Hegel's 'Individuality': Beyond Category [1st ed. 2023] 3031213688, 9783031213687

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Hegel’s ‘Individuality’ Beyond Category m a rt i n d onougho

Hegel’s ‘Individuality’

Martin Donougho

Hegel’s ‘Individuality’ Beyond Category

Martin Donougho Department of Philosophy University of South Carolina Columbia, SC, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-21368-7    ISBN 978-3-031-21369-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ellen

Key to Citations

Citations in the text are to Hegel Werke (Suhrkamp 1969), then to available English versions. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit I cite by paragraph (¶) and pagination in Werke 3, mostly in my own translation. I cite Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences by section number (§) and pagination in Werke 8-10; for the Logic by page number in Hegel 1991a, for the Philosophy of Nature by Miller’s translation in Hegel 1970a, and for the Philosophy of Mind by the Wallace/Inwood translation in Hegel 2007a. Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right I cite by section (§), remark (Anmerkung) and addition (Zusatz), followed by pagination in H.B. Nisbet’s version (Hegel 1991b). For Hegel’s Aesthetics I employ T.M.  Knox’s translation (Hegel 1975b), supplemented by reference to several student transcripts of the Berlin lectures, now made accessible in Gesammelte Werke 28.1-3. The transcripts serve to put Hotho’s official edition in much needed perspective. I often amend the translations, especially when they habitually conflate ‘Individualität’ with ‘Einzelheit’ (singularity).

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Key to Citations

References Hegel, G.W.F. 1970a, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V.  Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Hegel, G.W.F. 1975b, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) Hegel, G.W.F., 1991a, The Encyclopædia Logic [1830], trans. Geraets, Suchting, & Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991) Hegel, G.W.F. 1991b, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B.  Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Hegel, G.W.F. 2007a, Philosophy of Mind, trans. M. Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the writing, largely because of the oddness— the individuality—of its topic. ‘Individuality’ has been relatively little studied. Although a familiar enough category, it proves hard to pin down, as I soon discovered when embarking on the project more than five years ago. In a 2006 essay on ancient tragedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) I had argued that Hegel’s employment of the term ‘Individualität’ brought into relief an equivocation in the classical understanding of action, with respect to responsibility, justification, and gender. It took a while to broaden my approach and consider the role the category might play beyond that particular text and context, not just in the rest of Hegel’s Phenomenology but also in the Encyclopædia or Aesthetics. Meanwhile I had become interested in the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, especially the parallels between his systems approach and Hegel’s logic of self-limitation. Luhmann argues that, as social fact and as category, ‘individuality’ came to the fore in the eighteenth century to mark those otherwise without social affiliation. Thinkers such as Goethe, Herder, Humboldt, Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel engaged in a lively conversation about ‘individuality,’ which Hegel gradually joined. Reading Hegel I was struck by his consistent demarcation of ‘individuality’ from ‘singularity’ (Einzelheit). (We should note that Hegel lived before the emergence of the term ‘individualism,’ with which ‘individuality’ became all too easily confused, not least in Hegel scholarship.) ix

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My progress was slower than I had wished, owing to the detailed exegetical work needed, and my relative unfamiliarity with several of Hegel’s texts (notably his Philosophy of Nature). I had much to learn! I am all the more grateful for the assistance of friends and colleagues, who offered advice or proved willing to read excerpts from the manuscript project. I thank Lydia Moland for showing me an early version of her work on Hegel’s conception of humor, and for tackling a draft of what was then my introduction. Phil Alperson offered incisive comments at the outset and again on my last chapter, displaying his customary judgment. Joan Gero, a close friend both from South Carolina and later in Washington DC, read the very first pages I wrote. Her frank response— “Martin, this makes no sense!”—warned of the challenge I faced and (I hope) have met. I am only sorry she didn’t live to read the final version. David Kolb has been a valued friend over many years, and I particularly thank him for criticism of a draft on Hegelian ‘Physics.’ Jeffrey Reid heard a paper I presented in Montréal, from which stemmed valuable conversations about comets and other eccentric matters. Allen Speight invited me to join a session he and Lydia Moland organized in Philadelphia: my second venture into the topic. I learned from the discussion, and from a chance meeting with Leonardo Lisi, who taught me much about Kierkegaard and about ‘marginal modernity.’ Larry Shiner provided generous commentary on a paper I gave on recent controversy surrounding Kristeller’s “system of the arts.” I thank Jon Stewart for commenting on portions of the manuscript concerning Kierkegaard and tragedy. Jim Elkins long ago helped challenge me about ‘the sublime.’ At a late stage I received encouragement also from Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin. I have to mention two anonymous referees for a journal submission on ‘individuality’ several years ago: their scornful dismissal of so nebulous a category was what prompted me to write a book on it! I thank the many students taught over the years, whether in philosophy or comparative literature. I am grateful to my last doctoral student, Rosa Fuller, for requesting an independent study on Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. My project would have been quite different without her meticulous focus on that text. I owe a great deal to my good friend and collaborator, Larry Rhu, always a sympathetic reader and listener, who taught me

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about Stanley Cavell among many things. My former student Omar Lughod remains a valued interlocutor, at a late stage discussing material on Hegel’s logic of ‘life.’ My thanks also to Anthony Morley, who asked me to read the Phenomenology with him. Our regular Fridays at ‘Bread Furst’ continued for over a year, to my great benefit (wonderful pastries and coffee as well). I enjoyed a spirited email discussion with Patrick Welsh, on surviving Hegel’s ‘Animal Kingdom of Spirit,’ and on the logic of ‘Absolute Mechanism.’ I should mention the generosity of several friends. I thank Cécile Whiting, Jerry Hackett, Jim Herbert, Lee Jane Kaufman, David Whiteman, and Tom Willette, along with my late colleagues Bob Mulvaney and R.I.G.  Hughes (they showed me how conversation can turn things around). I should like to express gratitude to my Hegel teachers in Toronto, especially Emil Fackenheim, H.S. Harris and Kenneth Schmitz. Harris’s work in particular I mention throughout. I cite also two other teachers from whom I learned a great deal, Northrop Frye and Francis Sparshott. John Burbidge offered sharp advice about Hegel’s philosophy of nature. John Burrow has continued to stimulate my thinking long after my formal study with him at Sussex. Given my interest in Luhmann, Sepp Gumbrecht continues to be exemplary through his writings and his individual presence (though we don’t agree on Hegel’s Diderot). As for institutions, the Library of Congress has been an invaluable resource even in times of political ‘sequestration.’ The staff are dedicated and generous, and I recall many happy hours spent in the Reading Room of the Jefferson Building (I was there the afternoon it closed because of covid). I am grateful to the Bender Library at the American University—particularly for its ‘silent floor.’ I also thank Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, a source for material unavailable elsewhere. Allen Speight deserves special thanks for agreeing at short notice to examine the whole manuscript (then much longer), prompting changes large and small. I thank three anonymous readers at Palgrave Macmillan who helped me reshape an unruly manuscript. Brendan George, my editor at Palgrave, has been very supportive, especially in the later stages. Not least, I thank my wife, Ellen Wiley Todd, for her loving patience through a long process of study and composition, a process much

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extended by covid restrictions. She is for me the personification of ‘individuality.’ Her presence was all the more valuable as I worked to finish during our last months of lockdown. I dedicate my book to her. Washington DC August 2022

Martin Donougho

Contents

1 O  n ‘Individuality’  1 2 ‘Individuality’  Before Hegel: Leibniz, Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Schlegel 51 3 ‘Individuality’ in Hegel’s Early Thought 87 4 I ndividuality’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit (I)105 5 ‘ Individuality’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit (II)147 6 H  egelian ‘Physics’191 7 Hegelian ‘Organics’ and ‘Anthropology’223 8 ‘ Individuality’ in Hegel’s Aesthetics (I)267

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9 ‘ Individuality’ in Hegel’s Aesthetics (II)309 10 E  pilogue345 B  ibliography359 I ndex393

1 On ‘Individuality’

Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die as copies? (Edward Young 1759)1 To Generalize is to be an Idiot To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. (William Blake 2008, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (1798))2 There is, indeed, … no definition of individuality that is unobjectionable. (Herbert Spencer 1864)3 Individualism is a recent expression arising from a new idea. Our fathers knew only selfishness [egoisme]. (Tocqueville 2002, Democracy in America (1840))4

Prelude: My title—“Hegel’s Individuality”—requires explanation, whether for a general reader or for the specialist philosopher already familiar with the main features of Hegelian or German Idealist thought. I mean something more than Hegel’s own individuality, original though he was: I have in mind the specific ways in which he employs the category. In brief, I argue © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Donougho, Hegel’s ‘Individuality’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4_1

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1. that Hegel engages with a historically important conversation about ‘individuality,’ one that had emerged in the late-eighteenth and early-­ nineteenth centuries; and 2. that ‘individuality’ plays a surprisingly important (although often tacit) role throughout Hegel’s philosophical system. The category is crucial to his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), but also to the Physics, Organics and Anthropology (divisions within Hegel’s Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences—the first two from Philosophy of Nature, the last from Philosophy of Spirit). It is central to the Philosophy of History (the “beautiful individuality” of ancient Greece) and especially to Hegel’s Aesthetics, where it appears hundreds of times, admittedly in honorific more than technical—let alone dialectical—usage.5 Let me add another claim, difficult to convey in short order: 3. that ‘individuality’ brings out a certain pragmatics (as opposed to semantics or syntactics) in Hegel’s usage. It draws attention to the tacit rather than overt assumptions at work in any instance, and to implicit terms of address or reception.6 (I note, incidentally, that a ‘speech-act’ approach is characteristic of modern Hegel studies in both Continental and anglophone traditions: Kojève, Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, de Man, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Agamben, or Žižek on the one hand; Charles Taylor, Robert Brandom, Joseph Flay, John McCumber, or Judith Butler on the other.) Considered as a category, ‘individuality’ will often seem slippery, informal or indeterminate in application, with no set meaning or rules to guide its construal. Behaving in highly labile fashion nevertheless primes it to play a distinctive yet versatile role in Hegel’s texts, with great advantage to his dialectical mode of presentation. It also requires readers to keep their wits about them when following Hegel’s exposition or analysis. We are enjoined actively to construe what participants or practices might themselves construe— or misconstrue—in their dealings and situations. ‘Individuality’ is tailor made for such role play. Much more has to be said on that, via detailed exegesis. Yet a few words might help get at the gist. Most typically ‘Individualität’ will

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swerve in usage between ‘singular’ (sometimes ‘particular’) and ‘universal’ moments, so mimicking the equivocation it attempts to model. Moreover, the textual interpreter (who presents the view ‘for us’) must discriminate while at the same time integrating those moments. Or we may construe the category as a movement of what Hegel terms ‘overgrasping’ (Übergreifen)—inclusion, overlapping—of opposed moments, where ‘over’ hints at comprehensiveness rather than dominance (Herrschaft). The universal [concept] is therefore free power; it is itself and reaches out to its other [greift über sein Anderes über]; yet without doing violence [als ein Gewaltsames], instead being at rest in its other and at home [bei sich selbst].7

Most important, it lies closer to the logic of syllogism (Schluss) than to the logic of judgment (Urteil), although Hegel takes judgment also to involve elastic thinking (division and union). Syllogism mediates between Universal, Particular, and Singular; but ‘individuality’ seems to operate beyond the remit of such inferential reasoning. While Hegel takes ‘Singularity’ to mediate the other moments of syllogism, ‘individuality’ takes mediation yet further, towards concrete application. ‘Beyond category’ (hors catégorie) in my title hints at its eccentric status, its non-­ status. It operates outside Aristotelian or Kantian ‘categories,’ following its own irregular orbit through Hegel’s works as it negotiates the uneven spaces between empirical being and rational judgment. (Here is the place to applaud Sianne Ngai’s attempt—in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting—to shed new light on categorial pragmatics, which she frames as the union of seeing, speaking, and feeling.8) In Hegel’s Phenomenology, ‘category’ emerges as such at the outset of Chapter V: Reason (Vernunft). It appears under the rubric of ‘singularity’ (Einzelheit), as the immanent movement of the category into plural categories, whereby ‘concept’ mutates into ‘reality’ (‘concept’ and ‘reality’ constitute moments of the ‘Idea’). Singularity is the transition of the category from its concepts [Begriffe] to an external reality, pure schema which is pure consciousness and [also]— since it is a singularity and exclusive One—a pointing towards other.”9

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Catherine Malabou cites this passage as a prime instance of what she terms the “plasticity” of Hegelian dialectic (Malabou 2004, 18). But we might understand ‘individuality’ as still more plastic: beyond category, beyond even the schematizing of ‘singularity.’ I note incidentally that some of the renowned sections in the Phenomenology focus on ‘Einzelheit’ (‘einzeln,’ etc.) rather than ‘Individualität’: ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ and ‘Lord and Bondsman,’ for example, are both rooted in singular consciousness and otherness, not in the dynamic ‘overgrasping’ found with individuality. Hegelian ‘recognition’ (Anerkennen) too is singular, not individual (one reason I pay it little attention). The same goes for personal property, moral consciousness (‘Moralität’), and ‘Revealed Religion’ (Jesus is singularly singular). I argue that Hegel often employs ‘individuality’ to draw a distinction from ‘singular’ or ‘particular’ traits, even when such distinction is understood rather than stated. That does not entail its philosophical superiority: indeed, the road to individuality will often pass through a necessary separation, ‘the dividual self.’ Nothing is settled, least of all in the secondary literature (on the rare occasions it attends to the topic). Nevertheless, the notable absence of an accepted Hegelian theory of ‘individuality’ is unsettling. Why is it taken for granted, or worse, ignored? My textual exegesis not only pays heed to Hegel’s meticulous sorting of ‘individual’ and ‘singular’ moments: it also notes commentators’ habitual neglect of that difference. Much flows from Hegel’s expressivist model of meaning, shared with Herder, Schleiermacher and others: individuality is ascribed to acts of expression, whereby inner subjectivity seeks corporeal or verbal utterance (while possibly falling short of success). Moreover, on the farther shore of linguistic practice, individuality calls for active interpreters of deed or expression. The interpreter’s syllogistic inference aims to mediate the syllogistic inference under review. If the previous point turns on tacit usage, a further point acquires an explicit socio-political sense: 4. namely, that ‘individuality’ is all too easily confused with ‘individualism.’ The issue might seem peripheral; its impact is not. Equating the two expressions needlessly muddles discussion, so much so that I feel I must resort to basic etymology in an attempt to sort things out.

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Conflation also serves to underline the fact that concepts and categories do not subsist in a historical vacuum, nor are they independent of their social context. I make no apologies, then, for bringing sociology or intellectual history to bear on the discussion. I draw particularly on the work of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann to help define and come to grips with ‘individuality’ (it is no accident that Luhmann’s ‘systems theory’ bears a distinct likeness to Hegel’s Logic). True, the quasi-­ category of ‘individuality’ might seem outmoded or overly ‘Romantic’ in its focus on self-formation or self-cultivation, which might suggest callow escapism or subjectivist denial of responsibility. Charles Taylor takes this tack, in marked contrast with his early work on Herder and Hegel. I go the other way, exploring how for Hegel individuality is instead embedded in community, theoretically and in socio-historical fact. Individual and community are dialectically entwined.10 Historical context brings up a final point: 5. that we should beware the dangers of anachronism, in general but especially in Hegel scholarship. It is all the more urgent given Hegel’s occasional appeal to it. Thus, when dealing with ideas of self, person, or individual, it is tempting (even unavoidable) to export current approaches to other cultures or periods: for instance, treating Sophocles’ Antigone as a modern character or subject, someone we can more or less understand, admire, and sympathize or quarrel with on our own terms. I argue that Hegel was aware of the methodological challenge, and that the Phenomenology provides a detailed account of the long cultural history of ‘self ’-formation, displayed in modern perspective: how then to present the past? Moreover, he sometimes employs a philosophical version of ‘free indirect discourse,’ when the emic (or inside) perspective of observed consciousness merges or alternates with the etic (outside) perspective of the phenomenological observer. ‘Individuality’ is tailor-made for shifting between views or voices—now one, now the other (yet, ‘for us,’ both). Or again—to take a more complex instance—Hegel’s Aesthetics offers a sophisticated interpretation of art as both concept and cultural formation; as a theory and a historical practice first conceptualized (as Art, in the

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singular) during Hegel’s own time, thanks to the very Romantics he was at pains to criticize and keep at bay. What Winckelmann called ‘the Ideal’—epitome of art and artwork, centered on aesthetic ‘Individualität’—is essentially a view from abroad, not least because ‘individuality’ (as a self-aware category) stems from the late 1700s. I argue that Hegel’s lectures were a complex engagement with something as much constructed (collected in the museum, celebrated or studied qua ‘literature,’ performed in concert hall or opera house) as empirically in effect. He is aware all along of the generative though risky pragmatics of anachronism. Analogous and just as controversial was his foray into philosophy of nature, especially ‘Physics’ (that is to say, the speculative treatment of a science of material bodies and states). There we encounter systemic relations between individuals, where one individual both is and is not the whole—its whole—, both is and is not ‘self-like’ (selbstisch): para- or ana-subjectivity, perhaps. Unlike Kant’s appeal to the strictly regulative methodology of judgment’s ‘as-it-were’ (gleichsam), what Hegel calls “thinking consideration” carries ontological commitment and weight.11 * * * The importance of ‘individuality’ in Hegel’s texts might surprise us. Even more surprisingly, few Hegel scholars have taken note of it. I aim to make amends for this neglect or dismissal, in textual detail fine enough to establish how and why it is we should pay heed. Much of what follows is therefore expository, although I do try to summarize the main lines of argument for anyone reluctant to venture into Hegelian textual thickets, often densely tangled and sometimes contentious. Before getting to my topic and the texts themselves, I admit that the term ‘individuality’ itself needs clarification, which requires teasing out its tacit significance in a historically labile arena of usage. Moreover, while the term operates powerfully in Hegel’s texts, it often does so between the lines. Dictionary definitions offer little help. On the “systematic ambiguity” of the word ‘art’ R.G. Collingwood writes:

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The proper meaning of a word … is never something upon which the word sits perched like a gull on a stone; it is something over which the word hovers like a gull over the ship’s stern. Trying to fix the proper meaning in our minds is like coaxing the gull to settle in the rigging, with the rule that the gull must be alive when it settles: one must not shoot it or tie it there (Collingwood 1938, 7).

From his vantage in the late 1930s Collingwood simply assumed there could be a “proper meaning” attached to a word like ‘art,’ one that people in the artworld are already familiar with even when unarticulated. Whereas nowadays we (whoever “we” are) can no longer be as sure, even about the ship, or our own sea legs for that matter.12 My own approach must be indirect, selecting ideas for provisional consideration. * * * a. What is Individuality? 1. Seven (plus one) versions of individuality: I ignore for now any non-human contexts—nature or world, so far as it does not yet count for us through our subjective efforts at cognition or interaction—even though the concept itself originated in Leibnizian metaphysics, which understands monad equally as thing and as soul.

(a) Retirement: A recent issue of Harper’s Magazine features an advertisement for a retirement village near Philadelphia. Below the words “Snowflakes. Fingerprints. People”—all exemplify uniqueness—we see pictured a smiling older couple.13 Alongside in deep blue and green is a

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declaration of principle: “the power behind our community is individuality.” Beneath the picture we read: Retire your own way. On your own terms. As the individual you are. Our unique community: • Allows each resident to forge his or her own path. • Embraces Quaker values of dignity, respect and a commitment to community. • Features unique individuals expressing themselves every day!14 What are the salient features to note here? Besides a Quaker respect for each person in his or her own uniqueness, the central value on display is an emphasis on the expressive individual, suggesting perhaps informal endorsement of a Romantic aesthetic of expression and creativity. Ethical value merges with aesthetic. Even more remarkable—though easily overlooked—in this unpretentious appeal is the tacit reliance on a fundamental paradox in the modern conception of individuality (setting it wholly apart from individualism, I note). Community is understood as fostering the individual for whose sake it subsists; individuality forms and empowers community. The two ideas aren’t opposed but mutually embedded; each cannot properly be thought without the other.15 I count such mutual implication as by far the most striking component of individuality, even in its popular or informal usage (Harpers addresses a middleclass, liberal, educated readership). We might even trace its distant roots to Leibniz’s monadology: each individual offers a unique perspective on a shared world or universe. (b) Things That Matter: Individuality belongs to the ordinary furniture of life—in several cultures, one might add—even while remaining hard to define, docket or place. But consider now a different perspective, academic and literary rather than social, and considerably more intricate: Edward Mendelson’s The Things That Matter (2006). Here a fine literary critic addresses “individual” stages on life’s way.16 The author calls it “a book about individuality,” surveyed from birth through childhood, growth, marriage, love, parenthood, as far as “an old person’s view of death” (Mendelson, 228) when individual decline seems (to individuals themselves) of diminished weight in the scheme of things. Mendelson’s

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title derives from Virginia Woolf ’s “the things that matter”: matter, that is, to the individual characters she writes about as well as to her, as narrator, author and person. Mendelson does not attempt either to define in advance what matters or to explain why it might matter to an individual. He takes various attempts to come to grips with that as entirely provisional, no general stance being possible, just as “no one can become a unique individual by imitating someone else’s individuality” (242). Contingent circumstance forms much of what individuality amounts to. That all seven novels are by women, he adds, is due less to women’s supposed greater sensitivity than to their being more likely, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to attend to the intimate experiences of unique human beings, as opposed to discrimination by class or stereotype; women were positioned as motivated to defend uniquely personal values, in life and in writing (xiii). “A unique individual is not someone who has a single, undivided view of the world, speaks with one voice on every subject,” but someone who can be inconsistent, changeable in beliefs or reactions (xiv). (All the same, “external relations” alone won’t dictate what an individual comes to think and feel: a Leibnizian “disposition” will exert its own pull.) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for instance, contrasts Victor’s unpredictable temper, issuing from his “irreducible individuality,” to the creature’s lack of individuating impulse, which in turn comes from absence of external relation. He “doesn’t need to assert his individuality against them,” Mendelson observes. “Individuality never arises in total isolation, only through relations with others—even antagonistic ones” (20)—although I repeat the “Leibnizian” idea that relations serve to draw out what is already implicit (literally, “enfolded”) within the characters themselves. Relations and events supply the occasion for expressing one’s own individuality. Again, a paradox arises. Individuality is to be found in autonomous persons who at the same time exist in concrete relations with other persons (Mendelson, xv–xvi)—or in relations with external factors such as environment or upbringing (and we might include here the partly-­ given factor of character or ability). Sometimes individuals seek to evade their individuality by chasing delusory idées fixes: Victor pursues magic or natural philosophy, Lydgate (in Middlemarch) a universal science of the cell.17 Characters often show themselves in thrall to stereotypical

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thinking, as in Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway: “Peter’s dream of archetypal vagueness is the opposite of Clarissa’s hard arrogant prudery, but both are ways of denying the individuality of real persons,…” (174). Mrs. Ramsay (in To the Lighthouse) similarly imposes archetypal thinking on the world, tied in her case to the maternal goddess Themis presiding over the feast (her celebrated bœuf en daube), as she entices individuals to comply with her idea of cosmic order. She never understands how oppressive her unified vision can prove, but both her friend Lily Briscoe and her son James get it; each individually manages to escape her thrall (225). Mendelson remarks that the novel represents Woolf ’s pointed rejection of T.S. Eliot’s idea that tradition subsumes individuals (219). Its narrative places us in the great shift from an archaic, impersonal order to a distinctly modern individuality (206).18 Moreover, Woolf herself should be understood as resisting the aestheticizing order personified by Mrs. Ramsay, whose friend struggles to free herself. Lily’s final triumphant paint stroke is art, not life; in the end she does not confuse the two—nor does Woolf. But matters are more intricate, for Lily and for the author. Lily draws not a shape but a line (the lighthouse or unattainable horizon); less a human presence than an abstraction.19 As for Woolf, she ends A Room of One’s Own (1929) thus: “I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals.”20 To summarize: individuality stems from unique inner lives which yet must be lived in relation either with others or with circumstance and upbringing (or character); it shuns impersonal modes of thought, with respect to self or others; above all it opts for life—individual lives—over abstract scheme (art, myth). Mendelson adopts a moral stance towards literature. It recurs in his next book, Moral Agents, collected studies of several American writers (Mendelson 2015). Here though he varies the angle of approach by stressing ironic tensions between inward life and public mask; struggles that came to afflict all his subjects, from Trilling to O’Hara. The individual has no choice but to declare (or betray) himself in the public sphere. Mendelson resists two contrasting myths: first, that we become ourselves by remaining alone, unencumbered by obligations to others (exemplified by characters found in Twain or James); second, that the individual must forgo all corrupting relations with others and

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find salvation in a collective identity (Whitman’s grand scheme, twentieth-­ century group solidarity, ideologies demanding our moral allegiance). Mendelson’s chosen writers, mostly Jewish, display a conflicted attitude to their ‘identity,’ as they attempt to replace it with an ‘American’ independence of all social expectation. Compared to Things That Matter, the sequel offers a more constricted perspective on individuality: a tangled path which proves tough if not impossible for individuals to negotiate. (c) Social Contingency: Thinking of historical context yields another item. Besides pointing towards what is authentic or original, individuality remains constitutionally suspect, a work forever in progress: something to be achieved or claimed (perhaps in error). It has all the more value for being sought in modern, post-traditional society; a society where intersubjective criteria and credentials may be required yet—crucially— without resort to general rules, which by definition would erode the very thing asserted. Even to describe individuality or an individual in generic terms risks its betrayal.21 (Without making a fuss or intending to disparage, I shall from now on refer to individuality and the individual as ‘it,’ ‘its’ or ‘itself,’ prior to all distinction by gender or other feature.22) Whether as norm or as fact, individuality appears precarious. We find certain parallels with the notion of ‘personality,’ which points inwards to the singular self but also outwards to roles played or masks worn on our social stages. The special challenge individuality or personality represents came to the fore towards the close of the eighteenth century, when anonymous society with its labile roles began to replace traditional community; a shift that became more fully felt in the century following. In literature, sociology, or philosophy (Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, et al.), individuality became pivotal. Whether as social fact or category, the individual emerged at the very moment it seemed in crisis, without a real basis. As with “personality,” individuality displays both ethical and aesthetic faces. Ethical personhood derives from Kant: “The idea of the moral law alone, together with the respect that is inseparable from it … is personality [Persönlichkeit] itself ” (Kant 1998, 52).23 By contrast the aesthetic viewpoint seems Goethean, its lineage running via Humboldt and the Romantics down to our own day.24 Instead of personhood as calling (Beruf) it frames personhood as determination or destiny (Bestimmung);

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a cultivation (Bildung) of self in its many-sidedness, for which the ancient Greeks provide the model (I shall return to this). Important for J.S. Mill, it was equally so for much North American thinking from Emerson on.25 Yet mainstream sociological theorists such as Durkheim or Weber tended to prefer the first path, the one that stresses imposed duty rather than found opportunity; indeed Weber reserves special contempt for what he sees as the indulgent subjectivism of aesthetic “personality.”26 (I deliberately omit psychoanalytic theories taking duty to derive from the superego and repression of natural instincts. A weightier challenge features with Norbert Elias’s historicizing of Freud. The individual becomes a socio-historical product, from “court society” through more modern processes of self-formation. Elias understands ‘individuality’ in terms of prizing one’s inner being beyond society.27). Each version, moral or aesthetic, is given yet also constructed; an ambiguity we may trace to the fact that individuality is a state still to be achieved, claimed, or ascribed. Individual originality must continually prove itself. But how? Is the individual “my sole self!” (Keats), or has it rather to do with the clothes worn in public (to recall Madame Merle in James’s The Portrait of a Lady)?28 Or could the irony go deeper still, given that the very notion of individuality emerges as a way to think about people no longer ‘included’ within traditional social strata (even belatedly, as with F.H. Bradley’s “my station and its duties”)? Individuals are ‘remaindered,’ as it were, rather than seen as social products which in turn constitute ‘their’ society (as Elias proposes). Sociologists such as G.H. Mead or Niklas Luhmann adopt different versions of this position. Luhmann in particular provides a subtle account of the historical emergence of individuality (both concept and phenomenon) amid the wholesale shift from stratified to functionally differentiated social systems. I shall return to his theory, although I should warn that his systems approach rewrites “psychical” individuality as the false idea that we can really grasp our inner selves through a project of the sort Humboldt advocated (Romantic authenticity becomes the inverted image of a ‘remaindered,’ socially constructed or ‘subjectivated’ self ).29 Individuals can enter into a number of functional subsystems without being defined by any one of them. (A special case is the ‘individual’ constructed by mass media—news, advertising, entertainment—namely, as a hook for our

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interest, something we can ‘relate’ to.30) Even Kierkegaard’s “that single individual” (hiin enkelte) comes on the scene as a general inscription, hence in the guise of an abiding paradox. His assurance that social levelling can be halted only “by the individual in individual separation” (Individet i individuel Udsondring) seems an equivocal gesture at best.31 (d) Pragmatics: Let me give more substance to this strangely virtual figure of individuality, balanced on the historical edge of things, by adopting a performative angle on the individual’s enactment of its own role, its narrative and shared existence. This takes two possible forms. Either the individual in speaking opens up an intersubjective realm in which it hopes to reach an understanding (a) with others, and (b) with its own past and its lifeworld. Or else it communicates its self, its “I exist,” in a shared world which nonetheless might turn out to be ready-made, second-hand, as though authored by others. The one approach is found in Habermas’s late turn to Kierkegaard, the other in Cavell’s appeal to an Emersonian “self-reliance,” considered as linguistically mediated. (i) Habermas: In Postmetaphysical Thinking (1992) Habermas takes a performative line on individuality—an unexpected pivot from his universalist conception of rights. Habermas understands the “postmetaphysical” turn to be a rejoinder to the whole philosophical tradition, with its propensity to analyze universals into particulars themselves beholden to universality. Only with Leibniz was there a fresh angle on individuality, namely, as the unique, indivisible, incommensurable. How to grasp it in thought? Paradoxically, the “complete concept” of an individual monad is attainable only “in the limit.” From that Leibnizian orientation, Habermas’s account proceeds via Romanticism, then Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Hegel’s absolute spirit “can acquire the individuality that it claims for itself only at the expense of the individual figures of spirit encased in it” (Habermas 1992, 157). But this exaggerates: Hegel does not consign everything to an all-encompassing absolute Idea. Indeed, it is precisely the mediating roles ‘individuality’ plays in various Hegelian texts that I wish to explore. Even so, Habermas deserves praise for drawing attention to the Aesthetics’ application of ‘individuality’ to ancient Greek art and culture; little noticed, that is central to my own project.32

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Of special note is Habermas’s next step, adverting to the “linguistic” or “performative” turn taken by Humboldt and Kierkegaard. Whereas (for Habermas) Fichtean intersubjectivity—individual recognition of shared rationality—devolves ultimately upon an absolute, universal ‘I=I,’ Humboldt and Kierkegaard explore how the individual opens a perspective on the unique other; the one via conversation (I-you), the other through taking on board its own contingent history (Habermas 1992, 162). Habermas quotes Humboldt on our use of language: “Individuality fragments, but in such a wondrous way that it awakens, precisely through separation, the feeling of unity.”33 Grasping individual expressions— unfathomable in its way—does take place, after all. Ideas and feelings are exchanged in conversation with others, via personal pronouns which allow and invite (but don’t guarantee) mutual understanding. For Habermas, Kierkegaard marks the moment when the individual finds itself spontaneously acting; not as the Fichtean self might posit itself, with full autonomy, but rather under contingent circumstances, taking responsibility retroactively for its own history (in the version it tells itself ). Where Cavell underscores how the individual finds itself “chagrined,” continually framed at second hand, Habermas brings out the individual’s existential choice, its self-realization in finite circumstances (he has in mind chiefly the “ethical” section of Either-Or II). The individual has only itself to thank for its individuation, taking responsibility equally for what is excluded because taken as incidental (Habermas 1992, 165).34 (ii) Cavell: Although without transcendental guarantee, positive agreement between individuals is assumed by Habermas as a default position. For a more ambivalent response we may read Stanley Cavell’s essay on Emerson and Shakespeare, “Being Odd, Getting Even” from a 1985 conference, the proceedings of which were published as Reconstructing Individualism.35 The editors of this collection—devoted to the “concept of individuality, in relation to the historical phenomenon of ‘individualism’”—characterize the latter as holding that individual humans have fashioned the world we now inhabit. They add that the individual subject has recently come under attack, not just in academia but also in social reality. The stated aim of the conference was to reappraise prospects for

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the concept of the individual—that is, for ‘individuality’—, although few speakers seem to have followed the agenda. Several looked back at the emergence (theoretical and real) of the individual in the “interstices of the disintegrating medieval order” (Stephen Greenblatt). Just three of them (Hamacher, Cavell, Luhmann) actually addressed the problematic of ‘individuality.’ Without claiming to do justice to Cavell’s subtleties, I tug at one thematic thread. Cavell cites words outlined in brass above the main elevators in William James Hall, Harvard:

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual

The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community (William James) [From “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,” a lecture delivered before the Harvard Natural History Society, published in Atlantic Monthly, October 1880; see The Will to Believe, James 1992, 630. James attacks Spencer’s social determinism. (Photo by author; an image is also available at http://netnodes.tumblr. com/post/14401310826/in-­harvards-­william-­james-­hall-­from-­great-­ men)]Cavell asks not what James himself might have meant—in the context of his 1880 address—but how we might take those words nowadays,

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in the context of their presumed address to someone reading them in the austere vestibule of the Social Sciences Building. Averse to speculating about relations—conceptual or real—between individual and community, Cavell turns from pragmatism to pragmatics. He shifts to the use of performatives or speech acts, specifically Emerson’s citing of Descartes’ “I am, I exist” in his essay “Self-Reliance.” “I am” must be performed, put into effect through language. Yet language is public, exists “for others.” As Emerson puts it, intuition is subject to tuition, to communication, hence “conformity.” “Emerson needs a view of the world, a perspective on its fallenness, in which the uncreatedness of the individual manifests itself, in which human life appears as the individual’s failure at self-creation, as a continuous loss of individual possibility in the face of some overpowering competitor.”36 This is hardly the world without self, rather a world not of one’s making. (Kierkegaard had felt the same threat of an alien power seeming to author him, not always benignly. His notion of “levelling” is analogous to Cavell’s “getting even.”) In such times the individual feels called on to take a stand or stance of self-reliance, never knowing whether it isn’t just quoting others’ words (to quote Cavell).(e) Friends? Viewed performatively, the reverse is also conceivable: urging others to realize their individuality risks frustration, given their tendency to misconstrue the task, or their failure to carry it through. Nietzsche realizes this in addressing his readers—rather, when he quotes the lament of Zarathustra’s “sage”—“Friends, there are no friends,” or urges us to follow Schopenhauer’s example as educator (by not following him). The performative cuts both ways: urging others to endorse their individuality risks your own, while insisting with Zarathustra that “ultimately one experiences only oneself ” won’t prime you for the unexpected vista of other seas or the prospect of friends left behind.37 (By a neat irony we find Julian Huxley citing Zarathustra in the epigraph to The Individual in the Animal Kingdom of 1912, when the Wanderer proclaims: “The time has passed in which accidents could still befall me, and what could fall to me now that isn’t already my own [mein Eigen]?”38 Individuality is whole, made so by making nature your own. Yet we should beware of attempting its complete assimilation, as we’ll see.) Such desperate appeal to others is the moment of intense self-awareness superbly caught by Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), when a harried Brian addresses the crowd beneath his

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window. “You don’t need to follow me! You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals! (Crowd): “Yes! We’re all individuals!” (Brian): “You’re all different!” (Crowd): “Yes, we are all different!” (Quavering voice): “I’m not!” (Crowd): “Shhhh!”39 (f ) Reflective Judgment: Even to identify something as individual imparts a certain reflexivity to one’s concerns—a different angle on the performativity just canvassed. Judgment is neither objective nor subjective but “reflecting” (in Kantian terms), that is, internalizing the context or conditions in which it is passed. To identify or distinguish individuality amounts to a recommendation or challenge to the reader, viewer, or interlocutor to agree, even without effable features let alone a definition of ‘individuality.’ For not only does ‘individuality’ itself stem from social reflexivity or self-observation, when individuals become conscious of themselves as such, coining the term in the late eighteenth century. It also exemplifies a certain categorial mediation or self-differentiation found in Hegel’s Logic, where—to quote H.S. Harris—“‘individuality’ is what belongs to the concrete thinking of the logician, who unites the moments and comprehends them in their unity.”40 In that respect it compares with another category of similar vintage: ‘the interesting.’ That ‘the interesting’ is not merely interesting but often exceptionally so is one of Sianne Ngai’s provocative claims in her lively—indeed, interesting—book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.41 What is adjudged interesting reflects on its own conditions of utterance and reception or effect. It functions as what Friedrich Schlegel calls “art as idea,” for which the individual subject—producer or recipient—is essentially implicated: the very antithesis of ‘disinterested’ art or judgment, in other words. What makes something interesting? The fact that it’s interesting, of course! In 1971 the conceptual artist Ed Ruscha declared, “I’m interested in what is interesting”—which for him meant serial instances of mass culture, in a period of proliferating images that Ngai finds much like the boom in publications, criticism and hybrid genres during the early-Romantic era.42 My own interest lies in the benign circularity of our focus on the ordinary—the novel, photography, etc.—, on the “in-between” of “inter-­ esse.” Our involvement sheds light also on ‘individuality’—a category that does not appear in Ngai’s book, though it might well have done so.

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A final comment, on the essential “internality” of this moment, picking up on Kantian subjectivity and the individual’s “identification” with something as “its own [das Seinige].” Internality has been emphasized by Christopher Yeomans in The Expansion of Autonomy (2015a). He labels this the moment of “self-appropriation,” and aligns it with two other moments as constituting Hegel’s “expansion” of Kantian autonomy: “specification of content,” when individuals expressly link their inner selves with objective aims and concerns; and “effectiveness,” a Fichtean translation of individuals’ ends into a reality recognizable as their own.43 (Habermas likewise hails Fichte’s advance on Kant’s anonymous self.44) Each moment is accorded subjective and objective import (for example, “talent” is both given and cultivated, just as “interest” is what is found because already “interesting,” interesting as found). I shall return to Yeomans’ book in connection with the circularity of concerning yourself with what concerns you, being interested in the interesting, and the like. But I should register discomfort with his alignment of ‘self-appropriation’ with universality, ‘content’ with particularity, and ‘effectiveness’ with ‘individuality’ (sc., ‘Einzelheit’).45 The author’s healthier instincts present ‘individuality’ as potentially engaging all three moments. (g) Dividuality: In his comprehensive study Individualität (2000), Volker Gerhardt recommends Shaftesbury’s “Divide Yourself! or Be Two!”—a “dividuality.”46 Shaftesbury himself didn’t use that word; the OED awards primacy to Francis Galton (1883)—“Dividuality replaces individuality.” In Human, All Too Human §57 Nietzsche had already spoken of the moral self qua ‘dividuum’: self-sacrifice remains egoistic in its attachment to one part of the self over another, paradoxically enslaving itself.47 More recently, anthropologists have written about the ‘dividual’ self, exhibiting multiple, complex and distinct social aspects. Marilyn Strathern, a specialist in Melanesian cultures, credits Daniel Miller’s Stuff (Miller 2005, especially 54–64 on ‘objectification’) with importing Hegel’s idea that property functions to enhance abstract personhood (Strathern 2006, 152–3, 166–7): it reverses perspective so as to individuate the subject ab extra, through social objectification. You are what you own—your “stuff.”48 ‘Dividuality’ has also been applied to religion.49 From a very different angle, Gilles Deleuze writes: “Individuals have become dividuals …,” not separate personalities but linkages within

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modulated flows, controlled by codes (passwords, cards) giving access to information, data, markets, money, or (nowadays) personal blogs and “influencers.”50 That however would leave Hegelian orbit, which encompasses several texts besides Philosophy of Right, notably the Phenomenology, Chapter VIb, ‘Culture (Bildung) and its Realm of Actuality.’51 A Hegelian ‘dividual self ’ would differ from the ‘singular’ self; or rather, it can infuse singular features with dynamic life, ‘overgrasping’ and uniting separate moments (Rameau’s nephew is both beside himself and perversely authentic). (h) Nature, animate and inanimate: Not least, ‘individuality’ may be considered in a non-human aspect, viz., as characterizing nature. My epigraph quotes Herbert Spencer, and to complete this overview I should mention the special status ‘individuality’ has in science, botany in particular. How are plants or animals individuated? We can tell readily enough when there are, for example, two rather than three dogs or trees in the back garden. Yet matters are seldom quite as simple: consider the status of dandelions, say, or quaking aspens, a troop (as opposed to cluster) of mushrooms, a Portuguese man o’war, bee-hive (its workers don’t breed), or the myriad bacteria inhabiting the gut.52 Are these all individuals, and by what criteria? From ancient times the challenge of how to tell biological beings apart or how to give a theoretical account of their ontological boundaries has proven intractable. Moreover, how are we to distinguish between growth (of an individual organism) and reproduction (generating new individuals)? Some plants send out runners (stolons) from which new systems will sprout. It is difficult to distinguish in principle between strawberries grown from the original seed and those grown from the stem.53 The Aristotelian strategy would be to examine intrinsic identity or essence rather than what demarcates one entity from others. A modern approach (besides resorting to natural selection) looks rather at what makes for structural unity in nature—that is, functional interdependence of parts or members, plus integral wholeness (the system is internally regulated). Hegel propounds his own version of this double idea (of course without reference to cells, let alone genes and so on, still far in the future), as do Spencer, Julian Huxley, and many others. I return to questions of system and function in Chap. 7, on the Encyclopædia treatment of ‘organic individuality.’ I should anticipate a related issue

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here, concerning normativity. Hegelian individuality is normative, in principle at least: the workings of the system—physical as well as organic—resemble self-relation or self-reflexivity, subjectivity, “selbstisch” (“self-like”) behavior. How far and in what ways is such individuality normative, i.e., when the activity of a physical body or organism simply follows its ‘nature’? If bodies aren’t just thought of as obeying causal laws, may we suppose they are self-regulating or belong to a self-defining system? Besides organic bodies we might think here of certain physical systems: the behavior of a solar system, or the systemic nature of various phenomena.54 They go by themselves. How artworks might accord with such normativity—in the classical Ideal, for example—is something I explore in my chapters on Hegel’s Aesthetics. There I’ll also ask whether the artistic norm follows norms of human expression: as gesture, ethical action, or verbal work. * * * b. Hegel’s ‘Individuality’ ‘[I]ndividuality’ is what belongs to the concrete thinking of the logician, who unites the moments and comprehends them in their unity. (H.S. Harris, in The Encyclopædia Logic)55

My title is ambiguous—deliberately so. It connotes individuality at once of Hegel and as it appears in his philosophy. Without question Hegel’s system exhibits individuality, if by that we mean uniqueness or distinction; indivisibility too, so far as it displays coherence or consistency. More important—if unremarked by commentators—is Hegel’s own highly distinctive employment of the term ‘Individualität.’ There is, for a start, the surprising fact that Hegel makes extensive use of it, and in several precise ways, meticulously deployed to work a complex middle ground (at once mediating and neutral) between given nature and active subjectivity. Yet this intermediary function also remains ambiguous. As with Hegel’s logic of ‘semblance’ (Schein), ‘individuality’ shows itself fully present (or rather, expressed and expressive) in the world while potentially occluded, veiled in false representation. The ambiguity will prove

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characteristic; quite literally, for character means something both passive and active, given “by nature” (we are slaves to habit) and yet self-made and alterable. * * * 1. Problems in translation: (a) Some distinctions: Gauging what Hegel means by ‘individuality’ constitutes the major challenge for this book. How typical is his usage, and does it diverge from the Romantics of his time?56 When is the reader warranted in drawing a distinction in the text between ‘individual’ and ‘singular,’ the latter more fixed, the former revealing the speculative potential of ‘overgrasping’?57 That almost nobody has paid attention to ‘individuality’ does give pause—might this be a wild-goose chase after all? Presumably not, yet it remains a concern. I hope that helps excuse my literal-minded pursuit of this elusive quarry, when in fact my attitude is less a hunter’s than the explorer’s. With respect to the tacit dimension of discourse—if in little else— Hegel resembles Friedrich Schleiermacher, his great rival at the University of Berlin. Known for his insistence on ‘individuality,’ Schleiermacher nevertheless downplays explicit theory in favor of close analysis, feeling out habitual usage and situations in various areas of human concern, which are addressed in lectures rather than by formal treatise. Schleiermacher’s practice was tacitly to sort an authentic ‘Individualität’ from ossified patterns of ‘Eigentümlichkeit’—peculiarity or idiosyncrasy—, without strict rules for drawing such distinctions. Hegel will often do the same. He exposes a typical equivocation between existent trait and emergent capacity. Incapacity too, as with classical sculpture (in Hegel’s Aesthetics), the truth of which is its limitation (we might recall Coleridge’s maxim, “till I understand a man’s ignorance, I presume myself ignorant of his understanding”58). As with Schleiermacher, Hegel’s textual ‘pragmatics’ draws implicit distinctions as often as it observes express laws or principles. Moreover, their unspoken rivalry suggests a possible reason why Hegel rarely even mentions ‘individuality’ as such—apart from the Aesthetics, much of which showcases classical ‘individuality’—and why he

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fails to explicate its workings directly (in marked contrast to his attention to such terms as ‘syllogism,’ ‘dialectic,’ ‘sublation’ or ‘mediation.’). His usage tends to be tacit rather than thematized (when its logic would, per impossibile, be subject to principled explanation). That can render textual interpretation a challenge, since there is presumably a proper reason— other than dislike of his colleague—why ‘individuality’ works “between the lines,” and why to reveal its express working might distort what otherwise goes without saying. On the pragmatics of Hegelian ‘Individualität,’ I should first cite Brigitte Hilmer’s Scheinen des Begriffs (1997), a study of “Hegel’s logic of art.” She sorts the dimensions of semantics, syntactics and pragmatics in Hegel’s usage, focusing on how Hegelian ‘syllogism’ (Schluss) bears upon Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms. She highlights the role played here by ‘Individualität’ alongside familiar concepts such as form, content (Inhalt, Gehalt), Sittlichkeit, Idea, spirit, meaning (Bedeutung), or inwardness. She argues that the syllogisms of reflection engage centrally with the Classical artform, in particular its implicit theory of action (Handlung). Her approach offers the advantage that classical art shows up not in hypostatized content (“the Idea”) but rather in and through its active ‘presentation’ (Darstellung), the interaction between work and recipients “as absolute spirit in the community,” to cite Hegel’s 1826 lectures.59 Classical beauty is individuated relationally, Hilmer contends, not via independent or substantive relata (concept or meaning, as opposed to external shape, artwork or existence). Her interest lies above all in discriminating relational configurations, arrayed in the three dimensions of semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. (b) ‘Individuality’ vs ‘Singularity’: How does ‘individuality’ compare with logical operatives like ‘particularity’ (Besonderheit) or ‘singularity’ (Einzelheit), which with ‘universality’ (Allgemeinheit) constitute Hegel’s syllogistic triad? Anglophone readers might be misled by the usual translation of Hegel’s ‘Einzelheit’ as ‘individuality,’ a convention Michael Inwood silently adopts in A Hegel Dictionary (1992).60 In their preface to The Encyclopædia Logic two of the translators (Geraets and Harris) note that the decision to reserve ‘singularity’ for ‘Einzelheit’ came from Harris’s “insistence…that ‘individuality’ is what belongs to the concrete thinking of the logician, who unites the moments and comprehends them in their

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unity”61—words that I adopt as my mantra. Geraets and Harris observe that the Logic sometimes has (non-tautologously) a ‘singular individual.’ One might add that in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel has occasion to speak of ‘singular individuality,’ and of ‘universal individuality’ besides.62 Moreover, Hegelian ‘Physics’ divides comprehensively into ‘Universal,’ ‘Particular,’ and ‘Total Individuality.’ John Burbidge—one of the very few to comment on the word—writes: The English reader of this term needs to be careful. For ‘individual’ is frequently used to translate Einzelne and Einzelheit, as well as Individuum and Individualität. Das Einzelne is a logical term for the singular object of reference and stands in relation to concepts, both universal and particular. In Hegel’s usual order, it comes third in any analysis. Individuum appears in the Logic only within the concept of life and captures the way life is a subjective totality confronting an objective realm. Life individuates itself. … The term is functioning as a gerund (‘individuating’) rather than an abstract noun. Hegel is interested in those natural characteristics by which bodies are individuated and so distinguished from each other.63

‘Individualität’ conveys a sense of movement, of thinking activity, not just fixed quality or state. Hegelian Physics enunciates a logic of reflection, of self-dissolving dualisms, for which essence is nothing but its appearing (and disappearing). From its earliest instances in the Phenomenology, ‘individuality’ connotes incipient action or fluidity. In the section on “the Inverted World” (die verkehrte Welt) we encounter the idea of punishment as a reciprocal movement of individuality against law and of law against individuality. Or again, with “Stoicism,” the self-presenting of individuality—not the singular self—emerges as living or thinking activity aimed at grasping the world as system of thought.64 Finally, although the term scarcely features in Hegel’s Science of Logic, when it does so—in the Subjective Logic—self-reflexivity is in the offing. The “General Division of Logic” distinguishes between “the existent concept, and then as concept,” “the concept that exists for itself,” which includes not just human thought but also animal sentience and more generally “organic individuality” (it is concept “an sich” only as inorganic nature).65

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In any event, however we construe ‘individuality,’ it simply cannot operate as bare ‘singularity.’ Many reputable authors nevertheless ignore the distinction.66 Paul Franco’s Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (1999), for example, offers a nuanced account of the Jena writings, tracking the emergence in Hegel’s thought of the idea of modern subjectivity, as against classical customary Sittlichkeit (ethical being). He quotes a passage from the 1805–6 Jena system: This is the higher principle of the modern era, unknown to the ancients, to Plato …. Yet individuality’s [sc., Einzelnheit] knowledge of itself as absolute—this absolute being-within-self [Insichsein]—was not [yet] present. The Platonic Republic is, like Sparta, [characterized by] this demise [Verschwinden] of self-knowing individuality [Individualität].67

Hegel’s point is that ancient individuality lacked the inward self-­ knowledge distinguishing modern (singular) personhood. Plato had sought (preemptively) to “dispense” with “the principle of absolute singularity [Einzelnheit]”—as a marginal note has it—for the sake of an idealized universal.68 Franco misleads in writing of modern “subjectivity and individuality.” (c) Individuality/Individualism: That suggests scrutiny of another concept, ‘individualism’: emphasis on the particular subject or person, whether descriptive or normative.69 The problem here is that—to quote the much quoted Max Weber—“‘individualism’ embraces the utmost heterogeneity of meanings,” which very much demand sorting out.70 A further challenge therefore is to discern what a writer intends by ‘individualism’ in a given instance, when by the later nineteenth century it was often conflated with ‘individuality’ (the OED lists sense 4. of individualism, from 1854, as equivalent to individuality senses 2 & 3). An added complication is the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville popularized the term even in decrying atomistic tendencies it can denote. Yet he also admired American independent-mindedness and habits of informal association.71 Individualism did not of itself sap civic association, he admitted, although economic liberalism and market capitalism steered it in another direction.

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In Hegel’s time the word ‘individualism’ was just coming into vogue, first in French (with a pejorative sense), then from the late 1830s in German. Hegel himself employs the term ‘Individualität’—never ‘Individualismus’—doing so extensively and in an individual yet consistent manner. Sometimes he seems to align ‘individuality’ with singular trait, sometimes more with personhood (“singularity is the principle of individuality and personality”), or with the universal.72 Moreover, hypostasis is a constant danger, whether in subjective or objective direction. Context is all important, and close reading becomes imperative. Even with the most exacting commentators, muddling of ‘individuality’ with ‘individualism’ all too easily creeps in.73 Elsewhere I have attempted a brief conceptual history of the distinction of ‘individuality’ and ‘individualism,’ where I emphasize their recent vintage, ‘individualism’ especially. An Appendix gives the Ngram Viewer for the two words. Their usage is fraught, and it is difficult to make a historical argument about what caused their eventual import or connotation.74 The rise of ‘individuality’ seems associated with Physiognomics and with the spread of Romanticism, but conflation of terms makes exact diagnosis difficult. * * * 2. Problems of definition: (a) Greek Tragedy and Beyond: The term ‘Individualität’ first drew my attention in relation to what I called the “pragmatics of tragedy” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Donougho 2006). I had wished to forestall anachronistic insertion of a modern subjectivity (let alone subjectivism) into discussion of ancient Greek practice, or into our reading of Hegel’s description and analysis. His meticulous use of ‘individuality,’ in the section of chapter VI on Greek ‘Sittlichkeit’ (customary action or character), to portray and explicate heroic action (Handlung) avoids exclusive reference to singular agent or universal law. Indeed, it serves to mark (“for us”) a certain elision of agent with norm, motivation with principle. ‘Individuality’ itself seems to follow a logic—or better, pragmatics—of equivocation; which is not to despair of finding precise meanings in play. I discern five levels of ‘individuality’ in this section:

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• as male hero or government authority (which I label individuality1)75; • as female commemoration, in family cult and ritual (individuality2); • as autonomous processes of natural decay (maggots and so on: individuality3); • as brother-sister relation (individuality4); and • as general sublunary Earth-process (individuality5). Each works in a distinctive manner, although the agon in Sophocles’ Antigone concerns mainly the first two senses. Moreover, viewed in intersubjective perspective, individuality serves to mediate particular trait and general significance; the self may in practice ‘overgrasp’ fixed character trait, by altering its habitual ways or submitting to redescription (its own or others’). Not least, putting the classical ‘Ideal’ under the aegis of ‘individuality’ promises to throw a different light on Hegel’s Aesthetics. Its defining focus on “the artistically beautiful” (das Kunstschöne) will appear ambiguous, as much a veil (Schleier) occluding the truth as an authentic mode of absolute spirit.76 At the time I had in mind following up my essay on tragedy with something on the general significance of ‘individuality’ for Hegel’s system. The present work is a belated attempt to broaden my original focus. ‘Individualität’ plays a leading role also in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: it furnishes the structuring rubric of the Physics, which—following Mechanics and preceding Organics—amounts to over 45% of the entire text, crucially mediating between the other two parts. Yet little notice has been paid to its function, the ontological aspect of which recalls less scholastic discussions than Leibnizian monadology (the individual as monad, exerting force through its functioning members, so organizing systems in non-mechanistic fashion).77 To my knowledge, commentary on the Philosophy of Nature ignores the term altogether, while translations elide it with ‘singularity’ (Einzelheit). The challenge for Hegelian philosophy of nature is often taken to be how one might plausibly integrate mechanism and teleology; the functioning of ‘individuality’ in the ‘Physics’ gets short shrift. Why does Hegel adopt such an odd expression in this crucial median and mediating position? Further, can we identify precedents or contemporary usage that might elucidate his own meaning? Finally, how are we to square that meaning—individuality

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of ‘physical’ bodies or systems as seen in philosophical perspective—with its employment in human and cultural arenas, that is, where the topic is somatic or social expression.78 (b) Emergence of Individuality (in social fact/as theoretical category): From these brief remarks it is already evident that ‘individuality’ is ambiguous, slippery, not rigorous enough one might think for inclusion within our philosophical lexicon. In fact it boasts a highly respectable lineage, in response to specific metaphysical and social conditions. In the metaphysical tradition the concept arose in opposition to essentializing universals; in social perspective category and phenomenon register a generalized uncertainty about performing various public functions or interpreting expression via body, language, or deed. Historically there emerged a distinct space—even need—for ‘individuality,’ as both phenomenon and category. When hierarchical order (whether socio-­ political or religious) gradually waned through the eighteenth century, individual identity came to seem problematic. In Luhmannian vein David Wellbery writes: “The individual was left without a firm social or metaphysical anchorage, without a universal symbol that would fix its identity. Hence Goethe’s famous dictum: ‘Individuum est ineffabile.’”79 Wellbery identifies an emerging cult of friendship and a Pietist displacement of religious community into personal experience as compensatory attempts to touch bottom. An adequate cultural resolution would arise, he argues, only with the educational ideal of ‘Bildung’ (self-formation). One of the few to have discussed Hegel’s contribution is Catherine Malabou. Her remarkable study, The Future of Hegel (2004), offers insights (a) into links between individuality and habit, (b) on implications for classical sculpture and, more generally, (c) on the ‘plastic individuals’ Hegel envisages peopling the polis, as well as (d) on Greek philosophy and drama, both of which Hegel considers exemplars of ‘plasticity.’ More controversially, she speculates (e) on the temporality Hegel’s dialectic of plasticity opens up for his readers.80 ‘Plasticity,’ derived from ancient Greek plassein (to model or mold), connotes both giving and receiving form. The “miracle” of Greek sculpture (in Hegel’s eyes) lies in the virtually incomprehensible way stone comes to life under the artist’s hand—and in our own active experience of individual works.81 Sculpture

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seems able to discern how physiognomic features and bearing come to life in ordinary human expression, that is, in our customary and everyday ‘minding’ of the body. In this book I ask whether and how ‘individuality’ helps divulge the workings of Hegelian texts. In what ways might it supplement the logic of Universal/Particular/Singular, by virtue of the intermediary ‘pragmatics’ it deploys, as it were the concretizing RNA to the DNA code of syllogistic inference? Does it not entail also “working the interval” (Rancière) between competing voices or claims, as with Hegel’s approach to classical tragedy, where Sophocles’ Antigone may be read as unconsciously ‘overgrasping’ her proper sphere of action, tacitly setting in motion a wholesale deflation of heroic individuality even as she uncovers the incipient individualism behind political authority?82 May we not imagine something similar happening with “physical” systems (in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature), where individual bodies inhabit simultaneously two (or more) identities, in their own right and yet subject to solar dominion? And doesn’t it take the logician’s “thinking regard” to hold adverse moments in speculative unison? How—to take the crucial case of Art (in the singular)—are we to understand the classical ‘Ideal’ or its ‘beautiful individuality’ other than as deeply paradoxical: the anachronistic (yet legitimate) projection of a late-eighteenth-century category into the distant past, to reveal both its true character and its cultural boundaries?I should add in conclusion that in late-eighteenth-century Germany there emerged out of the Leibniz-Herder line two important, intertwined traditions: ‘Bildung’ (self-formation), and ‘Historismus’ (historism). Each puts ‘individuality’ front and center, and warrants more extensive treatment than could be given here.83

 ppendix: Ngram Viewer for ‘Individualität’ A and ‘Individualismus’ For what it is worth, the Ngram Viewer for ‘Individualität’ and ‘Individualismus’ shows usage of the first beginning in the 1770s, rising rapidly in the decade after 1800, subsiding until 1820, then rising even

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higher around 1840 before falling somewhat after 1850. The second is flat until 1840, rising steadily through the 1920s, though never overtaking the other in popularity.

Germany

For ‘individualité’ versus ‘individualisme,’ we find the first in sporadic use after 1760 (perhaps with reference to organic life: Buffon), a gradual rise after 1795, and a rapid increase after 1825, peaking between 1840 and 1870, then again in the early 1900s and the 1940s. The second begins its gradual rise from the 1820s, peaking around 1850, then rapidly climbing to a high in the early 1900s and again in the 1940s, easily overtaking ‘individualité’ around 1980.

France

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Britain

Any conclusions must of course be tempered by acknowledging (a) that conflation had certainly set in by the late 1800s, and (b) that the comparisons don’t discriminate between affirmative, negative, and neutral (or more complicated) attitudes. English usage shows a steady increase for ‘individuality’ from 1800 through peaks between 1900 and 1920, then gradual decline; ‘individualism’ begins its career around 1840, gradually rising to a peak in the late 1930s, briefly overtaking the other in the 1990s. There seems to be slightly higher usage of ‘individuality’ around 1800 and a slight decline up to 1810, before the explosion occurs. Compare results for English fiction:

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These results overall confirm a late-eighteenth-century origin for ‘individuality’, 1820s France for ‘individualism,’ whence it migrated into German and English (British, North American).

Notes 1. Conjectures on Original Composition: Young 1759, 42. 2. Blake 2008, 641. “Every Minute Particular is Holy,” writes Blake in Jerusalem (90: 42). He praises ‘individuality’ too, for evincing the unique human person in whom imagination amounts to divine emanation. 3. Spencer 1864, chapter VI, §74, 206. Individuation remains a problem—and a hot topic—in biology, botany especially; see Chap. 7. 4. Tocqueville 2002, 482. Publication of Volume Two was delayed until 1840. In Volume One (1835), by contrast, ‘individuality’ connotes independence, of townships, states or peoples. 5. ‘Individuality’ seems employed more occasionally in the Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1991b), where it pertains, for example, to heroic action (§118), family feeling (§158), chivalry (§167), state sovereignty (§§259, 271), or monarchy (§279). Individuals enter into consideration qua citizens or state officials, but not as members of civil society (strictly ‘singular’: einzeln). The category barely features in Hegel’s Logic, apart from a walk-on part in ‘Absolute Mechanism’: Hegel 1969, 6: 423–27/Hegel 2010b, 640–44. 6. See Donougho 2000, 153–4 (Phenomenology), and Donougho 2011 (Logic). Pragmatics exhibits a double, even triple, focus: on the object presented (whether action or speech), on Hegel’s own utterance or presentation (Darstellung), and on active reception, then or later. 7. Hegel 6: 277/Hegel 2010b, 532. He continues: “Just as it has been called free power, it could also be called free love and boundless blessedness, for it relates to what is distinguished [dem Unterschiedenen] solely as to itself; in that [the distinguished], it has returned to itself.” Theunissen understands the relation as symmetrical—modelled on divine love, God’s “condescending to singularity”—and furthermore as “communicative freedom” (Theunissen 1978, 42–3). Abazari (2020, 10) interprets “free power” as like the relation of ‘domination’ (Herrschaft) Theunissen had earlier seen afflicting the Logic of Essence. Theunissen 1978 (from 1975) was then more critical of ‘the concept’ for its subsumptive power, rooted

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he suggests in theological sovereignty. Manfred Frank too (Frank 2014, 121) refers to an “asymmetrically distorted” relation “dominating” the other. Yeomans 2015b (34–5), offers a measured defense of Hegel. 8. Ngai 2012. She finds inspiration in Cavell’s engagement with Kantian aesthetic judgment, stretched well beyond Kant’s own disinterested precincts. See also Ngai 2020, on ‘the gimmick’ as “aesthetic category [which] reflects nothing less than the basic laws of capitalist production and its abstractions as these saturate everyday life” (4). It reflects their boundary too, in a period of capitalist crisis. As with “all aesthetic categories, the gimmick names a relationship between a relatively coded way of seeing and a way of speaking that the former compels” (5); “seeing” includes hearing, smelling, touching, etc. (308). For Cavell on “passionate utterance,” Ngai 2020, 21–24. 9. Hegel 1969: 3, 183/ ¶236. I cite the Phenomenology by paragraph (pilgrow: ¶) and page numbers in Werke 1969. I sometimes employ Pinkard’s translation (Hegel 2018a), but mostly supply my own. 10. It seems unfair to confine to a footnote mention of another line of argument I pursue, against those indicting Hegel with deployment of masterful rhetoric. To many Hegel appears dogmatic, sexist, Eurocentric, racially insensitive, or logocentric—all that and more. Yet he will often draw distinctions over which his critics assume he rides rough shod. A good example is his approach to the sublime—ever alert to the dangers of Kantian ‘subreption,’ that is, smuggling subjectivity into things. Similarly with his accounts of human digestion and habit, or the classical Ideal (with respect to nature), or absolute mechanism in the Logic. Compare my remark on conceptual power, note 7 above. 11. Hegel’s ‘Introduction’ to the Encyclopædia, §2 (Werke 8, 41 Hegel 1991a, 24): “philosophy can be determined in general terms as a thinking consideration of objects.” Cf. Philosophy of World History, ‘Introduction,’ Werke 12, 20: philosophical historiography as “die denkende Betrachtung.” Alvarado (Hegel 2011b, 8) renders the phrase as “thoughtful consideration”; it is not in Hoffmeister (Hegel 1975a, 24). Cf. Hegel 2011a, 6–8, where the editors invoke Hayden White’s idea of ‘Metahistory’ (White 1973) for a synoptic perspective on perspectives. See also ibid., 140, where (under ‘philosophical world history’) Hegel ties the philosophical Idea to Mercury, tasked with guiding individuals through universal history.

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12. Collingwood wrote his book on a long sea voyage, recovering from heart problems. His name will return in Chap. 9, as exemplar of the Romantic aesthetic of expression, but also for his thoughts about “improper” usage (e.g., anachronism—sc., ‘parachronism’—and “courtesy” meaning). 13. In certain circles calling someone a snowflake—as in “Generation Snowflake”—is an insult. Chuck Palahniak’s Fight Club (1996) has the line, “you are not special, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” The censorious tone accords with what Hegel (in the Jena Logic) calls “so-called individuality”: the mere “this” or the “One” which presumably “should” (soll) exist, quite apart from any defining properties. (See Chap. 3) It does not rule out of court a properly-called individuality—the topic of my book. 14. Harper’s Magazine, December 2014, 99. Permission of Pennswood Village is gratefully acknowledged. 15. Matthew Crawford: “Individuality is something that needs to be achieved, and in this endeavor other people are indispensable to our efforts” (Crawford 2015, 149). He frames it as phenomenological experience rather than as logical, semantic or pragmatic implication. Not all social interaction really matters: he discounts the “levelling” effects of mere society much as Kierkegaard does. 16. Mendelson 2007; citations to this edition. The novels discussed are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (birth), Anne Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (childhood), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (growth), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (marriage), plus Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway (love), To the Lighthouse (parenthood), and Between the Acts (the future). Chapter V (‘Reason’) of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit features a section called ‘The Animal Realm of Spirit [das geistige Tierreich] and Deception, or the Thing that Matters [die Sache selbst].’ Hegel has in mind “the public interest” of civil society, a “thing” that exists only as a reflection of everyone’s conscious efforts yet also behind their backs, akin to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” There ‘individuality’ plays a pivotal role with regard to what is both mine and ours, the ‘inter-est’ in common, the “work of each and all.” Mendelson attends not to the public interest but to private interests—things that matter to individuals—if in their dealings with other individuals. 17. Mendelson comments that Lydgate was too early for twentieth-century cell biology, as Mr. Casaubon was too late for a universal theory of mythology (137–9). The young Marianne Evans (George Eliot) was

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taken with the pseudo-science of phrenology, even having a cast made of her own skull, but she later abandoned the idea since it failed to do justice to the complex meaning of individual organs. (The sham allure of phrenology/physiognomy returns below, with Hegel’s devastating critique in the Phenomenology.) Another early enthusiast of phrenology (and notable proponent of the evolutionary value of individuality) was Herbert Spencer, with whom Evans was once in love (he felt unable to reciprocate). 18. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot 1919). Constantly revised by new works, ‘tradition’ is hardly monolithic. Even the second aim of Eliot’s essay—urging that poetry is impersonal, all personality extinguished—is compatible with a version of modernist formalism. It all depends on how you frame subjectivity and expression. Eliot makes the poet a passive medium. (Hegel comments on individual “talent” in “Animal Realm of Spirit.”) 19. Woolf 1992, 226: “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” 20. Woolf 2015, 86. That looks far into the future, in terms of “we” rather than “one’s own” room. Meanwhile—in the world of Woolf ’s fiction— we are not merely separate but also interactive, finding ourselves in and through association with others. 21. Werner Hamacher grasps the paradox (Hamacher 1986, 106): “The concept of individuality betrays individuality in the very act by which this concept attempts to seize, in the mediation, individuality’s substance.” Cf. Piper 1973, 730: “Eine Metaphysik vom Individuum im strikten Sinn ist nicht möglich, eben weil im Begriff ‘Individuum’ etwas prinzipiell Unbegreifliches mitgedacht warden muß ….” 22. “When an individual refuses the application of a word that applies, by the rules of language, to them, or when an individual applies to themselves a word not yet in the public lexicon, they are making a move that they hope others will take up—and that will in turn, change how they are seen and treated by others. Words can change the world.” Srinivasan 2020, 39. I have no personal stake; my usage here is provisional, although I admit a possible tension between general and particular usage of ‘individuality.’

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23. I draw here on Donougho 2002. Cf. Früchtl 2009, 135–8, for an ironic take on divided individuality. 24. “Höchstes Glück der Erdenkinds/ Sei nur die Persönlichkeit” (West-­ Östlichen Diwan): Goethe 1974, 130–31. Goethe’s character Hatem rejects this exalted ideal—he wants his beloved in the flesh. See also Robertson 2016, 62–4: the poet balances Greek form against eastern nature (‘schöpfen’ means both creating things and drawing water). I owe the discrimination of ethical and aesthetic lines of descent to John Burrow; see Burrow 2000, Chap. 5 (“Constructing the Self ”), especially 190 ff. 25. Famously inspired by Humboldt, Mill advocated diversity of experience and individual autonomy, not so much for their own sake as in the interest of self-development. Oddly—if perhaps understandably, given his rejection of a strict upbringing—Mill favored a measure of eccentricity too, even though (as Burrow remarks) it would be difficult to imagine him, like Nerval, taking a lobster for a walk: Burrow 1985, 79. He teases out the peculiar mix of aesthetic and energetic elements in Mill’s mid-­ Victorian liberalism: less Goethean symmetry than free expansion of character, done not so much beautifully as dutifully. 26. Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (1919). Weber 1992, 84/Weber 2020, 14: “Jene Götzen sind: die ‘Persönlichkeit’ und das ‘Erleben.’” Both are associated via Dilthey with Goethe and contrasted with a proper sense of ‘personality’ in science, “der rein der Sache dient” (rendered by Searls as “wholly devoted to what you are studying”). Weber depicts a Goethe torn between practical and poetic life. 27. A convenient summary of his trailblazing work is found in Elias 1991, written mostly between 1930 and 1950. He criticizes the “curious party game” (54) of deciding whether individual or society is more important, when in fact “the individual is both coin and die at the same time” (55). But Elias neglects to examine the social formation of the concept of ‘individual’ or ‘individuality,’ on which Luhmann lays special emphasis. 28. James 1985, chapter XIX, 397–8. “What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear …. One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self.” Isabel responds: “My clothes may express my dressmaker, but they don’t express me. To begin with, it’s not my own choice that I wear them; they are imposed upon me by society.” (Power plays its part.) For “my sole self!” see Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats 2001, 357).

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29. For a general introduction, see Luhmann 1986. Also “Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus,” in Luhmann 1993, 149–258 (see now Luhmann 2022, 216–99); “Individuum und Gesellschaft,” Luhmann 1984, 2013a, e.g., 263–7, or 295–6 (Freudian unconscious as the individual within us all, distinct from itself, so leaving society to its endless ideologizing). For a deflationary, even sardonic approach (almost in free indirect style), see Luhmann 1995 Chap. 7 (“Individuality of Psychic Systems”), 258–9 (on the emergence of ‘individual’ in aestheticepistemic-­anthropological context—Baumgarten or Kant, for example, in Baeumler’s account), and 266–7 (on the paradox by which individuality is a closed system, essentially unrelated to social conditions). True, “individuals gradually become capable of referring to their individuality when describing themselves” (267). Yet if they then proceed to shun universality altogether, they become self-stylized and eccentric—hence imitable by others! (For “psychical” system, see editor’s note in Luhmann 2022, 227.) 30. Luhmann 2010, Chap. 10 especially. 31. 1847 journal entry, as cited by Garff 2000, 490. For discussion of how Kierkegaard sought “distance” from anonymous society, see Hannay 1999, especially 80. 32. Habermas 1992, 151 (Chap. 7: ‘Individuation through Socialization’). 33. Habermas, 164; Humboldt Werke 3, 160–61 (see Humboldt 1968, 125). The individual wants per impossibile to enter into another’s individuality. Humboldt continues: “Here language comes to his aid in a truly wonderful manner, binding together even as it distinguishes and containing within the shell (Hülle) of the most individual of expressions the possibility of universal understanding.” He means universal—the virtual whole of humanity! Similar ideas are found in On Language (Humboldt 1988), e.g., §20. 34. On Habermas’s turn to Kierkegaard after 1987 see Matuštík 1991, 1993 (Chap. 1). An individual may choose to live within a tradition while also maintaining a reflective distance. 35. Cavell 1986. See the Introduction by Heller and Wellbery, 1–15. 36. Cavell 1986, 284. 37. Nietzsche 1986, 148: §376 (‘Of friends’). Nietzsche 2006, 121: 3rd Part (‘The Wanderer’). 38. Huxley, Julian, 1912, 1 (“The Idea of Individuality”). Zarathustra ends up alone with his animals. He has no friends, apart from us, his readers.

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39. The clip (available on YouTube) captures the sense we have that Brian and his audience are performing, all of them playfully aware of the ironies of mass adoption of difference or non-conformity. Even the “Shhh!” should be understood as tacitly knowing (a “nudge, nudge, know what I mean?”). 40. Hegel 1991a, xix; see below, and note 56. 41. Ngai 2012, Chap. 2: “Merely Interesting.” 42. Ngai, 144 (Ruscha), 120–21 (Romantic publications). I cannot begin to do justice to the wealth and originality of Ngai’s treatment of what she calls “interest’s affective ambiguities.” 43. Yeomans 2015a. He provides little context apart from declaring it “the existential moment of identification with one’s own life, of success in overcoming estrangement, of affirmation” (2), which sounds as much Kierkegaardian as Hegelian. He links it also with Fichtean “formal freedom” (63). 44. Habermas 1992, 158–62, plus 152: qua self-actuating, “individuality is not conceived primarily as singularity, nor as an ascriptive feature, but as one’s own achievement—and individuation is conceived as the self-­ realization of the individual [sic] [des Einzelnen].” Habermas draws on Annemarie Piper (Piper 1973, 732): individuality doesn’t involve singularity (‘Singularität’) but is something the individual must bring about “um Individuum zu sein.” 45. Yeomans 2015a, most explicitly at 39 and 195. 46. Gerhardt 2000, 170. On Shaftesbury’s “dividuality,” Donougho 2016. 47. Nietzsche 1986, 42: “In morality man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum.” See Raunig, 2016, 91–6. Nietzsche’s story has another side however. Raunig links critique with Foucault’s approach to ‘ethics’ as “care of self ”; and Nietzsche does allow that habituation enters on the scene, putting self-division in a healthier light. It bears on Hegel’s attitude to habituating the self (in his ‘Anthropology’: see below). Habits can enslave the soul yet may also empower it, promoting its liberation. ‘Habit’ ushers in Hegel’s dialectic of ‘the’ versus ‘my’ self. 48. Strathern 1988, 13: “Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a generalized sociality within.” See also Smith 2002. For complexities within Strathern’s text, see Raunig 2016, 162–8. Alfred Gell’s “distributed person” (Gell 1998) is another example. 49. Antje Linkenbach and Martin Mulsow, “Introduction: the dividual self,” Part 2 of Religious Individualisation (Fuchs 2019), 323–43. They cite Raunig, Strathern, Taylor, and Gell.

