publications Inc.., 1955), p. 46). And Hegel defined logic as ‘the science of pure thought, the principle of which

is pure knowing, the unity which is not abstract but a living, concrete unity in virtue of the fact that in it the

opposition in consciousness between a self-determined entity, a subject, and a second such entity, an object, is

known to be overcome; being is known to be the pure [Concept] in its own self, and the pure [Concept] to be the

true being’. (Ibid. 9, p. 60). 42 ‘In point of form Logical doctrine has three sides: (α) the Abstract side, or that of understanding: (β) the

Dialectical, or that of negative reason: (γ) the Speculative, or that of positive reason ’. (Ibid. 1, p. 143). 43 Ibid.


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contradictions within them. This is a movement from understanding to reason, albeit

negative reason, or dialectic:

… in its true and proper character, Dialectic is the very nature and essence of everything predicated by

mere understanding, - the law of things and of the finite as a whole… by Dialectic is meant the indwelling

tendency outwards by which the one-sidedness and limitation of the predicates of understanding is seen in its

true light, and shown to be the negation of them. For anything to be finite is just to suppress itself and put

itself aside.44

The principle of reason at work at this stage is the principle of the identity of opposites,45 the

outcome of which is the speculative stage, positive reason, whereby opposed and apparently

distinct thoughts and things, (chance and necessity), are unified:

82. (γ) The Speculative stage, or stage of Positive Reason, apprehends the unity of terms (propositions) in

their opposition – the affirmative, which is involved in their disintegration and in their transition.46

Speculative logic thereby grasps both necessity and chance,47 in a way that Hume’s empirical

methodology, whether in the form of reflection or introspection, cannot. According to Hume:

44 Ibid., 147. 45 As Stace explains, reason ‘does not oppose, but includes the principles of the understanding. It only opposes

the one-sidedness of the understanding. Each category contains, and in fact is, its own opposite…The principle

of the identity of opposites was necessary if philosophy was ever to solve its ancient problems. It explains in

detail how it is logically possible for two opposites to be identical while yet retaining their opposition’. (Ibid.

40, p.88). 46 Ibid. 1, p. 152. 47 Speculative logic may grasp necessity, but not necessarily, however, as Stern explains, in terms of ‘what is

absolute… what is necessary, eternal, self‐caused, and so on’, but rather ‘on Hegel's view, to cognize reality in

absolute terms, is just to see that while concepts like ‘cause’, or ‘ground’, or ‘essence’, and so on make sense

when applied to matters within it, they do not make sense when applied to it as a totality ’, so there is no

necessary requirement ‘to give ‘what is’ the status of a necessary existent’. (Robert Stern, Hegelian

Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 33 – 34). That is, ‘what is’ may, in fact, be an

accidental existent.


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Our idea… of necessity… arises entirely from the uniformity observable in the operations of nature, where

similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one

from the appearance of the other. These two circumstances form the whole of that necessity, which we

ascribe to matter. Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference from

one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity or connexion.48

The speculative method, contrary to this, is capable of grasping not only that certain things

are, but that they must be so. It achieves this through ‘making objective what is initially

subjective’,49 as Inwood puts it, and is akin to poetry, which is both subjective and ‘the

universal art of the mind which has become free in its own nature’, as Hegel explains, ‘and

which is not tied to find its realization in external sensuous matter, but expatiates exclusively

in the inner space and inner time of the ideas and feelings. Yet just in this its highest phase

art ends by transcending itself, inasmuch as it abandons the medium of a harmonious

embodiment of mind in sensuous form, and passes from the poetry of imagination into the

prose of thought’.50

Poetry is thereby the art form that most resembles philosophical thinking, and what follows

is not literary criticism, but a rendition of subjective poetic expression into ‘the [objective]

prose of thought’. And although the principle of subjectivity is at work in Romeo and Juliet

to a greater extent than in Greek tragedy, as Houlgate points out: ‘both Greek and modern

tragedy present, for Hegel, the self-destructive fate of one-sided passion and character.

Whether the characters are motivated by justified concerns or by the interests of ambition…

they suffer because their individuality conflicts with other individuals who make up their

world or, indeed, with neglected aspects of their own being’.51 It is therefore with the

48 Ibid. 18, p. 82. 49 Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 272. 50 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, translated by Bernard Bosanquet

(London: Penguin, 1993), p. 96. 51 Ibid. 2, p. 212.


