doi:10.1017/hgl.2019.

29 Hegel Bulletin, Page 1 of 24

© The Hegel Society of Great Britain, 2019

What Is Novel in Hegel’s Phenomenology

of Spirit
Antón Barba-Kay

Abstract

While it has long been commonplace to advert to the Phenomenology of Spirit’s peculiar prosaic
form, there has been no sustained, thematic attempt to understand the relationship
between that form—as a continuous, quasi-fictional narrative—and the work’s philosoph-
ical content. I argue that some of what has been felt to be outlandish about the form may be
better accounted for by reading it as connected to purposeful literary decisions, decisions in
turn exhibiting philosophical claims about the new mode of modern self-understanding
that the argument is concerned with advancing. Extending Allen Speight’s suggestions
that Hegel sees literature as closely connected to his theory of agency, I argue that the
Phenomenology’s narrative should be understood as itself specifically and deliberately novel-
esque. I focus on three points that help clarify the book’s form as not simply in keeping
with, but as expressing aspects of its content: (1) the narrative structure of consciousness
(as a unified, unfolding activity through which Hegel explores the notion of actuality), (2)
the theatricalizing counterpoint between the ‘in itself ’ and ‘for itself ’ (as a dramatic device
that Hegel connects to the social underpinnings of consciousness), and (3) the role of
confession and forgiveness in the argument (as a theme that Schlegel had singled out as
essential to the novel, and that Hegel repurposes both to criticize and to overcome
Romanticism). I do not say that the Phenomenology is itself a novel, but that construing
some of its formal features and gestures as evoking the genre of the novel can help us
to see more of what is philosophically at stake in them, and therefore in the work as a whole.

Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated

has been accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.
—F. Schlegel

I. Introduction: Hegel’s peculiar work

As the word ‘modernity’ means the age of what is new, it is fitting that one of its
supreme aesthetic achievements should be something we call novel. And if an age
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 What Is Novel

can be said to recognize itself in some expressive practices better than in others, it is
clear that the question of what a novel is has more than just literary significance.
Cherchez Descartes, as usual. When Mersenne suggests that the Meditations would
have been better if Descartes had ‘set out the entire argument in geometrical
fashion’, he insists that the original ‘will yield by far greater benefit’.1 He resists
the invitation to turn himself into Spinoza, even as he obliges Mersenne by giving
him a condensed version of the Meditations that is only about a ninth the length of
the original. He thereby confirms many readers’ exasperated suspicions that there
is very little by way of actual argument there. But our exasperation is misdirected so
long as it misses the fact that Descartes is a master stylist, that his foundational
scepticism is meant to captivate as much by its matter as by its voice and the
voice it awakens within us. Descartes did not write novels exactly, but some
of his writings are, like Montaigne’s, unmistakably novelesque—both are near
contemporaries of Don Quijote and L’Astrée, usually identified among the first
modern novels.
Descartes’s use of the new genre is conspicuous for at least three reasons.
First, the narrative depends on the way in which Descartes manages to present
his own doubts as having a history in their own right. The Discourse and
Meditations are not reducible to a series of propositions more geometrico, because
what is being presented is a course of experience, which we are explicitly invited
to re-enact along with him.2 As the title of the Meditations indicates, it is a genre
with roots in spiritual exercise. Second, the plot of the Discourse and the
Meditations is advanced by a narrative voice that is removed from his own tenden-
cies to err. Descartes contrives to treat himself at once as agent and patient of an
extended experiment in self-detachment: he successively compares himself to
someone dreaming, a lunatic, a prisoner, a drowning man and a corpse. It is the
persistent fiction that the voice of doubt is not identical with his usual self that
gives the narrative its momentum. Finally, there is the unresolved question of
our own unsettled position, as readers overhearing Descartes’s confession of soli-
tude. He explicitly recalls for us in a number of passages the experience of being
alone—a traveller, a tourist, a stranger in a foreign land. He conveys the open nerve
of his own privacy, even as in doing so we are bound to him by the common experi-
ence of looking on and somehow participating in his withdrawal from the world.
Are we therefore all alone together with him? How could ‘we’ ever agree that
I think and so exist? How could we share this presence of mind, absolving it
from its seclusion?
I make these preliminary remarks to suggest some of what may be at stake in
thinking about the novel as a distinct form of reading and thinking. It is a form that
in some sense embodies a new understanding of human consciousness and
that can, by extension, help clarify some of what is unusual about Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit. The general suggestion that the book is unusual will probably
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 Antón Barba-Kay

surprise no one. Any casual reader fetches up on its bewildering style, its alterna-
tions of perspective and voice, and its presumption that we are following the epi-
sodes of some one ‘consciousness’ within a sustained narrative arc. If one adds to
these features the puzzles about Hegel’s own changing conception of the work,3 it
becomes clear why even the very basic task of paraphrasing what is said has itself
often proved contentious. Hegel himself wryly referred to the book as his ‘peculiar’
(eigentümliche) early work.4
What is remarkable then is how little agreement there is about whether the
Phenomenology’s insights should be understood to be in spite of or of a piece with
its idiosyncratic form. Jean Paul praised the book upon its publication for its ‘clar-
ity, style, freedom, and strength’,5 while Schelling says that it is full of barbarisms,
suggesting that Hegel wears ‘a scientific crown of thorns, through which he pre-
sents himself as the truly tormented ecce homo of the people’.6 Lauer compares
Hegel’s repetitions to the finely shaded recapitulations of a piano sonata, while
Solomon calls Hegel a ‘horrible writer’ of ‘abominable philosophical prose’, for
whom too many excuses continue to be made.7 Wallace says that reading the
Phenomenology is like a ‘voyage through the atmosphere of thought up to its purest
empyrean’, while Loewenberg insists on setting Hegel’s insights apart from the
book’s ‘odd and obscure locutions’, ‘dark diction’, and inscrutable ‘technical trap-
pings’.8 Gadamer and Bloch for their part both praise Hegel’s prose for stretching
language to express something that ordinary grammar is incapable of handling,9
and Findlay calls Hegel ‘a writer of literary genius’, comparable to Shakespeare,
Rimbaud and Mallarmé.10 Jacobi took a dimmer view: ‘If only that damned
Hegel wrote better!’11
There is more than one way to account for assessments as divergent as these,
of course, and a great deal of scholarly work has focused on uncovering and clari-
fying the connections between the Phenomenology’s structure, strategy and purposes.
My question, however, is whether and how we should understand the Phenomenology’s
peculiar dramatic form—especially its presentation of the ‘Science of the
Experience of Consciousness’ as a continuous, quasi-fictional narrative history
belonging to the character Consciousness—as bearing on its philosophical content:
is it irrelevant to the book’s argument that it takes the form it does? Would anything
be lost in paraphrase? Or does the form in some way evince, complement or extend
the book’s philosophical substance? I would like to suggest here that these discus-
sions could be supplemented by thinking further about its genre, and about its
appropriation of novelistic gestures as formally constituting the way in which the
prose is supposed to work on us. I am by no means the first to feel the need to
bring literary terms to bear as a means of access to the book. Ever since Josiah
Royce called it a Bildungsroman, it has been common to do so.12 But such compar-
isons have usually been en passant, whereas I would like to say that some of what is
outlandish about the Phenomenology’s form may be better accounted for by reading it
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 What Is Novel