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50. Deleuze 1995, 180. See also Rose 1999, 234–5, comparing with Foucault’s ‘subjectivated individual.’ For a recent ethnographic application, see Hopkins 2019. Before Strathern and Deleuze, ‘dividual’ was rarely mentioned. 51. See Hegel 1991b (Elements of the Philosophy of Right), §§ 46, 51, 57, etc. Property concerns the person “als Einzelner,” not individual. 52. One clonal colony of aspens in Utah, nicknamed ‘Pando’ (‘I spread’), is said to be the heaviest organism on earth, weighing in at around six million kilos; sadly, it is said to be in declining health. Recently a fiber-­ bull weed in Shark Bay, Australia, has been identified as occupying 120 hectares (versus 43 for Pando). On mushrooms, Hope Jahren writes (Jahren 2016, 104): “You may think a mushroom is a fungus. This is exactly like believing that a penis is a man.” Most of the organism lives underground. She goes on to remark that some fungi have a symbiotic relation with trees, further complicating issues of individuality. 53. Spencer 1864, vol. 1, 202: chapter VI (‘Individuality’). He defines ‘individual’ on 207: “a biological individual is any concrete whole having a structure which enables it, when placed in appropriate conditions, to continuously adjust its internal relations to external relations, and so maintain the equilibrium of its functions.” More generally, see Derek J. Skillings, “Life is not Easily Bounded” (Skillings 2017), citing Peter Godfrey Smith, “Darwinian Individuals” (Smith 2013). The contemporary literature on biological individuality (in evolutionary perspective) has proliferated, Pando-like. For an overview, see Wilson and Barker 2018. An excellent resource is Lidgard and Nyhart 2017; they confirm that ‘individuality’ takes many individual forms, even as the idea tends to be intuitively attractive to both theorists and working scientists. 54. For example, what we today call ‘solid state’ physics (gases, liquids, solids), plus material density, cohesion, elasticity, sound, heat, magnetism, color, smell and taste, then electricity and chemical process. Hegel pitches his discussion is at a middle level, mediating between abstract law and empirical observation. His reconstructions aim to bring out the rationality immanent in the behavior of physical bodies or states. 55. “Introduction: Translating Hegel’s Logic,” T.F.  Geraets, H.S.  Harris: Hegel 1991a, xix. The phrasing, and the distinguishing of ‘individual’ from ‘singular,’ are credited to “the insistence of Harris.” 56. Romantics favored ‘Individualität,’ close in sense to ‘Einzigartigkeit’ (uniqueness) as well as ‘Eigenartigkeit’ or ‘Eigentümlichkeit’ (peculiarity, idiosyncrasy). Friedrich Schleiermacher will often use the last expression

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interchangeably with the first, or with the subtlest of inflections. Translating Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Criticism, Andrew Bowie renders both as ‘individuality,’ whereas Louise Huish, in her translation of Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, reserves ‘particularity’ for ‘Eigentümlichkeit.’ To avoid muddle I suggest keeping all these expressions separate from Hegel’s major trio of universal (Allgemeine), particular (Besondere) and singular (Einzelne): their logic is totally different. ‘Individuality’ carries the further connotation of indivisibility (from Greek ‘atomos’). That too sounds Romantic, so far as it involves an expressive unity resisting analysis into independent parts. Human action, bodily demeanor, ethical character, the (classical) artwork, and physical systems are models of concerted expression, in Hegel’s view. 57. ‘Übergreifen’ enters when one moment of thinking includes or comprehends its opposite. I shall often appeal to this overlooked category. I learned of its potential from Emil Fackenheim, who credited Ivan Il’in for insight into “double transition.” ‘Übergreifen’ permeates Fackenheim’s major study, The Religious Dimension of Hegel’s Thought: Fackenheim 1967, 96–114, and passim. He rendered it (oddly) as ‘overreach,’ as does Inwood 1992. The translators of the Encyclopædia Logic prefer ‘overgrasp,’ tracing its origins to Zeno (Hegel 1991a, xxvi–xxvii). See Il’in 2010–2011 (abridged 2019). See too Maybee 2009; Bruce-Robertson 2018, 85. Inwood mentions ‘overreaching’ extensively, noting (58–9) its strange logic: “the concept of what is other than a concept, an object, is itself a concept.” 58. Entry (April 1801) in his first Notebook: Coleridge 1957, 928. 59. Hilmer 1997, 5, 21, 44. The words—“als absoluter Geist in der Gemeinde”—come from Griesheim’s 1826 transcript (ms. 50–51), cited in Hilmer 1997, 41 (note 69). 60. Inwood 1992, 302–4 (‘Universal’). Inwood allows that ‘Individuum’ and ‘Individualität’ “carry a stronger suggestion of human individuality and individualism than ‘einzeln,’ etc.” (302). 61. Hegel 1991a, b, xix (my emphasis). “In this view, the distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘singular’ is absolutely fundamental…,” they remark. 62. The more recent translation by Brinkmann & Dahlstrom (Hegel 2010a) conflates ‘singular’ and ‘individual’ (e.g., §165). By contrast, in his translation of The Science of Logic (Hegel 2010b, e.g., lxx), George di Giovanni observes the difference. For ‘singular individuality’ in Hegel’s

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Phenomenology see Hegel 1977a, 178, ¶295; Hegel 1969, 3: 225. Further instances are found at ¶382, 229/284, and ¶464, 278/342. For “universal individuality”—besides the first citation above—see ¶324, 319/388; ¶374, 224/279; ¶378, 227/281; ¶550, 335/407. (We also find at least one case of “proper or singular singularity,” ¶293/223–4.) The term exhibits a dialectical swing—a Schillerian ‘Schwung’—between singular and universal poles, as we shall see. Or better, when “syllogized,” it may be seen operating in mediant fashion, actively to determine the universal and universalize the singular, much as the search for ‘species’—Arten— joins abstract ‘genus’ to particular features in nature. 63. Burbidge 1996, 109–10. The last claim is debatable; more dubious still is his remark that Hegel prefers the Latin-rooted term for this part of his system, leaving Einzelnheit for the more theoretical part. 64. Phenomenology, ¶¶158–9 (law both on the books and in force, as the “inverted world”); ¶171 (life as process of inversion of invertedness); and ¶200 (the sage, “in der Tat” living a life of more than formal principle, of fully determinate content). In these cases the individual includes or “overgrasps” its opposed moment of universality, so moving continually beyond (while preserving) its singular existence. 65. Werke 5, 58/ Hegel 2010b, 39. The sole mention of ‘individuality’ in the Objective Logic—apart from the general concept of “organic individuality”—seems to come in a ‘Remark’ on the dissolution of “the thing,” where spirit is contrasted with thing by virtue of its ability to contain contradiction within its unity, within the subject or “the simple individuality” (Werke 6, 147/Hegel 2010b, 436). Later instances will be discussed in their turn (especially under ‘Mechanism’: 6, 410ff./631ff.). 66. For example, Hardimon 1994, Quante 2004 (compare Quante 2008), Moyar 2011 (e.g., 31—“In this study I always translate Einzelheit with individuality”), Church 2011, Rózsa 2012, Deligiorgi 2017. 67. Franco 1999, 79, Leo Rauch’s translation in Hegel 1983, 159–60 (on this same passage, see Nance 2017, 51). I insert “yet” to disambiguate the passage. It turns on the contrast between waning ‘individuality’ and rising ‘singularity.’ 68. Hegel 1987, 263/Hegel 1983, 160 (and footnote). 69. Izenberg 1992, 1–2, and passim. He cites Meinecke and Simmel on the contrast between Romantic individuality and Enlightenment individualism. 70. Several commentators invoke Weber’s admonition: e.g., Koebner 1934, Swart 1962, then Steven Lukes in his invaluable Individualism (Lukes

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1973, 43–4, 49 in the new edition). I offer an assessment of the confused conceptual history in an unpublished essay, “‘Yes! We’re all individuals!’: Notes on ‘individualism’ versus ‘individuality’.” (See my Substack entry.) 71. Democracy in America (1835), Part Two, Chapter 5: “On the Use that the Americans Make of Association in Civil Life.” Tocqueville 2002, 489–92. “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science” (492). 72. Werke: 7, 297/Hegel 2010b, 547. Hegel writes of the distortions wrought by abstraction, which would render individuality a “principle.” 73. For example, Kenneth Westphal, “Individuality, individualism and our human zoôn politikon,” in Bykova 2020, 133–48. Westphal says nothing about ‘individuality’ even where one might expect it (e.g., 137–8, 143–5). His analyses of “putative individualisms” in Hegel—always selling intersubjectivity short—are nevertheless persuasive. 74. Robert Putnam uses Ngram evidence for 1880–2008 to trace a broad twentieth-century decline of ‘individualism’ in the United States before its 1960s resurgence (Putnam 2020). Chapter 8 examines narrative trends and outlines several likely causes. 75. The polity (Gemeinwesen) is also “a people” (ein Volk: Phenomenology ¶474/353), and so qualifies as a singular individuality (which we might even dub individuality1a): the nation on a concerted war footing. It is itself individuality and essentially for itself, only in that other individualities are for it, in that it excludes them from itself and knows itself to be independent of them. The negative aspect of the polity, directed inwards, suppresses the isolation [Vereinzelung] of individuals, but when directed outwards is self-active, has its weapons in individuality. 76. Already in 1806 Hegel could write of beauty as “the veil covering the truth rather than its presentation (Darstellung).” Hegel 1987, 255/Hegel 1983, 175. The challenge, for Hegel and for us readers, is to keep both sides—blindness and insight—in balance. Meeting that challenge is difficult, but we should try nevertheless. It demands a “looking awry” at Hegelian texts. 77. On scholastic usage, see Gracia 1988, helpfully distinguishing ‘individuality’ from ‘particularity’ and ‘singularity’ (53–4). 78. The entry in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Ritter 1971), vol. 4: I-K, 295ff., esp. 316–20, pays unusually close attention to the various

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contexts (including Hegel’s Logic). Yet its brief survey does not ask what makes them all of a piece. It’s more like a guide to bird-life (plumage, profile, habitat, etc.). 79. Wellbery 1996, 242. His argument—much abbreviated—is that Goethe in effect projected problematic individuality into the formal production of lyric poetry. He performed it, thus foreshadowing the ideal (or myth) of aesthetic autonomy found in the early Romantics. 80. Malabou 2004. Compare Menke 2016, nicely formulating the paradox of habit via Aristotelian “second nature”: it is both second nature, and second nature, hence a never-ending struggle for freedom as autonomy. Julia Peters, in Hegel on Beauty (2015), captures the salience of anthropological ‘habit’ for Hegel’s philosophy of art (e.g., 21–31), but overlooks the important connection with classical sculpture and with the “plastic” generally. She misses the ‘Lebendigkeit’ animating Hegel’s Ideal (though a recent essay offers a partial corrective: Peters 2018, esp. 115–21). I return to the temporality of Hegelian dialectic—the future of his past, so to say—in Chap. 9, on anachronism in his conception of art. Here my focus is on corporeal ‘plasticity’ rather than Malabou’s ‘futurity,’ let alone her thoughts about “divine plasticity” (in Part 2 of her book) or linguistic presentation (Part 3). 81. Werke: 14, 362; Hegel 1975a, 710. Citations in text. 82. Rancière 2006, 61–2: “working the interval between identities, reconfiguring the distinctions of public and private, the universal and the particular.” Rancière’s later aesthetics puts Hegel to work in surprising ways: see Chap. 9. 83. On ‘Bildung’: Beiser 2003, Bykova 2020, Forman 2011, Herdt 2019, Horlacher 2004, 2016, and especially Koselleck 2002. On ‘Historismus’: Beiser 2011, and Meinecke 1937, 1957, 1972.

Bibliography Hegel, G.W.F. 1969, Werke, eds. Moldenhauer & Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969) Hegel, G.W.F. 1975a, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) Hegel, G.W.F. 1975b, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)

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Hegel, G.W.F. 1977a, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) Hegel G.W.F. 1983, Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6), trans. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983) Hegel, G.W.F. 1987, Jenaer Systementwürfe III: Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes Hamburg: Meiner, 1987/GW 8, 1976) Hegel, G.W.F., 1991a, The Encyclopædia Logic [1830], trans. Geraets, Suchting, & Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991) Hegel, G.W.F. 1991b, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B.  Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Hegel, G.W.F., 2010a, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. Part 1: Science of Logic [1830], trans. Klaus Brinkmann & Daniel Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Hegel, G.W.F., 2010b, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Hegel, G.W.F., 2011a, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, volume 1, trans. Robert Brown and Peter Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Hegel, G.W.F. 2011b, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. Ruben Alvarado (based on Sibree) (Alten, Netherlands: Wordbridge Publications, 2011) Hegel, G.W.F. 2018a, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Abazari, Arash 2020, Hegel’s Ontology of Power. The Structure of Social Domination in Late Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) Beiser, Frederick 2003, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) Beiser, Frederick 2011, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Blake, William (2008), Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) Bruce-Robertson, Lawrence 2018, “The Platonic Dimension of Hegel’s System,” in Glenn Magee (ed.), Hegel and Ancient Philosophy: a reexamination (New York: Routledge, 2018), 70-85 Burbidge, John 1996, Real Process: How Logic and Chemistry Combine in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996)

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Burrow, J.W. 1985, “Autonomy and self-realization: from independence to individuality,” chapter 4 of Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 77-100 Burrow, J.W. 2000, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) Bykova 2020, Marina F. Bykova & Kenneth R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Cavell, Stanley 1986, “Being Odd, Getting Even: Threats to Individuality,” in Reconstructing Individualism: autonomy, individuality, and the self in Western thought, eds. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, David Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 278-312 Church, Jeffrey 2011, Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011) Collingwood, R.G. 1938, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938) Crawford, Matthew 2015, The World Beyond Your Head: on becoming an individual in an age of distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) Deleuze, Gilles 1995, “Postscript on Control Societies” in Deleuze, Negotiations1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177-82 (original 1990) Deligiorgi, Katerina 2017, “Individuals: the revisionary logic of Hegel’s politics,” in Thom Brooks and Sebastian Stein (eds.), Hegel’s Political Philosophy: On the Normative Significance of Method and System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 185-201 Donougho, Martin 2000, “Stages of the Sublime in North America,” MLN 115/4 (December 2000), 909-940 Donougho, Martin 2002, Review of Breckman 1999, The Owl of Minerva, 33/1 (2002), 124-34 Donougho, Martin 2006, “The Pragmatics of Tragedy in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Idealistic Studies 36:3 (2006), 153-68. Donougho, Martin 2011, “Performing Hegel,” in Baur & Wood (eds.), Person, Being, & History: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Schmitz (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 156-80 Donougho, Martin 2016, “Shaftesbury as Virtuoso: Or, the Birth of Aesthetics Out of a Spirit of Civility,” in Fictional Characters, Real Problems: essays on the ethical content of literature, ed. Garry Hagberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 325-39 Elias, Norbert 1991, The Society of Individuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)

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Eliot, T.S. 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 42-53 Fackenheim, Emil 1967, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967) Forman, Paul 2011, Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics: Selected Papers by Paul Forman and Contemporary Perspectives on the Forman Hypothesis, eds. Cathryn Carson et al. (London: Imperial College Press, 2011) Franco, Paul 1999, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) Frank, Manfred 2014, “‘Identity of identity and non-identity’: Schelling’s path to the ‘absolute system of identity’” in Interpreting Schelling: Critical Essays, ed. Lara Ostaric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 120-44 Früchtl, Joseph 2009, The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity, trans. Sarah L. Kirkby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) Garff, Joakim 2000, Søren Kierkegaard: a biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Gell, Alfred 1998, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford Universirty Press, 1998) Gerhardt, Volker 2000, Individualität: das Element der Welt (Munich: Beck, 2000) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1974, ‘The Book of Suleika’ (1819), in West-Eastern Divan, trans. J. Whaley (London: Oswald Wolff, 1974) Gracia, Jorge J.E. 1988, Individuality: an essay on the foundations of metaphysics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988) Habermas, Jürgen 1992, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (1988; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) Hamacher, Werner 1986, “‘Disgregation of the Will’: Nietzsche on the individual and individuality,” in Reconstructing Individualism (see Cavell 1986), 106-39, 338-9. Hannay, Alastair 1999, “Kierkegaard’s Levellings and the Review,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 4 (1999), 71-95 Hardimon, Michael 1994, Hegel’s Social Philosophy. The Project of Reconciliation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Herdt, Jennifer 2019, Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) Hilmer, Brigitte 1997, Scheinen des Begriffs. Hegels Logik der Kunst (Hamburg: Meiner, 1997) Hopkins, Julian 2019, Monetising the Dividual Self: the emergence of the lifestyle blog and influencers in Malaysia (Oxford: Berghahn, 2019)

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Horlacher, Rebekka 2004, Bildungstheorie vor der Bildungstheorie: die ShaftesburyRezeption in Deutschland und der Schweiz in der 18. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004) Horlacher, Rebekka 2016, The Educated Subject and the German Concept of Bildung: a comparative cultural history (London: Routledge, 2016) Humboldt, Wilhelm 1968, Gesammelte Werke, vol 6, Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues (Berlin: Baer, 1903; reprinted Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968). Humboldt, Wilhelm 1988, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-­ Structure and its Influence on the Mental [geistige] Development of Mankind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Huxley, Julian 1912, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912) Inwood, Michael 1992, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) Izenberg, Gerald N., 1992 Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, revolution, and the origins of modern selfhood, 1787-1802 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Jahren, Hope 2016 Lab Girl (New York: Knopf, 2016) James, Henry 1985 Novels 1881-1886 (New York: The Library of America, 1985) James, William 1992 Writings 1878-1899 (New York: The Library of America, 1992) Kant, Immanuel 1998, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Keats, John 2001, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: The Folio Society, 2001) Koebner, Richard 1934, “Zur Geschichte des Begriffs ‘Individualismus’: Jacob Burckhardt, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die französische Soziologie,” Historische Zeitschrift, 149 (1934), 253-93 Koselleck, Reinhart 2002, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 170-207. Lidgard, Scott and Lynn Nyhart 2017, Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) Luhmann, Niklas 1984 “Individuum und Gesellschaft,” Universitas 39/1 (1984), 1-11 Luhmann, Niklas 1986, “The individuality of the individual: historical meanings and contemporary problems,” in Reconstructing Individualism (see Cavell 1986), 313-35

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Luhmann, Niklas 1993, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Bd. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993) Luhmann, Niklas 1995, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) Luhmann, Niklas 2010, The Reality of the Mass Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) Luhmann, Niklas 2013a, Theory of Society, vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) Luhmann, Niklas 2022, The Making of Meaning: From the Individual to Social Order. Selections from Niklas Luhmann’s Works on Semantics and Social Structure, trans. Margaret Hiley, Michael King, Christian Morgner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) Lukes, Steven 1973, Individualism, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973; reissued with a new introduction, Colchester: ECPR, 2006) Malabou, Catherine 2004, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2004) Matuštík, Martin J. 1991, “Habermas’s Reading of Kierkegaard: Notes from a Conversation,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 17/4 (1991), 313-23 Matuštík, M. 1993, Postnational Identity: critical theory, existential philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (New York: Guilford Press, 1993) Maybee, Julie E. 2009, Picturing Hegel: An Illustrated Guide to Hegel’s Encyclopædia Logic (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009) Meinecke, Friedrich 1937, Schiller und der Individualitätsgedanke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1937) Meinecke, Friedrich 1957, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1957) Meinecke, Friedrich 1972, Historism: the rise of a new historical outlook, trans. J.E. Anderson (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1972) Mendelson, Edward 2007, The Things that Matter: what seven classic novels have to say about the stages of life (New York: Pantheon, 2006; reprinted with afterword 2007 Mendelson, Edward 2015, Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (New York: NYRB, 2015). Menke, Christoph 2016, “Autonomy and liberation: the historicity of freedom,” in Zuckert & Kreines (eds.), Hegel on Philosophy and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Miller, Daniel 2005, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) Moyar, Dean 2011 Hegel’s Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

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Nance, Michael 2017, “Hegel’s Jena Practical Philosophy,” in Dean Moyar (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 31-57. Ngai, Sianne 2012, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012) Ngai, Sianne 2020, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020) Nietzsche, Friedrich 1986, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Nietzsche, F. 2006 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Peters, Julia 2015, Hegel on Beauty (New York: Routledge, 2015) Peters, Julia 2018, “Hegel on Spirit, Nature and the Function of Classical Art” in The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History, Paul Kottman and Michael Squire, eds. (Paderborn: Fink, 2018), 101-24 Piper, Annemarie 1973, “Individuum,” in Handbuch philosophischer Grundbegriffe, eds. Krings, Baumgartner, Wild, (München: Kösel, 1973), vol. 2, 728-37 Putnam, Robert 2020, (with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) The Upsurge: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020) Quante, Michael 2004 Hegel’s Concept of Action trans. Dean Moyar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Quante, Michael 2008, “‘Reason… apprehended irrationally’: Hegel’s Critique of Observing Reason,” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, eds. Dean Moyar & Michael Quante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 91-111 Rancière, Jacques 2006, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006) Raunig, Gerald 2016 Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, trans. Aileen Derieg (Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016) Ritter, Joachim 1971, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, et al. (Basel: Schwabe, 1971) Robertson, Ritchie 2016, Goethe: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Rose, Nikolas 1999, Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

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Rózsa, Erzsébet 2012, Modern Individuality in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2012) Skillings, Derek J. 2017, “Life is not Easily Bounded,” at https://aeon.co/essays/ what-­constitutes-­an-­individual-­organism-­in-­biology. Smith, Adam 2002, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); 1st edition 1759 Smith, Peter Godfrey 2013 “Darwinian Individuals,” in Frédéric Bouchard & Philippe Huneman (eds.), From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 17-36 Spencer, Herbert 1864, The Principles of Biology, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864) Srinivasan, Amia 2020, Review of Dennis Baron, What’s Your Pronoun? London Review of Books, 42: 13, 2 July 2020, 34-39. Strathern, Marilyn 1988, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) Strathern, Marilyn 2006, “Divided Origins and the Arithmetic of Ownership,” in Bill Mauer & Gabriele Schwab (eds.), Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 135-73 Swart, Koenraad W. 1962 “‘Individualism’ in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1826-1860),” Journal of the History of Ideas 23/1 (1962), 77-90. Theunissen, Michael 1978, “Begriff und Realität. Hegels Aufhebung des metaphysischen Wahrheitsbegriffs,” in R.-F.  Horstmann (ed.), Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 324-59 de Tocqueville, Alexis 2002, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop (London: The Folio Society, 2002) Weber, Max 1992 Gesamtausgabe 1/17 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992) Weber, Max 2020 “The Scholar’s Work,” trans. Damion Searls, in Charisma and Disenchantment. The Vocation Lectures (New York: NYRB, 2020), 1-42 Wellbery, David 1996, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginning of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) White, Hayden 1973, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) Wilson, Robert A. & Matthew Barker 2018, “The Biological Notion of Individual,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford. edu/cgi-­bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=biology-­individual. Woolf, Virginia 1992, To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin, 1992)

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Woolf, Virginia 2015, A Room of One’s Own; Three Guineas, ed. Anna Snaith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Yeomans, Christopher 2015a, The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel’s Pluralistic Philosophy of Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Yeomans, Christopher 2015b, “Power as control and the therapeutic effects of Hegel’s logic,” Hegel Bulletin 36: 1 (2015), 33-52 Young, Edward 1759, Conjectures on Original Composition, in a letter to the author of Sir Charles Grandison (London: Millar & Dodsley, 1759)

2 ‘Individuality’ Before Hegel: Leibniz, Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Schlegel

Individuum est ineffabile (Goethe, writing to Lavater, 1780).1

Whereas thinkers in theMiddleAgeshadpursued the metaphysics of ‘individuality,’ the concept itself—in its own individuality, we might say— wasn’t expressly considered until the early modern period. I begin with Leibniz (whose ‘monadology’ inaugurated the entire line), broadening my approach to consider his philosophy of organic life alongside his metaphysics proper. I proceed to Herder, who adopted Leibnizian themes (with important reservations) while extending the reach of ‘individuality’ to have it bear on ethics, anthropology, intersubjectivity, history and language, among other areas. After shifting focus to Herder’s friend Goethe, whose literary and scientific efforts turn out to hinge on ‘individuality,’ I take up Fichte’s peculiar usage (the individual conceived in society with others), followed by Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schlegel. Other figures might well merit attention—Schiller, Hölderlin, and Novalis, for example—but seem less central to the conversation. One can find striking or suggestive quotes in Novalis, but fashioning them into a coherent view proves difficult. Another marginal candidate is Friedrich

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Jacobi, whom Hegel criticizes for his extreme subjectivism and anti-­ rationality (his ‘personalism’ is often expressed in terms of ‘individuality’).2 * * * (a) Leibniz: While continuing to promote scholastic themes such as ‘substantial form, ‘ Leibniz (1646-1716) also makes a decisive break with tradition. His metaphysics supposes that the individual—later termed ‘monad’—was universal in its own right, since it comprises a unique perspective on the whole. Hegel (in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy) contends that Leibnizian thought was indeed founded on the principle of individuality: for him the individual implicitly represents the whole (hence its ‘idealism’), constituting a genuine “subjectivity” indistinguishable from self-determining universality.3 For Leibniz the “complete concept” of a substance contains virtually all predicates that might inhere in it: individual substance is “filled with the future and laden with the past,” we read in the Preface to the New Essays.4 Not that its infinite implications can be unfolded all at once (Monadology §61): “a soul can read in itself only what is distinctly represented there.” Predicates will in fact be unfolded solely given sufficient reason. Monads lack parts, hence are quite unlike atoms in being neither material nor extended (space is unreal). They are themselves indivisible, while all matter “can be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish” (Monadology §67), infinitely divisible. Monads lack access (“windows”) to the external, phenomenal world, openings through which they might communicate or be affected: rather, all relations reduce to internal determinations, predicates of the complete concept of a thing. Moreover, each monad implicates every other monad, each a “living mirror” of the entire universe (as Leibniz puts it in §56). The individual is implicitly (sc., ‘enfolded’) the whole. When Etienne Balibar refers to Leibniz’s “inter-subjectivity,” he must intend this virtual implication (in the limit) of all other monads, certainly not actual communication or influence (the absence of which in Leibniz Manfred Frank and Alain Renaut deplore).5

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Leibniz does not deny that explanation of particular phenomena and effects in terms of spatio-temporal causes has a provisional yet “well-­ founded” validity, despite not entering the “sphere” of substantial forms (Discourse on Metaphysics, §10). Similarly, changes in underlying substantial states may register—that is, be consciously “apperceived”—yet there are also “petites perceptions” taken up unconsciously; continuous change no more than approximately or vaguely discerned, just as hearing the indistinct roar of the waves will not discriminate every slight splash. Last, phenomenal description may capture aggregates of monads or substantial forms, even though what we perceive is the action of substance. Monads express themselves as active force (vis viva). The unity observed in a composite body derives from its dominant monad. Strictly speaking, substances include humans, animals, plants, and some non-living forms, rather than the aggregates whose phenomenal shape and interrelation are evident to us. Individuals, in other words, are unities of active form and passive matter or bodies. It bears repeating that for Leibniz everything is endowed with individuality—a certain “entelechy” or vitality—not just organic life and human beings. “The whole of nature is full of life,” he writes.6 It is not that living things are more than machines: rather, “[n]ature was machinery all the way down”—“machines were more than machines.” It is a “restless clock,” as Leibniz puts it, noting that the German for balance-spring is ‘die Unruh,’ disquiet.7 Recent scholarship has emphasized a certain Aristotelian “realism” in Leibniz’s middle period. During these years he became familiar with observations made with Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, in particular the discovery of microbial creatures and the interdependence of all living beings.8 Corporeal substances contain other substances, and they in turn include an infinite number of others, as animals abound with worms which in turn contain germs, etc.—bugs “all the way down” (Daniel Garber). Some commentators (e.g., Nachtomy, Smith) speak of a hierarchy of “nested individualities,” dominating and dominated substances, levels of individuality each more or less active/passive.9Leibniz thought that such nesting characterized living bodies: “all are in a perpetual flux, like rivers, and parts enter into them and depart from them continually” (Monadology, §71: Leibniz 1991, 78). Hierarchies are continually

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shifting, in other words, apparent or expressed power relations always provisional. Hegel underscores the fundamental principle of individuality in Leibniz’s thinking. His main criticism pinpoints the “abstract” individuality of an “intellectual system,” merely “thought” or supposed.10 The association of monads with one another relies on the hypothesis of predetermined, divinely ordained harmony. The same criticism surfaces in Hegel’s Science of Logic, where “idealism” is characterized as the position that “the finite is an idealization … the form of representation.”11Idealism transcends the thought of a finite, given “limit” and “restriction” (Schranke) so as to think the unity-in-distinction (or distinction-in-unity) of finite and infinite. In a Remark to Chap. 3, “Being-for-itself ” (under the general rubric of “Being-for-one”) Hegel writes: The Leibnizian representing being [vorstellende Wesen], the monad , is essentially an idealization. Representation is a being-for-itself in which the determinacies are not limits and therefore not an existence but rather only as moments…. [F]or Leibniz even the things that lack consciousness are representational, perceptual …. The manifold is such only ideally and internally ….—That there is a plurality of monads, that they are thereby determined as others, is the affair not of the monads [themselves] but of a reflection external to them, of a third; in themselves they are not others to one another; the being-for-itself is kept pure, without the juxtaposition [Daneben] of an existence.12

Hegel rejoins that “the content of such a thought is inwardly external to itself [in sich selbst äußerlich]”—a performative contradiction. Ideality is immanent to the monads, so far as they represent the whole in their fashion; yet the harmony of the many monads is imputed from without, as “an abstract plurality,” not from within. A final note: Leibnizian ‘individuality’ will return in the last chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in ¶803, where Hegel alludes to the historical replacement of “self-less substantiality” (Spinoza) by expressive “individuality. * * * (b) Herder: J.G. Herder (1744–1803) was much indebted to Leibniz, portions of whose work he had copied out and studied intensively, although

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his own writings diverge markedly in content and manner.13 “Herder’s influence in German culture ran wide and deep,” declares Terry Pinkard: he was the “father” of any number of different movements in German thought, ranging from his study of folklore…, to the philosophy of history, linguistics, theories of culture, and so forth. Herder’s writings were crucially important in the Romantic transformation of the dominant metaphor of nature from that of the “machine” to that of “life”…. Likewise, Herder was crucial in fashioning a view of agency as “expressivist,” rather than mechanical: what distinguishes human agency, so Herder argued, is its capacity for meaning, for which the use of language is crucial…. [O]ne must understand both the agent’s culture and the agent himself as an individual from the “inside,” not from any kind of external, third person point of view. This also led Herder to propose that we should understand human history as a succession of ways of life, or “cultures,” whose standards for excellence and rightness are completely internal to themselves and which become expressed in the distinctive language of the culture…. Moreover, the defining mark of a “culture” or a people is language…. (Pinkard 2002, 132–3)

Such a protean thinker is hard to assess. In any event, the theme of individuality is already evident in Pinkard’s summary: as individual or cultural expressivism, originating from within rather than abstract or rule governed; as organicism in history, language in use; not least, in Herder’s individual voice, etc.—even the openness of “etc.” Moreover, while he declares “(t)he deepest basis of our existence is individual,” that tends to be tacit rather than explicit.14 We can trace it in several areas: in Herder’s responses—whether affirmative or critical—to Leibniz’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind; in his poetics, theories of language and of interpretation; in his ethics, anthropology, aesthetics, or philosophy of history. Every one of these influenced Hegel’s views in fundamental ways, which—because fundamental—are implicit, hard to sort out. * * * Catherine Wilson remarks on Herder’s “almost reverential image of Leibniz”; “he was a passionate lifelong admirer,” not just on philosophical grounds.15 Herder adopted Leibnizian views on continuity, force, individuality, and the non-destructibility of substance, along with the

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anti-­Cartesian idea that humans are not radically separate from animals (the main difference being our ability to reflect on and organize sensibility). He followed the teleological perfectionism of Leibniz and Wolf— the belief that nature was inherently well ordered and that each being is ordained to perfect itself (albeit in this world rather than the next). “Every created thing is defined with a most perfect individuality, and circumscribed by it,” Herder writes.16 Each of us has implicit powers we are called on to “unfold,” through application and practice. Yet Herder rejects Leibniz’s “pre-established harmony,” finding something dead and wooden in his simile of synchronized clocks. On the contrary, each of us is active force, vis viva.17 Yet we tend to act within context, and in real (not just virtual) interaction with others. The monad has windows: “how little has nature created us as scattered boulders, as egoistic monads!”18 Equally, Herder rejects (what he considered) Leibniz’s view that the soul cannot move the body, or that it takes divinely ordained harmony to synchronize them (Herder 2002, 182–4). Herder disputes any sharp division of thought from emotion, mind from body, and condemns the compartmentalizing (by “our bright and clear philosophy”) of the faculties of mind and sensation, particularly Leibniz’s sorting of clear and obscure, distinct and confused ideas, rather than describing an “individual human being” (Herder 2002, 197). Ridiculing Leibniz’s metaphor of “the sea of waves whose sounds get lost in one other more obscurely or loudly,”19 Herder describes instead a continuum running from “irritations,” sensations, and bodily states, the whole way to conscious reflection (Reflexion, Besonnenheit). The so-called “machine” is really all of a piece, organically alive, an expressive unity. Language too emerged from attending to single waves in the “whole ocean of sensations,” “marking” their individuality, then remarking it to oneself and to others.20Thought becomes active in and through language, he maintains—language broadly construed as symbolic usage in general.21 This constitutes his “expressivist” model, by which humans are capable of discriminating individual marks and of imparting their significance to other humans; the wave is distinguished but placed within the entire flux of human life. Herder explores the enlivening tension between individuality and holism of meaning. Meaning lies in usage above all, while in turn usage tends to be individual—individual to the times, speaker’s background or upbringing, and so on.

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I must for go discussion of Herder’s ethical or aesthetic views, his theology, or theory of interpretation—some of which have been touched on. Nor can I do justice to Hegel’s general debt to Herder: his approach to language, culture or life, his expressivist model of agency, above all his philosophy of history. It is pervasive, which might help explain why Hegel omits almost any specific mention (not that Herder simply anticipates Hegel, as Michael Forster charges). *** (c) J.W. Goethe: Although not a major theorist of ‘individuality,’ Goethe (1749–1832) may be said to have exemplified it in both life and work. Individuum est ineffabile—the celebrated motto mentioned in a letter to Lavater—epitomizes that principle and its paradoxicality. That Goethe linked it with Lavater’s Physiognomik and eventually broke with his pastor friend are telling: ultimately he could not abide absorption of individual trait into general type, let alone into a some divine Providence or destiny. “Modern knowledge is broken knowledge,” contends Barbara Stafford, situating Lavater’s vaunted science of fragments in the cultural and epistemic turn from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. She notes his reliance on silhouettes, diagrammatic outlines, serial portraits framed in ovals where features are schematically compared, along with detached lips, noses, or foreheads presented “like slogans or dicta.”22Lavater makes the entire universe fragmentary. Goethe admired the radical individuality ambiguously at work in Lavater’s theory—and in his person it should be added. Their later falling out, somewhat mysterious and coming just before Goethe’s departure for Rome (where he appeared disguised as a painter), was over other matters. He pronounced this “new eye” of physiognomics a kind of spying, designed to catch out individuals rather than capture the truth. Goethe early on had endorsed Lavater’s physiognomics, but his judgment of it was always qualified and soon became negative as he began formulating his own ‘morphology.’ In one respect he was at one with Lavater in seeking an identity between inner meaning and outer phenomena, which could be sensed directly (‘Anschauen’ as both seeing and intuiting). Unlike Lichtenberg or Hegel, he did not seek to undermine the whole project of physiognomics. Moreover—as Richard Gray shows in a

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study of this peculiarly German tradition, About Face (2005)—physiognomics would borrow Goethe’s cultural prestige as it flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, albeit in distorted, ultimately racial form (via disciples such as Carus, Klages and Kassner).23 As early as the “Addendum” (Zugabe) Goethe wrote for the first volume of Physiognomic Fragments, he allowed of the individual that “class, habit, possessions, clothes, they all modify him, disguise him.” “It appears extremely difficult, even impossible, to penetrate all these veils to a person’s innermost being, or even stable points in these alien modifications on the basis of which one could draw inferences about its nature.” In short, “Nature forms human beings, but they in turn transform themselves, and these transformations are once again natural”24—hardly the fixed correspondence Lavater claimed. While physiognomics can be said to have left its mark on Wilhelm Meister’s theatrical experiences, the later parts of Goethe’s novel reveal a pronounced skepticism.25 In short, individuum est ineffabile. It is impossible to perceive an individual’s inner essence in face or body. As with his good friend Herder, Goethe remained beholden to a Leibnizian metaphysics, which he likewise broadened to admit a continuum of interacting individuals. Goethe’s biographer Nicholas Boyle suggests that the “metaphysical compromise” between individual monad and (divinely underwritten) universal order finds a parallel in the “social compromise” by which middle class inhabitants of the German absolutist state, though constrained in their economic independence, found compensation in relatively free private lives and in official assurance of an identity of interest with the state.26 Goethe accepted the compromise, in his thinking and politics both. Despite his later declaration of allegiance to Spinoza’s Ethics (impressed by its attention to the moral life and to a unified nature), his Spinoza “is, philosophically speaking, a markedly Leibnizian figure,” Boyle writes.27 The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)—the epistolary novel which made Goethe famous—presents an emergent individuality, yet with a measured ambivalence. Werther appears to be directly present to the reader when he writes—almost it seems to us—of his overwhelming feelings of love.

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David Wellbery comments on how the letters aim not to advance the action but rather to “make imaginatively accessible the tonality of a unique subjective experience.”28Love and desire are no longer tied to general values but, in a modern functionally differentiated society, are framed reflexively, in their own terms, those of “romantic” love. Describing Charlotte to Wilhelm, Werther quite fails to get at what enchants him—“not some ideal she embodies, but her unique, and inexpressible, individuality,” Wellbery remarks. If Werther himself is seen gradually disintegrating through the course of the novel—more so in the 1786 revision29—other Goethean characters may also be understood as modelling how individuality is formed and fitted in modern society. Götz or Egmont, for example, and especially Meister, understood by Humboldt as a character without clear definition (Goethe’s novelty having been to make “the world and life” appear “as entirely independent of a particular individuality and therefore as open to any individual whatever”).30 The novel stands at the same time for a certain withdrawal from artistic introspection. As T.J. Reed suggests, it inaugurates Goethe’s ‘Classical’ phase. The unity of Goethe’s Classical œuvre lies in the way individuality asserts itself under the even and serene style—not as an arbitrary rebellion against convention but as the finally unquestionable unfolding of a distinctive personal nature.31

I forbear extending the list through other characters, such as Otilie (in Elective Affinities), or Faust, forever experimenting with his own individuality (as Hegel portrays him in the Phenomenology). To quote Richie Robertson’s summary (Robertson 2016, 111): What matters to Goethe is individuality. In life and literature, he likes people who have strong, distinct personalities, who are genuine, spontaneous, natural, and who seek to realize their individuality.

Robertson quotes from the posthumously published essay “One More Word for Young Poets.” In the eyes of others he had been a liberator, Goethe writes:

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for they saw from my example that, just as a person must live from the inside outwards, so the artist must have his effect from the inside outwards, since, whatever he does, he will always bring forth only his individuality.

In his last letter at age 82, aptly enough to his friend Humboldt, Goethe addresses the relative share of conscious planning versus unconscious inspiration in the composition of Faust. Assuring Humboldt that the artist should welcome “a regulated intensification of his natural abilities,” he adds, “whatever he receives from without does not harm his innate individuality [Individualität].” Goethe ends with the words: I have no more urgent task than to intensify [steigern] where possible whatever is and remains in me, and to distil again and again [cohabiren] my peculiar powers [meine Eigentümlichkeiten]. You, my friend, are doing the same in your castle.32

I conclude with a glance at Goethe’s scientific endeavors, his morphology especially, viewed in individual aspect. Goethe writes: “What we become aware of in experience is mostly just individual cases…,” which we draw together into an intuition (Anschauen) of the Urphenomenon then descend once more to everyday experience.33 In the 1790s he absorbed the influences of Baader and Schelling, again to promote a Leibnizian individuality. As his thinking moved towards grasping the fluidity of a universal nature sweeping up all particular “shapes” into its continuum, he became disdainful of the individual, declaring that individuality “is a trivial concept” which hinders our understanding of organic beings (Boyle 2000, 600). In an 1806 aphorism he could even proclaim: There are no individuals. All individuals are also genera: namely, this individual or that, what you will, is representative [Repräsentant] of an entire genus. Nature doesn’t create a singular unique [Einziges]. It is something unique, it is one, but the singular is often many, exists as plenty [Menge], without number (Riemer 1841, 261).

Compare the early fragment, “Nature”: “All her efforts seem bent towards individuality, and she cares nothing for individuals. She builds always,

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destroys always, and her workshop is beyond our reach.”34Metamorphosis seems the obverse yet complement of individuality. Hegel bore a complicated relation to Goethe’s thought, whether the theory of plants or his normative aesthetics. Hegel was reluctant to disagree openly with someone he took as mentor. He pokes fun at Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, probably because it had been praised by early Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel, and would distance himself somewhat from Weimar classicism. Yet Goethe’s espousal of ‘Individualität’ left a deep impression. * * * (d) J.G. Fichte (1762–1814): Writing to Friedrich Schiller (5 May 1798), Goethe reports that he has been reading the second part of Fichte’s Naturrecht, recently sent by its author. “Practical sceptic that I am,” declares Goethe, he detects empirical influences even in its abstract format. More generally, “I see in many famous axioms only the expression of individuality”—namely, Fichte’s. (Schiller, writing in August 1795, had rejected Fichte’s contribution to Die Horen because as individuals they were fundamental opposites.) Goethe concludes his letter: “Farewell, and love my loving individual [Individuum], notwithstanding its heresies.”35 Ironically enough, Fichte had three years earlier complained about Reinhold’s divulging his “passions” qua “Individuum,” whereas the real philosopher would never mix a particular “Individuum” with the truth.36 Yet his Foundations of Natural Right (1796–97) puts ‘individuality’ center-­ stage, in the first part anyway (the next, on “applied natural right”—the part Goethe was reading—makes no mention save for its bearing on individual property and contracts, marriage included).37 Much more than something artistic illusion would have us forget, Fichte writes, individuality combines self-limitation and recognition of others just like myself. Hence it bears crucially upon my moral and political existence. As Fichte puts it, “the rational being cannot posit itself as a rational being with selfconsciousness without positing itself as an individual, as one among several rational beings that it assumes to exist outside itself.”38 In the original Wissenschaftslehre, the I is said to posit itself as free yet opposed by the ‘check’ (Anstoss) of the not-I, so that ultimately the I in its

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theoretical being will devolve upon practical activity. In Foundations it posits itself instead as a free individual, recognizable as such by other rational agents inhabiting a sensuous world in which the I is capable of giving objective reality to the idea of its own freedom.39 In other words, the I finds itself bound by principles of right, reciprocally imposed on all rational beings. The I posits itself as freely limited in its freedom, as others do for their part, with the result that each is accorded a definite sphere of operation for its moral activity. Fichte’s “second theorem” formulates the paradox: each subject is determined as “its being-determined to be self-­ determined”; each supposes a summons (or invitation: Aufforderung) to resolve to exercise its efficacy (Wirksamkeit) in the world.40 Moreover, this hypothesis about reciprocal positing of limitation is realized solely in practice, “for only in action does there exist such a recognition valid for both.”41 (Matthew Crawford invokes Fichte in a story about his gym experiences. When young, Crawford would exercise at the local YMCA, where someone selected the music playing on a cassette player; years later at a university gym he found the music piped in impersonally. The first experience might, he says, act as a “summons” to his own individuality from another individual; a challenge to, even assault on, his own taste, addressing “where you’re coming from.” By contrast the second precluded any sharing, determined by impersonal happenstance without individual involvement.42) To summarize: “The concept of individuality is a reciprocal concept [ein Wechselfbegriff], i.e., a concept that can be thought only in relation to another thought, one that (with respect to its form) is reciprocally conditioned by another—indeed, an identical—thought.” Never just “mine,” in other words, but “mine and his, his and mine.”43 Fichte’s arguments about individuality and recognition have received close attention in recent anglophone scholarship.44 Fichte’s later metaphysical phase leaves the orbit of interpersonal recognition altogether, favoring talk about the “one life” (of the human race) which the sensible individual imperfectly frames. In Lecture III of his Characteristics of the Present Age (1806) Fichte disparages the individual, personal life as incapable of attaining reason or idea, caught up as it is in the empty abstraction of sensuous existence.45 Lecture V refers to a certain “catchword” (Stichwort) disseminated by “conceited aesthetes” (Dünkel-Schöngeistern): ‘individuality’—“fair, lovely individuality,” in

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Fichte’s sardonic depiction—which blocks proper understanding of a term that stretches from the “sensuous existence of the individual” to “the One eternal Idea.” Fichte does identify an “ideal individuality, however, more correctly called originality [Originalität].46 It isn’t obvious whom Fichte was mocking as “Schöngeistern,” “fine spirits”—perhaps some extravagant Romantics in Berlin or elsewhere, surely not Goethe or Humboldt. Given that ‘individuality’ proper appears here in equivocal light, both sensuous and ideal, the passage encourages a more complex reading. It is cited by Angelica Nuzzo (Nuzzo 2008, 213). She appeals to Emil Lask on ‘individuality’—in his Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (1902)—and specifically his suggestion that attending to the contingent, empirical or “irrational” enabled Fichte to present individuality as a transition between history as “world-plan,” and its realization in time and space, namely, as various “peoples” (Völker).47 Free agency requires individual form, yet that moment—vanishing border between sensuous and ideal individuality—defies conceptual comprehension.48 Fichte’s argument on ‘individuality’ and the practical “invitation” to recognize others is original and provocative. Hegel simply ignores it. His 1826 lectures on Aesthetics instead mount a sharp polemic against (so-­ called ‘Romantic’) irony and its vaunted ‘individuality.’ He traces irony to the Wissenschaftslehre specifically, accusing Fichte of reducing everything to the ‘I,’ to its arbitrary positing of self and world. Hegel protests that the ‘I’ is also a living individual, whose life consists “in making its individuality [evident] for itself as well as for others, so as to express itself…” in original fashion (Hegel 1969, 13: 94/Hegel 1975b, 65). He spies a contradiction between selfhood and its supposedly public existence, even in an intimate circle of intersubjectivity—a salon, perhaps. The ‘I’ wants to shape its life artistically: its own expressive individuality is what really counts for it, with little regard for others. Even so its efforts remain indeterminate, ungrounded. It dissolves into a “morbid beautiful soul,” whereas “the truly beautiful soul acts and is actual”(13, 96/67). Its god-like irony becomes ironic even about itself (a gibe at Schlegel’s “irony of irony”). But why make such a fuss about irony—Fichte’s, Schlegel’s, or Solger’s—, and so late in the day? Jeffrey Reid suggests that Hegel

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perceived irony as an outright threat to his own speculative ‘science,’ much as postmodernism offends many in recent times. It would undercut his efforts to comprehend actuality (Wirklichkeit), by reducing objectivity to the “fiery crucible” of an omnipotent subject (Reid 2014). Art and aesthetics are simply too serious to be left to the virtuoso aesthete. We cannot overlook the further irony that Hegel seems to repeat Fichte’s own attack on ‘beautiful spirits.’ * * * (e) Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835): Gerald Izenberg contrasts Humboldt’s approach to ‘individuality’ with Schleiermacher’s, on philosophical, psychological and literary grounds. Where Schleiermacher exhibited a “divided self,” Humboldt promoted “the whole man” tuned to “inward authenticity” and a harmonizing of faculties modelled on classical Greece.49 Mill’s On Liberty famously cites On the Limits of State Action, published posthumously in 1851 and promptly translated in 1854. Both men followed the aesthetic model of ‘person-hood’ rather than the Kantian or morally inflected version. In Chapter III, “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” Mill refers to ‘the free development of individuality,’ quoting Humboldt (whom few have comprehended, he contends): ‘the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason and not suggested by vague and transient desires is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers [Kräfte] to a complete and consistent whole’; that, therefore, the object ‘towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts…is the individuality of power and development’; that for this there are two requisites, ‘freedom, and a variety of situations’; and that from the union of these arise ‘individual vigour and manifold diversity’, which combine themselves in ‘originality’. [See The Sphere and Duties of Government, pp. 11–13.]50

Their shared dislike of political authority is rooted less in rights than in a view of the individual’s freedom to invent and imagine itself, often in association with others. They also shared a concern about religious

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freedom; chapter VII of Limits draws on Humboldt’s 1789 essay criticizing the Prussian king’s 1788 edict declaring Lutheranism the state religion.51 Let me offer a digest of some of Humboldt’s main ideas. First, the “eternal” dictates of reason (lauded above), along with the “whole” at which self-development (‘Bildung’) aims, are classical rather than Kantian in conception, as Humboldt’s previous chapter makes explicit (he had early on fallen under the sway of the Stoics). “The ancients cared for the power and development of humans as humans, … the moderns for their prosperity, possessions and capacity for work.”52 Second, “individuality of power and development” renders German “Eigentümlichkeit der Kraft und der Bildung.” Both Coulthard and Burrow translate ‘Eigentümlichkeit’ as ‘individuality’—reasonably enough given that diversity (Mannigfaltigkeit) matters to Humboldt while uniformity poses a constant threat.53 Yet individuals are more than peculiar bearers of traits and characteristics: they are to be conceived as creative, formative, beyond the fixed grammar of finite circumstance so as to imagine possibility, in concert with other individuals. Third, we can avoid one-sidedness by seeking to unite our past and possible future rather than variety for its own sake, and by social engagement with others so as to form one another’s characters, thus combining personal independence with intimate association.54 Like Schleiermacher, Humboldt had been shaped by a youthful experience with a “Tugendbund”—society for self-improvement via intimate conversation, with educated women especially (one became his wife). Sociality furnished a model for both political and linguistic interaction. Hence the principle of the true art of social intercourse consists in a ceaseless endeavour to grasp the innermost individuality [Eigentümlichkeit] of another, to avail oneself of it, and, with the deepest respect for it as the individuality of another, act upon it.

Humboldt remarks that it is an art much neglected, and especially vulnerable to state interference.55 Habermas draws special attention to the performative aspect of Humboldt’s views on language. That bears on individuality itself, which exists essentially in performance—that is to say, in interaction with

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others in small associations rather than society at large or the state. More to the point, it operates in Humboldt’s own writing, even though he admits his lack of literary prowess and had found that completing his various projects lay beyond him. Individuality can assimilate given, natural “characteristics,” yet also possess the “energy” or potential to exceed them, so forming its own character into manifold shapes, especially when spurred by other active individuals. Humboldt’s ideas on language offer a different picture, yet there too he locates authority in the individual speaker as much as language. ‘Energeia,’ which features in the posthumously published On Language, operates at both levels: our individuality is formed by language even as language stems from individual creative energy. True, Humboldt takes the form of language to be universal, though some languages prove superior, more creative. For Humboldt, language “is the formative organ of thought …” (Humboldt 1988: §9, 54); thinking is intimately linked to speaking, and language promises a crucial self-awareness. Our inner being, our own individuality, inhabits its language. Hegel’s interaction with Humboldt was limited to a long review of the latter’s treatment of the Bhagavad-Gita.56 While praising Humboldt, he disputed any idea that the poem qualifies as philosophy. Implicitly too he opposed the Romantics’ glorification of it.57 Hegel considered its pantheist sublime to range an endless succession of finite singulars against the indivisible All (Brahma). * * * (f ) Schleiermacher: Ever since Dilthey’s 1870 biography, Ernst Behler writes, Schleiermacher (1768–1834) has enjoyed a reputation as “the quintessential philosopher of individuality.”58 Andreas Arndt begins his study of the philosopher by quoting from a letter of 1803, “Ausgehn von der Individualität”—starting out with individuality—and continues: “Individualization of the universal and the coexistence of universality and individuality are the central themes of Schleiermacher’s ethical thought.”59 Impressed early on by Spinoza’s metaphysics (mediated via Jacobi), Schleiermacher had at first accorded individuals no special place.60 While

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never abandoning Spinozist monism, he would come to give individuality its due in a second, “Romantic” phase, once inducted into the world of Berlin salons and their intense conversational manner. For a later editor of his Monologen (1799), Schleiermacher might have discovered ‘humanity’ in Schlobitten (as family tutor to Count Dohna-Schlobitten), but ‘individuality’ he found in Berlin.61 Averse to salon society itself, he still came to know its main personalities, assisting the Schlegels on their Athenaeum (1798–1800), even sharing rooms with Friedrich. In 1799 there appeared an anonymous “Essay on a Theory of Sociable Conduct,” later revealed as Schleiermacher’s handiwork.62 “Schleiermacher’s theory of sociability issued from the lived experience of the salon,” remarks Peter Foley, who understands it as a rebuttal of Fichte’s idea that individuality reflects our common rational status.63 The aim of ‘free sociality’ is avoidance of shame—the bugbear of Kant, Fichte, even Hegel—, allowing instead only “bashfulness” (Schamhaftigkeit).64 As Adrian Daub puts it, “[t]rue sociability flows not from similarity or identity but rather from difference,” making sociability of a piece with friendship or love (Daub 2012, 187). Distinction (Eigentümlichkeit) is not privative; rather it affirms one’s own talent, endowment, even genius, which exists to be both cultivated and shared. Penning of the essay was interrupted by publication of On Religion (1799), which brought Schleiermacher instant fame.65 Cast as a series of “addresses” (Reden) to a specific audience, it was in effect a conversation with his Romantic intimates on the very topic of community. Religion concerns intuition or feeling rather than knowledge: “to accept everything individual as a part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite is religion” (25). The paradox Schleiermacher enunciates stems from the individual’s feel for a defining relation to “the one and all,” its sense that you must (to cite the Second Address) “annihilate your individuality” (54), escape your limitations and angst about isolated individuality (50, 53). Schleiermacher was on his way to the feeling of absolute dependence characteristic of his mature religious views.66 The Fourth Address, on the social element in religion, urges individuals to resist sharp distinction of layperson from priest; we are at once leaders and led, virtuoso practitioners and hearkening audience. “Every person is a priest to the extent that he draws others to himself in the field that he

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has specially made his own and in which he can present himself as a virtuoso” (85). Hegel mentioned the Addresses approvingly in his Difference essay (Hegel 1969, 2:13/Hegel 1977b, 83), yet remains ambivalent. While not answering a “speculative need,” such publications nevertheless in themselves and by their enthusiastic reception evince a growing openness to poetry and art. Contrasting Fichte to Schelling, Hegel declares that “art and speculation are in their essence divine service” (113/172). The Addresses work in both religious and aesthetic register, yet fail to integrate intuition with reason; Schleiermacher remains an intuitionist. Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge assailed religious subjectivism even more severely.67 While Jacobi and Herder are the express targets and Schleiermacher is unnamed, he might nevertheless be thought the true exemplar of a faith rooted in intuition and feeling. Hegel judges the “virtuosity of the religious artist” to be wholly subjective; his “individuality” is not “embodied in an objective presentation of great figures and their interactive motion”—compare the classical sculptor or dramatist (391/150–51). The art of a religious virtuoso by contrast “is supposed to be ever without artworks”; his freedom lies in “singularity,” in “having-something-­ particular-­for-itself ” (392/151). As for the congregation, it should “let the priest, as a virtuoso of edification and enthusiasm, produce in it the inwardness of intuition” (ibid.). Outward expression (Äusserung) has solely inward significance, as “an immediate outburst or emulation of some singular and particular enthusiasm. Genuine expression—an artwork—is not forthcoming” (393/152).68 Another perspective is offered in Monologen (1800), the very title of which—as Jacqueline Mariña remarks—recalls Leibniz. Distinctiveness (‘Eigentümlichkeit’) is both precondition and result of authentic community—a paradox that would unfold in subsequent essays and lectures. A further paradox concerns the intermeshing of freedom and determinism. My choice of what to do with my life is dictated both by past choices and by my unique circumstances and endowment; I am never wholly free, nor just a cog in the machine.69 Moral choice is a continual negotiation: a process of habit formation, cognitive reassessment, aesthetic or pedagogical fusion of horizons, owning up to feelings of chagrin or resolution,

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practical experiment, cooperation, religious feeling, and so on, at assorted levels from personal to political. There’s no space to follow Schleiermacher’s ethical project, played out over many years in various lecture series, often obscure in articulation and employing a homegrown yet flexible vocabulary (perhaps to avoid easy docketing).70 He thought that ethics tended to abstract from individuality in pursuit of universal norms or through making physical body and habit foes of moral law. For Schleiermacher the supreme principle of morality is individuation itself.71 Mariña identifies four characteristics of ‘individuality’ in Notes on Ethics (Mariña 2008, 170ff.). (a) The individual apprehends the world through feeling, (b) which entails the uniqueness or “non-transposability” (Unübertragbarkeit) of each individual. (c) All individual knowledge is finite and perspectival, and (d) every individual is embodied. It is through feeling that I apprehend others; “individuality is not something attainable through thought,” whereas in feeling it is given immediately (Schleiermacher 2003, 75). Besides individuality, Eigentümlichkeit (irreplaceability) supplies the armature of Schleiermacher’s ethics, although it has received little separate recognition in the secondary literature.72 A brief word on the intense rivalry between Schleiermacher and Hegel in aesthetics. Pace Gadamer, it is unfair to make Schleiermacher a subjectivist. Kristen Gjesdal rightly defends his emphasis on meaning and thought as much as feeling or style. He endorses tradition while acknowledging the need to renew its resources and fight stultification, in language especially.73 Yet she errs in contrasting Schleiermacher with a monolithic Hegel, exemplar of rationalist convention and objectivism. Hegel turns out to be surprisingly close to Schleiermacher. Both observe subtle distinctions between ‘Individualität’ and ‘Eigentümlichkeit’; each responds to the challenge that lines must continually and deftly be drawn, on the fly rather than by appeal to rules. For both, individual freedom finds itself through feeling and habit formation. * * * (g) Friedrich Schlegel: “Perhaps the greatest Romantic critic, despite his undisciplined nature an iridescent thinker and probing observer of art

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and literature…who, like Novalis, jotted down ideas incessantly.74 That judgment reflects an older view of Schlegel (1772–1829), oriented more to his literary fireworks than to what has more recently come to be been seen as his considerable philosophical insight, not least in pioneering a radical anti-foundationalism. Rather than deriving everything from a first principle or ground, Schlegel emphasizes a certain “Wechselerweis” or reciprocal conditioning/self-conditioning: not a straight line but a circle.75 “It is as fatal to the spirit to have a system as to have none,” declares one of his Literary Aphorisms (1797–1800): “It must therefore opt for both.”76 Such systematic non-systematicity amounts to more than rhetoric, a mere play with irony, paradox, aphorism and fragment, as some contemporaries thinkers supposed. It is a distinctive style of thinking, pursued as both literary experimentation and philosophy. On the first, another aphorism runs: “A fragment ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog” (#206). Etymologically (ap-horizein, from the horizon) we may already glimpse an affinity with ‘individuality,’ similarly poised between self-same and universal, and with ‘Bildung’ (formation, development). We should not expect to find a principle or method in ‘individuality.’ Yet ‘individuality’ resounds through Schlegel’s thinking. He began in neo-classicist mode, penning an early essay (1795, published 1798) which contrasted ancient and modern, the classical literature of disinterested beauty and objective form as against a modern “interessante Poesie” emphasizing content and subjective striving. Still under Winckelmann’s spell, he privileged the classical even while praising Dante, Cervantes, and especially Shakespeare. By 1797 he had reversed himself: what had before seemed a perversion was now taken positively as (in Schlegel’s coinage) the ‘romantic’ norm. Such art is, to quote Lovejoy, “more interested in the individual variant than the generic type… aware that the distinctiveness, the idiosyncrasy, of the individual artist’s vision is one of the elements of [the] abundance of Nature, and ought therefore not to be suppressed in art….”77 It is interested in ‘the interesting,’ a category that Schlegel almost singlehanded put in circulation. I’ve already noted its kinship with ‘individuality.’78 Both categories implicate the judging subject in the object judged without thereby reducing to ‘subreption’ (projection). Both emerge from a social context that is anonymous

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or serial, yet where order, rule, genre and position are never just given. The result: meaning must be made as much as discerned—or alternatively, discerning gets creative. Schlegel’s ‘characteristic’ behaves similarly. According to Beiser, the idea arose (ca. 1797) from doubts as to whether objective (‘classical’) standards retained application. It functions as “immanent critique,” without firm criteria: “Critique should judge a work not according to some universal ideal, but should seek the individual ideal of every work.” Schlegel claims to take a moral stance, albeit minus universals.79 (We’ll see later how the ‘characteristic’ emerges in Hegel’s last lecture series on aesthetics, becoming the hallmark of artworks, classical or modern.80). Schlegel continually appeals to the category of ‘individuality.’ Fragments and facts are both called individual.81 Systems too are individual, just as individuals tend towards system.82Virtue lies in individuality.83 Even God becomes the highest individuality: see Ideas (1800) #6, its publication inaugurating Schlegel’s turn towards religion.84 In his “Speech on Mythology”—part of Dialogue on Poesy (1799)—having declared that “[i]t is in the Orient that we must seek what is most romantic,” Schlegel continues by remarking that we may reach our goal by more than one path: May each follow his own, with cheerful confidence and the greatest individuality. For the rights of individuality (if that is what the word signifies: indivisible unity, inner lively coherence) are nowhere more valid than here, where the highest is at issue.85

Not only do humans or artworks comprise individuality: so does nature, according to Schlegel’s lectures on transcendental idealism. Imaginative thinking must grasp “the individual as individual,” always on the wing or in context, like a musical tone.86 Schlegel provoked scandal with his 1799 book Lucinde—the “absolute novel”—an account of falling in love while reflecting on that experience, and a work that instantiates his view of how art should be staged in the radically new mode of “progressive, universal poetry [Poesie].”87 Yet Schlegel remains beholden to a dyadic logic of judgment (Urteil), rather than opening individuality to Hegel’s logic of the syllogism (Schluss)

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whereby—Adrian Daub shows—the middle term takes the individual out of itself into a reverse, inclusive perspective.88 Hegel was conventionally moralistic in his censure of Schlegel’s novel—and what he took as Friedrich’s ‘scandalous’ behavior—but we can understand why its jokey bag of tricks struck him as self-indulgent or evanescent, an offence against the true objectivity of art or moral action. Irony finds its place in Hegel’s parade of cultural formations in the Phenomenology as one moment of ‘the beautiful soul.’ His polemic is reprised in §140(f ) of the Philosophy of Right (under ‘Morality’), where Hegel takes exception to how Schlegel’s “particular selfhood” masquerades as universal.89 Schlegel is further lampooned in the 1826 lectures on Aesthetics, where his playfully ironic refusal to take a position emerges as the mortal enemy of Hegelian ‘science’ (Wissenschaft). The Hegelian irony is that Schlegel became more of a threat in Berlin than he ever seemed at Jena, where Hegel lived briefly in the same house, even attending Schlegel’s 1801 lectures on “transcendental philosophy.”90 The Introduction to the Critical Journal (January 1802), attributed jointly to Schelling and Hegel, aims several barbs at the kind of “unphilosophy” deemed Schlegelian. We read about “short formulae [kurzen Worten]” (fragments?), a ‘particular’ mode of doing one’s own (eigenen) philosophy, “enlarging such particularity [Besonderheit] into system,” even the subjectivism of a ‘beautiful soul.’91 Although they shared certain ideas—that critique should be immanent, should address the whole rather than particular works, and polemic against ‘non-­philosophy’ may be legitimate—Schlegel undoubtedly comes under attack. Whereas Hegel approves of Schlegelian ‘individuality’ in his Difference essay, he rejects it in the Introduction, which holds that any “particular” articulation is excluded from the scope of “true” philosophy.92 Hegel later came to take Schlegel’s joking much more seriously. Unfair though his criticisms often are, he assigns Schlegel a crucial role in his philosophy of art. Schlegel models, for Hegel, the aestheticization of philosophy.

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Notes 1. Goethe 1985, vol. II, 300 (20 September, 1780). “Habe ich das Wort ‘Individuum est ineffabile’ woraus ich eine Welt ableite, schon geschrieben?”. 2. See Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge (Hegel 1977c), which takes Jacobi, along with Herder and Schleiermacher, to personify religious subjectivism. Hegel charges that Jacobi’s union of particular and universal is subjective, merely felt, congealed into sheer yearning (Hegel, 1977c, 153). Although a prototype of the Romantic ‘beautiful soul,’ “Jacobi’s principle tarnishes the beauty of individuality … through reflection on personality” (Hegel, 148–9), reducing all—reason included—to finitude. 3. Hegel 1969, 20: 233/Hegel 1896, 325. Cf. Hegel 1990, 198: “The most important point in regard to Leibniz resides in the fundamental principles, the principle of individuality ….” (Griesheim). 4. Leibniz 1991, 71—cf. 55 (Monadology §22: “the present is pregnant with the future”), and 13 (Discourse on Metaphysics, 1686, §13): that Julius Caesar will cross the Rubicon, become perpetual dictator, etc., is contained in his very concept. Ibid., 71, for the quotation from Monadology §61; 78 for §67; 76 for §56. 5. Balibar 1996, 230–31. 6. Leibniz 2017: “Principles of Nature and Grace,” §1. 7. He writes in Nouveaux essais (1704), Leibniz 1996, 166: “In German, the name for the balance of a clock is Unruhe—that is to say, disquiet [inquiétude]…. the disquiet of our Clock, so this appellation is rather to my liking.” It supplies both epigraph and title for Jessica Riskin’s study of automata—of nature as machine-like—The Restless Clock (Riskin 2016). For “machinery all the way down,” see Riskin 107; machines as more than (mere) machines, 108. 8. Smith 2011, 137. 9. Nachtomy 2007, 215ff., Chap. 9: “Nested Individualities.” Smith 2011, 139, 146, applying Leibniz’s own idea of a natural (versus artificial) machine containing an infinity of machines, all comprised in one dominant machine. 10. Hegel 1969, 20: 242; Hegel 1896 (vol. 3), 335. 11. Hegel 2010b, 124; cf. 129. The reverse criticism could apply: Leibniz reifies the soul. Cf. §389Z of the Encyclopædia under ‘Anthropology’: “Leibniz treated soul as a thing,” albeit “a somewhat more distinct, more

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developed monad than the rest of matter—a representation by which the material is doubtless exalted but soul is reduced [heruntergesetzt] to rather than distinguished from materiality.” Hegel 1969, 10: 46; Hegel 2007a, 30–32. 12. Hegel 2010b, 130–31 (translation amended). 13. See DeSouza 2012, 790; and Wilson 2010, 308. 14. Herder, “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul” (1778), in Herder 2002, 217. 15. Wilson 2010, 295, 301. 16. Herder 1967, vol. 16, 488. (Cited ‘SW’). 17. “On Cognition and Sensation, the Two Main Forces of the Human Soul” (1775), in Herder 2002 182. 18. “Treatise on the Origin of Language” (1772), in Herder 2002, 65 (translation amended). Forster notes that “egoistic” here would mean “solipsistic.” 19. Herder 2002, 192. Catherine Wilson comments that, impressed by the vivid imagery of the Monadology and the New Essays, Herder read Leibniz “for the pictures, one might say, rather than for the propositions” (Wilson 2010, 305). Conversely, we might read Herder for its undercutting of Leibniz’s imagery. 20. Herder 2002, 196–7, 201, 203, 210. On language, “Treatise,” ibid., pp.  87, 155. See Charles Taylor, The Language Animal (Taylor 2016), 9–10, 27–9. 21. Forster argues that for Herder thought is “framed” by language though not identical with it. See Herder 2002, xv, 22, 65; and Forster 2010, 22, 45. 22. Stafford 1991, 330–31; for compartmentalization, 93–103. I quote Donougho 2020a, 142. 23. Gray 2004. Chapter 4—“Goethe as Found(l)ing Father of Modern German Physiognomics”—deals with Goethe’s extraordinary posthumous adventures. 24. Lavater 1775, 15. See Gray 2004, 33–4, 145. 25. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Goethe 1994, vol. 9, trans. Eric A. Blackall, 271. I expand on many of these points in Donougho 2020a. 26. Boyle 1991, 13–18, 157. Boyle does full justice to the cultural mix of Pietism, Wolffianism, and Sentimentalism. 27. Ibid., p. 384. Individuals are more than just finite modes but individual existences conceived as centers of energy. See also Richards 2002, 376–80, 439–40.

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28. “Afterword” to Goethe 1994, 11, 283; for the following, 284–5. Welberry cites Niklas Luhmann’s Love as Passion (Luhmann 1986b). 29. Boyle 1991, 408–10, under the heading “Werther: Retreat from Objectivity.” 30. Boyle 2000, 448. 31. Reed 1984, 62–4. The citation comes from a chapter on “Classicism,” but Reed emphasizes Goethe’s attention to individuality from youth onwards. His first chapter, covering the period up to 1775, is entitled “Individual.” 32. Schloss Tegel in Berlin. See Goethe 1985, vol. 22, 933; Goethe 1957, 537–8. The alchemical term “cohobate” means distil repeatedly. “So much for Goethe’s mental vigour as an octogenarian,” comments Barker Fairley in “Goethe’s Last Letter,” Fairley 1957, 8. 33. Quoted in Robertson 2016, 31; Goethe 1985, vol. 23/1, 80–81. 34. Goethe 1985, vol. 12, 3 (trans. Douglas Miller). The fragment is now attributed to the Swiss theologian Georg Christoph Tobler, but as Goethe’s “Commentary” (12, 5–7) attests, its ideas match some of his own in the mid-1780s. 35. Goethe 1890, 92. See also Behler 1995, 126. For Schiller’s frank reply to Fichte, see Schiller 1795. 36. Quoted in La Vopa 2001, 284–5. 37. Fichte 2000. For a synopsis, see Daub 2012, Chap. 5, 191ff., which points up the stark contrast between Fichte’s “judgment” (Urteil) and Hegel’s “syllogism” (Schluss). 38. Fichte 2000, 9 (II.2; Sämtliche Werke, III, 8). 39. Fichte 2000, editor’s introduction, xiv. 40. Fichte 2000, 31; SW III, 33. 41. Foundations, p. 44; SW III, 47 (under “Third Theorem”). 42. Crawford, 2015, 187: “To get at this difference in the two gym experiences, we need a train of thought that comes from … Johann Gottlieb Fichte.” No reference is given, although it might have come from reading Robert Pippin on Hegel (Crawford attended the University of Chicago). In any event, Crawford switches to a general discussion of Kierkegaardian “levelling,” here called “flattening.” 43. Fichte 2000, 45; SW III, 47–8. The I has no right to a thing but rather “a right in relation to another person” (ibid., 51; SW III, 55). Fichte’s argument (much abridged here) involves the thought of being recognized, not actual recognition or being recognized. Jerrold Seigel is cor-

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rect: “No actual interplay of other individuals is involved” (Seigel 2005, 371). The autonomous subject must posit itself as an individual among other such individuals. 44. See Gottlieb 2016, particularly essays by Gottlieb and Neuhouser. 45. Fichte 1847, lecture 2, 23–8; SW VII, 19–25. 46. Ibid., 68 (translation amended); SW VII, 68. 47. Lask 1914; Nuzzo, 213–4. 48. Nuzzo adduces Fichte’s 1810 “Facts of Consciousness” (Die Tatsachen des Bewußtsein). 49. Impossible Individuality: Izenberg 1992, 27ff. 50. Mill 2002, 59–60; cf. Humboldt 1969, 10–12 (original 1854). 51. See Burrow’s note, Humboldt 1969, 53. 52. Introduction, Humboldt 1969, 7 (translation amended). True, Humboldt continues, they operated on “inner existence, which constitutes the being unique [eigentümlich] to humans,” and so induced a communal “one-sidedness” inhibiting freedom. 53. Ibid., 14–15, for example. ‘Individualität’ first appears at 27: the State’s concern for the positive welfare of its citizens “hinders the development of individuality and uniqueness [Eigentümlichkeit]” (the translation omits this last word). 54. Ibid., 11: “mit der Innigkeit der Verbindung.” For Humboldt’s youthful adventures with the “Tugendbund,” Bruford 1975, 3–9. 55. Bruford, 27–8. 56. 1826 review, in Hegel 1969, 11: 131–204. An English translation by Herbert Herring (New Delhi, 1995) is conveniently reprinted in Hegel’s India (Rathore and Mohapatra, 2017), 87–139. For the fixation on singular things equated with deity, see Werke 11: 191/Hegel’s India, 130: “A second [form of ] knowledge is to see various [particular] principles in all singular things [knowledge as partaking of rajas]” (‘individual’ amended to ‘singular’). 57. Hegel’s India, 23–28, esp. 23–24 on his critical attitude towards Romanticism. Hegel followed Humboldt in emphasizing the poem’s ethical ideas: dharma (duty), yoga (e.g., meditation), and brahman. 58. Behler 1995, 131. 59. Arndt 2013, 11. The 1803 letter runs: “Das Ausgehn von der Individualität bleibt aber gewiss der höchste Standpunkt, da zugleich den der Allgemeinheit und der Identität in sich schließt” (quoted Arndt, 3 & 170).

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60. See Mariña 2008, Chap. 2 (“The Principle of Individuation”), esp. 48–51, 71–73. She deals with his mature conception of ‘individuality’ in Chaps. 4–6. 61. Friedrich Michael Schiele, foreword to the 1902 edition; see Schleiermacher 1978, xxi. 62. Schleiermacher 1995, 20–39. The essay remained incomplete. 63. Foley 2006, 1. Foley’s remarks on Fichte occur at 87–94. 64. Adrian Daub emphasizes this peculiar balance between reserve and communicability, hence the willingness to adapt communication to mixed company. Communication occurs on the basis of what we share rather than what separates us. It is threatened by shame above all—which serves only to segregate the sexes. See Daub 2012, 183–6; on “true sociability,” 187. Whereas Fichte accorded women no public role, Schleiermacher expressly detaches free sociality from “civil status.” 65. Schleiermacher 1988 (page references are to this edition). On Schleiermacher’s intuitionism as a powerful force for reconciling science with religion, see Richards 2002, 97–105. 66. Izenberg 1992, 18–20. The second edition drops references to the “religious artist,” and favors ‘feeling’ over ‘intuition’ (Reid 2014, 98). 67. Hegel 1977c. 68. Jeffrey Reid (2014, Chap. 3), gives an incisive treatment of Hegel’s relations with Schleiermacher. For polemical background to Hegel’s gibe about religious dependence, 108–09. See also “On Schleiermacher and Postmodernity,” in Reid 2007, 104–116, esp. 107–09, sharp on Hegel’s inability at the time to mediate between objectivity and reflection via objective spirit. Reid comments (108): “What is missing in pure intuition is its polar opposite: reflexive understanding, which alone makes the particular distinctions necessary for the understanding of ‘finite realities’.” 69. How far this flexible aversion to fixed dualities anticipates Hegel’s account of corporeal expression (his critique of typological thinking, phrenology, etc.) is moot. The two thinkers share a sense in which for ‘individuality’ the world is reflexively its world, in a continual reversal (Verkehren) of perspective. See the chapters below on Hegel’s Phenomenology and Anthropology. Cf. Monologue III (in Beiser 1996, 193): “A person belongs to the world he helps make. This [world] absorbs the whole of his willing and thinking; only beyond its borders is he a stranger.” 70. Mariña 2008, Chaps. 5–6, is especially clear on individual and community.