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understanding that we begin, with its one-sided abstractions,52 for ‘character is an essential in

conduct, and a man of character is an understanding man’, Hegel explains, ‘who in that

capacity has definite ends in view and undeviatingly pursues them’.53 But ‘understanding is

not an ultimate, but on the contrary finite, and so constituted that when carried to extremes it

veers round to its opposite. It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions: but the

man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract ‘either-or’, and keeps to the

concrete’.54

The youthful Romeo is initially portrayed at as such an understanding spirit, its one-

sidedness encapsulated in the admonitions to him of Friar Laurence:

Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love,

Misshapen in the conduct of them both,

Like powder in a skilless soldier’s flask

Is set afire by thine own ignorance,

And thou dismembered with thine own defense.55

Romeo’s wit, after his killing of Tybalt, goes awry, the very thing by which he should be

defending himself is destroying him. And yet, Friar Laurence, putative manipulator of the

fate of others, is himself fatefully an understanding spirit, a discoverer of new associations

among phenomena, an explainer of their causes and consequences. His discussion, with

himself, concerning the power of herbs foreshadows his offer of the potion to Juliet that she

is to drink:

O mickle is the powerful grace that lies

52 ‘Its foremost requirement is that every thought shall be grasped in its full precision, and nothing allowed to

remain vague and indefinite’. (Ibid. 1, p. 146). 53 Ibid. 1, p. 144. 54 Ibid., p. 146. 55 Ibid. 5, Act 3, Scene 3, lines 130 – 134, p. 124.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_consequence


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In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.

For naught so vile that on the earth doth live

But to the earth some special good doth give.56

Friar Laurence’s understanding interprets that which is sensuously presented to it as the

expression of an underlying force, (a ‘powerful grace’), beyond the matter at hand, and

conceives of such force as an independent inner essence (‘true qualities’ of the matter at

hand). But his finite understanding comprehends the world as in reality consisting of distinct

things, with their own inherent powers, a self-satisfied spirit theorizing about the distinction

between that which is inherent, or essential, and that which appears. As Hegel himself

theorizes:

The reason why ‘explaining’ affords so much self-satisfaction is just because in it consciousness is, so to

speak, communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself; although it seems to be busy with something

else, it is in fact only occupied with itself.57

In explanation, whereby (outer) phenomena and (inner) essence are distinguished,58 ‘a law is

enunciated; from this, its implicitly universal element or ground is distinguished as Force, but

it is said that this difference is no difference, rather that the ground is constituted exactly the

same as the law’.59 That is, in its objectification of phenomena, understanding spirit, (Friar

Laurence), necessarily makes use of objective concepts, (‘powerful grace’, ‘true qualities’),

without the expediency of resorting to a transcendent metaphysical or empirical realm, and

56 Ibid., Act 2, Scene 3, lines 10 – 14, p. 92. 57 Ibid. 15, §163, p. 101. At the stage of understanding both Romeo and Friar Laurence are alike in their self-

absorption, with tragic consequences. 58 Friar Laurence, it may be said, is at that stage whereby, in Pippin’s words, ‘the idea is that the intellect can

make use of its unclear sensory representations, clarify them, and so ‘see through’ to the ‘inner source of an

object’s ‘outer’ manifestations’. (Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 133). 59 Ibid., §154, p. 94.


14

occupied only with itself it contradicts its own objectivity.60 That is, as Hegel explains, ‘the

absolute flux of appearance becomes a simple difference through its relation to the simplicity

of the inner world or of the Understanding’.61 And this ‘is a flux that is posited in the inner

world as it is in truth, and consequently it is received in that inner world as equally an

absolute universal difference that is absolutely at rest and remains selfsame’.62

‘This realm of laws63 is indeed the truth for the Understanding’, Hegel contends, ‘and that

truth has its content in the law. At the same time, however, this realm is only the initial truth

for the Understanding and does not fill out the world of appearance’.64 Juliet, as

understanding spirit, expresses such limited truth, finding herself having to transact dual

categories that either support essence on the one hand, or appearance on the other, on hearing

of the death of her cousin Tybalt at the hands of her lover:

