For what is a relatively short book, Martin Thibodeau begins by framing his project in remarkably ambitious terms. As he argues in his Introduction, a proper understanding of Hegel’s relation to Greek tragedy requires both a historical and a systematic component. Historically, one must unpack how Hegel and his contemporaries viewed Greek tragedy, first, as a solution to the various dualisms inherited from Kant (6–7), and, second, as able to engender a new political order for the modern world (15–16). Systematically, the aim is to examine the conception of tragedy in Hegel’s authorship as a whole, from the earliest writings to the mature system of the Encyclopedia (16–17). While such a frame is a persuasive ideal, it is perhaps for the better that the bulk of Hegel and Greek Tragedy has a significantly narrower focus, largely leaving aside the historical context and limiting its selections from Hegel’s corpus.

In the first chapter, Thibodeau begins by examining Hegel’s claim in The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate that Judaism fails to achieve proper (Greek) tragic grandeur because the fall of the Jewish people does not qualify as that of a ‘beautiful being’ (26–35). The latter is not, of course, a category Aristotle applies to the hero of tragedy in his Poetics, and Thibodeau instead develops its meaning from Sophocles’s Antigone. As he argues, whereas the Jewish people, for Hegel, remains fixed in an absolute opposition between particularity and universality, what makes Antigone a beautiful soul is that she recognizes that the divine law she follows is only a partial expression of reality and therefore requires unification with the opposing law of the community represented by Creon. While she also represents particularity, hers is therefore ‘a struggle with a view to universality, a struggle aimed at reconciliation, the reconciliation of the universal and the particular’ (33). As a reconstruction of Hegel’s meaning, this is very suggestive and gives an important indication of Hegel’s conception of tragedy as a process of mediation. Since Thibodeau does not cite any sources for his interpretation, however, its immediate basis remains unclear.

A more extensive discussion of Hegel’s view of Greek tragedy in The Spirit of Christianity comes in the third section of Chapter One, where Thibodeau unpacks Hegel’s claim that Greek tragedy cancels the shortcomings both of the abstract formalism of Jewish law and those of the Christian morality of love. As Thibodeau forcefully shows, this is possible because Greek tragedy, on Hegel’s account, introduces a new conception of action and causality (50–51). In the punishment inflicted by fate we no longer encounter a universal law which precedes and applies to a particular action that transgresses its demand. Rather, the criminal act consists in the individual’s separation from the totality of its community, which then turns back on the criminal as the enemy (46–47). On this picture, the universal follows rather than precedes the individual’s act, since it is only the moment of separation that posits the opposition. Moreover, the punishment of fate is not an alien and external force, but the world to which the individual itself belongs and on which it depends for its own determination. In contrast to the supposedly stark opposition between universal and particular in Jewish law, the criminal in Greek tragedy can thus recognize his or her identity in the totality that punishes it. This in turn brings a deep longing for a returned unity—a new way of living with the lost community—which provides a positive element missing from Christianity. As Thibodeau reminds the reader, the problem with Jesus’s attempted reconciliation of universality and particularity is that his conception of love remains incapable of realization (41, 45). The desired reconciliation with the universal that Greek tragedy gives voice to, however, lays the foundation for a new ethical and political order; one that, for Hegel, needs to be retrieved in modernity.

Thibodeau’s discussion of Greek tragedy in The Spirit of Christianity derives particular strength from the way it shows that Greek tragedy for Hegel is a mode of thought in its own right, not merely an illustration of philosophical concepts discovered elsewhere. Indeed, as Thibodeau goes on to assert in Chapter Two, the ideas Hegel discovers in Greek tragedy are central to his entire philosophical project and intimately tied to his notion of the absolute (56). This contains the inviting suggestion that it is tragedy that makes possible an understanding of philosophy in Hegel, rather than the other way around.