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71. Notes on Ethics: Schleiermacher 2003, 74. 72. I have found one source on the topic: an obscure dissertation by August Frohne (1884; electronic reprint 2010). It is well written, subtle in scope, and clear on the place of “psychological” explanation in Schleiermacher. (Along with Dialectic, Psychology was a cornerstone of his system.) 73. Gjesdal 2014, 92–3, 99–102. She wishes to undo the rift between historicity (or Bildung) and individuality (or feeling), arguing for a different sort of tradition in Schleiermacher. Yet she remains wilfully blind to Hegel’s reciprocal embrace of individuality. 74. Willson 1982, xvii. 75. Nassar 2013, 90ff., and see also Allen Speight’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Speight 2016). ‘Wechselerweis’ appears in Schlegel’s 1796 review of Jacobi’s Woldemar. 76. Schlegel 1968, 136, #53 (translation amended); Schlegel 1958, 18: 380. Schlegel proposes a system of fragments, of aphorisms. For #206, ibid., 143. 77. “The meaning of ‘romantic’ in early German Romanticism” (1916), in Lovejoy 1948, 183–206, at 202. 78. See the Introduction, note 27. Ngai quotes Lovejoy (Ngai 2012, 121). 79. See Crowe 2010, especially 63–67. 80. On Hegel’s surprising turn to the ‘characteristic’ in 1828, see Donougho 2020b. He borrows Aloys Hirt’s definition, proceeds to make it general rather than exclusively modern, then applies it to his polemic against the art critic von Rumohr. 81. Every fragment has individuality (Schlegel 1958, 18: 69). “Every fact must have a strict individuality, must be both a mystery and an experiment, that is, an experiment of creative nature” (Ath. Frag. # 427). 82. “Is it possible to characterize something as other than individual? … Aren’t all systems individual, just as all individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency? … Aren’t there individuals that contain within themselves whole systems of individuals?” (Athenaeum Fragments, # 242, in Schlegel 1971, 196; translation modified). 83. “The highest virtue [is] to promote one’s own individuality as the final end.” “The highest principle of morality is the juridical form of individuality. Everyone ought to strive to become what s/he is” (Schlegel 1958, 11: 60). “The highest self-awareness is that of individuality, of one’s own genius” (ibid., 18: 348)

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84. “All spirits dwell in [God]; he is the abyss [abyssus] of individuality, alone the [infinitely] full [Volle]” (Schlegel 1971, 241; Beiser 1996, 125). “Individuality is precisely what is original and eternal in man; personality doesn’t matter so much. To pursue the cultivation and development of this individuality as one’s highest calling would be a divine egoism” (Ideas # 60: Schlegel 1971, 247)—evidently no bad thing. 85. See Schulte-Sasse 1997, 180–94, at 187. 86. Nassar 2014, 136. The analogy with music appears as early as 1795, in a letter to his brother: individuality is possible only within an organic unity, since “every organic tone, as general as it may be, nonetheless has something individual, which, like all individuality, is inexhaustible and infinite in the true sense” (quoted Nasser 2014, 123). Or again, “the individual is the expression of form” (Schlegel 1958, 12: 39—quoted Nassar, 132). 87. Athenaeum Fragments, # 116, Schlegel 1971, 175. 88. Daub 2012, 196–7. Love is communing with the other, whereas marriage lifts the individual into a mediating practice. Concerning Schlegel’s androgynous ideal, see Nassar 2014, 151–2. 89. Hegel Werke (Hegel 1969) 7, 277–80, 286/Hegel 1991b, 180–83, 184— plus Allen Wood’s note, 432–5. Strictly speaking the talk is of the “aspect of singularity in individuality,” something Conscience cannot face. 90. See Korngiebel 2018, for details. Hegel attended in February and March. Korngiebel suggests (2020, 125) that the lectures “can…be considered the key to Hegel’s early experience of Schlegel—both positively and negatively.” Some have conjectured that Hegel took his conception of ‘dialectic’ from Schlegel’s course. The term receives mention there, although Hegel’s usage differs considerably, in form and substance. Hegelian dialectic derives from attempting to explain a fundamental conflict between ethical norms. 91. Werke 2, 174ff.; translated in Di Giovanni and Harris 1985, 272–91: here, 277ff. Hegel and Schelling took aim at various targets; Harris ­suggests Jacobi as the most likely here (Di Giovanni and Harris 1985, 286n). I should add that, compared to Schelling, Hegel was less purist in his attitude to “true” philosophy, as his progress towards the Phenomenology would show. 92. Korngiebel 2020, 127–28 (Werke 2, 178/Di Giovanni and Harris, 279–80). True, Hegel/Schelling shield ‘Individualität’ from complaints about ‘Besonderheit’ and specious originality (see 175/277 or 177/279). Yet it remains subjective, “piecemeal [einzelne] philosophizing” (176/278).

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Gjesdal, Kristen 2014, “Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition: Schleiermacher’s idea of Bildung in the landscape of Hegelian thought,” in Dalia Nassar (ed.), The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 92-109 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1890, Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, vol. 2, trans. Dora Schmitz (London: George Bell, 1890) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1957, Letters from Goethe, trans. Herzfeld & Sym (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1985, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Friedrich Borchert et  al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985-99) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1994, The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Gottlieb, Gabriel 2016, Gabriel Gottlieb (ed.), Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right : A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Gray, Richard T. 2004, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004) Herder, J.G. 1967 Sämtliche Werke, ed. Suphan (reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1967) Herder, J.G. 2002, Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Humboldt, Wilhelm 1969, The Sphere and Duties of Government, trans. Joseph Coulthard (London: Chapman, 1854); revised J.W.Burrow as The Limits of State Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); reissued (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1993) Humboldt, Wilhelm 1988, On Language: The Diversity of Human LanguageStructure and its Influence on the Mental [geistige] Development of Mankind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Izenberg, Gerald N., 1992 Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, revolution, and the origins of modern selfhood, 1787-1802 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Korngiebel, Johannes 2018, “Schlegel und Hegel in Jena. Zur philosophischen Konstellation zwischen Januar und November 1801,” in Michael Forster et al. (eds), Idealismus und Romantik in Jena (Munich: Fink, 2018), 181-209 Korngiebel, Johannes 2020, “Hegel as an Attendee of Schlegel’s Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy in Jena,” in Michael Forster & Lina Steiner (eds.), Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 119-33

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La Vopa, Anthony 2001, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Lask, Emil 1914, Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (Tübingen: Mohr, 1914) Lavater, Johann Caspar 1775, Physiognomische Fragmente. Zur Beforderung der Menschenerkenntnis und Menschenliebe vol. I (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1775) Leibniz, G.W. 1991 Discourse on Method and Other Essays, trans Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991) Leibniz, G.W. 1996 New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Leibniz, G.W. 2017, https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz1714a.pdf, trans. © Jonathan Bennett Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1948, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948) Luhmann, Niklas 1986b, Love as Passion: the Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1986; original 1982) Mariña, Jacqueline 2008, Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Mill, J.S. 2002, On Liberty (London: Folio Society, 2002); original London, 1859. Nachtomy, Ohad 2007 Possibility, Agency, and Individuality in Leibniz’s Metaphysics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007) Nassar, Dalia 2013, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795-1804 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) Ngai, Sianne 2012, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012) Nuzzo, Angelica 2008, “‘The Logic of Historical Truth’: History and Individuality in Fichte’s Later Philosophy of History,” in After Jena: New Essays on Fichte’s Later Philosophy, eds. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 198-219 Pinkard, Terry 2002, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Rathore, Aakash Singh, and Rimina Mohapatra 2017, Hegel’s India: a reinterpretation with texts (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017) Reed, T.J. 1984, Goethe (Past Masters) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Reid, Jeffrey 2007, Real Words: Language and System in Hegel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) Reid, Jeffrey 2014, The Anti-Romantic: Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)

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Richards, Robert 2002, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) Riemer, F.W. 1841, Mitteilungen über Goethe (1841; reprinted Leipzig: Insel, 1921) Riskin, Jessica 2016 The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over what Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) Robertson, Ritchie 2016, Goethe: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Schiller, Friedrich 1795 http://www.friedrich-­schiller-­archiv.de/briefe-­schillers/ an-­gottlieb-­fichte/schiller-­an-­gottlieb-­fichte-­3-­august-­1795/ Schlegel, Friedrich 1958, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe (München: Schöningh, 1958-) Schlegel, Friedrich 1968, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler & Roman Struc (University Park: Penn. State University Press, 1968) Schlegel, Friedrich 1971, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971) Schleiermacher, F. 1978 Monologen 3rd ed. Hamburg Meiner 1978. Schleiermacher, F. 1988, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Schleiermacher, F. 1995, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct and Essays on its Intellectual Context, ed. Ruth Drucilla Richardson, trans. Jeffrey Hoover (Lewiston: Edward Mellen Press, 1995) Schleiermacher, F. 2003, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics: Brouillon zur Ethik/ Notes on Ethics (1805/1806), trans. John Wallhausser (Lewiston: Mellen Press, 2003) Schulte-Sasse, Jochen et al. (eds.), Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) Seigel, Jerrold 2005, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Smith, Justin E.H. 2011, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) Speight, Allen 2016, “Friedrich Schlegel,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (winter 2016), URL = Stafford, Barbara Maria 1991, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991)

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Taylor, Charles 2016 The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) Willson, A.  Leslie 1982, German Romantic Criticism: Novalis, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Others ed. Amos Leslie Willson (New York: Continuum, 1982) Wilson, Catherine 2010, “Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century: Kant and Herder,” in G.A.J. Rogers, Tom Sorrell, Jill Craye (eds.) Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2010), 294-308

3 ‘Individuality’ in Hegel’s Early Thought

The concept of individuality includes opposition to infinite variety, and at the same time inner association [Verbindung] with it. (Hegel, Systemfragment)1 As with everything living, ethical life [Sittlichkeit] is a sheer identity of universal and particular, is an individuality and a shape. (Hegel, Natural Law)2 This so-called individuality is supposed [soll] to have reality: ‘it is’ is what is said of it, since the merely possible being within hypothetical judgment is [here] expressed as actual. (Hegel, Jena Logic)3

I’ve complained of the scant attention paid to Hegel’s employment of the term ‘individuality.’ Treatments of Hegel with regard to individual freedom—and there are many—tend to focus on ‘singular’ or ‘particular’ agency.4 There are valuable studies of corporeal expression in the Phenomenology and of characteristic “habit” in the Encyclopædia (Malabou, Forster, Quante, Siep, Yeomans, Novakovic or Peters, to name a few), duly acknowledged below. But no-one has asked how ‘individuality’ bears on Hegel’s overall thinking. True, Hegel does not expressly signal that we need to do so; nor—apart from isolated criticisms of Schlegel or Jacobi— does he join the contemporary discussion of ‘individuality’ just sampled. Moreover, he was rather slow to take up the category in his own work. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Donougho, Hegel’s ‘Individuality’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4_3

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Despite scattered remarks in the Early Theological Writings, the System-­ Fragment (1800), Faith and Knowledge (1802), and System of Ethical Life (1802–3), only with the essay on Natural Law (1802/3) does Hegel broach a more systematic—if extremely dense—application. (For readers preferring to get a sense of the whole—the individual forest rather than single trees, not to mention thickets, bogs or ditches—I summarize developments in conclusion.) Hegel’s early period (Bern/Frankfurt) finds him gradually feeling his way towards a more inclusive conception of ‘individuality,’ though it is hardly his chief focus. When the term does feature, it often sounds a privative note; indeed, Knox sometimes translates it as “exclusive” individuality, perhaps to bring out a suggestion of isolate personhood. In Hegel’s early fragment on “Love” (1797/8) the individual is said to lose its (distinct) individuality in the beloved, lover and beloved separable only in death. Yet the individual also must transcend its conditioned existence, transcend reflection, annul objectivity, discover life (a Hegelian watchword from now on, even in the Logic). With love, “the living being senses the living being [das Lebendige fühlt das Lebendige] … [yet] love strives to annul even this distinction” (whether between lovers or from physical existence).5 There is a “sort of ” antagonism, Hegel says, between surrender to the other and maintaining one’s autonomy. Union feels the latter as a hindrance; love is individuality if part of the individual is severed and held back as a private property. This rage [Zürnen] against [exclusive] individuality is shame (247/ETW 305)

—but not love, which is never ashamed. “Shame enters only through recollection of the body, through the personal presence of an [exclusive] personality or the sensing of an [exclusive] individuality.” Such isolate individuality vanishes in love itself, and in its product, the child: “this union [the child] is free of all inner division” (248/ETW 307), becoming independent of the parents. Eventually, as Adrian Daub shows, Hegel would advance beyond this ‘Romantic’ or dyadic model of love, rooted in judgment, to embrace a syllogistic model by which each partner is mediated by a third (marriage, social recognition, Sittlichkeit).6 Here individuals might lose yet also find themselves in another—a complex two-step

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dance of thought, which will remain central to Hegel’s thinking. Love takes center-stage in “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” 1798–99), specifically in the guise of Jesus’ love for his fellow humans and of the “Liebesmaal” (Last Supper). It allows Hegel to inject an irony into his thinking about individuality. With the Systemfragment (1800)—just two sheets of which remain— Hegel reaches a new stage, bearing comparison with views held by Schleiermacher or Humboldt. As living being, the individual must be capable of entering into relation with the other, whether inorganic nature, the life process, or a person. It must be “capable of losing its individuality or being linked to what has been excluded” (419/ETW, 310). More pointedly: “The concept of individuality includes opposition to infinite variety, and at the same time inner association with it” (ibid.). The individual living being is a virtual infinity of lives.7 The key term is ‘life,’ comprising both individuals themselves and the infinite process in which they participate, which in turn subsumes them. “Life is the union [Verbindung] of union and non-union [Nichtverbindung]” (422/ETW, 312), as Hegel encapsulates the entire dialectical process.8 Hegel’s time in Jena (1801–06) was one of self-discovery, even self-­ formation. At Schelling’s invitation he moved to the city, working as unpaid lecturer at the University and completing the Phenomenology. For the Critical Journal of Philosophy he wrote a series of extended essays, on the “culture of reflection” and on natural law, among other topics. He lectured on logic, metaphysics, philosophy of nature, and social theory, lectures edited much later as the so-called ‘Systementwürfe’ (system drafts), from 1803–4, 1804–5, and 1805–6.9 The category of ‘Individualität’ performs a larger and more complex role. A restrictive tinge still marks ‘individuality’ in Hegel’s polemical Difference essay (1801).10 I have already noted his criticism of Friedrich Schlegel: “The true peculiarity [Eigentliche] of a philosophy lies in the interesting individuality which is the organic shape that Reason has built for itself out of the material of a particular age” (19/88).11 The phrase “interesting individuality” alludes to Schlegel’s On the Study of Greek Poetry (1797).12 Its mention here shows Hegel’s ambivalence; he seems both to endorse ‘individuality’ and to keep his distance.13 A final gibe targets “the very personal, individuated individuality,” to which paltry condition

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Hegel accuses Reinhold of reducing the speculative achievements of Fichte and Schelling (120/178).14 The underlying problem (it returns with the Phenomenology) concerns how philosophy may even have a history, comprising particular systems; or conversely, how individuality in philosophy may claim universal standing. With Faith and Knowledge (1802) Hegel pivots to defend Kant against Fichte and Jacobi. “In Jacobi, the infinite appears as affected [affiziert] by subjectivity, that is, as instinct, impulse, individuality” (Werke: 2, 296/Hegel 1977c, 62). Jacobi “makes subjectivity entirely subjective, … turns it into individuality” (333/97)—in a privative sense. “Jacobi’s philosophy secures the identity of universal and particular in individuality, but the individuality is subjective” (394/153). He reduces philosophy to musical thinking, unguided by rational ideas.15 As for Jacobi’s ethics, Hegel commends its stress on “the vitality of the individuality refusing to obey the dead concept” (385/144)—the law is made for humans, not humans for the law (Mark 2:27)—but complains that Jacobi finitizes ethical objectivity (‘Sittlichkeit’), rendering the individual wholly subjective and self-­beholden (386/146). Such “beautiful individuality” had infected faith in general, Hegel suggests. Although “close in its principle to the subjective beauty of Protestantism …, Jacobi’s principle tarnishes the beauty of individuality and its form of feeling and love and faith” (387–8/148). Hegel finds individuality more deeply realized in Schleiermacher’s On Religion (391/150), which exalts not just “the virtuosity of the religious artist”—the priest—but equally individual members of the congregation (392/152). Jacobi’s “singular and particular enthusiasm” doesn’t reach as far as Schleiermacher’s “objective intuition” of the universe, or even the genuine externalization found in the artwork. These publications denounce individuality’s surrender to aesthetic or religious subjectivism. With Hegel’s essay on Natural Law (1802), ‘individuality’ comes to play a more comprehensive role, as an integral structure beyond singularity.16 Hegel observes that “ethical totalities such as peoples [Völker] take shape and constitute themselves as individuals” (Werke: 2, 481/Hegel 1999, 140). He enunciates an important principle here: “This connection [Beziehung] of individuality to individuality is a relation [Verhältnis], and accordingly twofold”: positive coexistence, plus

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negative exclusion—yet “both connections are absolutely necessary.”17 Relation, in the “shape and individuality of ethical totality,” furnishes an occasion to display individual courage in war, where the struggle is not over single features but for the universal life of a people. Individuals exhibit their virtue through willingness to face death in battle.18 Shape and individuality figure as “singularity facing outwards” (Einzelheit nach außen), the antagonistic aspect of which persists as “negation of negation.”19 Yet the obverse—negation together with opposition—must equally persist, namely, as determinate and manifold (mannigfaltig) reality. In particular, the “negative” economic system must subsist within the ethical whole, Hegel stipulates, as inorganic element subsumed into organic whole. But ethical individuality can neither account for nor yet efface internal difference and opposition. Difference can be staged and represented however, proving how the inorganic must be hived off and sacrificed. Famously Hegel writes: This is nothing but the performance [Aufführung] in the ethical [realm] of the tragedy [Tragödie] which the Absolute eternally enacts [spielt] within itself, by sacrificing itself to forces of objectivity ….

“The image [Bild] of this tragedy [Trauerspiel]” Hegel finds in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, specifically in litigation between the Eumenides (powers of distinction) and Apollo (indifferent radiance of light): 495–6/151–2. Tragedy arises when ethical nature—in order not to become entangled [sich verwickele] in it—sequesters its inorganic nature as a fate to which it opposes itself; and by acknowledging this fate in struggling against it, [ethical nature] is reconciled with the divine being as the unity of both.20

Hegel proposes a theatrical model, not just of Sittlichkeit (framed as tragedy) but also of history. It offers a picture (Bild) of spirit’s self-sacrifice; the sacrifice of its own inorganic part only to retrieve it under the aegis of intuition (Anschauung).21 Yet Sittlichkeit does not think but observes its simulated unity. Although the polis “must look on nature as alien, it nonetheless looks on it [schaut es sie doch an] and is one with it in spirit” (499/155—my emphasis); the Absolute is later said to take itself as

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“absolute Anschauung” (503/158). Hegel writes at a methodological rather than literal or historical level: it’s not causal explanation of real process. Moreover, he embraces the anachronistic, artificial, even ironic mingling of ancient production and exchange with modern (Scottish/German) “political economy.” The “Kindly Ones” (Eumenides) of nature’s economic laws strangely haunt the scene of conflict, finding their modern avatars in the ‘civil society’ described by Scottish Enlighteners. Not least, the model of tragedy is imputed (better, pictured) by the polis itself. Pace Karin de Boer, the polis—not Hegel—attempts to contain the threat of contingency.22 Bracketing and acknowledgement (nature is fate) are how the polis names (hoping to dispel) the perceived threat from natural, contingent difference. By contrast, comedy falls haplessly into entanglements (Verwicklungen) without ‘fate’ (498/154). We catch hints of Hegel’s later view of comedy as instigating the particularization (Besonderung) already evident with Socrates and in “the teeming profusion and high energy of all the individualizations then emerging” (497/153–54). In other words, comedy as genre both critiques the cultural slide into singularity (incipient individualism), and shows itself complicit in the downfall—the tragic fate—of the polis. It is at once expression, symptom, and contributing cause of cultural collapse. Hegel concludes his essay with a paean to absolute Sittlichkeit, drawing a stark contrast with the disintegration of German states (their laws hostage to long-moribund “shape and individuality”: 527/178). “As with living things, Sittlichkeit is a sheer identity of universal and particular, is therefore an individuality and a shape” (521/172), where inorganic nature is “grafted onto [an-organisiert] shape and individuality” (521/173). Hegel closes with a flourish: “it is necessary for individuality to advance through metamorphoses… Just so the growing individuality has both delight in the leap into a new form, and a lasting enjoyment within it” (528–9/178–9)—before its inevitable decline. “Sittlichkeit ultimately recognizes that this vitality of individuality as such, whatever its shape, is a formal vitality” (ibid.), beyond which lies an infinite process infusing individual forms. I turn briefly to Hegel’s System der Sittlichkeit (1802/3), again viewed strictly in the perspective of ‘individuality,’ which features multiple times, often in sharp contrast to ‘singularity.’23 It marks the appearance of

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‘recognition’ (Anerkennung) in Hegel’s thought. Hegel follows Schelling’s lead in tracing the gradual emergence of spirit and intelligence out of natural process. With “intelligence” we find one individuality encountering another, for example, in reproduction, or with the parental relation, and finally the task of Bildung, the child’s formative education: “a recognition that is mutual or supreme individuality” (13/111) hence a “reconciliation” of subjective and objective levels. The tool constitutes another such fusion of subjective and objective process, as does language. Speech “displays totality resumed into individuality, the absolute entry into the absolute [monadic] point of the individual whose ideality is inwardly dispersed into a system” (19/116). At the next level, the individual is recognized by others as individual, not just an abstract bearer of rights or owner of property. “At this [level] a living individual confronts a living individual,” though not on equal terms (28/125). One becomes lord over the other, its bondsman (Knecht): a rudimentary framing of what will later become the struggle for recognition. Herr/Knecht here remains a natural, external relation of power; implicitly it is gendered as masculine.24 Although they are individuals—their later appearance in the Phenomenology demotes them to ‘singletons’25—the dialectic of recognition remains embryonic. The higher stage of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) moves beyond relative identity to attain absoluteness: the people (das Volk). It connects the mass of individuals, where “the individual intuits itself as itself in every other individual: it reaches supreme subject-objectivity” (49/144). As this living and independent spirit, which like a Briareus appears with myriad eyes, arms, and other limbs, each of which is an absolute individual, this ethical life is something absolutely universal …. if the individual subsumes absolute ethical life under itself … it appears in it as its individuality …. This appearance of ethical life is the ethical life of the single individual, or the virtues (51/146).26

Government individualizes the state still further as “universal government” (70/163). Hegel has reservations about its “self-constituting individuality,” which in quest of recognition fails adequately to absorb its “inorganic aspect”—manifest in the real difference it serially encounters

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by chance, like a “bad infinity.”27 Political battles for recognition here remain beholden to contingency rather than reason. In sum, the System appears less neatly packaged than Natural Law, which resolves discussion into a model of history as tragedy. Two features stand out however: the consideration of political economy and technology, plus the emerging theme of ‘recognition’ (Anerkennung). In developing his material in various lecture series between 1803 and 1806, Hegel shifted from a naturalist unfolding of levels or ‘potencies,’ and from the Volk as a given fact, to the perspective of consciousness which then reflects on and reconstructs its own emergence from nature to become spirit/culture. This “transformation” (di Giovanni) effects a smoother shift to philosophy of spirit, opening a perspective in which to trace spirit’s emergence from a nature now cast as its own image.28 ‘Individuality’ plays a crucial role in this secondary phase of reflective, dialectical internalizing. Interlude: on “so-called” individuality: One of the very few explicit discussions of ‘Individualität’ in the literature is Brady Bowman’s contribution to a symposium on Hegel’s 1804/05 system. Focussing on the first part (Logic), he asks how we are to grasp actual individuality without relapsing into a bad, de-individualized infinity; that is, a mere gesture towards an ‘absolute substance’ lurking supposedly ‘behind’ its various properties (Bowman 2003, 208). He takes Hegel as attempting to overcome Spinozan substance, “die absolute Sache,” so as—though he is not explicit—to endorse Leibnizian individuality.29 The Jena Logic cites a bad, infinitely determinable “so-called individuality” of the mere “this,” whose unity (as the One) lies outside the many properties it indifferently has.30 Its so-called individuality ‘should’ (soll) have reality, as mere possibility taken nevertheless to be actual. Bowman compares the spuriously infinite This to Musil’s ‘man without qualities,’ who possesses every trait possible, but indifferently, in the limit—so in effect has none. What I take from the argument is the built-in ambivalence of ‘Individualität.’ Properly speaking it exceeds abstract possibility, ‘overgrasps’ (übergreift) its realization, yet is always open to misconstrual, as a peculiarity the individual betrays on its face, an sich. Physiognomy and Phrenology supply notable paradigms of this slippery logic, as we’ll see. Classical tragedy similarly evinces a dialectic of misconstrual, whether as ethical content or

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in cultic form. The player/agent/author assumes that the situation simply ‘is what it is.’ Experience teaches otherwise, though the lesson isn’t understood (and couldn’t be, in antiquity). Hegel’s Jena Systems: Bowman provides a sharp insight into how ‘Individualität’ works in logical mode. Application of the term in other parts of the Jena System appears less straightforward, lacking in dialectical plasticity. It enters into various contexts, from mechanics, through physics, up to the organic and ultimately spiritual realm. If Hegel had started out from a Schellingian idiom of “potencies” (levels or stages) and the progressive integration of ‘intuition’ and ‘concept,’ he shifted gradually to his own articulation, which was constantly changing, and never properly resolved (or indeed published). H.S. Harris gives a helpful overview of the state of play circa 1802: ‘Finite’ or Newtonian mechanics is evidently the first moment in the life of the Earth as a ‘universal individual’. Chemism, as the second moment, embraced all the polarized phenomena of magnetism, electricity, and chemical affinity. The ‘totality’ of mechanism and chemism—the ‘individuality’ of the Earth itself—is reached in the ‘meteorological process’ of the physical elements.31

The Jena Systementwürfe (system outlines) comprise three sets of lecture notes, from 1803–4, 1804–5, and 1805–6. The first two sets follow Schelling’s theory of ‘potencies’ still, while the last series shows Hegel breaking through into his own distinctive style of thinking. I must forego even a cursory treatment, save for brief comments (a) on Hegel’s sociological insight along the way, and (b) on his astringent treatment of art. In his classic study German Home Towns (1971), Mack Walker borrows from nineteenth-century social geographer W.H.  Riehl the idea of an “individualized country” (individualisiertes Land), found more in the north than in the “centralized country” typical of the rest of Germany.32 Such towns share an individuality manifest in disdain for nobles, merchants and peasants alike. Notable here is the parallel Walker draws with Hegel’s 1805–6 sorting of classes, which he claims (following Franz Rosenzweig) took account of Napoleon’s wholesale transformation of German society. Instead of nobility Hegel now distinguished a “general

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estate” of “movers and doers,” dominated by the civil service and separate from peasants, local bürgers, or merchants. Peasants evince the disposition of trust (Vertrauen), bürgers uprightness (Rechtschaffenheit), merchants and officials a punctilious legality and “utter ruthlessness” (gänzliche Unbarmherzigkeit: Hegel 1987, 246/Hegel 1983, 166) abstracted from all individuality. The general estate tends to absorb individuality into the universal duty or task performed by administrator, lawyer or policeman. “The missing element…[where] the whole is individuality” (250/170) distinguishes the military class—yet with a cruel twist. In modern warfare the warrior behaves towards his opponent in strictly “singular” manner: impersonal, without individuality, not looking him in the eye (251/171). Hegel’s final subsection considers Art, Religion and Science (Wissenschaft). With regard to art and ‘individuality,’ Hegel takes a cynical view.33 As with Plato’s focus on semantics and disparagement of irrational inspiration, Art creates the world as spirited [geistige] and for intuition [Anschauung]— it is the Indian Bacchus, not transparent self-knowing spirit but inspired spirit—enveloping itself in sensation and image, beneath which the terrible lies buried” (254/174).

Conversely, art—really just modern art—appears torn between formalism and naturalism, foreshadowing the disillusioned endism diagnosed in the Berlin lectures. “Absolute art” is viewed as collapsing content into form: anything can be “elevated” into art, which then becomes “alien fancy.” So far as content comprises the “existent” (seiender Inhalt) and form is “prosaic intuition,” it remains spirit’s own doing nevertheless. But Hegel belittles its arbitrariness: Hence poetry of nature [Naturpoesie] is the worst—landscapes, etc., since its enlivening [Belebung] contradicts the shape in which it immediately is— modern formalism in art—poetry in all things; yearning for everything….

Realism, bringing the everyday to life, isn’t simply imposed: things are so intrinsically (an sich)—“but this ‘Ansich’ is abstract, unequal to their existence [Dasein].” Such “intellectual beauty,” “this music of things” (the quotidian), lies at the opposite pole to Homeric “plastic” art: it is

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non-­sensuous rather than sensuous intuition. Sheer meaning is preferred to shape; art is in “contradiction with itself ” and, taken as independent, it slides into allegory. But “then it vanishes as individuality, and so far as meaning amounts to individuality it doesn’t get expressed.” In sum, “beauty is the veil covering the truth rather than presentation [Darstellung] of truth” (255/175): a striking result. The artist has become “this singular self ” (dieses einzelne Selbst), particular even, trafficking with a merely “singular content”: “a self divorced from beauty, from union of individuality with universality, [union] of the self with its universal existence.” By comparison the Christian God-man is the “actual self… this singular.” Hegel switches abruptly to religion—“Art in its truth is rather religion”—then to philosophy, when the ‘I’ becomes “the indissoluble binding [Verknüpfung] of singular and universal” (261/181). Hegel seems here to have soured on art, or perhaps had fixed on inward spiritual meaning beyond the reach of sensuous shape. We hear nothing of art “proper”—that is, classical individuality, the Ideal—save for its lying in the distant past. Art is in decline. (The suggestion that beauty veils rather than presents the truth is one to which I shall return in my last chapter, on Hegel’s philosophy of art—veils show as well as hide, after all.) For those wishing to avoid textual briars es, I summarize the lay of the land. Hegel’s initial treatment of Christianity contrasts it with the wholeness of Greek religion viewed as integral sensuous practice, but with a growing focus on ‘love’ he gives ‘individuality’ greater prominence. Here “individuality faces individuality,” aiming to annul any hint of separation. Individuality needs to transcend “exclusive” individuality—a tension that runs throughout these texts. Eventually Hegel shifts from a “romantic” model of judgment (self/other) to one of syllogistic mediation comprising three terms, ‘individuality’ in the middle. With the ‘Systemfragment’ (1800) individuality is observed losing itself in its other only to rediscover itself there, through a characteristic movement of ‘inclusion’ or ‘over-grasping’ (Übergreifung). Displacing the model of ‘love,’ it takes the form of ‘life,’ a metaphor that permeates the years following. Even so Hegel remains critical of ‘individuality’ framed subjectively, as in Jacobi’s aesthetic individuality—“musical thinking” he dubs it. Natural Law (1802–3) reconstructs the ethical individuality of the classical polis in relation to inorganic nature (economics), and trains

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the lens of Greek tragedy on the community’s attempt to “disengage” itself from natural necessity (fate, Scottish political economy). It presents a picture of world-history as theatre, aesthetically ‘looking on’ the historical cycle of conflict and reconciliation of nature and spirit. Individuality is the protagonist in this tragic perspective, in which the polity observes itself, as it were from the stalls. Comedy will then enact a critique of virtue’s decline from individuality to singularity. The System of Ethical Life likewise shows the need for Sittlichkeit to keep itself open to natural contingency, on pain of falling victim to it. It also announces a theme that will later assume prominence: the struggle for recognition. The various Jena systems (1803–1806) present the reader with some highly refractory material. Most important is the shift—mainly between first and second formulations but firmly established in the third—from a model of immanent evolution by stages or “potencies” in nature (Schelling) to the reconstruction by consciousness of its own emergence in and from nature, its emergence as mind in full self-awareness. (En passant I note Hegel’s use—in the Jena Logic—of the expression “socalled individuality” to capture the supposed existence of Spinozist substance apart from all qualities or epithets applied to it; a recurrent temptation and ambiguity in what would become his ‘dialectic,’ and a misconstrual serving to document the labile nature of the term, when it reflects on the conditions of its own applicability.) I grapple with Hegel’s own grappling with his material, as he outlines a gradual growth in selfreflexivity in the shift from the “mechanics” of causal process to the individuation, first of physical bodies and processes, then of organic life (plants, animals). Reconstructing the emergence of self-awareness allows Hegel to plug in the sciences as an intellectual screen or mediator between sheer nature and philosophical narrative—the ‘aether’ as membrane covering nature, giving it voice. ‘Individuality’ figures in the repeated distinction of individual significance from “singulars” or “particulars” in relatively unmediated nature. Such self-distinction from natural singularity recurs in many structures characterizing spirit or mind (Jena III, 1805/6), even when (under “Intelligence”) Hegel writes of “this night, this empty nothing, … the inner of nature, …—pure self.” Individuality is seen emerging from the multifarious givens of singular nature. The process reveals its own irony, as the singular subject finds

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recognition in the legal roles it plays (or that play it) en route to integration in the political community, the people (Volk). I note Hegel’s discrimination of the “universal class” of a town-dwelling civil service asserting its own individuality. Finally I turn to what Hegel calls “absolutely free spirit” (253/173), comprising art, religion and philosophy (science). In none of them does ‘individuality’ get a say—save as the long-lost beauty of classical art, the vanished “unity of individuality and universality, of self and its universal existence [Dasein]” (279/175). Philosophy makes the ‘I’ into “the indissoluble bonding [Verknüpfung] of singular and universal” (261/181).

Notes 1. Hegel 1969, 1: 419/Hegel 1948, 310. (I cite the latter as ETW in the text, pagination keyed to the 1975 edition—which includes the Systemfragment.) 2. Hegel 1969, 2: 521/Hegel 1999, 172. Citations in text are to these editions. 3. Hegel 1982, 102/Hegel 1986b, 103. 4. For example: Erzsébet Rózsa’s Modern Individuality in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (2012) aims to recover an individual perspective within Hegel’s work (“the hidden Hegel”: Rózsa, 296), in an effort to rebut criticism of his supposed “de-individualizing” (Manfred Frank) or ‘hyper-­institutionalizing’ (Axel Honneth). But by “total free individuality” (73) Rózsa means ‘individualism,’ even ‘singularity.’ Hegel’s own use of ‘Individualität’ is surprisingly absent. 5. “Love,” Werke: 1, 244–50, at 246–7/ETW, 302–8, 305. Dieter Henrich—“Hegel und Hölderlin,” in Henrich 1971, esp. 27–9—argues that, while not following Hölderlin’s model of ontological division, Hegel came to admit that “love must seek to diversify,” enlarge itself (28). 6. Daub 2012, and Chap. 2. “This cognition is love. It is the movement of the syllogism [Schlusses], so that each extreme is fulfilled by the I″ (Jena III, Hegel 1987, 193/Hegel 1983, 107). I finds itself immediately—yet ambiguously—in the other (so to speak). 7. For example, “his ancestors and descendants” (Harris 1972, 386).

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8. Dialectic is above all paradoxical, in ‘overgrasping’ (übergreifen) opposite moments. Dialectic resembles Wildean irony (which owed much to Hegel after all): “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning” (‘The Critic as Artist-Part 1,’ Wilde 2008, 245). Analogously, Hegel is a philosophical Wilde, and so is Wilde. Wilde is a literary Hegel, and so is Hegel. 9. Pinkard 2000 (e.g., 169–202) provides a helpful introduction to developments. Harris 1983 goes into greater detail and is indispensable. 10. Hegel 1977b. Page citations in the text, following Werke (Hegel 1969: 2). 11. “Every philosophy is complete in itself, and like an authentic work of art, carries the totality within itself” (19/89). Philosophy is both universal and particular. The section following is titled “the need of philosophy,” exploiting the ambiguity of subjective/objective genitive: its need and the need for it. 12. Schlegel 2001. It is found also in Schlegel’s 1801 lectures on ‘Transcendental Philosophy,’ some of which Hegel had personally attended. See Donougho 2020. 13. Korngiebel 2020, 125. 14. Controversy swirls about what Reinhold is doing in a book principally taken up with Kant and Schelling. See Harris’s Introduction (Harris 1972, especially 64–6), where Reinhold is depicted along with Bardilli as a mere sideshow, “like the clowns bowing and taking the curtain calls for that daring young man on the flying trapeze, Schelling” (66). 15. Hegel cites Jacobi’s David Hume (1787), in Jacobi 1994—(Hegel 337/100)—on how we arrive empirically at “what we call our ego [Ich].” “‘The indivisible in a being defines its individuality …. In corporeal extension in general we perceive something that is somewhat analogous to individuality; for an extended being as such is always indivisible’.” Such ‘individuality’ is a mere ‘façon de parler.’ 16. Published in The Critical Journal 2. Hegel 1969, 2/Hegel 1999 (citations in text). 17. I follow Nisbet, or di Giovanni in his translation of Hegel’s Science of Logic (Hegel 2010b). See especially the latter’s note (at lxviii), suggesting that ‘Verhältnis’ may also connote comportment or attitude—from ‘Verhalten’—, which comes into its own alongside ‘concept’ and ‘idea.’ See also translators’ remarks in Hegel 1991a, xix, and Glossary, 344–45. (I alter Nisbet’s translation of ‘Einzelheit,’ preferring ‘singularity’ over ‘individuality.’) 18. Hegel has more on courage (Tapferkeit) in System der Sittlichkeit, perhaps under Garve’s influence (Garve had translated Aristotle). See Dickey 1987, Chap. 6, esp. 218–27, for the “reflective” sense of courage distinct

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from animal spiritedness. Dickey registers Hegel’s indebtedness to Ferguson, Montesquieu, Smith and Rousseau. 19. Hegel 1969, 482/Hegel 1999, 140–41. My translations attempt to maintain the distinction—surely intended though lost in both Knox and Nisbet—between a flexible ‘individuality’ and the more sclerotic ‘singularity.’ Harris makes the point that Hegel’s model throughout is organic life, and that philosophy of nature subtends much of the later theorizing about absolute spirit in this text. 20. 496/152. Citing Dante, Hegel maintains that comedy lacks such fate, lacks opposition, seriousness, inner truth (496–7/152–3). Comedy dreams of autonomous individuals, or it envisions “perfect individuality” without force or effect. Besides Dante however we have “the other comedy” (498/154): modern comedy, “whose entanglements are without fate and true struggle” but consist of contingent abstractions, legal obstructions, and so on. See Donougho 2016, 2021. 21. See Donougho 1989. Also Lypp 1972, e.g. 226, 230 (on the dramaturgical and aesthetic model of history, beholden to intuition not knowledge). 22. De Boer 2010, e.g., 13. Compare Phenomenology, in Chap. 5, esp. notes 10 and 11. 23. In the text I cite Hegel 2002 (from GW 1998), and Hegel 1979. 24. I mention the masculine inflection of ‘Anerkennung’ because Hegel’s model of love, like his model of family under classical ‘Sittlichkeit’, is not so restrictive. Tzvetan Todorov’s Life in Common (2001) criticizes Hegel-­ Kojève (sic) for being reductively male; he proposes an alternative model (the ‘maternal gaze’) to that of conflict and prestige (Todorov, 19–26). But he uncritically adopts Kojève’s reduction of desire to ‘desire for desire,’ calling it Hegelian. His later chapters offer a nuanced account of the ‘structure of the person’ as an “internal multiplicity” (ibid., 114–37). 25. In her recent The Betrayal of Substance (2022), Mary Rawlinson coins the term ‘singleton’ for ‘Einzelne’ (perhaps by analogy with mathematical logic); a helpful convention I borrow. 26. Briareus resembles—yet differs from—the later comparison of the Greek Ideal with thousand-eyed Aster/Argus, where the individual sees itself through the eyes of the comprehensive other (see Chap. 9). 27. Hegel raises no objection to what might be called ‘perpetual war.’ The text further takes up government in relation to “the system of needs” (the economy): “a living dependence and a relation of individuality to individuality” (78/171), via trust in and respect for others’ business dealings—a rudimentary system.

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28. Introduction to Hegel 2010, xviii. Cf. di Giovanni 2014, 672. 29. Cf. Hegel 1977a, ¶803. The short history of philosophy proffered in chapter VIII (‘Absolute Knowing’) has spirit recoiling from “this selfless substantiality” (i.e., Spinoza) to affirm individuality (i.e., Leibniz). 30. “This so-called individuality should [soll] have reality: ‘it is’ is what is said of it, since the merely possible being in the hypothetical judgment is expressed as actual [wirklich]. Thereby the hypothetical syllogism is posited, since the subject of the hypothetical judgment turns out to be a positive proposition” (Hegel 1982, 102/Hegel 1986b, 103). In his interpretive comments Harris identifies Leibniz rather than Spinoza as the chief focus (xii, 78), adding that we have to do not with a pure “this,” empty of content, but with intro-reflection, determinacy as totality. The “middle term” of the hypothetical syllogism—dubbed ‘individuality’—is the point of transition between ascending and descending to/from universal and singular, ambivalently opposed to yet at one with the extremes. (The cyclical movement prefigures the “immaculate” transition we find in Hegel’s Phenomenology ¶463, under ancient Sittlichkeit; see below.) 31. Harris 1983, 99. Harris takes his subtitle from Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts,’ Book 1, ‘Moonlight.’ 32. Walker 1971, 1. Walker praises Hegel’s idea of a ‘general estate’ (der Stand der Allgemeinheit), integrating universal and singular as individuality: Walker, 197–98, 215. Jerrold Seigel too notes parallels between Riehl and Hegel in addressing ‘bürgerlich’ themes (Seigel 2012, 137–47). 33. Harris writes: “We can scarcely recognize even the project of Hegel’s mature Aesthetics in the extremely telegraphic notes on the forms of art that he put down here…” (Harris 1983, 513).

Bibliography Hegel, G.W.F. 1948, Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M.  Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); reissued with additional fragments trans. Richard Kroner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975). Hegel, G.W.F. 1969, Werke, eds. Moldenhauer & Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969) Hegel, G.W.F. 1977a, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) Hegel, G.W.F. 1977b, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris & Walter Cerf (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977)

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Hegel, G.W.F. 1977c, Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen), trans. Walter Cerf & H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977) Hegel, G.W.F. 1979 System of Ethical Life (1802/3), trans. T.M.  Knox & H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979) Hegel, G.W.F. 1982, Jenaer Systementwürfe II: Logik, Metaphysik, Naturphilosophie, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1982) Hegel G.W.F. 1983, Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6), trans. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983) Hegel, G.W.F. 1986a, Jenaer Systementwürfe I: das System der spekulativen Philosophie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986) Hegel G.W.F. 1986b, The Jena System, 1804-5: Logic and Metaphysics, trans. Burbidge & di Giovanni, et  al. (Kingston & Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986) Hegel, G.W.F. 1987, Jenaer Systementwürfe III: Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes Hamburg: Meiner, 1987/GW 8, 1976) Hegel, G.W.F., 1991a, The Encyclopædia Logic [1830], trans. Geraets, Suchting, & Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991) Hegel, G.W.F. 1999, On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on its Place in Practical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right (1902-1803), in Hegel Political Writings, trans. H.B.  Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 102-180 Hegel, G.W.F. 2002, System der Sittlichkeit, ed. Horst Brandt (Hamburg: Meiner, 2002) Hegel, G.W.F., 2010b, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Bowman, Brady 2003, “Unendliche Bestimmtheit und wahrhafte Individualität in Hegels Logik-Entwurf von 1804/05,” Die Eigenbedeutung der Jenaer Systemkonzeptionen Hegels (Rotterdam, 2003), ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 201-14. Daub, Adrian 2012, Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) De Boer, Karin 2010, On Hegel: the sway of the negative (London: Macmillan, 2010) Di Giovanni, George 2014, “Kant’s Critical Legacy: Fichte’s Constructionism and Hegel’s Discursive Logic,” in Matthew Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014), 665-86 Dickey, Laurence 1987, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Donougho, Martin 1989, “The Woman in White: on the reception of Hegel’s Antigone,” Owl of Minerva 21:1 (1989), 65-89

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Donougho, Martin 2016, “Hegelian Comedy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 49/2 (2016), 196-220 Donougho, Martin 2020, “Hegel’s ‘characteristic’ (die Charakteristik) in 1828/29,” in Studi di estetica (2020) Donougho, Martin 2021, “Hegel and ‘the Other Comedy’,” in Mark Alznauer (ed.), Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy: New Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021), 185-205 Harris, Henry S. 1972, Hegel’s Development: Towards the Sunlight 1770-1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) Harris, Henry S. 1983, Hegel’s Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) Hegel, G.W.F. 1999, On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on its Place in Practical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right (1902-1803), in Hegel Political Writings, trans. H.B.  Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 102-180 Henrich, Dieter 1971, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971) Jacobi, F.H. 1994, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill , trans. George di Giovanni (Montréal/Kingston: McGill/Queen’s University Press, 1994) Korngiebel, Johannes 2020, “Hegel as an Attendee of Schlegel’s Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy in Jena,” in Michael Forster & Lina Steiner (eds.), Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 119-33 Lypp, Bernhard 1972, Ästhetischer Absolutismus und politischer Vernunft: Zum Widerstreit vom Reflexion und Sittlichkeit im deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972) Pinkard, Terry 2000, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Schlegel, Friedrich 2001, On the Study of Greek Poetry trans. Stuart Barnett (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001) Seigel, Jerrold 2012, Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Walker, Mack 1971, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871 Cornell 1971 Wilde, Oscar 2008, Oscar Wilde: The Major Works, ed. Isabel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

4 Individuality’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit (I)

The true being of a man is rather his deed; there individuality is actual … the individual human is what it [the deed] is. (Hegel)1 The true poem is the poet’s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. (Emerson)2

With the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Hegel “finds his voice” (Pinkard 2000, 203). According to his student Karl Ludwig Michelet, Hegel would call this early work “his voyages of discovery,” after the breakthrough of his “speculative method” in managing to encompass and take possession of “the entirety of human knowing.”3 Even so, plural “voyages” hints at its tentative character; and despite the claim to system (Wissenschaft), it hardly ensured smooth sailing in the present. Hegel’s key insight is clearly enunciated in the Introduction. We have a double plot at work, two concurrent paths the reader is enjoined to follow. One tells of consciousness in relation to its object, while the other concerns the relation itself, whether cognitive or practical; first a claim to know (or act on) something, second, the criterion tacitly applied with that claim. The narratives are inextricable: in Hegel’s formulation, “consciousness itself is their comparison” (¶85/Werke 3, 78), testing its own consistency—as “we” can © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Donougho, Hegel’s ‘Individuality’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4_4

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see in observing what has gone on. “We” are also responsible for linking successive “shapes of consciousness,” precisely by noting how both the successor object and consciousness of it emerge from the “inversion” (Verkehrung) of the previous one. We supply the narrative, in discerning its systematic unity and necessary sequence (though it could always be told another way). Hegel entitles his approach “Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” capturing what consciousness “goes through” (experire) as it suffers continual defeat and renewal, then defeat again, before a (projected) final arrival. Unlike Kant’s usage, ‘experience’ is not so much a stable structure of phenomena, more continual collapse of what was taken as real. Appearance (Erscheinung) may thus be understood as a constant exposure of illusion or semblance (Schein)—“the pathway of despair,” as Hegel dubs it.4 ‘Individuality’ may inhabit either narrative strand: no surprise, given its inherent reflexivity and its normative import (something is taken as individual). It is only intermittently present however. Significant though Hegel’s deployment of ‘Individualität’ might be, his frequent resort to ‘singularity’ (‘Einzelheit’) proves revealing. For example, the section on Hapless Consciousness (das unglückliche Bewusstsein) in Chapter IV has no time for ‘Individualität’; ‘Einzelheit’ and variants rule. The same goes for the famous ‘struggle for recognition’ in ‘Lordship and Bondsman,’ and the treatment of ‘Manifest Religion’ in chapter VII.5 Hegel draws a clear distinction of scope and significance between these two sets of terms. With Hapless Consciousness the focus is on the proto-Kierkegaardian associations of a ‘singular’ being, bereft of both heavenly consolation and worldly mediation (whether religious or dialectical). Lord and Bondsman take themselves to be singular, despite sharing a tacit claim to universality, one that will take hundreds of pages to be met; each acknowledges, yet fails fully to acknowledge, the other. That is not to hold ‘singularity’ inferior to ‘individuality,’ however. In the cases just considered, isolating or estranging oneself has its advantages. It might open the world of action and knowledge to what was called above the “dividual” or “distributed” person: I define myself by the “stuff” or the roles defining me, by the characteristic habits (second nature) I acquire by choice or training, by my objectivity as much as subjectivity. Prima facie, though, we are dealing here with ‘singletons,’ only secondarily (or in alienated form) with individuals.

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In what follows I look selectively at passages bearing on ‘individuality.’ After some preliminary observations on Hegel’s Preface and his chapters on a) Consciousness and b) Self-Consciousness (life, Stoicism, Hapless Consciousness), I take up in order: • V: Reason: a-‘Observing Reason’ (plant ecology, psychology, phrenology/physiognomy); • b-‘Actualization of Rational Self-consciousness’ (‘romantic’ attempts either to render or to find society intrinsically rational); and • c-‘Individuality taken as real in and for itself,’ notably (a) ‘the Animal Realm of Spirit’ (dialectic of individual praxis and naturalizing social mechanism, ‘political economy’); • VI: Spirit: a- classical ‘Sittlichkeit’ (customary virtue or character, in action and deed), and • c- ‘Morality’ (especially ‘Conscience’ and ‘the beautiful soul’); • VII: Religion: b- ‘Art-Religion’ (‘individuality’ narrated or staged, masked and unmasked). • A final glimpse of ‘individuality’ is to be had in VIII: “Absolute Knowing,” namely, Leibniz.6 I begin with a glance [a] at earlier use.s of ‘individual,’ in the Preface— where Hegel remarks on the role of the individual (das Individuum) with respect to the entire project—, then with some particular points raised in Chapters III and IV. * * * [a] First Appearances: The ‘individual’ becomes thematically important at several points in the Preface, usually to highlight its role within a universal process, in contrast to the “contingency of person and individual [individuellen] motivation.”7 The individual (das Individuum) has the “right,” says Hegel, to demand that “science” provide a ladder to the absolute standpoint (¶26/29–30). Though capable of judging for itself, the individual may sometimes feel isolated in its views and convictions. But the climb to the absolute proves fraught, while the individual undergoing the process has its own complex dynamic, pitting “particular individual”

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against “universal individual” in the “coming-to-be” of science (¶28/31). The individual is both particular—on a continuum from fairly uncultured towards more comprehensive—and universal. Being a particular stage, it is “shadowed” by its past, and the individual “whose substance is a higher form of spirit runs through the past” as one might recapitulate prior stages of a science that has long since internalized their contents. “Every singleton also runs through the formative stages of universal spirit, but as shapes spirit has already laid aside … .” They are now reduced to a bare outline, “the already acquired property of universal spirit”; property that “constitutes the substance of the individual … its inorganic nature” (¶28/32). Through self-reflection the individual acquires what implicitly it already is: it becomes explicitly what in substance it is.8 The following paragraph (¶29) expands on how each stage is “an entire individual shape whose distinctiveness [Eigentümlichkeit] of determinacy” gets absorbed into the whole—a task made easier because the basic work has tacitly (an sich) been done. Already something thought [ein Gedachtes], the content is the property [Eigentum] of individuality …, already remembered in-itself [erinnerte Ansich], it is to be converted into the form of being-for-self (ibid./34).

This marks the first appearance of the term ‘individuality’ (although Miller omits the whole sentence). Or it would do so if in his 1831 revisions Hegel hadn’t replaced the word with “substance.”9 The concluding paragraphs (¶¶71–2) place the individual centerstage. They articulate a sense of living within a community of judgment, not peripheral and isolated; compare the Preface to Philosophy of Right, declaring each individual “a child of its time” and philosophy “its own time comprehended [erfasst] in thought.”10 On the one hand Hegel affirms his faith that individuals will eventually speak with a universal voice; on the other he acknowledges that a prevailing universalism shows indifference to individual action. Modesty is called for. Each must do what it can, Hegel declares, while acknowledging the fact that nowadays less may be expected. It is highly significant that ‘individual’ operates as a placeholder for occupation by subjectivity, whether Hegel’s or ours. ‘Individuality’ plays a part, we might say, one that ‘we’ may seize on.

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‘The Inverted World’: Turning from the Preface to section a: Consciousness (‘individual’ is absent from the Introduction), I note that the first authorized instance of ‘individuality’—discounting the ambiguous ¶29 amended in 1831—is at ¶158–9/128–30.11 By no accident it comes in Chapter III: ‘the Inverted World.’ One of Hegel’s examples of inverted law in practice is the putative “supreme satisfaction of injured individuality,” when an individual takes its due revenge. Expressed as universal law, however, revenge inverts into legal punishment (through invocation of a “supersensible” realm of moral standing) which, by treating the other reciprocally as individuality, inverts comprehensively to honor—indeed, pardon—the transgressor; the one moment encompasses the other.12 Thus the law is “both at rest and in force, and the movement of individuality against it [sc., law] and of it against individuality is quenched” (¶159/130). The law has been enacted; the individualities recognize their mirror images in a dialectic of forgiveness (craved and granted, perhaps not straightaway) echoed at the close of Chapter V in the section on “the Beautiful Soul.” Life’: Hegel’s section b: Self-Consciousness mentions the individual several times, notably in general remarks on ‘Life’ (¶171/141–2: I simplify somewhat, since the text gets particularly involved—but so do the issues). Life, for Hegel, is both process and the living being: “das Leben als Lebendiges” (ibid./141). The individual organism resists the “fluidity” of life. Separating from its inorganic nature, it consumes that so as actively to preserve its own determinate shape (and that of its internal organs); a process that will continue until shut-down of organs in death. Life inverts into living organism, while the organism inverts into life.13 What is consumed is the essence, and as a result individuality, in preserving itself at the expense of the universal and giving itself a feel for its unity with itself, straightaway sublates its opposition to the other through which it is for itself (ibid.).

Life comprises a fluidity of distinctions, “their universal dissolution” (ibid./142). The individual organism resists being dissolved into sheer process, universal life or death: death marks the end of independent

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taking-shape.14 Yet such resistance is living, as opposed to the sheer life-process. We might recall from the last chapter Hegel’s 1804 claim that in raising a child the parents “generate their own death” (Hegel 1979, 233). This suggests a second way by which the living organism meets its end. “Yet inversely the sublating of individual consistency [Bestehen] is just as much its own engendering [Erzeugen] … the positing of [another] individuality” (ibid.)—its offspring. Individuality comprises both self-preserving organisms and their progeny.15 The two cycles of self-preservation and reproduction complete the overall circle of life, at once abstractly fluid (substantial essence) and concretely individual. Stoicism: Hegel remarks (¶172/143) that the life-process “points to” something quite other than it, “namely consciousness, for which it [life] exists as this unity or kind” (Gattung).16 We enter a new dialectical phase: the singular self-consciousness opposes another singular, to which it relates in the mode of desire, and in whose self-consciousness it seeks satisfaction (Lord and Bondsman, Herr and Knecht). Famous though section a. on the struggle for recognition is, it contains nothing on ‘individuality,’ just as with Jena-systems I and III. There at least the struggle implicated institutional norms like honor or property (the distributed or ‘dividual’ self ). Here singular consciousness remains isolate, mutual recognition of and by individuals a distant prospect.17 I pass over the dialectical detail, however celebrated, jumping to the next section: b. the Stoic logos (¶200), where ‘individuality’ resurfaces as the “spark” of reason.18 Stoic individuality must actively distinguish itself, proving itself to be in fact alive and rational. But so far as individuality qua acting [handelnd] must present itself as alive, or qua thinking must grasp the living world as a system of thinking, there must be in the thoughts themselves provision for a content, first of the good, then of the true (¶200/158).

There should be a criterion for any tacit claim of normativity, a proof in deed (in der Tat) of its theoretical position. With ‘the problem of the criterion’ Hegel moves (still under b.) to Skepticism, and thence to Hapless Consciousness (unglückliche Bewusstsein)—again, the transitions don’t

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appeal to or devolve upon ‘individuality.’19 One might expect the individual to play a central role in this section, especially in view of Schleiermacher’s or Kierkegaard’s faith in the concept. Yet the opposite is the case. Instead of ‘Individualität’ or ‘Individuum,’ ‘Einzelheit’ and ‘Einzelne’ (Miller: ‘individuality,’ ‘individual’) mark every paragraph.20 Hegel shuns talk of ‘individuality’ precisely to indicate the narrow defile singular consciousness must pass through, losing itself to find itself again, in a community less religious than scientific, obsessed with observing reason in nature. Even when the individual seeks to “actualize itself ” practically in society (Faust, Karl Moor, Don Quixote), with an eye to finding reason ‘out there,’ it remains in quest of a kind of proof, attempting to prove itself. Science is an adventure, a secular quest played out in historical time. * * * [b] Reason: Most of the work done by ‘individuality’ comes in Chapter V: Reason. It shows the category stretching its wings, as it were, to encompass opposite moments of particular/singular and universal, now as singular, now as universal individuality (and sometimes as stubbornly ‘singular singularity,’ refusing to take flight). Hegel considers the ways in which rationality shows up in natural phenomena or human behavior: a) in scientific observation, b) in structures and shapes of (social) action, finally c) in the scientific study of society, where empirical and normative rationality (are supposed to) coincide, in the human study of humans. a. Observing Reason, aa: Observation of Nature. Mere description runs at random from particularization to singularization (Vereinzelung) and back again, Hegel says. Rarely do we find significant patterns tying ‘individual’ to universal—a new planet or new genus (even species), for example (¶245/188). ‘Significance’ hints at the mind of the observer, however, starting (Hegel suggests) with geology, which pertains to what Harris calls “the stabilized images of living process,” and a borderline indeterminacy.

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Plants and Animals: We next encounter vegetal organism, emergent from the primitive structure of planet-Earth. Lacking in self-relation (“being-for-self”), the plant merely “touches the limit [Grenze] to individuality” (¶246/190), a boundary that displays mere “semblance” of sexual division. Hegel takes issue with Linnaeus’ proposal of sexual division in plants. In contrast, the “distinguishing marks” of animal organisms (e.g., claws and teeth) sort the essential from the inessential not just in the eyes of the observer but also for the individual itself: it preserves itself in competition (a) with others and (b) with the environment. Distinction is functional rather than just fanciful description. Plants can specify but not individuate themselves, although the lack of functional differentiation might help them survive, Hegel later adds.21 Environment: Hegel considers the scientist’s attempt to observe law-­ like correlation of organic and inorganic nature, organism and (its) environment (¶255)—the “its” giving the game away. When Hegel cites “individualities” whose essence consists of the universal elements (air, water, earth or climate) in which they are also “reflected into themselves,” it is only to debunk the notion of some teleological link of ‘sympathy’ between the supposedly separate terms of individuality and environment. There is no law-like correlation between them. Genus: As for the linkage between genus (life as fluid process) and individual organism, that might look like a matter of arbitrary classification (a feature Hegel allots to species). Indeed, Hegel sides with Buffon in holding the living organism primary.22 But he also wants to trace a rational connection with the life process, a permanent individual order of life, devolving ultimately upon the “individuality” of Earth-process.23 That is what Hegel is getting at in ¶292/223 when he writes of the “transition from genus into the individual configuration” as displaying a certain “necessity,” or of the “universal individual” whose “existence [Dasein] as singular organic living individual cannot fall outside its own bounds if it is to be consciousness” (ibid.)—the point being that the organic individual is not yet conscious, which is its limitation. Hegel refers to the two poles, genus and singular being, as the terms of a syllogism mediated by a determinate universal (species) and a “proper [eigentliche] or singular singularity” (sic! ¶293/223–4).

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(We might say that the genus roots itself in nature, singularizes itself, concretely rather than in the abstract, while also accommodating Harris’s “concrete thinking of the logician.”) Everything operates under the aegis of the “universal individual, the Earth” (¶294/224), which exerts its necessary sway while allowing room for empirical conjecture (e.g., about particular species: Arten). Hegel writes: If in the syllogism of organic shaping [Gestaltung] the middle-term (under which is subsumed both species and its actuality as a singular individuality [sic]) were to bear on its self [an ihr selbst] the extreme terms of inner universality and universal individuality [sic], then it would have in the movement of its actuality the expression and nature of universality, and it would be a self-systematizing development (¶295/225).

“So consciousness, as the middle-term between universal spirit and its singularity [Einzelheit], sensuous consciousness,” would serve then to mediate organic life—except that consciousness is not yet in consideration, and the idea is just fanciful. Hence “organic nature has no history”: the descent from universal whole to singular existence is abrupt, bumpy, unmediated. Only conscious organisms have the capacity to reflect on the process of their emergence. Hegel mocks contemporary theorists of some “great influence” the environment (zones, climate) supposedly exerts on the organism. He also ridicules those making “clever remarks” or “interesting connections” between the “individuality” of the organism and the genus, or who talk of its “friendliness” to the concept (¶297/226).24 Nature is not teleological. * * * Psychology: Let me turn briefly to ab: Observation of logical and psychological laws (from the standpoint of ‘individuality’). It is really psychology that Hegel discusses, since logic is not an empirical science. The psyche is a unity comprising the moments of “being-for-self, the principle of individuality, and in its reality [Realität] active consciousness [tuendes

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Bewusstsein]” (¶301/229): individual character or disposition, then its practical expression or effect. The latter is what we observe. Hegel remarks that a “new field has opened up for observation in the acting effectiveness [handelnden Wirklichkeit] of consciousness” (¶301/229): observational psychology. In other words, consciousness need not merely conform to habit and custom; it can also select and practise which inclinations are to be habituated. In the first attitude it comports itself passively towards its own “singularity,” in the second actively to its universal being (Sein); in the first its independence confers on the given “the form of conscious individuality generally,” while in the second it gives actuality “a peculiar [eigentümliche] modification” (though it remains ‘in character’ rather than acting unilaterally or in singular [einzelne] manner: ¶302/229). Hegel condemns the attitude that understands faculties and inclinations as just singular items in a bag, rather than “actual individualities” with a mind of their own. It tells a tale (Hererzählung) of how various features are arrayed in a neutral frame—as though “enumerating species of insects, mosses, etc.”—which is precisely to discount their self-aware unity and active alignment. Hegel rejoins that “to take conscious individuality mindlessly [geistlos], as a manifestation that is single and separate, involves a contradiction, since its essence is the universal of spirit [Geist]” (¶304/230). Even so, the psychologist’s “apprehension” admits a formal universality (with regard to individuality) in discovering “its law,” when it might seem to be in rational business. Such a law finds its content in individuality’s pitting itself against universal inorganic nature (circumstance, situation, habits, mores, religion, etc.), nature that at the same time expresses itself “in the form of individuality” (¶305/230–31). But in actual fact what exerts an influence on individuality depends—on individuality itself (¶306/231). Otherwise each system—environment or individuality—would establish its own frame of comprehension: “a double gallery of pictures, each reflecting the other,” never touching, utterly unstable. The truth however lies in ‘the inversion of inversion,’ an ‘Übergreifen,’ or second-order reflection (Luhmann). “Individuality is what its world is, as its own…and the sheer unity of being, [both] given [vorhandenen] and made” (¶308/232).25 * * *

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Finally, section ac: Observing the relation of self-consciousness to external actuality, Hegel’s analysis/critique of Physiognomy and Phrenology. Since the section has been studied a good deal, while in addition some commentators (notably Forster and Malabou) have focussed specifically on ‘individuality,’ I’ll keep my remarks brief. Hegel begins with individuality as itself the object observed, implicitly opposing Fürsichsein and Ansichsein (¶309/233). ‘For itself ’ it is free activity, ‘in itself ’ an original determinacy. The body is the medium through (or on) which “determinate individuality” has “brought forth” or made known—as expression—what it is, having set its original nature to work (¶310/233–4). Here “the whole determinate individuality is the object of observation” (¶311/234): outer body gives individual expression to inner individual. How then to conceive of the observable relation between inner and outer? (1) A first attempt would take the outer as organ of inner activity. Yet action here has an equivocal meaning: “either inner individuality and not its expression [Ausdruck] or, as outer [als Äußeres], an actuality free-standing from the inner, which is quite different from that” (¶312/235). But then the physical organ (the “speaking mouth, the working hand”) turns out to express either too much or too little (a kind of indeterminacy of translation). To give it a different spin, speech and labor can be considered both as expression (Ausdruck) and as utterance (Äußerung), the latter signalling alienation or exposure (Katrin Pahl).26 Individuality is always on edge, balanced between a) self-possession, and b) self-exposure. (2) A second attempt would seek to fuse inner activity and outer shape into a “passive whole”; in effect a sign which arbitrarily links expression and meaning.27 Enter Physiognomy, determinate individuality in the “necessary” opposition of inner/outer, of character as determinate essence and as existent shape (¶314/236). But there is no law correlating the two. In chiromancy (like Lavater’s physiognomics) the palm-reader takes a short cut by looking at traits in isolation, as an in-itself, ‘Ansich.’ The hand must present (darstellen) the ‘Ansich’ of individuality with regard to its destiny (Schicksal)—what will be. Yet (“in der Tat”) our hand is, after the tongue, the organ by which we actually make our fortune: “the ensouled artisan [Werkmeister] of its fortune [Glück]” (¶315/237).28

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(3) There ensues a third formulation: Lavater’s Physiognomics. The physical organ, fusing action (Tun) and deed (Tat), is now taken as the “middle-term” in a syllogism whose extremes are inner (to be expressed) and outer (deed). It doesn’t matter whether externality is conceived as simple or as “dispersed”; a singular work, a condition (Zustand) merely contingent for the whole individuality, or else “a whole externality,” a destiny (Schicksal) distributed among several works and conditions.29 The point is that the lines of hand or face, the timbre of the voice, or handwriting traits—all can count as both index and (causal) effect of character. Bodily organs allow passage in both directions. (4) A fourth version: expression may extend to the individual’s “reflecting on the actual expression,” its lineaments and movements partially within its control, when “self-reflectedness” can be expressed outwardly (¶317/238). The individual’s conversation with itself is “audible” (vernehmlich) to others as well.30 Moreover—Lavater proposes this too—it seems we can gauge from body language, facial expression or vocal turns whether someone “is serious about what he says or does” (¶318/239). Lichtenberg’s famous riposte exposes the limits of such a view (qua science at least): if it were valid, the resolute individual could promptly make itself inscrutable once more. “Individuality permeates its shape, moves and speaks in it,” but for the individuality itself its demeanor might be its real countenance or just a disposable mask (ibid./239–40). Meaning can never be reduced to a code, let alone a ‘natural’ one, as Lavater supposed (Goethe’s prescient complaint).31 (5) “Individuality gives up that reflectedness-into-self which is expressed in traits [Züge], and places its essence in the work” (¶319/240). This constitutes the fifth attempt at formulating the relation of inner and outer, which Quante dubs a shift to action theory avant la lettre. The observational stance regards the deed itself (die Tat selbst) or the work as unessential, and individuality’s “being-within-self ” (Insichsein) as the “essential inner” or, more paradoxically, the “visible invisibility” of its essence (¶323/244). On the one hand, what is meant or intended (gemeint) by the deed—the true individuality; on the other, the resultant deed. Physiognomy was supposed to establish law-like correlations between them. But if the contents of such a science are merely “opinion”—“mine,” as Miss Anne Elk says of her “theory on brontosauruses”—then they are

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like the sayings Lichtenberg ridicules: “it always rains when we have our annual fair …” (¶321/242). “The true being of a man is rather his deed; in it, individuality is actual … the individual human is what [the deed] is” (¶322/242–3). In Ludwig Siep’s judgment, “Hegel’s discussion of physiognomy incorporates an astonishing amount of … reflections from the philosophy of action.”32 The individual has to own up to the fact that, even in exceeding the limits of intent or control, the deed remains its own. At this point we seem to have left physiognomics behind in favor of action in the world. The physiognomist claims not just a parallelism between inner individual and external trait but also an expressive relation between them. This is Leibnizian monadology rather than Spinozist dual-­ aspect theory. Even that way of putting it fails to grasp the rationalist’s need to accommodate both inner freedom and external rationality, somehow doing justice to the latter—i.e., “that individuality expresses its essence in its immediate, fixed, purely existent [daseiende] actuality”; a determinacy that has still to be dealt with, Hegel avers (¶323/244). This entails, first, fixed actuality rather than variable speech or action; and further, a causal connection between that and inner individuality. “If spiritual individuality is to have an effect on the body, it must qua cause itself be corporeal” (¶325/244–5). Hegel reviews various candidates for such a physiological basis (¶¶326–8: liver, heart, brain, spinal cord, nervous system, etc.). The brain alone seems suited to function as the “medium” (Mitte) of corporeal organization, a “middle term” between fluid self-awareness and objective existence for other (that is, the skull, bone being as dead as brain is alive). Enter Franz Joseph Gall, founder of Phrenology (‘Cranioscopy’ at first); a “science” hugely popular in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, and enjoying a marked resurgence today in the form of neurobiology (“modular” theories of mind). It is important that the skull divulges no significance in (or on) itself— as a sign, for example—for we would then have a “pre-established harmony” between independent sets of factors, not causal dependence (¶328/247–8). But what causation may we observe between inner meaning and features discernible on the skull? Hegel pours scorn on Gall’s idea that growth in the brain affects the formation of the cranial bone(s). Why not the reverse: pressure from the bone affects brain development along

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specific lines (¶329/248–9)? He also undercuts the assumption that one could observe correlations between inner “self-­conscious individuality” in its subjective experience and the size or location of bumps on the head, on someone’s “skull-bone” (¶331/250). A “more refined psychology and knowledge of human nature” would have to register countless nuances of character, which can hardly be aligned with general regions of the brain or bumps on the skull; while in turn any observations the phrenologist makes are as arbitrary and vague as the suggestion that it always rains on washday (¶335/253). Not least, individuals exhibit a freedom irreducible to given dispositions eliciting specific behaviors, as though there were no place for choice, selection or perspective on individuality’s part. The language of “original dispositions”—which merely should take effect, whether observed or no—sounds desperate (¶337/255). To cut a long story short,33 the being of spirit or mind “must be something more and other than these bones” (¶343/259). A hint at what this might include has already been given at ¶333/251, when Hegel rules out the possibility that the skull is a sign, akin to a look or gesture or signpost, which all serve to indicate something other than themselves. “With a skull you may well imagine [einfallen] all sorts of things, as Hamlet does with Yorick’s …”—yet it remains a skull-bone. This passing remark is highly significant, though the skull is not. For what enters here is reflection and memory. They serve to fill out the void of the middle term, the link between inner and outer, namely, Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio ….” The turn inward to memory (and towards intersubjective interpretation) is “the fulcrum upon which the whole book turns,” writes Harris.34 Later he adds: Hegel unfolds the whole comedy of instinctive Reason in the context of the axiom that ‘the outer is the expression of the inner.’ Franz Josef Gall appears as the scientific clown who brings the Leibnizian understanding of inner and outer into direct relation with the ordinary view of freedom and responsibility.35

* * *

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b: The actualization of rational self-consciousness through itself. Hegel interpolates here (¶¶349–52) a reminder of what Greek ethics—classical individuality—might mean “for us,” in philosophical retrospect. It is, he writes, the life of a people (Volk) in which singular and universal reason call each other forth: a life that permeates all independent beings, who become aware of their ‘being-for-self ’ through sacrificing (aufopfern) their singularity, bringing forth the universal through their singular doing (Tun), and as their own work (Werk). Each realizes that the whole is the work and deed of each and all (¶¶250–51/264–6). (Hegel’s emphasis on ‘singularity’ almost makes Hellenic society sound modern, individualist, a version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” except that this is our look back.) Out of this welter of singular effort a sense of the whole nevertheless emerges. But this existent and unchangeable essence is nothing but the expression of that singular individuality [sic] seemingly opposed to it …. The individual cognizes [the laws] not merely as its universal objective thinghood but equally itself within them, i.e., as singularized [vereinzelt] in its own individuality, and in that of its fellow citizens …. I intuit in them the free unity with others in such a way that, just as it exists as through me, so it exists through the others themselves (¶351/266).

Of other citizens I can say, “They as myself, myself as they [Sie als Mich, Mich als Sie].” Humankind must either withdraw from this “happy state [Glück]” and enter a gradual decline, we read (¶354), or else (¶356) glimpse there the model of what should be accomplished in modern society, namely, a happiness both produced and haply found, the individual’s mission being to “seek his fortune or happiness.” Hegel judges the alternative more suited to our times.36 He might have added that since modern society is made up of singular agents and minds, the singular quest is today what we are sent on (the language of ‘Einzelnheit’ predominates in these paragraphs). * * *

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ba. Pleasure and Necessity: The scholar—his self-awareness modelled on Goethe’s Faust—seeks an escape from conventional morality and from the “grey and vanishing shadow” of theory. He plunges into life, putting into practice the pure individuality in which it comes on the scene. It does not make its own good fortune [Glück] so much as immediately take and enjoy it.37

* * * His “singular consciousness” here transcends animal desire in the thought of another independent being, which it knows “as its own selfhood … not as this singleton [dieses Einzelne],” but rather in its own unity with another self-consciousness (Gretchen), i.e., “as sublated singular or as universal” (¶362/272). They love each other as one, yet—isolated from any larger context (family, society, law)—they come to grief. What follows (¶363/272–3) is important in framing singularity and individuality. The singular self finds itself destroyed by a negative essence without actuality for it; an abstract, impersonal fate, sheer contingency.38 But this essence is simply the “concept of what this individuality implicitly is”: the abstract unity of being for itself and being in itself, of life and death (non-tragic death). This constitutes the first inversion (Verkehrung) in individual experience: “the merely singular individuality [sic], instead of having plunged from theory into life … has even more plunged now into consciousness of its own lifelessness …a dead actuality” (¶363/273). The individual is extinguished (“zugrunde gegangen”); “the absolute intractability [Sprödigkeit] of singularity is pulverized on the equally unrelenting but uninterrupted world of actuality” (¶364/273): discreteness falls to continuity. The individual inverts from abstract One—self-centered Fürsichsein—to the equally abstract universality of fate, dead Ansichsein: “the merely negative, uncomprehended power of universality in which individuality is shattered” (¶365/274). But first, this turns out not to be individuality at all, only its singular perversion, conceived as separate from its other (in truth, from itself ). Second, Hegel speaks here of mediation of the abstract “transition” from life to death, resulting in a more

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adequate shape where consciousness cognizes its own essence within abstract necessity. Individuality would situate itself with respect to a worldly necessity. Such ‘inversion of the inversion’ nevertheless lies beyond Faust’s ken, though perhaps within Gretchen’s.39 It is really her tragedy, misconstrued as Faust’s. * * * bb. Law of the Heart and the Insanity of Self-Conceit: We now observe an intricate dance between the singular and universal individuality. The law of the heart is the individual’s own law, which it knows to be its singular essence but also as universal and necessary (previously, necessity just befell consciousness): ¶367/275. This law of the heart is in evident conflict with the actual law of the world as the contradiction of law and singularity [Einzelheit]. On the one hand actuality is … the law oppressing singular individuality [sic], a violent order of the world in contradiction with the law of the heart; on the other it is humanity suffering under that order … subject to an alien necessity (¶369/275).

