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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
1 Typical is the collection of pieces in Hegel's Philosophy of Action (Atlantic Highlands, 1983)Google Scholar, excepting an essay by Charles Taylor (see below). See also Quante's, Michael excellent Hegels Begriff der Handlung (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1993)Google Scholar. Wiehl, Reiner, “Über den Handlungsbegriff als Kategorie der Hegelschen Ästhetik,” Hegel-Studien 6 1969)Google Scholar, is more concerned with the logic of Hegel's aesthetic system. Much closer to the lines of the current book is Jurist's, Eliot recent Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: philosophy, culture, and agency (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chapters 5-9.
2 Habermas, Jürgen, “Labor and interaction: remarks on Hegel's Jena Philosophy of Mind ,” chapter 4 of Theory and Practice (Boston, 1973)Google Scholar. Habermas rejects what he sees as Hegel's eventual resort to a model of self-reflexion in Absolute Knowing; he prefers the earlier dynamic mix of labour and interaction, each symbolically mediated (i.e. by communication). The mutual implicature of action and language in the Phenomenology is something I'll come back to.
3 Besides H.S. Harris's commentary, see Falke, G.-H. H., Begriffne Geschichte (Berlin, 1996)Google Scholar, which Speight praises especially for its discussion of the Romantic subtext.
4 See Taylor's “Hegel and the philosophy of action” in Hegel's Philosophy of Action, but also his “Inwardness and the culture of modernity” in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)Google Scholar.
5 The Philosophy of Right does take up the ‘causing’ of events, and the relation of attribution of responsibility. Hegel also (§115 ff.) distinguishes between ‘action’ (Handlung) and ‘deed’ (Tat). See Quante, pp. 142-45, who argues that the terms capture different ways in which the same set of events may be described, the one emphasizing content (the realizing of agent's intentions), the other the formal quality of my own free willing. Whatever the merits of this particular interpretation of Handlung/Tat, it does not hold for the Phenomenology, which renders the first as virtual functioning, the second as actual instance (see below).
6 Davidson speaks of beliefs and desires, whereas Brandom prefers talk of commitments and entitlements. “An act is intentional if it is […] the acknowledgment of a prior commitment,” Brandom, writes (Making Explicit, p. 254)Google Scholar. But one can still speak causally of how intentions might elicit suitable performances.
7 Speight takes these terms as roughly equivalent, which needs explication. ‘Expressivism’ comes from Taylor (in turn from Isaiah Berlin), who posits a dialectic between the more traditional drive for self-control and a more modern turn inwards in the face of external loss of meaning. Expressivism renders relations between self and other both authentic and challenging (or ‘improbable,’ as Luhmann would say).
8 See pp. 26-27. Here and elsewhere Speight impresses the reader not just with his comprehensive knowledge of the scholarship on Hegel's possible allusions but also with his economical presentation of it.
9 So Hyppolite argues, though I think a better case could be made for the new discipline of political economy, as Marx assumed: ‘die Sache selbst’ is the rational ‘interest’ putatively served by disparate private passions.
10 See Phenomenology §357. All that paragraph claims is that a striving for ethical unity is the “form” nearer our times than the fall from such unity; following ‘Observing Reason’ it is clear that the rationality of the world is something to be fashioned rather than found. Nothing is said about a literary or romantic form, though the connexion is at least plausible.
11 Steiner, George, Antigones (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar; Schulte, Michael, Die “Tragödie im Sittlichen”: Zur Dramentheorie Hegels (Munich, 1992)Google Scholar. My own view is that the subtlety in the later approach remains implicit and requires work to extract; the interpreter must look beyond the lecture format and its tendency undialectically to separate form and content.
12 A small point: p. 68 cites Marx's well-known quip about Hegel on repetition in history, forgetting that the first time it was as tragedy, the second as farce (i.e. comedy), but a note expresses doubt as to whether Hegel ever said it. Speight argues that this section of the Phenomenology would support taking action as comic (if not farcical), which is no doubt so. But Marx surely refers to Hegel's Philosophy of World-History, and the end of the Roman republic, when people need reminding of the need for a Caesar. Hegel goes on: “So ist Napoleon zweimal unterlegen, und zweimal vertrieb man die Bourbonen. Durch die Wiederholung wird das, was im Anfang nur als zufällig und möglich erschien, zu einem Wirklichen und Bestätigten” — Werke 12 (Frankfurt, 1970), p. 380 Google Scholar. That is supported by the context of Marx's allusion, namely, the Roman virtue impersonated by French revolutionaries and by Louis Napoleon.
