Freedom and Necessity: Hegel on Music and Self-Knowledge
Hegel’s idealism proposes that, although much of our daily existence involves limited thought and practical coping behaviors, reflection on our actions logically forces us to consider ourselves in relation to a larger whole—a whole that can only be comprehended through thought. In a characteristically post-Kantian move, he also maintained that there are ways of grasping that whole through forms of thought that do not appear, on the surface, to be particularly conceptual. One such pathway is art.
Art is a viable practice because self-conscious primates are also self-interpreting creatures. They possess a fundamental interest in understanding what they are and what possibilities lie open to them. One obvious way to pursue this project is through thinking about things and about oneself. Yet the basic unity of concept and intuition in such beings provides another possibility—one that only art can actualize. They can reflect on themselves by constructing an object that embodies meaning without a rule—a fully explicit concept—guiding the construction or apprehension of the object. As substances, we act in ways that are meaningful but not governed by rules. As reflective subjects, we can build objects that carry a meaning capable of being articulated in a potentially infinite number of ways. The very human practice of creating works of art makes this possibility real. In the act of constructing and appreciating such works, thought, as Hegel puts it, becomes “embodied in the beauty of art.”
Hegel’s philosophy of art essentially stands or falls on this assumption: that we can encounter meaningful objects whose meaning invites various interpretations and cannot be exhausted by applying a set of rules. This idea was not original to Hegel. What was new was how he connected this conception to his idea of an organic, self-distancing form of life.
The interest in creating such objects lies in constructing individual items to be sensuously apprehended as possessing a meaning that demands its own explication. Ultimately, what needs to be explained is the meaning of what it is to be an embodied being in time—aware of one’s finitude and, therefore, of one’s own limits. For a human subject, this relates to her subjectivity, to what it means to have an “inner” life expressed in an “outer” form. The fundamental question animating art, then, is what it means to inhabit such a self-conscious life and to lead it in one way rather than another.
The object constructed in art, therefore, is something whose apprehension speaks to this meaning. The work itself serves a dual role: it expresses the inner in the outer, and what is expressed calls out for an interpretation of what has been or is being expressed. It seeks to put the inner on view so that it can become an appropriate object of reflection. In this process, the work of art does not merely display feelings and aspirations—though it may do that as well. It also raises questions about the authority these aspects of life might hold and what entitlements we have in deploying that authority in one manner or another.
Artworks, Hegel notes, can be challenging, entertaining, or even relaxing. What crucially distinguishes entertainment from art that also entertains is that only the latter raises issues of meaning—or any deep question about such matters. Art is driven, in particular, by the need of self-conscious primates to provide themselves with a vehicle for self-recognition, for seeing ourselves as we are, and perhaps also as we might be or ought to be. Like philosophy, art seeks the unconditional truth about what it is to lead a self-conscious subjective life in the natural world. It asks what it means to be such a self-conscious primate and what oppositions appear as crucial to the subjective life—oppositions that at least seem to call for some form of resolution. In Hegel’s own terminology, art, like philosophy, seeks the “infinite.” It aims to comprehend ourselves and the world in a way that does not ultimately rest on givens or immediacies that themselves can no longer be understood. Finite agents, deeply embedded in a natural and social world, want to know where they stand and whether they can make any sense of that position.
That art attempts to provide a type of self-knowledge only raises the stakes, since there is great conflict over what such “self-knowledge” would actually be. Art, by offering “embodied thought,” implicitly asks about the basic issues confronting the kind of self-conscious lives we lead.
If art is a vehicle for a particular sort of self-knowledge—a knowledge of our deepest concerns and our place as self-conscious agents in a natural and social world—then music should offer that same kind of self-knowledge. Yet music seems ill-suited for this task. It is more clearly non-representational than the other arts, and yet it is also linked to emotion and feeling more strongly—or at least as strongly—as any other art form.
Music is also distinctive in another sense. In his lectures on music, Hegel notes that going into the details of music requires engaging with highly technical matters such as scales, harmonies, and so forth—a knowledge he candidly admits he lacks. However, this turns out to be a key point about music itself, not just a reflection of Hegel’s acknowledged ignorance. Music, oddly enough, is both one of the most emotionally immediate of all the arts and the art that lends itself most readily to purely intellectual considerations.