as connected to purposeful literary decisions, decisions in turn exhibiting philo-

sophical claims about the new form of modern self-understanding that the argu-
ment is concerned with scrutinizing and advancing.13 I am particularly interested
in the three basic philosophical features I have noted above in my description of
Descartes, and which, I will argue, are connected to central theses of the
Phenomenology: that consciousness is narrative, that it is theatrical, and that it stands
in need of confession and forgiveness.
I will return to each of these, but would first like to add two considerations
lending plausibility to the view that some of the Phenomenology’s peculiarities are
deliberately novelesque. There is, first, the general fact that Hegel’s coevals were
—as a consequence of Kant’s Critique of Judgment—more preoccupied with the rela-
tion between the form and content of philosophical works (and therefore between
literature and philosophy) than any of their modern philosophical predecessors,
with the exception of Rousseau. Not only are many of the figures we associate
with German Idealism celebrated as poets, playwrights or novelists in their own
right—Lessing, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, Jacobi and Schlegel, say. More than
that, the form of philosophical writing was an explicit subject of discussion and
experimentation in a way that has scarcely since been paralleled. The most ambi-
tious statement of this confluence is found in the so-called ‘Oldest Program for
a System of German Idealism’—a tantalizing scrap from the 1790s variously attrib-
uted to Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling—which makes the case that concepts must
be exhibited within an aesthetic form if they are to command widespread adher-
ence, and that philosophy must develop a new rational mythology to do so.14 If
it is difficult to see anything quite so operatic as that in the decade following,
there was an undeniable profusion of literary-philosophical hybrids. Jacobi’s,
Novalis’s, Hölderlin’s and Schlegel’s novels are—in the pattern of Rousseau’s
Julie and Goethe’s Faust—self-consciously philosophical. Schelling wrote a dia-
logue, Bruno, and a novel, Clara, both of which include discussions of the best
way to communicate his philosophy. And, even if their efforts did not serve to
immortalize them, both Hegel and Fichte wrote lyric poetry, the latter leaving a
novel behind too. I am not suggesting that any of these works can help us pinpoint
the Phenomenology exactly; it is bound to remain sui generis.15 But it is at least clear that
one of the central aspirations of post-Kantian Idealism was to try to think within
the forms of intelligibility available to non-discursive writing, and that narrative
forms—the novel in particular—were singled out for the project. As Schlegel
summed up this situation, ‘novels are the Socratic dialogues of our times’.16
In the second place, though we have just about nothing from Hegel’s own
notes and letters from the period to tell us what he thought he was formally up
to in the Phenomenology (aside from some miffed comments in a letter about how
his reviewers paid attention only to its content17), there is a good deal of discussion
of works of literature within the book itself—discussion connecting forms of
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 Antón Barba-Kay

literature to philosophical claims—which can in turn teach us something about

how it is supposed to be read. The three aspects of consciousness I have singled
out roughly correspond to the ways in which Allen Speight has described Hegel’s
use of Sophocles’ Antigone, Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, and a handful of contem-
porary Romantic novels in the Phenomenology, as not simply illustrative or symbolic,
but as exemplary of Hegel’s account of action.18 Speight shows that Hegel’s analysis
invokes its literary examples as paradigms of explanation for the kind of holistic,
communally situated account of action that he is defending. The examples demon-
strate how it is that in literature, as in practice, isolating one set of interpretive con-
siderations cannot but do violence to our understanding of the whole: literature is
as synthetic as human deeds, and is not exhausted by formalized explanatory ana-
lyses of agency.19 This is more than I can spell out here in detail, except to say that
the three categories Speight names can help us see the three ways in which the
Phenomenology as a whole borrows formal aspects of the novel in order to make
its case—in other words, that the work’s form is wedded to its argument, in at
least these respects, to which I now turn.

II. Narrative consciousness

First, consciousness is narrative. Perhaps the most obvious formal feature of the
Phenomenology as a whole is that it is a continuous chronicle, in which the protagon-
ist, ‘Consciousness’, gradually comes to greater insight through a series of idealized
tableaux, a reconstruction of meaningful philosophical failures that Hegel com-
pares in his Introduction to ‘the way of the Soul which journeys through the series
of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed to it by its own
nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit’ (PhG: 55/PS: ¶77).20 The
story as a whole is intended at once as an embryology and palaeontology of mod-
ern consciousness (as Engels put it21)—an investigation of each of the grounds
underlying our form of self-understanding, which, seen now to make a whole,
will transform philosophy into wisdom. Because completeness is essential to the
task, Hegel is particularly mindful of the transitions between these tableaux, and
the way he connects them is consistent throughout: as each station is described
and its implications are gradually worked out, contradictions are brought to light
in it that are supposed to point to the next member of the series as its possible reso-
lution. It is a governing principle of such a procedure, accordingly, that there is a
cumulative cursus of experience as it presents itself in a particular character, and,
more importantly, that the full meaning of each of these positions is not explicitly
available to the protagonist in advance. Each station contains within itself the germ
of more or less intended possibilities, the teleology of which can only be worked
out within the full enactment of such a position. In other words, the procedure
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 What Is Novel

