King Lear, Heidegger, and the Encounter with Things and Nothing

This study looks at how “nothing” manifests across King Lear in ways that evoke an immediate level of interpretive engagement with the world. Drawing heavily upon the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, I argue that this immediate level of experience is essential to the play’s articulation of the human condition situated within a “strange” and “tough” world (IV.i.11-2, V.iii.313). The human condition is interrogated throughout the play—sometimes directly, sometimes through extended discourses on nature, society, and reason—and the extremity of sorrow within the play often pushes that condition to a breaking point. This study focuses on the moment of access to things dramatized in the play: the acts of encountering, perceiving, and making sense of things. These are actions that reveal the world in some determinant form while concealing other potential dimensions of that world, and, with reference to Heideggerian phenomenology, I argue that the concealing tendencies within these actions form a major part of Lear’s tragic culpability. What Lear ‘sees’ and what he fails to ‘see’ reveal the perspective by which he is encountering things, and the biases and oversights within his perspective lead to his fatal misjudgement of his daughters. Once Lear is out amidst the storm, the act of concealment becomes the very thing he confronts. For Heidegger, the encounter with nothing (das Nichts) shifts one’s perspective away from things to the processes of engagement with things, and a similar shift in perspective takes place as Lear goes mad, where his engagement with his own acts of concealment drastically shifts the way he encounters the world.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Renaissance Literature

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Gill, Jonathan

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Bishop, Tom
• Tomlinson, Sophie

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/66534

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/66534