Such divided actuality is in fact “the previous bifurcated relationship between individuality and its truth, a relationship of dreadful necessity which overwhelms individuality” (ibid./275–6). This necessity … and attendant suffering are what individuality is tasked with sublating …. For within its self, individuality is immediately one and the same as necessity; the law [is] law of the heart. [But] individuality has not as yet budged from its place, and unity is not as yet the result of its mediating movement … (¶370/276).

The shift is experienced in person by our idealist reformer, who (unlike Faust) acts and talks in earnest. Qua actuality, the deed committed by the individual agent is universal, yet content derives from its own individuality, which it wants to preserve as this singular against the universal (¶373/278). In effect it does whatever it wants while defending its principled action as binding on everyone else (‘it’s the law’); an attitude serving only to provoke resentment in others, then frustration for the idealist

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(not understanding why they resist).40 Singular consciousness fails to see any link between actuality (norms that others promote or at least accept) and its own attempted actualization. It fails to see in necessity (‘it’s the law’) something brought to life through universal individuality; it fails to recognize itself in that “living ordinance” (Miller’s nice phrase: ¶374/278–9). Inwardly distraught, it suffers bitter defeat. Matters reach a pitch in ¶377 when singular consciousness blames its own troubles on a conspiracy of others: it sees a perversion of its own “law” whenever others resist implementation. In its madness consciousness suggests that it is individuality itself that, as alien and contingent, drives one mad and is itself inverted. But the heart— the singularity of consciousness directly willing itself to be universal [die unmittelbar allgemeinswollende Einzelheit]—, … is not a contingent and alien individuality but rather just this heart itself, altogether in itself the inverted and inverting [in sich das Verkehrte und Verkehrende](¶377/280–81).

Inversion, and inversion of inversion, proceed apace. The heart’s vaunted universality strikes others as singular and self-interested, while others act to defend prevailing law as protective of their interests. Singularity is at bottom just the “way of the world” (Weltlauf—it can also mean historical process), mere “semblance,” an “essenceless play of … singularities.” Reason either identifies with such prudential rationality, or else sides with public order and “virtue.” On the one hand this order is the “restless” individuality that regards opinion (‘Meinung,’ what is mine) or singularity as legitimate, actuality as false (¶380/282–3). Yet this is also its “actuality,” how individuality sees itself (its “being-for-self”)—a “realist” perspective. On the other hand, “the universal as motionless essence, yet as something inner which can become actual only through sublating the individuality claiming actuality for itself ” (ibid./283). Awareness of the law as inherently true and good is the perspective of virtue. It knows individuality to be both perverted and perverting, and knows it must sacrifice its singularity (Einzelheit) of consciousness. Each perspective inverts the other. * * *

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bc. Virtue and the Way of the World: ¶381 begins with a helpful (if highly condensed) reprise of the previous shapes. First, self-consciousness saw pure individuality set over against empty universality. Second, both parts of self-consciousness came to include both moments, law as well as individuality: the first as their immediate unity (one at heart), the other as opposed (in the world). But now, each encompasses both unity and opposition of moments; each comprises a reciprocal movement between law and individuality. Working this out is an intricate contrapuntal exercise—a double if not triple fugue—which I radically abridge. In format, the section is overdetermined; it recalls stoic virtue but without transcendent guarantee—namely, ‘unchangeable’ fate—and without duty (that comes later, with ‘Morality’), while its play with private and public good anticipates the ‘Animal Realm of Spirit.’ It asks how the individual may (claim to) act virtuously in secular society. ‘Individuality’ here connotes both the individual’s innate gifts and its active application of them, ultimately to perform an action in constituted actuality. Virtuous consciousness comes to admit that settled law is necessary: individuality must be sublated. It is obliged to choose universality over individuality, rather than simply—in classical mode—conducting itself virtuously. Its own individuality must be disciplined, its personality sacrificed.41 Virtue understands its opponent, the way-of-the-world (Weltlauf), as a universal order that has been perverted by individuality, i.e., through a so-called “law” of self-interest. In the Weltlauf, by contrast, individuality subordinates virtue to a realism of self-interest (virtue here becomes Machiavelli’s virtó, self-interested yet for goodness’ sake). On the one hand (¶382/284): the Weltlauf features a “singular individuality” (sic), seeking pleasure only then to meet its downfall, so restoring universal order (but as empty necessity). On the other: individuality dignifies itself as the law we all follow anyway, resisting a universal law it labels complacent (compare Mandeville). For its part, virtuous individuality is more than abstract inherent potential, mere ‘An-sich’: it comprises the activity of struggle (¶383/285). It activates and serves the general good, doesn’t just use it for its private purposes (¶385/286).42 It sees itself, as in a mirror, actively inverting the Weltlauf. Yet that turns out to be a universal oddly without individuality, its action a virtual pose, mere imitation of

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virtue, a “sham-fight” (Spiegelfechterei): ¶386/286–7. In a familiar dialectical move, consciousness needs a Weltlauf for it then to invert (= first invertedness). Ultimate victory goes to the Weltlauf, which sees through abstract virtue and inverts the inversion (as inclusive ‘Übergreifen,’ syllogistic mediation). The middle term—‘sacrifice of individuality’ to effect the good—breaks down altogether, since “individuality is precisely the actualization of what is [only] in principle [Ansichseienden]” (¶391/290).43 With the Weltlauf, the being-for-self of individuality is set over against essence (the universal), appearing as an actuality separated from being-in-­ itself. But that turns out to be a mere viewpoint (Ansicht: ¶392/291), a picture of how things ‘really’ are beneath the pose. Individuality might suppose that its acts are in its own interest, yet its activity on the ground is already universal. “The concerns of individuality are an end in its own right” (¶393/291)—not an abstract to-be-enacted universal, but the “actuality of the process of individuality.” The difficulty in stating this derives from its dual modes of consciousness. The section is significant as exposing the mutable nature of ‘individuality,’ subtly shifting between inner potential and actual engagement. The section that follows attempts the advance to a dualism of consciousness versus social or institutional fact. That presents its own difficulties, of course. * * * To summarize this dizzying series of manœuvres: Hegel begins straightforwardly, with Faust’s passionate singularity, which either ends up exposing individualities (other persons) to the empty universal, death, or (Gretchen) finds itself shattered by an irrational fate. The law of the heart opposes its own (singular) individuality to the force of circumstance, then blames others for perverting its own law without admitting that the individual’s singularity (posing as universal) constitutes the legal order. The idealist comes to see others acting likewise, proclaiming their own singularly-individual schemes universal; on the other side, some individuals come to see the legal order as effective guarantor of their own

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singularly-individual interests. Both sides elevate their singular individuality to universal status, though both can (in principle) gain insight into how their shared delusion works. The best way to frame the section following is to take both consciousness of virtue and consciousness of ‘the way of the world’ as embracing the opposed valences of individuality—as singular (individualist!) yet universal. (‘Singularity’ leaves the stage momentarily, replaced by what we might call an exaggerated version of ‘individuality’; or better, an individuality with too-­narrow a view of itself and its interests.) Individuality is now either the enemy to be disciplined, or the reality to be (cynically) embraced. But each side ends up, ‘in der Tat,’ simply actualizing individuality; better, individuality is nothing if not implemented, made public. The imbricated dynamics of this will return (at a yet higher reflective level) in the next section, on economic rationality (qua political economy) in modern society. * * * The third division of chapter V: Reason is c) Individuality which takes itself to be in-&-for-itself real (reell). Again, I forgo detailed explication of Hegel’s argument in order to bring ‘Individualität’ into relief (the word appears over fifty times in the first section, nowhere in the last two sections). Moreover, this division is meant to integrate a) ‘Observing Reason’ and b) “Actualization of Self-Conscious Reason’ into c) the consciousness of itself as comprising “the self-moving interfusion (Durchdringung) of universal gifts or abilities and individuality” proper; it links being-initself (Ansichsein) to being-for-itself (Fürsichsein). The mere potential imputed to individual character or disposition is now made explicit and evident in the real world, in the shape of an existent actuality at once active and self-aware. Purpose (Zweck) is found in the world—or in our embodied experience of it—not just within the mind.44 Conversely, purpose may well be appropriated as one’s own, often as part of long-­made commitments: “the presentation [Darstellung] or expressing [Aussprechen] of individuality is to it the purpose,” no longer separable as an end to be achieved, or an objective factor the individual has yet to make its own (¶394/292–3).

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Since individuality is in itself actuality, the material for effectuation and the purpose of activity [both] lie in activity itself. Activity has therefore the appearance of the movement of a circle moving freely within itself in a void, [one] that unimpeded now expands, now contracts, perfectly content just to play games within and with itself. The element in which individuality displays [darstellt] its shape has the significance of purely absorbing this shape; it is the daylight in which consciousness wants to show itself (¶396/293).

Everything is out in the open—transparent, as Harris says, if not always evident.45 Individual character as well as intentions must reveal themselves in the public space of reasons, finding their full significance in interaction also with other interested individuals. Individuality is found rather than lost in translation.46 It is not just others who help contextualize the process, but equally the individual’s own constitution: its own peculiar character, its collection of habits, drives, aims, and commitments or values, all of which we might sum up as ‘embodied reason.’ * * * ca. The animal realm of spirit and deception or the thing-that-matters [die Sache selbst])47: Terry Pinkard notes the characteristically modern shift from an earlier project of individual self-assertion to one in which an attempt is made to decide which part of the individual transcends circumstances and remains constant throughout different acts and environments, since there must be some “preformed” part of individuality that makes it individual …. Thus, true individuality … cannot lie in any social construction, for that is precisely the difficulty with past models of agency that modern life takes itself to be rejecting. (As we might put it, it is a passage from the early modern idea of individualism, with its conception of each individual having an identical set of interests and liberties, to the pre-romantic idea of individuality—namely, the conception that each individual has a unique “nature” that cannot be commensurated with the other individuals’ “natures.”)48

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Christopher Yeomans puts Hegel’s basic idea succinctly: Spiritual animals … are, for Hegel, those creatures who are just starting to take reflective responsibility for their own individuation, and this is why the notion of interest-guided development of talents, which is the primary mechanism for such individuation and has its most intense location in the human lifespan in later childhood and adolescence, is the focal point of the moral psychology of this self-understanding of agency in the Phenomenology (Yeomans 2015a, 27).

Yeomans understands talents to be activated—and applied—by individual interests. Three initial points: First, while the process may look “natural” and “given”—the individual does what its constitution directs— individuality transcends its animal condition in choosing what seems interesting to it, through reflection (by itself or prompted by others), in its training, development, and so on. Second, individuality embodies a thoroughgoing perspectivism, an internal perspective on the external; as such it remains always internalist, a circle of both self-consciousness and self-determination. Third, it remains unclear how we may (or should) contextualize the section as a whole, although its applicability to academic quarrels or to artistic creation seems unpersuasive.49 More pertinent is Scottish political economy, especially given the growing significance of “interest” or “the-thing-that-matters” (die Sache Selbst), along with the whole movement from Mandeville to Smith and Kant addressing the problem of private interest versus public benefit, the “invisible hand” seeming to govern civil society. Thematically the section falls in two: (i/ii) a (proto-Romantic) theory of individual self-expression in and as (its) work; then (iii/iv) the attempted integration of individual contribution with communal enterprise. * * * (i) Self-expression: In its initial shape, individuality is again singular (einzelne) and determinate. We shall see, Hegel declares, how the concept of individuality real in-and-for-itself consciously determines itself in its several moments (¶397/294). “The concept of this individuality (namely,

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that individuality as such is for itself all reality) is initially a [bare] result” (¶398/294)—without internal articulation. A mere principle, such original individuality remains free through its various determinations, wholly unaffected by them. (Harris compares it to Leibnizian Monadology: expressivity without external relation.50) Qua consciousness it appears as the immediate singular content proper to what counts, for the individual, as the purpose. But first, it is a content only so far as we consider being-in-­ itself in isolation, in the way singular consciousness understands actuality as existent but not yet active (Emerson: “the true ship is the ship-builder”). Second, individuality simply expresses itself, of its very nature; there is no barrier to transcend—it just does it. In the process, third, individuality becomes determinate, i.e., negative (Spinoza: all determination is negation): “in [an] the acting, individuality [or] determinacy is dissolved into sheer negativity, the epitome of determinacy” (¶399/295). Yet fourth, individuality is untouched by the determinations its activity produces. There is no distinction drawn between individuality and being generally, nor any purpose beyond (what lies in) individuality’s original nature, nor any contrast with encountered actuality (¶400/295–6). Hegel attempts here to describe the circle by which consciousness makes explicit its innate, original individuality: its given capacities or dispositions, interests and talents, which exist solely in being actualized or applied. One must have a project or disposition in mind before its enactment reveals what it actually involves: “individuality posited for itself as the existent [als das Seiende]” (¶401/296). More to the point, self-expression is intentional, both willed and self-aware. It is perhaps easy to miss in Hegel’s text, but the circular movement is above all subjective, individuality’s own movement (or, as Yeomans puts it, a self-appropriation, which is at the same time self-determination, a choice of content). Hegel is getting at how reason may be realized in the world, or how objective purpose (still to be realized) is at the same time individuality’s own purpose.51 (Neither formulation implies that realization is successful or complete. Inversion into illusion or failure is a recurrent feature—indeed, the final result.52) At this point the circle is complicated by analysis of “the work.” The work may be assessed or construed in various ways, by the individual making it or by those making sense of it. The paradox is that, for “a selfpresentation and self-expression of an individuality” expression is, by its

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own lights, wholly good. Taking it as unsuccessful or defective would be to relativize it, compare with other individualities rather than taking it as the unique “self-expression of individuality.” “There is nothing for individuality that is not by way of it, or there is no actuality that is not its nature and its action, and no action nor any in-itself of individuality that is not actual—only these moments are comparable” (¶402/299). Neither exaltation nor lament have a place here. Even a supposed identity of original individuality with its achieved actuality misleads, since there exists only the semblance (Schein) of their opposition. The individual should feel solely joy in what it does (¶403/299–300).53 (That sounds like Spinoza, but is rather the perspective of Leibnizian Monadology: solely internal relations, shorn of external comparison or causal interaction between individuals.) Individual works are not to be judged by external criteria or rules (of meaning or of correctness); they transcend classical poiesis (production by set rules, for given ends or audiences, with given material or genres). The work Hegel analyzes here is to be understood as Romantic, expressive, creative.54 * * * (ii) Dialectic of the work (¶¶404–9): As its “interfusion” with being, individuality expresses itself in and as the work—its work. At issue is “how individuality will sustain its universality in the work’s being and how it will know how to satisfy itself there” (¶404/300–01). Cracks appear in the façade of unified being/acting. In becoming determinate as a work, individuality reveals the truth of its vaunted universality, namely, its own “dissolution” as individual. The turnabout comes in the following important passage: The work is, i.e., exists for other individualities, and is for them an alien actuality in whose place they must posit their own actuality …. They project their interest, as posited through their original nature, into that work, and it diverges from peculiar [eigentümliche] interest

—peculiar to the original creator, that is. The work turns out to be transient; individuality’s reality presents itself as vanishing (¶404/301).55The significance of the work escapes individual ken or

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control. The individual becomes conscious of an intrinsic tension between being and doing. The work remains the same in content; its form does not. Its “original concept” is enacted as absolute transition, or as becoming [Werden]. This lack of fit between concept and reality is experienced by consciousness in its work. (¶405/302)

Acting (Handeln) becomes negotiation, where authors have a certain authority over their meaning, but no absolute (Humpty-Dumpty) last word, which would entail that they are not talking about anything, anything that matters in the public realm.56 Thanks to “the work,” the fundamental contradiction in “real individuality”—the “real monad” Harris dubs it—now emerges, qua contradictory “aspects” of individuality (¶406/302). It turns out to be a contingent matter whether the purpose is substantial, whether the proper means are chosen, or whether the individual’s action accords with actuality. Yet—the dialectical reversal—realization of monadic individuality is itself contingent: necessity “overgrasps” contingency, which is now revealed as a necessary moment.57 Willing is not the same as attaining, but that too forms the content of experience: “the content is the vanishing work; what sustains itself is not the vanishing but rather the vanishing is itself actual and bound up with the work and vanishes with this work” (¶407/303). * * * (iii) Reason as thing (die Sache selbst) (¶¶408–14): “This vanishing of the vanishing lies in the concept of individuality real in itself ” (¶408/303). It constitutes the negation of negation. Action vanishes into work, work into action. But this doesn’t simply leave everything as it was; rather the “inversion” of original meaning entails an “enveloping” (übergreifen) by one term of its opposite, a continuing self-expression which allows for public acknowledgment and self-correction.58 (If monads really were windowless, adds Harris, their expressions would cancel out; yet we all experience real contradiction—disagreement, misunderstanding,

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correction—the vanishing of vanishing.) At the same time, not everything is thereby rendered self-transparent and true. Consciousness “experiences in fact [in der Tat] its concept, within which actuality is merely a moment, that is, something for it [consciousness], and not the in-and-for-itself ” (¶408/304). In other words, what counts for it is actuality that is considered “the true work,” “the thing that matters” (die Sache selbst), beyond the contingency of individual activity or circumstances, means or actuality. Reason appears as a thing: publicly shared ‘Sache,’ not singular ‘Ding’ (¶409/304). The question for real individuality remains, how to square universal activity with this its own act, meld them into the identity of die Sache selbst? The “interpenetration of individuality and objectivity has itself attained objectivity,” and self-consciousness has become conscious of its true substance in “the thing that matters.” Yet (Hegel concedes) it is only immediate consciousness, of an abstract universal or essence for which individuals are either accidents or else subjects linked to a universal predicate (¶411/305). Such idealism calls itself “honest” (ehrlich) to honor its own association with what matters (¶412/306), even though practically anything would count: the individual identifies the universal as its own, whether it really did anything, or had perhaps found its efforts dogged by misfortune (¶¶413–4/306–7).59 Such “honesty” is dishonest: the individual knows that the universal work is really its own and deserves honor even though honor was not its motivation. Conversely, even if an individual’s true self is for some reason not well represented in an enterprise in which it has participated, it still bears responsibility.60 * * * (iv) Dialectic of humbug61 (¶¶415–8): Consciousness plays a game, in circles without limit: The whole is the self-moving interfusion of individuality and the universal. But because this whole for consciousness comes up only as the simple essence and hence as the abstraction of the thing that matters, its moments, as separate moments, fall outside of the whole and outside one another” (¶415/308).

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Formally, the whole alternates between exhibiting (Ausstellen) itself and keeping to itself (Fürsichbehalten). Consciousness takes one moment to be essential in its internal reflection on what is its own, another moment as external to it, or for others. I do my bit, while “the thing that matters” proceeds on its own. I fail, in short, to recognize the other as myself. Hence “there occurs a play of individualities with one another wherein each finds itself everywhere deceiving and deceived” (ibid.). ¶416/308–9 presents a vivid scenario of this struggle for recognition, which I merely sketch: An individuality undertakes to do something. It acts (handelt), and others take that to indicate an interest in furthering or carrying out ‘the thing that matters,’ even tendering their own help in the common task. They are deceived. The individual had all along understood it as strictly its own affair, while they in turn aren’t disinterested but want some credit. The individual had after all paraded (herausgekehrt) its self-centered involvement, its “play with its own powers,” along with its indifference to what others might do. But again, others would be mistaken to credit this supposedly “singular” interest, when in fact it concerns what matters universally—indeed, the individual intercedes in what others do, passing judgment, even praising their efforts. But what it is really praising here is “its own generosity and its own moderation” in tolerating those efforts. Others in turn feel deceived by this—or pretend to feel deceived—thus joining in the larger deception (that others’ actions have nothing to do with me). It all amounts to a performative self-contradiction, as the individual communicates to others its perfect indifference to their concerns. Inasmuch as it concerns individuality’s self-expression (the original model), experience demonstrates that everyone is on the move and feels invited to the show: “a thing-that-matters” (¶417/310). The ultimate self-deception lies in calling ‘die Sache selbst’ itself an individuality, when it comprises indefinitely many individualities: The moments of individuality, taken one after another, counted as subject for this utterly thoughtless consciousness; now they gather themselves up into simple individuality which, as this individuality, is just as immediately universal. As a result, ‘die Sache selbst’ loses the relation of being a predicate,

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and loses the determinacy of lifeless abstract universality. It is instead substance permeated by individuality. It is the subject within which individuality exists as itself or exists just as much as this individual as it is all individuals. It is the universal, a being [ein Sein] only as this activity that is the action of each and all; an actuality because this consciousness knows it as its own singular actuality and as the actuality of all (¶417/310–11).

It might look like a victory lap for individual consciousness, as each manages to view itself (in part, momentarily) through the eyes of others, so successfully mirroring the whole, as with Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator.’62 Each can now understand itself as embodying dual models (a) of self-realization and (b) of public service, the good. Yet it is worth remembering that the result remains within the purview of individual reason, not yet of universal (moral) reasoning.63 The next two sections (cb and cc) consider the Kantian or moral law. They are notable for their total silence on individuality; the category returns only in chapter VI (Geist, Spirit). A further step seems needed by way of self-abstraction, or conceiving one’s singular role with respect to the moral universal (I note the phrase “its own singular actuality” in the above). The sole mention of individuality comes at the outset of cb, when Hegel claims that “the formal heart of things gets its filling from acting individuality as it distinguishes itself within itself.”64 It’s almost as though Hegel gives away (‘for us’) the entire Kantian dramaturgy: namely, within the self of universal duty there lurks the sheerly expressive action of monadic individuality, its actual content wholly contingent. We have far to go however before that makes its appearance. * * * Let me review the complex turnings that have led up to this pass—the ‘narrative’ is hardly straightforward! Real individuality begins with the basic model of Leibnizian expressivity, purely internal self-relation. That inverts dialectically, through the work, something individuality is and is not, owns and yet releases into the world, an object subject moreover to assessment (its own or others’). In turn identification with the (its) work

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resolves into the dialectic of action. This amounts to a second inversion (negation of negation), namely, ‘the thing-that-matters’ (die Sache selbst). From the court of judgment individuality is moved to submit to mediation, via the syllogism.65 (It is and is not the public object called its work; it ‘overreaches’ its opposite moment, reaching out to the public reality.) Hegel canvasses several modes by which in this ultimate move individuality identifies with the public weal—that is, its own interest and yet at the same time in alienated form.) Self-declared ‘honesty’ turns out to be dishonorable in fact. When individuality declares its own interest to be in the public interest, it easily shifts from dishonesty into hypocrisy or humbug, on everyone’s part. The critical factor is recognition, intersubjectivity, something the individual plays with yet hardly takes seriously (it makes representations to others, but half-heartedly). As with the earlier struggle for recognition (in Lordship and Bondsman), complete social transparency never does arrive! The most we can claim for individuality here is that it submits to mediation as between the syllogistic terms of subjective interest, actuality, and instantiated category (the thing-­that-­matters), each mediating the others by turns. It resembles a stage performance where individuality plays various parts, as do other members of the cast (who are also the audience). Although the text does gesture proleptically at “the essence of all essence, spiritual essence” (¶418), it does not indicate how ‘you can get there from here’ (Pippin 1993, 77). Indeed, it cannot get there, but must find itself in a new frame of reference. In sum, individuality in this section is always flirting with “so-called” individuality, when the dialectic hypostatizes one moment at the expense of another. Here individuality points beyond itself to the virtual universality of the social whole (“the invisible hand”), while also declaring that its own work; and it subscribes to a kind of perspectivism, unified only in the limit—a bad infinity. Recalling Brady Bowman’s point about the bad infinity of absolute possibility, Spinozist ‘Sache’: it features here too, even though individuality started out from the assurance that it is all reality.66 It fails to articulate just how its action and work could encompass all individualities, how my world is simultaneously our world. Instead, it plays fast and loose between individual (i.e., singular) and universal perspectives.

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Individuality does not feature at all in cb—Kantian reason as lawgiver—or cc—Kantian testing of laws. As Hegel’s later critique of ‘the moral worldview’ shows, the Kantian subject continually displaces itself through its chronic role-playing, its habitual temporizing, when hypocrisy enters in still more developed form. (It remains dramaturgical, but the role played is that of judge, even as it judges itself while pretending that nobody else is around.) A salient difference seems to be that the individual’s determinate nature is, in the next step, “only a sublated moment, and the individual [das Individuum] a self, as universal self ” (¶418/311). A certain impersonality enters. The moral person is everyone and nobody; no individual, certainly—or nobody I would recognize.

Notes 1. Hegel 1977a, ¶322/Hegel 1969, 3: 242–3. (Citations in the text are to paragraph—pilcrow: ¶—followed by page number of the Suhrkamp edition, Hegel 1969, vol. 3.) I sometimes adopt Pinkard’s translation. 2. Emerson 1983, 244. 3. Förster 2012, 305 note, citing Michelet 1937/38, 2: 615. 4. ¶78/72. In his remarkable Neues Organon (‘toolkit’) of 1764, J.H. Lambert had earlier formulated a ‘phenomenology’; see Donougho 1982, 417. His friend Immanuel Kant applied the idea to the “logic of semblance [Schein]” framing his own Transcendental Dialectic. “At issue here is the transformation not of semblance into truth [Lambert], but of appearance into experience,” Kant writes in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Kant 2002, 94). For his part, Hegel explores the historical development of experience alternating between the two: appearing, mere seeming, further appearance, etc. 5. Hegel 1977a, chapter IVb, ¶¶207–30. Usually called “Unhappy Consciousness,” the figure is also ‘hapless,’ given the suggestion in German of “unlucky,” “hostage to fortune,” even though it actually brings its fate upon itself. Cf. ¶¶178ff. (“Herrschaft und Knechtschaft”), and ¶¶747ff. (“die offenbare Religion”). 6. Hegel 1977a, ¶803: 586/Hegel 1969, 3: 489. Hegel sketches a condensed history of modern philosophical systems from Descartes on: “… spirit at the same time recoils from this abstract unity, this self-less substantiality [Spinoza], against which it affirms individuality [Leibniz].”

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7. Ibid., ¶5 (translation modified)/Werke, 3: 14. Hegel here speaks of the “external necessity” for knowledge to become systematic and philosophy to become “science” (Wissenschaft). (I have consulted Terry Pinkard’s superior translation, although I do not adopt his usual rendering of ‘Einzelnheit’ as ‘singular individuality.’) 8. Walter Kaufmann considers Goethe’s Faust I, lines 682–3, an apt motto for Hegel’s book: “What from your fathers you have inherited [ererbt]/ Earn [erwirb] it to possess” (Kaufmann 1966, 403). Eckart Förster quotes the same lines, adding that while Goethe was at work on Faust he was in conversation with Hegel (Förster 2012, 359). He thinks Goethe catalyzed Hegel’s wholesale recasting of the Phenomenology. 9. Harris is justified in claiming that Hegel was just clearing up an ambiguity (Harris 1997, 73, 104–5). Hegel wants to emphasize substantial property, not yet subjective in form. 10. Hegel 1991b, 21/Werke 7: 26. The individual is put in its place, while grasping its place within reason. 11. Chapter II (Perception) showcases “singularity … opposed [by] universality” (¶167/138), compared with Sense-Certainty’s “being of intention [Meinen]” or “the empty inner of Understanding.” Perception is all about ‘singularity.’ The word or cognate occurs a dozen times: e.g., “singular property” (¶117/98), “empty abstractions of singularity and opposed universality” (¶131/105). 12. Cf. ¶166/137–8: “The I is content of the relation and the relation itself. It is its self over against an other, and at the same time encompasses [greift…über] this other, which is for it equally its own self.” This is the opening of Chapter IV, ‘The Truth of Self-Certainty.” 13. “This inversion [Verkehrung] however is therefore once again invertedness in itself [die Verkehrtheit an sich selbst]”—an inversion of inversion leaving everything as it is while wholly changed, in the movement of “over-reaching” its other. Compare ¶¶292 f., on the dialectic (or syllogism) of life process and singular organism or shape. 14. Pinkard (Hegel 2018a, 106): “the process of life… is just as much a taking shape [Gestaltung], and this last is just as much a sublation as” articulation into members (die Gliederung). 15. Harris is right to point to Hegel’s emphasis on “self-satisfaction” in the sexual act, as opposed to his Frankfurt emphasis on love qua primitive ‘recognition’ (Harris 1997, 327). 16. My emphasis, to bring out the reflexive move; previously in the sentence Hegel writes that the simple genus “does not exist for itself as [als] this simple.”

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17. Phenomenologically, the drama is less between two actual ‘self-­ consciousnesses’ than within a singleton, at once self- and other-regarding; divided, dividual. It can’t even begin to conceive of the other as its semblable, in mutual recognition. That requires a long march through multiple external, social or cultural shapes (Chapters IV–VII), where individuality is sought or claimed but never quite secured (even in Religion). Markell 2003—preferring ‘acknowledgment’ to ‘recognition,’ abdication of sovereignty to its assertion—loses some of its purchase on Lord and Bondsman, since they are set up to fall short, ‘misrecognizing’ both themselves and the other. 18. ¶186/148 has self-consciousness in its immediate being as a ‘singleton’ (Einzelnes), which when confronted by another such appears as “individual against individual”—but that perspective is ‘for us,’ not ‘for itself ’! As Alfredo Ferrarin surmises, it “is for us [not for itself ] that recognition is mutual and free” (Ferrerin 2019, 46). Hegel’s chapter “acts a prophet to a messiah,” announcing what has yet to be attained: fullfledged intersubjectivity, “I that is We.” 19. Brandom (2019, 360–61) writes that the Stoic focusses exclusively on the universal aspect of individuality, the Skeptic on its negative aspect— the difference between recognizing and recognized consciousness—, while Unhappy Consciousness treats individuality as dependent. But he provides no textual support. 20. In revising his translation of the Phenomenology, Pinkard has ‘singular individuality’ render ‘Einzelnheit,’ as here (¶210–11/Hegel 2018a, 124–5). For some reason he drops the unusual emphases ‘AN’ and ‘AM’ in ¶210. 21. Mancuso 2015, 36: not being an individual, a plant might survive bisection. See also Harris 1997, 486. 22. See Hegel 1970b (Petry), vol 3, 230, for Hegel’s reliance on Treviranus (who cites Buffon). 23. As Harris insists, there must be “a permanent individual (rather than a transiently singular organism)”: Harris 1997, 534. The problem of “the origin of species” remains pressing to this day, even for evolutionary biologists, especially advocates of the “modern synthesis” (Ernst Mayr). How does formal taxonomy find explanatory anchor in fundamental reality rather than the mind? 24. For Hegel, the contemporary theorist of “influence” would be the biologist Treviranus, whose Biologie (1802–22) marks the shift from natural history to modern biology; Treviranus sought formal, axiomatic laws of this sort. It is unclear who might have made “clever remarks” about

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“friendliness”—perhaps a student of Schelling’s? Cf. Siep 2014b, e.g., 116–17. (Many today exhibit a similarly mystical faith in genomics, overlooking the vital epigenetic linkage.) The ‘good lord dwells in the details,’ individuating itself there. 25. Hegel’s critique of psychological “law” recalls the law of force(s) from ‘the Inverted World.’ If the two sides are separate, no necessity can link them; if not, talk of ‘law’ is empty. 26. Pahl 2012, 29–30, arguing here for two distinctive models of expression in the Phenomenology. In one, the inner retains possession of the outer; in the second, “the individual…abandons it to the other” (¶312/235), utterly outer. Both models operate in ‘Reason,’ she holds, and “the slight shift” from Ausdruck to Äußerung makes all the difference (Pahl, 30). I agree with her criticism of Charles Taylor’s “expressivism” (now abandoned by Taylor himself ). And I endorse her idea that Hegel often adopts a philosophical version of ‘free indirect discourse’ (Pahl, 11), when the perspective of the shape of consciousness under observation merges with that adopted by the phenomenological observer: the inner is, and is not, the outer. We observe the same dynamic in ‘the animal realm of spirit,’ and especially with ‘ethical action.’ Individuality is the mediator between singular and universal; a kind of ‘double-voicing.’ 27. See Quante 2008, 103–7, helpfully listing five “antitheses” in all. The remaining antitheses are (iii) the organ of action is the appearance of the inner, i.e., of particular individuality; (iv) inner reflection on the individual’s own deed as “actual expression” with an observable aspect; and finally, (v) action theory: the inverted result of self-reflection finds its essence in its deed—dialectic of theory and praxis. 28. The paragraph is unusually puzzling. But Hegel means to assert the dual nature of hand and tongue, revealing character but also as its self-­ fulfilment (Sichselbstvollbringen). It leads into the next formulation of antithesis. 29. Compare ancient virtue ethics (Aristotle), for which character exhibits itself in action without being tied to any instance (the particular work or deed might be ‘uncharacteristic’ of the individual). 30. A tricky question, for it seems a matter less of observation than of interpretation (Quante 2008, 104). In any event, we are familiar with the idea of ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’: the myriad cues we learn how to practise, in conveying our thoughts or feelings (and understanding others’ in turn) through bodily comportment.

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31. See Donougho 2020 for Goethe’s reservations about Lavater’s putative ‘science,’ but also its ambivalent treatment in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. 32. Siep 2014b, 128: “An individual acts freely and ethically when she manages to find expression for her own reflected ‘version’ of shared, rationally intelligible ethical principles.” 33. I leave aside Hegel’s appeal to ‘language,’ whether the individual’s possession or comprising arbitrary signs. The phrenologist says “the being of spirit is a bone” but means something else. What he utters (for us) is the “infinite judgment” that spirit is a thing, a “singular contingent” (¶342). Pahl takes note of Hegel’s having the phrenologist speak via indirect discourse, as though to save him from total humiliation (Pahl 2012, 198). 34. Harris 1997, 592. “It is the shift from the observing perspective of Gall to the recollecting perspective of Hamlet that makes this moment the fulcrum upon which the whole book turns”—all the more so, he continues, given that the context of physiognomy/phrenology is ethical. 35. Harris, 597. To mention phrenology in the same breath as Leibniz or Spinoza smacks of “intellectual blasphemy,” he admits, while noting that Gall was himself inspired by the idea of Enlightenment science. Of course, Hegel’s final joke, the reductio ad absurdum of “inner = outer,” is hardly respectable, “observing” the identity of the organs of generation and of pissing. The Phenomenology ends on another, less shameful identification: “Golgotha” (or skull-place), which John Smith wittily dubbed “the phrenology of spirit” (Smith 1988, 236, note 88). 36. The first scenario retains a certain plausibility in modern times, namely, when the “moment of this singularity of self-consciousness” (¶355/267) becomes a “vanishing quantity” in relation to “universal spirit itself,” consciously subsisting only “as trust” (Locke’s benchmark). The individual (das Individuum) places itself in opposition to laws and customs, which have only provisional reality compared with the “living truth” of “this I.” 37. ¶361/271: Faust wants conscious enjoyment of pleasure. It is the Faust of the so-called “Faust-Fragment,” published in 1790, not of Faust Part 1, published only in 1808, although Goethe was working on it from 1806 (see note 8, above). 38. Their night of love results in Gretchen’s pregnancy and her mother’s poisoning, along with other deaths. Hegel frames it in logical terms: unity or life, distinction (Unterschied) or death, and their relation (Beziehung) as abstract necessity.

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39. “It is Gretchen who illustrates the comprehensive inversion and the transition” (Harris1997, 31–2). Faust betrays their love and shouldn’t be considered victim of inscrutable fate; whereas in realizing his betrayal, Gretchen casts their love in a new light, that of “the law of the heart” in a cruel world. 40. Karl Moor in Schiller’s The Robbers has been suggested as the model, or perhaps Ferdinand in Kabale und Liebe. Idealists feel they are forbidden to compromise their principles, yet must at the same time justify them publicly. These paragraphs are filled with equivocations between singular and universal individuality (often obscured by loose translation). 41. “True discipline is solely the sacrifice of the entire personality, as proof that it [consciousness] is not in fact still focussed on singularities [Einzelheiten]. In this singular sacrifice [einzelne Aufopferung] individuality in the way-of-the-world is eradicated at the same time, since [individuality] is a simple element common to both” (¶381/283–4). There are just two further instances of ‘singular’ and ‘singularity’ (in ¶382); both refer to a previous moment of pleasure-seeking. Remarkably, such terms don’t appear again in this entire section (they await the next shape of Reason, the ‘Animal Realm of Spirit’). Whereas the distinction of singular from ‘individuality’ was pivotal for the law of the heart—in the dialectical confusion of the singular heart’s universalist pretensions— here ‘individuality’ becomes the hinge or middle term, through which individuality would sacrifice itself (an individual action, indeed!). 42. Harris does well to bring up the Stoic insight that, in Hamlet’s words, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Harris 1997, 53). You can read it either way. It all depends on your standpoint (and your faith); virtue versus mordant realism. 43. There are obvious parallels with previous moments of “individuality is its deed,” or later, “its work.” 44. ‘Zweck’: purpose, aim, or perhaps commitment (to catch the fusion of subjective and objective sense). Moyar and Yeomans focus on how reasons come to motivate as well as justify in the abstract. Yeomans also specifies how Fichte revealed to Hegel the salience of “effectiveness”— translating subjective purpose into objective reality such that individuality may recognize itself (oddly, he ignores Fichte’s own theory of ‘Individualität’—but so does Hegel). 45. Harris 1997, 81.

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46. Hegel has been interpreted by some (Taylor or Pippin, for instance)— though not all (McDowell)—as holding the “paradoxical” view that intentions may be determined retrospectively, after my activity or expression in a public forum; I discover my meaning (my original nature or intention) by observing what I’ve done. That is implied by ¶398, arguing that there is no outside limit to consciousness in its circular movement. As often with Hegel’s text, this is floated as a possibility always subject to correction or provisional limitation as we proceed. (See also Leitinen 2004.) The dialectic, whether of activity and work or of “the thing-that-matters” (die Sache selbst), explores these mere possibilities and what ensues “in fact.” 47. I acknowledge the help given me here by Anthony Morley, during our weekly readings in 2015–6. 48. Pinkard 1994, 113. I understand ‘individualism’ differently, but I take his main point: previous shapes pitted individuals against a society in which they are also embedded, whereas individuality now attempts to sort which portion of action is properly its own. 49. Harris 1997, 136, notes 5–6: “The geistige Tierreich is more accurately identified as ‘Civil Society’ than as ‘the academic community’”—Jean Hyppolite’s suggestion. Siep (2014b, 149 note) mentions that Hölderlin has Hyperion refer to the scholars around him as a ‘spiritual animal kingdom.’ Cf. generally Shapiro 1998. The broad influence of neo-­stoicism on the eighteenth century should not be discounted, especially with its revival of the idea of oikeiosis as that merged with “providentialism.” Virtue has little to do with it: social automatism is what counts. For some of the complexities here, see Donougho 2016. Pinkard 1994, 110–14, is generally helpful, but misleadingly ranges stoicism under prior discussions of virtue contra worldly egoism. For this section he proposes the implausible models of ‘l’honnête homme’ or ‘gentleman’ and its Augustinian opposite, Rousseau’s Confessions. I return to Hegel’s remarks on “honest consciousness”; but ‘honnêteté’ comes from the distinct tradition of ‘courtliness’ (Donougho 2016, 328). I understand this tradition to persist in displaced, non-aristocratic guise through Adam Smith and beyond, even into Arthur Danto’s ‘artworld.’ 50. Harris 1997, 82–90—“The Monadology of Reason”—, and 95–6. “It was axiomatic for him that the thinking individual is a substance. Hence he had to hold that every individual is a self-enclosed world; so he argued that what appeared to all of us as a ‘common’ world is just the ‘pre-­

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established harmony’ of our separate substantial realities” (Harris, 95). But the dialectic follows experience as much as axiom: real individuals acting in the real world. 51. See also Moyar’s argument via “nesting” of purposes, such that motivating and justifying reasons are conjoined. Moyar 2011, 74: “In ethical action, an agent’s motivating reasons stem from purposes that can be nested within broader purposes [which] provide justifying reasons for action.” What Moyar calls “standing purposes” comprise longstanding commitments, potentially public commitments open to being defended. My decisions need not be arbitrary; they are customarily part of a life lived in public, in the social space of reasons. 52. I am responding here to a challenge issued in correspondence with Patrick Welsh. He thinks the entire section presents a reductio. Complete individuality is impossible, its claim to realize reason in the “world” illusory. This captures an important point: civil society is both real and illusory, just as ‘what matters’—the public good—exists both in the world and in individual perspective. Ultimately they don’t add up— precisely Hegel’s point! (He makes it via indirect discourse, slipping into and out of individual perspective.) 53. Miller omits a paragraph number, and I correct the sequence from here on (as does Pinkard). Later his ¶540 (sc., ¶539) elides two paragraphs in the original, and with ¶541 the numbering gets back on track. 54. What may be called the Croce-Collingwood theory of art-as-expression (not representation) was inspired by Romantic theories of art (I return to the topic of Art in the singular below, Chap. 9). 55. This recalls Schleiermacher’s formulation of the principle of sociality: we should all beware of imposing our own understanding on the other (Wayne Booth’s “overstanding”). Each individual implements and repeats the paradox of Romantic self-expression: the meaning is found in the work, while the work means just what was (originally) to be expressed. See “History,” Essay I, Emerson 1983, 244: “The true poem is the poet’s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder”—and vice-versa! Also Humboldt’s “all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding” (cited, Chap. 2). 56. “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’” He adds: “‘The question is, … which is to be master—that’s all’.” Carroll 1962, 75.

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57. My emphasis: “dieser Seite greift über jene über” (¶407/302). 58. Harris is at his insightful best in noting here the crucial mediating function of ‘übergreifen’ in ¶407/302. See Harris 1997, 96, 98, and 138. (Characteristically his own illustration comes from Alice’s interchange with Tweedledee/Tweedledum—about what’s “real”!—Carroll 1962, 50–52.) ‘Übergreifen’ is pivotal for the shift to the “Inverted World”— law includes its own application—and for dialectical inversion altogether. 59. Judith Shklar identifies the moment of idealism with Fichte, with the agent’s self-subordination to the cause, or rather, its own claim to do so (Shklar 1976, 125–7). Claiming to be guarantor of one’s own honesty has nothing to do with ‘l’honnête homme’ (contra Pinkard 1994, 120–21), a figure that is other-regarding from the outset. Beginning in the previous century, such “presentation of self ” always involved social “distinction” in the eyes of others: Pascal’s “esprit de finesse” rather than “esprit de géométrie” (Donougho 2016). 60. See Leitinen 2004, 72 f. The socially mediated aspect of what I take on myself to do bears not just on what is done but also on its justification. 61. Josiah Royce’s rendering of ‘Betrug,’ adopted by Harris 1997, 104. 62. Smith 2002, e.g., 182–3, 252, 267. For Smith it is a matter of sentiment—settled and habituated judgment—as well as imagination. See also Nuzzo 2010, arguing that Smith’s mutual sympathy comes close to Hegelian Sittlichkeit: its standpoint is in conversation with the community. 63. Harris is helpful once more (Harris 1997, 108). His paraphrase (at 107) even suggests a positive interpretation of how individual reason might operate. He imagines a deadlocked committee where someone with no part in the rivalries besetting others can step back and offer procedural advice on how to resolve things. One can always play the “impartial spectator,” and perhaps more of us should, so raising the tenor of debate. Yet the model remains one of theatrical representation, even when we play on both sides of the footlights. The Kantian judge promises to inhabit another realm altogether: not that of spectatorship but one of pure thought—he (rather, it) isn’t even in the same room. It’s all role-playing, even ‘hypocrisy,’ Hegel will charge under ‘Morality’ (in Chapter VI). Without adducing the Phenomenology, Laden 2011 develops “a social picture” of reasoning, in which the ‘Hegelian’ approach is seen as advancing beyond “individual” attachments to consider “plural subjects” (235ff.).

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64. In German: “hat die formale Sache selbst ihre Erfüllung an der tuenden, sich in sich unterscheidenden Individualität” (¶418/311). The Kantian person is nobody in particular—a great achievement of abstraction. Yet from Smith to Kant is also a step backwards, out of society. 65. Harris’s insight again (Harris 1997, 108), though Hegel does not expressly use either ‘Schluss’ or ‘Mitte’ but speaks rather of the logic of “inversion.” 66. The same goes for Leibnizian perspectivism, inasmuch as it fails to acknowledge intersubjectivity; see Chap. 2.

Bibliography Hegel, G.W.F. 1969, Werke, eds. Moldenhauer & Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969) Hegel, G.W.F. 1970b Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. Michael Petry, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970) Hegel, G.W.F. 1977a, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) Hegel, G.W.F. 1977b, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris & Walter Cerf (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977) Hegel, G.W.F. 1977c, Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen), trans. Walter Cerf & H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977) Hegel, G.W.F. 1979 System of Ethical Life (1802/3), trans. T.M.  Knox & H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979) Hegel, G.W.F., 1991a, The Encyclopædia Logic [1830], trans. Geraets, Suchting, & Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991) Hegel, G.W.F. 1991b, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B.  Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Hegel, G.W.F. 2018a, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Hegel, G.W.F. 2018b, Gesammelte Werke 28.2, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst II (Nachschrift zum Kolleg des Jahres 1826), hg. Niklas Hebing & Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Meiner, 2018) Brandom, Robert 2019, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019) Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson) 1962, Through the Looking-glass, and what Alice found there (London: Folio Society, 1962)

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Donougho, Martin 1982, “The Semiotics of Hegel,” Clio 11/4 (1982), 214-25 Donougho, Martin 2016, “Shaftesbury as Virtuoso: Or, the Birth of Aesthetics Out of a Spirit of Civility,” in Fictional Characters, Real Problems: essays on the ethical content of literature, ed. Garry Hagberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 325-39 Donougho, Martin 2020, “Seeing faces in Wilhelm Meister: Goethe and Physiognomics,” in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Philosophy, eds. Sarah Eldridge & Allen Speight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 134-63. Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1983 Essays. First Series (1841/47), Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983) Ferrerin, Alfredo 2019, “Hegel on Recognition. Self-consciousness, Individuality, Intersubjectivity” in Thinking and the I: Hegel and the Critique of Kant (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 23-52 Förster, Eckart 2012, The Twenty Five Years of Philosophy: a systematic construction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012) Harris, Henry S. 1997, Hegel’s Ladder, I: The Pilgrimage of Reason (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997) Kant, Immanuel 2002, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Kaufmann, Walter 1966, Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts and Commentary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966) Laden, Anthony Simon 2011, Reasoning. A Social Picture. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Leitinen, Arto 2004, “Hegel on intersubjective and retrospective determination of intention,” Hegel Bulletin, 25/1-2 (2004), 54-72 Mancuso, Stefano 2015, (with Alessandra Viola) Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, trans. Joan Benham (Washington: Island Press, 2015) Markell, Patchen 2003, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) Michelet, Karl 1937/38, Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie in Deutschland (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1837/38) Moyar, Dean 2011 Hegel’s Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Nuzzo, Angelica 2010, “The standpoint of morality in Adam Smith and Hegel,” in Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker (eds.) The Philosophy of Adam Smith (London: Routledge, 2010), 37-57

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Pahl, Katrin 2012, Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012) Pinkard, Terry 1994 Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Pinkard, Terry 2000, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Pippin, Robert 1993, “You Can’t Get There from Here,” in Frederick Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 52-85 Quante, Michael 2008, “‘Reason… apprehended irrationally’: Hegel’s Critique of Observing Reason,” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, eds. Dean Moyar & Michael Quante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 91-111 Shapiro, Gary 1998, “Notes on the Animal Kingdom of the Spirit,” in Jon Stewart (ed.), The Phenomenology of Spirit Reader: Critical and Interpretive Essays (Albany: SUNY Press,1998), 225-39; originally in Clio 8.3 (1979), 323-38 Shklar, Judith N. 1976, Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) Siep, Ludwig 2014a, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie. Untersuchungem zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophie des Geistes (Freiburg/Munich: Alber 1979; revised Hamburg: Meiner, 2014) Siep, Ludwig 2014b, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2000; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Smith, Adam 2002, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); 1st edition 1759 Smith, John H. 1988, The Spirit and its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) Yeomans, Christopher 2015a, The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel’s Pluralistic Philosophy of Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Yeomans, Christopher 2015b, “Power as control and the therapeutic effects of Hegel’s logic,” Hegel Bulletin 36: 1 (2015), 33-52

5 ‘Individuality’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit (II)

The mere individual is a delusion of theory. (F.H. Bradley)1 larvatus prodeo. (René Descartes)2

Compared with Chapter V, the remainder of Hegel’s Phenomenology gives less central billing to ‘individuality.’ Yet its intermittent appearances on the quasi-historical stage of Chapter VI (Spirit, Geist) are significant. It plays a key role in Hegel’s interpretation of classical tragedy, for example (though the word ‘tragedy’ never appears). Much ink has been spilled on this topic, and I shall take a selective line, attending to secondary literature only when it bears directly on ‘individuality.’ After an initial focus on tragedy and ethical being (‘Sittlichkeit’), I glance at the middle-realm of ‘Culture’ (Bildung) and recognition (Anerkanntsein), before leapfrogging to modern conscience (Gewissen)—moral or religious—and its tragic fate. Finally, I take up Hegel’s intricate approach to ‘Kunstreligion’ (Artreligion) in Chapter VII: tragedy not in ethical thematics (cf. Chapter VIa) but in artistic genre and form—which commentary has tended to overlook. ‘Individuality’ here assumes its full dramaturgical shape as mask (persona) and role, on the social and cultic stages of western history. To anticipate, tragic reconciliation shows itself just as deceptive as the Greek © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Donougho, Hegel’s ‘Individuality’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4_5

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deities represented onstage: any semblance of reconciliation is seen through, as tragedy untunes the sky. “Hegel is the philosopher of the tragic,” Simon Critchley suggests, “its internal movement, contradictions, and collisions, indeed what we may call the collisional character of tragedy.”3 Ultimately, ‘individuality’ will reflect the deceptive role that representation (Vorstellung) plays in tragedy’s dialectical presentation (Darstellung)—its veritable theatre of the self. Throughout these passages ‘individuality’ shows itself in the middle of the action, often literally so as it mediates opposing terms, sometimes virtually by its marked absence from the textual operation of ‘singularity.’ My interest is less in exposition or explication of Hegel’s argument than in discerning the precise usage of these categories. We observe what amounts to the culmination of Hegel’s appeal to ‘individuality’ in his description, analysis and criticism of Greek ‘Kunstreligion.’ That bears in turn on my final chapters, devoted to Hegel’s conception of art (Art, in the singular) and artwork. With Spirit, we have on display what was merely anticipated in the formulae: “I that is We, and We that is I [Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist]” (¶177); “they as myself, myself as they [Sie als Mich, Mich als Sie]” (¶351). The challenge becomes how the qualifiers “that is” or “as” might be rendered actual, for each community member and for the whole institution.4 It requires more than recognition of one individual by another, and more than a tacitly intersubjective context invoked by the individual’s normative claim, when each recognizes itself in or as the community, tradition, or set of laws and customs in which it is embedded. Escaping any battle for recognition (Lord and Bondsman), the process finds the individual implicitly beyond the limits of its own death. ‘Reason’ had viewed the individual in the perspective of a rational community, yet normative validity remained for it what it finds or takes as authoritative, rather than now (with ‘Spirit’) the actual of what was and will be so, in past and future—a supra-individual tradition. Conversely, “individuals do not understand themselves individualistically, in the modern sense” (Pinkard).5 Their situation is closer to what the British Hegelian F.H. Bradley labelled “My station and its duties.”6 Hegel sets the scene as the Greek polis, prototype of a free people (Volk), their laws “transparent” to self-consciousness (¶436): “they are,

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and nothing more.” He cites Sophocles’ Antigone on “the unwritten and unerring [untrüglich] law of the gods” (ibid./322): Not now nor yesterday but evermore It lives, though none can tell whence it emerged (Antigone, ll. 456–7).

The laws “are, and nothing more.” Immediate and unquestioning certainty as to legal authority forms the basis of ancient Geek Sittlichkeit, an ethic of custom. I claim (i) that when such an ethic is put into practice, individuality operates as a middle term between singular agent and universal community, and (ii) that it does so both logically and as a pseudo-­ logic of theatrical representation: the agent represents itself as singular yet at the same time as stand-in for universal law (the deity, an ethical power). Although a tragedic format is barely discernible in the text itself, the result is indeed tragic, a downfall both individual (the hero) and universal or political (Hellas). Moreover, this reversal shows up the tacit dependence of Sittlichkeit on a masculine norm, a warrior ethic. It is the irony of woman, of Antigone, for us if not for her, not even for performers or spectators. Not least, what emerges after the fall of classical individuality is a proto-modern individualism, focused on ‘this singular self,’ the ‘person’ behind the persona. This singleton constitutes what Hegel dubs the first “self ”—the “legal person”—later placed alongside two others forged during the long march of western history: the self of social “cultivation” (Bildung), culminating in the revolutionary “citoyen”; and the self of moral conscience (Gewissen)—Fichte, “die schöne Seele” of Romanticism (¶633/465–6). * * * (a) VIa: Ancient Greek Sittlichkeit (universal vs singular): Hegel’s brief overview of VI (Spirit) includes the claim that “Spirit is the ethical life of a nation [Volk] so far as it is the immediate truth; the individual that is a world” (¶440/326). His first subsection (VIaa) depicts and analyzes the Greek polis, especially with respect to its normative status. In the deeper focus of the chapter as a whole it marks the emergence—better, formation (Bilden)—of “this self ” as individual person distinct from (though in

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association with) other such persons, and thus the downfall of ethical life.7 Hegel is well aware of the irony by which an individual is defined by the metaphor of persona or mask; I am the mask I wear, on the stage of the world. Such irony is retrospective however. At the outset we need to take care not to superimpose later determinations, nor to conflate separate moments of ‘in itself,’ ‘for us,’ and ‘for itself.’ Viewpoint or voice demands close attention. The practical implications of an utterance or an action—within the depicted shape of spirit—might not be evident to the speaker or agent as they are ‘for us,’ and even in rearview they might not become evident to participants.8 How then to describe the initial situation.? It is above all paradoxical. It supposes a clash of universal norms—one of which is itself ‘universality,’ the other ‘singularity’ (Einzelheit)—norms to be acted upon.9 Yet both universals must be instantiated, by spokesmen for community and individual respectively. How then are universality and singularity, the law and its execution, to be mediated: by universal law, or by singular enactment? We see the paradox worked out dialectically in the text. Hegel understands ‘law’ in terms of social roles assigned to ethical agents who represent—i.e., perform—these roles more or less well. The various antitheses do not map directly onto individual agents, let alone the literary characters Creon or Antigone (Chagfoot 2002). We observe a looseness or play between given role and actual performance. It is not the case that conceptual or teleological closure conceals an underlying “entanglement” (Verwicklung), as Karin de Boer argues.10 Hegel’s description captures rather an ideological representation of how nature and culture are staged as symmetrically unified, not an explication of the disorderly descent of the polis from a previous “archaic” stage.11 Unity is a representation, and eventually seen through. Once exposed, the political community will be shown to have abandoned symmetry and symbiosis, and to suppress the family norm through warfare especially (de Boer discerningly notes Hegel’s use of “aufzehren”—“consume,” as in “consume energy”—to express government’s exploitation of familial power). * * *

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–“A natural perspective, that is and is not”12: Hegel offers a complex account of things: (1) A particular take on the shift from an epic or Homeric world (‘Weltzustand’ or ‘world-condition,’ per the Aesthetics) to classical democracy and Roman imperium. (2) An image or representation of how the polis acknowledges traditional, aristocratic, or familial authority. (3) Exposure of that illusion, in and through tragedy: The Eumenides, Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannos. The first point is well caught by Bonnie Honig when she describes a larger divide between two paradigms of political culture: aristocratic Homeric/heroic individuality (and the elite community it postulates) and classical democratic community (and the forms of individuality [sic] it permits).

For Honig, Antigone further documents and exemplifies “a shift from a heroic ethics and politics of individuality to a democratic ethics and politics of interchangeability and substitution.”13 With Hegel too, ‘individuality’ invokes “irreplaceability,” as we’ll see. Following Hegel’s exposition ‘for us’ (VIaa) comes the dialectic of experience (‘Erfahren’: VIab), undergone by consciousness. This dialectic exhibits a chiasmic inversion of terms typical of all such binary hierarchies, from Sense Certainty on.14 Agents find through experience that the categories under which they perform their deeds are (always already) inverted: the singularity (Einzelheit) associated with male authority overlaps the universality (Allgemeinheit) ascribed to the family cult, while tacit universality must also be enacted, made determinate in the public realm. Each norm implicitly overgrasps its opposite, as in the dialectic of the “Inverted World”: more than sheer inversion (Verkehrung), it also includes its opposite moment. Inclusion can be sham, when differences are papered over in representation, which is how the symbiosis pictured in VIAa looks, via the “shades” of male heroes. Or it can be actual, when the vaunted harmony of opposed norms proves false, in fundamental self-contradiction.

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If that is a fair description, we realize how necessary it is to keep the various contexts properly sorted. Though we today might pass judgment on Hegel, it should be recalled that the Greek ‘Ideal’ is not Hegel’s ideal, however much he admired it.15 * * * –Anachronism, for and against: A chief source of anachronistic readings of Hegel is the contamination of his discussion of Sittlichkeit by modern suggestions of individualism. Hegel’s language is carefully chosen. ‘Individualität’ should not be conflated with ‘Einzelheit,’ both translated as ‘individuality,’ especially because ‘Individualität’ performs a crucial mediating role (if also, as we’ll see, a sham-mediation), in VIaa-b. Even when authors focus directly on the Phenomenology’s account of the emergence of ‘individuality’ as a problematic category, Hegel’s exact wording is ignored.16 The same goes for Hegel’s deployment of words like ‘nature’ or ‘natural’: it shifts artfully between his own voice and the impersonated voice of members of the polis. Hegel describes the traditional roles assigned men and women, the one active and self-aware, the other passive and “unconscious” nature. The ‘natural’ ethical community is said to be the family, rooted in blood-relation (¶¶449/451, etc.); a relation of ‘singularity’ rather than ‘individuality,’ and subject to ‘singular’ desire rather than ‘individual’ spirit. For his part, Hegel might seem to side with spirit against alien ‘nature,’ or the merely ‘natural’ familial community. In fact, he is describing a cultural dichotomy, one that draws a normative distinction between nature and spirit rather than reflecting given natural features (birth, gender, etc.), which devolve ultimately on chance. Hegel does not himself draw the distinction nature-culture, which we can trace to the seventeenth-century scientific revolution.17 He does attribute it to the classical Ideal, although the picture he offers is more complex: the Greeks interpreted nature, he says, thereby partly escaping natural determinacy.18 Yet at the same time (says Hegel) they saw themselves in symbiosis with nature, framing their norms as “natural law.” Hegel renders his final verdict at ¶475/354:

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immediacy bears the contradictory meaning of being the unconscious quiet [Ruhe] of nature and the self-conscious restless rest [unruhige Ruhe] of spirit. —On account of this naturalness, this ethical people is all told an individuality determined by nature, and so a restricted [beschränkte] individuality finding its sublation in another individuality …

—namely, imperial Rome. In non-political terms, otherness becomes the ‘self ’ (more precisely, spirit hypostatized as singularity): legal or Christian ‘person.’ * * * –Exposition (“for us”): I turn first to Hegel’s exposition, VIaa (¶447/329–30), of the popular community as actual, conscious of itself as “human law.” That in turn takes a universal form as “settled” (bekannt) law or “prevailing” (vorhanden) custom, and singular form as “actual selfcertainty” found in individuals. (¶446 ascribes to individuals a “Gegenschein” or “counter-glow” from the solar spirit—like specks of zodiacal dust catching the sun’s rays.19) Self-certainty as “simple individuality” is associated with government, whose “truth” comprises public and open validity, immediately accepted and situated in “free-standing existence.” (Hegel’s Jena system had similarly referred to a ruler-king, featuring an indivisible sovereignty, “unleashed” as an existent [Dasein].20) Over against government stands the family which, besides seeking power and wealth, has the political task of rearing the (male) child. In training this “singleton” to be virtuous it smooths out natural singularities, then launches him into the polity, most importantly as warrior (¶450/330–2: this paragraph and the next feature ‘singular’ more than twenty times).21 His ultimate role within the family is to be a corpse, honored within the cult of the familial gods, where in fact he is no longer “actual” at all but a “non-actual hollow [marrowless: marklos] shade” (ibid./332).22 This constitutes the point of transition from abstract, dead, “impotent, pure singular singularity [sic!] to universal individuality” (¶451/333). Where (i) the first individuality—individuality1 —is government (and male) authority, (ii) the second—individuality2—recalls familial (and female) remembrance; an act of bestowing “being-for-self ” upon the

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individual, through salvaging the body from “empty singularity” at the mercy of (iii) “every lower irrational individuality”—individuality3—in decomposition.23 The individualities that count are masculine government, plus the hero whose (spiritual, hence universal) memory lives in the familial cult of heroes. (iv) Another norm—individuality4—emerges with the parity between brother and sister, which Hegel claims (controversially) is free of natural desire, unbeholden to extraneous factors, hence self-sufficient: “they are free individualities with respect to each other” (¶456/336).24 Later he speaks of gender division as “their determinate individuality in naturally distinct self-consciousnesses” (¶458/338), “their natural self [Selbst] and their activating [betätigenden] individuality” (¶460/339).25 Without diving into controversies about Hegel’s own moral views or his interpretation of Sophocles, I’d just say—contra Hegel—that Antigone’s notorious lines (alluded to at ¶456/338) seem to engage in sophistic comparison as much as firm enunciation of a separate ethical norm, the rationality of the brother-sister bond. Had she lost a husband or a child she could have found or had another, she declares, but with both parents gone, her brother is irreplaceable.26 Hegel’s incidental claim—that brother-sister ‘individuality’ avoids the indeterminacy of self-expression found previously (in ‘the animal realm of spirit’)—remains hard to accept, even accounting for cultural bias on what is ‘natural’ in gender relations.27 Antigone honors Polyneices not just by virtue of her own conventional individuality2 but also for his individuality4, viz., irreplaceability: her brother is separate, ethically equal, even if she herself may not fight for the polis in manly fashion. I repeat my initial observation that we must sever our modern normative attitude from Hegel’s perspective and equally that of the ancient Greeks (always remembering that it is Hegel’s depiction of their typical views). * * * –Political symbiosis: Hegel reviews (without endorsing) the situation. “The whole is a stable equilibrium of all the parts, and each part is a spirit at home in this whole” (¶461/340).28 Justice (Nemesis) maintains the

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balance of human and divine law, government and familial individuality, though we should note the balance is mechanical, not measure or inference. Injury or vengeance invokes nature and ‘singularity,’ not mediating ‘individuality.’ The ultimate paragraph describes individuality as designating the active but “immaculate [unbefleckte]” transition between ethical powers, upwards and downwards. The pole of universal self-conscious spirit is “integrated with its other extreme, … unconscious spirit, by way of the individuality of the man” in government service.29 Conversely, “divine law has its individualization [Individualisierung], or the unconscious spirit of the singleton [Einzelnen] has its existence [Dasein], in woman” (¶462/341), through implementation of funeral rites.30 Woman is the “middle term” of the syllogism of divine law, representing the claim of natural forces, just as man embodies the middle term of human law. In this benign picture, male and female syllogisms intermesh ‘by nature.’ Let me diagram the symbiosis, a double syllogism (the right-hand side should read “so-called natural cycle”): actuality (citizen) human law

divine law

(male)

( female)

(a ‘natural’ cycle)

non-actuality (shade) *

—Dialectic of Experience (tragedy, Antigone): Subsection VIab will now recount the process of enactment or practical testing—in deed, “in der Tat”—of this (purely virtual) union. (We might note that with this tectonic shift Hegel hints that we are now given direct access to ethical action in a manner unlike comedy or other forms of theatre, which all interpose their framing devices.31) Sittlichkeit is put to the test through what Hegel pointedly calls the “singular individuality” of heroic action (¶463/342).32 Acting—the pragmatic testing of virtual universals—is the catalyst here for the action that goes on behind the agents’ backs, action they are brought to acknowledge as theirs. Antigone acts expressly in god’s name; what she does is what she knows.33 Her individuality is undivided. But she also learns the complexity of her deed, coming to

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acknowledge her error—so Hegel notoriously contends.34 But even if she fails expressly to acknowledge the authority of a different law, the fact that she voices slight doubt about her own authority is enough to shake her ethical being, her character and conviction. She identifies her individuality with the universal ethical substance that is her ‘pathos,’ her motivating ‘power.’ Just as ‘individuality’ “brings substance to life and so stands above it …. ethical individuality is immediately and in itself at one with the universal” (¶470/349). It cannot abide challenge by a rival ‘law.’ Lines 927–8 in the play find an echo at ¶471/349. Antigone’s individuality “has here [dabei] the certainty that the individuality whose pathos is this opposite power suffers no more evil than it has inflicted.” Sophocles’ Antigone expresses her conditional wish, not her certainty about what will happen to Creon. As Billings admits, this might matter if Hegel “were making an interpretive argument” rather than showing us “a glimmer of the reflective ethical understanding that is emerging” in the polis (Billings 2014, 174). Reflective distance suffices to shake an immediate fusion of individual and universal. Rival ethical powers, along with their animating individualities, experience the same demise, for the “self ” of each is split, discordant, deceased (verschieden): ¶471/349.35 Both undergo punishment, meet their downfall, although Antigone alone perishes (alongside her betrothed, Haemon, ignored by Hegel). Presumably Creon too counts as an individuality, his disposition and pathos oriented to the city (individuality1) rather than “singular” detail (his tyrannical edict and rigid character). So does Polyneices (per ¶472/350), even if his rash assault on the city and conflict with his brother Eteocles exhibit mere singularity: “individuality, which connects danger for the whole with its being-for-self, has expelled itself from the community, and dissolves inwardly.” The community had honored Eteocles even though he was the younger brother. The restored government of Thebes punishes Polyneices for having proclaimed devastation on the city walls. The universal (¶473/351) “carries off the victory over a rebellious principle of singularity, the family” (my emphasis), taken by Creon as embodied in Antigone’s gesture—secret at first, then blatant— of throwing dirt over her brother’s exposed corpse. Creon’s reaction provokes a clash (Kampf) with divine law, a struggle that implicates

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government’s own unconscious roots. The Furies gain their revenge on the community. At further remove, a contingent plurality of communities wreaks destruction on the singular polis. * * * –‘Individualität’ vs. ‘Einzelheit’: ‘Individuality’ and ‘singularity’ are undeniably at odds in the text, semantically and in their pragmatics, but also in their theatrical form. When Hegel writes “[i]n this representation,” at the outset of a long, involved paragraph (¶474/352), he points to human and divine laws (and their necessity) in the guise of “individual” action, which bestows “the semblance of contingency.” “But individuality and action constitute the principle of singularity as such, a principle that in its pure universality was called inner divine law” (my emphasis).36 By publicly asserting her brother’s right to burial, Antigone reveals Creon’s subverting of universal into singularity; and by picking out her youthful brother understood for his own sake, she uncovers the suppressed “spirit of singularity” which constitutes an “essential moment” for the community itself (¶474/353). The text goes further still: by suppressing singularity, the community in effect brings about what it had proscribed. Despite official denial, the power of young warriors (in their very singularity) is what sustains the community in war.37 Suppressing internal “singularization [Vereinzelung],” while relying on its “outward self-activation, the community finds its weapons in individuality”—that is, in the individual warrior-hero. War “makes the singular systems of property and personal autonomy as well as singular personality [Persönlichkeit] feel the force [Kraft] of the negative”; yet negativity (force, opposition) is what sustains the whole. The community, moreover, “is itself an individuality, and essentially such for itself only so far as other individualities are for it” (¶474/353). Individuality must include those it would exclude, in other words (a dialectic of ‘overgrasping’—or its failure, equivocation). On a still larger stage, their individuality will fall to a “formal universality” of states, the Roman Empire: a community “without spirit … alive only in the singular individual, qua singleton” (¶474/354). “The simple solidity of its individuality is scattered into manifold points” (¶475/354).

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With mention of “this representation” (Vorstellung) Hegel takes a step back from the actual experience of normative collision—the dialectic proper—to draw some conclusions (‘for us’) as to the implications of what has gone on. The paragraph contains the notorious lines about “Womankind—everlasting irony of the polity—,” i.e., converting universal purpose to private use. The irony comes at the expense of the patriarchal order, and contains a hint of dramaturgical form to underscore ‘representation.’38 While it remains unclear who might count as female intriguer against patriarchy, Antigone certainly fills the bill, given her open defiance of Creon and because “she seeks only to keep warfare in its subordinate place,” as Harris puts it.39 But Antigone goes a step much further in recognizing her brother’s own particular self. Irony is the literary figure for self-conscious subjectivity, Christoph Menke remarks, in a provocative study of Hegel’s conception of tragedy.40 Yet this subjectivity belongs to us onlookers rather than Antigone, other dramatic characters, or audience members. Antigone sees herself acting out of piety, which to Creon appears as deliberate defiance, just as she understands his actions as arbitrary rather than performed in the community’s name. The deeds of both parties are ambiguous, therefore, and at a further remove “we” can see why. We can see that the heroine has in effect uncovered the singularity without universality lurking within a pseudo-‘natural’ equilibrium of norms. And it should be remembered that the “individualized” shapes of drama help uncover an emergent individualism tacitly at work—a point to return to later with the section on Kunstreligion. Billings concludes: “Antigone appears as a depiction of the growing individualism in Greek society, a first stage in this process of transition” (Billings 2014, 176). We might even suggest that Antigone (heroine or play) uncovers the “male chauvinism” of the Greek polis.41 Masculine individualism is nevertheless the tacit truth in the dialectic of Sittlichkeit. Tragedy may be understood (from a Hegelian standpoint) as reconstructing ethical legitimacy even while rendering it problematic. This is not Hegel’s final word on classical tragedy however. That will come with Chapter VII, Kunstreligion.42 * * *

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Personal Right and Culture (die Bildung): The next section of VIa, c. Legal Condition (der Rechtszustand), articulates a new political dynamic, which promises to mediate the opposed moments of universality and singularity in a unity of rights and personhood (qua social role or persona), although that picture of things will of course prove inadequate in turn. The universal splits apart into atomic individuals, “an equality where all count the same as one another, as persons [Personen]” (¶476/355).43 With Greek Sittlichkeit, the ‘singleton’ was actual only as blood-kin of the family. “As this singleton he was the departed spirit without self; but now he has emerged from his non-actuality” (ibid.), to act on the social (not political) stage. The ‘I’ of self-consciousness faces a blank destiny (Schicksal) rather than—as with the ancient Greeks—cosmic fate; in secular terms it faces the emperor, a singleton wielding absolute power. Despite flourishing, intermediate forms of self-consciousness—Stoic, Skeptic, Hapless Consciousness—are consigned to this wasteland of estrangement (Entfremdung), the inversion of self-consciousnes: loss of self at both individual and institutional levels (¶482). In the perspective of my topic, ‘individuality’ exhibits here an ancillary role, on the margin of the world (though margins define). * * * (b)–The Distributed Person: Hegel pioneered the idea of a separate ‘Hellenistic’ period. In VIbc, Self-Estranged Spirit: Culture (die Bildung), he explores the ambivalence of its secular condition, where the subject encounters itself in barely recognizable guise. The section would seem to have little use for ‘individuality’ save as utopian contrast to a depleted existence. Yet culture is revealed as a strange (indeed, estranged) mode of self-expression. The individual “utters” itself in letting the self be formed by actuality—the actual world—even as it actively forms (bilden) the world in which it finds itself. I must forgo discussion of court culture (noble and base consciousness, the language of flattery legitimating the Sun King), or Diderot’s dialogue Rameau’s Nephew, a display of self as sheer linguistic performance.44 Most

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interesting here is the focus on the ‘distributed’ or ‘dividual’ self, which is defined by its status, property, or the language it speaks (and that speaks it).45 * * * –‘Subjectivation’ and the Singular Citoyen: After the section on Bildung comes a famous depiction of the French Revolution (‘Absolute Freedom and the Terror’).46 “Universal freedom,” having dissolved the “singular individuality” (sic) of the Estates, encounters problems, first with assigning individuals determinate roles within the whole, then with legislative representation (¶588/435). Singular self-consciousness cannot find a place in the “universal work” of absolute freedom, in the deeds and individual activities of the state’s “will.” For the universal to perform effectively it must “gather itself into the One of individuality and put a singular self-consciousness at the head” (¶589/435). But that would exclude other singletons from the whole. Only negative action remains, “the fury of extinction [Verschwinden]” (ibid./436), and the extremes of dictatorship versus anarchy or faction. The sole individuality is government, identified now with “la volonté générale” (¶591/436–7)—almost in parody of individuality’s fusion of singular and universal, since (as Hegel will say, ¶595/438) pure will is divorced from the agent who wills. The final result of Culture is the citoyen: everyone and no one. It is a kind of Foucauldian “subjectivation” through discipline. Fusion of the self ’s singular and universal moments, whether as cognitive self-consciousness or in practical will, produces the Kantian subject, seen here almost parodically as forged by Terror and mortification. The French had only changed the world, in various ways: the point however was for German philosophers to assemble the pieces and interpret the result. For present purposes, however, the Kantian response is to abstract from individuality altogether; an individual perspective emerges only with aesthetic judgment, as we’ll see. * * * The Moral Weltanschauung and Conscience: Section VIc opens with a review, ‘for us,’ of the path travelled (¶595), one to compare with that

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offered from the later standpoint of Conscience (¶633). Beginning with the Roman world, western history offers an almost Foucauldian prospect of “subjectivation” or external discipline of conscious agents so as to fashion distinct formations of “self.” The ethical world ended in a “departed spirit, the singular self [das einzelne Selbst]” (¶596/441). That self became, in turn, “[t]his legal person [Person des Rechts],” which counts (gilt) simply as person, existing not just (i) in “being acknowledged [Anerkanntsein]” (¶633/465) but also (ii) in the perspective of another—an estranged— world (¶596/441). Bildung did away with abstract self—the first self—to “cultivate” or discipline what ultimately became the absolute freedom of a revolutionary citoyen—the second self—in which “singularity and universality fall asunder” (¶633/465); a being purely abstract and immaterial, finding its identity in an empty “general will.” Cognitively or conatively, the Kantian subject fuses singular and universal self. And its immediacy explains why there is no Kantian ‘Individualität’: singular agent vanishes into the universal realm of ends—quite literally, it’s the end for me. I experience the glory of accounting myself a moral ‘person’: I am everybody, so nobody! As an empirical ego I feel temptation, yet I can also will myself to follow universal duty, the same for all. Only with the self-positing Fichtean ‘I’ is there a glimpse of the third self—Conscience—which takes the Kantian revolution to its logical end. Even so, perfect freedom and self-consciousness come at a cost: the moral person’s dealings with the objective world—nature—display complete indifference to it. As Hegel unfolds this contradiction, ‘individuality’ is understood, oddly, as autonomous nature, not as conscious duty or purpose. The object has thus become a complete world unto itself with an individuality of its own, a self-subsistent whole of laws peculiar to itself, as well as an independent operation [Gang] of those laws and a free actualization of them…” (¶599/443).