is a properly narrative one in that, for each stance involved, the protagonist’s taking
himself to be committed to it is itself made a condition of its full articulation—a
criterion for distinguishing between his real conviction and what he thinks he
thinks. This remains, admittedly, a very abstract way of putting it, but it might be
glossed by saying that claims to meaning are only alive by being lived, are only viable
by being undergone, and that their actualization, even when it fails in some respect,
is itself constitutive of what they are. We have here, in other words, a determinate
philosophical place for what would otherwise remain a fanciful feature of the work:
the fact that Hegel insists on describing experience as consisting of what he calls
the dialectical movement [Bewegung] of experience (PhG: 60/PS: ¶86)—a movement
that he then claims to add up into the ‘succession [Reihe] of experiences’ that can
become a ‘scientific progression [Gange]’ (PhG: 61/PS: ¶87).
The Introduction for this reason describes the very notion of experience not
simply schematically—as structured by some set of conditions for the possibility of
cognition, say—but as comprised of the ongoing work of contrast between its dif-
ferent ‘moments’: consciousness takes itself to know something, and it is in and
through its comparison between what it takes itself to know and what it actually
knows that it is then in the position to originate a new conception of the object
(PhG: 60–61/PS: ¶¶86–87). The fact that this activity of consciousness is presented
as constitutive to its experience—as resulting in a typical, universal pattern that
Hegel can attend to as such—can be called specifically narrative. It is only in the
process of bringing our knowledge to bear on its objects that we are in a position
to understand what our knowledge has been all along: as Hegel puts it once he has
described the failure of sense-certainty to say what it means: ‘the dialectic of sense-
certainty is nothing else but the simple history of its movement or of its experience,
and sense-certainty is nothing else but just this history’ (PhG: 68/PS: ¶109, my
emphasis). In other words, our abstract stances are worked out in their expression
and acquire essential content through this realization. It is the mark of an inad-
equate position that it cannot do what it says it does, not simply because it failed
to match intentions to their description, but because it is always at doing more than
it took itself to have meant.22 Our relation to our commitments is revelatory in this
sense: we discover meaning by meaning it; it takes practice to know just what we are
committed to.
This is a bare-bones characteristic of the relation between plot and character
in the narrative arts generally. One might minimally say that a successful fictional
character cannot be reducible to some closed set of propositions that are entirely
available from the outset. We might sometimes say that a character ‘stands for’ a
certain point of view, but if there is no aspect of that view that can be clarified
by appeal to a character’s development, if the character is not fully embodied within
narrative time, then it is difficult to see what we could mean by ‘character’ at all in
such a case. (I am thinking of transparently didactic literature—like Galileo’s, or
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 Antón Barba-Kay

Berkeley’s, or Hume’s dialogues.) We might say that it is precisely the aesthetic task
of narrative characters not to refer or match or correspond to some distinct, under-
lying set of principles, but rather, to mean and manifest them by virtue of their con-
crete development.23 We cannot and would not simply skip to the last chapter or
read a synopsis, if we wanted to find out what a novel was all about—someone who
did so would not only have missed the pleasures of gradual disclosure, he or she
would have missed the very point of the story.
The genre of the Bildungsroman provides an especially apt example of this living
relation between a character and his experience. (Karl Morgenstern first identified
this as a narrative category around the time of the Phenomenology’s publication.24) The
point of Tom Jones, or Wilhelm Meister or Sentimental Education is not that youthful
idealism is (merely) warped by the weight of mature disappointments, but rather
that it comes to see through analysis of its own experience that it is in fact pursuing
an end other than that which it first understood itself to be pursuing, that its means
contained unintended ends all along (in other words, what is sometimes called
growing up). The Phenomenology has very often been felt to conform to this generic
pattern, as I have noted—before Royce, it was Karl Michelet, Hegel’s student, who
first seems to have referred to it as an Entdeckungsreise, a voyage of discovery. But it is
nonetheless worth urging that this resemblance is not merely aesthetic, but properly
and substantially philosophical, in so far as it bears on Hegel’s case about the neces-
sary effectiveness of what it is to be rational and intelligible. As he argues in the
Preface, philosophy does not consist in true conclusions, as if one could understand
the whole tree by inspecting its fruit alone: it is rather like apprehending the move-
ment from bud to flower to fruit to seed to sapling as the mutually defining
moments we call tree (PhG: 10/PS: ¶2).25

III. Theatrical consciousness

Not all that is entailed by one’s position will necessarily be transparent to one’s
explicit evaluation of that position, however. This brings me to the second aspect
of what I want to say is novelesque about the Phenomenology: the way in which one’s
understanding of one’s position may have recourse to a communal view within one’s
own view as a means of self-articulation—the recursive power or dramatic irony
that is sometimes called ‘theatricality’. What I have said about narrative so far
does not distinguish the Phenomenology from any other kind of storytelling, however,
so that it will first be worth spelling out here why novels are a distinct form of story-
telling and why they involve a specific kind of theatricality.
The novel as such has been notoriously recalcitrant to tidy categorization.
Prior to the wide array of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiments,
Schlegel had already noted that the novel cannot be defined as a genre alongside
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 What Is Novel

