‘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 told that Juliet is dead. ‘Then I defy you, stars!’5 For

the heroes of this modern tragedy, in which 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 fate, although, according to Hegel:

In a dreadful way…[Romeo and Juliet] 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

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, Aestheticst, Vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 1205.4 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p.158.5 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (London: Penguin, 1967). Act 5, Scene 1, line 24, p 153.6 Ibid., the Prologue, lines 6 - 7, p. 53.

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elsewhere an external fate does – external accidents frustrate the cleverness and artfulness of the go-between

Friar and bring about the death of the lovers.7

Paolucci contends that in such tragedy ‘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,’8 but for Houlgate this is ‘self-imposed

rather than inflicted on something from the outside…Tragedy…is generated by freely self-

determining, heroic human individuality’,9 whereas for Roche ‘tragic fate is rational;10 reason

does not allow the individuals to hold onto their positions in their one-sidedness’.11

I argue, however, that chance, an unknown encompassing situations, is the operative factor

in human events, is a non-rational element in tragic fate,12 and that the role of tragic spirit in

the larger scheme of things is thereby diminished, however much the protagonists have the

resources to impinge on their surroundings. And tragic spirit in Romeo and Juliet can be

shown to be thinking through its contradictions dialectically,13 only for its intentions to be

thwarted by chance at every turn, the operations of which infiltrate tragic drama as a whole.

Though Hume asserts 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’,14 chance, in fact, operates in

7 Ibid. 4, pp. 584 – 585.8 Anne and Henry Paolucci (eds.), Hegel on Tragedy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1962), p. 376.9 Stephen Houlgate, Hegel and the Arts (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), note 5, p. 170.10 ‘Neither is the necessity of the outcome a blind fate, a merely irrational, unintelligible destiny’, Hegel wrote, ‘but a rational one’. (Ibid.3, p. 1216).11 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. 57.12 ‘The superiority of its conforming to its eternal laws through all its contingency is attributed to nature’, Hegel explains, ‘but that is also the case in the realm of self-consciousness’. But ‘if spiritual contingency or caprice goes forth into evil, that which goes astray is still infinitely superior to the regular movement of stars… because that which errs is still spirit’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, Vol. 1 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 210).13 ‘Dialectic’, Szondi explains, is ‘the tragic (and the overcoming of the tragic)…the fundamental, tragic conflict [is] 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).14 David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 95.

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Romeo and Juliet, in the manipulation of the course of action in two directions, and it

operates in the development of spirit, in which ‘consciousness itself is the absolute dialectic

unrest’,15 or ‘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’.16 It operates in the dearth of rational coherence

in dreams,17 or it emerges out of the stirrings within the deep ‘night-like pit’18 of the

unconscious.19 And the manipulation of the details of Romeo’s 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’),20

thoroughly undercut all of his endeavours, including his suicide for the sake of his putatively

deceased beloved.

Aristotle, however, said that ‘chance is supposed to belong to the class of the indefinite and

to be inscrutable to man...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.21 His example is that of a man serendipitously encountering his debtor in the

market place; he had not gone there for that purpose, rather he ‘is said to have gone “by

15 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §205, p. 124.16 Ibid., p. 125.17 ‘I dreamt a dream tonight’, Romeo warns Mercutio, declaring ‘’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). 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).18 ‘Intelligence’, Hegel wrote, is a ‘night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations…yet without being in consciousness…a potentiality which is the first form of universality offered in mental representation’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §453, p. 204). The unconscious construed as a possible source of random possibilities.19 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 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 11). ‘It is just this unrest that is the self’, as Hegel says. (Ibid.15, §22, p. 12.) 20 Ibid. 5, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 50 - 51, p. 86.21 Aristotle, ‘Physica’, in The Works Of Aristotle, Vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 196b – 197a (p. 196b).

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chance”’.22 But ‘why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is

better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity’.23 For

Aristotle coincidences are exceptional, for if everything in nature occurred at random it

would be ‘inscrutable to man’.24 But this is to confuse two senses of ‘chance’, the accidental

pairing of two events, and the occurrence of events that are causally undetermined. For the

man who coincidentally meets his debtor, two separate events are accidentally paired, and

chance in this sense does not undermine the view that nature is intelligible. And chance itself

operates as a cause, interrelated in some manner with probability,25 and this is the sense of

‘chance’ to be understood in this essay.