And when Hegel declares that “duty fulfilled is [supposed] to be as much purely moral action as it is realized individuality, and nature, the aspect of singularity in contrast to abstract purpose, is [supposed] to be at one with this [purpose]” (¶602/444), their actual union becomes sheer luck,

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supposition, or faith. I must be able to think moral purposes or convictions realizable in the world. Nothing justifies that belief. After its brief appearance on the moral scene, ‘individuality’ recedes from view in sections a) and b)—the latter contains Hegel’s devastating critique of Kantian “dissemblance” (Verstellung)—returning only in c) Conscience proper (¶¶641–65), a shadow of its former self. * * * —Conscience: Turning to VIcc: Conscience (¶¶632 f.), again I focus on paragraphs bearing on ‘individuality,’ especially those on “freedom of conviction” (¶642  f.). Introducing Conscience, ‘for us,’ Hegel emphasizes that even “in its contingency it is to itself completely valid [vollgültige], and knows its immediate singularity to be pure knowing and doing” (¶642/465). As the “third self,” Conscience does away with the last remnant of Kantian dualism of duty versus actuality, universal versus singular being, pure will versus contingent inclination, ought and is: it acts in total conviction. Immediate self-certainty is the essence of its action, the content of which derives from its own immediate singularity, the form from personal conviction (¶637). Duty is no longer a separate yet-to-be-­ actualized universal: “It is now the law that exists for the sake of the self, not the self for sake of the law” (¶639/469), echoing the New Testament.47 At this point everything turns on how the singular self—beyond having simply declared its own views eo ipso justified—renders itself answerable to others. If the moment of conviction is essential to Conscience, equally so is the moment of “being acknowledged [Anerkanntsein]” (¶640/470): what is done from conviction necessarily “obtains and exists” for others. The pivotal ¶641 casts a backward glance at “the utterance of individuality” in ‘das geistige Tierreich,’ when ‘honest consciousness’ busies itself with ‘die Sache selbst.’48 In ‘Reason’ this was just a predicate, but with Conscience it becomes subject: expression of individuality turns upon its self-certainty.49 Conscience now confers on its concerns a determinate, public content (¶641/471). Conscience links its reasons for acting with determinate features of the world. Its claim to be right is more than subjective declaration, but one

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advanced in context. Conscience is the power of injecting fullness or substance into ‘the thing-that-matters,’ “because it knows the moments of consciousness as moments, holding sway over them as their negative essence” (ibid.). To put it in reverse, following my conscience makes me answerable to others, because as “negative essence” I hold sway over all salient moments (Moyar 2011, 99). Hegel is here exploring the ambiguities in the word itself inasmuch as it suggests shared insight: ‘con-scire’— literally, knowing-with-others.50 Something like the dialectic of the expressive “work” returns to haunt the utterances of Conscience. They may well be sincerely meant, yet others will tend to interpret them otherwise, even accusing the utterer of humbug (Betrug) for absolving itself of a “blemish of determinacy” (¶645/474). Conscience would never stoop to such reckoning, comparison, or cost-benefit analysis; its deed is its bond, and it presumes others will extend a trusting hand. (When “the beautiful soul” in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister tells her father she’d do anything rather than abandon her convictions, he remains silent for a moment, then declares his wholehearted assent.51 How could he not!) As becomes clear with Hegel’s summary in ¶646, Conscience “acts and preserves itself in the unity of…pure thought and individuality.” What counts is its knowledge of the particular circumstances in which it acts, filling the content of duty “from its natural individuality” (¶646/476): that’s who it is. When Hegel writes—“[i]n the strength of its own self-assurance it possesses the majesty of absolute autarky, to bind and to loose”—he reveals the elemental turn from Fichtean ‘Gewissen’ to Jacobi’s “moral genius.”52 In one sense all conscientious action can do is proclaim its parity with other selves, their shared universal selfhood (¶647). In another sense, the indeterminacy of acting from conviction allows a divergence between acting Conscience and others’ recognition that it seeks to follow its duty, with no bridge between the two. As before with individuality’s expression as ‘work,’ both sides are free to interpret as they will, even to “dissemble” and “displace” their positions, as far as supposing Conscience evil (¶649).53 And yet it is not just the (in)determinacy of duty that is at issue with conscientious action:

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“knowledge and conviction that it is duty” must both be made plain to others. Its “being known as the self-expression of an individuality” simply ought to be recognizable (¶650/478). How to ensure this? * * * –Speech (die Sprache): As before, language comes to the rescue, for language “is self-consciousness existing for others,” not just for itself: “pure ‘I = I’ becomes objective to itself,…” (¶652/479). Consciousness “declares its conviction,” and the very declaration constitutes validity (Gelten) of action (¶653/479), because it is “the self that is actual in language” (¶654/481). We should understand language in a ‘performative’ sense, akin to Humboldt’s approach to the self ’s direct address to others (I-Thou).54 The actions of Conscience are now to be understood as speech acts. Hegel takes them as characteristic of ‘the beautiful soul,’ which—in Hegel’s vivid description—both worships itself as divine and is worshipped in turn by a community of like-minded souls, each contemplating the majesty of its Fichtean ‘I=I.’ Ultimately ‘the beautiful soul’ subsists only as a pure “vanishing” (¶657/483). Its defining self-certainty reduces to an echo, speech fading away; the pure soul disperses into thin air (¶658/483–4).55 ‘Individualität’ returns in ¶659, where Hegel supposes the content of duty to derive from “this determinate self… as a natural individuality” (¶659/485), and in ¶665/488–9, where Hegel famously repeats the adage, “no man is a hero to his valet”—not because individuality fails to actualize in the deed but because the valet shrinks universality into ‘singularity,’ more accurately, to the “aspect of singularity in individuality” (489).56 The idiom of ‘Einzelheit’ too recedes from view. It features solely in ¶660, where it opens up the dialectic of acting as opposed to judging consciousness, via a disparity between its particular ‘singularity’ and that of another. For the former, self-certainty is the essence, universal duty counting as a sublated moment. For the latter, universal duty is essential, ‘singularity’ sublated. In the subsequent dialectic of evil and forgiveness, individuality is nevertheless implicit, I’d argue; always at stake in Conscience is self-expression (of equal weight with its being recognized— deserving recognition, anyway).

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I had originally included a discussion of expressive individuality (with regard to Hegel on evil and forgiveness), drawing upon J.M. Bernstein’s imaginative reconstruction.57 Although failing consistently to sort ‘individuality’ and ‘singularity’—indeed, showing little awareness of their divergence—Bernstein clearly grasps that expressivity is the main issue for both acting and judging consciousness. Reluctantly I had to admit that his reconstruction could not be taken as a direct reading of that famous text. Hegel shows remarkable insight into the ‘logic’ of forgiveness, not least in his realization that the action of forgiving is not conclusive but rather an open process (indeed, of ‘overgrasping’).58 ‘Individuality’ bears crucially upon the process, in my view. But since Hegel says nothing about it, I won’t either. * * * (c) Chapter VII: Religion. Looking back on the Greek religion of the underworld, Hegel comments that it had balanced the negativity of universal fate (Schicksal) against the negativity of singular figures (the Eumenides). The “departed [abgeschiedene] spirit” is the “singular self [einzelne Selbst]” qua “this singular shade” (¶674/495–6). But neither there nor in the notion of a self without fate did this cult of the underworld attain the determinate self-awareness characteristic of religion proper, Hegel maintains. Religion comprises spirit’s self-consciousness (¶677), yet it is not yet cognizant of its true makeup. —Representation (objects represented/shapes representing). To set the scene: much of the section is a preliminary reflection on the status of ‘representation’ (Vorstellung)—medium of the entire Phenomenology— here understood (i) as image or shape, and (ii) as a speech act, one that ‘stands for’ the truth.59 For us (¶678/498) each shape of religious or cultic practice is a representation, which both thematizes ‘the divine’ and (in Durkheimian fashion) reflects its social existence. It both presents (darstellt) the divine/self-consciousness (god knowing itself in its community), and falls short of such transparency, as a mere shape or garment (Kleid) for divine self-knowing. The split between expressive essence and symptomatic existence is exemplified in its very medium, Vorstellung (Feuerbach and other Left Hegelians would exploit this feature). Hegel

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distinguishes religious formations (a) by the objects they represent (in figural imagination), and (b) by the determinate “shapes” universal spirit takes, in time and actuality. As Hegel puts it in ¶679/499, “by virtue of determination, spirit descends from its universality to singularity.” ‘Bestimmung’ acts as the middle term in this process of “singularization” by which religions attain singular, actual existence, via a series of progressively more self-aware formations. * * * —Nature and subjectivity: The different shapes assumed by religious consciousness derive from its divided nature and the relative occlusion of its object. As ‘we’ may see (in the exposition prior to the dialectical procession of cultic shapes, especially at ¶¶677–8/496–8), this entire section comprises the presentation (Darstellung) of serial representations (Vorstellungen). In the first such presentation, the “immediate” religion of nature takes up various figurations given or found in nature. ‘Individuality’ makes an initial, rather humble entrance here, with the pantheistic religion of flowers, “which is merely the selfless representation of self…[exhibiting] the calm [Ruhe] and impotence of intuiting individuality” (¶689/507: my emphasis). The second series of shapes leaps to the opposite pole, the representing subject. It both reflects and mediates artistic (künstliche) subjectivity: “the shape raises itself to the form of the self through a producing [Hervorbringen] in consciousness, whereby the latter beholds [anschaut] in its objects its own deed, or the self ” (¶683/502). Yet the self does not appear as such—or rather, as Hegel puts it, self ‘figures’ on the one hand as the infinite negativity of fate, on the other as the sheer producing activity of the poet (the productive power of utterance, complementing produced statement). This paradox repeats on the level of form what was made visible at the level of content in the previous chapter (VIaa-b) on the ethical order. And what could not be accommodated within (though essential to) ethical action—namely, the singular self—is also the latent truth of religion, in Hegel’s account. As before, ‘Individualität’ is the catalyst for this dual presentation of deficiency, simultaneously covering up and exposing actual/active division.60

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I discern several moments in this presentation: reflection or reflexivity, linguistic utterance, and theatrical performance. They constitute the essence of Hegel’s conception of art and artwork. * * * –Art-Religion. First moment: self-reflection—irony, absolute art, subjectivity. Hegel begins by noting that the artisan (Werkmeister) of ‘nature religion’ has now become a spiritual “laborer” (Arbeiter), capable of producing outer shapes fully independent of an inner self “that utters itself out of itself and as (an) itself,” in Hegel’s words (¶698/512). The artist produces images of the community, images in which members recognize their community as “the individuals’… own essence and work” (¶700/512), that is, as “individualized” rather than mere “singletons” (Einzelnen). Artists are tasked with interpreting their community to itself, allowing it enjoy its own fair image. Another side to the picture emerges in ¶701/513–4, where Hegel refers to the “scission” (Scheiden) religion interjects, in its developed form, between the dynamics of its self-­ consciousness on the one hand, its continuance (Bestehen) on the other. The artist gives citizens a reflective insight into their existence as “a free people.” At the same time, a gap opens up between freedom under customary law and the principle of self-consciousness understood in its own terms (¶701).61 The consummation of Sittlichkeit in free self-consciousness and the fate of the ethical world is … individuality that has taken an inward turn, the absolute levity [Leichtsinn] of ethical spirit which [has] dissolved within itself all the fixed distinctions of its enduring existence and the social spheres of its organic articulation …. (¶701/513)

But once immediate trust is broken, inward self-consciousness takes on a life of its own.

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This is spirit, inwardly sure of itself, which mourns over the loss of its world, and now out of purity of self, engenders its own essence raised above actuality. (¶701/514).

The following paragraph goes yet further, claiming that in such times “absolute art” emerges. Harris wonders whether such art remains ‘art proper’—that is to say, naive ‘art-religion,’ cultic practice of art-—or isn’t rather predicated on a separation of art and religion after the fall of the polis, when the self not only creates a work but also has its own “concept” for its shape (seeming allusion to Christ, understood as absolute artist or artwork). Art mourns not just over the loss of its world, but also over its own end. The ambiguity repeats itself in ¶703/514, where the conceit is carried still further. Hegel speaks of the “pure form” (better, pure forming) into which the artist’s poetic activity has been concentrated: This form is the night in which substance was betrayed and made itself subject. It is out of this night of pure certainty of self that ethical spirit is resurrected as a shape freed from nature and its own immediate existence [Dasein].

The allusion to Christ at Gethsemane—or creative artist as Christ’s avatar—is unmistakable. ¶704/515 speaks of an individual (Christ? the artist?) chosen as the vehicle of spirit’s sorrow. Hegel’s text makes clear that the Passion story is enacted in the formal guise of tragedy, namely, as a struggle between the poet and the community commemorated, between their respective ethical powers or pathé—“by surrendering to which his self-consciousness loses its freedom.” Both suffer. What one might call this ‘meta-tragedy’—a tragedy about tragedic form—now exhibits a final twist. It inverts into ‘comedy’—comedy about tragedy. The inversion constitutes victory for the “pure self of the individual, of negative power.” Here poetic activity, conscious of its inalienable force, wrangles with the shapeless being; becoming its master, it has made the pathos into its own matter and given itself its content, and this unity emerges as a work, universal spirit individualized and set before us (vorgestellt) (¶704/515).

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It is the triumph of the comic subject or agent, but equally of the modern artist, no longer beholden to the muse for inspiration but rather entirely self-creating. Romantic expressivity invades and displaces classical mimesis. I need hardly underline the power of these passages, programmatic for the entire Phenomenology, arguably for the Aesthetics too. We get to see behind the scenes, a glimpse of the inner workings of Hegel’s own work: his presenting of representation. * * * –Abstract, Living, and Spiritual Artwork (language: epic, tragedy, comedy). I pass in rapid review the successive stages of art that Hegel discerns, beginning with VII ba: ‘the abstract artwork,’ which “exists as the immediate, the abstract and singular” (¶705/515). Initially the existent shape (Gestalt) disintegrates into an opposition of singularity (the self ) and universality (its architectural environs), poles that gradually refine their interrelation into properly divine shape, composed of plastic images of the gods (¶707/516). Classical sculpture rids itself of the endless “detail” (Vereinzelung) of nature so as to focus on the “individual centers” of self-­ consciousness, here brought together in “restful individuality [ruhige Individualität]” (¶708/517). Artists themselves retain nothing of their “determinate individuality” but instead pour it into the artwork, their inspired activity producing an impersonal work, a “thing.” Yet now the “higher element” of language comes to the rescue once more, reconciling the two sides (self and shape) as subjective externality—the hymn. For “language is the soul existing as soul” (¶710/518), albeit as “singular” inwardness which yet exhibits infection (Ansteckung) by the universal.62 Plastic image (sculpture) and linguistic utterance (hymn) merge to form the cult (¶714). Here worship of the deities subsumes the singular labor of the artist, “dissolves particularity into universality” (¶719/524). Conversely, the artist/craftsman doesn’t merely estrange itself in the work or honor some alien being. In a proto-Feuerbachian inversion, the people find themselves divinely honored and favored: “the honor of a magnanimous people rich in the arts” (ibid.). In adorning its temples and statues, the Volk venerates itself.

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–Linguistic utterance (second moment). After casting aspersions on the “empty depth” of the Jewish deity, Hegel pivots to praise (VII bb) “the living work of art” found in the Greek cult of beauty, mainly including feasts and sacrifices. As the site (Stätte) of the “pure night of individuality”—versus the “tension-filled individuality of the artist” (¶721/526)— the cult takes shape as Apollonian and Dionysian rites (Hegel stresses that Ceres and Bacchus are not yet the self-conscious individuality of the higher gods, let alone that of the Christian mystery of flesh and blood: ¶724). Hegel turns from what I count as the first moment of art-­ religion—viz., subjectivity, self-reflexivity, irony—to a second moment, equally important, that of language in its performative dimension of speech or utterance. Addressing the transition from a ‘living’ art of cult and lyric (¶726/528–9), Hegel highlights the role of speech, which now achieves a remarkable degree of transparency between inner self and outer determinacy; a content that is lucid, and a form that directly reveals the artist at work. Spoken ‘individuality’ displays an advance beyond the ‘singularity’ of the oracle, the singular god of hymn or of Bacchic frenzy, or even the “corporeal singularity” (¶726/529) of the warrior fighting for his particular nation: it becomes the “spiritual work of art” (VII bc: ¶727 f./529 f.). Chapter VI saw performative language featured several times: as Antigone’s claim to legitimacy (the language of the Law) or lamenting her fate; as the language of flattery at court, or of young Rameau’s performative self; with the ‘beautiful soul,’ words’ fading echo, or with the word of reconciling forgiveness, etc.63 But the theme of language as the self ’s transparent speech act emerges explicitly only in this section on the ‘spiritual artwork.’ Hegel focuses on epic, tragedy and comedy. Epic is said thematically to create a single pantheon of spiritual beings or gods “whose element and habitation is language” (¶727/529). The language is about national strife (Trojan war), or individual heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, or the gods—individualities all. In such a world political existence comprises not one state but many; a loose “assembly of individualities,” all deriving from ethical individuality (¶727/530). The rhapsode in his singularity sings of universal deities, syllogistically via the “middle term” of particularity (Besonderheit)—that is, a particular nation and its heroes—, singular like the rhapsode yet universal like the gods (¶729/531). He begins in

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medias res, as does his own individuality. Hegel describes him as vanishing in his thematic matter, effacing himself before his tale, or—in reverse shot—not owning up to his latent presence in the narrative. The heroic world of action created and borne along by his own activity Hegel calls a “synthetic binding” (¶729) or “intermingling” (Vermischung: ¶730) of singular and universal. Universal powers take the form of individuality, that is, of acting in and as “free” human action; yet the gods pull the strings. “Hence one and the same thing is done as much by gods as by humans” (¶730/532). The gods appear universal even in their determinate character: “eternal, beautiful individuals [Individuen] who, serene [ruhend] in their own existence, are removed from transience and alien powers”—while yet remaining “particular” (besondere) deities (¶731/532–3). They can display a “comic self-forgetfulness” regarding their divine character, rooted as they are in the “self-sufficiency” of their “whole individuality,” as they soften their distinctiveness in blended polysemy (Vieldeutigkeit). At the same time their universal power stands opposed to the “singular self of mortals,” which cannot resist what is at bottom the “universal self” of fate. That “concept-less void of necessity”— Greek Ananke—“hovers over this entire world of representation” (¶731/533). It is worth quoting at length from ¶732, to foreground how the twin singularities of Fate and rhapsode stand apart from both represented action and the individuality of our epic hero, Achilles (who remains unnamed): The content of the world of representation plays [out] its movement, set free on its own account, in the middle of things [in der Mitte]64; it assembles round the individuality of a hero [Achilles] …. For singularity, fixed-within-­ itself and actual, is expelled to the extremity …. One singular, the abstract non-actual, is necessity [Fate], which does not share in the life of the middle any more than does the other, the actual singular or rhapsode, who stands aloof from it, absorbed in his performance. Both extremes must draw nearer the content … (533–4).

The first singleton (Fate) does so by acquiring some content, the rhapsode’s language by participating directly (that is, in mimesis rather than

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diegesis, narration). Fate is staged for an audience, while the artist himself puts in an appearance onstage. –Tragedy: the “higher language”: By comparison with the rhapsode’s indifferent and anonymous singularity, ranged against the abstract singularity of necessity, the “higher language” of tragedy (¶733/534) allows the dramatist to appear in propria persona, onstage, one of the “players” (as Sophocles was reputed to have done), just as fateful necessity will form part of heroic action reenacted for the community. Individuality takes the stage, in other words. Conversely, says Hegel, the characters in the drama … are artists, who do not express with unconscious naturalness and naivety the external aspects of their resolves and enterprises [as in ordinary life], but give utterance to the inner essence, establish the rightness of their action, and the pathos that moves them is soberly asserted and determinately expressed in its universal individuality [sic],…. The existence [Dasein] of these characters, finally, is [as] actual humans, who assume the personae [Personen] of heroes and present [darstellen] them, not in narrative mode, but in their own [direct] speech. Just as it is essential for the statue to be the work of human hands, so is the player essential to his mask—not as an external condition from which artistically we must abstract (534-5).

That is to say, the poet/player is directly the mask through which they speak. Plural ‘they’ is warranted here by a triple (con)fusion of (1) creating subject, (2) player onstage, and (3) the social, ethical or religious parts played in reality, on the stage of the world. We might even discern another level (4) in the characters and roles constituting the “action” of the play, in turn representing (what is taken to be) ‘reality.’ This is language as dramatic performance, we might say, and of a high and revealing order. The chorus, holdover from the epic world, expresses what Hegel calls the “universal ground” (Boden), the collective wisdom of the people, powerless and quiescent compared with the “individuality of the regime” it confronts (¶734; 535). Its hymns praise various independent gods in a scattershot way, adverting to every separate (einzelne) moment of their existence. It generates an “empty wish for reassurance and feeble talk about appeasement,” terror-stricken and helpless before the necessity of fate, in whose “work” it comprehends neither the “necessary action of

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character” nor “the immanent activity [Tun] of absolute essence” (536).65 Our conventionally minded chorus simply fails to grasp the syllogistic logic in tragic action. The audience presumably has an inkling of their failure. Yet the Hegelian dialectic pushes relentlessly forward, to unmask all remnants of immediacy in poetic mediation. Reconciliation turns out to be semblance, at the level of plot (tragic action) or in theatrical presentation (its staging). I summarize Hegel’s account, highlighting the role played by ‘individuality’:The cast of characters includes the chorus, spectators of the drama (¶734). The main antagonists are heroes, “self-conscious individualities,” whose individuation of universal powers devolves into stage-players, performing before spectators and their choral stand-ins (¶735). Multiple deities find a focus in the collision of human/divine, male/female, the gods advancing thus to “genuine individuality” rather than the “superficial individuality” of their previous manifestation (¶736). The world of gods and chorus is in turn delimited by active individualities, in whom the universal norms are divided essentially between two individual shapes, though they share a universal individuality and take “particular shape” only in poetic representation (¶739). Apollonian knowing collides with Eumenidean unknowing, the two held together in the figure of Zeus. Yet the Furies serve to bring out the underside, “the singularity and contingency of knowing,” which devolves in fact (in der Tat) upon forgetfulness. “Reconciliation of opposition with itself is the Lethe” of forgetting.66 Ethical powers or individualities resolve into the serene (ruhig) unity of Fate (¶740). Fate empties out the Greek heaven. It deflates Vorstellung too.

We observe how the poet-cum-player know and do not know what they are doing, seemingly innocent of the ‘self ’ with which they people stage or world. A gap emerges between knowing and ignorance (¶737/537). Hegel mentions modern alongside ancient tragedy—Oedipus, Orestes, Macbeth and Hamlet are the obvious allusions. His point, I think, is that eliding role with subjective knowledge is characteristic of drama throughout history. Hegel describes not so much the declension of tragic form or its survival into modern, post-aesthetic times; more a perennial feature of human attempts at depicting universal ethical-religious norms in sensuous, individual guise—on stage, so to say.

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—“I come forth masked” (third moment: performative artifice): Holding fast to the virtues of ‘individuality’ requires a kind of “forgetfulness,” Hegel says (¶740/539). I consider this the third moment in the dialectic of experience. It is the moment Hegel labels (¶742/541) “hypocrisy” (Hypokrisie), in the original Greek sense of play-acting (‘the beautiful soul’ is hypocritical in the modern sense of self-deception, rather than part-deceiving others). If the ‘Fate’ thematized (though not depicted) in tragic representation “completes the depopulation of Heaven,”67 that is not only because there is for Hegel a deeper, Christian ‘destiny’ or Providence waiting in the wings. It is due equally to the player in comedy (Aristophanic, ‘Old Comedy’) who doffs the mask to appear as his own “self ”—just as we in the audience become “singular selves,” “persons” (¶747/544).68 (For their part, the gods are shown up as lacking a “self,” mere figments of representation sporting “the form of individuality”: ¶744/541–2.) Comedy both embodies and portrays the dissolution of individuality; in a double sense, it comes down to singularity. It reveals the gap between characters’ proclaimed universal purpose and their ordinary existence, just as Socrates’ questioning of the pretensions of theory (the Sophists) shows up theory’s self-serving hypocrisy and delusion. Of the demos, the new social reality, Hegel says: “If the principle of its singularity [Einzelheit], separated from the universal,” assumes actual shape and claims political power, then it reveals its secret hostility to the public order. What emerges is the “contrast” between universal theory and what in practice amounts to “the total emancipation of immediate singularity from universal order, and the scorn it shows for the latter” (¶747/543).69 It is all mere play-acting, whether onstage or in the polity. Descartes’ motto applies across the board: larvatus prodeo.70 But that is also to proclaim with Muriel Rukeyser: “No more masks! No more mythologies!”71 I mention this not to bring the story to an end, as it were, but to underline that there is no ending.72 We cannot ‘dispense’ with figure and metaphor simply by dragging on stage a figure typed as ‘the individual person,’ the comic player/artist. The real issue concerns the pragmatics or performativity which ‘Kunstreligion’ brings to the surface—namely, the self whose expression never reveals the self “as such” (its final “shape” of

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individuality in chapter VIII will be purely logical). That the issue is not resolved is evident from those later parts of the text that retrospectively reflect on the whole process of Vorstellen (¶¶ 765–85/556–72), its manner of presenting the godhead or absolute, how this presenting bears on the notion of ‘evil’ (its negativity strictly unrepresentable), and—not least—how ‘evil’ affects poetic subjectivity (already condemned in the person of ‘the beautiful soul’). –‘Manifest Religion.’ The task is complicated further by the next section, on Christianity (‘Manifest Religion’). It considers how the modern world’s reception of Greek culture once the gods have “flown” (Hegel deploys the vivid metaphor of a maiden plucking fruit from the tree and handing it down to modernity as its classical heritage). Chapter VII concludes with the verbal representation “God is dead”: the death of religion qua metaphor, picture-thinking.73 To broach the topic of Hegel and figuration would however be another chapter, indeed, a book. In presenting figural representation as it appears via successive ‘images’ (Bilder) of spirit or culture, Hegel ultimately wants to expose the action (or pragmatics) of thought as it were ‘behind’ the curtain of sense; yet the result is a tightening spiral of figures presenting figural consciousness. So considered, the death of the gods enacted in tragedy presages the words of the Lutheran hymn, “God is dead.”74 In other words, the tragi-comedy of tragedy is more than a Greek affair: it has to do with the ultimate impossibility of representing truth proper. I’ll return to the issue in Chap. 8, in connection with Hegel’s remarks about ‘didactic poetry,’ for which meaning is all, sensuous shape extraneous. (Joseph Koerner takes these remarks as illustrating the dilemma of the Lutheran image for a painter like Cranach: the “end of art” is nigh.75). ‘Individuality’ makes just a couple of appearances within ‘Manifest Religion,’ after all the religion of the (uniquely) singular Christ. Indeed, ‘singularity’ pervades this section.76 I remark solely on its importance for the dialectic of good and evil (inclusion vs. self-sundering, ‘Insichsein’). Here, “singular being-for-self ” is represented as the principle of evil, and yet—being implicitly its other moment too—it must “raise itself to spirit, or exhibit [darzustellen] the same movement on its face [an ihr]” (¶781/569).77 It parallels the dialectic of confession and forgiveness in

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‘Morality.’ That same inclusiveness returns in purely conceptual terms in Chapter VIII (Absolute Knowing), first as the Concept’s self-sundering— in action—and return to itself—in recognition and dissolution of all hard-and-fastness (¶793/578); then more directly as the “particular shape” of the ‘beautiful soul’ which knows itself solely as “pure inwardness” (Insichsein) (¶795/580)78; and finally at the very edge of representational imaging, as the ‘intro-reflection’ that is evil (Böse), as opposed to generous letting-go in continuity with the universal (sc., the good). The first (Evil) gives us a disparity between “the being-within-itself-in-its-singularity” (In-sich-in-seiner-Einzelheit-Seins) and universality. The second (Good) reveals disparity between its abstract universality and the self (¶798/581–2). The first comes forward to confess, the second to renounce its inflexible self, when the universal movement of thought is achieved by thought’s surrendering—dis-owning—its own fixity. We are on the verge of pure knowing, when individual consciousness will have dissolved its determinate form, an ultimate ‘inversion of the inversion’: thought thinking itself. * * * –‘Absolute Knowing’: A closing aside on the sole instance of ‘individuality’ in Chapter VIII (‘Absolute Knowing’): ¶803 offers a brutally concise history of philosophy—formulated as thought, in its continual self-­ excavation drilling down to the foundations—from medieval times to the present. Spinoza is framed as a throwback to oriental substance or “self-­ less substantiality,” from which Leibniz recoils in horror to affirm ‘individuality’ as indispensable (¶803/586). Enlightenment thinking “externalized” ‘individuality’ in and as Bildung (culture), conferring determinate existence (Dasein) upon it and infusing it throughout culture generally, whereupon it is grasped first as ‘utility,’ then as French-­ Revolutionary ‘will.’ That in turn receives philosophical articulation, first as Fichte’s I=I, then in Schelling’s ‘identity philosophy.’79 Hegel understands pure knowing as having fused with existence: no further distinctions may be drawn, no external demarcation for self-consciousness to observe or withdraw from, nor even provisional distinctions via the syllogistic movement of thought.

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Notes 1. “My Station and its Duties,” Essay V in Bradley 1927, 174. 2. “I come forth masked”: Descartes 1911 (vol. 1), 2. 3. Critchley 2013, 83, and Critchley 2015—“The Tragedy of Misrecognition”—, 256 (on Hamlet and Hamlet). Critchley remains a minority voice. The received view ascribes to Hegel’s theory of tragedy— in content as in form—a model of reconciliation (Versöhnung) rather than collision, or at best reconciliation through conflict. 4. The first formulation occurs in the introduction to IV: Self-Consciousness, launching the concept of ‘Spirit.’ The second appears in V: Reason, where Hegel refers proleptically to a free people whose language and laws are “the work of each and all,” having concluded that the topic should not be directly treated until constitutive determinations of Reason—implicit in ‘Sittlichkeit’—are first articulated in their own terms. Hence the characteristically Hegelian paradox: we can fully comprehend ethical individuality only thanks to a concept of ‘singularity’—the historical fallout from its wreckage. It helps frame the classical Ideal. Anachronism is a distinctive feature of Hegel’s classical Ideal. 5. Pinkard 1994, 138. “The Greek individual understood himself in terms of his social role; his individuality is filled out by his social role, not by any idiosyncratic and contingent features of himself.” Pinkard footnotes (at 387) Hegel’s Philosophy of History: “We can assert of the Greeks in the first and true formation of their freedom that they had no conscience… to them the end was the living fatherland: this Athens, this Sparta, this temple, these altars, this mode of living together, this circle of citizens, these mores [Sitte] and customs” (Hegel 1969, 12: 309). Sophists first injected an element of subjective reflection, Hegel adds. 6. Bradley 1927, 186–7. Bradley echoes Hegel—“Them as myself, myself as them”—footnoting Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle”: “Two distincts, division none:/Number there in love was slain./ … Either was the other’s mine.” 7. “But in fact ethical substance has … become actual self-consciousness or this self [dieses Selbst] has come to be in-and-for-itself; but precisely thereby has Sittlichkeit perished” (¶444/328). Individuality falls victim to an emergent individualism. I draw upon Donougho 2006. 8. Speight 2001, Chap. 2 especially, casts the tragic process as “retrospective” in mode: agents come to realize only after the fact just what they did or meant. It recalls the circular intentionality that characterized the ‘Animal Realm of Spirit.’

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9. ¶445/328 sets up the “essential antithesis of singularity and universality,” though it is labelled superficial, mere “perception”—that is, when taken in the deeper perspective of spirit rather than consciousness. ‘Individuality’ itself doesn’t enter until ¶447, in the guise of “government” or “self-­certainty as simple individuality,” publicly proclaimed as (human) law. 10. De Boer 2010, 18–20. “The Phenomenology no less [than Natural Law] considers Greek culture to rely on an archaic and a rational determination of ethical life” (18). For government’s “consumption” of family energy (¶474), see 23. 11. “Archaic” is a word Hegel never uses. Moreover, he doesn’t trace causal descent but discerns reconstructions in thought, or better, in representation. Several Hellenists do theorize a primitive or mythological period before the period when tragedians were active: Vernant for one, but also Meier, Honig, and Pomeroy. See Strauss 2013, “Introduction” and passim. 12. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, V.i, l. 217. 13. Honig 2013, 103. She focuses on the emerging discordance between Antigone’s unquestioned duty to bury her kin, and her—for some people—scandalous calculation of “replaceability” of assorted family ­ members (see Honig, 125–7). 14. Chiasmus is a favoured mode in Adorno, Derrida, and de Man, all of whom link it with Hegelian dialectic. Little has been written on Hegel’s strategic use of chiasmus. For some suggestive insights on it, however, see Budick 2000, Chaps. 3 and 5. 15. See Donougho 2014a. Cf. Schneider 1998, 337: “Hegel war kein Klassizist, wie er häufig mißverstanden wurde.” Patchen Markell alerts us to Hegel’s complex rhetoric, noting (Markell 2003, 98) that interpreters freely quote passages as simply reflecting Hegel’s own views. Yet he assumes that (like Creon) Hegel himself takes gender traits as “natural,” so shifting from a “critical” or “diagnostic” voice to a “reconciliatory” voice, that of the “system” (110). 16. Jonathan Strauss identifies “two orders of individuality” in Hegel—one archaic-mythical, the other modern and political—, proceeding to complain about inconsistency in Hegel’s use of ‘individual,’ “the meaning of which shifts somewhat confusingly over the course of his argument” (Strauss 2013, 31). He notices the oddness of “particular [sc., einzelne] individuality” in ¶463. Yet he only confuses matters in defining the

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“essential antithesis” as individuality (sc., ‘Einzelheit’: ¶¶445–6/328–9) versus universality, or when he has Hegel call the family “the rebellious principle of pure individuality” (‘Einzelheit’: ¶474/351). 17. Cf. Anderson 2018 (e.g., 49, 59, 89), disputing the typically modern application to the Greek polis of a dualism of nature versus culture. Along with anthropologist Philippe Descola (2013) and historian of science Bruno Latour, Anderson thinks the accepted view distorts how cultures describe themselves. 18. In his Philosophy History Hegel writes: “Everywhere the Greeks wished for an explication [Auslegung] and interpretation [Deutung] of the natural” (Hegel 1969, 12: 290/Hegel 2011a, 216). Poetry was taken to derive from divination (manteia). 19. See Pinkard’s note (Hegel 2018a, 257). The term identifies a phenomenon caused by solar dust reflecting the sun’s rays (light pollution has now rendered it unobservable). It was first named by Alexander von Humboldt, who reports it in the journal of his South American journey, 1803: Humboldt 1997, 138. Thomas Posch (private communication) suggests an equivalence with ‘Widerschein’—reflection—, more frequent in Hegel’s lexicon. There are very few other instances. Introducing ­‘architecture’ (under ‘Division’ of the Aesthetics) Hegel remarks that the Greek temple shelters the community and elevates the deity to spirit’s ‘Gegenschein’ (13, 118/86). Or again, in the wonderful passage distinguishing the twin worlds of ‘romantic’ art, he speaks of the external world absorbing and remirroring a ‘Gegenschein’ of the inwardness [Insichsein] of soul (14, 141/527). Finally, Philosophy of Religion (1829), 9th lecture (17, 410/91), in the movement beyond subjective piety, beyond mere ‘Schein.’ 20. Harris 1997, 172, contextualizes ancient Greek kingship, which as he points out was pre-political. In a Hegelian touch, he writes that its memory remained nevertheless politically salient. 21. Just as in the Jena lectures, individuality lies beyond the family’s ken. The citizen doesn’t belong to the family, even in his role as one destined “to cease counting as this singleton [dieser Einzelne], but [is rather] this singleton belonging to the family, as a universal being [Wesen] released from sensuous, i.e., singular actuality” (ibid.). Family activity deals no longer with the living but with the dead, with singularity, indifferent to its individuality. The only good hero is a dead hero, framed for universal remembrance.

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22. Georg Bertram understands ‘marklos’ to signify ‘without markings or properties.’ Recognition is “unconditional,” as with divine law (Bertram 2019s, 173). 23. Interment protects the dead hero (at least in spirit) from maggots and animal scavengers, themselves living ‘individualities.’ Burial confers cultural or spiritual meaning on what would otherwise be a sheerly natural process of decay or consumption. In Hegel’s words, it “weds the kin [of the dead] to the womb of the earth, to elemental and imperishable individuality” (ibid.)—Earth being original individuality in the Jena system (still another sense: individuality5). 24. They form their own subsystem, as it were. The notoriety attaches both to Hegel’s attitude to his own sister and (more importantly) to his ‘interpretation’ of Antigone’s speech, which for many (Goethe included) had to be a corruption in the text, since it struck them as “unnatural” for her to put brother above husband, even hypothetically. Much has been written about the controversy. 25. Cf. ¶458/338: “The brother is the aspect in terms of which the [familial] spirit becomes individuality, which turns towards others and passes over into consciousness of universality.” Also ¶458/338: “two universal essences of the ethical world have their determinate individuality ­therefore in naturally distinct self-consciousness,” i.e., they give an ethical interpretation of gender distinction, avoiding the indeterminacy of ‘individuality’ in the ‘geistige Tierreich’—so Hegel contends a few lines further. 26. Antigone invokes “this law alone,” at line 913. Hegel (or Sophocles/Antigone) ignores the husband’s replaceability. The parentchild relation is primary; husband-wife, qua representation or image, “has its actuality not in itself but in the child” (¶455/336). 27. ¶458/338. “It is now the determinate opposition of the two sexes whose naturalness at the same time takes on the significance of their ethical destiny [sittlichen Bestimmung].” 28. Markell rightly questions whether this (and the description of an “immaculate world”) represents Hegel’s own position (Markell 2003, 99–100). He dubs it a “stylized reconstruction” (98). Crucial is the transition between identities (or positions) and the action (or doing, Tun: Markell, 100). 29. Pinkard notes that ‘zusammengeschlossen’ (integrated) suggests syllogistic con-clusion, not mechanical balancing.

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30. Harris comments (Harris 1997 206, n. 73): “We cannot hope to understand the argument of paragraph 463 [i.e., 462] if we do not distinguish the ‘individuality’ of the man, who works for the community in supporting his family, from his ‘singularity’ as a mortal living organism. But Miller has translated die Individualität des Mannes and der bewusstlose Geist des Einzelnen as if ‘individual’ were present in both cases.” 31. The closest Hegel comes is his comment (¶464/342–3) that a strict sense of ethical duty rules out the “sorry spectacle” (das schlechte Schauspiel) of a collision between passion and duty, or the comedy (das Komische) of a mere collision of duties. It is as though we too must enter directly the serious action, without formal framing. Antigone is named just once (in ¶469), though the play is quoted directly (¶¶469, 471); I remark below on a more direct hint at theatrical “representation” (Vorstellung: ¶474) once ethical individuality seems in disarray, all credibility gone. 32. Cf. ¶467/347: “Self-consciousness within the Volk descends only to particularity, not as far as singular individuality, which in its activity posits an exclusive self, an actuality negative in itself.” But the implications of the individual’s deed now encourage it to press further, to reflect and own up. 33. ¶466/345—if the ethical “were merely absolute essence without power (Macht) it could experience inversion by individuality”; but this ­individuality forgoes such inverting. “On account of this unity, individuality is the pure form of substance which is the content, and the act is the transition from thought to actuality…”: any suggestion of movement is illusory. 34. Ethical action thus corresponds to the Romantic ‘work’ found above: individuality does what it is. ¶469/348. —Commentators complain that Sophocles’ Antigone is more circumspect in her language: “Should the gods think that this is righteousness, in suffering I’ll see my error clear. But if it is others who are wrong, I wish them no greater punishment than mine” (ll. 925–8). Joshua Billings observes (Billings 2014, 173–4) that the optative mood hardly suggests her own state of conviction, but rather the opposite. 35. Harris notices that ‘verschieden’ (various, different) is also a pun on the past participle of ‘verscheiden’ (pass away); Creon and Antigone both end up losing close kin, part of themselves: Harris 1997, 242, note. 36. Cf. ‘singularity’ as treated in Science of Logic: Werke 7, 297/Hegel 2010, 547. There it is termed “the principle of individuality and personality.” It

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is kept apart from universality only by abstraction, which drains the universal of color and content. 37. Compare James Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Redfield 1975), e.g., 232. The warrior exists on the frontier between nature and culture (101); society produces heroes unassimilable to society (104). 38. Adam Müller seems to have pioneered the phrase “tragic irony” in 1806, extending Friedrich Schlegel’s association of the idea with Greek comedy. Connop Thirwall was its first exponent in English (Thirwall 1833). For helpful context, see Dane 1991, 122–6; Menke 2009, 47–50, and Menke 2015, 45–52. 39. Harris 1997, 225–7: besides Antigone, he suggests Helen, Jocasta, Electra, above all the mythic sphinx. But he allows that for Hegel “womankind” in its very singularity could do nothing without political recognition of the “force of youth … as the force of the whole” (¶474/353). 40. Menke 1996, arguing that for Hegel Antigone is not just a player in but also a spectator of tragedy (Menke, 136, and Chap. 4 passim). That conflates the self-consciousness of Chapter VII (‘Kunstreligion’) with the innocent “experience” of Chapter VIAa. 41. Kain 2002, 176, note 34, commenting on Donougho 1989, 86. David MacGregor endorses the conclusion (MacGregor 1992, 105–06), arguing that “Hippel taught Hegel about the nuances of gender, and provided the anthropological theory that underlies Hegel’s theory” (106). “Hegel was radically anti-essentialist; for him, both sexes are determined not by biological makeup, but by mind or reason” (MacGregor, 103). 42. See Donougho 2006 for Hegel’s dual approach, and Billings 2014, 177–8, who considers the retrospective imposition of the Aesthetics model (presumably of reconciliation) methodologically suspect. 43. See Introduction (above) note 13, my review of Breckman (Donougho 2002), briefly surveying the complex origins of the metaphor of ‘person,’ the very figure of ‘figure.’ The basic metaphor is (1) theatrical, the mask (prosopon, persona), extended to staged role, then on the social stage, hence to an individual life. (2) The religious version involves Christian ‘hypostases,’ one substance in three ‘persons, but also equal persons in the sight of God. (3) The legal metaphor is what Hegel expounds here: in Roman law a ‘person’ had no distinction of rank, but eventually a right as ‘person,’ nobody in particular (foreshadowing the Kantian or ethical interpretation of personhood). (4) Politically, personhood characterizes the sovereign (Northrop Frye’s ‘royal’ metaphor); this too proved ambiguous in theory or practice—dangerous too.

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44. Gumbrecht 2020, Chaps. 2–3, deplores Hegel’s “impulse towards sublation” (19), resolving finitude into self-relation, whereas I consider Hegelian ‘dividuality’ open to contingency and ‘second-order observation.’ 45. Schmitz 2005, 67, on “a new sense of individuality.” 46. Robert Wokler praised Hegel’s conceptual narrative of Revolution as “the most accurate reading of its early stages,” notably abolition of distinct social spheres. See Wokler 2012, Chap. 11, 188ff., esp. 198–200. He defends Rousseau against Hegel’s accusation of individualism (“das Einzelne als das Erste”): Wokler 339, note. Still, he credits Hegel with coining the concept of ‘Enlightenment.’ 47. Jacobi: “the law is made for man, not man for the law,” alluding perhaps to Mark 2. Hegel had cited this in Faith and Knowledge (Werke 2, 384/ Hegel 1977c, 143–4), alongside Jacobi’s echoing Kant on “man’s authentic right of majesty” (Majestätsrecht). 48. Moyar argues for the importance of this overlooked paragraph (Moyar 2011, 93ff.). 49. At ¶417/310–11 Hegel admits that “die Sache selbst loses the relation of being a predicate” and becomes individuality, or subject, though not yet fully self-aware. It still plays the parts of “each and all.” 50. In Leviathan, I: 7, Hobbes censured ‘conscience’ for equivocating between (a) classical “shared knowledge,” Greek suneidos—a shared secret or confidence—, (b) “internal witness,” and (c) “internal lawgiver,” moral judgment. I borrow from C.S.  Lewis, “Conscience and Conscious,” in Lewis 2013, 181–213. Hobbes added a fourth stage, very apt here: “men, vehemently in love with their own new opinions,” gave those too “that reverenced name of Conscience …, and so pretend to know they are true, when they know at most, but that they think so” (Hobbes 1991, 48: my emphasis). 51. Goethe 1994, vol. 9, 231. “I gave free reign to my tongue and my tears. I revealed to him … the certainty I now felt … that I would rather leave my country, my parents and my friends and earn my bread elsewhere, than abandon my convictions [Einsichten].” Later (232) she writes to her bethrothed (Narcissus!) about “my reputation, of which my conscience [Gewissen] and my innocence were the strongest safeguards.” 52. The allusion is to Matthew 16, xix, where Jesus gives Peter the keys—i.e., the authority to admit or reject, which Conscience here takes upon itself. Conscience is not limited to moral certainty, but is also religious, touching on other areas that invoke ‘genius’; see Bertram 2019, 239.

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53. “Evil” surfaces in a less conjectural manner later on, when the “hard-­ hearted consciousness” refuses to acknowledge the confession of “acting” consciousness, so laying itself open to being dubbed “evil” for its refusal of continuity with the one confessing its faults. 54. Feldman 2006, Chap. 2. 55. Whether Hegel’s model is Hölderlin, Novalis (‘Hymns’), or Schleiermacher (‘Addresses’) is of little account. Jeffrey Reid plausibly argues that this moment of ‘disappearing’ constitutes the beautiful soul’s first appearance in Hegel’s narrative, its first ending: see Reid 2014, 84–7. Its second appearance comes with the dialectic of confession and forgiveness culminating in the ‘judgment’ (i.e., distinction) passed by the ‘hard heart,’ or rather, in the latter’s internal ruination. The beautiful soul exists solely in transit beyond fixed shape. The third occurs in Absolute Knowing (¶795), reconstructed in philosophical thought. 56. My emphasis: “die Seite der Einzelheit der Individualität….” The category’s ambivalence manifests in singular-cum-universal aspect. Cf. ¶669/492: in forgiveness, “the aspect of singularity” is taken back into spirit, leaving no scars behind. Robert Brandom adopts “aspect of individuality” almost as a mantra (Brandom 2019, 360, 361, 465, 600, 601, 626, 756). “‘Particularity’ would be a better expression of what Hegel is after here,” he writes (601–02), “but he is not as careful in his diction on this point in the Phenomenology as he later will be in the Science of Logic.” Hegel’s diction is more careful than Brandom allows. 57. As found in his essay on “Confession and Forgiveness” (Bernstein 1996). See also Bernstein 1994. 58. Compare Comay 2011, her provocative book on Hegel’s response to Revolution. 59. I draw here upon Donougho 2006, 160 f. 60. Asked by Stalin what might counter the power of Hollywood cinema, Eisenstein is said to have replied, “Hollywood cinema.” It must be ‘seen awry’ (Žižek). 61. The ethical Volk has yet to take on board (an ihm) “the principle of pure singularity of self-consciousness. … the self does not know itself as a free singularity, and which in this inwardness or in the liberation of the self, therefore perishes” (¶701/513–4). Individuality proves vulnerable to the principle of singularity, which requires a different political or social structure for its stabilization, namely, Roman imperial rule.

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62. Other religious language appears in the guise of the oracle, and also Antigone’s expression of the authority of everlasting law (¶¶711–12). 63. Speight argues convincingly that Hegel’s ‘beautiful soul’ alludes to Jacobi’s Woldemar, viewed against an intertextual background. Jacobi’s novel is in tacit conversation with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, its focus the true place of theatre in modern society. The prospect is abyssal: Hegel thematizes literature about literature about action as language …. 64. I follow Harris’s idea that the reference is to Homer’s in medias res: Harris 1997, 620, 645 notes 56 and 57. In contrast to most commentators, Harris remains keenly aware of the operative distance between ‘Individualität’ and ‘Einzelheit’: the rhapsode in time comes to act, his singularity is individuated, while fate is no longer external but (partly) self-made, in the hero’s own hands. 65. The Aesthetics also takes a dim view of the chorus. It instantiates and articulates a basic “world-condition” (Weltzustand), the background against which heroic individuality appears. It plays no role in the drama; not acting is its role. Hegel speaks of its “tranquil reflection” on things, beyond faction or interest, eyeing the eventual return to an original “harmony.” If it voices a sense of justice-as-balance, in no way is it an active reconciliation. Christoph Menke (1996, 86–8) argues—contra Martha Nussbaum—that Hegel’s chorus offers no superior understanding of error, only the reassurance that “all is well,” uttering reverential generalities. The Philosophy of History (Hegel 1969, 12: 285/Hegel 2011b, 212) labels it “passive, deed-less,” in favoring the Volk over “heroic individualities.” 66. ¶740/539–40: the sole instance of the term ‘reconciliation’ in the section on ‘art-religion,’ it implies semblance and forgetting rather than truth. 67. ¶741/540. Hegel speaks here of theatrical representation (or its ethical content) as “the unthinking amalgam of individuality and essence.” 68. To repeat, Hegel’s point is wholly lost if “das einzelne Selbst” and “einzelne Bewusstsein” are rendered as “the individual self” and “individual consciousness” (Miller). The “superficial individuality” of divine personage dissolves into Aristophanes’ “clouds” (¶746). 69. My rendering of this contorted sentence tries to bring out what I take to be its main point: if singularity is made into a principle (Prinzip), it serves to undermine the polis whose enemy it really is, all the more so when

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people try to defend their self-interested actions by appeal to universal law. The meaning becomes only more opaque if ‘Einzelheit’ is rendered as ‘individuality’ (Miller, Billings), even ‘singular individuality’ (Pinkard): Hegel 2018a, 428. ‘Contrast’ is an unusual word for Hegel; it signals perhaps a figurative rather than logical opposition (it is rare elsewhere in his work). 70. The Latin is found in Descartes 1911, vol. 1, 2: #213 of Cogitationes Privatae. The full sentence runs: “Hitherto I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forth masked.” 71. “The Poem as Mask: Orpheus” (1968), Rukeyser 2004, 123. Earlier we read: “it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,/… it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself.” 72. See Donougho 2006, 164, on which I draw for the following. 73. Spirit becomes aware of “the loss of all essentiality within this self-­certainty and the loss even of this knowledge of itself—of substance as of self; it is the pain [Schmerz] which expresses itself in the harsh saying that God has died [gestorben ist]” (¶752/547). 74. For an alternative approach, see Williams 2012, especially Chap. 12, arguing that divine love ultimately ‘overgrasps’ tragedy and death. 75. Koerner 2004, 37. Koerner errs in taking the Aesthetics to privilege meaning over sensuous shape or style (Koerner, 35), and he misconstrues Hegel on indexicals (Introduction to the Phenomenology, not “its famous Preface”—Koerner, 228). Nevertheless, he aptly cites Hegel on the ancient epigram: writing that reflexively grasps at the ‘this’ of its own material support. 76. For example, Christians believe God to be incarnate “as self, as an actual singular man, sensuously beheld; only so is he self-consciousness” (¶758/552)—“the pure singularity of self ” (¶760/553), “this singular self-­consciousness” opposed to universal (¶762/555), not yet dialectically mediated. 77. In German: “…zum Geiste zu erheben oder die Bewegung desselben an ihr darzustellen.” Of the advance to ¶781 Harris writes that even the ‘particular’ (besondere: ¶780/567) aspect of the dead Christ is redeemed (Harris 1997, 690). “In becoming ‘universal’ the Incarnation becomes universally singular; before that happened Christianity was merely a ‘particular’ faith.” Cf. ¶¶784–5/571, where Hegel presents the death or “non-­being of this singular” as transfigured (verklärt) into universal spirit, and “absolute spirit as a singular or rather as a particular,” its ‘particularity’ dying away into its universality. It is the actual death of Vorstellung.

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78. Jeffrey Reid is unique in having noticed this return of the beautiful soul, in philosophical guise at least. Reid 2014, 87–9, portrays Novalis playing the part of ‘the beautiful soul’ in three versions, the third of which stages a conceptual interpretation—'for us’—of his position (or rather, his vaunted renunciation of position-taking). 79. Harris suggests Hölderlin as the referent. Earlier he observed that the “Leibnizian substantial monad… becomes the finite bourgeois self ” (Harris 1997, 735). Hegel would replace Fichte’s abstract ‘equals’ sign in ‘I=I’—reducing substance to subject—with the concrete recollection of history as fulfilled. Time proper enters on the scene.

Bibliography Hegel, G.W.F. 1969, Werke, eds. Moldenhauer & Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969) Hegel, G.W.F. 1977c, Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen), trans. Walter Cerf & H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977) Hegel, G.W.F., 2010, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Hegel, G.W.F., 2011a, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, volume 1, trans. Robert Brown and Peter Hodson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Hegel, G.W.F. 2011b, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. Ruben Alvarado (based on Sibree) (Alten, Netherlands: Wordbridge Publications, 2011) Hegel, G.W.F. 2018a, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Anderson, Greg 2018, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Bernstein, J.M. 1994, “Consciousness and Transgression: the persistence of misrecognition,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 29 (1994), 55-70 Bernstein, J.M. 1996, “Confession and Forgiveness: Hegel’s Poetics of Action,” in Richard Eldridge (ed.), Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 34-65 Bertram, Georg W. 2019, Hegels ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’. Ein systematischer Kommentar (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2019) Billings, Joshua 2014, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)

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Bradley, F.H. 1927, Ethical Studies, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) Brandom, Robert 2019, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019) Budick, Sanford 2000, The Western Theory of Tradition: Terms and Paradigms of the Cultural Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) Chagfoot, Nadine 2002, “Hegel’s Antigone: a response to the feminist critique,” The Owl of Minerva 33:2 (2002), 179-204 Comay, Rebecca 2011, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) Critchley, Simon and Webster 2013, Stay Illusion: The Hamlet Doctrine (New York: Pantheon, 2013) Critchley, Simon 2015, “The Tragedy of Misrecognition,” in Joshua Billings & Miriam Leonard (eds.), Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 251-65 Dane, Joseph A. 1991, The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991) De Boer, Karen 2010, On Hegel: the sway of the negative (London: Macmillan, 2010) Descartes, René 1911, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Haldane & Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911-12) Descola, Philippe 2013, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013; original 2005) Donougho, Martin 1989, “The Woman in White: on the reception of Hegel’s Antigone,” Owl of Minerva 21:1 (1989), 65-89 Donougho, Martin 2002, Review of Breckman 1999, The Owl of Minerva, 33/1 (2002), 124-34 Donougho, Martin 2006, “The Pragmatics of Tragedy in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Idealistic Studies 36:3 (2006), 153-68. Donougho, Martin 2014a, “Hegel on the History of Art,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford UP, 2014), vol. 3, 285-88 Donougho, Martin 2014b, “Winckelmann,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford UP, 2014), vol. 6, 281-85 Feldman, Karen 2006, Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1994, The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 2020, Prose of the World. Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020)

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Harris, Henry S. 1997, Hegel’s Ladder, II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997) Hobbes, Thomas 1991, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Honig, Bonnie 2013, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Humboldt, Alexander 1997, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E.C.  Otté (New York 1858; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) Kain, Philip 2002, “Hegel, Antigone, and Women,” Owl of Minerva, 33:2 (2002), 157-77. Koerner, Joseph Leo 2004, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Lewis, C.S. 2013, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Canto, 2013; original 1960) MacGregor, David 1992, Hegel, Marx, and the English State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992) Markell, Patchen 2003, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) Menke, Christoph 1996, Tragödie im Sittlichen. Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996) Menke, Christoph 2009, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, trans. James Phillips (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009; original 2005) Menke, Christoph 2015, “The Aesthetics of Tragedy: Romantic Perspectives,” in Joshua Billings & Miriam Leonard (eds.), Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 42-58 Moyar, Dean 2011 Hegel’s Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Pinkard, Terry 1994 Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Redfield, James 1975, Nature and Culture in the Iliad. The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) Reid, Jeffrey 2014, The Anti-Romantic: Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) Rukeyser, Muriel 2004, Selected Poems (New York: The Library of America, 2004) Schmitz, Kenneth L. 2005 The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005)

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Schneider, Helmut 1998, “Hegels Theorie der Komik und die Auflösung der schönen Kunst,” in Geist und Geschichte: Studien zur Philosophie Hegels (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1998), 307-39 Speight, Allen 2001, Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Strauss, Jonathan 2013, Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013) Thirwall, Connop 1833, “On the Irony of Sophocles,” Philological Museum 2 (1833), 483-537 Williams, Robert R. 2012, Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Wokler, Robert 2012, “The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity” (1998), in Brian Garten (ed.) Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and their Legacies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 185-213

6 Hegelian ‘Physics’

What in nature roars with life is hushed in the stillness of thought … , which resembles a murky northern fog. (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature)1 Water is one individual thing, it never changes (Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle, 1861).2 Sound, of itself, is the self of individuality … individuality entire …” (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature)3

The major arena for Hegel’s deployment of the term ‘Individualität’ is found in his Philosophy of Nature, part two of the Encyclopædia, primarily in its second division, Physics (that is to say, philosophy of the science of physics). Although there are similarities to isolated sections of the Phenomenology, the category features here in new, more comprehensive, if also less dialectically modulated ways. This chapter attempts to survey the main features of the landscape, as part of my overall aim of demonstrating the textual importance of ‘individuality.’ Given that much of my attention to ‘individuality’ concerns forms of spirit rather than nature, a word should be said on the general differences and links between these, in Hegel’s view. * * * © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Donougho, Hegel’s ‘Individuality’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4_6

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(a) Preliminaries: Hegel’s philosophy of nature still suffers from the poor reputation it gained (hardly earned) in the nineteenth century, although recent interpretations have sought to redress this. It was long supposed that Hegel’s “apriorism” showed nothing but disdain for empirical fact or experiment, for data collection or classification, the favored example being his alleged “deduction” of the proper number of planets in the solar system.4 The truth is rather that his tireless efforts at reconstructing the rational structure of nature tended to track quite closely the theories and evidence generally available. Indeed, the fact that much of Hegelian “Physics” refers to outdated ideas, phenomena, or the scientific consensus on (what counted as) fact serves to show that he did not simply devise his own ideas from whole cloth, via the Schellingian method of “construction” followed in his early Jena system. Sounder to adopt Stephen Houlgate’s suggestion that Hegel aimed “to provide a flexible conceptual framework which organizes in an intelligible way, and is wholly relative to, the scientific knowledge [sic] of a given time, and which changes with future scientific discussions.”5 We must allow nevertheless that precisely how the framework appears “relative” to the various sciences remains moot. What matters is that his procedure aims to avoid any dogmatic sort of distinction between a priori and a posteriori.6 –Human intellect: In §246 of the Philosophy of Nature Hegel writes: “What is called physics was formerly called natural philosophy, and it is also a theoretical, and indeed a thinking consideration [denkende Betrachtung] of nature.”7 He adds that while science and philosophy share the same universal content, science begins from determinations in nature and derives its rational ordering from within nature itself, whereas philosophy treats of the same universal explicitly (für sich), in its own necessity (eignen Notwendigkeit), and with respect to the concept or Idea rather than through external analogy (§246A/Werke 9, 15—an approach that had already lent Naturphilosophie a bad name at the turn of the century): for metaphysics is nothing but the entire range [Umfang] of the universal thought determinations, as it were the diamantine net [das diamantene Netz] into which everything is brought and thereby first made intelligible.8

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Although Hegel’s allusion is to the god Vulcan’s ensnaring of his wife Venus in bed with Mars, Hegel’s point concerns the qualities of the wondrous contrivance deployed: a translucent yet adamantine mesh which science and philosophy alike forge so as to display the universal, thereby rendering mere “Stoff” intelligible. As compared with philosophy, science remains abstract and formal, its categories not yet immanent in the matter they abstract from, and quite without philosophy’s putative integration of core and rind (in Goethe’s words).9 In a passage eliciting Gerd Buchdahl’s praise, Hegel writes: The more thought enters into our representation of things, the less do they retain their naturalness, their singularity and immediacy. The wealth of natural forms, in their infinitely manifold configuration, is depleted by the all-pervasive power of thought; their vernal life dies, their glowing colours fade. What in nature roars with life is hushed in the stillness of thought …, which resembles a murky northern fog.10

Hegel is not against scientific abstraction, despite its northern murk. What he does contest is any move reductively to blur qualitative differences, as Thomas Posch underscores.11 Hegel takes philosophy to seek a middle way, that is, between (i) abstract laws posited as ruling over nature and (ii) a descriptive or experiential fidelity to its copious detail: what is intuited must also be thought, he declares in §246Z, singular features referred to universal structure. Comprehending cognition (begreifendes Erkennen) supplies the mean between mind and object; the universality of the one penetrates the singularity (Einzelheit: not Miller’s ‘individuality’) of the other, and vice-versa, “for genuine singularity is also deep-down [in sich selbst] universality” (ibid./22). Implicitly (Hegel continues) nature is reason, “but it is through spirit that reason as such emerges from nature into existence,” so that spirit exists in relation not to an other but with itself (ibid./23)—flesh of its flesh, he adds with a religioso flourish. A primary characteristic of nature would therefore be its fundamental affinity with the human intellect, made evident through the joint efforts of empirical science and speculative philosophy. –Nature’s “Otherness” and “Impotence”: A second chief feature Hegel discerns in nature might seem the very opposite of rational harmony,

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namely, its ‘otherness’ (Anderssein): “Nature has presented itself as the Idea in the form of otherness” (§247/24). Hegel quotes Schelling’s description of nature as a “petrified [versteinerte] intelligence” (ibid./25). Yet, as Dieter Wandschneider counters, it appears alien and separate solely with respect to intelligence or the Idea. Wandschneider even supposes the non-­ Ideal—nature, in its separateness (Einzelheit), externality, or self-­ externality as juxtaposition—to be “co-implied” by the logical Ideal (Wandschneider 2013, 106-7)! Such dialectical implication ushers in a third characteristic, described by Hegel as the “impotence” (Ohnmacht) of nature, viz., “that it preserves the determinations of the concept only abstractly, leaving the articulation of particulars [Besonderen] to external determinability” (§250/34). In other words, contingency is a necessary part of natural processes. It would be fruitless to try to understand it completely, in its every detail; to deduce Herr Krug’s pen in all its contingent facticity.12 Nature taken in Hegelian perspective is not subject to abstract laws, then, nor is it irrational, even though necessarily contingent in its operations. It is spirit’s ‘other,’ as self-external; beside itself, so to say. The crucial question remains how it may be understood nevertheless as somehow self-determining, or as a preparatory stage for a true conception of freedom (granted that Hegel from early on abjured any sort of Romantic ‘Naturphilosophie’). How are we to address what Terry Pinkard calls “the Kantian paradox”—problematic for human agency but particularly acute when it comes to speculation about nature—namely, that we are both authors of norms and subject to them? How may individuality in nature give itself the law it also obeys?13 Is normativity even conceivable in Hegelian Physics? Norms cannot here derive from a formal representation of law (as with animals), or even from self-distinction in living process (as with plants). In other words, the logic of reflection prevailing in the Physics entails dualism, relation or difference, as much as unity of parts. The circle of self-formation cannot be closed without remainder. As Hegel puts it, an individual physical body will always remain conditioned by its specific properties; should it undergo a process—chemical development, say—by which its properties suffer alteration, it simply ceases to be what it is. By contrast, organic individuals have the ability spontaneously to change while yet remaining themselves, für sich in their

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own distinction: living beings, in short. Even there a skeptic might call it the philosopher’s wishful thinking. In response some have proposed that normativity can be conceived as immanent to the object or system, embedded in its essence or concept; less expressly distinguishing the law than tacitly operating in accordance with its nature, as Aristotle puts it.14 How far this quasi-Aristotelian approach may be extended beyond zoology and botany is moot. The least we may claim is that ‘individuality’ seems perfect for the hybrid role between given character and subjective ownership, between seeming independence and immanent operation within a system. Ambiguity prevails. Individuality is—and is not— subjectivity, selfhood, the universal. What Hegel terms “Physics” differs in both conception and procedure from physics considered as empirical science. Moreover, philosophy regards nature in hierarchical light, as “a sequence of stages, each arising necessarily from the others” (§249/31), a necessity that is due to the Idea or concept rather than any real process of emergence or evolution. (Hegel did not place great store by the idea of evolution, though he allowed that nature has evolved.15) In particular, the framing concept of ‘individuality’— which entails a necessary advance beyond Mechanics—is found not in empirical science but rather in the philosopher’s “thinking regard” (I’ve seen no reference to that category by scientists of the time). Nor, if we heed Hegel’s warning, will its authority derive from external analogy—as if nature behaved like human expression and self-formation (Bildung). Hegel seems to have first invoked the concept as a major sorting device in the 1827 Encyclopædia. In the 1817 edition it crops up as ancillary frame for the sub-section called “Individual Physics.”16 Only later is it used to articulate Physics overall, namely, into Universal, Particular, and “Free” Individuality.17 In the 1830 edition of the Physics (§§272-336) the word ‘Individualität’ (or cognate) occurs more than three hundred times. * * * (b) ‘Mechanism’ in the Logic: Before going into the details of the 1830 version of the Encyclopædia I should briefly raise another issue, regarding the way Hegel’s Logic might bear on the philosophy of nature. Under ‘Objectivity’ the Logic features sections on Mechanics, Chemism, and

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Teleology—but not Physics, seemingly a good fit between the first two. In a fragment from 1808 (published in 1963) Hegel seems first to have identified ‘Mechanics’ as a distinct logical category—that is, employed in organizing thought generally—in application both to nature and to spirit (for example, as a mechanical mode of politics or memory).18 Hegel there distinguishes free mechanics, chemical process, organics, and cognition; a division that resurfaces somewhat altered in volume 2 of the Science of Logic (1816) as well as the Encyclopædia Logic (1817/1830).19 Section 2 of the Logic deals with ‘Objectivity,’ subdivided into chapters on Mechanism, Chemism and Teleology. The peculiarity of Mechanism is said to reside in a strictly external linkage between parts or between parts and whole, “even when a reflective semblance [Schein] of unity is associated with it.”20 Mechanism may also characterize human existence, whether theoretical (as in mechanical representation and memory) or practical (fixed habits, mechanical functioning in politics); although spontaneity of will and consciousness is always involved, “the freedom of individuality is still lacking,” Hegel writes.21 Yet individuality will come gradually to infiltrate mechanical objectivity, in Hegel’s exposition, first as “real mechanical process” (bb) in which “communication” (imparting: Mitteilung) of the stronger, more self-subsistent (body or structure) with a weaker, less self-subsistent takes place, if only because the second already reveals a capacity to be affected. Solely with potential resistance can there be real “communication,” that is, a shared “sphere” of determination.22 Without such resistance the weaker will simply succumb to the other, or just be defined with respect to the other. The object’s relative lack of self-subsistence is manifested in the fact that its singularity lacks the capacity for what is communicated to it and is therefore shattered by it, for it is unable to constitute itself as subject in this universal, cannot make the latter its predicate.—Violence [Gewalt] against an object is for the latter alien only according to this second aspect (639/420).

“Power, as objective universality and as violence against the object is what is called fate,” Hegel continues. Fate is “blind” inasmuch as objective universality is unrecognized.

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Only self-consciousness has fate, in the strict sense, because it is free, and therefore in the singularity of its ‘I’ it absolutely exists in and for itself and can oppose itself to its objective universality and alienate itself from it. By this separation however it excites against itself the mechanical relation of a fate.23

The reference here is to culture rather than nature; the separation or ‘Besonderung’ over against the universal appears as “a deed” (eine Tat). The individual deed, consciously and deliberately performed, elicits a mechanical reaction. The following bears directly on Greek tragedy (or rather, on the shift in perspective from an epic to a tragic “situation”): A people without deeds is without blame; it is enveloped in objective, ethical universality, is dissolved into it, without the individuality that moves the unmoved, that gives itself a determinacy on the outside and an abstract universality separated from the objective universality; yet in this individuality the subject is divested of its essence, becomes an object and enters into the relation of externality towards its nature, into that of mechanism.24

Fate is the unacknowledged surrogate for the subject’s own individuality; the mechanism that ensnares it is its own doing, albeit unwitting.25 (Everyday individuality, we might suggest, would instead absorb the communication and operate ‘normally’ within its accepted orbit or system, without opposition and resultant penalty. To anticipate, it seems moot here whether individuality veers towards unruly or compliant behavior—part of its essential ambiguity.) The further step—besides generalizing the dialectic beyond practical application in the model of tragedy—would be to cast the result as “an objective singular, so that in it that reflective semblance of singularity, which is only a self-subsistence opposing itself to the substantial universality, is sublated (ibid.).” Internalizing the above dynamic yields a structure marked by intro-­ reflection and semblance, an individual self-subsistence which holds sway over satellites that only seem separate from it: in short, the center around which other objects revolve, along with the lawful governing of such a mechanical system (either natural or cultural—in politics, say). Again, to anticipate, we might wonder whether “so-called individuality” is to be

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found in independent being, or merely in the semblance of independence. It could be either, although the latter option allows for dialectical fluidity: the individual is what it is and also the whole—individuality “overgrasps” its opposite moment. Before considering the next section—(c) Absolute Mechanism—I should point out that in effect Hegel imports here a logical idiom that (after 1827) would come to characterize philosophy of nature (Physics) overall, namely, as the rational individuality of the solar system. What renders particular/singular bodies true singulars (indeed, individuals) is their participation in a system in which differences both are, and yet are not but merely seem to exist: individuals are implicitly the universal totality while nevertheless seeming to retain their own distinct selves and independence. Hegel divides his exposition into two: with regard first to the center, then to law. (a) The central body is designated an “individual universality”; less an object than an “objective totality,” a “being-for-self,” which can be regarded as “an individual” exhibiting “an immanent form, a self-­ determining principle.”26 Whereas mechanical singulars are determined or defined by external force or “striving,” individuals define themselves syllogistically, according to Hegel, namely, with respect to their extremes. Thus, the initial determination assumes objects existing outside the original (“abstract”) center, objects that in turn act as sub-centers for their own satellites or moons. The whole system is mediated by the “absolute middle-term,” which actively “communicates” between the original center or (because externally defined) “objective singularity” and the other bodies, which are merely dependent and particular. The abstract singularity (an infinite manifold) is also a particular body; yet both operate universally also (as in a gravitational field).27 The second syllogism (U-S-P) operates through the “middle-term” of the relative individual centers (planets), which are subsumed under the universal term (the sun) and in their turn subsume the “non-self-subsistent” objects (their moons), whose “formal singularization” they in turn support. Those singular objects—in a third, “formal” syllogism, namely, P-U-S—mediate between absolute and relative “central individuality.” Hegel’s prime example is gravity, which operates in the same manner for planets and moons (comets too). He further adduces the political system, where the syllogistic

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operation comprises government, individual citizens, and socio-economic life (or system of particular needs—no provision seems made for comets, perhaps as criminals or eccentrics).28 This syllogistic logic of dependence is considerably modified in the Philosophy of Nature. There gravity features under ‘Mechanics’ (including laws of celestial motion) whereby dependent or “particular” bodies (comets, moons) revolve around “individual” bodies (sun and planet, respectively). In contrast, the subsequent ‘Physics of universal individuality’ considers celestial bodies in their mutual opposition or limitation (as darkness versus light, correlated with rigidity/opacity versus instability/translucence—i.e., planet versus comet). The syllogisms are now arranged differently, while earth is said to display a certain “violence” (Gewalt) in subduing sidereal forces to its own physical elements and processes, effecting a fundamental split between celestial mechanics and sublunary (tellurian) physics, contra Newton. There remains a veiled sidereal influence, merely “gemeint” or supposed (as Hegel puts it in the long addition to §270/81), affecting sleep or wine, for instance. But the solar system operates strictly in accordance with the syllogism, if with four terms (a doubling of particulars thanks to the logic of reflection, of appearance and essence). I cite a fascinating essay by Jeffrey Reid: Syllogistically, the actual existence of the solar system qua system depends on the real differentiation of content that particularity introduces into the relative indifference between the universal and the singular.29

Without particulars, no system: it could gain no real purchase. Particular bodies (moons or comets) exist with respect to earth and sun, the one as rigid (non-expressive) “for itself,” the other as wholly “for another” or “otherness”—though I think Reid mistaken to call the moon “a hard individuality,” when ‘individuality’ applies first and foremost to the earth.30 He is partly justified, inasmuch as individual planets within the solar system appear both passive and active: subject to the sun’s gravity yet also—by overgrasping the dominant central term—behaving as incipient subjectivity. As in the Logic, reciprocal relations between terms express themselves via interlacing syllogisms, which I summarize.31

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Let me briefly return to the logic of absolute or free mechanism, then take up the Physics. After the syllogism of centralized systems, Hegel reformulates the three-fold mediation in terms of (b) “law”—that is, an ideal individuality which nevertheless exists only in application to particular instances, an identity or “negative unity” which “resolves into the specific differences of the concept” while remaining “self-same universality.” Whereas there is no formal rule for the application of a rule, law in and of itself must establish its own (conditions of ) applicability. What Hegel calls “subjective individuality” thus maintains itself even in “external objectivity.” Only free mechanism has a law, the determination proper to pure individuality or to the concept existing for itself. As difference, the law is in itself the inexhaustible source of self-igniting fire and, since in the ideality of its difference it refers only to itself, it is free necessity.32

In short, individuality marks the logic both of free mechanism (center/ satellite) and of law-in-action. (c) Hegelian ‘Physics’: To see how and why ‘individuality’ is utilized, consider the 1830 edition and its preliminary division (§252) sorting contents into • Mechanics—universal, with respect to quantitative movement between points, where unity of form lies outside matter, as something merely sought; • Physics—particular, as qualitative, real determinacy, where form is taken to be immanent to bodies: “This is a relationship of reflection whose Insichsein is natural individuality”; • Organics—subjective determinacy, where real differences of form are returned to ideal unity in the organism (and in self-moving life). To begin with: In the sphere of mechanics, being-for-self is not yet an individual stable (ruhend) unity having the power to subordinate plurality to itself. Heavy matter does not yet possess the individuality, which preserves its determinations … and matter, as mass, has no form. (§252Z)

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What the Logic says about “central individuality” in gravitational systems does not apply therefore to the Physics, which deals with bodies and their interrelations or internal structuring—their constitutive form, in other words. “Bodies are now subject to the power of individuality” (§272Z), Hegel declares.33 No longer causally determined or defined by their external “limit,” or yet by gravitational pull—mere “place,” even when framed within a planetary system—, bodies now find their determining form or shape to be immanent in them, as essence that manifests itself.34 (It is worth emphasizing that Hegelian Physics enunciates a logic of reflection, of self-dissolving dualisms—e.g. essence/appearance—for which essence is nothing but its appearing, and equally its disappearing.) Indeed, Thomas Posch considers this to be a return—not a regression— from Newtonian force to Aristotelian morphé (Posch 2005). The crucial question concerns how individuality may give itself the law it also obeys, in Kant’s formulation (though the model harks back to Aristotle’s distinction between meta ton logon and kata tou logou—‘under’ versus ‘with regard to’ law).35 Is normativity even possible in Hegelian Physics? It cannot here derive from the formal representation of law (as in animal consciousness), or even from self-distinction within living process (cf. plants). In other words, the logic of reflection prevailing in the Physics entails a dualism— relation or difference—as much as unity, of parts. And the circle of self-­ formation can never be closed without remainder. As Hegel puts it, an individual physical body remains “conditioned” by its specific properties; should it undergo a process (chemical or other) by which its properties suffer alteration, the individual ceases to be. By contrast, organic individuals have the ability spontaneously to change while yet remaining themselves, ‘für sich’ within their own distinction—living beings. Hegel will continue to speak of “organic physics” (§337ff.) and “organic individuality.”36 But such individuality is now said to have freedom posited of it, no longer determinable even in part by immanent form (Gestalt). That must suffice for a preliminary attempt at clarification (although it remains unclear just how individuality may rightfully be considered self-­ determining, autonomous, ‘für sich,’ when the self or I has yet expressly to emerge in the system but remains incipient or tacit). A good example— illustration, perhaps—is ‘Light,’ the initial determination of:

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(A) ‘Physics of Universal Individuality’ (§274). Light is described in §275 as pure identity-with-self, inwardness (Insichsein), self-manifestation, as opposed to external existence, matter illuminated as a limit spatially outside it. “This existent, universal self of matter is light—as an individuality [it is] a star … the sun.”37 In itself light is invisible, sheer darkness, without definition. Unlike the I, which it resembles in its self-­ reflexivity, light lacks internal distinction or relation to otherness (§275A/113). Light exists as a mode externally limited by spatial determinations, bare opposition, as e.g., by moons and comets, satellites of the body illuminating them. By contrast, planets constitute bodies of individuality (§280), “self-like” (selbstisch) points of unity which arrange themselves into system (Hegel opposed not so much Kepler’s attempt to “rationalize” the solar system as his imaginative appeal to musical ratios, which would here count as an external determinacy). The solar system is individuality as light; whereas considered as determined by gravitational forces it remains an example of mechanistic causality. What serves to render this ‘Individualität’? Per my provisional list of features in chapter 1: the term connotes something unique, without determination by universal rule or norm but rather self-forming; something active—individuating—, indeed self-defining, if only developmentally, that is, pointing towards an implicit principle of actualization, while yet unbeholden to the mere Sollen of “so-called” individuality (a possible relapse forever lurks). This stage shows an advance in self-determination beyond subjection to causal laws—externally determinative gravity—, and it realizes immanence of form in matter, in the ordering of material bodies. Yet there remain gradations of matter-form integration, and residual externality, which together enable the theorist to discern a sequence, from universal light, through external relation or opposition, to reunification as solar system. Moreover, the system determines its own center or principle—yet not so completely as to attain selfhood or mindedness (Geist): the ‘Insichsein’ of individuality remains “beside itself ” even in self-relation—rather, in its self-relating. It doesn’t attain transparent ‘Fürsichsein.’ There are always unspoken limits to corporeal self-limitation.

