Allen Speight’s Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency can be approached as a rigorous attempt to recover the inner architecture of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by taking at face value what many readers have treated as merely ornamental: Hegel’s insistent, even obstinate, recourse to literature at decisive junctures of the argument. The wager is precise yet far-reaching. If the Phenomenology is not only a sequence of logical “shapes” but also a carefully staged pedagogical itinerary in which consciousness learns to recognize itself as an agent within a space of reasons, then the sudden appearance of tragedy, comedy, and the Romantic novel is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the dialectical medium through which Hegel renders visible three constitutive moments of modern agency—retrospectivity, theatricality, and forgiveness. Speight’s book reconstructs this claim by charting the work’s conspicuous “literary turn” from Reason to Spirit, reading the interlaced citations and allusions (Antigone; Rameau’s nephew; Woldemar; Faust; Don Quixote; Karl Moor) as the narrative scaffolding that supports Hegel’s re-founding of practical philosophy after Kant. In doing so, Speight advances a “corrigibilist” picture of action: intention and deed are not separable givens but mutually interpretive moments whose meaning is grasped only retrospectively, socially, and—at the limit—reconciliatively.
Already in his introduction Speight situates Hegel’s project within a post-Kantian horizon that refuses the “myth of the Given.” The point is not merely epistemological. The same critique permeates Hegel’s theory of action: if there are no incorrigible, self-authenticating mental givens, then there can be no simple appeal to an inner intention that would fix the meaning of a deed once for all. On this view, agency entails an irreducible retrospectivity (how an act is taken up in and through its outcome and uptake), a constitutive theatricality (how acting is always situated within public roles, recognitive expectations, and scenes of mutual address), and a fragile possibility of forgiveness (how the community re-articulates meaning when intention and actuality conflict). These three determinations require narrative forms that can display, rather than merely state, the way meaning is made and revised; hence Hegel’s reliance on the literature of tragedy, comedy, and the Romantic novel as “privileged access” to the very grammar of action.
The exemplary hinge in Hegel’s book—Speight’s point of departure—is the crux between Observing Reason and the “actualization” of reason in action. Here Hegel’s text executes a sharp pivot: from the phrenologist’s skull (the fantasy of reading spirit off a bone) to Hamlet’s recollection of Yorick (the reminder that what matters in agency is not the inert substrate but the deed that once animated it), and then abruptly to Goethe’s Faust. This interlude, at once philological and programmatic, marks the leave-taking from Reason’s fixation on objects toward a scene in which subjectivity must test itself by acting. It is no accident that Hegel reaches for the Faustian moment; he thereby frames actuation as a dangerous longing for immediacy—pleasure, mastery, the law of the heart—whose tragic entanglements open the pathway to Spirit. Speight shows that this is not an incidental embellishment but the inaugural gesture of a sustained “literary turn” that continues through Spirit and is retrospectively thematized in Religion.
Speight reconstructs the sequence. Hegel first juxtaposes the Hamlet/Yorick scene with phrenology to expose the naiveté of an observational science that expects to see agency in a thing rather than to recollect it in a deed’s history; then he inserts and even slightly reshapes Mephistopheles’ lines, thus letting Faust dramatize the will’s impatience with mediation (“It despises intellect and science… It has given itself to the devil / And must perish”), and only thereafter brings forward Schiller’s Karl Moor—the “law of the heart”—and the “knight of virtue,” a quixotic figure whose comic exertions collapse against “the way of the world.” The three figures form a composite dramaturgy: tragic momentum (Faust and Moor), comic reflexivity (the knight’s mirror-fight), transition to Spirit. The plot is not accidental; it is the itinerary through which Hegel dislodges voluntarist pictures of action and forces the reader to confront the dialectic of intention and actuality.