As for ‘fate’, or ‘necessity’,26 for Hegel this had an important role in Shakespeare, where

‘we find no justification…only an observation of the universal fate; individuals view its

necessity without complaint or repentance…they see everything perish, themselves included,

as if they saw it all happening outside themselves’.27 This he identifies with Nemesis, bringer

of divine retribution on those overstepping necessity, or due measure:28

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.29

22 Ibid.23 Ibid, p. 198a.24 Ibid.25 C.f. Lem’s ‘The Impossible Life’, the narrator of which, Professor Kouska, traces his origins back to a meteor that fell 2.5 million years ago: ‘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’ by Cezar Kouska’, in A Perfect Vacuum (London: Mandarin, 1979), pp. 141 – 166, p. 160). ‘The existence of any man is a phenomenon of cosmic impossibility, since so improbable as to be unforeseeable’. (Ibid., p. 161). 26 ‘In the creed of the ancients, as we know, necessity figured as Destiny’. (Ibid 1, p. 269).27 Ibid. 4, p. 586.28 ‘Fate drives individuality back within its limits and destroys it if these are crossed’. (Ibid. 3, p. 1216).29 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. 329.

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But Kant had classified ‘fortune’ or ‘fate’ among the ‘usurpatory concepts’, the deduction of

which ‘involves us in considerable perplexity, no clear [right], sufficient to justify their

employment, being obtainable either from experience or from reason’.30 ‘Fate’ is a word with

a use but no meaning, an empty name, as Frege explains:

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.31

Empty concepts are possible, there could be certain objects that fall under the concept’s

extension, it just so happens that there are none. But when Romeo declares ‘O, I am

fortune’s fool!’,32 and Juliet declares ‘O Fortune, Fortune! All men call thee fickle’, 33

‘Fortune’ is a proper name, the meaning of which is the object that it designates, and,

according to Frege: ‘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’,34 so that ‘a proper name that designates nothing has no logical justification.35

‘Fortune’ is an empty name, bewitching Romeo and Juliet into the thought that something

meaningful is being said, though nothing is being thought.

Logic has to do with statements that express thoughts,36 and tracing the dialectical operation

of chance in Romeo and Juliet will follow three stages, the first of which is an understanding

of the subject matter, that ‘sticks to fixity of characters and their distinctness from one

30 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1990), p. 120.31 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 (Oxford: Blackwell Ltd., 1980), pp. 86 – 106, (p. 104).32 Ibid. 5, Act 3, Scene 1, l. 136, p. 111.33 Ibid., Act 3, Scene 5, l. 60, p. 129.34 Ibid. 31, p. 106.35 Ibid., p. 104.36 As Stace has said: ‘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 defines logic as ‘the science of pure thought, the principle of which is pure knowing’. (Ibid. 29, p. 60).

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another’.37 The second stage is dialectic, negative reason, ‘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’.38 Finally, the speculative stage, positive reason, that ‘apprehends

the unity of terms (propositions) in their opposition39 - the affirmative, which is involved in

their disintegration and in their transition’.40

For Hume, either through reflection or introspection, ‘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’,41 but with speculative logic necessity is grasped, through making the

subjective objective, and is analogous to poetry, which, as Hegel explains, ‘ 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’, thereby ‘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’.42 And although a principle of subjectivity is at

work in Romeo and Juliet to a greater extent than in ancient Greek tragedy, as Houlgate

points out: ‘both Greek and modern tragedy present…the self-destructive fate of one-sided

passion and character…they suffer because their individuality conflicts with other individuals

who make up their world.’43 It is therefore with the understanding that we begin, with its

one-sided abstractions,44 for ‘character is an essential in conduct, and a man of character is an

understanding man’, Hegel writes, ‘who in that capacity has definite ends in view and

37 Ibid 1, §80, p. 143.38 Ibid., §81, p. 147.39 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’. (Ibid. 40, p.88). 40 Ibid. 1, §82, p. 152.41 Ibid. 14, p. 82.42 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 96.43 Ibid. 2, p. 212.44 ‘Its foremost requirement is that every thought shall be grasped in its full precision, and nothing allowed to remain vague and indefinite’. (Ibid. 1, §80, p. 146).

