Peer Gynt and Oedipus: Ibsen on Hegel's Precursors of Modernity

Lior Levy

doi:10.1017/hgl.2021.11

Abstract

AbstractG. W. F. Hegel sees Oedipus as an epitome of the philosophical quest for self-knowledge. In Hegel's readings of Oedipus, the latter becomes a distant reflection of the modern and mature Hegelian self, who consciously takes on this quest. Yet unlike Oedipus, whose search for the truth about his past is characterized by both metaphorical and literal blindness, the modern self knows itself, precisely because it understands its past and can thus appropriate and situate itself in relation to the present. For Hegel, self-understanding entails grasping the proper relationship between past and present, which in turn necessitates acknowledging his own relationship to Oedipus. This essay examines Henrik Ibsen's turn to the Hegelian engagement with the past (Oedipus being one crucial moment in the Hegelian story of the history of self-consciousness), by focusing on one of the most enigmatic scenes in his 1866 drama, Peer Gynt, where the Norwegian protagonist is cast as Oedipus. The scene examines the drama's own past—through an engagement with a dramatic ancestor—and focuses on the influence of the past on fashioning modern European identity. Moreover, it offers a critique of how the past is utilized in the creation and consolidation of that identity. With this, Ibsen offers an implicit critique of Hegel's understanding of Oedipus, and his encounter with the Sphinx in particular. Revisiting Oedipus through its modern reception, Ibsen questions the act by which the past is revealed as such and is put to work in the service of a particular present.

Highlights

Hegel’s admiration for the homeliness of the Greeks, shining so splendidly because it reflects a German spirit, is manifest in the abundant references to Greek culture, art and political life in his work
Homeliness was certainly an issue for Oedipus, a man who was never at home, in Corinth as in Thebes, and whose life ended in exile, but for Hegel he prefigured the German spirit of homeliness
This to such an extent that Jean Hyppolite even suggests that readers of the Phenomenology of Spirit—a text in which spirit is portrayed as returning to itself from estrangement —envision ‘the totality of this difficult and sinuous work as the veritable Oedipus tragedy of the human spirit in its entirety’ (Hyppolite 1957: 18)

Summary

Introduction

Hegel’s admiration for the homeliness of the Greeks, shining so splendidly because it reflects a German spirit, is manifest in the abundant references to Greek culture, art and political life in his work. Following the presentation of Ibsen’s critique of Hegel, I turn in the ensuing section to Hegel’s notion of cultural development as homecoming, and examine a particular trope that governs his idea of the self making itself at home—that of digestion. By studying his 1809 address on classical studies, given while he was rector of the Nuremberg Gymnasium, together with his philosophy of nature, I give an account of digestible and indigestible others, which returns to the idea that Hegel effaces the inherent relationship to otherness on which the notion of homecoming rests. While Ibsen does not suggest that the past is undetermined by the present, free of the interests of the knowing subject who restores it, his own playful return to Oedipus points to the blind spots in Hegel, mainly the latter’s refusal to acknowledge his own investments in making Greece an anchor for the modern mind

Peer Gynt and Oedipus: setting up the encounter

Eating one’s way home

Abbreviations used