other traditional ones. He says that it is in fact capable of absorbing all other
genres into itself (as his Lucinde is supposed to demonstrate), and so that the
novel is more accurately analysed as a distinctive kind of narrative voice, or
mood, or ‘bond of ideas’, than through an established set of formal or thematic
characteristics.26
One might nonetheless venture a few remarks by way of cautious generaliza-
tion. It is the novel’s art to concentrate on human inwardness, perhaps particularly
on the private introspection of experience in its relative failures to fit into its sur-
rounding world. In Lukács’s phrase, the novel is an expression of ‘transcendental
homelessness’.27 If it may be said that the core theme of ancient and medieval
literatures was the imitation of human deeds within their larger political or theo-
logical significance, modern literature’s main preoccupation leans toward invisible
and involuntary action: it deals with self-knowledge and its shortcomings by way of
self-deceit, with the sophistry of passion and its guises, and with the ways in which
we are opaque to, or in the grip of, or belied by our own clandestine motives.28
Pierre Manent observes this by saying that ‘literature appears when the word begins
to contest the privilege of action’, that is, when it becomes a distinct domain, no
longer obviously subordinate to other concerns.29 The German or French word
for ‘novel’—Roman—still carries the original connotation of ‘romance’, a story
about matters of the heart. And it is for this reason that the genre was continually
denounced for being more or less immoral as late as the nineteenth century.30
More than just the old complaint about the bad example set by the depiction of
vicious characters, what was at issue in these charges was the very act of putting
on someone else’s experience, of making oneself vulnerable to another’s vulner-
abilities from the inside out. Explicit dialogue recedes in importance in the
novel compared with tragedy or epic for this reason too; external communication
is no longer essential to it. Just so, the very context of the enjoyment of novels is a
private one, as Schlegel points out:31 unlike lyric poetry or theatre or fairy tales,
novels are not meant to be viewed or heard or enjoyed in common—the door
is closed to the possibilities of improvisation and public performance available
to oral recital. Novels are to be read in silence and alone.32
Whether or not this sketch is right in all particulars, it is clear that the novel-
esque tends to sharpen two points under mutual pressure. That is, to the extent
that the narrative concentrates our view on a character’s inwardness and individu-
ality, to the extent that we are permitted to overhear what cannot be said out loud
by him, there must be a corresponding increase in the scope of the narrator’s
knowledge. There thereby arises a new question (even if not always explored)
about the relationship between these two views. I’ll address these in turn.
First, the genre tends to focus on the spiritual biography of a single character.
There are counterexamples here. But the seventeenth and eighteenth century
largely preferred to name the work for a particular character—The Princess of
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Clèves, Les Aventures de Télémaque, Clarissa, Candide, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels,
Julie and so forth. The same is obviously true of most of the novels I’ve noted
above by Hegel’s contemporaries—Allwill, Woldemar, Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
Hyperion, among others. This is telling because, for reasons noted, it is the experi-
ence of an individual character that the novel is most interested in, the fixed integer
with respect to which plot accrues. The protagonist of the Phenomenology is not
exactly a fully concrete subject in this sense; he or it is, as mentioned, a sort of idea-
lized reenactor of human experience (where ‘experience’ is understood as the
immanent dialectical activity described in the Introduction: PhG: 60/PS: ¶86).
But it is significant for the reasons noted above, that there is nonetheless supposed
to be a stable view that is gradually filled out by the realization of its experience,33 a
personification of a vision to contain all visions. The Phenomenology has, for similar
reasons, been compared to Faust, its close contemporary.34 The narrative unfolding
of experience depends on reflection on one point of view that is underway toward
wisdom.35
Second, however, the novel requires a mediating artifice by means of which
we are given licence to trespass on the character on terms of such intimacy. This
is the role usually played by a narrator—though it may well be that we are not
given to know the narrator as a distinct voice, as in the epistolary novels favoured
by Hegel’s contemporaries, or in Descartes’s narrative first person, or in cases
where we speak of such a narrator being omniscient. Even in such cases, however,
the mediating artifice or narrator must be relatively or potentially distinguished
from the character as an independent stance, a voice that forensically presents
us with the special conditions of knowing what we could not otherwise know.36
And this is how Hegel sets up his experiment—we observe a pattern of shapes
of consciousness that ‘proceeds for us, as it were, behind the back of conscious-
ness’ (PhG: 61/PS: ¶87).37
I say all of this to explain some of what underlies the obvious formal oddity
that the Phenomenology’s argument is advanced by the continual counterpoint
between two perspectives designated from the opening as the ‘for itself ’ and the
‘in itself or for us’. The first is something like the first-personal requirement that
I’ve described above—the necessary fact that there be a protagonist with a partial
view of his experience at all—while the ‘in itself or for us’ functions as a sort of
narrator, who sees where the story is going. This ‘for us’ is tasked with scrutinizing
a position’s particular expectations from a stance of uncommitted, quasi-Socratic
detachment—spelling out the connections or contradictions that are entailed by
what the protagonist is doing and saying, but that are not yet evident to him
(‘This way of looking at the matter is something contributed by us […] but it is
not known to the consciousness that we are observing’, PhG: 61/PS: ¶87). The
‘in itself or for us’ voice, in other words, by virtue of measuring each ‘for itself ’
stance according to its internal, purported stipulations, may be regarded as laying
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 What Is Novel

out what is at stake at any given moment in the pageant in the form of a running
apostrophe to the audience.
And there is something more or less explicitly theatrical about the proceed-
ings. As Hegel tells us in the Introduction, once we have set up the conditions
of his narrative experiment, ‘all that is left for us to do is simply look on’ (nur
das reine Zusehen bleibt, PhG: 59/PS: ¶85). The ‘masking’ and ‘unmasking’ of
pretence (along with hypocrisy and dissembling) is at issue in a few prominent pas-
sages throughout the work, while the appearance of a new shape of consciousness
is dozens of times marked by the verbs auftreten or hervortreten—to emerge, to make
an appearance, to come on the scene.38 It is Hegel’s practice to give the position he
is investigating its own explicit voice, before cross-examining it (cf. PhG: 120–21,
228–32/PS: ¶¶205, 252–56, e.g.); and this tacit distinction occasionally breaks out
into something like a fully-fledged argumentative dialogue (cf. PhG: 178, 210–13/
PS: ¶¶321–22, 386–90, e.g.).
So far, however, this logical polyphony might simply be glossed as a dialectical
gimmick—a call and response between the author and an ideal objector not fun-
damentally unlike that in an Aquinas article or in Wittgenstein’s Investigations. Yet
what is finally most peculiar about this counterpoint in the Phenomenology is that,
on another level, the voices are not meant to be finally separate. Because we are
also told in the Introduction that consciousness is always both in itself and for
itself: ‘these two moments […] “being-for-another” and “being-in-itself ”, both
fall within that knowledge which we are investigating’ (PhG: 59/PS: ¶84)—both
are distinct stances that are at least in potency always available to conscious experi-
ence. (Note, for instance, how Hegel uses the first person singular for dramatic
effect while also seeming to narrate in his own voice throughout PhG: 63–70/
PS: ¶¶90–110.) In other words, though the ‘for itself ’ and the ‘for us’ perspectives
are necessarily distinguishable, we are also forced to notice from the outset that the
narrator and the characters he narrates are in an important sense aspects internal to
the same activity of experience, even as they bespeak obviously distinct powers of
it: I mean, on the one hand, the power to be committed to a norm, and then, on the
other hand, to be able—even if partially and provisionally—to able to reflect on the
very fact of one’s commitment to it as a norm, on the source and character of its
authority, and therefore to be able to entertain it under a different (and potentially
shared) aspect.39
This is important because it is one of the central contentions of the work that
consciousness is not atomically self-determining, but that the structure of its rea-
sons is only coherent when it is understood to be implicated within a larger histor-
ical order. The general issue shows up several times throughout the Phenomenology as
the question of the communal underpinnings of consciousness, of the social
dimension of all intelligibility that Hegel calls ‘Spirit’. The claim that to be a discur-
sive mind must also mean being an embodied, social self is defended in a number
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of different ways throughout, the recurring point being that the introduction of
such a communal view cannot be simply extrinsic to our view of our own positions,
but that it is an attendant condition for their possibility. In other words, that in
thinking through what I think or what I ought to do, I must and in fact can only
do so, whether I endorse or reject it, in light of its communal context, of the
intended or unintended consequences under which such a position is to be upheld
or contested. That is, the question of whether I am committed to what I take myself
to be cannot but take shape against a projected background of collective signifi-
cance. This is not to say that the ‘for us’ is interchangeable with some definite
shared view of things (since the former is present all along, while the latter is
only formally introduced in chapter 6). But ‘we’ are nonetheless present as a
tacit (if unarticulated) aspect of consciousness’s horizon from the outset, operating
as a condition for the possibility of ‘my’ context of deliberation even prior to the
discussions from which ‘we’ emerge with any historical content and contour.
The narrative counterpoint I am describing is therefore most clearly on dis-
play in the section of chapter 6 in which the possibility of diremption (Zerrissenheit)
or self-alienation of subjectivity from its cultural milieu is explicitly at issue (PhG:
281–86/PS: ¶¶519–26). Hegel makes liberal use of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew to
make this point. But whereas Diderot presents Lui and Moi as different roles,
Hegel’s indirect narrative discourse manages to give each character his own distinct
say ‘for himself ’, while deftly showing how ‘for us’ the two voices should be
regarded as complementary aspects of a single whole. It is this fundamental indi-
visibility of my own view or of consciousness’s ‘for itself ’ view from ‘our’ view that
I am calling ‘theatricality’: the fact that it is intrinsic to the activity consciousness to
be capable of taking an ironic view of itself, to regard its own view precisely as a
view, and moreover as a view potentially situated with respect to other views.
The term is not Hegel’s, but I think helpfully evokes something like Kant’s occa-
sional mention of an impartial spectator as a way of appealing to an idealized,
socially situated view of our own role.40 It therefore serves to give a communal
location to the meaning of one’s own action, but also, accordingly, serves as a con-
dition of sympathy, of incorporating a set of priorities that are at once one’s own
and wider than one’s own. As readers, we are in fact being asked to play both
parts throughout: as the ‘for itself ’ view is centrifugally widened, the ‘for us’
view is centripetally specified as the culminating point toward which the argument
must have aiming all along. We are worked into a voice that recognizes itself within
its other.41
It may seem odd, of course, to appeal to a term pointing to the theatre when I
have been insisting all along on a different aesthetic form. What is meant is a kind
of irony—an explicit awareness of the difference between what a character knows
from doing, and what we know from watching him do it. What is specifically nov-
elesque about this is the way in which both positions are integrated into a single
11
 What Is Novel