In Spirit, the genres are not illustrative add-ons but the very grammar of the exposition. When Hegel turns to Sophocles’ Antigone, he is not simply venerating Greece; he is opening the horizon within which action becomes an object of recollection and judgment. Antigone’s deed, already decided before the curtain rises, renders transparent the retrospective logic of justification: the meaning of what she does is constituted in the unfolding collision of ethical claims, not in an inward report available prior to action. For Speight, this “breaking open” of action through the tragic form is deliberate: the spectator sees ethical substance as a totality only when the deed has set its consequences in motion, and the actor herself is re-situated within that retrospectively disclosed whole. Tragedy thus names the first, necessary disenchantment of immediacy—an exposure of Handlung as a stepping-forth that can be grasped as mine only through its public fate.
But tragedy alone would freeze the agent in the dignity of necessity; the Phenomenology proceeds by complication. The next movement—culture—requires a genre that can exhibit the duplicity, play, and role-consciousness of a world in which selves make and unmake themselves through the gaze of others. Here Hegel draws, with deliberate anachronism, on Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (mediated by Goethe’s translation). Speight is precise: Rameau is not a naturalist’s bundle of drives but an egological virtuoso of social positioning; his pantomimes, masks, and “musical” modulations of tone reveal that, in an advanced world of culture, no one simply is what he is except as he is taken to be that by others. Theatricality does not trivialize action; it articulates the recognitive conditions under which intentions are legible at all. Hegel’s deployment of Rameau does not praise duplicity; it discloses that self-knowledge, and so agency, is mediated by spectatorship and scene—by the anonymous chatter, the shifting moi/lui interchange, the ceaseless “playing with masks” that shows we inhabit not a moral interiority sealed off from the world but a discursive nexus where we learn what we meant by what we did.
If tragedy clarifies the retrospective constitution of meaning and comedy clarifies the social mediation of agency, the Romantic novel addresses the crisis that ensues when inwardness, seeking purity, recoils from the risks of acting. Hegel’s “beautiful soul” is frequently read through Rousseau or through the self-reflexive fragments of early German Romanticism; Speight argues, more stringently, that the narrative solution Hegel requires can be found neither in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse nor in Schlegel’s ironic Lucinde alone, but in the peculiar confessional-reconciliatory architecture of Jacobi’s Woldemar. The choice is pointed. Jacobi’s novel dramatizes the hardening of the heart under the pressure of wounded conscience and the possibility of its softening through confession and forgiveness; it stages a recognitive language that neither retreat into purity (beautiful withdrawal) nor unmasking irony can achieve. The denouement—“Judge not!” facing “Trust love. It takes all, but gives all.”—is not a sentimental afterthought; it is an attempt to articulate the mutual renunciation by agent and judge without which modern ethical agency cannot be held together. For Hegel, Speight contends, this narrativization of forgiveness is the indispensable third moment: the site where Spirit recognizes itself in and as the reconciliation of conflicting claims, not by erasing retrospectivity and theatricality but by preserving them in a higher unity.
Speight’s most original move lies in knitting these genre-moments to the Phenomenology’s notorious transition problem. Read from Reason’s frustrated observational stance, the sudden onset of literary figures can seem arbitrary; read through the structure of agency, the sequence is methodical. The phrenologist’s skull is countered by Hamlet’s recollection; the dead “observables” give way to the living deed urged on by Mephistopheles’ goad; tragic collisions expose the insufficiency of subjective certainty, pushing consciousness into the theater of social roles; and the impasse of conscience is resolved not by logical deduction but by a narrative act—confession, acknowledgment, pardon—that rebinds agents to their world. Tragedy, comedy, novel: these are not genres imposed from without but the internal phenomenology of practical self-understanding.
The stakes, as Speight keeps insisting, are methodological. Hegel’s appeal to literature is not a capitulation to edifying storytelling; it follows from the very corrigibilist structure of the Phenomenology’s epistemology. If knowledge claims are to be treated as appearances whose truth emerges through self-critique and transformation, then the grammar of action—how intentions become explicit in consequences, how selves are formed through recognition, how norms are actual only in practice—cannot be presented adequately in apodictic propositions. It requires a narrative that makes the implicit explicit by showing a deed into its outcome and a self into its public standing. In this sense, Speight argues, the Phenomenology is “like” a Bildungsroman without being one: its plot is not the education of a character but the self-education of Spirit, achieved by staging—under tragic, comic, and novelistic lights—the retrospective, theatrical, and reconciliative constitution of agency.