In Chapter Two, the longest discussion of the topic takes up the relationship of Hegel’s treatment of tragedy in the natural law essay to that of Schelling, highlighting some of their differences (84–86). To Thibodeau, Schelling considers tragedy to express a unity that belongs to the past, whereas Hegel sees it as a solution relevant for the present. Moreover, for Schelling it is the individual hero’s act that brings about the reconciliation of freedom and necessity, whereas for Hegel reconciliation is a product of the ethical totality of the people. Again, these points are presented without textual references or a detailed exposition of Schelling’s argument, which makes them difficult to assess.

For Thibodeau, the differences in question rest on a deeper disagreement on the nature of the absolute in Hegel and Schelling (86–87). This claim assumes different forms in Thibodeau’s exposition. At first, it is linked to the assertion that for Hegel the absolute can be recovered, which suggests, in continuity with the claim that he views tragedy as outdated, that for Schelling it cannot. But clearly this would shortchange Schelling’s position, insofar as the absolute for him is a metaphysical, not a historical, actuality. A second source for the break with Schelling is located in Hegel’s conception of the absolute ‘as negation, as the reconciling sacrifice and, more precisely, as the tragic manifestation of absolute ethical life’ (87). A contrasting quote from Bruno invites the assumption that Schelling does not allow for these features, although it is unclear why his conception of the absolute as the indifference of terms should exclude a tragic process of negation and reconciliation (an assumption again invited on page 95). Finally, Thibodeau claims that for Schelling, tragedy is only a ‘supreme representation or manifestation’ of the absolute, while for Hegel the concrete realization of the absolute is itself tragic. How deep this difference reaches is difficult to establish fully, however, and Thibodeau’s claim would appear to be significantly complicated by his own assertion, at the end of Chapter Two, that Hegel does not think the absolute should be retrieved by writing further tragedies, since these indeed do belong to a bygone era. That task, instead, must rest with the development of a system of philosophy (89–91).

This shift marks the key transition in Hegel’s thinking on tragedy that occurs with the Phenomenology of Spirit. With the mature system, as Thibodeau explains, tragedy ceases being something like the model for reason and instead becomes one of the moments spirit must pass through. From within that system, this change can be explained (as Thibodeau does most extensively in Chapter Four) with reference to the limitations of the forms of immediacy to which art in general is bound, but it remains unclear in Thibodeau’s account why and how that new conception emerged in the first place. There is thus something of an unexplained gap that divides the two approaches to Greek tragedy in Hegel’s thought, one which is not directly addressed in the transition between the two parts of Hegel and Greek Tragedy. The same could be said for the shift in Hegel’s choice of model play, from Aeschylus’s Eumenides in the essay on natural law to Sophocles’s Antigone in the Phenomenology and the Lectures. As Thibodeau notes, this is a significant change, insofar as the problems and dynamics in the two vary widely. In the Eumenides, for one, the topic is the reconciliation of ethical life, whereas in the Antigone it is the break-up of the Greek polis and the emergence of individuality (135, n. 6). However, the reader is not provided with an explanation of the possible motives for or consequences of this shift.

Chapter Three, ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit: The Science of Experience of Consciousness and Greek Tragedy’, provides a summary of two chapters in that work where Hegel discusses tragedy, the opening of ‘Spirit’ on the ethical world, and the chapter on ‘Kunst-Religion’ in the section on Religion. With respect to both, Thibodeau clarifies the role Hegel attributes to tragedy in the historical development of spirit, first in the transition out of the unity of the Greek polis, in which individuals act in accordance with an ethical law ascribed to them by nature, into the emergence of modern individuality, and then in the decline of Greek religion and the birth of Christianity. While meticulous in its detail, this discussion stays so close to Hegel’s text as to frequently approximate paraphrase rather than analysis. Most regrettable in this respect, perhaps, is the lost opportunity to examine the relation of the two treatments to each other as well as to Hegel’s previous uses of Greek tragedy. For example, Thibodeau notes that tragedy in the chapter on the religion of art centres on the problem of knowing and non-knowing, and that these categories are relative, so that the ‘hero knows the law, which is revealed to him by the divine power to which he belongs, but he ignores the law or power’ which confronts him as antagonist (126–27). But it is unclear how this compares to the exposition of tragedy in the chapter on the ethical world in the ‘Spirit’ part of the Phenomenology, where the properties of hidden and known were ascribed in static terms to female and male laws respectively (100–1). Likewise, Thibodeau notes that the Erinyes are associated with the hidden law that opposes the tragic hero in the religion of art (127), but does not address explicitly how this compares to Hegel’s treatment of the same figures in his discussion of Aeschylus in the essay on natural law. It thus remains unclear whether Thibodeau takes all these instances to be equivalent or whether, on his reading, significant changes exist between them.