view, the way in which the two poles between which we are moved (the intimacy of
one’s experience and its distance from us in being reported) are distinct yet com-
plementary within one single narrative.42 One might sum up what is modern about
this form of cinematic, indirect free discourse by saying that, since it no longer pri-
marily belongs to a public occasion, it no longer finds its other fully outside itself
(unlike in theatre, or in epic, or in lyric). But whatever its modernity, it is clear that
the form came to absorb both voices within itself; and that Hegel is making use of
this development to exemplify the twin aspects under which, he argues, conscious-
ness knows itself. Consciousness is character, narrator and novelist at once.

IV. Forgiving consciousness

But if the ability to adopt another’s position is a condition for sympathy, this
condition also carries with it a threat of alienation: where one can identify one’s
position with another’s, one thereby also runs the risk of over-identifying it.43 In
other words, if consciousness’s narrative power is a way of articulating the unified,
historical activity of my conscious experience, and its theatrical power is a way of
bringing others’ reasons to bear on my own, then this very doubleness (along
with the possibility of estrangement between ‘I’ and ‘we’ that it contains) also raises
a question about their satisfactory mediation. This brings me to the third and final
aspect of the Phenomenology I’d like to mark as novelesque. It is an issue that I noted
in the case of Descartes above: the question of our relation to his confession,
where the full sense of the first person plural has gone missing. The intimacy of
novelistic experience tends, as I have argued, to have the contrary effects of allow-
ing us to enter into the experience of another and of calling into question what is
common or even explicitly communicable about that very experience. One could
say that Romanticism’s insistence on the private self is, for this reason, the direct
obverse of its scepticism. We are given to know everything we could know
about someone, at the cost of not being able to know whether we share the
world with them at all.44
Hegel is attentive to the formal possibilities of this open question about who
‘we’ are in the novel, and is interested in putting them to his own philosophic use.
After appealing to ‘our’ position without further scrutiny for the first three
chapters, Hegel indicates at the beginning of chapter 4 of the Phenomenology that
the governing purpose of the work is the understanding of a form of collective
reason: ‘I that is we, and we that is I’ (PhG: 108/PS: ¶177). The peculiarity of
this way of putting it is too often overlooked: neither ‘I’ nor ‘we’ is to be subsumed
under the other—Hegel is by no means proposing that we dissipate ourselves into
the oceanic totality of the state, as the stock charge has it—and yet whatever single
third position is being gestured at can only be indicated by means of this double
12
 Antón Barba-Kay

phrase. It is precisely this studied, paradoxical reconciliation of opposites

that begins to hint at the task that I think novelistic forgiveness has, as a form
of knowledge, in the work.
Or the two tasks, rather. I’d like to distinguish between a ‘performative’ and a
‘logical’ task, which I will address in turn. Now, we know from the outset that the
‘for us’ view I have mentioned is a sort of pedagogical invocation: we are invited
from the first to identify with a wider perspective that cannot yet be entirely our
own. A first-time reader is bound to feel that there is no ‘for us’, as yet. The precise
significance of this ‘for us’ is itself in motion—one could say that it is the main task
of the entire book to make that phrase come true. I would say that the single most
important step in this regard is the transition between chapters 6 and 7, where we
are explicitly presented with a description of what an I becoming also we would
have to entail. Crudely summarized, chapter 6 is an account of historical forms
of life, sifted with a view to the practices and institutions that embody their cumu-
lative, adaptive responses to the question of freedom. Chapter 7 then traces a line
through the whole of human history again, this time with an eye to the history of
religious, rather than political, forms. The transition between chapters 6 and 7 is
therefore especially important not only because it is intended to show why a purely
institutional account of communal life cannot be fully intelligible without appeal
to an additional kind of description of how any given community represents to
itself what is unconditionally valuable, and not only because the discussion
holds up a mirror to a too abstract conception of human interiority that Hegel
identifies with contemporary political life, but, finally, because he makes thematic
use here—more than anywhere else in the Phenomenology—of the modern novel in
order to make his point. The modern Romantic novel is, in this regard, identified
with what is inadequate in modern political life, even as it is used to point to a
solution beyond itself.
The episode in question revolves around a conscientious agent who insists on
the absolute truth of his pristine subjectivity: he is made to highlight a specific
excess of a modern attitude toward individual authenticity, in which deeply held
conviction for a cause is held to be more important than what could be expressed
in any discursive defence of it. This figure faces off against the reverse excess: a
dutiful, ‘judging consciousness’ (PhG: 359/PS: ¶667), who insists that the former
is in fact evil, because his act cannot be construed in universal terms, and so cannot
but be motivated by vanity and caprice. I pass over many of the details of this
encounter, except to say that it is, in basic contour, a conflict between conviction
and moralism, between wordless passions and specious words. Both the
Conscientious Agent and the Judging Consciousness claim to be able to identify
the correct kinds of reasons for articulating what is universally right, though
both speak in the name of a position they cannot coherently put into words: the
latter argues from abstract, moralistic grounds—‘duty for duty’s sake’—the former
13
 What Is Novel