Now, to lead a self-conscious life is to live not only in time but with an awareness of one’s temporality and finitude as the structure of one’s entire existence. Hegel observes, “The I is in time, and time is the being of the subject himself.” In music’s expression of this being-in-time, we find “the essential reason for the elemental might of music.”
What does it mean for music to express our being-in-time as a mode of self-knowledge, and how does this account for the “elemental might” of music? For an agent to be free, she must be subject to a law that she experiences as her own law. As a living being, she must do something to maintain herself as an organism. An organism acts according to its own law—that is, according to what is required of it as the particular organism it is. It acts completely in terms of the form of life it occupies. For a self-conscious organism, however, what counts as its own law is already an issue for it. Although being an agent means locating oneself and occupying a position in social space, once one has become an agent, one can imagine oneself differently in the future, even if one cannot actually be different. Abstractly put, as Hegel formulates it when speaking about music, “the actual I… is nothing but this empty movement of positing itself as other and then sublating this alteration, i.e., maintaining itself in this activity as the I and only the I as such.” At first glance, music would have to present us with an expression of empty movement that simply means what it means—just the movement of positing itself and sublating this positing.
This capacity to abstract oneself from one’s concrete context—to imaginatively think of oneself as something not quite identical with what one is—is an “abstract” capacity of agency. The “I” can see itself as distinct from any of its actualizations in action or thought. It can see itself merely as the pure subject of experience and action, and for such a pure subject, the future is a set of possibilities opening up before it. Which fork it takes on its future path will determine who and what the agent is. Which forking paths are actually open depends on the specific context and the determinate set of dispositions and habits that make up her second nature. This forms a partial, incomplete experience of a type of freedom.
The experience of freedom regarding these possibilities concerns how an agent understands her actions to proceed not merely from her character but from a character that makes sense to her. This is a more abstract way of saying that her actions must be guided by a law of her own nature, not by forces—internal or external—that seem to lie outside that law. How much in any given action is actually up to the agent is always a matter of contention, but it is also a matter of the utmost importance to the agent.
This characterization remains merely abstract. The future stands before each agent as a set of forking alternatives, but one never was, nor can become, nor remain, such an abstract agent. Whatever one does or does not do, one has both been determined and has determined oneself, and has become something consistent or inconsistent with what one was. One cannot do this as an “abstract” subject. One acts as the “substance” one is—in terms of one’s own second nature, idiosyncrasies, and talents. What one does (even if that means standing still) involves more than the intellectual consideration of forking possibilities. It also involves, at least potentially, the full emotional life of the individual—the fact that things matter to her in often profound ways.
The “elemental might” of music is its phrasing in sound of this most basic feature of subjectivity. Music is the art that expresses the pure inwardness of subjectivity and the logic of its motion in time. Exactly how music does this was not Hegel’s question. (There is obviously a link between brain physiology and the perception of structured sound as music, but that is not a matter for the philosophy of art.) Although sculpture, painting, and literature also deal with this aspect of subjectivity, music focuses more exclusively on what it means to be an agent making sense of herself as being-in-time.
Music is thus paradigmatically the unity of the abstract and the concrete. It expresses the unity of the subject as a creature holding itself together in time, but in a way that calls up various emotions in the process. Moreover, it expresses the form of the inward life as it must express itself outwardly, through the progress of sounds structured in a certain way. In a musical piece, one experiences a structuring of time that puts on display the kind of temporal structure an abstract subject faces as she stands before a series of forks leading into the future. With each passing note, a thickness to that flowing life is built up. At the end of the piece, various forks have been taken, and the music has a shape that expresses the shape a subject acquires as she progresses through time. How that progress is charted makes a significant difference: is the subject compelled by forces outside herself, or is she making her own way through the music?
The building blocks of the classical musical art of Hegel’s time were the familiar elements of timbre, melody, harmony, and rhythm. Each can be used to construct a sense of forward movement or, perhaps more surprisingly, to present the inherently forward temporal movement of music as a way of expressing a sense of time stopping or circling in on itself—as in musical works that exploit harmonic means to create a sense of reverie. These have been fairly common moves in European music since at least the Renaissance, however difficult they may be to execute, and however much only the more gifted can truly succeed at them.