Consider Speight’s reading of the Faustian onset of active reason. The Faust-agent, driven toward immediacy, first figures the naiveté of trying to bypass mediation—pleasure as deed-making. Yet precisely here the text reveals the tragic grammar: the deed’s meaning exceeds the agent’s self-description, and necessity enters. Karl Moor’s law-of-the-heart heightens this lesson by exposing the conflict between inward conviction and ethical substance; the “knight of virtue,” in turn, displays the comic dissonance of noble intent in an unaccommodating world. The cumulative force of these scenes is to rupture any pretense that intention alone can justify action; instead, justification is distributed across a temporally extended, socially mediated process in which agents learn what they willed by owning what they did.
On this background, Antigone functions not as a museum piece but as the exemplary case of retrospective intelligibility. Antigone’s resolve is immediate, but the meaning of her act is not; it unfolds through the conflict between kinship and public law, revealing an ethical totality that neither side could monopolize. Speight reads Hegel as extracting from this tragic scene the very form of justificatory practice: only by recollecting a deed within the whole to which it belongs—its institutions, its recognitive expectations, its unforeseen consequences—does an agent understand herself as author. That is why tragedy must come first: it “opens” action by destroying the illusion of immediacy while preserving the pathos of responsibility.
Yet tragedy would paralyze without comedy’s reflex. In Rameau’s world the self is a virtuoso of roles; motivation is not decoded by peering inward but by analyzing the circuits of esteem, dependency, and power in which desire is staged. Hegel’s often-noted anonymity in citing Diderot—quotation marks without attribution, ventriloquism of “chatter”—is faithful to the phenomenon: the voice of culture is impersonal and performative. Speight emphasizes that Hegel’s aim is not cynicism but demystification: theatricality is not a corruption of agency but its medium in a socially articulated world. Only by acknowledging that medium can philosophy “overcome” theatricality—not by abolishing performance but by integrating it into a recognitive order where roles are answerable to reasons.
The Romantic novel, in Speight’s account, finally provides the indispensable language for reconciling retrospectivity and theatricality: the practice of forgiveness. Neither law’s impartiality nor conscience’s purity suffices when intention and actuality come apart; what is required is a reciprocal renunciation—judge and agent each withdrawing a unilateral claim—in which the community acknowledges the interpretive nature of action. Jacobi’s Woldemar is provocatively chosen for this task. Despite Hegel’s well-known polemics against Jacobi’s philosophy of immediacy, Speight shows that Hegel selectively appropriates the novel’s praxis: its dramatization of confession, the softening of the “hard heart,” the mutuality of pardon, and the emblematic pairing of “Judge not!” with “Trust love,” all of which sketch a language adequate to modern ethical life. In Speight’s reconstruction, this is not sentiment but method: forgiveness is the dialectical operation by which Spirit preserves the truth of tragic retrospectivity and comic theatricality within a higher form of agency capable of self-binding without self-righteousness.
This triadic mapping reverberates outward. Speight suggests that the literary arc from tragedy to comedy to novel in the Phenomenology anticipates the systematic shift from the analysis of consciousness to the institutions of ethical life that Hegel later articulates in the Philosophy of Right. Retrospectivity reappears as the internal connection between will and deed—no “incorrigible” volition prior to actualization; theatricality returns as the recognitive fabric of civil society and the state; forgiveness becomes legible as a modern practice of reconciliation embedded in law and custom rather than an edifying supplement. Thus the Phenomenology’s literary itinerary is neither abandoned nor superseded; it is “taken up” as the rational core of a theory of institutions.
Two further consequences sharpen Speight’s thesis. First, the “transition problem” from Reason to Spirit is illuminated, not dissolved. If Spirit names the realm of instituted normativity, then only a narrative that exhibits how agents come to be “in” their deeds—how they acquire Bildung sufficient to occupy roles, answer to reasons, and accept reconciliation—can motivate the turn. In this sense, literature is not a detour but the shortest path to Spirit: it supplies the forms in which the self-legislation of norms is legible as lived. Second, the much-debated end of art theme in the Aesthetics receives a clarified status. On Speight’s reading, the Phenomenology already relies on art’s genres to make practical reason explicit; but because that explication must be recollected and conceptually grasped, the narrative is always in the service of a science that knows what the story shows. The point is not that art becomes useless, but that philosophy must cultivate an internally literary mode at the level of method even as it claims conceptual primacy.