on the grounds of the validity of his bare conscientiousness (he acts as ‘this
particular self ’). Each party is therefore called upon to realize an aspect of the
performative nature of speech and of practical reason generally. The Judging
Consciousness must acknowledge that the avowal of recognizably good conduct
requires a wholehearted commitment to do so, while the Conscientious Agent
must realize that his view of his inwardness cannot be fully translated into action,
because it has no communicable content.45 Hegel seems particularly interested in
this conflict, then, because bridging it requires a kind of spoken acknowledgment
that goes beyond what could be formally prescribed or specified in advance by any
new social norm. Their essential breakdown in communication can only be
bridged, Hegel says, when each sues for forgiveness: the Conscientious Agent
puts himself into words by confessing ‘I am so’ (evil, that is; PhG: 359/PS:
¶667) and the Judging Consciousness, though at first repudiating this confession
with ‘hard heart’ (PhG: 359/PS: ¶667), finally yields by acknowledging that he is
so too.
Hegel’s description here is obviously indebted (in letter, mood and circum-
stance) to several novels by his contemporaries. The phrase ‘beautiful soul’—
applied in these passages to the Judging Consciousness in particular and to the
affectation of segregating inner being from external acts in general46—was in cir-
culation to mean a character of poetic and brooding sensibilities, a Herzensmensch, as
he shows up in Lucinde, Allwill and Wilhelm Meister. (Hegel is sometimes thought to
be referring to Novalis here too.) More significantly, many of the eighteenth-
century and the early nineteenth-century novels I’ve mentioned had a special the-
matic interest in confession and forgiveness as the climactic moment of heart to
heart revelation—such moments structure the plots of Jacobi’s Woldemar and
Schlegel’s Lucinde, which scholars have felt to be most on Hegel’s mind here.47
Both in Lucinde and in his literary criticism, furthermore, Schlegel seems to
incline to the more ambitious claim that confession is not accidental to the novel-
istic medium—one of many subjects—but that it is rather one of its defining
experiences: the novel is a fantasy of sentiment that engages our imagination
beyond what could be dramatized on stage. It enables us to hear the spirit behind
everyday words and appearances, and so part of what is actually depicted must be
the very inadequacy of those words and appearances.48 Characters and writers of
novels are only understood by being ‘forgiven’, in this sense—their inner life is
redeemed, despite the shortcomings of their words, by being made whole in our
imagination. This is part of what makes novels novelesque in Schlegel’s view,
and one sees how he then moves from his analysis of the Roman to inventing
the term romantisch, ‘Romantic’, from it.
But whereas Schlegel is evidently interested in the open-ended unattainability
of this project as it spins out into an endless play of irony and arabesque, Hegel’s
novelization of the act of confession and forgiveness aims at more than aesthetic
14
 Antón Barba-Kay

effect, by showing that the explicit acknowledgment of what we cannot communi-

cate is an insight that establishes our shared understanding in a distinct way.
Contrary to his usual practice of stressing the seamless continuity of his argument,
Hegel says here that the softening of the Judging Consciousness’s hard heart is
‘necessitated by and already contained in the foregoing’ (PhG: 360/PS: ¶669),
even as he insists that the confessional gesture of forgiveness is unprompted
and even somehow anti-dialectical, with respect to the deadlock in which both fig-
ures had found themselves. I mean that it is the Judging Consciousness that refuses
to acknowledge and forgive the Conscientious Agent, while in what immediately
follows it is this same hard heart whose judgment ‘breaks’, who ‘renounces’ his
divisive thought, and ‘lets go’ of his characterization (PhG: 361/PS: ¶¶669–70;
translation modified). Unlike other paired opponents in the Phenomenology, where
Hegel’s analysis focuses on the ways in which the actions and self-conception of
one party are directly reflected in or motivated by some corresponding change
in the other, the only reconciliation available to the spiritual stalemate described
for us at the end of chapter 6 takes place through the free renunciation of
one of the two figures, through a confession of the Conscientious Agent’s own
inadequacy that is not obviously elicited by any corresponding action on the
part of the Judging Consciousness’s hard heart. The latter then simply balks at
the concession, only to break later. There is no (because there can be no) clear
sense of mediated negotiation involved; forgiveness is a grace freely proffered
and returned.
This emphasis on the peculiarly uncaused progress of the situation is I think
meant to indicate the fact that forgiveness makes an impossible demand on us:
namely, to promise to recast the significance of an event, and so, in this sense,
to change the meaning of actuality itself—to retroactively change the very narrative
we have been attending to as the context in which meaning is expressed (‘Spirit […]
is lord and master over every deed and actuality, and can cast them off, and can make
them as if they had never happened [ungeschehen machen kann].’ PhG: 360/PS: ¶667;
my emphasis).49 The specifically historical or narrative dimension of human action
had been thematically introduced in chapter 6 in the context of Greek tragedy—
where it is precisely the fateful incorrigibility of action that generates the dramatic
conflict. (As Hegel quotes Antigone: ‘because we suffer we acknowledge that we
err’ [PhG: 256/PS: ¶470]50). By the time we’ve worked our way to the end of chap-
ter 6, the account of modern conscience has brought us to the opposite extreme—
the view that the meaning of our responsibility cannot even be put into words, so
that there is no context of shared acts left to speak of. The renunciation of this pos-
ition through forgiveness is marked, in turn, not by a denial of what has been the
case—Hegel says that the Conscientious Agent’s request to be forgiven is not a
form of abasement or wishful thinking—but by a new form of self-understanding

15
 What Is Novel

that enlarges our view of what we are answerable for as agents, and what we are able
to say to each other about it (PhG: 359/PS: ¶666).51
The Conscientious Agent’s gesture is therefore presented as a new insight into
the identity underlying agents’ apparently irreconcilable differences. What we have
done or failed to do are inexorable facts; their history cannot be retracted from our
experience. Hegel’s description of forgiveness, on the other hand, permits us to
become better readers of that history by including what we cannot know about
ourselves (and therefore about others) in our description of what has in fact
been. What’s done is done, but the possibility of forgiveness is necessary for under-
standing the full sense of it, for healing the break between agent and the public
meaning of the deed into a whole. As Hegel puts it: ‘the wounds of spirit heal,
and leave no scars behind’ (PhG: 360/PS: ¶669). It is important, therefore, that
Hegel’s account of this moment borrow so clearly from the novel: the novel
is the act of imaginative projection that best expresses what is taking place in
forgiveness. It brings our inner life to light.
This is then what I mean by the ‘performative’ role that forgiveness plays here:
the act of freely extending a forgiveness that, precisely by acknowledging that we
cannot fully fathom each other’s motives (and so foregoing a bad picture of
certainty about their mental states), thereby absolves us from our own privacy.
We are asked to know that there can be no real first person plural without this ges-
ture, and that forgiveness must entail a use of speech that is more than a matter of
words. It is also for this reason, however, that Hegel is using what is novelesque in
the description as a way of showing the limitations of human art and practice, or at
least the way in which they must point beyond themselves to the next (though not,
of course, the final) chapter of the account. He therefore identifies forgiveness as
constitutive of a higher form of community, the religious community. ‘The recon-
ciling Yea, in which the two I’s let go their antithetical existence […] it is God man-
ifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge’
(PhG: 362/PS: ¶671). At this decisive moment of recognition, the novel gives way
to the Book.
All of this raises the wider application that I take this performative notion of
forgiveness to have throughout the Phenomenology—what I have called the ‘logical’
sense above, and which I will only touch on only briefly. It is plain that language is
being asked to perform an unusual task in the Phenomenology, when from the begin-
ning of the Preface Hegel insists that all philosophical prefacing is no better than
issuing promissory notes, even as he spends fifty pages seeming to do just that; or
when he criticizes the hypostatizing failures of ordinary predication, even as he
feels free to say that ‘The True is the whole’ (PhG: 19/PS: ¶20) or ‘Substance is
essentially Subject’ (PhG: 22/PS: ¶25). Many commentators have called attention
to the paradoxical character of these sentences.52 It is not just that the very notion
of beginning to philosophize is being called into question. More drastically, the
16
 Antón Barba-Kay