In 1810, E.T.A. Hoffmann famously claimed that the subject matter of music was “the infinite.” Whether or not Hegel was aware of Hoffmann’s piece, he would have had to agree, since for Hegel the subject matter of all art (as also of religion and philosophy) is “the infinite”—that which is unconditionally authoritative for us and which does not demand that we stop at something immediate or “given.” What music presents us with is a reflection on one of the most basic antinomies in human life: the tension between being compelled to do something and having some sway over our futures. Hegel puts it starkly:
“… rigorous (gründliche) music runs up to the limits of the non-harmonic and breaches that limit, but does so in a way so that from this breach one can return. In the unity of harmony and of melody lies the secret of deep compositions, which calls forth the deepest oppositions of harmony and then pulls back from them. – It is, as it were, the struggle of freedom and necessity which is displayed to us here.”
Music presents us with an experience of being-in-time, starting from some contingently chosen point (a particular note, a chord, a mere sound) and developing from there into a piece. In the classical form familiar to Hegel, it reaches a conclusion partly set by the beginning and the piece as a whole (for example, by its key or genre), with the necessity of that conclusion being compatible with the freedom the music takes along the various forking paths it follows. Some of the greatest music offers an expression, or perhaps an imaginative experience, of what a reconciliation of the opposites of freedom and necessity might feel like. This resembles the necessity of acting in terms of one’s second nature—one’s character—yet always having that character as an object before oneself on which one can act, and experiencing the unfolding of events as following one’s own law. Music puts on display, in an emotionally charged way, the otherwise abstract idea of freedom as rational necessity being equivalent to freedom as compulsion by rational character and second nature. The best music, that is, takes us through the experience of both the tension and the unity between “substance” and “subject,” demanding a kind of reflective thought about that tension and unity.
In his lectures, Hegel does not discuss any particular piece of music in real detail. There is, however, one place where he discusses an important work without naming it—the section of his work titled “Pleasure and Necessity.” There, his focus is Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, which he attended in concert in 1797 in Frankfurt. This comes at a point where Hegel is discussing the conditions under which modern agents try to develop a certain kind of individualist freedom and the internal problems that arise from such development.
At the end of the first paragraph, Hegel gives a slightly mangled quote from Goethe’s Faust: A Fragment (from 1790). The mangling appears intentional. In Goethe’s version, Mephistopheles says that those who despise reason and science are easy prey for wonder-workers and liars, such that (conditionally) even if they had not already surrendered to the devil, they are as good as gone anyway. Hegel, on the other hand, has Mephistopheles speaking of despising intellect and science, and he drops the subjunctive: for Hegel, those who despise intellect and science have already given themselves over to the devil and are necessarily doomed.
It almost goes without saying that there are great differences between the fates of Don Giovanni and Faust. In Goethe’s final version—which Hegel could not have known, as it had not yet been written—Faust is ultimately “saved” because of his striving nature. However, at the end of Mozart’s opera, Giovanni is dispatched to hell. Hegel’s deliberate mangling of the quotation indicates he is not speaking of Faust at all in this section, but of somebody else: Don Giovanni. The mangling is therefore not a misquote; it is a self-conscious alteration. He is drawing a lesson from Goethe’s Faust about a different character entirely.
Hegel was not the first to see an affinity between the myths of Faust and those surrounding the figure of Don Juan (Don Giovanni). Both stories began around the same time (the start of the sixteenth century) and were originally intended as morality tales, offering a warning about excess. In Faust’s case, the excess lay in trying to know too much; in Don Juan’s case, it was obviously erotic. These figures emerged at a time when the older certainties about Aristotelian virtues as a mean between excess and deficiency were losing their hold on people’s imaginations. (At the end of that line of development lies Kant’s complete dismissal of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean as utterly useless.) The emerging figure of “the individual” during this period—claiming authority for ranking his own needs and projects above those of others and for discovering his own “authentic” needs—made such excess appear perhaps heroic, rather than something against which we should be warned. The underlying unease with such figures stems from the inchoate feeling that excess and deficit may no longer be the right categories for expressing the energy unleashed by individualism. Both epistemic and erotic potential seemed on the horizon.
“Self-consciousness is desire,” Hegel says at the beginning of the section on self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Desire is the feeling of a lack in an organism—such as hunger, which expresses a lack of nourishment. A self-conscious organism, however, participates in the practice of giving and asking for reasons and seeks a rational sense for the course of his life. He feels a lack of an additional and different sort: a lack of a sense of the intelligibility of his life and his world, or perhaps a dissatisfaction with reasons that run out or culminate in some kind of immediacy—a justification that “just is” and cannot itself be further justified. Hegel calls this object of lack “infinity.” Ultimately, the “infinite” would be a self-authorizing space of reasons, and would be self-limiting. The feeling of such a lack is brought on not merely by the immediacy of intelligibility (or limits to intelligibility) with which an agent lives, but by the way in which what counts as ultimate conflicts with itself and undermines itself, thereby making being the kind of person oriented by such an “absolute” into an uninhabitable status.