13 This assumes — as perhaps Hegel, or at least his narrative voice, does — that Diderot was himself the philosophe who spoke for the Enlightenment ‘insight’ rather than the ironic theorist of play-acting who could see through Rousseau's gestures at transparency. See Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1992), pp. 143ff.Google Scholar, for this alternative view. I might add that the preceding section dealt with the court of Louis XIV, which culminated in a linguistic performative, “L'État c'est moi,” indeed, the self as utterance; Diderot's dialogue must in consequence be a self-conscious performative. Here as elsewhere, Speight underplays the importance of language in and as action.
14 Absorption and Theatricality: painting and beholder in the age of Diderot (Berkeley, 1980)Google Scholar. Fried has recently substituted the more neutral term ‘address’ for ‘theatricality’, as in his 2002 Mellon Lectures on Caravaggio.
15 Rosenkranz suggests that the young Hegel discussed the novel with friends, there is also a brief reference in a Berne fragment.
16 I admit I am pushing things, since the author doesn't actually say that Jacobi is implicated in his fiction and would, so to speak, forgive his stand-in, Woldemar. But he does cite Giovanni's, George di edition of Jacobi — The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill” (Montreal, 1994)Google Scholar — where di Giovanni perceptively discusses the relation between author and character, alongside Hegel's sympathetic 1817 criticism of Jacobi (to which Jacobi responded, “He may well be right”). The issue between the two concerns how one might integrate, without a “leap”, instinctive feeling and intellectual reflexion, sympathy and judgement.
17 “Conscience and transgression: the persistence of misrecognition,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 29 (1994), 55–70, at 66Google Scholar. Cf. his “Confession and forgiveness: Hegel's poetics of action,” Beyond Representation: philosophy and poetic imagination, ed. Eldridge, Richard (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 34–65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The model harks back to Hegel's Frankfurt essay on the ‘fate’ of Christianity, in which Christ figures as a ‘beautiful soul’.
18 As Bender, John does in his edition of Tom Jones (Oxford, 199 ) pp. xx–xxiii Google Scholar.
19 “The beautiful soul and the language of forgiveness,” in Metaphysik der praktischen Welt: Perspektiven im Anschluss an Hegel und Heidegger, hg. Grossmann & Jamme (Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 239-45, at p. 242 Google Scholar — citing Bernstein's analysis.
20 “Conscience…” 66-67, and “Confession…” pp. 40, 51, 6263.
21 Szondi, Peter, Versuch überdas Tragische (Frankfurt, 1961) p. 52ff.Google Scholar
22 Menke, Christoph, Die Tragödie im Sittlichen: Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Frankfurt, 1996)Google Scholar.
23 Pippin, Robert, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar. Pippin counts as James's great theme the transformation of modern life into universal dependency, and a correlative struggle to attain individual freedom. The tension between subjective integrity and openness to others — that is, the dialectic of forgiveness — strikes me as central to this.
24 Oneself as Another (1990; Chicago, 1992), pp. 247–49Google Scholar. Oddly, , Hegel does comment (Phenomenology, p. 343)Google Scholar that ethical collision is no mere “Trauerspiel’ of passion vs. duty, nor a comedy of opposed duties, but a clash of absolutes (even to call them ‘norms’ or ‘values’ would be to relativize them in a modern way). He thereby emphasizes consciousness' inability to see its action whole.
25 Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche, pp. 87-91.
26 Derrida, Jacques, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York, 2001)Google Scholar. Of Hegel — the theorist of reconciliation — Derrida says only that for him all is forgivable save a crime against spirit itself, i.e. against the reconciling power of forgiveness, alluding to Hegel's early ideas on fate and life. Derrida draws on the work of Jankélevitch, asking how one might come to terms with Nazi crimes against humanity. But he seems happy to remain at the level of paradox and hyperbole: “I remain ‘torn’ […]” — between asserting a right to forgive and questioning his right even to that.