Preface underlines one of the critical contentions of Hegel’s holism, namely, that
no single proposition can be self-evidently and self-sufficiently true, because
each is only fully corroborated by its systematic relationship to all the others
(‘the circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only at the end’ PhG:
429/PS: ¶802). The Preface itself has the character of a palinode, by introducing
a system whose parts can only each be fully present in the determinate absence
of all the others, and which can only get started once it has ended.
With some exceptions (PhG: 12/PS: ¶7), it is true Hegel does not methodic-
ally use the terms ‘confession’ or ‘forgiveness’ to describe the overcoming of these
paradoxical features of philosophical speech throughout. On the other hand, the
final chapter does place extraordinary weight on the transition between chapters
6 and 7 as a culmination of the ‘pure self-recognition in absolute otherness’ that
he had called the ground of Science from the outset (PhG: 22/PS: ¶26). In his
recapitulation of the argument, Hegel singles the passage out as the place in the
Phenomenology in which knowledge of the individual self achieves a form of univer-
sality that adumbrates the absolute knowledge with which the book concludes
(PhG: 425–27/PS: ¶¶793–96). The ‘I am so’ (Ich bin’s) that had marked the moment
of confession earlier is thus reinterpreted as the ultimate realization that ‘it is “I”
[…] which is no less immediately a mediated or sublated universal “I”’ (PhG: 428/
PS: ¶799; translation modified). Forgiveness is thus analysed as the specific
acknowledgment that one is able to recognize oneself in others—to bridge the lim-
itations of its merely private, Romantic intelligibility—precisely by realizing the
inadequacy of being able to fully account and respond to them as atomic agents
within a framework reducible to the letter of social practices and legal institutions.53
The realization is not a matter of rhapsodic ineffability, so much as a shift in key to
the mode of knowledge that Hegel calls ‘Absolute’—Spirit’s achieved recognition
of itself as also comprehending its other.54 It is only by acknowledging its dialectical
dependence on this logical whole—by acknowledging the inherent limitations of
discursive speech as discursive—that finite speech thus becomes adequate to the
responsibility of speaking the unconditional truth.
This extension of the meaning of novelesque forgiveness is logical, therefore,
not only because we are constantly being asked to recognize the ways in which con-
sciousness is always meaning something more than it had meant to mean, and not
only because of the way we gradually brought to see that the ‘for itself ’ view and
the ‘for us’ view are one and the same all along, but because the Phenomenology
confronts us throughout with the insufficiencies of discursive speech precisely
as a means of acknowledging what it is (again: specifically) that we cannot say.
Forgiveness in this ‘logical’ sense thus means being aware of the limitations of
propositional, discursive predication as such, even as one acknowledges that we
cannot but continue to make use of such predication in order to make ourselves
understood.55 This ‘unsaying’—the necessary revocation of what is said in order
17
 What Is Novel

to say it—therefore adds an additional aspectual power to the structure of

consciousness that is unfolded for us throughout, even as it also, in reconciling
ourselves to ourselves and ourselves to others, rounds off the narrative and theat-
rical aspects of consciousness I’ve noted. Just as saying something may be a way of
not saying it, so it is that not being able to say something turns out to be a way
of saying that thing. Or rather, as I’ve noted, it can turn out so if we forgive the
necessary inadequacy of discursive speech to say what is most intelligible to us
about human community—as when someone tells us that they are rendered
speechless, or that their sorrow is inexpressible, or that what we are after is
‘I that is we; and we that is I’.

V. The novel truth

Hegel has maddeningly little to say about novels as such in his Berlin Lectures on Fine
Arts (and most of what he does say is not by way of commendation).56 Consciously
or not, however, the Phenomenology is a work that, as I have tried to argue, is patently
working within the sceptical idiom that marks modern literature, even as it tasks
itself with using that idiom to overcome it. The three features that I have singled
out here—the narrative, the theatrical and the forgiving—are, I have argued, pos-
sibilities internal to that idiom, and Hegel activates them to express the philosoph-
ical matter of his account. My claim has not been that the mode of this expression
contains some additional content not otherwise discursively available to us (or at
odds with standard descriptions of what is going on in the argument). In this
sense, my conclusion is prosaic: that the Phenomenology’s form is in keeping with
some of its substantive commitments. But to separate some fixed content from
its specific expression would be, by Hegel’s own lights, misguided and mislead-
ing—and the Phenomenology’s formal peculiarities are such as to at least invite the
question of what Hegel was up to when he undertook to write such a book, and
whether and how its explicit philosophical claims are consonant with (rather
than incidental to) the kind of narrative they conform. In this sense, the
Phenomenology’s form does, I have argued, figure the content.
If the form of the novel was born of modern scepticism, this is itself an
expression of its deeper promise. It is scepticism’s insight that the truth is not
something that can impose itself on us, but something that we are free to affirm.
But where the effect of that freedom is isolating in Descartes’s soliloquy and
Schlegel’s heart to heart confessions, the Phenomenology has the ambition of
responding to this isolation through an invocation of collective conviction, it is a
kind of myth by which we will again be able to say ‘we’ and be bound to mean
it. Hegel claimed in a letter written around the time of the Phenomenology’s compos-
ition that the ‘novel of the [French] Revolution’ was to be completed by German
18
 Antón Barba-Kay

philosophy.57 If the theme of the novel is ‘transcendental homelessness’, Hegel has

given us a city in speech that must continue to affirm its fallibility in order to make
our common meanings live again.