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undeviatingly pursues them’.45 But ‘understanding is…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’.46 The youthful Romeo is initially portrayed as such, as Friar Laurence

admonishes him:

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.47

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 not himself a man ‘who has learnt to

know life’; a fatefully 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:

O mickle is the powerful grace that lies

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.48

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

45 Ibid., p. 144.46 Ibid., p. 146.47 Ibid. 5, Act 3, Scene 3, lines 130 – 134, p. 124.48 Ibid., Act 2, Scene 3, lines 10 – 14, p. 92.

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hand). His finite understanding comprehends the real world as 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 explains:

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.49

Explanation distinguishes outer appearance and inner essence,50 so that ‘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’.51 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 occupied only

with itself it contradicts its own objectivity. 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’.52 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’.53

49 Ibid. 15, §163, p. 101. 50 As Pippin puts it, ‘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).51 Ibid. 15, §154, p. 94.52 Ibid., §149, pp. 90 – 91.53 Ibid.

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‘This realm of laws54 is indeed the truth for the Understanding’, Hegel contends, ‘and that

truth has its content in the law.55 At the same time, however, this realm is only the initial

truth for the Understanding and does not fill out the world of appearance’.56 Juliet, as

understanding spirit, fleshes out the world of appearance through engaging with dual

concepts that either support appearance on the one hand, or essence 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?57

But this understanding is incapable of grasping necessity,58 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’.59 And Szondi has noted

that ‘the world of law…is based on the rigid opposition between the universal and the

particular and offers no possibility of the tragic’. The dialectic progression of tragic spirit

must intertwine the universal, some form of ethical necessity, with the aspirations of a

particular individual.60 But in the absence of necessity, understanding can conceive of a

54 Including the law of probability, pace Hegel, who in his explication of ‘the solar system [as] a true system on account of its essential coherent totality’, accounts for comets as part of the system, against the reassuring view that ‘in the vastness of the heavens, [they] have so much space through which to move upon their ways, that there is only a minimal chance of their encountering the Earth’, the plausibility of which ‘is not increased by its being transformed into a theory of probability’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, Vol. 2 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 26 – 27).55 ‘The law…is the stable image of unstable appearance’. (Ibid. 15, §149, p. 90).56 Ibid., pp. 90 – 91.57 Ibid. 5, Act 3, Scene 2, line 73 – 85, p. 116. 58 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).59 Ibid. 15, §152, p. 93.60 An individual that is an ‘irreducible substance’, according to Stern, ‘not a mere combination of properties…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).

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world in which laws are inverted, in which ‘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’.61 The self-identical, or non-contradictory, or possible,

transforms into its opposite, and the impossible is possible, as Romeo declares:

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!62

The ‘sensuous form’ is abandoned63 in poetry that expresses ‘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’.64 And, as Houlgate has said,

‘through its insight into the laws of the inverted world…the understanding discovers…the

principle of tragedy’,65 and from which, in Romeo and Juliet, a tragic ‘prodigious birth of

love’,66 as Juliet designates it, is brought about.

While Romeo is thinking on the impossible, he is determined by his situation, an actuality

determined by its limit.67 And Juliet, becoming an embodiment of love,68 eradicates her

61 Ibid. 15, §157, p. 96.62 Ibid. 5, Act 1 Scene1, lines 176 – 182, p. 61.63 See note 42.64 Ibid. 15, §160, pp. 98 - 99.65 Stephen Houlgate, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 77.66 Ibid. 5, Act 1, Scene 5, lines 140, p. 82.67 ‘A thing is what it is, only in and by reason of its limit…It…goes through and through the whole [of] existence’. (Ibid.1, §92, p. 173).68 ‘In the feeling of love…the selfishness of the single being is negated, together with its self-contained aloofness’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, Vol. 3 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 176).