O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell

When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend

In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?65

60 ‘Once we go below the level of empirical phenomena’, as Stern explains, ‘it becomes harder to defend the

claim that we have cognitive access to this underlying reality, or to know what we can say about it: it thus

becomes a ‘supersensible beyond’, outside the reach of our intellectual powers’. (Robert Stern, Routledge

Philosophy GuideBook to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 62). The

understanding, at this stage, ‘attempts to render this supersensible realm less mysterious by identifying it with

the laws that govern the natural phenomena, which both stand above the phenomena and are instantiated in

them’. (Ibid.). That is, ‘the law…is the stable image of unstable appearance’. Ibid. 15, §149, p. 90). 61 Ibid. 15, §149, pp. 90 – 91. 62 Ibid. 63 Including the law of probability, an explanatory law, pace Hegel and his account of ‘the solar system [as] a

true system on account of its essential coherent totality’, in which the appearance of comets ‘are regarded as

being in accidental opposition to the entirety of this system when they cross and impinge upon it’. For Hegel, it

is ‘possible to conceive of the other bodies of the system as protecting themselves against comets, i.e., as

having to maintain and preserve themselves as the necessary moments of an organism’, as opposed to the

reassuring view that ‘in the vastness of the heavens, the comets have so much space through which to move

upon their ways, that there is only a minimal chance of their encountering the Earth’. Hegel is dismissive

of this argument, declaring that its ‘plausibility… is not increased by its being transformed into a theory of

probability’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, Vol. 2: Physics, translated by M. J. Petry

(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 26 – 27). 64 Ibid. 15, §149, pp. 90 – 91. 65 Ibid. 5, Act 3, Scene 2, line 73 – 85, p. 116. But of course she goes on to say of Romeo: ‘Sole monarch of the

universal earth./O what a beast was I to chide at him!’ (Ibid., lines 94 – 95, p. 117).


15

Such understanding grasps possibility as the essence of the inner world, as opposed to the

phenomenal world of appearance, but is incapable of grasping necessity,66 for ‘it is only with

law as law that we are to compare its [Concept] as [Concept], or its necessity’, as Hegel

explains, ‘but in all these forms, necessity has shown itself to be only an empty word’.67 And

according to Szondi, ‘the world of law…is based on the rigid opposition between the

universal and the particular and offers no possibility of the tragic’.68 The dialectic

progression toward tragic spirit, therefore, has to incorporate the universal, perhaps as some

form of ethical necessity, as well as the aspirations of an individual.69 But in the absence of

necessity, understanding can conceive of a world in which laws are inverted,70 a world of

appearance in which nothing is constant, and concepts are merely fluid assumptions:

The law was, in general, like its differences, that which remains selfsame; now, however, it is posited that

each of the two worlds is really the opposite of itself. The selfsame really repels itself from itself, and what

is not selfsame really posits itself as selfsame.71

That is, the selfsame, or self-identical, which is to say, the non-contradictory, and therefore

the possible, turns into its opposite; the impossible conceived as the possible. Romeo, true to

his experience at this initial stage, conceives of the selfsame undermining itself and turning

into its opposite in this manner:

66 As Harris notes, ‘the dialectical movement in its abstract purity seems to be a process that leads to the

unsaying of what is said, or to the saying of the opposite…In the Understanding, especially, [there] is

permanently present…the awareness that ‘necessity’ is only a subjective feeling’. (H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder

I: The Pilgrimage of Reason (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), p. 391). 67 Ibid., §152, p. 93. 68 Though he adds : ‘In the Phenomenology, however, the tragic conflict arises precisely between the worlds of

law and love’. (Ibid. 14, p. 21). But this is an over-simplification. 69 Although, as Stern points out, for Hegel, ‘…properly conceived, the individual is an irreducible substance,

and this irreducibility is explained by virtue of its being of such and such a kind; for as such the individ ual

object is not a mere combination of properties, or a bare particular in which these properties inhere, but the

manifestation of a universal substance-form which confers unity upon it’. (Robert Stern, Hegel, Kant and the

Structure of the Object (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 4). 70 ‘Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;/And vice sometimes by action dignified’, as Friar Laurence says.

(Ibid. 5, Act 2, Scene 3, lines 18 – 19, p. 92). 71 Ibid.15, §157, p. 96.


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O brawling love! O loving hate!

