“In his Phenomenology, Hegel introduces the figure of the unhappy consciousness and connects it with ancient tragedy, when he shows that it arose historically as a successor to the tragic tradition. The unhappy consciousness is the endgame of tragedy. With the collapse of fundamental values and institutions in the fall of Greek culture and its subjugation to the Roman Empire, tragedy in Hegel’s sense – a conflict of right against right – is no longer possible. The result is dispirited culture – nihilism. To portray this condition, Hegel introduces the term ‘death of God’ as the utterance of the unhappy consciousness that expresses the loss of everything substantial.”
Robert
R. Williams, Tragedy, Recognition, and
the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1.
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