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subjectivity in uniting with Romeo, whose ‘otherness’ is ‘firstly finite – secondly

alterable’,69 as it is with Juliet as Romeo beatifies her: ‘dear saint, let lips do what hands

do!/They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair’.70 For it is ‘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’.71 Juliet is thereby forced out of her

own bounds, 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’.72

This negation is ‘another’, and we are now at the dialectical stage, whereby the inner world

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 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’.73

It is infinity, ‘the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood…[that]

pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest’,74 that has ‘freely

and clearly shown itself’75 at the culmination of the dialectic of understanding. Hegel invokes

the ‘infinite content of depth of those still hearts’,76 of such as Juliet, who develops ‘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’.77

69 Ibid. 1, §92, p. 172.70 Ibid. 5, Act 1, Scene 5, lines 103 - 104, p. 80.71 Ibid. 1, §92, p. 174.72 Ibid, p. 172.73 Ibid. 15, §165, p. 103.74 Ibid., §162, p. 100.75 Ibid., §163, p. 100. 76 Ibid. 4, p. 581.77 Ibid., p. 581 – 582.

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A spirit that grasps infinity78 grasps its unity with infinity as well as its difference, expressed

by Juliet to Romeo thus:

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.79

This is a spurious infinite, however, a perpetual repetition of the contradiction inherent in the

finite, an infinite process of alteration,80 an other ‘becomes an other: this other is itself

somewhat: therefore it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum’,81 a ‘negation of a

finite: but the finite rises again the same as ever, and is never got rid of and absorbed’. 82 A

perpetual repetition of a contradiction involved in her finite being, but from this unfolding

arises the concept of an ought83 that is never attained, and with Romeo and Juliet

overstepping the boundaries of necessity,84 we are now at the speculative stage, the transition

from appearance to actuality, the latter a realized possibility that is causally effective, and

‘essential…in so far as it is in immediate external existence’,85 as opposed to ‘Contingency

(accidents)…the unessential immediate…valued at the rate of a mere possibility, the actual is

a Contingent or Accidental, and, conversely, possibility is mere Accident itself or

Chance ’ .86

78 ‘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).79 Ibid. 5, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 133 – 135, p. 89.80 Understood as ‘othering’.81 Ibid.1, §93, p. 174.82 Ibid., §94, p. 174.83 ‘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. 29, p. 134).84 See note 29.85 Ibid.1, §142, p. 257.86 Ibid., §144, p. 262 – 263.

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The contingent 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 what is but

could have been otherwise, and then the spectre of dialectic illusion arises, that which is

merely imaginable. Romeo is at liberty to think on what is not, but what is actual comprises

the ought that can and does put itself into effect, an ought which cannot is no more real than

Romeo dreaming about becoming an emperor.87 Actuality as unessential immediate

implements its own reality as and when required, and real possibility is the extent of things

that are not, but are the objects of Romeo and Juliet’s expectations, or agitations, or

presentiments, their hopes and fears. But only what is really possible can be actualised, and it

is unessential because not yet real, it has no real essence except in Romeo and Juliet’s

freedom to think on what might be. During the balcony scene, for instance, when Romeo

expresses his faith in love overcoming all barriers:

With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls.

For stony limits cannot hold love out,

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.88

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

real, in contradistinction to actuality and necessity that are concretely real. Romeo actualizes

an unmediated freedom of choice by being there, beneath the balcony, and from this fact

there are more things contingently actual for Romeo and Juliet, the range of real possibility in

the world is extended for them, though others, like Count Paris, may have more wealth, or

greater social status. But when Juliet muses to herself, concerning Romeo: ‘’Tis but thy

name that is my enemy./Thou art thyself, though not a Montague’,89 she shows that she does

87 ‘I revived and was an emperor’. (Ibid. 5, Act 5, Scene 1, line 9, p. 152).88 Ibid., Act 2, Scene 2, lines 66 - 68, pp. 86 – 87.89 Ibid., Act 2, Scene 2, lines 38 - 39, p. 85..

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not know what her chances are, for chance itself is her enemy, and though this appears less

true for Romeo and Juliet as their actual range of choices is diminished during the course of

the drama, it is still true when Romeo comes to believe all his options to be closed, save that

of killing himself.