O any thing, of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,

Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!72

In poetry ‘the sensuous form’ is abandoned73 as it expresses an idea of an inversion that

constitutes ‘the essential nature of one aspect of the supersensible world’, and from which

‘we must eliminate the sensuous idea of fixing the differences in a different sustaining

element….We have to think pure change, or think antithesis within the antithesis itself, or

contradiction’.74 From such a principle, for Hegel, both Greek and modern tragic characters

emerge. As Houlgate observes, ‘through its insight into the laws of the inverted world… the

understanding discovers what Hegel himself… will declare to be the principle of tragedy’,75

and from which, in Romeo and Juliet, a tragic ‘prodigious birth of love’,76 as Juliet designates

it, is brought about.

Now although possibility may be thought of as the most extensive category, limited only by

the law of non-contradiction, Romeo is not thereby engaged in limitless free thought, for his

thinking can only be determined by his actual situation, and an actuality can only be

determined if it incorporates limit.77 Juliet, an embodiment of love, eradicates her objectivity

as a separate being in her union with Romeo,78 an ‘other’, which ‘otherness is not something

72 Ibid. 5, Act 1 Scene1, lines 176 – 182, p. 61. 73 See note 50. 74 Ibid., §160, pp. 98- 99. 75 Stephen Houlgate, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 77. 76 Ibid. 5, Act 1, Scene 5, lines 140, p. 82. 77 ‘A thing is what it is, only in and by reason of its limit. We cannot therefore regard the limit as only external

to being which is then and there. It rather goes through and through the whole of such existence ’. (Ibid., p. 73). 78 ‘In the feeling of love however, the selfishness of the single being is negated, together with its self-contained

aloofness. The single shape is no longer able to preserve itself, therefore, and so perishes, for only that which is


17

different and outside it, but a function proper to it. Somewhat is by its quality, firstly finite –

secondly alterable, so that finitude and variability appertain to its being’.79 We see this

process in operation as Romeo unites with Juliet at the masque, altering her into a saint, for

‘the nature of the finite, which, as something, does not meet the nature of the other as if it had

no affinity to it, but, being implicitly the other of itself,…undergoes alteration. Alteration

thus exhibits the inherent contradiction which originally attaches to determinate being, and

which forces it out of its own bounds’:80

…dear saint, let lips do what hands do!

They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

……

…move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

He kisses her

Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purged.

Juliet is thereby forced out of her own bounds, for what is actual is objective and leaves the

subjective trailing, for that is how we descry it. And yet limit ‘involv[es] a contradiction in

itself, and thus evinc[es] its dialectical nature. On the one side the limit makes the reality of a

thing; on the other it is its negation. But, again, the limit as the negation of something, is not

an abstract nothing but a nothing which is, - what we call an “other”’.81 That is, we are now

at the dialectical stage, that of reason and the infinite. For the inner world, as opposed to the

phenomenal world of appearance, operates like the middle term in a syllogism, from which

the ‘curtain [of appearance] hanging before [it] … is therefore drawn away’, and ‘we have the

absolute in its self-identity, i.e., the universal which is for the universal, is self-preserving’. (Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, Vol. 3: Organics, translated by M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and

Unwin, 1970), p. 176. 79 Ibid. 1, §92, p. 172. 80 Ibid., p. 174. 81 Ibid.


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inner being [the ‘I’] gazing into the inner world – the vision of the undifferentiated selfsame

being, which repels itself from itself, posits itself as an inner being containing different

moments, but for which equally these moments are not different - self-consciousness’.82

It is infinity that makes such a realization of unity in difference possible, ‘the simple

essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood… it pulsates within itself but does

not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest’,83 and it is only at the culmination of the dialectic

of understanding that it has ‘freely and clearly shown itself’.84 Hence Hegel writes about the

‘infinite content of depth of those still hearts’,85 of such as Juliet, whose character is of an

‘inner but undeveloped totality’,86 and who ‘can not otherwise be taken at the beginning than

as a quite childlike simple girl… [that] has no inner consciousness of herself and the world,

no movement, no emotion, no wishes;…Suddenly we see the development of the whole

strength of this heart… like an infinite outpouring of the inmost genuine basis of the soul in

which previously there was no inner differentiation, formation, and development, but which

now comes on the scene as an immediate product of an awakened single interest, unbeknown

to itself, in its beautiful fullness and force, out of a hitherto self-enclosed spirit’.87 A spirit

that grasps infinity grasps its unity with infinity as well as its difference, expressed by Juliet

to Romeo thus:88

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep. The more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.89

82 Ibid., §165, p. 103. 83 Ibid. 15, §162, p. 100. 84 Ibid., §163, p. 100. 85 Ibid. 4, p. 581. 86 Ibid., p. 580. 87 Ibid., p. 581 – 582. 88 ‘People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger lost in abstraction, and their

light dies away’. (Ibid. 1, §92, p. 173). 89 Ibid. 5, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 133 – 135, p. 89.