Antón Barba-Kay
The Catholic University of America, USA
barbakay@cua.edu

Notes

1
Descartes 1984: 113 (cf. 92).
2
Descartes 1984: 8.
3
For which, see esp. Pöggeler 1973 and Förster 2012.
4
Quoted by Findlay in his forward, PS: v.
5
See Jean Paul’s letter to Jacobi from 6/9/1807: #130 in Nicolin 1970. I am grateful to Stephen
Houlgate for this reference.
6
Schelling 2002: 63 (and see the note on 95).
7
Lauer 1993: 7; Solomon 1983: xi.
8
Wallace is quoted by Loewenberg 1965: ix; Loewenberg’s own statement is then on xi.
9
Bloch 1952: 15; Gadamer 1976: 31–33.
10
PS: xiii.
11
This last comment (quoted by Vater in Schelling 1984: 81) is not specifically aimed at the
Phenomenology.
12
For a helpful discussion of the history of thinking of the Phenomenology as literature, see Smith
1988: 5–6. See too Verene 1985 (esp. x, 24, 65, 112–13); Lauer 1984; Dove 1970 (esp. 626–27);
and McCumber 1993 (esp. 33–58).
13
While a number of articles have attended to particular features of Hegel’s narrative approach
in the Phenomenology—I mention them in subsequent notes here—I have nowhere found a the-
matic treatment focusing on the genre of the Phenomenology as such. The alternative to my main
claim is therefore tacit, rather than express: the de facto position the Phenomenology should be read
as advancing a series of discursive, propositional claims independently of its rhetorical form.
14
See Hölderlin 2009: 342.
15
See Speight 2001: 16–17.
16
In Bernstein 2003: 240.
17
See Förster 2012: 307–8.
18
Speight 2001.
19
This is also well said by Speight 2010: 242.
20
Abbreviations used for texts by Hegel:
GW = Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hamburg:

19
 What Is Novel

Meiner, 1968–.
PhG = Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. W. Bonsiepen and R. Heede. GW IX.
PS = Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
21
Engels 1941: 14.
22
Cf. PhG: 44, 69, 79–80/PS: ¶¶63, 109–10, 130–31 (respectively), etc. Houlgate (forthcoming)
develops the parallel between the Phenomenology and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister in this regard.
23
Cf. Förster 2012: 358–62.
24
Cf. Herman, Jahn and Ryan 2005: 42.
25
And cf. PhG: 35/PS: ¶48. These themes are worked out in Pippin 2011 (cf. esp. 110) and
McCumber 1993 (esp. 91).
26
Bernstein 2003: 293–94; cf. too Booth 1983: 34.
27
Lukács 1971: 41.
28
Cf. Pavel 2015: 152–66.
29
Manent 2014: 122; cf. Berger 2001: 253: ‘The reason why the novel is so important is that the
novel asks questions which no other literary form can ask: questions about the individual work-
ing on his own destiny…And it poses these questions in a very private way. The novelist’s voice
functions like an inner voice’.
30
See, e.g., Kant 2000: 32, 155, 157, 210; Kant 2007: 294, 314; and Schlegel in Bernstein 2003:
288. Cf. too Arendt 1998: 39; Pavel 2015: 164–65; Rutter 2010: 258.
31
Bernstein 2003: 293.
32
See Benjamin 2007: 87, 100.
33
See bereichern at PhG: 107, 429/PS: ¶¶173, 801.
34
See esp. Lukács 1969: 176–207; and Bloch 1961.
35
See Lukács 1969: 176; and Bloch 1961: 170.
36
See Booth 1983: 64, 151–60 and Phelan and Rabinowitz in Herman et al. 2012: 29–38.
37
Dove 1970 develops this point well (25–29); cf. too Loewenberg 1965: 17–21.
38
For masking/unmasking, see: PhG: 176, 356–57, 397–98/PS: ¶¶318, 661–63, 742–44; for
auftreten and hervortreten, see: PhG: 15, 118, 199, 209/PS: ¶¶12, 199, 361, 383, etc.
39
The language of this description—in terms of norms and commitments—is borrowed from
Pippin 1989: 147; and from Pinkard 2002: esp. 225. I draw on it because it helpfully emphasizes
(for my purposes) the social inflection that consciousness acquires in chapter 4—the ‘native [ein-
heimische] realm of truth’ (PhG: 103/PS: ¶167)—where Hegel explicitly thematizes the connec-
tion between any possible judgment and the social practices and institutions that underwrite
it. But the same point might be made more neutrally and without these authors’ apparatus.
The two powers or aspects I mean are already fully present in Hegel’s description of experience
as such from the Introduction: ‘Consciousness knows something; this object is the essence or the
in-itself; but it is also for consciousness the in-itself. This is where the ambiguity of this truth
enters’ (PhG: 60/PS: ¶86).
40
See Kant 2012: 9, 22.
41
See Richardson 2006: 37–60.
42
Cf. Abbott 2002: 70–71; as well as McKeon 2002: 95; and Phelan 2007: 7–14.

20
 Antón Barba-Kay

43
See Pippin 1997: 12–16; and Speight 2001: 76–93.
44
For this connection, see McKeon 2002: 47–52, 114–28; and Pavel 2015: 119–22.
45
I am following Moyar 2011: 164.
46
For ‘beautiful soul’ see PhG: 354–55, 360/PS: ¶¶658, 668.
47
See Speight 2001: 94–102 (esp. 97–98), for a full statement of the scholarly positions
advanced in this connection.
48
Lucinde’s subtitle is ‘Confessions of a Blunderer’, while confession is presented as constitutive
of Julius’ religion of love (cf. Schlegel 1971: 33, 72). See Schlegel’s remarks on confession in his
‘Letter about the Novel’ (Bernstein 2003: 288, 294–95)—he then mentions Rousseau’s
Confessions (and one thinks of the ‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul’ within Wilhelm Meister).
49
For a very helpful description of the world-historical significance of the notion of forgiveness
as an aspect of the analysis of action, see Arendt 1998: 236–43.
50
See Speight 2001: 53–65.
51
Speight 2006: 29: ‘only consciences may forgive, but it is the act of forgiveness that enables their
judgments’.
52
See Sallis 1977: esp. 130–40; Loewenberg 1965: 2–7; Lauer 1993: 9; Dove 1970: 24–35; Cook
1973: 146–67; Houlgate 1986: 141–50.
53
See Smith 1991: 17–56, 122–31; as well as Moyar 2011: 143–72.
54
Cf. McCumber 1993: 303 and 323.
55
Hegel’s remarks to §82 of the Encyclopedia are of special interest in this connection (see §88 as
well).
56
See Rutter 2010: 254–65.
57
See Pinkard 2001: 229.

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