Abstract
Howl, howl, howl, howl! … A violently reiterated Howl is not the usual way to initiate a philosophical meditation. Neither Aristotle’s list of categories nor Kant’s table make mention of any Howl. Hegel’s Science of Logic contains no concept corresponding to Howl. There is no Platonic eidos of Howl. Indeed the Howl seems to shout down, shout against all categories, drowning out the civilities of reason in its brute explosiveness. Perhaps we might think of the cynics, the dog-philosophers as not silencing the Howl. But Hegel saw nothing much in Diogenes’, bastard offspring of Socrates. Nor did he take much notice of Diogenes’ self-description: the watchdog of Zeus. And many philosophers are much more Hegelian than they realize, or care to know. We will shrug it off. With sweet reason on our side, we will say: Why have a bad conscience in turning from the Howl? Where can Howling find its place in the ideal speech situation? This Howl is no voice in the grand ‘conversation of mankind’. The rest is philosophical silence.
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Notes
Shakespeare scholars argue about the difference between the Folio (1623) and the Quarto (1608) editions. In the Folio there are 5 nevers, in the Quarto 3 nevers. As the reader will come to realize, for purposes of the metaphysical reflection undertaken here, the difference between 3 and 5 is not of ultimate significance. One Never can be enough, Once is enough. I thank Robert Miola for bringing to my attention the point about the different editions.
See Philosophy and its Others: Ways of Being and Mind (Albany: SUNY, 1990), ch. 6 on thought singing its other. Nietzsche speaks of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music. It is not entirely clear how, in Nietzsche himself, something like Lear’s Howl might turn into Nietzschean music. How do we get from the howl to the music? On what I call ‘aesthetic theodicy and the transfiguration of the ugly’ in Nietzsche and also Hegel, see my Art and the Absolute (Albany: SUNY, 1986), 150–9.
See my ‘Schopenhauer, Art and the Dark Origin’, in Schopenhauer, Eric von der Luft, ed. (Lewistown: Mellen Press 1988), 101–22.
On the eyes of the mad Nietzsche as seen by some visitors, see Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries, ed. and introd. Sander L. Gilman, trans. David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), e.g. 242, 246, 247.
Is there any sense in which the idea of sub specie aeternitatis has some applicability here? Even Spinoza says: we feel and experience ourselves to be eternal. Do we need a sense of time’s other, tradi-tionally called eternity, to make sense of the Once and Never of our time? Here eternity could not mean the impersonal universal, the eternity of the dead ideas. It would have to be something like the living conversation of mind that outlives time, as in Socrates’ dream of the other world: this other world is not simply the world of ideas, but of thises — particular heroic humans to whom Socrates wants to talk. Philosophy and its Others, chapter 6 reflects on time and time’s other. On agapeic creation, see my Desire, Dialectic and Otherness: An Essay on Origins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), especially chapter 8. On the critique of ‘static eternity’, see ibid, chapter 4.
On idiot wisdom, see Philosophy and its Others, chapter 6.
The theme of patience is very important, both for Lear and our reflection here. But it would require another meditation.
On ‘posthumous mind’, see Philosophy and its Others, especially 278ff., 300, 304, 368n20.
Hence the difficulty sometimes felt in staging the final death scene. Shakespeare’s sources have a restoration and happy ending. In the eighteenth century the ending sometimes was changed. Dr. Johnson said that the death of Cordelia was so shocking that we would want to avoid it if we could.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Desmond, W. (1993). Being at a Loss: Reflections on Philosophy and the Tragic. In: Georgopoulos, N. (eds) Tragedy and Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22759-4_10
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