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But this is a poetic expression of a bad infinity, unbounded and endless, a perpetual repetition

of the contradiction inherent in the finite, an infinite process of alteration,90 or, as Hegel puts

it: ‘Something becomes an other: this other is itself somewhat: therefore it likewise becomes

an other, and so on ad infinitum’,91 a ‘negation of a finite: but the finite rises again the same

as ever, and is never got rid of and absorbed. In other words, it is an infinite that merely

expresses a that which ought to be elimination of the finite. The progression to infinity never

gets further than a statement of the contradiction involved in the finite, that it is somewhat as

well as somewhat else. It sets up with endless iteration the alternation between these two

terms, each of which calls up the other’.92

The bad infinite is decisively actual, for this is not merely Juliet no longer abiding within

her own limits, but a perpetual repetition of a contradiction involved in her finite being, the

self-negating of this finite, for ‘everything finite (such as existence) is subject to change.

Such changeableness in existence is to the superficial eye a mere possibility, the realisation of

which is not a consequence of its own nature. But the fact is, mutability lies in the notion of

existence, and change is only the manifestation of what it implicitly is. The living die, simply

because as living they bear in themselves the germ of death’.93 Romeo’s dream in exile is

itself an expression of this condition:

I dreamt my lady came and found me dead –

Strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think! –

And breathed such life with kisses in my lips.

That I revived and was an emperor.

Ah me! How sweet is love itself possessed,

90 To be understood literally, that is, as ‘othering’. 91 Ibid., §93, p. 174. 92 Ibid., §94, p. 174. 93 Ibid. 1, §92, p. 174.


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When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!94

However, from the complete unfolding of the bad infinite arises the concept of an ought95 that

is never attained, and with this concept, together with Romeo and Juliet overstepping of

boundaries of necessity,96 we are now at the speculative stage,97 a transition from appearance

to actuality, or an overcoming of the opposition between possibility and actuality, and of

subjectivity and objectivity.

Actuality we may take to be realized possibility, that which is causally effective:

Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence with existence, or of inward with outward. The

utterance of the actual is the actual itself: so that in this utterance it remains just as essential, and only is

essential, in so far as it is in immediate external existence.98

And that which is merely possible is but one aspect of actuality:

Contingency (accidents) But the Actual in its distinction from possibility (which is reflection-into-self) is

only the outward concrete, the unessential immediate. In other words, to such extent as the actual is

primarily the simple merely immediate unity of Inward and Outward, it is obviously made an unessential

outward, and thus at the same time it is merely inward, the abstraction of reflection -into-self. Hence it is

itself characterised as a merely possible. When thus valued at the rate of a mere possibility, the actual is a

Contingent or Accidental, and, conversely, possibility is mere Accident itself or Chance.99

94 Ibid., Act 5, Scene 1, lines 6 – 9, p. 152. 95 ‘In the ought the transcendence of finitude, that is, infinity begins. The ought is that which, in the further

development, exhibits itself in accordance with the said impossibility as the progress to infinity ’. (Ibid. 9, p.

134). 96 See note 35. 97 Having defined our concepts and specified them (the moment of understanding), then identifying a limitation

in such specifications (the moment of dialectic), now is the moment to devise a new specification to correct this

and grasp all our limited conceptions as a whole (the speculative moment). 98 Ibid., §142, p. 257. 99 Ibid. 1, §144, p. 262 – 263.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/glossary.htm#chance


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The actual, in contradistinction to the possible, is ‘the unessential immediate’, not in the

sense that it has no essence, but rather that as immediate it is distinct from the complete

extent of possibilities. It is a contingent fact or a possible existence just as it is but that could

have been otherwise. But speculative logic has to be alert to the possibility of dialectic

illusion, and to grasp the opposition between what is actual, and what is imaginable. Romeo

is at liberty to think on what is not, but what is not cannot be a concept, and it is actuality that

contains the ought which can and does put itself into effect. An ought which cannot do that,

Romeo as an Elizabethan courtly lover, for instance, is no more real than if Romeo were to

fantasize about becoming Prince of Verona.