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It might help to outline the sequence of Hegel’s steps. He switches from celestial to terrestrial bodies, attending first to the individuating of “aggregate states” (gases, plasma, liquids, solid state physics), then to the ‘particular individuality’ of form (Gestalt).38 Following consideration of individual bodies Hegel takes up the individual “elements” (air, fire, water, earth), which operate at a level other than bodies and should never be confused with them.39 Hegel’s usage need not be taken as merely poetic—although it is that!—let alone as some anachronistic hankering for a pre-scientific past. It is instead motivated by his anti-reductionism, an opposition to making “chemical” elements the key to understanding physical individuals, say. “In recent times chemical simplicity has been arbitrarily accepted as the definition of an element,” Hegel notes; whereas he understands that as “chemical abstraction” rather than “real matter” (§281A/134). In §281Z he describes (traditional) physical elements as “universal natural existences which are no longer self-subsistent and yet are not yet individualized” (ibid./135). They are the elements of individualization. Somewhat ruefully he allows that: No physicist or chemist, in fact no educated person, is any longer permitted to mention the four elements at all …. The chemical standpoint presupposes the individuality of bodies and then seeks to tear apart this individuality, this point of unity which holds differentia in itself, and [then] to liberate the latter from the violence done to them …. The individuality ofabody,however,ismuchmorethanthemereneutralityofthesesides…(ibid.)—

(i.e., acid and base, which together form a salt). Physical elements may always be analyzed into their chemical constituents—air into oxygen and nitrogen, for example—as may organic beings (plants and animal organisms). But the intermediate stage of physical, individual inorganic matter is the most refractory [Hartnäckigste] to deal with, since here, although matter is specified [spezifiziert] by its individuality, that is still at the same time immediate, not alive and not sentient, and so as quality directly identical with the universal.40

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We should be able to speak about physical entities and processes in a rational, non-reductive manner. Hegel proposes that we first consider universals of undifferentiated individuality, then—moving from the logic of being to that of reflection or difference—opposite modes of individuality, and finally the integrated thought of individuality: air, the dyad fire/water, then their unity in earth. Despite the seeming eccentricity of Hegel’s procedure, plus the fact that (as far as I can tell) no scientist or theorist ever considered following his lead, we can perhaps understand its rationale: he drafts a middle way between abstract universal and abstract element or constituent, then compares it with empirical facts or contemporary scientific theory and practice. With a foot in both universal and singular realms, ‘individuality’ is his proposed middle term or mediator. Moreover, the use of the category remains stipulative or pragmatic, akin to Faraday’s well-known assertion (cited approvingly by Wittgenstein) that “Water is one individual thing, it never changes” (The Chemical History of a Candle, 1861).41 I summarize Hegel’s sequence of reconstructions. –Elements: First comes ‘air,’ only in principle individuality, behaving more like a transparent and elastic fluid. “The bond of individuality … is the inner self of the individual body” (§282Z; 137); yet here it is not yet posited, made explicit. It is “active” all the same, for example, in taking up and spreading odors from individual bodies, even dissolving them (into thin air, as one says), or else in cleansing itself (a refreshing breeze). And it offers resistance, even as it allows permeation of other gases into the same space, as well compression (by a piston, say). Fire is like water in being “an element of opposition,” its individuality posited as a moment. It exists only in relation to the matter it consumes and brings into opposition (§283/139). Water by contrast is a neutral element, without “singularity” (§284), without internal determinacy, a solvent of matter.42 Earth appears as an individual element, “developed distinction and its individual determination” (§285/142-3); as “earthness” (Erdigkeit) it holds together various moments in “individual unity,” as Hegel puts it, kindling and sustaining them (with the help of enlivening sunlight). It supports the interaction of all the elements in a vital “process” which Hegel terms a “dialectic” (§286/143)—that is to say, the “meteorological process” (under this rubric Hegel ranges geology along with weather). It is described as

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the “self-fructified” earth, whereby earth is first posited as a self-producing individuality beyond abstractly mechanical gravitational force (§288Z; 155).43 As Hegel sums up: the principle of individuality is pervasive, and is therefore the same at all points of this physicality [Physikalischen]. Instead of one universal individuality we therefore have a multiplication of individualities, which partake also of the whole form. The earth separates out into such [individualities] each of which has the form of the whole within it.44

This leads to the second sphere: ‘real individuality.’ * * * (B) ‘Physics of Particular Individuality’ (§290): i.e., physics of individual form, shape. Hegel reviews a gradual internalizing of otherness, via successive stages of density, cohesion, sound, and heat (Hegel remarks that not just musicians get hot: so do their instruments), culminating with combustion, wholesale dissolution of shape. Individual determination of form is at first only a “search” (Suchen) for individuality (§290), implicit or immediate, not yet posited (§291): a “conditioned individuality” still, merely “for us.” “To be free requires selfness to posit distinction as its own, whereas here it is merely something presupposed” (§291Z/158)— as yet no more than the “coming to be” of shape (das Werden der Gestalt). The whole process begins with (a) ‘specific gravity,’ density (§293Z): the earth considered as more than ideal support of “particular existents [Existenzen]” but rather a “showing-itself-as-determining,” and thereby individuality’s escape from “the grip of universal gravity”—that is, into a tellurian rather than celestial physics. Following density comes (b) ‘cohesion’ (§295), non-gravitational attraction between a body’s material parts (nowadays understood as mutual attraction between like molecules45), as opposed to ‘adhesion’ or attraction to another body (§296). This remains a “conditioned individuality,” inasmuch as it derives from relations within or between material bodies rather than the “free individuality” of shape (Gestalt): §296Z. It comprises such characteristics as brittleness, tenacity, or ductility and malleability; by contrast, elasticity is the capacity to

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remain—to reinstate—itself under external force (§§297–8). From elasticity Hegel turns to (c) sound (Klang: §300), i.e., the “exchange [Wechsel] of mutually sublating determinations, the inner trembling [Erzittern] of the body within itself ” (§299Z/171): elasticity as inner vibration, transmitted outwards (“being-for-other”) as sound.46 On the one hand, different material properties yield different kinds of sound (timbre, tone, etc.); on the other, sounding bodies seem to penetrate the soul as much as the ear: sound affects our innermost feeling. It speaks to the inner soul since it is itself inner and subjective. Sound, of itself, is the self of individuality … individuality entire [die ganze Individualität] …”

—forming a unity of soul and material body (§300Z/173). Material vibration reverberates within us. Thus the ideal triumphs over the violence (Gewalt) of a material shake-up. The “real ideality” (rather than “ideal ideality”) of density and cohesion is however (d) heat (§302), treated for the first time in the 1827 edition, and much the same in 1830. Hegel no longer appears to accept the theory of heat as substantial fluid or ‘caloric,’ which he had earlier favored. While hardly abreast of developments in modern thermodynamics (dated to Carnot’s 1824 treatise, further developed by Joule and Kelvin in mid-century), Hegel conceives of heat as manifesting the internal state of bodies and their constitution (§305)— their ‘thermal capacity’ in short; heat reveals inner form in and as thermal behavior.47 Thomas Posch suggests that this is “in remarkable accordance with” Maxwell’s kinetic theory of gases: “heat is simply a modal condition of matter.”48 “Individuality … is a higher resistance to heat,” we read (§307Z), owing to its internal organization or ‘form’: metals conduct heat more readily than organic matter (plants or animals). As in the late-­ Jena system, Hegel conceives of heat as material individuality culminating in self-dissolution, in ‘selfness’ ultimately rendered ideal and so indifferent to its material existence. “Heat is shape in process of liberating itself from shape” (ibid/197), through combustion, ‘oxidation’ (Hegel does in fact use that term later, in §330: ‘Galvanism,’ electricity). Internal “infinitely self-relating form” enters thereby into existence; as “external individuality itself becomes external (as flame), and so vanishes” (¶ 307/195). We are

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ready for the next sphere, ‘free’ or ‘total’ individuality: the unity of the opposed moments, unified form and being-for-other. * * * (C) ‘Physics of Total Individuality’ (§308): Finally we have the return of individuality to itself from externality; matter becomes informed matter. Discussion divides (§309) into three “configurations” (Gestaltungen): (A) the concept of immediate shape (Gestalt) as such, or the spatial opposition to be found in magnetism (its axis constituted by mutually defining polar points); (B) distinct determinations of properties in bodies—“individual particularization” (Besonderung)—ranging from color, texture, sight, smell and taste, culminating in individuation as electrical current; and (C) the reality (Realität) of chemical process—not so much individual bodies as individual reactions within or between bodies. Here shape engenders (erzeuge) itself, and shape is to be conceived (or appears) as “something produced [ein Erzeugtes]” (ibid./619). This verges on ‘organic physics,’ or self-catalyzing process. With Ca: ‘shape’ (‘Gestalt’: §310), Hegel contends that form manifests itself “by itself” (von selbst) rather than as a characteristic resistance to alien force: self-determining, determined by “immanent and developed” form. Whereas before, internalized being (Insichsein) revealed itself only in reaction to external stimuli, here “the body contains in itself a secret silent geometer which, as all-permeating form, organizes it outwardly and inwardly” (§310Z/200). Such internal and external boundary setting is “necessary to individuality.” Yet “individuality is not yet subjectivity” (as with organic form); “individuality is still submerged in matter—it is not free, it only is” (ibid.). Hegel puts it neatly: “Formation [Gestaltung] is thus a secret drawing of lines, a determining of surfaces and a bounding by determinate angles,” rather than organic curvature. Generation of shape is here indeterminate—for example, the growth of crystals, a mixture of points, lines or surfaces showing indefinite continuity and

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replication. Referring to magnetism, Hegel speaks of a restless “drive to form” (Trieb der Gestaltung): §312Z/204. The earth—foundation of individuality—is itself a magnet, though not yet “crystallized” (Hegel seems to hint at its molten core) so as to halt wandering geomagnetic poles.49 Almost tongue-in-cheek, Hegel declares that “magnetism holds no mysteries” (ibid./216), no hidden current or fluid, etc.; it is just as it appears. Yet this is to obscure the dialectical strangeness of a phenomenon that is both polar punctuality and sheer movement between poles; we can perhaps understand why Hegel concludes by pointing to the incompatibility (or juxtaposition) of silent nature and active dialectic. “It is the impotence [Ohnmacht] of nature that isolates [vereinzeln] the motivic activity in magnetism; it is the power of thought to bind that then into a whole” (ibid./217). Again, the ‘individuality’ connecting moments is at once imputed by the thinker (scientist or dialectician) and found in physical fact or process. Hegel understands the further step to comprise determination of the “drive to form” which characterizes magnetism, its “having passed over” into “product” (Produkt), namely, crystalline shape (§315). Here is how he depicts what we might call ‘crystallogenesis,’ geological crystallization: This is the inarticulate activity of nature which deploys its dimensions timelessly—nature’s own vital principle which expounds itself without action, and of whose shapes one can only say that they are there” (§315Z/218).50

Hegel seems to conceive of minerals as essential crystallizations of fluid magnetism, where linear polarity is replaced by regular formation in several different directions; he doesn’t attempt to see a link between crystals and magnets by any physical interaction or explanation (although solid-state physics today would have much to declare about such connections).51 Hegel remarks that we glimpse here for the first time the purposiveness of nature itself—“a connection of disparate indifferents [verschiedene Gleichgültigen] as necessity, or an inwardness [Insichsein] which is there [externally]—an intelligible act of nature [acting] by itself [durch sich selbst]” (ibid./219). This is quite astonishing, although Hegel makes little of it in the larger context—and nobody else seems to do so either.52

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With Cb, particularization (Besonderung) of the individual body (§316), Hegel switches to “physical particularization,” albeit as immediate, not yet posited (cf. chemical process). Determinate properties (subjectively apprehended) have yet to be taken back explicitly into individuality, but remain relative to basic elements (modifications of earth, air, light, or water, etc.) and equally to the sensory apprehension of such individuality (see §316Z/223).53 We see light, as individual shape and color (§§317-20); I here disregard Hegel’s promotion of Goethe’s theory of color, while noting that it conceives of colors as individualized, that is, each as potentially universal rather than qualities to be analyzed in an objective framework.54 Smell and taste represent a shift from universal to “distinct” (unterschiedene), particularized corporeality, qua opposed moments (following the logic of essence): smell is “determinate individuality concentrated in difference” (§321/269-70), while taste is “individualized to determinate physical neutrality,” as with water (§322/271)—although Hegel mentions that Swabian speaks of “tasting” flowers. Fourth and last, there is ‘totality’ of particular individuality: electricity. By this Hegel understands just static electricity; he was unfortunate in having written just before Faraday’s groundbreaking work on electromagnetism, and unwise in rejecting Berzelius’ theory of electrolysis—in effect backing the wrong horse.55 An individualized body behaves “differentially” (different) towards another: when charged (e.g. by friction) up to the point when a spark relieves the tension, the first individual retains its individuality.56 For Hegel “we see in electricity a body’s own selfhood which, as a physical totality, preserves itself when in contact with another body” (§324Z/278)—like an outburst of anger, he says. “It is not only we who compare bodies, they themselves compare themselves, and in doing so preserve themselves physically”—an adumbration of the organic, in short, as if charged bodies were somehow alive. Again, we should not take this as anthropomorphic projection, but rather as index of Hegel’s caution. He wished precisely not to propose an ‘explanation’ of phenomena, either through abstract models or with reference to occult substances (electric ‘current’).57 Hegel could have known little of Faraday’s pioneering experiments with electrical circuits or electromagnetic induction. He felt warranted to speak of electrical movement (Bewegung),

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yet only if that doesn’t refer to some reality as it were ‘behind’ appearances.58 What you see is what you see, as Frank Stella famously said of his early paintings. Turning briefly to Cc: chemical process (§§326-35), we may appeal to Burbidge’s observation that Hegel’s treatment comprises three sets of paragraphs: the first set (§§326-29) discusses general features, partly derived from logic (‘Chemism’), the second (§§330-34) absorbs particular empirical patterns found in nature, while the third (§§335-6) reflects on how it all fits together.59 Hegel begins by noting that total individualities are now understood in real relation to one other, resulting either in new individualities or in the dissociation of individuality into other already existing individualities: contradictory identity manifest itself as process. “Chemical process is the totality of the life of inorganic individuality; for here we have whole, physically determined shapes” (§326 Z/288). These shapes interact to produce changes of state which in their dependence on external conditions lack only spontaneity (§328 might hint at the need for a third body or catalyst to animate the whole process, in syllogistic fashion). Hegel further remarks that chemical process unifies magnetism and electricity, citing recent discoveries (connected perhaps with galvanic or voltaic cells, though as we’ve seen, Hegel adamantly resists reducing electricity to chemistry). Shifting from universals to the particulars of process, Hegel describes four kinds of chemical combination: galvanism, or the electrical production of oxides and hydrates; combustion, production of acids and alkalis; neutralization into salts in solution; and finally, recombination of salts dissolved in water (by “elective affinity”). The last two paragraphs reflect on the whole process, concluding that although the mutuality of chemical combination/separation might seem analogous to life, “the genuine individuality of body does not exist in a single state [Zustand] but is exhausted and displayed only in [a] cycle of states.” In other words, the individual body, state or form does not endure through chemical change but is consumed and transformed in the process. By contrast, we shall observe with organic bodies that they are lit up by what Hegel calls the “Heraclitian” fire of life, the fire of soul or mind (§336Z/335-6).60 “The organism is the infinitely self-stimulating and self-sustaining process” (§336: Petry, in Hegel 1970b, 220).

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‘Individuality’ features extensively in the third division of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, where—in Hegel’s words—we switch “from the prose to the poetry of nature” (§336Z/334), from the physics of inorganic nature to the physics of life: ‘Organic Physics.’ The next chapter examines that section—chiefly the philosophy of plants and animals—, then takes up ‘Anthropology,’ first division of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit (or Mind: Geist).

Notes 1. Hegel 1970a, §246Z.  Further citations in text, with ‘A’ for Remark (Anmerkung) and ‘Z’ for Addition (Zusatz, due to Michelet), translation often amended; and to Hegel 1969, vol. 9—here, 15. As we’ll see, Hegel thinks that where science abstracts (and so risks obscuring) things, philosophers pledge allegiance to the concreteness of life and experience. 2. Faraday 2011, 32. 3. Hegel 1970a, §300Z/Werke 9, 173. 4. Posch 2011, 178 and 194. In his 1801 dissertation Hegel had surmised only that if planets follow a numerical ordering of distance from the sun, then there is no need to search for a body orbiting between Mars and Jupiter (that Ceres had in fact been observed and named the same year does not affect the truth of his hypothetical). 5. “Introduction” to Houlgate 1998, xiv. 6. Sebastian Rand observes that ‘a priori’ (or its cognates) appears just four times in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, usually with respect to others’ claims, never in a main paragraph. See Rand 2017, at 389, note 16. 7. Hegel 1979/Hegel 1969, 9: 15. 8. Ibid./20. Without reading too much into the allusion, it seems apt inasmuch as Physics deals with tellurian forms and processes—beginning with the volcanic forging of individuality. 9. In §246Z, Hegel cites Goethe’s Morphology (1820) on our capacity to get inside nature: “Natur hat weder Kern/Noch Schale,/Alles ist sie mit einem Male” (Nature has neither core nor rind, it is all things at once). In his translation Wallace remarks that the lines go back to a poem by Haller. The Phenomenology already alludes to it in the “Inverted World.” 10. §246Z. Buchdahl is cited in Posch 2011, 189.

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11. Posch 2011, 189-91. Hegel is anti-reductionist, which means also that he doesn’t believe explanation is ultimately to be had at the atomic level. This bears also on his aversion to making chemical elements the basis of physical things and processes; abstraction remains representation, picture thinking. 12. In the first issue of the Critical Journal (I.1, 1802) Hegel published a rejoinder to Krug: di Giovanni and Harris 1985, 294-310/2, 188-207. Harris notes (293) that Hegel’s “definitive answer to Krug’s challenge” came in Chapter I of the Phenomenology, ¶102/3: 87). 13. Pinkard 2007, 21. In the present context, how are physical bodies subject to the “sway” of a systemic normativity they at the same time establish: how may they (be thought to) individuate themselves? 14. Sebastian Rödl points out that Kant “inherits” his model from Aristotle’s distinction between kata ton logon and meta tou logou: ‘with regard to law’ versus consciously ‘following the law’ (“formally represented,” as Rödl puts it). Authority derives from the law, which the subject acknowledges, not from its positing the law. See Rödl 2007, 106 and 114-15, expressly contra Brandom, Pinkard and Pippin. (Sebastian Rand too tends in the same direction, in Rand 2017, e.g., 384f.: “Introduction: Nature and Self-­ Determination.”) Rödl distinguishes organic from inorganic normativity, however: “Laws of the living are laws of autonomy…, while laws of inorganic nature are laws of heteronomy” (Rödl, 118). The former would comprise “the dispositions and powers characteristic of life forms: pine trees grow in sandy ground, chimpanzees eat fruit” (119). 15. There is some controversy as to whether Hegel might conceivably have found common ground with Darwin. See Kolb 2008, 104-5. For Hegel, nature might have evolved to be the way it appears now, whereas Darwin understands nature as continuing still to evolve. 16. It enters at §§224-5 with the discussion of planets as “bodies of individuality,” and of the central body of the sun, the truth of which is also individuality. It is in §224 that Hegel retracts his earlier idea of a possible rational law governing the distances of planets from the sun. “What is irrational is to establish the thought of contingency as the basis …, as an imaginative confusion…,” (my emphasis) instead of continuing the search a rule. On the 1817 formulation, see Hegel 1990, 164-5. §234 introduces “Individual Physics,” or individuality first in shape (Gestalt)—density or coherence, magnetism, elasticity, friction—, then in “particularization” (as colour, smell, taste, electricity), and finally in chemical process.

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17. See Hegel 2001 for 1817; Hegel 1989 for 1827; Hegel 1992 for 1930. 18. Hegel 1963. Cf. Nathan Ross (Ross 2008, 68-70), who has the category address the problem of self-determination within an objective, non-­ teleological sphere of reference, one that aims to resolve matters via syllogistic mediation of singular and universal. He mentions Pöggeler’s doubts on whether this “true mechanism” amounts to anything more than a logical convenience, a mere analogy or fiction (72). Ross finds the strategy more credible than does Pöggeler. 19. Hegel never got to revise the Subjective Logic. Its articulation remains the same in 1833 (when the second volume was republished) as for 1816. In his Berlin lectures on Logic, employment of ‘individuality’ within ‘Absolute Mechanism’ tends to yield to that of ‘singularity.’ See Vorlesungen Logik, Hegel 2015a, 636–7 (Rollin 1829) and 788–92 (Karl Hegel 1831). 20. Hegel 2010b, 631. 21. Ibid. Objectivity is necessarily thought to be, but is not yet posited in judgment: it is not yet “the Idea” (third section). The constituent objects are thought of as separate from their tacitly mediating concept. 22. Hegel 2010b, p.  638/Werke, 6: 419. At the previous stage, (a) “the mechanical object,” objectivity features as an aggregate or composite, which would form no more than an implicit totality, viewed for instance in a monadological perspective such as Leibniz’s (see ibid., 632/6, 411). But—Hegel continues—“it is a matter of indifference for the monad that it constitutes an object together with other objects….” Such implicit individuality becomes gradually more explicit first in “mechanical process,” and then in the third stage, “absolute mechanism,” where an “individual center” holds sway over other objects. (Again, this pertains to logical relations, not real processes, in nature or culture. It is the logic of objectivity, evident in nature and spirit alike.) 23. Ibid./421. 24. Ibid., 640/421-2. 25. We might recall that in the Phenomenology (Chapter VI), the ‘Fate’ invoked in tragedy is really the (unacknowledged) self, self-consciousness disguised as representation. 26. Ibid., 641/423-4. Solar bodies cannot properly be considered in their own terms; they move solely within the system, subject to the central individual’s power. (I thank Patrick J.  Welsh for alerting me to the salience of “central individuality” here.)

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27. Ibid., 642/424. The formula for this first syllogism—per the Encyclopædia Logic—is S-P-U. Hegel’s attempt to render determination fluid can make for confusing reading: original ‘singularity’ (sun as object) holds sway over external objects, which may also act on others, the entire dynamic falling under universal gravity. See Hegel 2010a, §198 (although Brinckmann/Dahlstrom render ‘Einzelheit’ as ‘individuality’). S is P, but P is U: the singular dialectically operates as individual, i.e., in ‘overgrasping’ the—its—other moment. 28. Ibid./425. (1) Government mediates between “singleton” and “particular.” (2) Singletons mediate by inciting “that universal individual into external concrete existence and [transposing] their ethical essence into the extreme of actuality.” (3) Finally, “individual citizens are tied by their needs and external existence to this universal absolute individuality.” This last constitutes a formal, reflective syllogism of “semblance” (Schein), which is grounded in—so unites—the other two syllogisms. 29. Reid 2013-14, 4. In a note Reid explains why, for Hegel, “singularity and universality are unstable if not mediated by particularity” (10). Reid begins with a surprising declaration by Hegel: “We shall pursue solar, planetary, lunar, [and] cometary nature through all further stages of nature; the deepening [grasp] of nature is nothing but the progressive transformation of these four” (§270Z/80). Reid proposes in effect to follow a “cometary” path through Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, seeking out those exhilarating moments of aberration or incipient flying off the solar handle, a voyage out and away, always “for other.” 30. Reid mentions a 2014 paper I gave on ‘individuality’—my very first outing with the topic (Reid 2013-14,10, note 13). The most Hegel says is that the “moon, as rigid body, is more akin to the planet, for as independent presentation for itself of the earth’s core [als Darstellung des Kerns der Erde für sich] it contains within itself the principle of abstract individuality” (§279Z/129); my emphasis. A merely formal analogy obtains between comet and sun, moon and planet-earth; abstract, not real, in other words. 31. §279Z/129–30 takes up the relations between sun, planets and moons— plus comets—but reversing the order of the first two syllogisms:—(i) U-S-P: planets mediate between sun and moons/comets;—(ii) S-P-U: dependent bodies mediate between sun and planet-earth, and—(iii) P-U-­S: the sun mediates between planet and moon/comet. Hegel cites (§280Z/132), the earth’s “violence [Gewalt] of individuality,” which nullifies celestial influence. Compare the previous ‘Gewalt’ of fate: earth is

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here incommunicado, as if by fiat or through its own individual workings. Individuality (i.e., earth) now sets the agenda for the universal operation of mechanical forces. Stars and moon retain no influence on earthly processes (save for rhythms of sleep and waking). As for viniculture, it’s unclear whether Hegel was just teasing Herr Bode about a supposed benign influence on “comet-wine” (§279Z, 130). 32. Hegel 2010b, 643-4/6427. On the paradox of legal justification, Niklas Luhmann argued that what justifies the law is—the law! If it were justified by any extraneous factor (ethics, economics, psychology, biology, religion, etc.), it would cease to be the law. Equally important, tautology itself must remain tacit if justification is to hold sway. See Gunther Teubner, “And God Laughed...” in Teubner 1993, 1–12. 33. There is a prior mention of ‘individuality’ in ‘Mechanics,’ to make the inverse point: it enters on its own terms only with ‘Physics.’ In §258/51) Hegel distinguishes time as process or duration from time as concept or universal. The individual (Individuum) is genus and transience “united in a single form.” Achilles, the flower of Greek life, Alexander the Great, that infinitely powerful individuality, did not live long. Only their deeds or their effects remain behind, i.e., the world they brought into being. Mediocrity endures and ultimately rules the world. 34. Cf. §271/107, transition to Physics: “matter, in this self-negation of its self-externality in the totality, has now acquired within itself what it had previously only sought, namely, the center, its self, determinacy of form.” 35. See Pinkard’s formulation of the “Kantian paradox”—“how I can be author of the law and subject to the law”—as problematic for nature, in contrast to human agency: Pinkard 2007, 21. I think the problem lies rather in the question of how physical bodies may be subject to the “sway” of a systemic normativity they at the same time establish. How may they individuate themselves, even if ambiguously? They are and are not self-­ sufficient, they are and are not the whole. 36. E.g., §350: “organic individuality exists as subjectivity so far as externality proper to shape is idealized into members, and organism in its process outwards preserves inwardly its self-like (selbstisch) unity.” 37. Ibid./111. Hegel refers to the “self-like [selbstisch] nature of light by which natural things are enlivened and individualized” (§276Z/118). 38. Hegel might be criticized for sticking with an antiquated Aristotelian division demolished once and for all by Newton’s unification of

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cosmology and microphysics. But Lee Smolin, for one, has questioned the metaphysical overreach of such total theory, which he dubs the “Newtonian Paradigm” (unification is a goal physics shares with bad romance novels, Smolin suggests). See Lee Smolin and Roberto Unger, Smolin 2015, 273ff. Perhaps Hegel was not outdated but rather ahead of his time. (The term “aggregate state” comes from Thomas Posch’s attempt to give Hegel a more modern look.) 39. Petry maintains that discussion of the ‘elements’ (an archaic notion anyway) should have followed discussion of heat, not vice versa (Hegel 1970b, 2: 259), adding that Hegel had ceased to keep up with developments in thermodynamics after 1810 (ibid./261). Hegel takes physical elements to be “abstract determinacies” lacking any subjectivity; treating them as individual bodies leads only to confusion (§286Z/144-5). 40. (Ibid./136). Hegel claims that individuality of form in physics is real, not just a façon de parler. (‘Individuality,’ ‘individualized’ or ‘individual’ occur more than 20 times in §281.) 41. See Faraday 2011, 32. In his lecture, Faraday continued: “water, as water, remains always the same, either in a solid, liquid, or fluid [sc., gaseous?] state.” Wittgenstein admired the book, quoting it in §104 of Philosophical Investigations to underline how one opts to use a concept in a certain way (the context: what follows from following a rule). He was fascinated by Goethe’s idea of the archetypal plant—‘Urpflanze’—which Wittgenstein understood pragmatically as a recommendation to look, to make connections between data, rather than as an explanatory theory about how things are. See Wittgenstein 2009, 50. 42. Compare Phenomenology ¶492/366, where Hegel introduces the “actuality” of culture (Bildung), first as “substance.” He compares it with “nature,” which displays itself “in the universal elements of air, water, fire, and earth.” Water is what is continually sacrificed, abandoned, then recovered into the whole. The analogy here would be that it can change its state and yet return to itself (evaporation, precipitation, freezing, etc.). It finds its identity in “meteorological process.” (Fire becomes the “animating unity” of the process, continually dividing and resolving things.) 43. Previously ‘individuality’ was “an empty word,” because (in actuality) not yet “self-generating.” See also §289Z/156, on the “selfness” (Selbstischkeit) of light which now becomes the “selfness of matter itself, … permeated by this principle of individuality… a multiplication of individualities, each likewise possessing total form.”

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44. §289Z/156. The last sentence reads in German: “Die Erde vereinzelt sich in solche, die die ganze Form in ihnen haben.” Here I’ve preferred Petry (Hegel 1970b, vol. 2, 54) to Miller. 45. Hegel opposes any sort of molecular or atomic “explanation,” when molecules or atoms are understood to exist independently in reality rather than as a dialectic of moments (§298A/168). Hegel adds (ibid./169) that this pseudo-“explanation” results from the understanding’s habit of separating the metaphysical from what is supposed to be “actual”—a separation itself metaphysical! 46. As Petry notes, “this transition from cohesion to sound, rather than from air to sound,” was unusual in the early eighteenth century, and betrays the influence of Chladni (1756–1817), who argued that other elastic bodies also resound, transmitting more readily than air (Hegel 1970b, 2: 281). 47. Hegel cites Count Rumford’s experiments, which tend to undermine the theory of ‘caloric.’ Petry avers that Hegel’s idea of combustion is “not incompatible with Lavoisier’s discovery [that combustion is oxidation], and not irretrievably at odds with Carnot’s definition of heat” (concerning transfer of heat between bodies—‘heat engines’—at different temperatures: Hegel 1970b, 2: 263). I’m unsure how ironic Petry’s tone is here. 48. Posch 2011, 187. 49. Hegel already articulated this thought in Jena Realphilosophie 1805-6: “The whole body, the earth, is a magnet… the total universal earth… In the earth the magnet is everywhere” (Hegel 1987, 53). Daniel Shannon cites this passage to bolster his argument that Hegel’s philosophy of nature abjures any sort of ‘formalism,’ e.g., substituting an occult model for the totality of nature—here, the universal (indeed, individual) earth. See Shannon 2013, 111–12. He compares the treatment of “Force and Understanding” in the Phenomenology, which similarly juxtaposes dialectical thought and natural process; sheer appearing, not index of occult force. 50. Hegel writes of the “artisan” (Werkmeister)—Petry: ‘overseer’—at work in nature itself. Again, the thought of a silent geometer or workman had featured already in Jena Realphilosophie II, as Petry notes. 51. A crystal lattice can be magnetized, but most ferromagnetic materials are non-crystalline. Modern explanations of magnetism refer to the dipolar character (or spin) of electrons, a reductive line Hegel couldn’t have countenanced. For contemporary scientific context, see Petry’s notes, Hegel 1970b, 2: 328–-9.

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52. One remarkable exception is André Breton, the French Surrealist. He quotes §315Z (in A. Véra’s French translation): “magnetism finds its satisfaction in the crystal” (‘befriedigt’ in the original, hinting at a pacification of magnetic ‘Trieb’ or urge). See Rabaté 2002, 25 (translation amended). Breton apparently considered crystallization the single most vital principle in nature. Robert Smithson too was fascinated by the process of crystal deposition and its irregular regularities, although with no evident Hegelian investment. See Roberts 2004, Chap. 2, “The Deposition of Time.” She suggests (137) that Spiral Jetty might be taken as “seasoned” by salt crystals (citing Derrida on the French term ‘relever,’ throw into relief, for ‘aufheben’), which Smithson thought supplied “historical flavor” to the work while also preserving it. 53. ‘Individual’ or ‘individuality’ features a score of times or more in §316. Hegel’s point is that the senses relate individually to determinate features of physical bodies: we see shapes and colours via light (the chemical properties of pigments are not involved), smell their odors (air), or taste them (water). As for electricity, as Hegel understands it, individualized bodies behave “differentially” to one another, not just in relation to sensibility. 54. There exists a huge secondary literature on Hegel’s critique of Newton and devotion to Goethe. I simply ignore it here, along with the twenty pages of detailed comment in §320 (though I recommend Hegel’s quip, “No painter is such a fool as to be a Newtonian”: §320Z/254). 55. See Burbidge 2007, 169-70. Burbidge is careful to note that Hegel was not ignoring empirical evidence; on the contrary, Burbidge indicts others of projecting an abstract model upon the evidence. 56. Hegel employs the unusual word form ‘different’ or ‘an ihm differentes’ (see remark above, and comparison with ‘middle voice’ in Ancient Greek). 57. Hegel cites the Berlin physicist G.F.  Pohl: “the idea [Vorstellung], rife everywhere, of electricity as in a state of motion, as a current… the empty schema of a merely external movement of the fictitious electric fluid … this fundamental electrical substrate” (§323Z/282). 58. See Hegel 2007b, 154: “This is electrical movement [electrische Bewegen]: to posit identity in the different and to differentiate the identical.” (Quoted in Posch 2011, 188, 198.) Cf. §324A/277), on “the intellectual distinction (Gedankenunterschied) of positive and negative electricity, positing the opposed as identical, the identical as opposed.” It shows the power of the concept to absorb empirical discernment.

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59. Burbidge 2007, 115ff. Note that ‘individuality’ features almost twenty times in these paragraphs, and variants yet more often. 60. Compare §335/333: “The chemical process is indeed, in general, Life; for the individual body in its immediacy is just as much sublated as produced by the process, so that the concept no longer remains at the stage of inner necessity but comes to appearance.” Yet the process is everywhere “infected” (behaftet) with division, with external condition; its finitude marks it off from Life. Or: “Life is a chemical process made perpetual [perennierend]” (§335Z/333).

Bibliography Hegel, G.W.F. 1963, “Fragment aus einer Hegelschen Logik,” hg. Pöggeler, Hegel-Studien, 2 (1963), 12-47 Hegel, G.W.F. 1969, Werke, eds. Moldenhauer & Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969) Hegel, G.W.F. 1970a, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V.  Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Hegel, G.W.F. 1970b Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. Michael Petry, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970) Hegel, G.W.F. 1979 System of Ethical Life (1802/3), trans. T.M.  Knox & H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979) Hegel, G.W.F. 1987, Jenaer Systementwürfe III: Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987) Hegel, G.W.F. 1989, Gesammelte Werke 19, hg. Bonsiepen and Lucas (Hamburg: Meiner, 1989) Hegel, G.W.F. 1990, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, trans. Steven Taubeneck (New York: Continuum, 1990) Hegel, G.W.F. 1992, Gesammelte Werke 20, hg. Bonsiepen and Lucas (Hamburg: Meiner, 1992) Hegel, G.W.F. 2001, Gesammelte Werke 13, ed. Bonsiepen and Grotsch (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001) Hegel, G.W.F. 2007b, Vorlesungen über Naturphilosophie Berlin 1825/26 [ms. Dove], eds. Bal et al (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007) Hegel, G.W.F., 2010a, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. Part 1: Science of Logic [1830], trans. Klaus Brinkmann & Daniel Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

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Hegel, G.W.F., 2010b, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Hegel, G.W.F. 2015a, Gesammelte Werke 23.2, Vorlesungen Logik (1828-1831) hg. Annette Sell (Hamburg: Meiner, 2015) Hegel, G.W.F. 2015b, Gesammelte Werke 28.1, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst I (Nachschriften zum Kolleg des Jahres 1820/21, 1826), hg. Niklas Hebing (Hamburg: Meiner, 2015) Houlgate, Stephen 1998, (ed.), Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998) Burbidge, John 2007, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Di Giovanni, George and H.S.  Harris 1985, (translators) Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985) Michael Faraday 2011, The Chemical History of a Candle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Kolb, David 2008, “Darwin Rocks: Does Nature Have a History?” in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 57 (2008), 97-117, Pinkard, Terry 2007, “Speculative Naturphilosophie and the development of empirical science: Hegel’s perspective,” in Continental Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary Gutting (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 17-34 Posch, Thomas 2005, “Kraft und Form: Zwei verschiedene Gestalten des Allgemeinen,” in Die Natur in den Begriff übersetzen, eds. Posch & Marmasse (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005), 96-116 Posch, Thomas 2011, “Hegel and the Sciences,” chapter 8 in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 177-202 Roberts, Jennifer 2004, Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) Rabaté, Jean-Michel 2002, “Breton’s post-Hegelian modernism,” in Extreme Beauty: aesthetics, politics, death (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002), 17-28 Rand, Sebastian 2017, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” chapter 17 of The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, ed. Dean Moyar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 384-406 Reid, Jeffrey 2013-14, “Comets and Moons: the for-another in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” The Owl of Minerva, 45: 1-2 (2013-14), 1-11 Rödl, Sebastian 2007, Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)

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Ross, Nathan 2008, On Mechanics in Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Shannon, Daniel E. 2013, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature of 1805-06; its relation to the Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Cosmos and History, 9:1 (2013), 101-32 Smolin, Lee and Roberto Unger 2015, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). www.robertounger.com/en/wp-­content/uploads/2017/01/the-­ singular-­universe-­and-­the-­reality-­of-­time.pdf. Teubner, Gunther 1993, Law as an Autopoietic System (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) Wandschneider, Dieter 2013, “Philosophy of Nature,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, eds. De Laurentiis and Edwards (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 103-26 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2009, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed. P.M.S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009)

7 Hegelian ‘Organics’ and ‘Anthropology’

The organism can recover from disease; but because it is inherently sick, therein lies the necessity of death, i.e., of this dissolution … (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature).1

Besides the ‘Physics’ of systemically ordered bodies, Hegel’s Encyclopædia includes other sections bearing directly on individuality. This chapter considers the two main ones: study of organic life and living individuals (a burgeoning field in Hegel’s time); and study of human beings, or ‘Anthropology’ (another new field—founded by J.F.  Blumenbach— which Hegel approaches from an angle very different from Kant’s).2 They extend and deepen previous discussions in the Phenomenology, sometimes with change of emphasis or content as we’ll find. Both areas have benefitted from recent scholarly attention, which I attempt to bring to bear on ‘individuality.’ * * * (1) ‘Organics’:

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“I am this whole circle of determinations: they have coalesced in my individuality.” (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature)3 “‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’” (Lewis Carroll, 1962)4

Following the Physics Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature proceeds, in his words, “from the prose to the poetry of nature” (§336Z/334). The section has three parts: (A) as shape, the universal image [Bild] of life, the geological organism; (B) as particular, formal subjectivity, the vegetable [organism]; (C) as singular concrete subjectivity, the animal organism (§337/337). * * * (a) Geological Organism. Hegel advances beyond eighteenth-century ‘geognosy,’ and certainly by 1808 he had come to distinguish “Geologie” from mere “Mineralogie.” He was aware of contemporary developments (Georges Cuvier, Alexandre Brongniart) theorizing “life” implicit in the earth as more than a process of stratification.5 In Hegel’s non-evolutionary perspective, geology is “only the corpse” of the life-process. Essentially it has become what it is now; while it “is to be” (soll) living individuality, it is not there yet. As Hegel puts it: On the one hand there is individuality, on the other the process of the same; individuality does not yet exist as active idealizing life, has not yet determined itself to singularity [Einzelheit], but is a frozen [erstarrte] life, over against active [life] (ibid./340: my emphasis).

Hegel doesn’t deny that the earth has had a history—witness fossilized organisms found deep in the earth—or that it had been formed by volcanic (igneous) forces and erosion and by alluvial deposit. He denies only its philosophical relevance (§339/345, 347). Hegel proceeds (§§340–41) to portray the resultant geological shape as a juxtaposition of earthly individuality and its “fructification” as vitality (“points” of individuality) in the sea and on land. Hegel values the primordial and evanescent life of phosphorescence on the ocean surface over a spectacular starlight.6 The

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stars are as nothing compared even to such rudimentary life (“merely punctiform, transient subjectivity,” he writes at §342/367). §342 reflects on the previous paragraphs in preparation for the transition to ‘life’ proper. Hegel observes that the individual organism (vegetable or animal) contains the inorganic within it: first via chemical process (in disease and death it submits to chemical dissociation: §337Z/338) or by ingestion of nutrients; and second, in its mediated/mediating relation with the inorganic or with cyclical process (i.e., subordination to an abstract genus indifferently ‘using’ the organism). Syllogistically considered, individuality mediates the extremes of inorganic nature and the genus.7 Or (second) the genus mediates between organism and inorganic existence: the exclusive One of organism consumes the inorganic—its external existence—so preserving the genus even as life just goes on.8 Finally, the syllogism of sexual generation has actuality sublate the singleton (or pair of singletons) in generating another singleton—a child—which in turn proves self-subsistent.9 Plants do not reproduce sexually, Hegel contends; the species maintains itself by reproducing singletons, via “points” or seeds of life.10 * * * (b) Vegetable Nature (§343). Hegel’s botanical expertise owed much to his friendship with F.J.  Schelver, a student of Schelling’s who had been appointed professor of botany at Weimar, soon becoming an enthusiast of Goethean morphology. It was Schelver who brought Hegel close to the great man. Hegel wrote Goethe in 1807 angling for teaching opportunities, perhaps even a post assisting in Goethe’s beloved botanical garden. Under Schelver’s influence Goethe had come to advocate “a theory of asexual plant reproduction developed in Schelling’s circle of Naturphilosophen,” a view critical of the Linnaean appeal to sexual traits as determining speciation.11 Schelver appears to have converted Hegel too. Although he didn’t get the post, Hegel fell under Goethean influence, perhaps even revamping his project of a “science of the experience of consciousness” (Eckart Förster’s argument).12 At any rate, Hegel now saw the need to integrate abstract and concrete in a fundamental way, albeit not Goethe’s own ‘scientia intuitiva.

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Plant individuation remains a besetting problem in science, though nowadays posed against an evolutionary background of natural selection. Things look quite different when gauged in the context of Hegel’s own time. He didn’t have to consider the peculiar status of collective ‘individuals’ (aspen patches, fungi, dandelions, and the like), while the theory of cellular development had yet to be formulated. Moreover, the relation between ‘individual’ and ‘organism’ has meanwhile become much less straightforward.13 In his 1864 work The Principles of Biology, Herbert Spencer formulated a synthesis of individuality and Darwinian evolution, but concedes: “There is, indeed, … no definition of individuality that is unobjectionable.”14 Many nowadays would agree, despite substantial scientific advances. Individuality remains pivotal, whether in anatomy (articulation), embryology (development), physiology, immunology, or evolution (genetics).15 As Hegel frames matters, the individual plant has its own internal end (Zweck), and also distinguishes itself from itself in relating to its members (leaves, stems, roots, etc.). Yet those members remain individuals in their own right, relatively neutral rather than truly organic (ibid./341).16 Hegel makes his point clearer in §343Z, claiming that growth is increase in size rather than alteration of form, and that it is “not a coming-to-self as individual but a multiplication of individuality, so that the one individuality is only the superficial unity of many” (373). The parts simply are the plant rather than defining themselves with respect to the whole, as with animal organisms.17 Second, “the difference between organic parts is only a superficial metamorphosis and one part can easily assume the function of the other” (§343/371). Third, a “self-like [selbstische] universality, the subjective One of individuality, does not as yet separate itself from real particularization [Besonderung] but is merely submerged in it” (§344/373).18 The plant can neither move nor determine how and when to ingest nutrients from the soil (“it does not take sips of water”); it is beholden to externals (sunlight, space, time), and to inorganic individuality (the earth) or universal elements (minerals).19 Nor does the plant have sensation (Empfindung): Only that which possesses sensation can bear itself as other [i.e., to others], can with the hardiness [Härte] of individuality assimilate it and venture

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into conflict with other individualities. The plant is immediate organic individuality in which the genus has predominance, and reflection is not individual; the individual does not as such return to itself but is an other, and so lacks self-feeling [Selbstgefühl] (ibid./378–9).

Growth consists merely of the formation of a hard skin (bark, e.g.)—a continual dying off, as it were, on the part of the sap of living tissue (§346a)—and the generation of new life (individualities) as buds, flowers and ultimately seeds dropping to earth and germinating. We should note that Hegel’s enthusiasm for Goethe’s “Morphology of Plants” (from which he quotes at length) did not extend to admitting their spiritual dimension. Plants are almost spiritual, yet ultimately appear externally conditioned. “Goethe has ingeniously represented the unity of the plant as a spiritual conductor” (geistige Leiter), though Hegel continues: “But metamorphosis is only one side and does not exhaust the whole” (§346Z/392). Hegel agrees with Goethe that sexual division in plants—Linnaean taxonomy, for example—is mere semblance, though on other grounds (plants are only pseudo-spiritual). That echoes the Phenomenology: lacking self-relation (“being-for-self”), the plant merely “touches the limit [Grenze] to individuality” (Phenomenology ¶246/190), the edge that displays mere “semblance” of sexual division.20 Notoriously, §166Z of Philosophy of Right compares ‘woman’ with plants in her relative passivity and lack of individuation, a slur repeated in the 1827–8 lectures.21 Such prejudice contrasts with the Phenomenology’s anti-essentialism (ridicule of physiognomics, Antigone’s gender transgression). That underscores how Hegel’s conventional views belie a deeper suggestion that roles are constructed (precisely as ‘natural’) rather than given; see below on his debt to Hippel’s pioneering work on women and marriage. Michael Marder has attacked Hegel’s weak arguments, although one might equally take Hegel’s theory of plants to reveal the weakness by not defining it clearly, instead placing it ambiguously on the boundary of/to ‘individuality.’22 In The Philosopher’s Plant (2014) Marder calls Hegel’s argument “laughable,” though he doesn’t laugh at it so much as articulate an inclusive, non-oppositional alternative dubbed ‘vegetal being.’23 Marder also notes Hegel’s appeal to plant metaphors (tree, blossom, seed) in characterizing, indeed lauding, speculative thought.

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Much of the material in this section is admittedly dated—dated by the empirical science Hegel cites as much as by the conceptual terms employed (he himself mentions the uncertain status enjoyed by the study of plants, uneasily poised between chemistry and zoology).24 We might today remark that “neutrality” or lack of differentiation between plant tissues hardly fits modern accounts of cell generation, which identify the ‘meristem’ (a layer of immature cells at the plant tip) promoting division and specialization, hence greater flexibility or variety.25 Moreover, modular development—replication or recombination of components of the organism—allows plants to flourish and variegate, the better to survive infection. Finally, though sessile, plants do move, i.e., twist in place.26 Hegel debunks supposed “sensitivity” in plants, including the apparently “defensive” behavior of mimosa leaves; response to external stimulus remains local, he maintains, not organic (§344Z/377, 379). Nevertheless, recent experiments manage to identify systemic response to threats from poison, insects or human depredation, and even hint at subterranean or aerial networks of quasi-communication between trees (see Mancuso, e.g.). In sum, the liminal framing of plants found in a Hegelian perspective—“on the boundary of/to individuality”—renders that perspective peculiarly indeterminate. As with ‘individuality’ itself, the plant is and is not universal (i.e., ‘selbstisch’). The underlying issue is whether this equivocation is Hegel’s (the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back), or resides more in the very nature of plants—as understood by the observer-theorist—or else is both! Compare H.S. Harris’s words cited at the outset: “‘individuality’ is what belongs to the concrete thinking of the logician, who unites the moments and comprehends them in their unity.” One might have to add “or their disparity.” * * * (c) Animal Organism (§350): The section opens thus: Organic individuality exists as subjectivity so far as the externality belonging to shape is idealized into members, and organism in its process outwards preserves inwardly a self-like [selbstisch] unity. This is animal nature,

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which—in the actuality and externality of immediate singularity—is also, by contrast, the inwardly reflected self of singularity, inwardly existent subjective universality (§163).27

That is to say, the animate individual is at once externally singular and internally universal (‘self-like’): body and soul, in short. More dynamically, the self actively enlivens its body, inhabits it, unifying the two moments. The soul reflects on its own embodiment, reflects into itself, just as corporeal members are “purely and simply moments of form, perpetually negating their independence and bringing themselves back into their unity [which] is the reality of the concept and for the concept” (§350Z/431). Voice exhibits the inner “trembling” of subjectivity. Unlike vegetal individuality, animal individuality is self-moving (§351). Moreover, it reflexively relates itself to its inorganic nature—its singularity—distinguishing itself from even while incorporating that (already in 1817 Hegel speaks of “actually differentiating individuality”: Hegel 2001, 160: §275). Both Phenomenology and Logic offer analogous treatments of ‘Life’ and ‘the living individual.’28 The Logic expressly frames the concrete mediation of concept and reality (the singular instance) under the ‘Idea of life’: in relation to mechanical or chemical process, “it wholly comprehends them [greift es über sie über], permeates them as their universality,” so transforming them into “living individuality” (Hegel 2010, 686/6: 483).29 “To this extent it is the individuality of life itself, generated [erzeugt] no longer from the [mere] concept but from the actual idea” (687/485). On the one hand, “generation of singularity”: on the other, its sublation into universal genus or idea (singularity ‘dying to become’ universality).30 The relation of ‘life’ to the ‘idea’ of life has become a hot topic in recent Hegel scholarship. I take individual ‘Lebendigkeit’ as analogous to the syllogistic individuality of “free mechanism” or of “law-in-action” (Chap. 6): individuality enlivens singularity. Returning to the Encyclopædia: Hegel had long admired De anima, and this section offers a dialectical update of Aristotelian ideas on feeding and perceiving (and implicitly thinking).31 For his part, Hegel subdivides animate life into the three moments of shape (Gestalt)—better: the active

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process of shaping or configuration (Gestaltung)—, assimilation, and reproduction (§352).32 “In that it shapes itself thus as individual, it is unity of shape and individuality” (§353Z/437): it shapes itself, confirming its identity as “a Being-at-one-with-itself-in-the-other.”33 Hegel follows Bichat’s advance (circa 1799–1800) towards understanding organic life in its own terms, as “the interdependence and coordination of functions,” sensibility and irritability in particular (see §§353–55, passim).34 Irritability is the individual’s active turn towards the external world (via muscular contraction and circulation of blood). Hegel adds a third, intermediate function in digestion, which serves to “reproduce” cellular tissue and internal organs (in particular stomach and intestines), expelling what is not itself. Inward auto-maintenance responds to external stimuli, so internalizing its situation (viz., as nervous system, as blood—“the great internal circulation of individuality whose centre [Mitte] is the blood itself; for it is individual life itself ”: §354Z/449—, plus viscera). It is Luhmann’s paradox, whereby system defines the environment defining it, both theoretically and practically. In normative terms, free individuality acts according to the laws of its own nature, its own constitution, responding in its own way (to recall Rödl’s point on ‘autonomy’). Dialectically it prompts the shift from ‘Grenze’ to ‘Schranke.’ The second moment, ‘assimilation,’ takes this paradox further: theoretically via sensibility or feeling (§358); practically through the process of feeling external nature as negation of individuality, feeling it as a lack the organism needs to overcome (“Only what is living feels lack”: §359Z/469). Need is “the animal’s relation to its inorganic singularized [vereinzelten] nature” (§361/474)—nature taken as singular. The animal’s alimentary process exerts power over externality, first negating nature, then rendering it one with itself; the individual is what it eats—Feuerbach inverted!—, in transforming material nutrients into itself. Hegel abjures the fiction of a mechanistic or chemical separation of independent parts, citing here Spallanzani’s experiments with digestion.35 He proceeds to speak of a formative drive (Bildungstrieb: §365Z/494)—for instance, avian nest-building or song; a fashioning of external material in accordance with instinctual needs to attain a specific “self-enjoyment” or “self-­ feeling,” both theoretical and practical (ibid./497). Satisfaction of needs

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serves almost to ground individuality, when the “individual that feels a lack is filled with its own self ” (§366/497–8)—“it is a dual individual” (ein gedoppeltes Individuum). It produces itself, and in conjunction with another living being also reproduces itself, and indirectly the universal genus. The summary in §381 describes the animal preserving itself by negating nature, then resolving the contradiction inherent to its nature through finding itself in a sexual relation, “where each sex feels in the other not an alien externality but its own self or the genus common to both.”36 Hegel’s third moment—reproduction—speaks directly to the “generative process” (der Gattungsprozeß: §367). The individual “exemplifies, maintains and reproduces its genus.”37 Hegel writes of the “contradiction” that individuals do so unconsciously, their essential nature (universal life) proving wholly unlike their “particular individuality”: “the individual is just one of two, and does not exist as unity but only as singular.” One desires another, they unite, procreate (§369Z/517)—and life continues.38 Individuality here works syllogistically, mediating opposed terms: physiological particular, interaction between singletons, production of a third (their progeny), furthering the universal (in life or as death). “The genus preserves itself only through the destruction of the individuals, which in the process of generation fulfil their destiny [Bestimmung] and … in this process meet their death” (§370/519)— although Hegel offers some consolation in remarking that higher-order animals tend to survive longer after coitus than species like butterflies. Spiritual love has no place here since that invokes the universal, whereas “in the animal the genus exists not as such but only implicitly” (§370Z/520). “Properly speaking love is not, therefore, as Hegel had held in 1797/98, an incomprehensible miracle,” H.S. Harris declares. “It is only natural desire that is incomprehensible, because it is below the level of reflective consciousness altogether” (Harris 1983, 29). Implicit here is the idea that individuality transcends animal singularity, though oblivious of genetic continuity. If in procreation individual animals ‘die to become’ their genus, as it were, the boundary condition of mortality manifests itself in two further ways: in competition between species (§§368–70), and as illness or natural demise (§§371–6). The first exposes individuals to possibly “violent death”

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(§368/500); Hegel comments that classification of animals often devolves on means of survival (teeth, claws, etc.). The inherently “weak” concept of nature betrays itself not just in occasional “monstrosity” but also in its condemning animals generally to an “insecure, anxious and unhappy” state, a struggle to survive (§368Z/501–02).39 Discussing the further articulation of life in animals, Hegel remarks that it may entail amphibian or transitional forms when determinant conditions (water, land, air) are intermingled.40 What of disease, the other threat to life? “Health is the due proportion of the organic self to its existence [Dasein]” (§371/521), Hegel stipulates. “Disease … is a disproportion between irritation and effectiveness [Wirkungsvermögen]” (ibid./522]. Its causes lie partly in the organism itself. Illness is systemic, in other words, arising when particular parts operate separately from the whole; restoration comes from overcoming such “particularization” (§371Z/522). This recalls the ancient idea of health as internal harmony, while taking on board more modern ideas drawn from Brown and Bichat. Illness and death are part of the life process, but death proves the more significant, comprising “the necessity of transition of individuality into universality,” the sublating of the individual whereby “the merely immediate singular perishes” (§374/535).41 Animals die when individuality ebbs, subsides into universal nature; internal organs fail to maintain their distinct form and function. Disease lurks in the organism’s own nature (§375Z) as its “original disease” (§375), staved off by a continual sublation of singularity into universality, keeping body and soul together. If disease is a kind of life, its cure too becomes internal process, mimicking the sequence sensibility, irritability, reproduction. Although listing both acute and chronic forms of disease, Hegel emphasizes the first, since it implicates the entire organism rather than a single organ. Both illness and cure consist of mobilizing the whole, in sequence, rather than treating the affected part in isolation.42 Two concluding remarks, on animal ‘habit,’ and on alleged inconsistency in Hegel’s conception of animal pathology. ‘Habit’ is behavior or character that sustains the organism while ultimately spelling its end. “The living being, as a singular, dies from the habit of life, as it settles into

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[hineinlebt] its body, into its reality” (§375Z/536). The same paradox afflicts human life. Habit allows for survival while bearing death within, namely, when the individual becomes set in its ways, turns inward, shuns life in productive tension with others, literally losing interest (what ‘lies between’ us). In fine, death is the “sublation of the formal opposition between individuality’s immediate singularity and its universality …” (§376/537). Just as walking has been described as a process of repeated falling and recovery, so living is (individually) a continual process of dying, and (supra-individually) of dying generations. Seen in a different perspective, however, serial expiry, generation after generation, seems less a singular and finite repetition, more awareness of the individual’s constitutive embeddedness in life broadly understood. Hegel now advances several ways of understanding the shift from natural to spiritual (or minded) life. Here is one articulation: With individuality, this movement of both sides [continual decline into singularity and sublation of singular into universal genus] is the self-­ sublating process which results in consciousness, unity, the unity in and for itself of both, [and moreover] as self, not merely as genus in the inner concept of the singular (§376Z/538).

The individual begins to think its relation to existence or nature, beyond just living it. At the same time, the individual comes to understand that spirit was always (already) implicit in nature. My second remark turns to Tilottama Rajan’s deconstruction of Hegel’s supposed idea that illness is both autonomous (self-related, self-­digesting) and complete (Rajan 2004, 226). As Hegel understands it, the “self-like” individual contains multiple subsystems or organs in interaction, some of which at the onset of illness start operating independently, thereby hampering organic “fluidity” (Flüssigkeit): §371/520, §373/52. As acute illness advances, the affected organ starts to usurp the whole organism and disrupt its normal functioning. In turn the organism becomes isolated from its environment, failing to register and respond to its situation. Fever represents the final stage. If the crisis breaks, the individual can rejoin its world, resuming normal life. Hegel writes that “every disease (but especially acute illness) is a hypochondria of the organism, which

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disdains the outer world sickening it because, restricted to itself, it possesses within its own self the negative of itself ” (§373A/532). This describes the peculiar self-negating by which the individual begins to posit “a dual life [ein doppeltes Leben]”; over against the “peaceful universal self ” the organism becomes a “differentiating movement” (§372Z/527). The diseased individual has become not so much beside as within itself, wholly withdrawn. The cure too will come from within; the physician can only assist nature. Rajan objects that Hegel’s analysis of illness as “the defection of a part from the whole is … a mise-en-abime of the very system of assimilation at the heart of his Encyclopedia” (Rajan, 224). “Hegel’s argument has not digested itself ” (227); nor can it “cure” itself. But that drastically misrepresents Hegel’s approach. Everything turns on his consistent rejection of both formalism and reductionism: twin errors which would separate thought from “real” being or process. As already noted with digestion, Hegel seeks a rationality within the life process itself, abjuring the opposed notions of independent parts and Romantic élan vital, occult substance. Just as force in the play of forces ‘overgrasps’ its other moment, so life ‘overgrasps’ or ‘includes’ its singular state. To repeat: the term ‘individuality’ neatly condenses such lability between singular distinction and universal continuity. Moreover, it is perverse to assume that Hegel’s model of reflexivity implies self-relation without remainder. The entire burden of Book 2 of Hegel’s Logic (the logic of essence/appearance) is to demonstrate how positing will always yield presupposing (and vice versa)—dualisms and remainders all the way down. Book 3 proceeds to examine the logic of the concept—of the idea, concept-and-­ reality—which aims at syllogistic mediation of three (not two) terms or moments.43 * * * (2) ‘Anthropology’: “The soul is … actual; in its corporeity it has free shape … which as the soul’s work of art has human—pathognomic and physiognomic— expression. Hegel, Philosophy of Spirit.44

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Making the cognitive leap from philosophy of nature to philosophy of spirit/mind, ‘individuality’ again takes the initiative: an embodied ‘soul’ proves itself quintessentially individual. (‘Individuality’ features less often in ‘Phenomenology’ and ‘Psychology.’) Hegel plays a delicate game of compare-and-contrast regarding ‘individual’ and ‘singular,’ never drawing a definitive line. It recalls Schleiermacher’s continual feints between authentic ‘Individualität’ and a more occasional, finite or contingent ‘Eigentümlichkeit’ (nomenclature that Hegel also employs). §377 opens by arguing that knowledge of spirit covers more than an individual’s particular “foibles.” Such self-knowledge “has interest and salience only for the singleton [Einzelnen], not for philosophy.” The same goes for so-called ‘study of humanity’ (Menscherkenntnis), directed at the idiosyncrasies [Eigentümlichkeiten] of singular spirits [einzelner Geister]” (§377Z/10)— unlike the deeds of “world-historical individuals” (ibid./11). Or again, as regards the “concept of spirit” (§381), Hegel adds that the genus exists for animals “only in the form of singularity”; they generate “only a singleton.” Death too comes for them in singular guise, not as the universality spirit experiences by “sublating” singularity.45 In what follows I selectively track how ‘the individual’ endures being burdened or “affected” by its finite characteristics (Eigentümlichkeiten). Thus, the “natural soul” is said to evince various geographical or ethnic features. Hegel courts charges of racism in favoring northern over southern peoples, the latter burned by the sun and—more scandalously— exhibiting animal-like skull shape.46 Yet Hegel warns against fixation on such ‘singularities,’ for example, when pedagogy serves every student’s idiosyncrasies, or when individuals court eccentricity. Hegel attends to the “alterations” found in the gradual passage from childhood to old age, in the temptations of ‘singular’ isolating business in society, or with eventual waning of interest in the world as we age—an “abstract negating of living singularity.”47 He considers sexual difference, then the soul’s “awakening” in judgment, where it distinguishes itself from itself, discerning its self-reflexive singularity (‘I’) from its substantial being (‘me’). In the 1827–8 lectures the individual is said to relate itself to itself:

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The natural individual, formerly divided against itself, is now identified with itself, but as a posited individuality, individuality as such and [then] for itself … . Individuality existing for itself and individuality in itself are one individual, in which this judgment—this difference—exists, their relation a merely superficial variation.48

So begins a radically new stage: ‘sentience’ (Empfindung). It constitutes what Hegel terms the soul’s “genuine individuality” (§399), where the mind considers its relation to its body; to its ‘mood’ (Stimmung, attuned to or determined—bestimmt—by its world); and to its various senses as well as “inner” sensations or feelings of anger, grief, shame, or laughter. ‘Sentience’ marks the transition from ‘the natural soul’ to Hegel’s second division, ‘the feeling soul,’ called in 1827–28 a “dreaming soul” (the importance of dreams soon emerges).49 Here the individual feels (rather than thinks) its embeddedness in the world—its world—framed now as a “world-soul” (§402): “we are, as actual individuality, in ourselves [an sich: à même] also a world of concrete content with an infinite periphery … as an individually determinate world-soul” (ibid./120). It is worth dwelling briefly on the uncanny moment of self-emergence, and indeed on the implications of ‘an sich’ discerned by Jean-Luc Nancy: inseparable yet not identical.50 He quotes §403: “The soul is the existing [existierende] concept, the existence of the speculative …. The soul is in itself [à même] the totality of nature, as individual soul it is a monad.” Hegel continues: “it is itself the posited totality of its particular world, so that this world is included in it, its fulfilment; in relating to this world it relates solely to itself ” (123). The monadic individual feels, is not as yet expressly aware of, the totality in which it is embedded. Despite being ‘singular,’ finite and limited, in almost Leibnizian fashion each represents a “universe determined in accordance with the soul’s individual [individuellen] standpoint” (which neatly captures how individuality is at once singular and universal).51 Each soul has countless relations with the world-totality even when not actually sensed (Leibniz’s “petites perceptions”); yet the world is not ‘outside’ it but internally linked. “The feeling soul traffics solely with its internal determinations” (§402/121)—the return of the distinction within the distinction. At the same time, its “inward individuality, its being-for-self,” must be

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“liberated,” made determinate while still retaining its inwardness, in its function as the enlivening ‘I’ (§403). “As individual the soul is altogether excluding and positing distinction within itself [in sich]” (§404/124)— not just an sich. The individual soul finds itself divided, even beholden to or possessed by another—its “genius”—, some “magic” influence or hypnotic condition perhaps, which both is and isn’t itself, but which “perturbs” (durchzittert) it. The individual feels either ‘beside itself,’ or instead, self-possessed. The latter is characterized thus: a good-hearted person [ein gemütlicher Mensch] means … one who gives free rein to the individuality of his feeling [Gefühlsindividualität], even when restricted in scope, and throws himself with his whole individuality into its particularities, entirely fulfilled by them” (§405; 127).

The rational individual, or person of “sound sense,” is aware of the complex of threads constituting its individuality, its own condition (Zustand), a complex that both limits and enables (§406). The individual simply is these threads, these mediations; it ‘overgrasps’ its material other (§406Z/143). (The inverse also holds: the individual is not some general soul but this individual, just as “love for parents, relatives, friends, etc., becomes individualized in me; for I cannot be a friend, etc. in general ….”52) “I am this whole circle of determinations: they have coalesced in my individuality … the feeling of the totality of my actuality,” the world I have yet to posit as my external being yet simply feel as my actuality (ibid./144). Hegel’s analysis appears especially fraught here. It partly recalls Phenomenology (¶¶307–8), on the ‘psychology’ of individual expression, a feeling ‘at home’ and free in its situation or circumstances while conditioned by them. In the Encyclopædia however Hegel appears to regard the feeling soul as relatively unstable, ready at any moment to fall into delusion or “alienation.” Nobody could find this step well motivated. Hegel writes that a feeling for one’s inner genius is “to this extent” (insofern) a clairvoyance (ein Hellsehen), defined as the immediate sensing or intuiting of another’s individuality as one’s own.53 He then embarks on a discussion of somnambulance (sleep-walking, but also any quasi-­ hypnotic behavior), followed by enthusiasm and especially the

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phenomenon of clairvoyance, to which he devotes several pages (144–50). He attends to similar effects, such as ‘Mesmerism’—animal magnetism, i.e., hypnotism—(150–60), before turning to madness, derangement, and dementia. All these seem disconnected from reason—from mediation or discrimination by “sober [besonnen] consciousness” of an intelligible context—so that the clairvoyant is left “at the mercy of its own contingent feeling, imagining, etc., not to mention others’ ideas” (135–6). The price of individuality is that one might lose one’s footing, with nothing to fall back on. Both individual and world feel ‘out of joint,’ ‘out of sorts.’ Paradoxically, ‘self-feeling’ (Selbstgefühl: §407ff.) promises an escape from confusion, via judgment (i.e., self-distinction): The feeling totality, as individuality, is essentially this: distinguishing itself within itself, and awakening to judgment within itself, by which it has particular feelings and stands as a subject with respect to these determinations of itself ” (§407/160).

The individual gains a stable perspective, on both objectivity and itself— itself precisely in the objective world. (Hegel, one should note, makes it more personal in referring to “my infinitely determined individuality as distinct from my substantial being”: §408Z/167.) Such self-possession or “being at home with oneself ” (Beisichsein) in turn provides a standard for assessing derangement (Verrücktheit). Hegel describes this last as fixation on an indeterminate, abstract ‘I,’ authorization to entertain any number of nonsensical ideas, all wholly disconnected from the world (my world). Insanity amounts to losing my world and myself (as with the older term “alienism,” we become other to ourselves, in a state of abstraction, beside ourselves). Humans alone have the capacity of grasping themselves in this complete abstraction of the I. That is why they have, so to speak, the privilege of folly and madness …. In the deranged consciousness the abstract universality of the immediate I—the I that just is—stands in unresolved contradiction with a representation ripped from the thus isolated totality of actuality.54

Hegel’s analysis of derangement and madness is complex. For simplicity’s sake I’d emphasize the central feature of contradiction (not merely

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difference, as with hypnosis, etc.) between “totality systematized in consciousness and particular determinacy,” inflexible and refractory (§408/161); between subjectivity and a particularity on which self-feeling fixates (§408A/161). On the one hand contradiction offers a contrast with healthy “self-possession” (Besonnenheit), an integrated “being-with-­ itself ” (Beisichsein) within its “individual” world. The cure for mental illness would then be ‘getting a grip,’ you might say, both on oneself and on mundane things. On the other hand, Hegel claims that to grasp self-­ possession we must first understand derangement (not that we must go crazy before attaining sanity, any more than criminality precedes legal order).55 That becomes clear only in the extraordinary passage that follows, on Habit. “The far-reaching implications of this section are often overlooked,” Khurana observes, although (as Andreja Novakovic remarks) “Hegel’s discussion of habit has received more scholarly attention than earlier sections.”56 Hegel reviews the dialectical shift from derangement to sanity (§410Z/187). To be integrated in the world is to find my system of subjective representations in harmony with the world they order (we might always be in error, Hegel adds). But what strikes the single soul as a contingent comparison between subject and object turns out itself to be deceptive: “for in itself the soul is absolute ideality, the overgrasping [das Übergreifende] of all its determinacies … for its own self coming to be free individuality” (ibid./188). Again, this might seem just to reinforce the norm, when in fact the danger lies in a continual relapse into abstraction, with respect either to one’s formally conceived self or to particulars taken in isolation, ‘singularized.’ Hegel speaks of the needed “overcoming of the mind’s inner contradiction found in derangement, through sublation of complete disruption [Zerissenheit] of the self.” Yet Aufhebung is no magic wand. The self looks to be suspended over an abyss, without form and void—indeed, no self at all! There simply is no stable anchorage to the world, when the world is its world, now disrupted. (Emptying out meaning or subjectivity is characteristic of Hegelian dialectic, as witness “thing-like” repetition in “Hapless Consciousness,” purging selfhood in the Terror, or “mechanical memory”—Gedächtnis—in ‘Psychology.’) At this point, in extremis, Hegel writes simply: “This being-with-one’s-own-self [Beisichselbersein]

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we call habit [Gewohnheit].” There is no proper self, at least prior to habituation as what Hegel terms its “second nature.” Habit is “the mechanism of self-feeling” (§410A/184), says Hegel, as ‘Gedächtnis’ is the mechanism of intelligence; feeling that through repetition and practice is rendered natural and automatic.57 It is “nature, because it is immediate being of the soul; a second nature, because it is an immediacy posited by the soul …” (ibid.). Habit takes a variety of forms, Hegel continues: our upright deportment, regularized seeing (beyond isolated glimpses), even thinking, when I freely “take possession of my singular self ” (that is, in becoming properly individual). “Only through this habit do I exist for myself as thinking” (ibid./186). True, one can become a slave to habit, “and it is the habit of living that brings on death … is death itself ” (ibid./187), as observed with animal life. “We are habituated to the representation of habit; although the determination of its concept is difficult,” Hegel adds.58 In the second paragraph of the Zusatz Hegel marks such fixation and incorporation via reiterated use of ‘einzeln’—singular, isolated, merely contingent detail—“merely the abstract universality produced by reflection from the repetition of many singularities [Einzelheiten] … mutually external singularities,”59 and so on. Singulars amount to natural determinacy, an indiscriminate mingling of particular and universal; it is not (pace Christoph Menke) a “perception” of the particular, rather its sheer repetition.60 And yet, when posited, the singular can become individual, and so free. Hegel argues that “one enters into a relationship not to a contingent singular sensation, representation, desire, etc., but to one’s own self, to a universal mode of action constituting one’s individuality, which is posited by oneself and has become one’s own, and appears just for that reason as free” (ibid./188). Khurana elucidates: In habit, the soul transforms particular determinations in such a way that they are situated in its general dispositions and capacities, and it articulates its generality in such a way that it takes on a particular shape (in the guise of specific habits).61

These can then acquire their own necessity, one not due to nature itself. They may be integrated into one’s self, either habitually or through reflection and attentive practice. They remain contingent, self-posited,

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the product of the self ’s autopoiesis or bootstrapping. In sum, habit “introduces stability into my feelings and thus paves the way for perceptual consciousness.”62 Habits are no longer me but mine (McCumber). Slavoj Žižek is justified in urging that madness is for Hegel a presupposition for selfhood or subjectivity. The self emerges from a welter of inchoate feeling and disordered representations. It continually repeats “the primal scene of its subjectivization” (Menke 2016, 174). Žižek will even associate this uncanny origin with Hegel’s Jena description of “pure self ” as “this night, this empty nothing, which in its simplicity contains everything … a night that is awful”—the self as pure negativity.63 Habit doesn’t so much conceal that phantasmagoria as displace it into the self ’s own production, its corporeal shaping. Žižek takes note of a strange circularity, both descriptive and normative, remaining to haunt us. He cites with approval Malabou’s linkage of corporeal traits to Hegel’s critique of physiognomy: corporeal expression which “in truth signifies nothing.” “Human habitus signifies the fact that it signifies nothing,” Malabou writes: “nature is always second nature,” recalling Pascal’s “nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”64 I can change my habits, and with good reason, yet I am formed by my habits. The same is true for ‘second nature’ in Hegelian ‘Objective Spirit’—the ethical realm—as Menke points out, citing the Philosophy of Right: “that’s how I am,” “choice, assent—posited as identical with me.”65 I always remain in part a creature of nature, even in the process of liberating myself from nature; conversely, my identity is imaginary, posited by spirit yet seemingly natural (Menke 2013). The conclusion to ‘Anthropology’—“the actual soul” (§§411–12)— finds Hegel attempting explain an antinomy between (second) nature and spirit. For even if the individual posits natural determinacies so as to integrate them into a whole, a coherent world, it still remains “merely anthropological,” as he puts it. Hegel claims that in habituated, thoroughly trained (durchgebildet) corporeity the soul fashions its body into a “singular subject for itself ”: that is, it exists in self-relation. The external body is now fashioned to signify the soul, becomes the sign of the soul, is made identical with the inner. Julia Peters nicely underscores how the soul is (in Hegel’s words) made manifest in its body, discerning its own actuality as that which overcomes rather than flees externality.66 For

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the universal is self-particularizing, while yet remaining self-identity. Therefore the determinacy of spirit is manifestation. The spirit is not one determinacy of content whose expression or externality is only a form distinct from spirit itself. Hence it does not reveal something; its determinacy and content is this very revelation [my emphasis]. Its possibility is therefore immediately infinite, absolute actuality (§383/27).