Life itself is fundamentally limited by birth and death, but agents seek the “infinite” within it to see if there is any fundamental intelligibility to the finite lives they lead. (A few chapters after “Pleasure and Necessity,” Hegel continues this exploration.)
This desire for “infinity,” they note, ends up becoming self-alienated and self-defeating when it is supposed to be mediated by reflective judgment—the kind that involves “stepping back” from and “standing above” one’s desires, taking that capacity itself as “absolute.”
What agents now seek is a way to make peace with this desire and their own dissatisfaction, thereby actualizing the status of “individuality.” Even if the old order has not yet surrendered to individuality’s authority, the demand for more intense personal experience has already begun to operate within it. For this reason, the figure of Don Giovanni (Don Juan) both attracted and repelled the moderns so captivated by the myth. What this character pursues is not a self-sacrifice of his other, mundane desires for some religious conception of the “infinite,” but rather a way to carry out an unconditional program of self-realization as a free, desiring agent. He seeks, in Hegel’s words, the “actualization of rational self-consciousness through himself.”
Behind this lies the historical experience of an ancient failure. That failure consisted in the idea that a self-conscious agent could be self-authorizing simply as an organism in the world, acting essentially on the desire to be a master who sets the terms of entitlement for all his servants and rules them by force. The breakdown of slave-owning societies in antiquity was the existential realization of the incipient conceptual failure of all such forms of mastery and servitude. Yet despite these obvious historical and conceptual failures, the psychological desire on the part of some individuals to exercise mastery over others never completely disappeared—and probably never will. Its conceptual bankruptcy has never erased its psychological allure.
Hegel takes up the modern figure of a “master”—an aristocrat—seeking not just mastery but self-realization as the only way to make freedom actual (that is, real) in the chapter on “Pleasure and Necessity” in the Phenomenology. In essence, the self-realizing individual at that point in Hegel’s narrative is an agent (a “self-consciousness”) who takes himself to be “the essence”—that is, who considers himself and the world fully intelligible to his own rational powers. For such an agent, there is no longer supposed to be any metaphysical mystery to the world, even if much remains to be discovered about it. A world of physical and social limits but no metaphysically mysterious limits is a world open to the free play of someone whose conception of himself is that he is to become free—that is, to obey only a law of his own nature as a self-conscious individual and to know that law as an unconditional reason for action.
In such circumstances, seeking “infinity” requires recognition from another agent. This is not the recognition the master demands of the slave, since such compelled recognition must fail to possess the authority needed to make it real. (The master always fails because he demands as a condition of his mastery recognition from an other who, by the very terms the master has set, cannot in principle possess the authority to bestow such recognition.) Moreover, the recognition sought is not that attached to a social office or function mediated by shared social norms. Such recognition—gained by occupying a position one has not chosen for oneself—could not count as completely free self-realization, since it would be constrained by more or less external principles. (Once again, it is crucial to the opera’s progression that Don Giovanni rejects the older idea of a metaphysically organic natural order that delimits the social structure to which everyone belongs.) Don Giovanni must therefore, as an individual, seek recognition that is freely given; he is a character who must rely on seduction, not compulsion. He must seduce—by playing on the vulnerabilities of the other, bringing the other to a point of view at which she gives her consent.
The figure of Don Giovanni thus approximates what Jean-Paul Sartre later argued are the only three ontological possibilities for that kind of agency (which Sartre identified with agency per se): either one is determining and the other is determined, or one is determined and the other is determining, or each is mutually determining and being determined. Sartre called these stances sadism, masochism, and love. (In Sartre’s version of Hegelian jargon: one is either subject to another’s object, or object to another’s subject, or each is reciprocally subject and object.) The third possibility—love—Sartre deemed ontologically impossible. For him, just as for Hegel’s conception of the “individual” agent seeking the realization of rational self-consciousness through itself, there can be no higher standpoint from which one is both subject and object. Such an agent is one or the other.