Actuality is an essence that enforces its own reality as needed, real possibility is the range

of things that are not, but are objects of hope or fear. Possibility is an essential conditional

actuality, because only what is really possible can be actualised. But it is unessential because

it is not yet real, it has no real essence except the freedom of thought. It is unessential in

contrast to what is actual. Possibility is a function of Actuality, rather than vice versa. The

freedom of thought is determined by the actual situation it is in. Possibility seems like the

most comprehensive category because it is limited only by the law of non-contradiction. It

embraces the whole range of abstract thought. It is the abstraction of the ‘inner’. But this

abstract inwardness of thought now knows itself to be the abstract externality of what is not

real. It is external to the world of reality (merely subjective). Actuality and Necessity are

concrete realities. Everything that is consistent (abstractly self-identical) is possible; but

everything abstractly possible is concretely possible too, in the sense that everything actual

must perish. Then we get to be the heroic pioneers in that sphere. We should see this

transition in terms of what truly is (at the level of practical everyday common sense) an

immediately free choice. The very fact that we are here (reading this book) means that for us

more things are actually-contingent, and we have a better chance (i.e., range of real


22

possibility) in the world than most of our living human fellows. Others may have a better

range of material possibilities than we (more money, better social connections, etc.). But if

they do not know what their ‘chances’ are, they are actually less fortunate. (This ceases to be

true as our actual range of choices is diminished).

A question arises, however, as to whether contingency and chance are the same.100 Hegel

wrote that though contingency ‘is only one aspect of the whole of actuality, and therefore not

to be mistaken for actuality itself, it has no less than the rest of the forms of the idea its due

office in the world of objects’, and that ‘on the surface of Nature, so to speak, Chance ranges

unchecked…Nor is contingency less visible in the world of Mind…In respect of Mind and its

works, just as in the case of Nature, we must guard against being so far misled by a well-

meant endeavour after rational knowledge, as to try to exhibit the necessity of phenomena

which are marked by a decided contingency, or, as the phrase is, to construe them a priori’.101

And that ‘in language (although it be, as it were, the body of thought) Chance still

unquestionably plays a decided part; and the same is true of the creations of law, of art,

&c'.102…The problem of science, and especially of philosophy, undoubtedly consists in

eliciting the necessity concealed under the semblance of contingency’.103

100 Inwood notes the difference with reference to the original German: ‘The formally actual is the contingent

(Zufälliges): it is possible for it not to be, as well as to be. That it is actual is thus a matter of chance (Zufall)’. (Ibid. 50, p. 199). 101 Ibid., §?, p. 265. 102 Antigone declares of ‘the unwritten unalterable laws/Of God and heaven’ that: ‘They are not of yesterday or

to-day, but everlasting,/Though where they came from, none of us can tell’, (Sophocles, ‘Antigone’, in The

Theban Plays, translated by E. F. Watling (London: Penquin, 1974), pp. 126 – 162, (p. 138)). But we can say

that chance played its part in their formation. In 'Civilization as a Mistake' Lem argues that humanity, in

attempting to give meaning to its frailties, declares them to be part of a larger plan of things: ‘human

communities produce cultures through mistakes, false steps, failures, blunders, errors, and misunderstandings…

desiring to understand the mechanism of a phenomenon through and through, they interpret it for themselves

wrongly; seeking truth, they arrive at falsehood; and thus to customs come into being, mores, faith,

sanctification… They make false generalizations and thus arrive first at the notion of manna, and afterward at

that of the Absolute. They create mistaken representations of their own physical construction, and thus arise the

concepts of virtue and sin; had the genitalia been similar to butterflies and insemination t o song (the transmitter

of hereditary information being specific vibrations in the air), these concepts would have taken a completely

different form’. (Stanislaw Lem, ‘Die Kultur als Fehler by Wilhelm Klopper’, in A Perfect Vacuum (London:

Mandarin, 1979), (pp. 127 – 140), p. 128). So even if a tragic narrative does depict an eternal justice restoring a

society’s ‘ethical substance’, (its mores and laws), with the downfall of an individual that had disturbed it, the