Hegel continues: “In the other, spirit reveals solely itself, its own nature; but its nature consists in self-revelation” (§383Z/28). Returning to §411: through its corporeity the soul “feels itself and makes itself felt,” as Hegel puts it (ibid./192). Its corporeity—Hegel adds, in a striking phrase—“as the soul’s work of art, has human, pathognomic and physiognomic, expression.”67 That is to say, the soul fashions and trains its body to be its own expressive medium. I’ll return to Hegel’s claim of a link to “the artists of antiquity” (§411Z/194), through their portrayal of deportment (Haltung) and gesture, not momentary facial expression, ‘pathognomics’ (Hegel repeats the observation he makes elsewhere, that the ancient Greeks wore masks onstage because they entrusted meaning to words rather than the fleeting interplay of actors’ looks: §411Z/195.) Ancient artists present and represent the soul in corporeal form: its carriage, gesture, and facial cast. A returning theme concerns how far classical art is instinctively ‘physiognomic’ in its portrayal of substantive virtue or character, proving incapable of “signifying” inner subjectivity of thought or feeling. Andreja Novakovic observes that Hegel wasn’t especially fond of ‘virtue’ (Tugend)—uncomfortably close to modern ‘virtuosity’ and moral ‘genius.’68 For the ancient Greeks, heroic action required exceptional qualities. Modern life does not; it demands mere “rectitude.” (In the Aesthetics ‘Tugend’ enters as a discrete norm of portrayal in medieval literature, via formal displacement or imitation of the classical Ideal.) Similarly with ‘character’: “Only by character does the individual attain its stable determinacy,” we read in the Anthropology (§395Z); when Hegel speaks there of ‘physiognomy’ it is in a general sense rather than Lavater’s pseudo-science of determinate correlations between external traits and inner disposition. If by ‘character’ Hegel means modern firmness of resolution or disposition, that differs from ancient ‘character’ (ethos),

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which comprises a substantive identity between individual agent and universal “power” or norm. We might interpret actualizing the soul as opening up a certain intersubjective space, I’d argue, since its habituation is also—tacitly at least—a signifying and communication with others (in fairness Hegel doesn’t develop this idea). The soul “makes itself felt” (sich zu fühlen gibt), not in isolation but for others.69 Subjectivity empties itself out, to the point of madness, but in consequence those indifferent, meaningless signs may serve as means of communicative self-manifestation—an entry into the space of reasons, as Pippin might say.70 Habits allow me not just to exist in the external world, but also to signal and share my inner being (character, state of mind, even feelings). Hegel suggests further that acquiring habituated skills in writing or hand gestures allows the easy expression of inner thought, feeling, etc., when we infuse singular details with universal meaning. Habits underlie conventions, “a universal mode of acting to be handed on to others too, a rule” (ibid./194). In short, the individual soul promises to acquire a public and settled aspect, so escaping the spectral threat of its night-like isolation down the ‘mine.’ A last note: §411Z sketches the reciprocal relations between, on the one hand, “voluntary embodiments of the mental”—which habit then renders mechanical—and on the other, “involuntary embodiments of what is sensed”—which may be accompanied by consciousness and freedom (ibid./196). Voice thereby becomes speech, no longer simply an involuntary exclamation of soul; laughter shifts from involuntary reaction to deliberate expression, a laughing at something, perhaps with others’ involvement. More to the point is the dialectic between physiognomy and pathognomy, the latter applicable to transient feelings, the former to stable character traits. Feelings may be rendered more permanent and characteristic, hence physiognomic; set features can in turn be enlivened or transformed by momentary emotions, facial creases enlivened in a smile or frown. Hegel cautions nevertheless that what may seem a regular correspondence of physiognomic features with inner traits might well prove deceptive—certainly no science of the sort Lavater had proposed.71 “Humans are known much less by their outward appearance than by their actions,” Hegel concludes, when even words might be used also to deceive (ibid./197), echoing the Phenomenology. The freedom of the

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abstract ‘I’ can regard its (second) nature as “a world external to it,” a world in which it relates simply to itself, as consciousness, Hegel continues (§412/197). But the break with nature, via consciousness and freedom, is ambiguous and even paradoxical. “The liberation from the power of second nature [habit] first makes autonomy [freedom] possible, but is itself no act of autonomy,” Menke observes.72 * * * (3) Other instances in the Encyclopædia: After ‘individuality’ specific to soul, the term occurs sporadically, and seldom with vital import. For example: (a) Under the rubric of ‘Psychology’ it enters in §455 as imagination (Einbildungskraft), specifically “reproductive” (rather than “productive”) imagination, or “the emergence of images from the I’s own inwardness” (ibid./262). “But solely in the subject—in whom the image is preserved— does the image have individuality, in which determinations of its content are interlinked.” Images issue from the “universal mine” of intelligence but acquire a higher universality in representation (Vorstellung), the vital medium (Mitte) between being and universality. Intelligence furnishes the (given) image with universal meaning. Hegel seldom employs ‘individuality’ in the remainder of theoretical and practical spirit; ‘singularity’ is more common. (b) In the third section—‘Ethical Life’ (Sittlichkeit)—Hegel mentions the ‘individual’ with regard to its disposition or duties, and even “individuality [so far as it] expresses its particular character, temperament, etc., as virtues” (§516/319).73 We may compare it with the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, where Hegel describes the honor of great individuals as standing out from their circumstances, or the action represented in ancient drama as heroic individuality, or individuality found in the family, in chivalrous deeds, or in duties to the state.74 More significant is the treatment of marriage, under “die Sittlichkeit” (§142ff.), the “ethical powers” holding sway over the life of individuals (§145/294). Individuals generally are said to belong to ethical substance rather than to “a basic singularity”: §156/305. For the family, ethical

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“disposition is to have self-consciousness of its individuality within this unity as essentiality that has being in and for itself ”; the individual exists less in its own person than as family member (§158/307). Love is the feeling of oneness with another, which involves “the most immense [ungeheure] contradiction” in self-awareness. That is, the individual in love wishes precisely not to be independent but to count for another as the other counts for it. Love both produces and resolves the contradiction, however; it functions syllogistically, mediated by a third term.75 No legal right follows from love, however. Right enters—as “determinate singularity”—only with the family’s dissolution, as the individual enters civil society. Marriage is neither a legal matter merely, nor just the feeling of love. Rather, it is essentially an ethical (sittlich) relationship —“rechtlich sittliche Liebe” (§161Z/310: Griesheim)—involving not just particular inclination but also free consent. Both parties agree to “constitute one person [e i n e Person] and give up natural and singular personhood in this union” (§162/310–11). Moreover, the agreement is ratified in a written contract, abstract words (syllogistic mediation). As opposed to modern (melonndrama, where everything comes down to contingency (§162A/311)—perhaps felt as significant for these people, but not for everybody—, “(t)he ethical in marriage consists in the consciousness of this union as a substantial end, and hence in love, trust, and the sharing of the whole of individual existence” (§163/313). Paul Kottman is right to say that Hegel’s is an historical rather than general account of ‘married love.’ It reflects the recent emergence of mutual recognition in institutional arrangements, without reducing to Romantic love. That is so despite our contemporary discomfort with Hegel’s assertion of a ‘natural’ hierarchy (the husband as head and representative of the family: §171/324), or his notorious lines (§166/319) on the “undivided individuality” of female and male norms—epitomized in Sophocles’ Antigone—whereby woman is “individualized” as plant, man as animal.76 But the deeper question is whether Hegel himself credited this naturalized picture, or saw it as just reflecting the way society (ancient or modern) treated woman (and man). David MacGregor advocates the latter, arguing that Hegel learned much from Hippel’s writings on the invidious position women have come to occupy in society, even citing Hegel’s “feminist vision.”77 In that perspective, Kottman follows a line

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pioneered by Hippel and Hegel: marriage can imprison yet also liberate its partners. Kottman himself would accept various institutional arrangements beyond the nuclear family; what counts for him is that marriage is normative rather than merely ‘natural.’78 To summarize: ‘individual’ connotes a process of concrete mediation, the embedding in a context neither abstract nor instinctual but reflective and promoting freedom. Hegel’s text consistently distinguishes ‘singletons’ from integral ‘individuals.’ A discerning translator like Nisbet will sometimes signal this key point by adding ‘Einzelheit’ in parenthesis— even as he retains ‘individual’ in the text. The weightiest instances of ‘individuality’ in ‘Objective Spirit’ occur with regard to the state: “one individual,” relative to other individuals (§537). The state allows freedom within its bounds: an “independence of individual particularity” (viz., to pursue one’s own ends) as well as “inward freedom” of convictions (§539). In the Remark to §541, having noted that the state subsumes ‘singularity’ to ‘universality’ when balancing legislative against executive (administrative/judicial) power, Hegel declares: “Individuality is the supreme and pervasive [durchdringende] determinant in the organization of the state” (ibid./338). More to the point, political subjectivity turns on “actual individuality, the will of one resolving individual—monarchy” (§542/339), “the individuality of the monarch” as opposed to “the atomism of singular wills” (§542Z/339). Analogous statements are found in the Philosophy of Right, which also warns against confusing the state with civil society, so reducing citizens to the level of singular interests. Rather, each individual owes a duty to the state and to the ethical orders of family or corporation.79 Thus, “the state in its individuality is an excluding one which accordingly has relations to others…” (§271), or “this absolutely decisive moment of the whole therefore is not individuality in general but one individual, the monarch” (§279).80 It is difficult to parse Hegel’s considered views on the monarch’s proper powers: individuality wears thin, as it were. Dudley Knowles discerns variant readings: “hard”—real executive power over appointments and the like—versus “soft”—a merely formal role (as with the modern British crown) exercising merely token powers, even personifying what Žižek dubs a Lacanian “quilting point.”81 (I won’t enter into the controversy as

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to how Hegel understands or values state sovereignty, what Locke termed royal ‘prerogative,’ on which Locke himself equivocates. Hegel supports hereditary monarchy, to avoid dissension or prolonged debate and ensure undivided authority, yet with no hint of “negative” or veto power.82) §545 refers to “a singular and naturally determinate people,” and to the state as “a singular individual excluding other such individuals,” their relations marked by wilfulness (Willkür) and contingency, and by violence tending towards the condition (Zustand) of war. “Warfare shows the substance of the state in its individuality proceeding to abstract negativity” (§546/346), when the particular independence of “singulars,” tied to their possessions and their physical lives, is shown up as a nullity, although they might still find universal meaning in sacrifice and acts of bravery (as in Jena III). It seems doubtful that Hegel would countenance putting the state on a military footing, let alone that he would champion the “necessity” of war. Warfare was (I’d add) about to change its character: technological advances, the fading importance of the battlefield as an arena for displays of bravery, plus the growing invisibility of ‘the enemy’ itself: all would by mid-century effectively purge warfare of ‘individuality.’ (c) Let me jump to the paragraph preceding Absolute Spirit, on relations between religion and state. Hegel notes first that individuals sometimes face a hard choice between obeying the law and following their religious conscience, but that law and religion ultimately cannot be separated: revolution without reformation is inconceivable (§552/360). Whereas Plato decreed that political form should issue from the philosophical Idea, Hegel counters that this is to overlook thinking subjects, those who actually represent the Idea in their minds. “This further individuality, the abode of the free existence of universal substance, is the self of the thinking mind” (ibid./362). The import (Gehalt) characteristic of natural things will never find its individuality in mere form. “Human import” by contrast is free spirit itself, and it attains existence in spirit’s self-consciousness, in ‘thought thinking itself ’ (Hegel prizes Aristotle even above Plato here).83 Although in Hegel’s Aesthetics ‘individuality’ is ubiquitous, it barely features in section III, Absolute Spirit. With art, Hegel’s tone isn’t as scornful as in Jena System III, where he decried modern trends (formalism, subjectivism, naturalism). The Encyclopædia account shows more

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forbearance, its focus on the Ideal of classical art and its ‘interpenetration’ of form and content.84 In 1827 Hegel for the first time separates art from religion, though it remains the cult of beauty: art presents gods as one with nature, accessible via sensory intuition (Anschauung): §557. In 1830 Hegel adds a new paragraph (§558) on the inherent significance of given configurations (Gestaltungen) of nature, preeminently the human figure; significance that art “must surmise (ahnen) and inhabit (innehaben).”85 He cites Anthropology §411, the celebrated passage on corporeal expression as implicitly “the soul’s artwork” (see above). This takes care of the principle of imitation of nature, he comments: of external nature, that is, rather than “as a characteristic, meaningful nature-form signifying spirit” (§558A/368).86 Yet Hegel straightaway qualifies his praise (§559). Absolute spirit cannot be “explicated” by the singularity of artistic shaping (Gestaltens); its one-sided immediacy amounts to “something made by the artist,” conditioned by his “inspiration,” natural “genius” or the “particular subject.” “The work of art therefore is just as much a work of free wilfulness, and the artist master of god” §560/369).87 §562 claims that ‘romantic’ art—receiving its first mention here, in 1827—may present divinity in its subjective inwardness and depth, beyond sensuous shape, even beyond beauty. In ‘Manifest Religion’ (Christianity) ‘singularity’ comes into its own, surpassing Greek anthropomorphism. The moment of “concrete singularity” is realized as the actual Son, Jesus Christ (§567), who grounds opposing moments in the “universal unity of universal and singular essentiality … spirit living and present in the world” (§569/376).88 Hegel distinguishes Christ’s essential singularity from the “worldly singularity” typical of Hindu deities (in the Bhagavad Gita), a feature Hegel exploits in demarcating pantheism from philosophy (§573A/386), despite his admiration for Rumi. Jesus constitutes a special case—uniquely unique, you might say. “This individual… is this unique one [dies Einzige],” Hegel announces in the Philosophy of Religion. Logically God could have had just the one son, and in an astonishing apothegm Hegel adds: “‘Once’ is conceptually ‘always’ [‘Einmal’ ist im Begriff ‘allemal’], and the subject must without option have recourse to one subjectivity.”89 He declares the resort to “immediate singularity to be the most beautiful aspect of the Christian religion.”

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Hegel deems philosophy “the unity of art and religion, as of art’s mode of intuition, external in form, its subjective production and splintering [Zersplittern] of substantial content into many independent shapes,…” being held together in religion’s totality (§572). How that is effected is left unclear (I offer some ideas at the close of chapter 9). * * * A final set of proleptic remarks: In a larger perspective we may view the philosophy of nature as a pageant of gradual revelation to the point where nature is seen to become spirit (or mind), when we observe a second graduated series of revelations, from anthropology to objective spirit, up to modern society and state. Significantly, the human figure seems analogous to the artwork proper (as noted in the ‘Anthropology’). What remains to be seen is how and why artworks might lay claim to a decisive advance beyond that standpoint (viz., the human body—its eyes especially—as window on the soul, presentiment of human rationality). Hegel’s Aesthetics offers, presumably, a way of understanding how the artwork promises more than a “thoughtful regard” upon human formations, not just to “surmise and inhabit” their hidden significance. In short, how might art comprise reflection on such reflective/reflexive thinking. Crucially, for Hegel, this will involve beauty, in a manner yet to be discussed. How does—in Julia Peters’ phrase—the ‘manifesting’ of corporeal manifestation work, in philosophical regard? Further, how does the implicit rationality of such expression and self-expression appear in aesthetic light, specifically as beauty (Schönheit)—understanding ‘appearance’ (Erscheinung) as something more than verbal play on ‘Schein’/‘schön’? These questions subtend much of my last chapter.

Notes 1. §375Z (Hegel 1969, 9: 536/Hegel 1970a, 441). 2. J.F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), sometimes called the “father of physical anthropology,” famously sorted the five ‘varieties’ of humans based on skin color (white, yellow, red, brown, jet black). His championing of

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human universality is less well-known. For a clear account of Hegel’s approach to race, see de Laurentiis 2014, esp. 626–32. She defends Blumenbach, especially from poor English translations. Blumenbach did adjudge whiteness the most beautiful, presaging Winckelmann’s celebration of classical statuary (Smith 2020, 130). 3. Encyclopædia, §406Z/143 4. Carroll 1962, 75. Humpty Dumpty addresses the unruliness of words, especially verbs. 5. Hegel tracks the shift in science from basing geology on physics and chemistry—hence separate from organics—to a “biophysical” approach, understanding geology as the initial stage of an integral telluric life process. On this see Cinzia Ferrini’s outstanding contribution to Ferrini 2010, 119–35. 6. It is unclear who among his students might have appreciated Hegel’s quip addressing rumors about town that he had compared the stars above to a rash on the body “where the skin erupts into a countless mass of red spots” (§341Z/365—cf. 268Z). Heinrich Heine remembered (or invented) something similar in his tale of Hegel’s sarcastic rejoinder to Heine’s wonder at the night firmament: “the stars are just leprous spots glowing on the sky.” See Confessions (1854) in Heine 2007, 206. After Heine’s protested, Hegel “just stared at me with his pale eyes and said cuttingly, ‘You took care of your sick mother, and you didn’t poison your brother. Do you really expect a tip?’” Hegel looked round anxiously for fear he’d been overheard, but “it was only Heinrich Beer,” his whist partner. The story reminds us of Hegel’s occasional resort to “double-voicing.” 7. In syllogistic form, U-S-P: the singular being unites particular nature with universal genus. 8. Syllogistically, P-U-S. 9. The particular unites singularity with the abstract genus of inorganic nature (continual regeneration, over and over). Or the cycle of particular desire and its finite satisfaction produces more singletons, indirectly maintaining the genus: S-P-U. 10. The status of ‘life’ (Leben) in Hegel’s philosophy, especially as he shifted from an exclusive focus on ‘life’ to its union with ‘spirit’ (Geist), is complex. See Thomas Khurana’s Introduction to Khurana 2013, 19–21, with helpful references. Contributors tend to discuss animate and spirited rather than vegetal life.

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11. Koerner 1993, 492. She highlights the irony that this a-sexual theory consorts with Goethe’s gendering of botany as a scientific—albeit amateur—pursuit suitable for young ladies. 12. Förster 2012, chapter 14, 351–72. Schelver left Jena after Napoleon’s troops smashed his botanical collections. The story is well told in Förster, 289–90. 13. The entire section is permeated by the term ‘individuality’ (twenty instances) or its variants (seventy or more). For a representative modern angle see Wilson and Barker 2018. In his classic “A Matter of Individuality,” David Hull proposed counting species (not just organisms) as “spatiotemporally localized individuals, historical entities” (Hull 1978, 335). 14. Spencer 1864, vol. 1, chapter VI, §74, 206. Spencer continues: “All we can do is make the best practical compromise.” And then: “a biological individual is any concrete whole having a structure which enables it, when placed in appropriate conditions, to continuously adjust its internal relations to external relations, and so to maintain the equilibrium of its functions” (207). Hegel likewise identifies functional interdependence and systemic integration as principal criteria for organic individuality. 15. Criteria I borrow from Gilbert et al. 2012 (“A Symbiotic View of Life: we have never been individuals”), 327–33. Cf. 336: “We are all lichens.” 16. In The Botanic Garden (1791) Erasmus Darwin wrote: “A tree is properly speaking a family or swarm of buds, each bud being an individual plant.” Quoted in Derek J. Skillings’ “Life is not Easily Bounded”: Skillings 2017. 17. Mancuso 2015, 36: “A tree is much more like a colony of bees than an individual animal.” Compare 125: modularity allows plants to survive attack, since individual parts are inessential. 18. Cf. §344Z/377: “it is not genuine subjectivity, rather its individuality always fragments into its particularity, so that it does not hold onto itself as an infinite being-for-self.” The true self would both relate to and distinguish itself from its physical environment. (Varela and Maturana call it ‘autopoiesis in the physical space’). 19. As a criterion demarcating animal from plant life, motility dates to Hegel’s 1805 lectures. See Harris 1983, 458–9, on the shift from “singular” to “individual” organism to describe “this animal.” 20. On the difference between ‘Grenze’ and ‘Schranke’ (boundary), see Hegel 2010, 98–104 (di Giovanni renders ‘Schranke’ as ‘restriction’). As with

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the horizon, limit cannot be discerned. All finite entities ‘ought’ (sollen) to surpass their defining limit. 21. Hegel 2007c, 102. Great artworks are made by men (101). 22. Of course, stereotyping plant existence as vague and ambiguous—it is and is not individuality—might be construed as another way of disparaging ‘feminine’ vagueness, versus ‘masculine’ firmness in drawing the line. Here again, Schlegel’s Lucinde—or rather, Julius’s condescension towards Lucinde—offers a parallel. 23. Marder 2012a, chapter 9: “Hegel’s Grapes,” 164ff. Elsewhere the author recommends ‘plant-thinking,’ on the model of photosynthesis: coexistence with the environment rather than its exploitation. See Marder 2013 (Plant-Thinking), plus 2017 (Energy Dreams), appealing to Hegel’s formulation of power as “actuality” (rather than “potentiality,” which just feeds instrumentalist habits). 24. Cf. §346Z/395. “In the plant these processes [of syllogistic inference] are not distinguished in the way they are in the animal but collapse into one another, and precisely this makes for the difficulty in expounding vegetable organism.” The theorist draws distinctions which are promptly deemed non-operative, because plants are not self-determining. 25. Swiss botanist Carl Nägeli first identified the meristem in the mid-­ nineteenth century. 26. See Marder 2012b, 1365–72. Darwin wrote a book on the topic (1880). Hope Jahren (Jahren 2016, 191) says that plants “travel through time, enduring one event after another, and in this sense, winter is a particularly long trip.” In this figurative sense of ‘travel,’ trees ‘prepare’ for winter by conserving sugar and water. 27. §350/430. §274 of the 1817 edition is almost identical in its wording; Hegel 2001, 160. The reference to §163 highlights the role of “the subjective concept” or “the concept as such.” The concept in turn comprises immediate singularity (this or that singular being), but equally what is actual and active, the concept posited as totality. The strange wording “idealized into its members” indicates the active processing of the given. Catherine Malabou (2004, 60) maintains that Hegel borrows Cuvier’s or Bichat’s idea of ‘contractility’ for such adaptation, but since German lacked the word, he substituted ‘idealize.’ She even claims (59) that the “entire Philosophy of Nature is organized according to the logic of this contraction,” notably via ‘habitus.’ The animal “contracts” habits, so inhabiting nature.

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28. The Phenomenology emphasizes the individual’s threefold shaping, sundering (Absonderung) from “inorganic” life, and procreation. Life is inverted when the individual separates itself from inorganic nature (typically by consuming it); then comes the inversion of that inversion in the individual’s procreating another individuality—and life continues (Hegel 1977a ¶171). The Logic features an unusual chapter on ‘Life’— the idea of life—under the rubric ‘the living individual,’ where we read that the concept acquires reality as minded (ensouled) body in the form of singularity (Hegel 2010, 677–9/6, 474–5). “This individuality is… the impulse [Trieb] to posit as real difference the otherwise abstract moment of conceptual determinacy, …”—the impulse to produce and reproduce itself (681/476), so begetting the Gattung. 29. In Hegel’s Concept of Life (2020) Karen Ng attends to the logical ‘idea of life,’ though by naturalizing it in almost Schellingian manner as logic implicitly active in life. She also gives priority to reflective judgment (of inner purposiveness) over syllogistic inference. I argue that individuality shows itself capable of integrating body and soul, nature and spirit. It harbors the concrete resources to mediate between singular and universal in a manner more informal than inferential reasoning: hors catégorie. Responses to Ng’s book may be found in European Journal of Philosophy 2021, notably Thomas Khurana, “This other life that knows itself as life” (Khurana 2021). Cf. Jensen Suther’s incisive comments (Suther 2020). 30. ‘Individualität’ appears over twelve times, cognates even more often. Compare Hegel’s Berlin lectures on logic (Hegel 2015), where Karl Hegel observes of the genus: “Singular individuality yields itself up [gibt sich selbst auf]” (799/Hegel 2008, 217). Cf. Hegel 2010, 687/485: “the sublation of singular individualities, still mutually particular,” though in themselves universal. They “disperse into their genetic universality [ihre Gattungsallgemeinheit].” But the genus becomes actual when “the moment of negative unity and individuality” is posited in it: propagation [Fortpflanzung] of the living species [Geschlechter]” (ibid., 688/486). 31. On Hegel’s relation to Aristotle, see Matthias Haase, “Life and Mind,” in Khurana 2013, 69–109, at 77ff., 103ff. 32. For 1817, see Hegel 2001, §280: “Gestaltungsprocess innerhalb ihrer selbst,” a phrase that reappears in 1830, Hegel 1992: §356/459. 33. Quoting Thomas Khurana (2013, 155–93, 176). For a good summary of the three moments, 176–80.

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34. Quoting Cinzia Ferrini (2009, 108). She cites Hegel’s early adoption of Bichat’s ideas, against both a reductionism (living through chemistry) and the Romanticism of Schelling and his school, Steffens especially (life is poetry). 35. §365/481—cited by Ferrini as evincing Hegel’s reliance on empirical proof (erweisen), preceding the philosopher’s attempt to square it with the concept. That attempt focusses on the living being’s own resources for drawing nourishment, instead of reductively foisting abstract models upon dumb nature. See Ferrini, “Knowing phenomena” (2004)—neat title—, 143. 36. Hegel 2007, §381/Hegel 1969, 10: 20. As such the sexual relation is the acme of animate nature. Even so, “the genus exists for the animal merely in the form of singularity [Einzelheit]”—it is felt, not yet known. Likewise, it brings forth another singularity, while death appears as singular rather than being abolished, as with true subjectivity (ibid./20). Subjectivity emerges with a capacity to pronounce “I.” Later (ibid./24) Hegel comments that natural generation is just the onset of ‘being-for-­self ’…, “still hampered by the form of singularity and externality.” 37. Khurana, “Life and Autonomy,” Khurana 2013, 179. 38. §369 in the 1830 edition. Here and in §370 Hegel plays on the ambiguity between static or asexual singular, and productive or formative individual. We die as singular, yet survive in our individual genetic line. Martin Krahn argues persuasively that, despite reversing the order of sexuality and genus between 1827 and 1830, Hegel was truer to his principles in the earlier formulation (and closer to contemporary evolutionary biology). Sexuality precedes the emergence of genus, inasmuch as it both presupposes species differentiation and individualizes it. See Krahn 2019, adducing David Hull on species individuation (Hull 1978). 39. An idea drawn perhaps from Lamarck’s theory of indifferent ‘milieu.’ See Mitchell 2013, 153. 40. By contrast, works mixing generic distinctions—poetic prose or prosaic poetry, tone-poems, etc.—contravene the uniqueness (Eigentümlichkeit) of art: “for genius can produce a genuine artwork only by expressing a definite individuality” (§368Z/512). 41. In his remarkable This Life (2019), Martin Hägglund proposed that the “second trait of natural freedom is the ability of a living being to bear a negative self-relation,” in striving to be itself despite adversity or disease (Hägglund 2019, 185). He draws explicitly on Hegel’s Philosophy of

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Nature, §§ 371–4. The third trait Hägglund lists (186–7) comprises the capacity in certain animals (but not plants) to play, to display their “constructive impulse” (Bildungstrieb) or “artistic impulse” (Kunsttrieb: §365Z, #3): e.g., nest-building, birdsong. They belong to our natural lives, Hägglund suggests. Humans endure their singular state in order eventually to become individual and ultimately free, exercising their “spiritual freedom” (Hägglund, 187–92). Note that §366 refers only to the “single individual” (einzelner Individuum): in satisfying its desires it finds the “universal returned to itself, which has individuality immediately present [an ihm]” (§366Z/498). Pace the birds, their song is only implicitly individual or free, not yet full ‘artistry.’ 42. §371Z/525. Hegel mentions a third form—disease of the soul—which, while animal in part, belongs also to ‘Anthropology,’ where it is treated at length. 43. Cf. Theunissen 1978, 352–3, citing Hegel 6: 465/Hegel 2010, 532, on the absolute power of the universal (concept) over its reality or other, compared with divine love. The question is whether God is stern or generous. 44. §411: Hegel 1969, 10: 192/Hegel 2007, 136. 45. The passage is even more tortuous than most. Animal death stems from the necessary contradiction between singularity [Einzelheit] and genus, but since it is not the sustaining [erhaltende] sublation of singularity, only its annihilating negation, it does not produce universality that is in and for itself, universal singularity in and for itself, or a subjectivity with itself for its object (§381Z/21). By contrast, actual negation/sustenance of singularity—e.g., the minded (“idealized”) human body—is universal, hence individual. (The entire dialectic is obscured by translating ‘Einzelheit’ as ‘individuality.’) Much of this Zusatz concerns the “affliction” of human existence by its “mere singularity.” Individuality is the subject’s inhabiting of its body, making the body its own—itself. 46. Hegel’s racist tendencies should not be ignored. See DeCaroli 2006. I return to Hegel’s bias when considering his appeal to Petrus Camper’s ideas on the “facial angle.” Cf. de Laurentiis 2014 for a reevaluation of Hegel (Blumenbach too).

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47. §396Z/78, 86. The sequence of “ages of man” begins with an “undifferentiated unity of genus and individuality, with the abstract emergence of immediate singularity, with the birth of the individual” (ibid./76); “the unborn child has as yet no proper individuality” (78). (These are the sole instances of ‘Individualität.’) The many alterations the individual undergoes during its lifespan are all “singular,” merely finite details or traits (a detail the translation misses). Cf. the 1822 “Fragment zur Philosophie des Geistes” (11: 535): the sequence of the “ages of man,” from the immediate, distinction-less unity of genus and individuality, through grades of singularity, to the abstract negation of singularity in death. 48. Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1827–8), Hegel 2007c, 103. Cf. Hegel 1969, 11: 538–9: “in its [the soul’s] individuality… particularity is now posited, and for the soul.” 49. Hegel 2007c, 124ff. The translator Robert Williams supplies a helpful note (110–11) on the differences between ‘Empfindung’ and ‘Gefühl.’ The one tends to passivity, while the second sustains a contrast of self and nature in ‘self-feeling,’ when the individual situates itself (ambiguously) with respect to nature. 50. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Identity and Trembling,” in Nancy 1993, 9–35, esp. 18 f., 396 (note 12). The translator remarks Nancy’s use of ‘à même’ to render ‘an sich,’ like the ‘ad’ in ‘adjacent’—impossible to convey in English but “carrying its ghost of some nesting transcendence, of ‘inseparable from, yet not identical to.’” (Holmes quotes a letter in which Nancy recounts his body’s rejection of a heart transplant, “à meme my body!”) Nancy plays with the idea of “imparting” self in the shift from sense to feeling: parturition, partition, judgment (Ur-teilen), together announce the awakening of consciousness to itself. 51. “Initially feeling individuality is indeed a monadic individual…,” although still immediate and so passive (§405/124). 52. Ibid./144—almost the sole mention of ‘love’ in the ‘Anthropology.’ It returns with ‘Ethical Life’ and the ‘Family’ at §518: “The unity of [sexual] love and the disposition of trust” (320). See below: the Philosophy of Right is brought to bear on the subtle dialectic of singular and individual status within the family unit. 53. Hegel emphasizes that this unruly individual is not subject to the mediating conditions experienced by “sober consciousness,” when consciousness “is restricted in its own external singularity.”

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54. Ibid./168–9. ‘Isolated’ is Miller’s translation of ‘vereinzelten,’ preferable to Inwood’s ‘individualized’ (Inwood is forced to use ‘isolated’ a page later). Indeed ‘singular fixation’ seems to be the hallmark of madness as Hegel frames it, while individuality would be its avoidance (cf. 174, “the mind sticks fast in a singular, merely subjective representation”). 55. §408Z/163—referring to the Philosophy of Right. Criminality is a background condition of lawful action. 56. Op.cit./183 note. See Novakovic 2015, 417. Khurana finds an exception in Catherine Malabou, overlooking multiple sources: McCumber 1990, Moland 2003, plus various contributions to Stern 2013, notably Lewis, Lumsden, Magee, and Mowat. More recently: Peters 2015, 20–31; Novakovic 2015, the comprehensive Novakovic 2017, chapter 1, “Habit,” 20–68; and not least, Magrí 2016 on the “tension” in habitus between apprehension and spontaneity (81). Žižek also cites Malabou on the importance of habit in defining the ‘self.’ See Gabriel/Žižek 2009, 99–118, replicated in Žižek 2012. 57. Menke 2013 cites ‘Mechanism’ in the Science of Logic (Hegel 1969, 6: 410/Hegel 2010, 631): “Spiritual mechanism, like its material counterpart, also consists in the things connected in spirit remaining external to one another and to spirit. A mechanical mode of representation, a mechanical memory [Gedächtnis], a habit, a mechanical mode of acting, mean that the pervasion and presence characteristic of spirit are lacking in what spirit grasps or does…. The freedom of individuality is still lacking in it…” (translation amended). We might say that habit-assecond-nature is analogous to mechanistic system, when individuality does not yet characterize subjectivity. 58. (§410Z/187). The original reads: “Wir sind an die Vorstellung der Gewohnheit gewöhnt.” We are habituated both to habits themselves and to the idea of habit, in almost circular (Humean) fashion. But can’t there be a deeper rationale? Hegel maintains that there is one, even though it verges on natural contingency. 59. Ibid./188 (cf. Inwood, Hegel 2007, 134, habitually rendering ‘singular’ as individual,’ as Menke 2013 notes). ‘Singular’ occurs more than fifteen times in this Zusatz. 60. Menke 2013, 39. Of course, there are degrees of perception. Compare Dobby the elf: “Master has given a sock …. Master gave it to Dobby … and Dobby—Dobby is free!” 61. Khurana 2013, 186.

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62. Novakovic 2017, 33. She cites McCumber 1990, 158. 63. Žižek 2012, 353. He notes Hegel’s appeal to the same metaphor in the section on ‘Psychology,’ describing ‘intelligence’ “as this nocturnal pit [nächtlichen Schacht] in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations” (§453/122). The ‘I’ as pit or shaft recalls §403A, the ‘feeling soul.’ See too Donougho 1982. 64. Malabou 2004, 67, plus 57. Cf. Pensées (Pascal 1966, 32), VII, #126, 93. “Signifying nothing” is Hegel’s take on how we should understand the ‘discipline’ of Physiognomics. See ¶318 of the Phenomenology: it is “for individuality … merely a sign indifferent to what it signifies, for that reason in truth signifying nothing.” Malabou takes paradox to an extreme. If Anthropology deals with how the soul expresses itself through its corporeal habits, and habits are in turn a “reduplication” of nature, as second nature, what we get is the “reduplication of reduplication.” Hence “human habit appears as the passage from second nature to a second second nature” (Malabou, 68)! Less paradoxically, physiognomics naturalizes what the soul had already naturalized, tacitly, via habitus. 65. Menke, 2016, 171–2, citing Philosophy of Right §147Z.  Cf. Menke 2013, 41. Inversely, what looks like Sartrian mauvaise foi could as easily be understood as honest self-knowledge. 66. Peters 2015, 25–6. In her words, “the manifestation manifests itself—it is essentially self-manifestation …. One can therefore say that the actual soul is a self-signifying sign.” 67. See epigraph (plus note 45), and below, on Encyclopædia §558. Malabou 2004, 68–9, remarks on the phrase, “artwork of the soul.” So does Peters (2015, 24–6), although in a very different spirit: she sees no problem in principle with such a “self-signifying” gesture. 68. Novakovic 2017, 45, citing Philosophy of Right, §150Z. 69. Peters hints at that, especially in her emphasis on ‘manifestation’ as self-­ manifesting (26–7), and in taking it a stage further with her argument (63–7) that the ‘self-signifying sign’ of Greek art amounts to an appeal to the sympathetic spectator. She cites Hilmer 1997, who makes it more explicit. 70. Pippin’s reply to Žižek (Pippin 2012a, –13, 11–12) turns first to Žižek (347–8) on the empty or virtual ‘self.’ Pippin advocates an alternative approach via “a possible space of reasons, into which persons may be socialized, and within which constant self-correction, self-‘negation,’ is possible” (Pippin, 12).

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71. §411Z/196–7. This conforms to Hegel’s polemic against Physiognomics in the Phenomenology, although we’ll observe his ambivalent treatment of the Greek profile—Camper’s “facial angle”—in the section on classical sculpture; Hotho mentions Camper, ms. 224, and there is a sketch at 225 (affixed later). See DeCaroli 2006, esp. 138 and 143–50. On Goethe’s equivocations—and on the bearing of ‘individuality’—see Donougho 2020a. 72. Menke 2016, 248. He sees an unrelenting struggle between two forces: habit (second nature) and arbitrary (“free”) choice. 73. Note that §§515–6 use ‘singular’ to capture abstract relation to universality, ‘individual’ to refer to concrete disposition, character, etc. or identity as family member. §519 speaks of “exclusive singularity” of “personality” which (through marriage) becomes “one person.” As autonomous actors in civil society, each is also to be considered ‘individual’; see §§517, 520, 527–8, 531. 74. Hegel 1991b, §§71Z (great individuals), 118A (drama), 158 (family), 167 (chivalry), 261Z (duties to the state). There are minor instances too: honoring of individuality in contract law (§71), individual preference in contractual exchange of goods (§80), individual consent to the death penalty (§100), a modern individual “right” whether in love or in salvation (§124). There is even an echo of the Phenomenology’s critique of an individual ‘conscience’ fleeing actuality (§138) or living in ‘hypocrisy’ (“das Eigenste des Individuums”: §140/267). But Hegel refers also to “the authority of my singular [einzelnen] conviction” among “countless individual convictions” (ibid./275),—awarding priority to the first over the second. 75. “Marriage is the ‘middle term’ of a syllogism that mediates between the individual [sic] inclination and the demands of the universal institution”: Daub 2012, 204. Citing Philosophy of Right (Daub, 202–5), he conflates ‘individual’ with ‘singular.’ 76. Zusatz due to Hotho/Griesheim. A discrepancy surfaces as between “natural” right and historical or institutional arrangement. Hegel’s citing of ancient tragedy doesn’t justify gender differentiation within modern family or social institutions; the opposite in fact—perhaps Hegel’s point, after all! Pinkard alludes to Hegel’s conventionally bourgeois attitudes to gender relations; Pinkard 2000, 191–2, 314–15, 711. But perhaps this is another instance of “the hidden Hegel”; he underscores their arbitrariness.

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77. MacGregor 1992, 108; on Hippel and Hegel, 97ff. MacGregor’s neglected book is overdue for reappraisal (as are Hippel’s writings). 78. Kottman attempts to articulate what the paradox of modern love might mean in practice. ‘Lovemaking’ “is a historical achievement because it requires the failure of sexual reproduction and sexual domination in order to ‘make sense of ’ the deepest threats to sense” (Kottman 2017a, 163). Reliable contraception, plus recognition of the freedom of others (recognition also of its contrary, sexism), have profoundly changed social relations. 79. §258R/399. Hegel excoriates theorists who start from “the singularity of individuals” (ibid./401, 403), when in fact “singular individuals” are but moments of the whole. §302 (342/471) holds that estates mediate between government and the spheres within which individuals operate. 80. Hegel 1991b, 304/Hegel 1969, 7:431; also 317/444. Hegel seems to admit a certain contingency into subjective decision, arguing that what is required of the monarch is neither character nor reason but a purely formal assent, “to dot the i’s” (§280Z/451). (The royal “Negative,” which proved so intractable for the American Revolution, is quite different. See Nelson 2014, Introduction; and Locke on ‘prerogative,’ below.) §§321–22 pertain to external sovereignty: “the state has individuality…” (359/490); “[i]ndividuality, as exclusive being for self, appears as relation to other states” (ibid.). §324: “individuality existing in and for itself” (360/491), preserves “this substantive individuality” (361/492). Warfare demands sacrifice for the “individuality of the state” (§325, 363/494). External relations may be governed by the state’s “strong individuality” (§334, 369/500), always ready to take offence when it identifies infinite honor with merely “singular” interests. 81. Knowles 2002, 329–30. In favor of the hard reading we may cite §283: “the appointment of individuals [to executive office] and their dismissal fall within the [competence of the] unrestricted arbitrary will of the monarch.” Knowles adduces §295A, where Hegel presciently notes how the monarch must resist the mutual solidarity of the civil service (a power shift not completed until mid-century). On such centrifugal tendencies, Seigel 2012, 145–6, citing the Hegelian W.H. Riehl’s baleful diagnosis of officialdom’s “individualism.” 82. I avoid discussing Klaus Wieweg’s interpretation of Hegel on executive authority—even though it privileges the role of syllogistic reasoning— because he remains quite mum on monarchical ‘individuality.’ See Wieweg 2012, chapter VIII, 366–432, especially 423–29.

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83. Note, in 1827 this material appeared within the section on religion as part of absolute spirit. The rearrangement makes more sense, the state being finite spirit. 84. On ‘Durchdringung’ see Allen Speight’s cogent summary: Speight 2015, 105–11. 85. ‘Inhabit’ is Speight’s apt translation, in his treatment of art as absolute spirit: Speight 2019, 236. 86. On ‘characteristic,’ see Donougho 2020b (Hegel took the definition from Hirt), and Chap. 9. 87. Cf. §562A which credits art as seeming “to give religion the supreme transfiguration, expression and splendor” (Glanz) and liberating it (i.e., pre-Hellenic religion?) from sensory limitation. Art of the Ideal makes both artistic genius and spectator “at home.” 88. Inwood translates ‘Einzelheit’ as ‘individuality,’ aligning ‘singularity’ with ‘individual’ citizen or state (§§527, 537/546): Inwood 2007, 633. But singularity distinguishes civil society, not art, or virtue (classical, familial), or citizenship. 89. Hegel 1998b, 115 (translation amended)/Hegel 1969, 17: 276.

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Pippin, Robert 2012a/2013, “Back to Hegel?” Mediations 26.1-2 (Fall 2012-Spring 2013), 7-28 Pippin, Robert 2012b, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Rajan, Tilottama 2004, “(In)digestible material: illness and dialectic in Hegel’s The Philosophy of Nature,” in Timothy Morton (ed.), Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 217-36 Seigel, Jerrold 2012, Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Skillings, Derek J. 2017, “Life is not Easily Bounded,” at https://aeon.co/essays/ what-­constitutes-­an-­individual-­organism-­in-­biology. Smith, Helmut Walser 2020, Germany, A Nation in its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500–2000 (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2020) Speight, Allen 2015, “Philosophy of Art,” in Michael Baur (ed.), G.W.F. Hegel: Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2015), 103-15 Speight, Allen 2019, “Art as a Mode of Absolute Spirit: the Development and Significance of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Account of the Philosophy of Art,” in Marina Bykova (ed.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 225-42. Spencer, Herbert 1864, The Principles of Biology, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864) Stern, David 2013, Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ed. David Stern (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013) Suther, Jensen 2020, “Back to Life? The Persistence of Hegel’s Idealism (A Response to Karen Ng, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic),” boundary 2, 2020 Theunissen, Michael 1978, “Begriff und Realität. Hegels Aufhebung des metaphysischen Wahrheitsbegriffs,” in R.-F. Horstmann (ed.), Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 324-59 Wieweg, Klaus 2012, Denken der Freiheit: Hegels Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Paderborn: Fink, 2012) Wilson, Robert A. & Matthew Barker 2018, “The Biological Notion of Individual,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford. edu/cgi-­bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=biology-­individual. Žižek, Slavoj 2012, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012)

8 ‘Individuality’ in Hegel’s Aesthetics (I)

Preamble: Considered as a category, ‘individuality’ proves elusive. It displays a disconcerting plasticity, a dialectical penchant for shape-­shifting, sliding over the horizon. In previous chapters we’ve seen such indeterminacy manifesting itself repeatedly: individual planets are and are not the solar system; corporeal expressions are and are not characteristic of the individual person; the artist is and isn’t the artwork or its interpretation (in philosophical retrospect). Moreover, so-called individuality emerges the moment you begin to hypostatize objective or subjective moments. When it comes to Hegel’s Aesthetics—which is to say, the consolidated record of lectures given in Berlin over several years, transcripts of which are still being published1—the first thing to note is that ‘individuality’ draws on a dialectic between content (Inhalt or Gehalt: human shape, deed or expression) and form or configuration (Gestaltung), in and as the artwork. The work is understood as both expressivity and expression, energeia and ergon; its form in turn operates either to discern or to display artistic content.2 In the second place, ‘individuality’ occasions a dialectic between semantics and pragmatics, between meaning and its assertion in

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context or use, between what is said (l’énoncé) and its utterance (l‘énonciation); a double perspective as both pragmatics under scrutiny and the pragmatics of its philosophical consideration (‘for us’). Dialectic applies also to Hegel’s ultimate (and perhaps mystifying) praise of the “the classical überhaupt” for encompassing what he calls “free, self-­ sufficient meaning,” namely, “what signifies itself and thereby also interprets itself” (das sich selbst Bedeutende und damit auch sich selber Deutende) (14,13, 427).3 Both artwork and its signified content are here understood as ‘speaking for themselves,’ transparent in expression. Yet that vaunted translucence isn’t borne out in fact (in der Tat). It veils a deeper truth or implication: something remains unsaid, perhaps cannot be said. ‘Individuality’ derives much of its meaning and force—descriptive or normative—not from positive qualities such as unity, harmony, purity, etc., but from a tacit contrast with what would not count as such. In that respect it resembles one of J.L. Austin’s ‘trouser words’ (perhaps a ‘chiamys word,’ to honor ancient fashion).4 ‘Individuality’ gains traction in particular from a tacit contrast (a) with the symbolic, which for Hegel includes the sublime; (b) with the merely singular, e.g., things found in nature, plus non-human creatures, non-Olympian deities, the figure of Christ (whose ‘singularity’ is unparalleled), non-heroic agents in society or on stage, or just contingent, humdrum and isolated detail, etc.; and (c) with a homogenous and abstract universal. But, in contrast to its active usage in the Phenomenology or Encyclopædia, ‘individuality’ in the Aesthetics does disappointingly little dialectical work. What there is of dialectic comes from our own retrospective framing of Greek individuality as cultural manifestation of (what we now call) ‘the classical Ideal.’ I have in mind the elementary senses of ‘individuality’ listed earlier: being authentic, original, creative, or expressive; as a work-­in-­progress or language-inuse, tacit in significance rather than governed by rules or ulterior aims; and displaying a measure of performativity, as something reflexively mediating-and-mediated. Such reflexive engagement belongs to ‘individuality’ itself, to invoke H.S. Harris again: the dialectician unites and comprehends moments of the Ideal. That is not to “Romanticize” either the world or the Greeks, even though ‘individuality’ first emerged in the late eighteenth century as a distinctly Romantic perspective. Hegel’s deliberate employment of the term—self-­conscious and ironic as it may

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be—instigates a dialectic of self-delimitation which appears negative as much as positive, and queries as much as it celebrates the (classical) Ideal. As Hegel developed his conception of art through the Berlin period, he was continually drawn to the pre-classical (‘symbolic’) and post-classical (‘romantic’). He had little to say on the consummate central moment. The classical Ideal remains Keats’s “Cold Pastoral!” Yet we should recall that the pastoral mode itself harbors a ‘sentimental’ wish for utopia at the expense of the present.5 There is always more to be said about ‘nothing more to be said.’ In contrast to the Aesthetics, Hegel’s Phenomenology contains in Chapter VII a thoroughly dialectical account of classical art and artwork. It incorporates into the observed the observer’s own perspective (second-­ order observation), the view ‘for us,’ in particular with respect to a formative self or subject (see ¶¶703–04). Citing an “absolute art” mourning over the loss of its world, Hegel depicts the artist’s activity as “pure forming” which through the tragic ‘agon’ between itself and ethical substance leads to the victory of the “pure self of individuality, of negative power” (¶704/514). Prolepsis allows Hegel to read modern subjectivity back into the classical artwork and worldview, even though the latter could never have countenanced such a disruptive intervention, either on its face (an sich) or in self-description (für sich). In short, classical individuality is taken paradoxically to express itself in “creating” works that nevertheless remain in appearance detached, serene, harmonious: classical form as much as Romantic forming, ergon as much as energeia. A further, complicating factor demands brief mention. If Hegel was increasingly fascinated by ‘symbolic’ and ‘romantic’ artforms/worldviews, his interest was itself dialectical. Individuality is understood to be absent from these cultural formations, yet its very absence is plain in their form or on their face, according to Hegel—or rather, is presented as such. There is an air of paradox in treating, say, the Egyptian pyramid both as signifier of emptiness and as self-reflexively advertising its own abstract semiosis, its failure to escape abstract convention. The pyramid, says Hegel, is itself symbolic of the symbol. (An expert in Egyptian art will doubtless complain that Hegel’s circular procedure imports the very criteria by which both artworks and culture itself are adjudged inadequate, signifying their own failure to signify.) Or again, with ‘the sublime proper’

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of Hebrew psalmody, verbal performance self-reflexively cites its own failure, either to signify or to address the Almighty. At the other extreme, with ‘romantic’ works (Gothic cathedrals, modern literary romance, landscape painting and the like) the dialectician might deem them successful (they express a universal meaning of sorts) even though falling short of transparent signification: compare Stanley Fish on “self-consuming artifacts.”6 Or again, late-‘romantic’ art—e.g., ‘objective humor,’ modern comedy—verges on the ‘end’ of art through its formal and thematic immersion in ‘the prose of the world.’ Yet, paradoxically, it indexes the emergence of Art proper, Art as such rather than plural ‘fine arts’: Romantic, creative, autonomous, formalist.7 This emergent Art finds its home in various places—the museum, concert-hall, ‘literature,’ etc.—, situated at the same time in a modern society distinctly prosaic and secular. These are instances of what was earlier called ‘dividuality’ or subjective ‘enhancement,’ in the secular mode of self-estrangement; artworks inhabit the world of modern Bildung and self-fashioning. The subject here finds itself ‘beside itself.’ I shall deal with similar examples as they come up, wishing here only to underline how exceptions to the rule may dialectically serve to confirm it. That’s a lot to unpack! But the first order of the day is to look more closely at the strange category called ‘individuality,’ as it passes in and out of the text. Following this overview, I turn to Hegel’s mature treatment of art in his Berlin lectures. Rather than offering a comprehensive account (something Lydia Moland has recently provided: Moland1 2019), I take up selected, often unresolved issues, ones that I think lie at the core of his thinking on ‘art.’ * * * Several types of ambiguity: How is ‘individuality’ actually employed in the Aesthetics? Hotho’s edition features the word multiple times: almost three hundred by my rough tally, and many more if you include instances of ‘individual’ (adjective or noun). Student transcriptions from various years (1820/21, 1826, 1828/29) likewise showcase ‘individuality’ and its cognates, though less so than Hotho’s 1823 notebook. Given that the word is non-technical, often we cannot be sure whether its employment is fully

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considered rather than informal or vague, except when ‘individual’ and ‘singular’ seems too pointedly contrasted to count as arbitrary. As Hegel says of symbolism overall, we might be unsure what is intended to begin with. All the more reason for textual and contextual scrutiny. I discern four principal heads: (I) As Ideal of the ‘artistically beautiful’ (das Kunstschöne), divine or human. (II) Under ‘artform’: first ‘classical’—Greek deities or human character (both taking sculptural shape) and their “dissolution”—then ‘romantic’—distant, parodic echoes of the Ideal in the form of honor, love and fidelity, or framed as character, or finally as a presiding split between ‘realism’ and ‘humor.’ The ‘symbolic’ falls on the side of particularity or singular detail, although—“trouser-word” like—that may reveal a good deal about ‘individuality’ too. We should note a unique instance of self-standing ‘individuality’ in the ‘sublime proper,’ Hebrew Psalms especially, where the paradigmatically lone individual supposes itself addressing, and addressed by, its ineffable Lord.8 (III) Under ‘sculpture’—paradigmatically classical—namely, as ‘physiognomics,’ the corporeal expression of mind/soul; here we are guided, Hegel says, by “the individuality which serves as the fundamental principle of sculpture” (14,437/771). (IV) Not least, under ‘verbal art’ or ‘poetry’ (i.e., literature), where paradigmatically it characterizes epic, then lyric and drama (tragedy, comedy).9 I survey each in turn as prologue to remarks about Hegel’s general approach to art: ‘Art’ in the singular rather than plural ‘fine arts.’ My approach is preliminary, given that sources are often recently published or else unfamiliar.

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Note that the initial appearance of ‘individuality’ in Hotho’s edition (13,23/9)—under the alleged deceptiveness of ‘Schein’ (semblance) in art—proves anomalous. We read that the seemingly “more truthful presentations [Darstellungen] of historiography” in fact have for their content “the entire contingency of quotidian actuality, its happenstance, complications, and individualities [sic],” whereas artworks reveal the “eternal powers” at work in history. This is to reverse Hegel’s normal distinction of inessential particularity/singularity (even peculiarity, ‘Eigentümlichkeit’) from essential individuality. The second occurrence also proves unusual in being credited to Hegel’s colleague Aloys Hirt. Hirt equates ‘the beautiful in art’ (das Kunstschöne) with ‘the characteristic’ (die Charakteristik): a category we associate above all with Friedrich Schlegel, and with a modern as opposed to classical sensibility. Hegel quotes Hirt’s definition: By ‘characteristic’ I understand the distinct individuality through which forms, movement and gesture, features and expression—local colour, light and shade, chiaroscuro and posture—are distinguished, as the object may require.10

Elsewhere I argue that Hegel’s defense of Hirt, against both Weimar classicism and Rumohr’s deflationary naturalism, is strategically as well as theoretically important. It makes ‘the significant’ central to his conception of art, even the classical Ideal.11 ‘Individuality’ or ‘individual’ is prominent in Hegel’s Introduction (Hotho edition), typically in its “trouser” role demarcating it from ‘singularity’; or in discussing common “representations about art (as production, as sensuous medium, or concerning its proper aim); or again, on the recent history of aesthetics (Kant, Schiller). Starting in 1826, Hegel accords ‘irony’ special attention, deriving it from Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. He forcefully condemns it, as “so-called individuality” (i.e., subjective hypostasis), although this wholly overlooks Fichte’s novel articulation of ‘individuality’ as a feature we share with all other moral agents. Hegel indicts Fichte’s universal I with negating all determinate content, supposing itself lord and master of all. Everything is reduced to

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semblance (Schein), there solely at the behest of the omnipotent I. But the I is at the same time “a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality—for itself as well as for others—express itself and bring it [in]to appearance” (94/65). It aims to “live as an artist and shape its life artistically.” Yet this is a self-made show (Schein), which the I never takes seriously. Hegel’s vehemence during the mid-twenties reflects his growing suspicion of Romanticism as a mortal threat to speculative science; it seeks to replace true objectivity—Hegel’s logos— with ironic subjectivity, as personified in Fichte’s absolute I.12 The Introduction closes with three requirements on art: with regard to its ideal content, its sensuous form, and its Gestaltung or “configuration,” which Hegel declares should be individual and concrete, so that the inner meaning ‘comprehends’ (übergreift) its outer shape—just as with the human body. In 1828 this essential feature is used as a stick to beat von Rumohr, whom Hegel charges with having misunderstood ‘Idea’ (as a mental thing rather than as the “fulfilled” or “realized” concept). Rumohr is reproached for confusing ‘Idea’ with “indeterminate representation [Vorstellung], and with an abstract Ideal devoid of individuality [individualitätslosen] familiar from theories and schools” (13,145/106–7). Rumohr took it as artifice, a direct contrast with determinate natural forms, authentic nature.13 • To take up my first head, (I) the ‘artistically beautiful’ (das Kunstschöne) and its ‘Ideal’: Hegel stresses its “beautiful individuality,” in general and in its determinate form (whether as a grouping of gods or as human action, ‘Handlung’). Action constitutes the pivotal category of Hegel’s entire discussion. (We should note that for him ‘category’ is a mode both of thinking and of the reality it forms; here, both plot and what it emplots, in quasi-Aristotelian fashion.) Again, Hegel restricts discussion to individuals-in-action, as opposed to ‘single’ (einzeln) persons performing their roles in modern society: art concerns ‘characters’ all of a piece, whether in themselves or at one with their natural or cultural environment. Its prototype is the epic hero, embedded in a general

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‘world-condition’ (Weltzustand)—the “heroic age”—rather than some modern world-condition tending to thwart sensuous presentation. Let me review the formal elements Hegel introduces (as early as 1820/21). I arrange them in a series of growing determinacy, while noting that ‘situation’ first appears in 1823 (Ascheberg in 1821 had Hegel discuss it under ‘painting’), ‘character’ as a separate heading in 1826, and the same for various gradations of situation (e.g., harmless vs serious). A first division comprises: (1) the general ‘World-Condition’ (Weltzustand), “corresponding to the individuality of the Ideal” (236/179), and specifically found in a mythical ‘heroic age’ (236–7/180–82).14 ‘World-condition’ as a distinct category first appears in 1823; it is not in Ascheberg 1820/21, although that has much to say on the unitary heroic individual embedded in a pre-political society before any “moral” notion of virtue. In 1826 it is labelled “a) Self-sufficiency” (die Selbständigkeit ).15 Modern society loses this “free configuration [Gestaltung] of individuality” (242/184); authority rests with individuals as such. Art however requires that there be no “cleavage between universality and individuality” (243/185), no legal bond which might sap “the power of independently acting individuality” (244/186). That explains why the rhapsode will find inspiration in a distant, often mythical past, so avoiding the “obliteration of that individuality required by the work of art” (249/190). After general world-­condition comes: (2) ‘Situation,’ which as it gradually becomes more determinate shades into normative ‘Collision.’ Here again ‘individuality’ plays the major role. For while individuals encounter the eternal ethical powers governing their world as given, these norms also require “the arbitrariness and caprice of individuality” (258–9/197–8) to activate them and confer a determinate shape. The category first appears expressly with Hotho (1823), and is further developed in 1826.16 The same goes for various gradations of situation (e.g., harmless vs serious).17 In 1828/29 its importance recedes, largely because it is adjudged “infinitely various,” but also because it is folded into its instantiation as sculpture, lyric, drama or epic.18 A deeper reason might lie in the hint of circularity attending any exposition of ‘situation’: a chiasmus much like the Phenomenology’s

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dialectic of individuality-and-environment (in ‘Observing Reason’), whereby the exact manner in which general background conditions come to bear depends in turn on individual aim and action, and vice versa. ‘Situation’ encapsulates the paradox by which circumstances affect action when stimulated by individual expression of interest; we exercise a certain freedom to choose how we are determined (cf. Schleiermacher). David Simpson has argued for the special relevance of ‘situatedness’ to modern times, when individuals both define themselves in and see themselves defined by their perceived or interpreted environment; our historical situation is one that leaves us at once active and passive, in a situation of essential risk. In turn, certain situations attract the interest of art—in poets, or in readers, audience and spectators. More accurately, art distinguishes and draws attention to our historical situatedness, just as (Wilde) yellow fog arrived with the Impressionists.19 ‘Individuality’ serves (a) to capture both universal and singular moments in the situation, and (b) to emphasize what Kenneth Burke dubbed a certain “magic” by which the statement “I am reviewing the situation” creates a vague shimmer between how things strike us and how they really might be.20 Hegel seems to have pioneered this technical use of ‘situation,’ in German certainly.21 He observes that the gods represented in works of classical sculpture tend to display only “harmless” situations. But as situations become more determinate, difference will out, then opposition or collision of normative assessment. Hotho’s official edition surveys various levels of collision, from purely natural up to a “spiritual” (cultural) clash of values or ends (sometimes these derive from natural distinctions, e.g., birth order). Individuals may feel slighted in their social position, or can give way to feelings (of greed, ambition, even love), though significant collisions arise only when a substantive norm (moral or religious) appears at stake (see 268–83/206–17). When the situation leads—via “oppositions, hindrances, complications, and transgressions” (282/217) plus eliciting of passions—to a determinate reaction, a further level is reached, namely: ( 3) ‘Action’ (die Handlung) proper, plus reaction (Hotho’s edition downplays the latter, though it features in his own transcript).

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Strictly speaking, it is reaction against the initial situation, as Hegel phrases it in 1826; human construal and misconstrual, which can entail an entire chain of actions, one thing leading often horribly and ineluctably to another. Action amounts to a public deed (Tat), performed in compliance with divine ordinance, and carrying with it: (4) a substantive ‘Pathos,’ that is, a universal impetus or charge, much more than subjective feeling. Hegelian Anthropology casts light on the relations between world-condition, situation and individual action. It considers the “feeling soul” in its immediacy, not yet “self-like” [selbstisch], indeed as amenable to “possession” by another individual—one’s genius perhaps, or else the universal power or deity under whose aegis one tacitly acts. “I am this whole circle of determinations: they have blended [verwachsen] with my individuality,” Hegel declares, just as—from another angle—the heroic individual is its presiding deity.22 Here again ‘individuality’ enunciates a crucial ambivalence. So far as deities appear individual, they are external to humans, who feel and will on their own account while also being moved by “independent divine individuality,” by one substantive “pathos” (293/225–6). The poet should artfully meld both sides, so that (for reader or spectator) the universal powers “are individualized on their own account” (293/227). The gods are at once beyond human agency and immanent in it, at least for heroic drama (296/228). Pathos—intrinsically justified power—is “the universal import [Gehalt] of what drives human individuality to decisions and actions” (301/232).23 After action or deed and pathos comes: (5) ‘Character,’ again exemplifying classical reality or art inasmuch as character directly embodies universal powers or norms. Individuality finds itself at home in such integral characters, at once vividly particularized and universal in significance; Greek ‘ethos’ means both character (as habituated disposition) and virtue or moral quality. The Greek term further suggests stamp or impress, both as mark and as act of marking, typing. “Character is something flatly legible, significant, and at the same time carved into the body or object,” Brian Dillon writes.24 Ancient theatre employed character types on stage, while Aristotelian or Theophrastian ethics described distinctive characters without sug-

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gesting artifice or caricature. I noted in connection with the ‘anthropology’ of habit that for Hegel individual character appears more classical than modern, while in modern usage it has come to denote integral force or spirit. One simply has character, or not. It even acquires a sense of peculiarity, as with Dickensian ‘character.’ (Hegel disdains the pseudo-science of ‘Physiognomics,’ which anachronistically supposes ancient characteristics or determinable traits to have discrete effects or meaning in modern circumstances. But modern psychology still trades in personality types, as Marjorie Garber observes.25) Hegel compares epic with dramatic character or action, the latter speaking for just one ‘pathos,’ the former for values held in common. It is a paradox, then, that for the ancients character tended to be immanent in action or plot, while for moderns character comes to the fore, functioning in isolation. Classical individuals are seen as embedded in what we might call “positional” or “hierarchical” society, a “strong” group, strictly regulated.26 Yet they are trained and encouraged to be at once self-sufficient and super-competitive (paradigmatically in battle); in the limit—as we saw with tragic ‘Sittlichkeit’—they act for themselves alone. The polis depends ultimately on proto-individualist action which it officially proscribes (or would proscribe if individualism could be articulated, avant la lettre). Classical individuality is found and founded on the unstable edge between “positional” and “individualist” culture. Individuals in modern civil society, on the contrary, inhabit another world, weak in affiliation. They might well verge on social and cultural isolation, so falling into apathy or fatalism (see remarks below on Hippel), or into being “fifth business.”27 Individuality, in short, is an erratic category, hard to pin down, shifting constantly between literary fiction and ethical substance, ancient and modern. Perhaps it goes without saying—though we shouldn’t forget— that Hegel’s interest doesn’t lie in some kind of realism, whether in fiction or as ‘psychological’ fealty to ‘real people.’ Nor on the other hand does it focus exclusively on formal structure (action, character, situation, and so on). From a Hegelian angle, heroic characters appear as vehicles of the action—plot, plus the interlacing of deeds—

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and thus they embody and realize ethical norms, doing so better or worse as the case may be. (Hegel remains thoroughly Aristotelian in affirming the primacy of plot over character or psychology; cf. Jones 1962, 279.) Such individuals feel what, in a modern perspective, would be called “strict responsibility”: it is with pride that heroic agents hold themselves guilty even when they didn’t intend (perhaps couldn’t even have envisaged) the wrong that ensued. Heroic individuals or agents should be understood as embedded in their social and cultural condition (Zustand) or situation, neither separate from nor wholly determined by their particular circumstances. That is what defines their individuality, at once singular and universal. Character becomes formally separate and independent only in modern times and in modern art, where Hegel prefers to speak of ‘individuals’ (in comedy, for example) rather than ‘individuality.’ Here I recall my discussion of the emergence of subjectivity in early-­modern society and art, while conceding that Hegel says little explicitly on the dialectic between social and artistic categories—certainly nothing as sophisticated as Clemens Lugowski’s conception of ‘individuality’ as in part an artifact of literary form.28 I’d add that Hegel’s discussion of ‘character’ operates under classical aegis inasmuch as characters are thought of as embodiments of virtue (ethos), even when one-sided; hence the paradox that heroic characters might seem more like E.M. Forster’s “flat” types than the more realistic (or “round”) personalities inhabiting modern novels or painting, portraits especially. A final note: Toril Moi has recently advocated a return to “real characters” as part of what she terms “the existential turn” in literary studies.29 Hegel finds a home, I suggest, within this perennial debate between realism and formal analysis (construction of types). (6) After this pivotal discussion of ‘action’ Hegel shifts gears to discuss the “external existence” (Dasein) of the Ideal, considered (a) as natural or cultural context and (b) as the audience for whom the artwork is presented, performed or read (something like a hermeneutics of reception or response). With respect to potential constraints on reception, individuality is again the desideratum. For example, Goethe in his West-East Divan is said to assimilate eastern poetry to his own “individual” expression.30

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* * * My second head (II) artform/worldview comprises three stages: in the symbolic, the classical Ideal may be seen as coming gradually to articulate itself, then dissolving into romantic (i.e., post-classical) iterations. I don’t argue for it here, but in my view each stage has both semiotic and hermeneutic components: signifying form on the one hand, content or import (Gehalt), whether signified or inferred, on the other.31 I merely note in passing that this section of the Aesthetics constitutes one of Hegel’s most original contributions, mapping the theoretical structure of the art-­ideal upon historically determined stages. Art history was never the same afterwards—and not just art history.32 Let me run through each stage: • a. Hegel presents the ‘Symbolic Artform’ (versus the ‘Classical’) as quite un-individual, in its detailed ‘singularity.’ This may be documented at length: with respect to “unconscious” symbolics (Lamaism, Zoroastrianism, Persian poetry), then the “phantastical” symbolics of Indian poetry (Hegel displays some prejudice here, but was often well-­ informed), and finally symbolism “proper”—“die eigentliche Symbolik”33—centered in ancient Egypt, the “native land” of symbols. Here, the pyramid manifests “the simple image [Bild] of symbolic art itself ” (459/356), though its semiotic mode consists of signifying something distinctly other, a singular body preserved inside abstract shape.34 Hegel’s fascination with ancient Egyptian symbolism is itself fascinating: we aren’t sure whether there are symbols to begin with, he suggests, let alone what they mean. In turn we readers can’t be sure whether Hegel claims to have finally deciphered the proper (i.e., self-­ reflexive) meaning of Egyptian symbolism—assuming ancient artisans knew what they were doing—or has simply declared it (‘for us’) thoroughly enigmatic and opaque. Historians specializing in Egyptian art will doubtless attack Hegel’s presumption in labelling it mere ‘Vorkunst.’35 • The second stage of symbolics comprises the ‘sublime,’ itself dyadic. First comes the aesthetic ‘pantheism’ of Indian and Arab poetry, almost wholly ensconced in singularity, followed by Christian mysticism; second, the art of the sublime, viz., Hebrew psalmody. Hegel’s

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articulation of the sublime in his Berlin years proved complex and labile. In 1826, the ‘classical sublime’ of the ‘Judaic worldview’ precedes a second moment, ‘oriental pantheism,’ while in one formulation of the lectures on philosophy of religion the sublime even succeeds classical art, smacking of the Christian thematics of a god-without-­ shape, a hidden god.36 Elsewhere I argue that Hegel understands the Psalms as the finite individual’s addressing, and being addressed by, its Lord. Most surprisingly, the convoluted language verges on what Kant decried as ‘subreption,’ when readers (singers, listeners) become illicitly implicated in the rhetoric of apostrophe and personification enjoined by the Psalmist. On the one hand Hegel just turns his back on the so-called ‘Romantic’ sublime (epitome of German and English Romanticism); on the other, he cites its quasi-anachronistic invocation within the rhetoric of ancient Psalmody. As for the theme of ‘individuality,’ that too is equivocal. For the individual’s relation to the Lord is mediated: first by ‘law’—or better, ‘the Law,’ nevertheless devolving on individual human interpretation/application—and second by individual ‘de-cision’ (cutting qua judgment, primal ‘Urteil’). It all comes out right, however, or at least it finds itself at home: god grants the Jewish people individual property rights.37 It is a strange, disorienting tale that Hegel offers: a peculiar focus on individual or individuality, leaving symbolics mired in singularity. The oblique moral of the tale is stranger still, for Hegel’s presentation hints also at the implicit limits of (or to) his conception of the beautiful Ideal. Ideality keeps a foot in both symbolic and sublime realms: a bifurcation that owes much to its provenance in the Schillerian Ideal, as Dieter Henrich remarked.38 Hegel’s ‘Ideal’ conjoins grace with ethical rigor, beauty with the sublime. “The paradox is well put by de Man: ‘The sublime for Hegel is the absolutely beautiful [i.e., the Greek Ideal]. Yet nothing seems less sublime, in our current use of the term, than the sublime in Hegel.’”39 • The third stage, ‘Conscious Symbolics of the Comparative Art-form,’ tells a story of gradually tightening self-reflexivity, which eventually prefigures the end of art itself. Symbolism comes to see through its own artifice, later internalizing that insight. Figures of speech comprise basically singular signs indicating universal meaning, and Hegel’s

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traversal of variants—fable, parable, metamorphosis, riddle, allegory, metaphor, image, simile—displays a gradual separation of these poles. Ultimately symbolism presents its own failure to mean: its failure to be individual, in short. Hegel now posits the charged coincidence of object and subject, plus an “explanation” of spiritual or minded significance in the world (546/426); a familiar dialectical trope in his work, whereby extremes meet and empty out, as prelude to wholesale renewal (compare the fate of ‘Gedächtnis’—mechanical memory—in ‘Subjective Spirit’). We might even find in this coincidence anticipation of the ultimate failure to mean implicit in the next formation, the classical artform/worldview: its fate is silence. It is a failure to embody spirit in artistic image (or metaphor) and sensuous shape, and by extension, the failure of art (even ‘romantic’ art) to embody meaning; artworks now reduce to the level of everyday “prose of the world.” Hegel hints that the symbolic (in its juxtaposition-cum-separation of elements) returns in both classical and romantic guise: ‘objective humor,’ for example, stands for just such a momentary—and equivocal—inspiration (Einfall), a primitive, expressive attunement to the world. Here emphasis falls primarily on alienated objecthood or utterance (Äußerung) rather than a transitive expression (Ausdruck). * * * Last, Hegel stages the transition to the next worldview, via didactic or descriptive poetry, followed by ancient epigram, which quite literally embodies the split between sign and meaning: letters upon things. In modern times too Schiller and Goethe composed epigrams— “garlands” infused with subjective feeling.40 Epigram fuses and confuses subjective and objective moments, and does so actively, as a performative speech-­ act, its garlands matching distichs the poet exchanges with others. “Xenien” Goethe called them, recalling the ancient custom by which for ancient Greeks or Romans giving and receiving, just like host and guest, are reversible functions.41 Not only is there an exchange between subject and object, but also a tacit intersubjectivity.