Adopting this standpoint, Don Giovanni is a rebel against the mores of his age—their strict duties of class and estates—but he is by no means a revolutionary. He accepts the social order of the time, but makes an exception for himself as one who seeks the expression of true individuality. (In the last act, he even sings an aria praising freedom itself, “liberta.”) There is therefore an element of bad faith in Don Giovanni’s approach to life. On one hand, he eschews the metaphysical order that grants him his status as an aristocrat, but he sees no problem occupying that status and demanding obedience from his servant, Leporello. (In turn, Leporello opens the opera with a witty aria deploring that Giovanni is the master and he the servant, but he expresses no dissatisfaction with a world based on such domination. In the aria, Leporello makes it clear he would simply prefer to be the master himself and have others subordinate to him.)
However, as his seductive powers seem to fall short and he fails to obtain the recognition for which he strives—as has often been noted, this famous seducer fails in the entire opera to seduce anybody—he turns to raw compulsion to set the stage for his attempted seduction of Zerlina, ordering her husband to leave the scene and ordering Leporello to ensure the husband does not intrude. With that element of compulsion figuring in the background, Giovanni turns to his attempted seduction of Zerlina, which is successful but interrupted by a contingency. The piece he sings to Zerlina and which they finally sing together is one of Mozart’s most famous, and it lets us see Giovanni in action. Musically expressed, Giovanni offers as convincing a story as there could be for why one should be doing as he bids—that is, how he moves someone from knowing the better but doing the worse to coming to believe the worse is indeed the better. Compulsion moves to what seems, in the Hegelian sense of Schein, to be free choice. He makes a lie seem like pure truth. His seduction of Zerlina (although thwarted) turns out, by the force of Mozart’s music, to be the seduction of us, the audience. The problematic status of freedom as free choice comes to be front and center of the opera.
From the Hegelian point of view, there is an obvious problem with Don Giovanni’s project. He seeks the infinite in the unconditional vocation he experiences as calling him to realize his own individuality. To do this, he must by seduction have others freely recognize him as the free individual he feels called to be. Nobody else in the opera has such an unconditional calling. The others are, to one degree or another, limited by each other, their social standing, or their own way of compromising with the way of the world. Only Don Giovanni pursues an unconditional end—his own self-realization as free. Don Giovanni radiates energy against the fixed baroque world around him, even though that energy is also clouded by his bad faith. (As Bernard Williams has argued, the others may even hold him in contempt, but they are boring without him.) Yet as Leporello’s famous aria—in which he reads the catalogue of Don Giovanni’s former lovers to Donna Elvira—makes clear, Don Giovanni pursues only the bad infinite. The recognition he demands, once given, cannot be given again, since that would slowly place limitations on his project, which is to seduce (or “convince”) an infinite number of others. The “bad infinite” is unsatisfactory because it proceeds only infinitely from one limitation to another. It never achieves full self-authorization. At best, it merely posits some mythical future point in time when the task will have been completed.
What rules Giovanni are abstractions. Being ruled by such abstractions is incompatible with the idea of a pure, almost Sartrean unencumbered freedom, in which that freedom demands a free but nonetheless deceived recognition from others. Thus, Don Giovanni cannot on his own terms secure the recognition he needs; instead, he can only stage-manage it. He must order Masetto out of the room, promise to change Zerlina’s social status, lie to Donna Elvira, blame Masetto for his own misdeeds, and so on. That he does this with otherwise admirable bravado and courage does not undermine its stage-managed character. Like the master of the master/slave dialectic, he pursues self-sufficiency on terms that necessarily undermine it. He is, as Hegel puts it, “pure individuality confronting empty universality.” The empty universality at issue is Don Giovanni’s pathos—the deep current of feeling that swirls through his life and defines the character he is: called to be free as the determinate individual he is, he discovers that there is and can be no content to that conception of freedom. Rather than being or becoming the self-moving, self-sufficient agent Don Giovanni feels destined to be, he instead finds himself progressively hemmed in on all sides by the consequences of choices he has made. As the recognition he demands is progressively removed from him, he more and more resorts to swagger, bluff, threats, deception, and sheer bluster to hold off such withdrawal of recognition and cling to what little remains. (Tellingly, although he is the main character of the piece, he has no reflective arias.) In putting his own concept of himself into practice, he becomes what his concept always was “in itself.” He becomes simply empty freedom seeking empty recognition, one after another, and what looked like freedom turns into necessity. The pursuit of “the bad infinite” cannot lead to satisfaction. If nothing else, it yields finally to recklessness and self-destruction.