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From our definition of ‘chance’ the contingent is that for which there is no rational

explanation, but for Hegel ‘the contingent to be what may or may not be’ which can be

‘overcome’.104 To use Inwood’s example, if there are ‘193 parrot species’, this is a

contingent fact serving a particular purpose that can be overcome, by ‘abstracting from the

parrot species and doing logic… or making them serve some higher purpose by, e.g., eating

them or stuffing them and placing them in a museum’.105 A contingent fact is that which I

can change if I so wish.106 But ‘chance’, as we have defined it, cannot be overcome in this

manner. That is, chance and necessity are dialectically inextricably linked. Necessity asserts itself

through the interaction of millions of accidents, while each such accident is the outcome of a

necessary sequence of causes. As Dowe has said: ‘Chance has components, in some respects

like the components of force, which combine in some way to give the total chance’.107

Though there are, so to speak, chance-raising and chance-lowering causes. Tybalt is of a

choleric humour, Mercutio the sanguine, Benvolio the phlegmatic, interpreting the text in the

light of the Elizabethan belief in the four humours does not reduce the amount of plot to be

attributed to chance for a modern audience.108 They are what they are through chance, 109 and

ethical substance itself arose through chance, the contingent facts concerning how human beings happen to be

constructed, and so on. As Xenophanes reportedly said:

But if cows and horses or lions had hands Or could draw with their hands and make the things men can make

Then horses would draw the form of god like horses, Cows like cows, and they would make their bodies Similar in shape to those which each had themselves.

(Quoted in Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 95).

‘Ethical substance’ is thereby another case of dialectical illusion, for that which we as a human community

believe ought to be is merely what we contingently make to be. 103 Ibid. 1, §?, p. 265. 104 Ibid. 1, §145, p. 263. 105 Ibid. 50, p. 199. 106 Whether something is contingent is a matter of effort and of faith. We can spend our whole lives struggling

to change something that ought to be ‘contingent’ (we hold); and it may prove to be an inescapable necessity (as

far as we are concerned). 107 Phil Dowe, ‘Chance-lowering Causes’, in Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World, edited

by Phil Dowe and Paul Noordhof (London: Routledge, 2004), (pp. 28 – 38), p. 35. 108 As the messenger in Antigone says, while conveying the news of the deaths of Antigone and Haemon:

What is the life of man? A thing not fixed For good or evil, fashioned for praise or blame.


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whether Romeo’s choice to kill Tybalt is due to a tragic flaw or to circumstance, chance plays

its part in either case.

So we can invoke ‘fortune’ after all. As Hegel said:

Throughout philosophy we do not seek merely for correct, still less plausible definitions, whose correctness

appeals directly to the popular imagination; we seek approved or verified definitions, the content of which is

not assumed merely as given, but is seen and known to warrant itself, because warranted by the free self-

evolution of thought.110

As Pippin has said:

…he believes that concepts are not abstracted forms,… and they are surely not ‘mere names’… But concepts

determine their own instances, are even ‘dialectically identical’ with such instances… that there is some

conceptual requirement for these and those particulars, that an empirically undetermined result of a

concept’s very nature so determines the vast expanse of the natural and human world.111

Fortune determines its own instances. To delay her forced marriage to Paris, Juliet visits

Friar Laurence for help and is offered a drug to put her into a deathlike coma. As Friar

Laurence explains: ‘in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death/Thou shalt continue two-and-

forty hours’,112 and he promises to send a messenger to inform Romeo, in Mantua, of the

plan, so that he can rejoin her when she awakens. But then, later speaking with Friar John,

Chance raises a man to the heights, chance casts him down, And none can foretell what will be from what is.

(Ibid. 101, p. 157). 109 See note 31. McGinn is therefore correct to say a tragic situation involves ‘the unlucky convergence of a

particular personality and a recalcitrant situation (relative to that personality)’, (Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s

Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (London: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 203), but incorrect to

say ‘a Shakespearean tragic death is not one that results from some sort of structural or teleological fact about

the universe, a death wish at the root of things. There is no necessity about Shakespearean tragedy’. (Ibid.

p.206). Rather, there is necessity (as chance) about Shakespearean tragedy. 110 Ibid. 1, §99, p. 186. 111 Ibid. 58, p. 234. 112 Ibid. 5, Act IV, Scene 2, lines 104 - 105.