Chapter Four, ‘The Lectures on Fine Art: The “Death of Art” and Greek Tragedy’, begins by discussing the place of art in Hegel’s mature system, relative to religion and philosophy as higher shapes of spirit (139–45). This is followed by an account of art itself as the sensuous appearance of the idea, the concomitant rejection of natural beauty because it fails to express human freedom, and the death of art thesis (141–47). Thibodeau then traces Hegel’s account of the development of art through periods as well as media, with tragic drama as the highest point. Interestingly, Thibodeau treats this exposition as Hegel’s ‘definitive theory’ of tragedy, in spite of the notoriously problematic status of the Lectures (which Thibodeau acknowledges; 174, n. 4). While this section will be highly useful to readers new to Hegel’s philosophy, it again stays so close to Hegel’s own discussion that it is unlikely to shift previous scholarship on the text.

Hegel and Greek Tragedy is without doubt a rich resource for anyone dealing with Hegel’s views on tragedy and Greek antiquity in general. It will be especially relevant for those seeking a clear overview of the topic in relation to Hegel’s broader project, either as a point of departure for more in-depth research or as a general source to reference in research focused more immediately on other issues. One of the regrets the reader may feel on reading the book is the lack of direct engagement with Greek tragedy itself. The most extensive references to the plays that Hegel draws on are limited to a few plot summaries (79–81, 169–71), and direct quotations without commentary that Thibodeau occasionally attaches in endnotes as passages corresponding to sections in Hegel’s text. More detailed comments about Greek tragedy can be problematic, such as the suggestion that, for Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy is to teach the audience a moral lesson of sorts (12–13), where Thibodeau appears unaware that such views have been the exception and highly challenged at least since Bernays’s defence of the physiological interpretation of catharsis (Bernays Reference Bernays1880). Perhaps a better title for the book would therefore have been Hegel on Greek Tragedy, although it also seems that according to Thibodeau’s own standards a more detailed engagement with the Greek sources would be necessary. In Chapter Two, he thus rejects prior scholarship on Hegel’s notion of Greek tragedy that claims that it derives from his conception of Christianity by stating:

It is difficult to see how this claim can be adequately defended without a more detailed analysis of the Greek sources, not least in light of the fact that scholars (as Thibodeau acknowledges in the Conclusion) have frequently rejected Hegel’s readings as misguided and anachronistic.

Thibodeau’s rejection of the Christian interpretation of Hegel’s notion of tragedy is interesting for another reason as well, namely that it constitutes one of the few engagements in the book with previous scholarship on the topic. Although Hegel’s views on tragedy and antiquity have generated countless interpretations, Hegel and Greek Tragedy is relative sparse when it comes to positioning itself vis-à-vis other readings. Almost all the references to secondary literature are relegated to the endnotes, where they tend to take the form of lists for further reading on the topic rather than critical examinations of prior approaches.Footnote ¹

The focus of Hegel and Greek Tragedy may in that sense be both its greatest strength and weakness. While it allows the author to provide a concise exposition and overview of Hegel’s understanding of Greek tragedy in different—and very difficult—works, it also tends to limit his contribution to that of an admirably clear textual summary, rather than a more in-depth analysis and exposition of the questions. Perhaps keeping this more specific purpose and ambition in mind will make most apparent the book’s many strengths.