The end of the opera has always presented problems, possibly even for Mozart and Da Ponte themselves. Don Giovanni is consigned to hell in the key of D minor (with which the opera begins and to which it continually returns). That is followed by the appearance of a sextet composed of the characters who have been wronged by Giovanni, singing in the sunnier key of D major. They espouse the normalizing values of the world around them and more or less sing about how they are and will be all better off without Don Giovanni’s presence. Shortly after the first performances, that final sextet was almost immediately dropped, since it was felt to be “false” to the actual world. It seemed far too moralistic and conventional for the very conventional world in which it was staged. The musical force and musical vitality of Don Giovanni’s character throughout the opera seems to put the lie to the sunny “so shall the evildoers be punished” sentiment of the finale.
Giovanni’s commitment to the realization of freedom is unconditional. His own character stays focused on what he is (B-flat and D major). To be sure, when pushed to deception, he changes his music to suit the circumstances (adopting the style of the other—always the tactic of a shrewd flatterer), but he always comes back around to himself. Even at the end, when the stone guest drains his power away and proceeds to cast him into hellish oblivion, Giovanni returns to one of his basic keys (B-flat), even as his usual D major is being challenged and upended by the D minor of the stone guest. It is, as Bernard Williams has argued, Giovanni’s refusal to be intimidated by fate. Even a supernatural stone guest and the threat of eternal damnation cannot undermine that kind of unconditional commitment.
The moralistic interpretation of the opera—which the final sextet not merely encourages but more or less explicitly lays out—would have one understand Giovanni’s unconditional quest for freedom as failure incarnate, perhaps even as a warning to avoid excess and return to the world of Aristotelian virtues.
This was not how Hegel understood it. Giovanni is a failure, but his failure is not a moral warning. Rather, his failure provokes the thought of rethinking ̣[w
For Hegel, music presents us with a type of embodied thought in terms of reflection on human sense-making activity. Although music seems not to be representational at all, it nonetheless makes a claim to truth about the inner life—the subjective as such. Music expresses what is at the core of sense-making activity itself: the idea of a self-conscious life—that is, the life of a subject and not merely a substance. With music, its form—its pattern of notes arranged with respect to each other as succeeding each other in time—is also its content (the being-in-time of the subjective life as such). Music thus also embodies the contingent fact that it must be experienced in time (unlike watching a play, which contingently must take place over time but can be reflectively grasped after the performance as a whole).
Modern music faced a particular difficulty that Hegel began to try to formulate over the eight-year period of his lectures on the philosophical significance of the arts. Enormous social and institutional pressures were at work in post-revolutionary European life to think of subjectivity itself as “empty.” In contrast to the idealized ancients, the “abstract principle of the modern world,” as Hegel put it, seems to be the idea of “the other extreme of abstract subjectivity… whether it is still empty or whether to a greater degree it has made itself empty.” Modern life has made itself “empty” in the sense that there is no longer any faith that there is anything essential about its content that purely conceptual thought would be able to articulate. If so, then modern philosophical thought—the realm of the “purely conceptual”—can at best outline the most abstract contours of what it means to be a free agent, to embody a point of view, and so on, but it is incapable of providing any more determinate conception of agency or offering determinate orientation to that life. ̨If that is the case, what remains for reflection is the purely contingent, the everyday; likewise, what is left to the individual seems more and more up to the play of circumstances (or to “the gods,” as the Greeks would have put it). If Kant and Hegel were right that freedom was a form of rational necessity, then the problem for modern life was that it seemed to contain very little of rational necessity within itself. Instead, it seemed to be composed more and more of events that, although they may conform to some social scientific laws, are nonetheless, like the laws of nature, both blind to normative concerns and resistant to human attempts to control them. As such, the world of action seems less and less like a field of rational activity and more like a kind of making-do with whatever happens to come one’s way.
Professor Sun Bin (of Fudan University, Shanghai) provided comments on an earlier version of this essay.
The self, Hegel explains, “is in time, and time is the very being of the subject itself.” And further, “the actual I … is nothing other than this empty movement of positing itself as another and sublating that change, i.e., preserving itself, the I and only the I as such within it.” In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes the will as containing “the element of pure indeterminacy or of the I’s pure reflection into itself, in which every limitation, every content … is dissolved; this is the limitless infinity of absolute abstraction or universality, the pure thinking of oneself.” The subject can abstract itself out of any commitment and view itself as a center of normative responsibilities uncommitted to any particular thing. Yet the subject must then confront its limitations. “In the same way, ‘I’ is the transition from undifferentiated indeterminacy to differentiation, determination, and the positing of a determinacy as a content and object. … Through this positing of itself as something determinate, ‘I’ steps into existence in general — the absolute moment of the finitude or particularization of the ‘I.’”