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the messenger, and asking how Romeo responded to his message, Friar John replies that he

was unable to deliver the letter because he was shut up in a quarantined house due to an

outbreak of plague. Friar Lawrence exclaims:

Unhappy fortune! By my brotherhood,

The letter was not nice, but full of charge,

Of dear import; and the neglecting it

May do much danger.113

Piling up detail upon detail, intensifies the reader’s feeling that chance is the dominant factor.

scheme of things.114 A thorough reduction of man’s individual significance.115 ‘I defy you

stars’. Romeo says this when he receives the news that Juliet is dead. He feels that fate (the stars)

have struck him the cruellest possible blow, and he is going to defy the stars by committing suicide

and joining Juliet in death:

…O here

Will I set up my everlasting rest

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars

From this world-wearied flesh.116

113 Ibid., Act 5, Scene 2, lines 17 - 120, p. 156. 114 This is a rejection, therefore, of Aristotle’s contention that: ‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is

serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; in embellished language, each kind of which is used separately in

the different parts; in the mode of action and not narrated; and effecting through pity and fear [what we call] the

catharsis of such emotions’. (Aristotle, Poetics, translated by W. Charlton (Oxford: Clarendon Aristotle Series,

1970), p.50). Chance diminishes the magnitude, and chance plays its part in the language, as Hegel

acknowledges (note 102). And catharsis is only a metaphor, to do with purification, but what this means in

connection with the emotions is unclear. 115 This is a refutation, therefore, of Aristotle’s contention that: ‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is

serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; in embellished language, each kind of which is used separately in

the different parts; in the mode of action and not narrated; and effecting through pity and fear [what we call] the

catharsis of such emotions’. (Aristotle, Poetics, translated by W. Charlton (Oxford: Clarendon Aristotle Series,

1970), p.50). Chance diminishes the magnitude, and chance plays its part in the language, as Hegel

acknowledges (note 102). And catharsis is only a metaphor, having something to do with purification, but what

that means in connection with the emotions is unclear. 116 Ibid. 5, Act 5, Scene 3, lines 109 – 112.


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Chance is a universal factor that helps understand mechanisms of all sorts of evolutions; it

determines us, the universe, the world of living creatures and culture in which we grow. The

chaos of the contemporary is not favourable to tragedy, having exceeded a certain

numerically critical mass display certain trends, certain structural regularities may begin to

emerge spontaneously. As human beings, we cannot but always try to inquire into the

causality behind the events that happen in our lives. The efforts to explain the world by

determining answers to the question "Why?" give us an impression of understanding and

control over its complexity. Accidents are a matter of course. The perpetrator of

catastrophes and death of people turns out to be the chain of chance, the outcome of

randomization of elements present in the modern civilization. The inherent failures of

induction, the overwhelming complexity of modern human society and the natural universe,

the ability of large-scale random events to mimic intentionality -- all the traps that await the

limited human mind and its insistence on pattern-seeking are itemized and laid bare.

Congenital defects of the human brain. The average person's life may indeed be a chain of

chance.117 Autonomous laws of chance, statistical laws of society. ‘Society became

statistical. A new type of law came into being, analogous to the laws of nature, but pertaining

to people. These new laws were expressed in terms of probability.118 They carried with them

the connotations of normalcy and of deviations from the norm. The cardinal concept of the

psychology of the Enlightenment had been, simply, human nature. By the end of the

117 As the appropriately named Dr. Saussure says: ‘…there’s no such thing as a mysterious event. It all depends

on the magnitude of the set. The greater the set, the greater the chance of improbable events occurring within

it’. (Stanislaw Lem, The Chain of Chance (London: Mandarin, 1990), pp. 125 – 126). 118 ‘Such social and personal laws were to be a matter of probabilities, of chances. Statistical in nature, these

laws were nonetheless inexorable; they could even be self-regulating. People are normal if they conform to the

central tendency of such laws, while those at the extremes are pathological. Few of us fancy being pathological,

so ‘most of us’ try to make ourselves normal, which in turn affects what is normal’. (Ian Hacking, The Taming

of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 2).


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nineteenth century, it was being replaced by something different: normal people’.119 ‘For

never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo’.120

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Hegel and Tragedy