Contingency and chance have to be distinguished, however.90 For Hegel, ‘on the surface of

Nature…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 try[ing]

to exhibit the necessity of phenomena which are marked by a decided contingency’.91 And ‘in

language (…the body of thought) Chance still unquestionably plays a decided part; and the

same is true of the creations of law, of art, &c.92…The problem of…philosophy…consists in

eliciting the necessity concealed under the semblance of contingency’.93 The contingent is

‘what may or may not be’ and which can be ‘overcome’.94 Inwood cites an example of ‘193

parrot species’, 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’.95 But chance

as we have defined it cannot be overcome, as necessity asserts itself through the interaction of

a multitude of accidents, each of which is the outcome of a necessary sequence of causes, for

90 Inwood notes a difference between them 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)’. (Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 199).91 Ibid.1, §144, p. 265.92 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 (London: Penquin, 1974), pp. 126 – 162, (p. 138)). But Lem has postulated that humanity, in attempting to give meaning to its deficiencies, declares them to be part of a larger scheme of things: ‘human communities produce cultures through mistakes…seeking truth, they arrive at falsehood; and thus customs come into being…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 to 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). If tragedy deals with an eternal justice restoring a society’s ‘ethical substance’, (its mores and laws), even so that which we as a human community believe ought to be is merely what we contingently make to be. 93 Ibid. 1, §145, p. 265.94 Ibid., §144, p. 263.95 Ibid. 90, p. 272.

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‘chance has components’, as Dowe notes, ‘in some respects like the components of force,

which combine in some way to give the total chance’.96 There are, of course, chance-raising

and chance-lowering causes. Tybalt is of a choleric humour, Mercutio of a sanguine,

Benvolio of a phlegmatic, but while we may not accept the Elizabethan belief in the four

humours, these characters are what they are through chance;97 their humorous dispositions do

not lessen the extent of the drama that is connected with chance, but increase it.98

It would seem, then, that we may invoke ‘unhappy fortune!’99 after all, like Friar Laurence

on hearing that his message to Romeo has not been delivered, one chance occurrence of many

from which the tragedy unfolds. Hegel had forewarned that the content of definitions ‘is not

assumed merely as given, but is seen and known to warrant itself, because warranted by the

free self-evolution of thought’,100 and that ‘concepts are not abstracted forms’, as Pippin said,

and ‘are surely not ‘mere names’…But concepts determine their own instances, are even

‘dialectically identical’ with such instances’.101 The particular fortune of Romeo and Juliet is

determined by a conceptual requirement,102 identical with its dialectical determination, just as

all thought of the human and natural world is conceptual,103 albeit empirically undetermined

by the nature of the concepts on which such thought is grounded.

Romeo believes that through suicide he may ‘shake the yoke of inauspicious stars/From this

world-wearied flesh’,104 but it is the autonomous laws of an unknown chance that are

96 Phil Dowe, ‘Chance-lowering Causes’, in Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 28 – 38, (p. 35).97 See note 25. 98 Cf. the messenger in Antigone, conveying the news of the Antigone’s death:

What is the life of man?A thing not fixedFor good or evil, fashioned for praise or blame.Chance raises a man to the heights, chance casts him down,And none can foretell what will be from what is.

(Ibid. 92, p. 157).99 Ibid. 5, Act 5, Scene 2, lines 17 - 120, p. 156.100 Ibid. 1, §99, p. 186.101 Ibid. 50, p. 234. Romeo and Juliet’s ‘fortune’, that is, has proven to be a concept that warrants itself.102 As a particular that is also universal, Romeo and Juliet’s ‘fortune’ is thereby a concrete universal.103 See note 36. 104 Ibid. 5, Act 5, Scene 3, lines 109 – 112.

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operating toward the consummation of this inauspicious outcome, for at the moment he utters

those words Juliet is not dead.105 ‘A greater power than we can contradict/Hath thwarted our

intents’,106 Friar Lawrence will tell her, the irrational power of chance. And with accidental

concurrences now aping intentionality as a matter of course in our complex modern world,

with its ‘new laws…expressed in terms of probability’,107 as Hacking observes, conveying

‘connotations of normalcy’,108 from which people eschew deviation, tragedy as an art form no

longer serves. But of the ‘star-crossed lovers’, within the context of a set of human events of

lesser magnitude, and hence of a lesser chance of improbable events occurring within it,

Prince Escalus can truly say ‘never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her

Romeo’.109

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