Todd McGowan

The break that Hegel introduces into the history of philosophy stems from the way that he transforms the basis for philosophical work from argument to drama. For this project, he takes Shakespeare as a paradigmatic figure and models his works on the structure of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Rather than asserting and defending concepts, Hegel places them in a drama. Whereas Shakespeare’s characters undergo a tragic denouement, Hegel’s concepts reveal their own inadequacy when Hegel reveals how they play out in the course of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. By examining Hegel’s philosophy through the lens of Shakespeare’s plays, we can discover the nature of the epochal change that Hegel presents and what makes him such a divisive figure in the history of philosophy.