Speight’s handling of secondary debates is judicious. Against “palimpsest” readings that treat the literary materials as late additions or incoherencies, he aligns with more recent reconstructions (Pippin, Pinkard) that see Spirit’s sociality as demanded by the epistemic program itself. What Speight contributes is the granular demonstration that the book’s literary references are not sporadic ornaments but an architectonic sequence with explanatory force. The famous eruption of the Faust lines, the quasi-anonymous ventriloquizing of Rameau, the concentrated focus on Antigone, and the quiet but decisive enlistment of Woldemar together form a pattern that the Religion chapter retrospectively explains through its account of art-religion and the “recollection” of Spirit. On this view, the Phenomenology becomes legible as a work about philosophical narrative as much as it is a work in philosophical narrative.
There is, finally, a distinct lucidity in Speight’s insistence that Hegel’s “images” are not detachable exempla but internal to the labor of the concept. When Hegel closes by adapting lines from Schiller to characterize the whole as a “gallery of images,” the phrase does not signal a retreat into aestheticism; it marks the recollective structure of knowledge itself: Spirit must see again what it did, in order to know what it is. In this retrospective light the triad tragedy–comedy–novel ceases to be a taxonomy and becomes a logic of action’s self-presentation: the deed disclosed as fate, the self disclosed as role, the community disclosed as reconciliation. When read with Speight’s attention to these structures, Hegel’s literary recourses appear not as rhetorical indulgences but as the necessary phenomenological optics of a modern theory of agency.
The net effect of Speight’s book is to unsettle familiar partitions—between epistemology and ethics, literature and philosophy, individual psychology and social theory—by showing that agency is where these lines converge and blur. To describe action without retrospectivity is to fetishize intention; to describe it without theatricality is to negate recognition; to describe it without forgiveness is to deny modernity its form of reconciliation. If Hegel’s Phenomenology is to educate its reader into Spirit, it must tell a story whose scenes make those absences felt and those necessities manifest. Speight’s scholarship, concentrated on the argumentative work done by Hegel’s literary choices, gives that story back its complexity. It is not that Hegel “uses” literature to decorate a doctrine; rather, the doctrine of agency becomes intelligible only when literature’s forms—tragedy’s stern retrospect, comedy’s lucid self-exposure, the novel’s difficult pardon—are allowed to do their work. In this way Speight both clarifies the Phenomenology’s most enigmatic detours and, more quietly, vindicates the thought that the concept and the story, far from rivals, are the two hands by which Spirit learns to grasp itself.
What emerges is a problematic picture equal to the modern world it depicts. The agent does not precede the scene; the scene does not override the agent; both are bound together by the temporality of recognition, in which what was meant comes to be known, and what is known comes to be forgiven. Speight’s exposition makes that temporality conspicuous by following Hegel’s own itinerary—through the skulls of science and the recollections of Hamlet, through Mephistopheles’ menace and the quixotic mirror-fight, through Antigone’s silence and Rameau’s chatter, until the hard heart at last learns the sentence it could not utter in advance. At that point, one can say without paradox that the Phenomenology’s literary materials are the very grammar of its science, and that Hegel’s problem of agency is not an annex to his system but the path by which the system appears.
Overall, the book renders Hegel’s literary “jump” legible as philosophical necessity: an account of action faithful to modernity must be narrated, not merely asserted; and a narration adequate to freedom must be capable of tragic retrospect, comic reflex, and novelistic reconciliation. Speight’s study is, for that reason, not simply an interpretation of Hegel but an intervention in our understanding of what it takes to think agency at all—a reminder that philosophy’s highest exactness may sometimes require the company of Antigone and Rameau, and that the last word of a science of spirit may have to be a word learned in the novel’s school of forgiveness.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment