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 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 tendencies 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 solitude. 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 experience 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 surprise no one. Any casual reader fetches up on its bewildering style, its alternations of perspective and voice, and its presumption that we are following the episodes 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,Footnote 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.Footnote 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 ‘clarity, style, freedom, and strength’,Footnote ⁵ while Schelling says that it is full of barbarisms, suggesting that Hegel wears ‘a scientific crown of thorns, through which he presents himself as the truly tormented ecce homo of the people’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 trappings’.Footnote 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,Footnote ⁹ and Findlay calls Hegel ‘a writer of literary genius’, comparable to Shakespeare, Rimbaud and Mallarmé.Footnote ¹⁰ Jacobi took a dimmer view: ‘If only that damned Hegel wrote better!’Footnote 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 clarifying 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 discussions 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.Footnote ¹² But such comparisons 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 as connected to purposeful literary decisions, decisions in turn exhibiting philosophical claims about the new form of modern self-understanding that the argument is concerned with scrutinizing and advancing.Footnote 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 relation 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 ambitious 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 attributed to Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling—which makes the case that concepts must be exhibited within an aesthetic form if they are to command widespread adherence, and that philosophy must develop a new rational mythology to do so.Footnote 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 dialogue, 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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 content Footnote ¹⁷), there is a good deal of discussion of works of literature within the book itself—discussion connecting forms of 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 contemporary Romantic novels in the Phenomenology, as not simply illustrative or symbolic, but as exemplary of Hegel's account of action.Footnote 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 demonstrate how it is that in literature, as in practice, isolating one set of interpretive considerations cannot but do violence to our understanding of the whole: literature is as synthetic as human deeds, and is not exhausted by formalized explanatory analyses of agency.Footnote 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 protagonist, ‘Consciousness’, gradually comes to greater insight through a series of idealized tableaux, a reconstruction of meaningful philosophical failures that Hegel compares 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).Footnote ²⁰ The story as a whole is intended at once as an embryology and palaeontology of modern consciousness (as Engels put itFootnote ²¹)—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 resolution. 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 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 different ‘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 inadequate 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.Footnote 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 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, underlying set of principles, but rather, to mean and manifest them by virtue of their concrete development.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 necessary 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 movement from bud to flower to fruit to seed to sapling as the mutually defining moments we call tree (PhG: 10/PS: ¶2).Footnote 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 storytelling 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 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.Footnote ²⁶

One might nonetheless venture a few remarks by way of cautious generalization. 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 surrounding world. In Lukács's phrase, the novel is an expression of ‘transcendental homelessness’.Footnote 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 theological 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 vulnerabilities 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:Footnote 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.Footnote ³²

Whether or not this sketch is right in all particulars, it is clear that the novelesque 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 individuality, 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 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 experience 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 idealized 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,Footnote ³³ a personification of a vision to contain all visions. The Phenomenology has, for similar reasons, been compared to Faust, its close contemporary.Footnote ³⁴ The narrative unfolding of experience depends on reflection on one point of view that is underway toward wisdom.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 consciousness’ (PhG: 61/PS: ¶87).Footnote 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 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 proceedings. 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 passages 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.Footnote 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 fundamentally 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 experience. (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.Footnote 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 reasons is only coherent when it is understood to be implicated within a larger historical 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 discursive mind must also mean being an embodied, social self is defended in a number 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 significance. 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 display 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 indivisibility 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 occasional mention of an impartial spectator as a way of appealing to an idealized, socially situated view of our own role.Footnote ⁴⁰ It therefore serves to give a communal location to the meaning of one's own action, but also, accordingly, serves as a condition 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.Footnote 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 novelesque about this is the way in which both positions are integrated into a single 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 complementary within one single narrative.Footnote ⁴² One might sum up what is modern about this form of cinematic, indirect free discourse by saying that, since it no longer primarily 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, consciousness 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.Footnote 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 allowing 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.Footnote 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 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 cumulative, 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 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.Footnote 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 circumstance) 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 generalFootnote ⁴⁶—was in circulation 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 thematic 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.Footnote 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 novelistic 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.Footnote 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 effect, by showing that the explicit acknowledgment of what we cannot communicate 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 figures 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).Footnote 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]Footnote ⁵⁰). By the time we've worked our way to the end of chapter 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 position 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 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).Footnote 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 understanding 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 gesture, 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 reconciling Yea, in which the two I's let go their antithetical existence […] it is God manifested 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 beginning 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.Footnote ⁵² It is not just that the very notion of beginning to philosophize is being called into question. More drastically, the 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 methodically 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 universality 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 limitations 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 consciousness 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.Footnote ⁵⁵ This ‘unsaying’—the necessary revocation of what is said in order 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 theatrical 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).Footnote 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, possibilities internal to that idiom, and Hegel activates them to express the philosophical 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 misleading—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 composition that the ‘novel of the [French] Revolution’ was to be completed by German philosophy.Footnote 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.