This is only a partial explication of music’s task. Some pieces go beyond expressing a subjective experience: they offer a critique of that experience, or simply raise certain issues about it. This is especially evident in various operas. Hegel observed, “The harmonious reduces itself to the mechanical. The further tones are determined through other numerical relations. The fundamental relations constitute the substantial basis, the law of necessity, which must remain as ground … In the unity of harmony and melody lies the secret of deep composition, which summons the deepest contrasts of harmony and returns from them. — It is, as it were, the struggle of freedom and necessity that presents itself to us here. The high point is the evocation and combat of the contrast.” In contrast, Hegel’s letters to his wife in 1824 include at least some discussion of what he heard in Vienna.
Many readers have taken the chapter to be about Goethe’s Faust, since it begins with a slightly mangled quotation from that work. However, Allen Speight countered that interpretation, showing strong evidence that at least part of the inspiration for this chapter and the two following it came from a review of three novels Hegel read as (or shortly before) composing this section. I now think Hegel’s discussion refers almost exclusively to the opera Don Giovanni, which he saw in Frankfurt in 1797. During his time in Jena, Hegel may well have heard from Goethe or an acquaintance about how much Goethe himself admired the opera, having seen it in Weimar in 1797. Hegel was always in awe of Goethe, so his opinions would have carried great weight. It was also around 1797 that Goethe began working again on Faust, having published portions as Faust: A Fragment in 1790 (the only version Hegel could have read at the time). For context, Hegel arrived in Jena in January 1801.
Hegel’s paraphrase reads, “It despises intellect and science, man’s highest gifts — it has given itself over to the devil and must perish,” whereas Goethe’s version runs, “Despise only reason and science, man’s highest power … And even if he had not given himself over to the devil, he would still have to perish.” Kant held that no virtue or vice can be defined by degree, making Aristotle’s conception of the mean useless; the real difference lies in the objective principle of the maxim. As Hegel writes in the Phenomenology, “self-consciousness … is essentially judgment,” not merely “desire itself” as at an earlier stage. The section in question is titled accordingly.
The opera leaves ambiguous how far compulsion enters Don Giovanni’s relations with Donna Anna. “The essence for self-consciousness is that it take its pleasure, and what comes to be the object to that self-consciousness is the further dissemination of those empty essentialities, that is, of pure unity, of pure distinction, and of their relation.” Self-consciousness “achieves its purpose, and it then experiences in that achievement what the truth of its purpose is. It comprehends itself as this individual essence existing-for-itself. However, the actualization of this purpose is itself the sublation of the purpose, since self-consciousness becomes not an object to itself as this individual self-consciousness but to a greater degree as the unity of itself and the other self-consciousness, and thereby as a sublated individual, that is, as universal.” As Bernard Williams noted, Don Giovanni as an idea reveals the truth of that purpose.
The characters pursuing Giovanni include Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, Leporello, Zerlina, Don Octavio, and Masetto. Steptoe’s analysis details their roles. As Hegel puts it, “in its own eyes, the cards it is dealt are merely those of an empty and alien necessity, a dead actuality” — a reference to Giovanni’s encounter with the Commendatore. Whether the final sextet was performed in the version Hegel saw in 1797 is uncertain, since it was absent from the 1788 Vienna libretto, making its inclusion unlikely. Nevertheless, an interpretation does not hinge on that empirical fact.
Something like this underlies Lydia Goehr’s abstract insistence that the opera offers a transfigurative experience for its audience, one that can be both liberating and controlling depending on other factors. The final sextet is both the conventional conclusion (for the period) and, through its “unreality” or false note, reveals that conventions offer no real answer to the problem Giovanni raises. The unconvincing explanations sung by the sextet members show those conventions are dying, and Mozart’s music suggests the characters themselves are of two minds about their own professions — even if the libretto has them maintain a different surface. “Only to emerge from oneself, to be within oneself, is the other extreme of abstract subjectivity (or pure formalism), when it is still empty, or rather has made itself empty — the abstract principle of the modern world.”