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* * * • Shifting focus to b. the classical artform/worldview, our treatment can be briefer, oddly enough, since Keats’s “Cold Pastoral!” presents fewer subtleties of interpretation. It is not just “ruhig” or “harmless” in its archetypal situation, but also (supposedly) “self-signifying, … self-­ explanatory,” although such apparent circularity itself requires explaining, as does any link with ‘individuality.’42 In this section alone, ‘individuality’ features well over eighty times. Classical Greek art presents “plastic individuality,” divine or human; a “corporeal individuality” both natural and spiritual (or minded). Besides the organization of physical bodies, the word applies above all to the “beautiful individuality characterizing the midpoint of the [ancient] Greek character”—to cite Hegel’s Philosophy of History—“configurations [Gestaltungen] of beautiful individuality.”43 Gods are themselves fully realized characters: “without character no individuality comes about” (82/481). Yet they continue to be a “universal individuality,” which “floats right in the middle between pure universality and an equally abstract particularity” (ibid.). Hegel allows that there remains a symbolic tinge to Greek art—in the early, austere style that Winckelmann had distinguished—but he expressly holds that classical beauty may not be called ‘sublime’ (83/482–3), even if with the ancients not all is sweetness and light.44 We verge on contradiction: for if on the surface the classical Ideal frees itself from nature, from symbolics and the sublime, it also originates there. In another aspect it will betray symptoms of a subjectivity it remains incapable of expressing. The Ideal is framed or defined by the non-ideal, in other words. The ancient Greeks discovered the meaning of nature; they interpreted nature rather than taking it at face value. In Geoffrey Hartman’s wonderful phrase, they passed “from the sublime to the hermeneutic.”45 On the same principle the Greeks listened to the murmuring fountains, and asked what might be thereby signified; but the signification which they were led to attach to it was not the objective meaning of the fountain, but

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the subjective, that of the subject itself, which further exalts the Naiad to a Muse. The Naiads, or fountains, are the external, objective origin of the Muses. Yet the immortal songs of the Muses are not that which is heard in the murmuring of the fountains; they are the productions of the thoughtfully heeding spirit, which listens even while as it produces [from] within. The interpretation and explanation of nature and its transformations—the indication of their sense and import—is the act of subjective spirit.46

How are we to get a handle on the peculiar ‘self-signifying’ of the Ideal, in cultural content or in artistic form, or dialectically, with respect to the pragmatics of ‘forming’? One audacious suggestion is to treat the classical Ideal as an autonomous, self-relating system—along the lines Hegelian Physics proposes for the solar system (sun/planets/moons/comets). It ‘goes by itself,’ of its own accord, without external prompts, yet also without human intentionality or self-awareness. The early essay on Natural Law had floated such a possibility (as we saw in Chap. 3), though it also understood solar/planetary individuality to suffer by comparison with the ethical system (Sittlichkeit). For the latter each individual is itself and the whole; it ‘envelops’ its other, existing only within the individuality of the whole, the Volk.47 H.S. Harris observes how the ensouled body becomes the ruling metaphor for ethical system at this period. Tempting though it might be to cast the classical Ideal as a kind of ethical physics, the analogy fails; Hegel’s mature Philosophy of Right adopts a very different model of politics and society. Yet the analogy does capture how individual characters are independent agents acting nonetheless in the name of—even identifying with—the supra-­individual norm, which in turn has no existence apart from the workings of law via human promulgation, execution, and compliance. Discussing the exposition of ‘Sittlichkeit’ (in Phenomenology chapter VI) I called it an ethical symbiosis, an image of harmony, though one promptly analyzed and pulled apart. Hegel claims that the human figure alone is the adequate shape of spirit, when genuine (wahrhaft) content either receives or fashions genuine form adequate to it.48 In stark contrast to other animals, with humans the relation of mind to body displays a certain “necessity” (14:22/434), Hegel claims, as noted in the previous chapter with regard to the

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Encyclopædia ‘Anthropology’ (§410). In that context I cited Julia Peters on Hegel’s employment of the term ‘self-manifesting’ to capture the mode of expression peculiar to corporeal meaning, where the body is no mere medium or element to which mind or spirit is externally related. Body is mind, mind is body—up to a point.49 I suggested there that ‘individuality’ supplies another way of thinking of this identity, this ‘Übergreifen’ by mind of the body—its body—since all singular traits promise to vanish into the act of expression, just as (conversely) any singular intention vanishes into corporeal signification and understanding. Sculpture seems itself perfectly suited to capture such ‘selfsignifying’ activity or demeanor, so duplicating the circular (non) relation in artistic form; and I return to this characteristic below. But, of course, perfect self-signifying turns out never perfect enough: dialectically speaking there is always a remainder, something unsaid or unacknowledged, something that cannot be said (which itself must go unsaid!). Hegel notes for example that the power of each particular/singular deity is limited, first by the gods’ contingent plurality, but also by an abstract necessity or Fate (Schicksal) wholly lacking determinate shape or individuality. (Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion speaks of ‘the religion of necessity,’ that is, the necessary union of inner and outer, meaning and shape—individuality in short—but now ‘necessity’ assumes a different, and necessarily external, aspect.) The Greek gods lack inner subjectivity, on the one hand, while on the other they assume an anthropomorphized shape. In the polis, an immediate fusion of individual with universal fails to accord “subjective peculiarity [Eigentümlichkeit] and its private particularity” their due, leaving no room for a subjective expression harmless to the state (14,118/510). Hegel echoes the Phenomenology in decrying the Roman society that ensues: the prosaic abstraction of daily life, its “sacrifice of individuality” to formal obedience of the law, and (externally) the harsh subjugation of other national individuality (Volksindividualität—14,123/514). In artistic terms, Roman satire was a wholly understandable response. * * *

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• Following classical beauty, c. ‘romantic’ art shifts the accent: for instance, to the “more special individuality” of portraiture, open to depiction of particular traits (14,142/531). Besides religious—and specifically Christian—thematics and instead of the exalted ‘pathos’ found with the Ideal, we find an emphasis on “spiritual” interrelations, or what in 1826 Hegel calls “the affirmative reflection of this inwardness”: the thematics of love, chivalric honor, and fidelity, become the worldly analogues of religious import.50 Yet they remain subjective, a purely personal obligation, without appeal to what Terry Pinkard identifies as the “social space of reasons,” or even a stoic withdrawal from or indifference to society.51 1826 adds the topic of ‘courage’ (eigentümliche Tapferkeit: Kehler) or ‘universal virtue’ (Tugend: von der Pfordten) to love, fidelity and honor (in that order): e.g. fantastic romances of the knights of the round table and the like.52 The last part of the ‘romantic artform’ deals first with ‘the formal self-sufficiency of individual particularities’ (Besonderheiten), character no longer beholden to substantive ‘pathos’ yet resolute (unbeugsam: Kehler) in adversity.53 Despite the emphasis on contingent detail, Hegel nevertheless favors “living individuality” in character over the masked types of Italian commedia, their stock roles deficient in “subjective individuality” (199/576). Such individuals define themselves, independently, abstractly, and as embedded in contingency; their very self-reliance and “formal firmness” (Festigkeit) entitles them to claim a certain ‘individuality.’ Hegel discerns a second type of self-sufficiency: character as “inward and undeveloped totality” (203/580), reserved and deep; it catches our attention like a hidden gem. He associates this with women especially, citing Shakespeare’s Miranda and Juliet as paragons of such deep and tranquil souls, though he includes Hamlet as well.54 Another illustration comes from one of Hegel’s favorite books, now (and even by the 1820s) largely forgotten: T.G. Hippel’s Lebensläufe in aufsteigender Linie.55 Hegel admires the independent-­mindedness of Hippel’s characters: individuals ensconced in prosaic jobs, who “in their reserve easily appear stubborn, unruly, gruff, wholly unreliable and contradictory in their actions and utterance” (208/584). In his estimation, Hippel’s novel itself “has a wonderful individuality, freshness and vitality” (ibid.); it “is very humorous, featuring many characters who are wonderfully individualized” (Libelt ms. 99: GW 28.3,1066).

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• Where the foregoing dealt with the inner aspect of character and action, a second section turns outwards to (2) ‘Adventure’ (die Abenteuerlichkeit): the medieval/modern world of ‘romance,’ tales of adventure, the worldly and profane, a world in which “independent individuality” (212/587) is ‘at home.’ The “dissolution of chivalry from within” (Ariosto, Cervantes56) and “of individual characters in their singularity” (Shakespeare: Falstaff’s derided ‘honor’) is then presented in comic light (217/591). Finally we have ‘das Romanhafte’ (the novel), outlined in a virtuoso parody found as early as 1820/21: “the knight-errantry [Ritterlichkeit] of heroes in modern romances [Romanen]”—youth as “these modern knights” in civil society (219/592–3), undergoing their “apprenticeship” (Lehrjahre: 220/593—transcripts from other years make explicit the sardonic allusion to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). Eventually they find their ideal maiden, along with the “headache” (“der ganzen Katzenjammer”) of bourgeois family life!57 Hardly a “genuine reconciliation” of individual subjectivity and social objectivity, this represents merely the protagonist’s passive acceptance of what seems inevitable, Jennifer Herdt observes in her book on the German tradition of Bildung.58 * * * No trace of ‘individuality’ is to be found in the final pages of this section, on the “end” of the romantic artform, save in looking back on classical art or when considering romantic character in its formalism-cum-formality. * * * • Now to my third major rubric: (III) classical sculpture considered as paradigm of ‘individuality,’ whether in form, in content, or in their combined dialectical presentation (‘for us’). The corporeal form of sculpture shapes “spiritual individuality” (351/701), not as yet “subjective singularity” (356/705), but nevertheless an advance on the singularity preserved and symbolized in the Egyptian pyramid.59 Spiritedness is “poured into” the corporeal cast, yet not by virtue of any inward element: sculpture cannot present the glance of the eye, its

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“singularized individuality” (357/706). Rather it is “substantive individuality,” linked essentially to ethical norm or ‘pathos.’ Hegel remarks on how physiognomics or pathognomics bears on classical sculpture. He remains skeptical, of the latter especially: states of mind or intentions are not amenable to being signified in external shape, while something like anger is shown only in a general manner, via shaking limbs or twitching lips (369/716). Physiognomy is declared more determinate—more “individual” (370/ibid.)—in its indication of character, yet the relation between meaning and shape remains contingent, governed neither by causal laws nor by conventional rules but by spontaneous acts of interpretation. Particular organs should be considered in relation both to mind and to physiology, Hegel argues. Gall was wrong to infer a direct linkage, as though spirit were a bump on the skull (recalling the Phenomenology’s “spirit is a bone”). Hegel cites Petrus Camper on the so-called “Greek profile” or line of beauty, the ideal facial angle Camper saw exemplified in classical sculpture (in his transcript Hotho affixed a sketch), far removed from animal appearance.60 It remains unclear how guilty of ‘essentialism’ Hegel proves, even of racial stereotyping, as often suggested. In appealing to Camper (less so to Blumenbach) Hegel seems to endorse solely the general aesthetic superiority of ancient Greek sculpture, as well the superiority of the human profile over the animal, rather than any kind of racial preeminence.61 I remarked earlier that habit is for Hegel the great mediator between nature and spirit/mind; I also cited his suggestion that the body could itself be deemed an artwork—as witness ancient sculpture. Through its corporeity the soul “feels itself and makes itself felt,” in Hegel’s words (§411/10, 192); otherwise put, the mind “manifests itself ” in and as the body.62 (In 1826 Hegel puts it neatly: “the soul appearing in the body and corporeity is only appearance, yet is not only an only [ein Nur], rather the appearance of soul also is affirmative, revealing itself as might [die Macht], as shaper [der Bildner] ….”63) Its corporeity—he adds, in a striking phrase already noted—“as the soul’s work of art, has human, pathognomic and physiognomic, expression.”64 Hegel points to “the artists of antiquity” (§411Z; 194), more especially to their presentation of carriage (or stance: ‘Haltung’) and gesture rather than the

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momentary facial expression of pathognomy. (Hegel repeats an observation made elsewhere, that the ancient Greeks adopted masks onstage because they entrusted meaning to words rather than the play of actors’ looks or glances: §411Z/195.) Hegel would allow that demeanor signifies, but not “mien” (Mienenhaften), particular facial expression (371/717). In turn, ancient Greece as a whole is dubbed prototypically plastic or sculptural: “the perfect plasticity of gods and humans … its poets and orators … all had this same plastic and universal yet individual character” (373/719). The great figures of Periclean Athens— “Pericles himself, Phidias, Plato, Sophocles above all, Thucydides, Xenophon, Socrates”—are without exception artists, “individuals of a single cast [Guß]” (374/719). Hegel’s argument is that classical sculpture (a) presents Greek citizens to themselves, and even more (b) presents their self-presentation to themselves. It is what Robert Pippin calls (with regard to Hegel on painting) the “dual doubleness” of artworks.65 The further question is whether and how far it presents such doubling for later generations and other cultures, who might recognize themselves there, or at least get a sense of how the ancients might have done so. How far might a sculptural ‘plasticity’ characterize our own modern sense of ourselves, as “an amphibian” inhabiting both spiritual and natural realms?66 (Heimann’s useful term ‘Amphibium’ will reappear in Hotho’s edition.) Hegel’s Phenomenology frames “the speculative proposition” (Satz) as inherently “plastic.” Thinking fashions the necessary unity (or sameness) of subject and predicate.67 The Preface to the Science of Logic contends that a “plastic discourse requires a plasticity of sense also in hearing and understanding,” while also despairing as to whether it is possible under modern conditions, set in their categorial ways.68 That is why Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville apply the label ‘Plasticity’ to their treatment of “the Hegelian writing of art.”69 The idea perhaps is that ‘plasticity’ attempts to capture the “becoming plastic of the Greek gods”—the way “something takes form in it [classical sculpture], or, more accurately, as it” (my emphasis). It captures the way classical sculpture displays no interior “but is itself a center,” anthropomorphic to the core, so to say:

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To be Greek is to participate in the formative process that makes the Greek gods what they are—selves in a strict Hegelian sense—and so makes Greek culture and identity what it is (Iversen and Melville, 166).

(By ‘selves’ the authors must mean self-sameness of form and content, shape and meaning: classical not modern individuality.70) Hegelian writing about art—classical sculpture its paradigm—imitates this fusion of inner meaning and external symbol: they is the same. Or so Hegel contends, while the authors comment, “we do not believe this.”71 Art history is written (they suggest) in perpetual oscillation between art’s architectural incipience and its painterly dissolution; just as art’s “highest end” (in classical antiquity) arrives long before its proper distinction as art (first with the Renaissance, more completely with the Romantics). Classical Particulars: When he turns to particular aspects of classical sculptural form, Hegel broadly follows Winckelmann. For instance, on the so-called “Greek profile” we read: “what sculpture has to display [darzustellen] is not spirituality as such but individuality expressing itself wholly in the corporeal” (388/731). Hegel remarks on the prominent forehead, eyes not protruding but deep-set, their sightless appearance indicating “withdrawal into essential individuality” (392/734), remarking too on classical ears, nose, mouth, chin, or hair. Hegel’s lectures might seem (pace Julia Peters) to suggest a strict connection between particular organs and mental traits; the eyes are ‘theoretical’ in signifying our cognitive potential, the mouth “practical” in its orientation to eating. Yet his developed view qualifies this. He interjects that the mouth is used for communication too, and further, that sculpture displays a physiognomic “mediation” between eye and mouth, which gives the nose its distinctive aesthetic importance (I’m unclear why). More generally, Hegel holds that features allow for flexibility in sculptural configuration: ‘individuality’ becomes subtly varied, invoking normative distinctions as well, ethical norms with practical weight.72 Hegel (per Hotho 1823) credits Winckelmann with distinguishing in principle between merely natural and ideal in classical art; Peters adds that Hegel never really says what makes for ideality while divulging a good deal about what it is not (Peters 2015, 118–19).

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That goes too for ‘individuality,’ as noted, but the reason is neither vagueness nor the uncertain pragmatics of “trouser”-words. It speaks primarily to an openness to difference even with respect to universal figures such as various Greek deities or heroic characters; and second to the normative charge that individuals either embody or else enact, concretely, in determinate deeds. * * * Hegel follows Winckelmann in another, more ideological respect, best caught by distinguishing ‘nature’ from the seemingly ‘natural.’ Bound up with Winckelmann’s idealization of the ancient Greeks is his periodizing of their art into successive ‘styles’: an austere “older” style, a second “high” style (closer to “the truth of nature”), followed by a “beautiful” phase (‘die schöne Stil’) gracefully rounded off, before degenerating finally into “imitative” style and pleasing effects. This fourfold pattern of stylistic development fundamentally influenced what would become the discipline of art history, not to mention independent theorists such as Schiller and Hegel (I’ve already noted that Hegel began by dividing classical form into sublime and beautiful, a bifurcation at the heart of the Ideal).73 We should take note of this strange ‘doubling’ (or ‘supplemental’) procedure by which internal distinction mirrors external, so that the classical removal from nature is achieved in two steps: the shift from “older” to “high” or noble, and then again to the “beautiful.”74 In short, Greek art attains naturalism by repudiating nature—Egyptian ‘fixity’ (Starrheit) of figure, for example—yet the Ideal is immanent in nature. Winckelmann’s account was bolstered first by his appeal to a model of cultural expression whereby Greek civilization is said to embody political freedom. Rhetorically it appealed to a doubling narrative in which Italian Renaissance art essentially repeated the achievement of the ancient Greeks, directly inspired by their ‘high’ stylistic model. What Ernst Gombrich dubbed ‘the Greek miracle’ has to do (for Hegel) with the liveliness, life-likeness, even the ‘naturalness’ with which classical art strikes us, in particular, the clear outlines famously characterized by Winckelmann as the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (edle Einfalt und stille Grösse) of the high style.75 With Hegel that qualitative

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advance describes not just plastic art but also literature: the contoured characters of Homer or Sophocles, the emotional depth of lyric, the sweep of epic or dramatic action. * * * Hegel warns against thinking sculpture of the gods devoid of individuality; indeed, he praises the ancient Greeks for their inventive characterization, wonderfully fusing universal with individual (426–7/761–2). He speaks of their “discovery of this plastic individuality” (428/763). A concluding chapter deals with “various kinds of presentation and material” and with the history of sculpture (via the guiding thread of ‘individuality’): single statues, groups, reliefs, “site-specific” works, pieces sorted by material (wood, bronze, marble).76 * * * I pass over Hegel’s extensive discussion of sculptural history, engaging though it is. The chapter ends by distinguishing what sculpture essentially lacks: a universality founded on “the principle of absolute personality” or “the moment of subjective singularity”—the human in all its weakness, contingency, particularity, etc. In short, it is “the whole individuality” of “the subject in its total range …” (461/791): precisely the business of painting, whose thematics comprise “individuality’s inner life” (15, 24/802), exceeding the “fixed self-enclosure” of sculptural individuality (34/810).77 True, the focus is here on “singular” shape or situation (84–5/851–2), yet even the portraitist should aim at a “characteristic individuality,” a “vital” or “most living” individuality (86–9/852–4) beyond peculiar traits. Instead of the plastic ideality of sculpture, painting exhibits “particular persons” (100/864), including the misshapen and ugly. Yet it can also depict exemplary figures (Hegel instances Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo), and with portraiture can do justice to the sitters’ individuality, the unity of their “spiritual individuality” (103/865–6). * * *

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• Finally: (IV) poetic or literary individuality, including “poetically subjective [dichtende subjektive] individuality” (15, 247/978). To quote from my own “Hegelian Comedy”: A literary work is at bottom verbal address, to a specific audience, about common concerns whether of subjective feeling or social conflict and resolution. Hegel speaks initially to differences between poetic and prosaic composition (15, 257/979): the poetic work displays a certain organic unity, its parts at once independent and integral to the whole. That reflects in turn the coherence of human action within the world the artwork depicts, epitomized in the term “individuality” (Individualität), whereby heroic agents appear more or less in harmony with their circumstances. The poetic work frees itself from “the world of prose,” to which the historian is beholden, and from the varied agenda pursued by the orator (Donougho 2016, 202).

Poetic representation (Vorstellen) may be called “figurative” (bildlich) inasmuch as it gives us neither an abstract essence nor contingent appearance but its concrete actuality such that “we cognize substance immediately through the external itself and inseparable from its individuality” (276–7/1002). Epic: Hegel describes the “free individuality” of its epic figures (Gestalten) embedded in a “heroic world condition” (342/1053). He maintains that epic situations often contain incipient conflict, when perceived injury leads to reaction; war best displays “individual epic action [Handlung]” (353/1062). The hero’s aims are animated by his individuality. Epic happenings require that there be “one individual” (357/1065), just as the rhapsode is unitary (Hegel mentions Dante’s Divine Comedy as a special case where the poet represents himself as hero: 358/1066). Such “total individuals” focus in themselves various national character traits, in contrast to dramatic characters, more “self-­ concentrated” on their characteristic purpose or on principles their “solitary individuality” has assimilated (361/1068–9—cf. 379/1082). Fate rules the world of epic, whereas dramatic characters help fashion their own fate. Epic action stems not just from subjective mood (Stimmung) or from “mere individuality of character,” but also from external circumstance (379/1082). If Homer is supreme in Hegel’s

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book, a modern parallel is Dante’s Divine Comedy, to which Hegel devotes some celebrated lines (406–7/1103–4), inspiring Erich Auerbach to speak of “Dante’s realism.”78 Though not displaying the “individually rounded” exposition proper to epic, instead of “particular happening” this work substitutes a sense of eternal action ruling over a transient and human world. Its characters are fully real, their actions— in the “Inferno”—frozen for all time, “in situations they have produced for themselves, for their individuality… eternal on their face [an sich selber]” (407/1104). Lyric: ‘Individuality’ is less in evidence with lyric poetry. In the treatment of circumstances (425/118), Hegel refers to “poetic individuality,” and to the “whole living individuality” of Hafiz’s love songs, close to ‘humor’ (428/1121). Content need not matter: what counts is the poet’s individuality (455/1142). Speaking of oriental lyric, Hegel suggests that simile can liberate the poet by assimilating external material, creating a certain “free individuality” (464/1149). Drama: Dramatic poetry presents human individuality in concrete action (480/1162). Dramatic characters display a lively individuality, one that combines determinate character with objective disposition (492/1172). Where Greek tragedy allowed the expression of individuality, modern German authors will indulge agents’ “particular individuality” (sic: 496/1175). With Shakespeare and Goethe Sophocles shares presentation of characters displaying an “all-pervasive individuality” (500/1177), in speech too. Modern actors face the challenge of adapting the part the poet gives them to their own disposition and individuality, having to make it come alive in the present. As for tragic characters, they have one essential nature or individuality (522/1195): they are “as it were, sculptural works, great individuals.”79 The gods come to life via the determinate pathos of human individuality, where individuals are nevertheless held answerable (523/1196). Eternal justice is meted out to individuals and their aims. Ethical unity is restored with the downfall of the individuality which had first disturbed the peace (524/1197). Reconciliation comes from stripping individuality of its false one-sidedness (527/1199)—but, to repeat, reconciliation is a sham, purely theatrical make-believe, in content as in dramaturgical form.80 Tragedy sees individuals destroy themselves

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through one-sidedness, whereas in comedy, subjectivity or self-­ assurance wins out, and individuals are allowed to laugh at their own foibles (ibid.). The beginnings of drama lay in the free individuality of the Greeks, in every walk of life; modern conditions speak instead to the fate of a particular individual or character in determinate circumstances (535–6/1206). For moderns, poetic interest lies in greatness of character, imagination, or disposition. Substantial values (country, family, crown, etc.) might well enter, but what counts is the character’s own individuality, and those substantial ends are the determinate ground on which it stands and acts (537/1207). Only in heroic times could substantive ethical powers or pathé appear as gods capable of animating free human individuality (539/1209). Over against acting individuals in potential conflict we find the chorus, embodying the actual substance of ethical life; peculiarly apt for difficult times when laws do not admit unambiguous interpretation or support. The chorus does not act or take sides, though it can warn or sympathize: it functions as “an environment for the heroes in the action” (542/1211), and is thus essential to (presentation of ) the action in classical tragedy. Comedy: Comedy—at least, Aristophanes’ ‘Old Comedy’—contains “the configuring [Gestaltung] of the divine into human individuality,” as the gods are roundly derided (553/1221), or rather, the difference between the truth of religion or state and the subjective opinions of citizens and individuals is exposed (554/1222). Hegel reserves special praise for modern portrayals of individuals, in Shakespeare particularly (Macbeth, Othello), whose individuality exceeds any one-sided passion or devotion to an idea (561/1227). Modern drama is, on the other hand, rich in portrayals of irresolute characters unable to achieve a firm, rounded individuality (563/1228)—Hamlet, for example. Alternatively, we find characters with no ethical rationale other than being driven by the “formal necessity of their individuality” (564/1230), Shakespeare again providing exemplars; or else “modern individuality and the particularity of character, circumstance and complications” show the character surrendering to a “fragile” world (566/1231). As for modern approaches, apart from than traditional German ‘Lustspiel,’

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Hegel specifies (in 1826) a “middle” genre called simply “drama”: Diderot’s ‘comédie sérieuse’ (bourgeoise).81 This Hotho’s edition shoehorns into a one-page discussion of ‘(ßß)’ “dramas midway between tragedy and comedy,” having Hegel dismiss the genre rather briskly (568–9/1232–3) as entirely consumed with money or property, superficial class differences, petty love-affairs and the like, where virtue gets rewarded and vice punished. The upshot is that, if comedy does not actually bring art altogether to an end (as implied), it manages to supplant an integral ‘individuality’ with isolate ‘individual.’ There remains a tension between the individual’s independence and the ‘singular’ (or finite) person set in place. In sum, the word ‘individuality’ runs like a silver thread through the text (or transcribed texts) of Hegel’s Aesthetics, yet does little explanatory work. It serves to demarcate—in the classical Ideal—integral characteristic from singular trait or contingent detail (in symbolism, say, or modern contingency, or finite and singular persons). Even there, individual touch or response (regarding Dutch genre painters or objective ‘Humor,’ for example) might enliven and salvage the merely literal, finite and fleeting (I’ll return to this characteristically modern moment). Hegel depicts classical individuality as the expression or “manifesting” of inner significance (virtue, character, ‘sittlich’ norms) in outer shape or action. Yet it reveals equally the cultural limits (even self-limitation) to such expression: a minded self-possessed subjectivity which (‘for us’) betrays its “cold pastoral,” a romantic/Romantic projection of grace into form and content. Pastoral is essentially past. At this point I turn from summarizing Hegel’s usage to examination of specific issues in his mature conception of art.

Notes 1. The latest (October 2022) comprises a trove of manuscripts unearthed in Munich and nearby Freising, many of which concern lectures on Aesthetics delivered earlier in Heidelberg, as transcribed by Carové.

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2. See Hilmer 1997, 132–3, and especially 155–75 (‘symbol’ as topos in the Goethezeit). She judges it naïve to describe the classical Ideal as tautologous in form, since its essential definition is that it has emerged out of the symbolic artform/worldview. See too Speight 2015, 110–11. 3. See Hilmer 1997, 132–3, and especially 155–75 (‘symbol’ as topos in the Goethezeit). She judges it naïve to describe the classical Ideal as tautologous in form, since its essential definition is that it has emerged out of the symbolic artform/worldview. See too Speight 2015, 110–11. 4. Austin 1962, 15 and 70–71. Austin writes of the “immense diversity in specific applications” conditioning any affirmative usage. If among those contexts we detect a latent sexist attitude—women in charge!—the pragmatics remain valid nevertheless. (A chiamys was the cloak worn by Greek male warriors or hunters.) 5. “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Keats 2001, 354. Compare Empson 1966, 25: “the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple.” I comment on that ironic regard in Donougho 2007, 182. For the pastoral as ironic mode in art history, see Wood 2019, 39–42 and passim. Wood understands it to define the entire discipline, at least until Erwin Panofsky turned away from its allure (Wood, 323). 6. Fish 1972. His chief concern is seventeenth-century English literature (Bacon, Herbert, Bunyan, Burton, Browne): didactic poetry as aesthetic therapy. He quotes Robert Burton (305): “Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse.” I return later to Hegel’s treatment of didactic poetry as self-­reflexive art. 7. Commenting on post-Hegelian art, Alexander Potts frames William Turner’s painting as ‘comic’ (cf. Hegel’s ‘objective humor’), and as claiming what he terms “anti-autonomous autonomy” (Potts 2009, 60). Some of Turner’s pictures append prose texts, as though to frame—yet undercut—their own autonomy. Compare Koerner 2004, on Lutheran imagery, Chap. 5 (note 77). 8. See Donougho 2000, 2001, 2018. 9. In 1826 Hegel refers to a “middle” genre, namely “drama,” which corresponds to Diderot’s ‘comédie sérieuse’ (or bourgeoise), but he devotes little space to it; there’s even less in Hotho’s edition (see below). 10. 13, 34/17. Hotho’s official edition adopts Hegel’s 1828 formulation: Hegel 2017, Heimann 6–7; Hegel 2020, 919–20. Hegel even supplies the reference: Horen 97., 7. Heft (1797). Hirt’s essay continues: “Only by observing this individuality can the work of art become a true type, a genuine reproduction of nature. Only in this way does artistic work become interesting, only in this regard may we admire the artist’s talent.”

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11. Donougho 2020. (See also Speight 2015, 105 f.) Hegel argues that ‘das Kunstschöne’ should integrate the opposed norms of taste (in singular works) and universal theory of beauty (e.g., Plato’s). This is where Hirt’s definition enters. The Ideal concerns both content and artistic form: each is individual, each significant. 12. See Reid 2014, passim, but especially 5, 10–13, 23–33. Hegel had at first targeted Friedrich Schlegel alone, according to Reid, but then took note of Schlegel’s reference to Fichte (among others). 13. Rumohr alleged that ‘Ideal’ was newfangled, even Mannerist in origin, although its use had become commonplace. He derived the word not from the Greek but from modern Italian ‘idea’—‘Einfall,’ arbitrary representation. See Rumohr 1827, 41–42. (I return to Hegel’s defense of the ‘Ideal’ from Rumohr’s assault.) 14. These few pages feature ‘individuality’ at least seven times, variants of ‘individual’ even more. 15. GW 28.2: Hegel 2018, 587 (Griesheim, 74). Heroic ‘individuality,’ located in character—as “universal determination,” distinct from modern conditions—is discussed at 587–96. 16. Hotho 79–80 (GW 28.1, 296) presents the situation as entangled with individuality, specifically with respect to ethical powers or norms, which exceed meeting needs. Hotho goes on to distinguish (a) “placid” (ruhige) from (b) dynamic situations (figures in motion or play). Hotho’s official edition adopts the more detailed 1826 articulation, especially between physical collisions, collisions in nature, natural distinctions understood normatively, and collisions or injuries derived from human deeds. See Kehler 48–54 (ms. 86–100), von der Pfordten 90–94 (ms. 17-18a): GW 28.2, 598–611. 17. After b. ‘Situation’ Kehler has c. ‘Reaction to Situation’ (Kehler 99–105, GW 28.2, 611–18): discussion of how, for the ancients, ethical offence and guilt motivate action over the course of several plays exploring its implications. Hegel warns that the ethical “powers” should always be “positive,” as opposed to “un-aesthetic” forms like servitude (Knechtschaft: Kehler 101, GW 28.2, 612). 18. Heimann 33–4; Hegel 2020 = GW: 28.3, 972–4. 19. Simpson writes: Situation was one of the keywords of eighteenth-century literary and philosophical diction in both English and French, from [where] it made its way into German. Indeed, the word appears somewhat obsessively in late eighteenth-century writings (novels for instance) describing the place of persons in the world (Simpson 2002, 23).

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He identifies Kenneth Burke as a theorist of ‘situation,’ though Burke preferred ‘scene’ (cf. Burke 1969, xv, on “the five key terms of dramatism”: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose). Hegel seems to have pioneered the extension of ‘situation’ to art, literature especially. It does not figure in his work before Berlin. He rarely uses it elsewhere, and then only in aesthetic or dramaturgical metaphor. 20. In the musical Oliver, Fagin ends his song, “I think I’d better think it out again.” 21. Simpson suggests that ‘situation’ emerged—in fact and in fiction—at the close of the eighteenth century (Simpson 2002, 23–4). It captures a basic paradox by which an individual defines itself as defined by its situation, in some measure even choosing its situation (i.e., how it should be situated). 22. Hegel 2007a, §406Z, 102/Hegel 1969 10: 144. 23. Individuality does however display local variation in expression of passion, as “Volksindividualitäten” (304/235). (The translator Knox nicely illustrates this with his Scottish ‘Och!’ and ‘O!’) Hotho’s transcript gives several examples of the difficulty the poet experiences in grasping the internal motivation of external events, as with the “acts” of the gods, which should neither be humanized nor appear ex machina. 24. Harper’s Magazine, review of Garber 2020; Dillon 2012, 90. 25. Garber has chapters on phrenology (Chap. 4), modern psychology (Chap. 5), physiognomy, art and photography (Chap. 6), and character types (Chap. 7) derived from Theophrastus’ Moral Characters. She concludes: “What was once an object of conviction, the belief in human character, has become more like a label, or an evaluation, or a good (and bad) grade…. Scientists tend not to use it” (Garber 2020, 375). 26. I invoke a typology due to Mary Douglas (see Douglas, no date): Isolate Individualism

Positional/Hierarchical Enclave or Sect

The diagram does not match Hegel’s own scheme perfectly. Nothing for instance corresponds to sectarian culture (strong group, weak internal regulation). 27. See Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (1970), epigraph: These roles which, being neither those of Hero or Heroine, Confidante or Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement, were called Fifth

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Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business. Credited to a real book—Thomas Overskou’s Den Danske Skueplads (1854–76)—the ascription is spurious. 28. Lugowski 1990. But as noted, Lugowski was equally attentive to the ‘Gehabtsein’ of the ‘world,’ a world literary individuals inhabit and by which they are inhabited. 29. Anderson 2019. Toril Moi’s “Rethinking Character,” 27–75. Garber 2020 lies at the opposite pole: character as type. 30. It later emerged that Marianne von Willemer (1784–1869), the woman to whom Goethe dedicates many of the poems, was herself a poet and might well have written some of the work. Ironically, her creative individuality was for long effaced. 31. See Donougho 1982b. Worth noting is the relative attention paid to various artforms. Consistently in all lecture series, most attention is devoted to the symbolic, least to the classical—as though perfect harmony is of slight interest, with little or nothing left to say. 32. Wood 2019, 215: “Hegel’s innovation is to have expounded his philosophy of art in the form of an historical fable.” (Art history employs fable or story, he says, replacing chronology or typology.) 33. Hegel borrowed the title from his Heidelberg friend, Friedrich Creuzer, who eventually dropped it from his own system of symbolics, perhaps embarrassed by the strong philosophical interpretation Hegel had imposed. See Donougho 1992, and more recent scholarship by Jon Stewart (in Stewart 2018, especially 32–41). 34. See Donougho 1982b, especially for Derrida and de Man. The sphinx, symbolizing the human as it emerges from nature (the rational head from the animal body), likewise acts as the symbol for Egyptian riddling culture (Hegel 1969, 12: 245–6). Cf. 13, 465/360: “It is the symbol as it were of the symbolic itself.” 35. Suffice it to mention Whitney Davis, who decries as prejudice Hegel’s dismissal of Egyptian therioanthropes, recommending instead a shamanistic, animist perspective (Davis 2018). He complains that Hegel finds in the symbol the very distinction (between meaning and shape) he had first put there; though he does allow that Hegel was aware of the risk of circularity. 36. Kehler ms. 165ff., in Hegel 2018 (GW 28.2), 677. (Part of the critical edition, this volume is based on Griesheim’s transcript, with variants

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including Kehler.) See also Donougho 2001, 2018. In 1826 Hegel drops any mention of individual relation with God, preferring talk of humans’ consciousness of their finitude, or (in 1828) their self-assertion under the law (Heimann 51: Hegel 2017, 87; Hegel 2020 (GW 28.3), 1014–15). 37. For background see the essays just cited, plus Donougho 2000. Hegel’s ultimate stance is deflationary or, as I term it, “Hegel’s bathetic sublime”: decidedly non-Romantic. That may be why it is overlooked in the literature. 38. Henrich 1957, 546–7. Henrich argues that Schiller united two senses of ‘freedom’: ethical self-determination, and a Kant-inspired harmonious play of our faculties. Schiller’s effort failed, yet in subordinating natural beauty to art he heralds the aesthetics of Schelling and Hegel. 39. Donougho 2001, 3; citing de Man 1983, 144. 40. See Donougho 2021, 199. Compare Hegel 1969, 14: 239–40/608–9; on Goethe’s Xenien and offending “rockets,” 13: 524–5/409; on poetic garlands, 14: 173/555. 41. See Norman Bryson on ‘xenia’ as magical phenomena, illusive and reversible, existing in the eye of the beholder: Bryson 1990, 17 f. 42. See 14, 13/427, already cited: “die klassische Schönheit hat zu ihren Inneren die freie, selbständige Bedeutung, d.i. nicht eine Bedeutung von irgend etwas, sondern das sich selbst Bedeutende und damit auch sich selber Deutende.” 43. Hegel 1969, 12, 295f./Hegel 2011b, 220f. “This stamps the Greek character as that of beautiful individuality, which is produced by spirit, transforming the merely natural into an expression of its own being” (2011a, 293/219). “The gods are subjects, concrete individualities…” (301/225). 44. See Donougho 2018, 219–20. Even in the 1820/21 series, where Hegel pairs a ‘classical sublime’ with a ‘classical beauty,’ he esteems the latter much more highly (Ascheberg ms., 85/Hegel 2015b, 95). Hotho does cite the “Ideal in its simplest most sublime form... sunken into itself... sublimity fused [verschmolzen] with beauty” (Hotho 156/Hegel 2015b, 392). “This eternal repose is the supreme manner of this classical Ideal.” The lofty seriousness of the Greek gods represents one moment in their individuality. 45. “From the Sublime to the Hermeneutic,” in Hartman 1975, 114–23. 46. Ibid. 289/215–16. Hegel adds: “to this the Greeks attached the name μαντεια.” (Jon Stewart drew my attention to the importance of this

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passage.) The Muses are individuated as the Naiads were not; they stand for individual spheres of culture and act essentially within their specific terms. 47. Hegel 1969, 2, 503/Hegel 1991a, 158 (for comparison of solar and ethical systems), and 524/175 (for the centrality of the Volk). 48. See Hotho ms. 31, Hegel 2015b (GW 28.2), 248: “a content which has a shape adequate to it, which as genuine content does not lack genuine form” (my translation). 49. Hotho ms. 214, Hegel 2015b, 460: “here spirit is presented as it is.” Hotho’s reference is admittedly to sculpture, but it applies equally to philosophy of mind. 50. Hegel 2015b, 752, Kehler ms. 268. 1826 adds themes of infinite pain (Schmerz) and reconciliation, with regard to Christ, Mary, or assorted martyrs. Ascheberg’s 1820/21 transcript shows how early Hegel had come to focus on honor, love and fidelity (ms. 106–9). Little worthwhile has been written on the literary theme of ‘honor’; Hegel’s approach seems original. While no fan of Hegel’s, Walter Benjamin praised his insights here, citing the Aesthetics on the “absolutely vulnerable” (Benjamin 2019, 74–5; translation amended). Cf. Johann Huizinga (Huizinga 1996, 74): “The preoccupation with personal honor and fame—seemingly arising from a high sense of honor at one time and from unrefined pride at another—has been posited by Burckhardt to be the characteristic quality of Renaissance man”—quite unlike medieval chivalry and feudal estate. 51. Pinkard 2017, 106–7, and 109–10, on the worldview of “feudal dependence.” Eventually the “chivalric individual” becomes a “Shakespearean individual”: “Shakespearian characters are the prototypical ‘amphibians’ of modern life” (110–11)—self-consistent, yet contingent in their situation. 52. Heimann (Jan. 1829, ms. 74–6; Hegel 2020, 1060–63) renders the sequence as honor, love, and fidelity, citing ‘das Individuum’ under all three. Hilmer refers to 1826 “experiments” in renaming, abandoned in 1828 (Hilmer 1997, 189f.). She notes that the 1830 Encyclopædia first awarded ‘romantic art’ its own specific place distinct from classical art. §562 names it, stating that the “externality” deposited by God “can therefore appear here in contingency over against its meaning” (Hegel 1969, 10:370/Hegel 2007a, 261). 53. Hegel 2018, 753–4 (Griesheim 233).

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54. I sense an affinity with Kierkegaard’s ‘Silhouettes’ in part 1 of Either-Or, even though Kierkegaard took strong exception to what he saw as the aestheticism of Hegelian ‘Individualitet.’ The section called ‘Silhouettes’ frames the inaccessibility of woman (sc., women!), hence the vain attempt to capture—more benignly, do justice to—its/their ‘essence.’ 55. Lebensläufe in aufsteigender Linie (1778–81). Hegel calls it “one of the few original German works of humour” (209/584), superior to Jean Paul’s efforts. Heimann notes (Jan. 1829, 78; GW 28.3, 1066) the mention of Kantian “principles”; Hippel had attended some of Kant’s lectures, and in part 2 of his novel (1779) inserts his own version of Kantian ideas. For influence on Hegel, see Macgregor 1992. 56. Ascheberg 128, Hegel 2015b (GW 28.1), 112: “Don Quixote ist ächte Ironie.” 57. A philistine like any other (Ascheberg 127–8, ibid.): the individual faces an arbitrary ‘singular,’ but then surrenders its subjectivity and merges with the state. Hegel was guarded in criticizing his own hero, Goethe, although distance from Meister would have been encouraged by its high reputation among the early Romantics. 58. Herdt 2019, 193–4, 199. 59. See Ascheberg 162/Hegel 2015b, 138: “der Hauptunterschied der griechischen Kunst von der egyptischen Kunst ist, die vollkommen Individualität der ersten.” See also ms. 167/140: “Bei der Griechen war das Gefühl der Individualität gesteigert.” 60. See Hegel 1969, 14:383/728; cf. 1826, Kehler 333. Camper (1722–1789) was a Dutch surgeon and talented anatomical draughtsman; his volumes of illustrations exerted a wide influence. 61. See Barbara Stafford’s Body Criticism (Stafford 1991, 111–115). She notes Camper’s unwillingness to draw inferences about comparative intelligence or racial superiority. Allegra de Laurentiis (2014, 631) defends Blumenbach from later distortions of his views on human variety, and from mistranslation of ‘Ausartung’ as ‘degeneracy’ (rather than neutral ‘derivation’). 62. Julia Peters (2015, 25–6) deserves credit for emphasizing ‘self-­ manifestation’ in Hegel’s text, distinguishing it from ‘expression.’ 63. Griesheim 61, Hegel 2018 (GW 28.2), 573: we could render ‘Bildner’ as sculptor (Bildhauer). Cf. Kehler 62: “das bestimmende, bildende, die unendliche Form…”; Löwe, “das Formierende.” 64. Malabou 2004, 68–9, and Peters 2015, 24–6, both remark on the broad analogy Hegel draws between mind-body expression and classical sculp-

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ture. Malabou’s title may be said to extrapolate from such fundamental “plasticity.” For commentary, see Hass 2014, 146–9 and 208–9. He observes that her use of the trope ‘voir venir’ (wait and see) links plasticity to the “future” in and of Hegel: hence the ‘temporality’ of her title. The topic will return in my remarks on art and anachronism, below. 65. Or “double doubling.” See Robert Pippin, “Painting,” in Kottman and Squire 2018, 189–205, especially 194, citing 13: 51/31—“der Mensch als Geist verdoppelt sich….” The artist is (1) a being in nature, existing (2) as embodied mind (or minded body), and (3) fashioning a self-reflexive image of that constitutive process or state. To which we may add (4) that artists present us—or their fellow citizens—with such images. Artworks are, Hegel declares (in Hotho’s edition), “essentially a question, an address [Anrede] to the resounding breast…” (13:102/72). 66. Heimann 11 (3 November 1828), 19; Hegel 2020 (GW 28.3), 929: “Ein Amphibium is der Mensch, einer Zweiheit gehört er an und ist nicht fähig, in Einem oder Anderm sich zu befriedigen.” 67. Hegel’s Phenomenology ¶64; Hegel 1969, 5: 60 (it seems the lone instance of ‘plastisch’). 68. Hegel 1969: 5, 31/Hegel 2010b, 20. He speaks of “plastic youths and men.” See too 5, 30/19: “The presentation [Darstellung] of no subject matter can be in and for itself as strictly and immanently plastic as is that of thought in its immanent development.” Later (33/21), citing the difficulty of thought becoming plastic today, Hegel famously wishes for time to rework his own text “seven and seventy times over.” 69. Iversen and Melville 2010, Chap. 8: “Plasticity: the Hegelian Writing of Art.” 70. OED, ‘self ’ adj. sense 3. of color or whiskey. 71. Iversen and Melville, 171. They still find Hegel’s argument “deeply powerful.” But as professional art historians, they admit that the plasticity of (their own) writing cannot be secured. Plasticity remains for them a mere dream, perhaps a parody. 72. See Kehler ms. 329–3, in a section labelled “[2. Idealität und Individualität]” by the editors of Hegel 2015b, 175–77; ‘individuality’ seems to capture the varied character and vitality of sculptural ‘Gestaltung.’ 73. Ascheberg: Hegel 2015b, 85/95. 74. See Fried 1986 and Donougho 2014. Fried argues that a third term— the Renaissance—is required to give the classical Ideal referential stability: retrospective invention is naturalized as cyclical process. But

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stability comes anyway from a Luhmannian ‘return of the distinction within the distinction,’ part and parcel of the Ideal’s ‘second-order observation.’ It’s just more giddy-making! 75. Gombrich 1960, Chapter IV: “Reflections on the Greek Revolution.” Gombrich later offered a very different explanation via “making and matching” rather than expression of worldview (Greek freedom in its physical situation and environment). For an excellent treatment of the issues, see Squire 2011, Chapter II: “Figuring What Comes Naturally? Writing the ‘Art History’ of the Body.” He notes that for Gombrich the invention of western naturalism parallels the invention of western narrative—“plausibility, character development, suspense, direct speech, empathy, etc.” (Squire, 45). Gombrich claims that is “no accident” that the tricks of illusionist art and perspective are found in the design of Greek theatrical scenery (Gombrich, 131). 76. I noted Hegel’s reference to Hirt, whose criticism of Weimar classicism he took on board, not least in disparaging the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon group. Hegel traces the Apollo to a later period, and calls it “pleasing” rather than “severe,” citing an “English traveller” (431/766) who had dubbed it “a theatrical coxcomb” (Heimann 100 has “einen Stutzer,” a dandy; Libelt 124r, “den theatralischen Stutzer”: GW 28.3, 1104). The writer, unnamed (and unidentified by the translator), was William Hazlitt, Morning Chronicle, 26 July 1825—testament to Hegel’s wide reading. 77. See Robert Pippin, “Painting,” in Kottman & Squire 2018, 190–92. 78. Auerbach 1953, 191: “the astounding paradox of what is called Dante’s realism.” Dante’s characters in Hell lead a “changeless existence”: “Hegel uses the expression… in one of the most beautiful passages ever written on Dante.” Cf. Dante, Poet of the Secular [irdischen] World (Auerbach 2007), e.g., 59, 132–3, 142–3. The book is indebted to Hegel, whose name remains hidden, doubtless for prudential reasons; ‘individuality’ and ‘individual’ occur frequently. See also “The Discovery of Dante by Romanticism” (1929), in Auerbach 2014, 141–43; and the overview in Donougho 1998. 79. Cf. Ascheberg 208/Hegel 2015b (GW 28.1), 261: “Eine solche wahrhaft plastische Individualität,” in tragic drama. 80. See my remarks in Chap. 5, concerning Hegel’s “collisional” (Critchley) view of classical tragedy. Here in the Aesthetics all appears sweetness and light, though that may be put down in part to the procedural need to make elements shipshape. Behind the scenes there is turmoil.

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81. Kehler ms. 457, 1826: Hegel 2015b, 234. I discuss Hotho’s distortions in my “Hegel and ‘the other comedy’” (Donougho 2021, 196). Hegel takes note of the bourgeois situation of modern individuals. It concerns a ‘middle’ genre, telling us about ‘middling’ individuals making their way in the world.

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Donougho, Martin 2016, “Hegelian Comedy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 49/2 (2016), 196-220 Donougho, Martin 2018, “Hegel’s Bathetic Sublime,” in Idealistic Studies 46: 3 (2018), 217-36 Donougho, Martin 2020, “Hegel’s ‘characteristic’ (die Charakteristik) in 1828/29,” in Studi di estetica (2020) Donougho, Martin 2021, “Hegel and ‘the Other Comedy’,” in Mark Alznauer (ed.), Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy: New Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021), 185-205 Empson, William 1966, Some Versions of Pastoral: a study of the pastoral form in literature (1935; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) Fish, Stanley 1972, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-­ Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) Fried, Michael 1986, “Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation,” October 37 (1986), 87–97 Garber, Marjorie 2020, Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) Gombrich, Ernst 1960, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) Hartman, Geoffrey 1975, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) Hass, Andrew W. 2014, Hegel and the Art of Negation: Negativity, Creativity and Contemporary Thought (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014) Henrich, Dieter 1957, “Der Begriff der Schönheit in Schillers Ästhetik,” in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 11/4 (1957), 527-47 Herdt, Jennifer 2019, Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) Hilmer, Brigitte 1997, Scheinen des Begriffs. Hegels Logik der Kunst (Hamburg: Meiner, 1997) Huizinga, Johann 1996, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney Peyton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Iversen, Margaret and Stephen Melville 2010, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) Jones, John 1962, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) Keats, John 2001, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: The Folio Society, 2001) Koerner, Joseph Leo 2004, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)

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Kottman, Paul and Michael Squire 2018, The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History, eds. Kottman and Squire (Paderborn: Fink, 2018) Laurentiis, Allegra de 2014, “Race in Hegel: Text and Context,” in M. Eggar (ed.) Philosophie nach Kant: Neue Wege zum Verständnis von Kants Transzendental- und Moralphilosophie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014) Lugowski, Clemens 1990, Form, Individuality and the Novel: an analysis of literary structure in early German prose (Cambridge: Polity, 1990; German original 1932). Malabou, Catherine 2004, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2004) MacGregor, David 1992, Hegel, Marx, and the English State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992) Moland, Lydia 2019, Hegel’s Aesthetics: the Art of Idealism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Peters, Julia 2015, Hegel on Beauty (New York: Routledge, 2015) Pinkard, Terry 2017, Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) Potts, Alexander 2009, “The Romantic Work of Art,” in Hinderliter et al. (eds.), Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 51-78 Reid, Jeffrey 2014, The Anti-Romantic: Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) von Rumohr, C.F. 1827, Italienische Forschungen, first part (Berlin: Nikolai, 1827) Simpson, David 2002, Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) Speight, Allen 2015, “Philosophy of Art,” in Michael Baur (ed.), G.W.F. Hegel: Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2015), 103-15 Squire, Michael 2011, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) Stafford, Barbara Maria 1991, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991) Stewart, Jon 2018, Hegel’s Interpretation of the Religions of the World: The Logic of the Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Wood, Christopher 2019, A History of Art History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)

9 ‘Individuality’ in Hegel’s Aesthetics (II)

[A]rt … should convert every shape at all points on its visible surface into an eye, which is the seat of the soul and brings spirit to appearance …. (Hegel)1 No Homer, Sophocles, etc., no Dante, Ariosto, or Shakespeare can appear in our day …. Only the present is fresh, the rest is paler and paler. (Hegel)2

Hegel’s conception of art in Berlin: In what follows I offer a series of remarks about Hegel’s approach to art and the arts during his Berlinmaturity, as that conception gradually emerged through the four separate lecture series (1820/21, 1823, 1826, and 1828/29). My starting point is that ‘individuality’ resembles a mask, one that with hindsight may be discerned in the classical Ideal—in its staging, so to speak—, cued up to play a gradually more complex or displaced role in post-classical culture. Yet masks are not merely seen through, revealing some authentic self beneath: rather, they largely constitute modern reality. The very duality of mask/ character is what meets our gaze. In turn, the dialectic of essence and semblance (Schein) is to be further comprehended via the logic of the concept. As I shall argue, a fuller actualization of art and artwork—“for us”—requires consideration of how classical individuality appears in the perspective (a) of Romantic poetics and (b) of a modern—even © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Donougho, Hegel’s ‘Individuality’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4_9

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contemporary—set of institutions. What that does for the strange figure ‘individuality’ remains to be worked out, but let me anticipate. The mediation of particular (or singular) and universal which it embodies in thematic respect (e.g., the ‘action’ impersonated or described) is matched in formal respect by the individuality of the artwork, and in the third place—via the pragmatics of philosophers’ “thinking regard,” their ‘uptake’—by a syllogistic recasting of form and content. It goes beyond judgment—Urteil—passed on historical content and genres/forms.3 To cite H.S. Harris once again: “‘individuality’ is what belongs to the concrete thinking of the logician, who unites the moments and comprehends them in their unity.” 1. Eyes on the artwork: Hotho’s edition of the Aesthetics features an extraordinary passage at the very moment Hegel’s exposition shifts from the beauty of or in nature to ‘artistic beauty’ (das Kunstschöne). Under the heading ‘beautiful individuality’ Hegel argues that the human form in its ‘Lebendigkeit’ (liveliness, vivacity) is uniquely suited to displaying the ‘Ideal’ (the Idea in sensuous shape), as compared with examples of natural symmetry, rocks, amoeba, plants, or non-human animals, and so on. In particular, the eye is best equipped to exhibit spirit or mindedness: the soul not only sees but is also seen through the eye—its eyes. Communicability is native to the human form, we might say, to its ‘look’ especially. In turn the task of art, Hegel declares, should convert every shape at all points on its visible surface into an eye ….—Or, as Plato cries out to the star in that familiar [bekannten] distich: “When you look on the stars, my star, oh! would I were the heavens, able to see you with a thousand eyes,” so conversely art makes every one of its productions into a thousand-eyed Argus, whereby the inner soul and spirit is seen at every point. And it is not just the bodily form, the look [Mien] of the eyes, the countenance and posture, but also actions and events, speech and sounds [Töne], and their serial passage [Verlauf] through all conditions of appearance, that art has everywhere to make into an eye in which the free soul is revealed in its inner infinity (13, 203–4/153–4).4

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Hegel/Hotho holds that the Ideal (of art) is “actuality,” not as abstractly universal (that’s for thoughts) but “as living individuality” (207/156). “This force of individuality”—he adds—“we recognize especially in the artworks of antiquity in the cheerful and serene peace of their shapes” (208/157). Sensuous shape (Gestalt) and spiritual significance (Bedeutung) manifest themselves as one and the same; ‘sense’ displays its dual significance, sense and sensibility. This passage stems from Hotho’s 1823 transcription of Hegel’s lectures, which rehearses Plato’s (not yet “bekannt”) distich, without mention of Argus—who knows where he comes from anyway—though the name ‘Aster’ is tacitly present.5 In 1826 the distich resurfaces, yet under ‘Simile,’ considered as a prime instance of ‘epigram’ (in Kehler if not in von der Pfordten).6 It seems absent from the final series 1828/9. Other transcripts present essentially the same picture, however, even if the paradox is expressed less piquantly than in 1823. The picture is also shorn of Hotho’s elaborate articulation of a simultaneous continuity-in-contrast between natural and spiritual beauty, between living and artistic organicity; a comparison his official edition would however adopt wholesale.7 It is not that humanity—the human form—is more beautiful than nature: rather, the Ideal is of another order altogether. What counts, in the end, is the selfreflexive step implicit in the Ideal, in ‘Art-beauty’; the step to “dual doubleness” (Pippin). Although (as Brigitte Hilmer observes) the model of organic unity carries over ambiguously from natural to “spiritual” beauty, art is sharply distinguished by its cognitive reflexivity, its capacity for selfrecognition.8 Observers are said to regard or interpret the work observing themselves, in what Luhmann termed ‘second-order observation.’ The individual artwork presents their own truth: their individuality as bodily demeanor, posture, gesture, action, speech, vocal expression, etc. In that sense art, for Hegel, escapes (without scorn or denial) an exclusively natural condition, even as spirit continues to inhabit its natural body, its actions or deeds, and is observed (and observes itself ) doing so. Hence the underlying paradox: the art of the Ideal—of individuality—may also be called (to cite Frank Bidart) an aesthetics of embodiment.9 * * *

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2. Philosophy of beauty versus hermeneutics of self-reflection: I think that the reflexive self-awareness implicit in ‘das Kunstschöne’ indirectly answers an awkward question posed by the late Walter Jaeschke: what on earth does beauty have to do with the Ideal? Is there any essential linkage between the beautiful and the hermeneutics of self-reflection? Hegel gives no argument, at least in extant transcripts, and Jaeschke takes him to task for that omission.10 In Jaeschke’s account, Hegel starts out from an overarching concept of ‘spirit,’ especially (alongside religion and philosophy) ‘absolute spirit’: spirit’s self-knowing, hence return to itself in cognitive self-relation. This foundation is evident as early as Jena-System III, even though self-relation was there viewed as partially occluded: “the veil covering the truth rather than its presentation” (quoted in Jaeschke, 388). Anchorage in the philosophy of spirit becomes more secure in the Heidelberg Encyclopædia, where Hegel declares that art is “concrete shape born of spirit,”11 then even more so in its two Berlin editions. Although beauty (“die Gestalt der Schönheit”) receives brief mention in 1817, the following editions (1827, 1830) award that concept equal billing with spirit’s self-knowing activity. The lectures on philosophy of art serve now to confirm what Jaeschke views as a shift in emphasis from 1823 on: Hotho describes the topic of the lectures as “the realm of the beautiful, more precisely the territory of art,” and even more, of “fine art” (die schöne Kunst).12 Not that Hegel ever wished to supplant the already established philosophy of spirit—the idea of self-awareness in artistic form—with a general theory of beauty, which he dismissed as “callistics.” Rather (Jaeschke contends) Hegel fails to work out how these two key elements can be integrated, and why the concept of the beautiful attains such privilege in the lectures. Bearing in mind that art is produced by spirit, a manifestation of self rather than presentation of something objective or existent in nature, the relation of beauty to self-awareness remains for Jaeschke highly obscure. He shows little patience for Hegel’s extended treatment of natural beauty (in Hotho’s transcript and edition), which traces a gradual ascent from formal regularity through organic life (‘Lebendigkeit’) to what Hotho calls the “artistically beautiful or the Ideal überhaupt”: all too flimsy (schmal) is Jaeschke’s verdict (391), which aligns with Hilmer’s criticism.13 Moreover, the systematic theory of the living organism—the

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minding of body, the “idealism of liveliness” (Lebendigkeit)—“has little to do with the concept of the beautiful” (Jaeschke, 390). The extensive section that follows, in Hotho’s transcript—on “the Dasein of the Ideal, or the actuality of the artistically beautiful”—just diverts us from Hegel’s central concerns and proves unhelpful. So Jaeschke charges. Jaeschke favors an interpretation emphasizing human production of the artwork so as to allow self-recognition; a “doubling” and “objectifying” activity that is both cognitive and practical (393). And, to repeat, this fundamental viewpoint hardly needs support from an independent concept of beauty. Beauty would accordingly constitute at most one element of the philosophy of spirit. Jaeschke adds that Hegel was misled by his fixation on the ‘beauty’ of the classical culture of ancient Greece, which predisposed him to believe in an Ideal modelled on the sheer “agreement of inner and outer” exemplified in classical sculpture.14 In Jaeschke’s eyes that conflicts with the hermeneutic model of “transformation” of finite and sensuous nature into the purely spiritual; in effect the “transcendence” of sensuous surface by inner depth (Jaeschke, 392). In fact ‘transcendence’ fails to match Hegel’s own model of expression. It applies more to the false idea that the inner can control or own the outer entire; see my remarks on ‘expression’ (Ausdruck) and ‘utterance’ or ‘exposure’ (Äußerung). Indeed, if we can generalize from the image of ‘eyes on the artwork,’ art moves out of the orbit of mimetic reflection to a model of self-reflection, indeed, second-order reflection. ‘Self-­ manifestation’ gets closer to what Hegel meant, and so far as it counts as beautiful, ‘das Kunstschöne’ turns out to be uniquely human (or spirited), of an order quite different from other instances (natural, animal, etc.). It is the difference between Jaeschke’s preference for “doubling” and Pippin’s notion of “dual doubleness.” The latter introduces a self-reflexive dynamic such that subsequent observers are able to describe the Greeks’ own self-­ observation, in a complex (yet stable) process of interpretation. Moreover, it seems naïve to take Hegel for a naïve believer in the Greek ‘miracle,’ when he claims to have seen through its claims to transparency or circularity. Hegel describes an Ideal to which he himself doesn’t subscribe; a norm that had ceased to be normative for post-Hellenic culture. The ‘Ideal’ is not his ideal.15 Moreover, I maintain that he adopts something

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like a ‘free indirect style’ in these lectures, even if student listeners might have been induced to admire unconditionally the classical harmony, the “beautiful individuality,” put on display for them (and for us). Dialectically considered, the very assertion of a univocal truth or unity undermines the validity of the norm asserted. “Ah, those Greeks!... Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity!” wrote Nietzsche;16 a sentiment finding its parallel in Hegel’s procedural indirection, I’d argue. And while Hegel could have been more straightforward in presenting the play of surface and depth (beauty as a “veil” hiding rather than displaying truth), his historicist presentation of the classical Ideal appears up to the task—for those with eyes to see, ears to hear. Such an approach, moreover, complements the account in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, where he describes the minding or ensouling of the body, via habit or healthy disposition: sensuous surface or shape “manifests” inner meaning (rather than merely “corresponding” to it). And just as consciousness emerges from the anthropology of minded body only to outstrip that stage, so here artistic possibilities point beyond classical unity—although we might suppose that some version of unity (harmony, beauty) survives even in distant declension. One thinks of Northrop Frye’s formalist theory of fictional modes, founded on a narrative of displacement from “mythic” and “romantic” (cf. ‘romance’) through “high mimetic,” “low mimetic” (even naturalistic) all the way to “ironic” mode.17 We’ve seen how Hegel’s conception of the art-Ideal as action (world-condition, action or deed, reaction, pathos, character) bears out this unity-in-­declension, a narrative (better, romance) of decline. The Ideal as viewed in modern-­day conditions (museum, concert-hall, literature) invokes something present in its own absence: as imagined past, and ultimately as Art, itself a Romantic conception. Individuality in art is likewise a view from abroad, self-aware in its Romanticism. With that I turn to a different task, directing a series of comments on various aspects of Hegel’s conception of art, the arts, and the artwork— some fairly short, and in no special order. * * *

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3. Textual problems: The uncertain provenance of ‘Aster’/‘Argus’ should remind us of the basic shiftiness of our text (if it is a text). Hegel’s Aesthetics exists in a fragmentary state—to put it mildly. Hotho’s official edition conflated several series of student transcripts of Hegel’s Berlin lectures, sometimes injecting the editor’s own views or emphases. There can be no authoritative version of Hegel’s “system” of art, even when supplemented by the student transcripts so far published (for 1820/21, 1823, 1826, and 1828/29).18 Even so commentary on Hegel’s Aesthetics tends to rely exclusively on the Hotho edition, choosing simply to ignore its problematic status (for example, the definition of beauty as “the sensuous shining [Scheinen] of the Idea,” which has no textual basis).19 Moreover, the fact that the Aesthetics takes the form of academic lectures before an undergraduate audience means that it lacks the intricate text and texture of such fully authored works as the Phenomenology or the Science of Logic, where the dialectic of “speculative” sentences demands in turn careful reading, at once meditative and mediating. And even in those few wholly dialectical texts we find differences, for instance, between primary exposition and less formal “observations” or “remarks,” along with various shades of construal somewhere in between. Tacit ambiguity bears especially on my topic here—namely, the meaning and usage of ‘Individualität’—a term that occurs multiple times. For despite its frequency in the Aesthetics compared with other works, its employment there seems quite non-technical, unproblematized, even nondialectical. ‘Individualität’ serves primarily to mark a state of achieved perfection, whether in the form of the artwork or in its thematized content; a graceful if sometimes hard-won integrity and concord, or a characteristic independence expressive of the whole—as with heroic deed (Tat), all of a piece. It is understood as drawing a contrast with isolated traits, singular instances, or merely “natural” details and given distinctions, not to mention the hard-edged feel of the “severe” or “sublime” which precedes the classical Ideal (Hegel owes much to Winckelmann’s sorting into four stages20). At the same time, such achieved concord easily veers into “so-called individuality,” that is, when the Ideal reveals itself as neglecting, eliding or hypostatizing essential distinctions such as inner subjectivity, selfhood, or personal responsibility. Hegel’s dialectic of art offers his own version of J.L. Austin’s “the bit where you say it and the bit

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where you take it back.” In short, Hegel’s official exposition can strike us either as marmoreal (complacently unified and Apollonian) or as presumptuously hypostatizing (oblivious to dynamic currents or Dionysian latency, and perhaps shielding the latter from view). I have nevertheless attempted to trace Hegel’s employment of the term through various lecture series, while drawing attention to any dialectical shaping discernible within or upon fixed shape. In the final series 1828/29 the term serves also to mark the third, “individual” part (that is, concerning particular “formations” of the artwork). But mainly it highlights a certain holistic character of plastic shape or heroic action on the one hand, and on the other the ‘work-character’ of an achieved artwork and its (seemingly) transparent expressivity—the paradox by which (to cite Emerson), the true ship is the shipbuilder, and vice versa. * * * 4. Nature versus spirit ( Geist ): If self-reflexivity connects with the absolute status of art (beyond the finite and merely relative hermeneutic expression of a culture, as with Herder), then we must ask how precisely art or artwork might go beyond nature, and beyond finite spirit—‘ethical life’ or Sittlichkeit—including history (the final stage of ‘objective spirit’ in the Encyclopædia prior to the wholesale ascension into ‘absolute spirit’).21 In Hotho’s edition much space is devoted to natural beauty, an echo of the 1823 lectures (in his transcription, admittedly the sole instance we have) where the ‘Lebendigkeit’ of organic unity plays an important role. There Hotho articulates the difference between natural beauty—merely implicit, not manifesting itself externally (fur or feathers obscure our perception of what animates physical body)—and a beauty for which the human form is exemplary because capable of manifesting mind or soul: “manifestation of the soul as such belongs to genuine artbeauty” (Hotho, ms. 55).22Brigitte Hilmer makes the point that for Hegel humans are not more beautiful than nature; rather, the human form is of a wholly different order, that of self-manifestation.23 Although Hegel finds ‘Lebendigkeit’ characteristic of art—in form and content alike—it would be mistaken to take him as asserting a continuum between natural beauty and artistic beauty, when in fact he argues just the opposite.24

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We face a paradox: absolute spirit would resolve all distinctions into itself—excluding only exclusion, as Luhmann puts it.25 But then the relation that art or artwork bears to nature or the finite is difficult to articulate (there’s the bit where you say it, the bit where you take it back). True, the Aesthetics puts stock in a clear disjunction between natural and spiritual beauty (‘the Ideal’), by which measure spirit would seek to obliterate nature utterly, rooting out every last trace of its normative sway. Compare the fearsome list of verbs compiled by Rebecca Comay from the Hotho edition, intended to capture the masterful attitude adopted by Geist with regard to nature: conquer, repress, eliminate, expunge, efface, erase, strip away, excise, conceal, eject—even a psychoanalytically inflected ‘abjection’ (abwerfen).26 Hegel (or Hotho) must really have it in for poor old nature, the pre-classical, the body, the animal, the barbaric—down with them all! The violent rhetoric must, it seems, redound to Hegel’s own discredit (how dare he!). But wait… let’s pause a moment for dialectical breath. To marshal such potent words, and in such short order, risks blurring the differences between them, their peculiar context of use, always more nuanced and specific than polemic will allow. Besides—and more telling here—Hotho’s choice of words in his edition often fails to match extant transcripts. To charge Hegel with such a masterful attitude simply ignores the distinction—tacit I admit—between users’ language and a commentator/ phenomenologist’s report on, description of or allusion to that language (in something like free indirect discourse). That Hegel cites Greek myths about the victory of Olympian over Titanic gods hardly implies that he himself ‘believed in’ myth; it might not even suggest that the ancient Greeks believed in their myths (to echo Paul Veyne).27 The opposite seems the case: negating the other without remainder only ensures fealty to that other (elementary dialectics). Consider Hegel’s idea of ‘force’ in the Physics (Chap. 7), by which communication of force to another body entails the latter’s receptivity to it. Fate becomes something named or mediated by the consciousness subject to it—otherwise the first body is (conceived as) directly subsumed to the other it opposes (Hegel’s reaction to Spinoza). We might similarly recall the treatment of the minded body/ embodied soul in Chap. 8. The critical turn comes with a precarious achievement of—or better, process of integrating habitual traits

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into—the (my) self, acknowledgement of who and what I am as embodied subjectivity; not as yet a fully conscious or self-conscious existence, it’s true, as one who lives among other such beings. More broadly, Hegel’s approach to nature and natural science treads a fine line between embracing a mystical ‘Naturphilosophie’ and sharply distinguishing between spirit (consciousness) and empirical nature, including organic and animal nature. Hegel doesn’t even appeal to an ‘as it were’ (gleichsam) to suggest, only then to discard, some kind of analogy between human and natural rationality. As noted, he shuns the idea that we posit and apply laws to an alien realm, as if we were in charge of posing questions for nature to answer. In the chapter dealing with Hegel’s ‘Physics’ I suggested that he sketches a concrete middle way between abstract universal and abstract element or constituent, then compares that with empirical facts or scientific theorizing. With a foot in both universal and singular realms, ‘individuality’ is his proposed middle term or mediator.

Hegel resists the parallel ideas of occult force (electricity, magnetism) and of abstract law or model. The ‘individuality’ displayed by nature is no mere façon de parler but stipulates how to regard and describe nature’s empirical behavior. Otherwise put, individual moments are understood as “overgrasping” their singularity in such a way as to include the otherness of their universality (of flow or field). We need only recall how Hegel articulates the logic of ‘force’ and its ‘law’ in Chapter III of the Phenomenology. Rather than asserting mastery over nature, Hegel’s dialectical logic seeks to include (übergreifen) nature within its reach. In The Realness of Things Past (2018), Greg Anderson assails the familiar attribution to the Greek polis of a dualism of nature/culture, sacred/profane, public/private, along with other modernisms such as ‘the economy,’ ‘government,’ and ‘persons’ (here labelled “natural, self-actualizing, psycho-­ physical individuals”).28 Hegelian dialectic avoids wishful projection while at the same time tracing the emergence of a post-Hellenic ‘self ’ or ‘person.’ Just as the distinction of ‘nature’ presupposes an act of drawing a distinction, entailing the “return of the distinction within the distinction”

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(Luhmann), so here we have a whole dialectical economy at work. Inverting Humpty Dumpty: the question is, which is not to be master— that’s all. Speaking of ‘individuality’ is a way of allowing him to survive his fall, and of putting him together again, holding the moments in unity (or, as we’ll see, disunity, dividuality). * * * 5. Art (in the singular) versus the arts (plural): To get a handle on this distinction requires a brief detour through intellectual history. To start with, the concept of ‘Art’—understood (grammatically) in the singular and as an integrated system, rather than the distributive and plural ‘fine arts’ or a more practically oriented ‘craft’—emerged only in the late eighteenth century. Whether as conceptual theory or as institutional practice, therefore, such Art (no longer an art) was taken to epitomize the creative potential of human imagination and culture. Art may be said henceforth to exist (a) under the aegis of a new metaphysic of form—or rather of creative forming—, (b) as formalist, and (c) as essentially self-reflexive in character.29 I take them in turn. (a) Traits such as originality, creativity, or expressivity are simply beyond the ken of classical form as poiēsis. The latter falls under technē, which comprises—to borrow from Collingwood—such features as production according to given rules, the deliberative informing of given matter, via determinable means to given ends (for example, production of emotion or intellectual entertainment). In a pioneering 1957 essay Hans Blumenberg identifies the epochal shift found in Nicolas of Cusa’s dialogue De mente, where the carving of a spoon is jokingly said to be an original, quasi-divine act, owing nothing to a metaphysics (or theology) of mimesis.30 It announced a wholesale break with the mimetic regime formalized by Aristotle, heralding a Romantic metaphysics of creativity (the word itself is quite recent, first entering the OED only in 1933). Despite his early enthusiasm, Hegel never signed on as a full member of the Romantic party, and he soon came to criticize what he took to be its excesses. If he espoused a robust ‘expressivism,’ it was always with a difference, always with something left over. He remained a Romantic in

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part, but his considered view would take ‘expression’(Ausdruck) as akin to ‘utterance’ or ‘exposure’ (Äußerung), even ‘alienation’ (Entäußerung).31 (b) With Romantic aesthetics, artistic activity becomes formalist as well as formative, what would later be called ‘l’art pour l’art’: it imitates or articulates no separate albeit essential content (perhaps the first to make explicit the radical autonomy of the artwork was Karl Philipp Moritz, 1756–93). Yet it should be emphasized that Hegel himself never invoked a normative aesthetic autonomy; a point Bernard Smith makes in his discerning study of Modernism’s History (1998).32 Hegel took artistic form to be immanent in socio-religious practice (Smith: “Praxis makes perfect”). True, any grand narrative as well as various sub-plots of the history of art will gesture at autonomy, whether as a prevailing norm or as a more neutral formalist practice. That is seen especially in the late nineteenth century, in the wake of what Peter Bürger dubbed the “institution” of art, and taking into account factors like a gradual rapprochement between art and craft (the decorative arts), or the myriad technical and market advances conditioning artistic production and reception. (c) Formalist autonomy verges on self-reflexivity, for which art serves as exemplar. Moreover, art promises to count not just as valuable but also as supreme value, once other norms have become relative; that was certainly so for the Romantics. Not least, ‘individuality’ finds its principal residence here: self-formative, original, creative, unified and harmonious—precisely the values espoused by the early Romantics. What we can call ‘the modern system of Art’ (updating Kristeller’s famous portrayal of an eighteenth-century ‘modern system of the arts’) owes much to a Hegelian (if not explicitly Hegel’s) conceptualization, in particular, his thoroughgoing historicizing of art.33 In 1828 Hegel expressly acknowledged that in Germany a new generation had “violently rejected” (verworfen) previous (i.e., Enlightenment) artistic practice, in the process revising critical judgment of both the past and other cultures. A “living poetry” had arisen and the superiority of genius over taste had been proclaimed, all in reaction to “the watery wastes of [rationalist] theories” (13, 37/20).34 Hegel could even celebrate what by then had become a Romantic touchstone: ‘the characteristic,’ notable for its focus on ‘individuality’ (he cites Aloys Hirt’s definition of ‘beauty,’ as remarked).

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We should recall the founding paradox of aesthetic ‘individuality’: it emerged as a prototypically Romantic category employed to describe the classical Ideal (“beautiful individuality”). I’d emphasize the labile, historicizing nature of all aesthetic categories, citing first of all Kristeller’s well-­ known (though misunderstood) argument, and equally the implicit stance from which he levelled it. Kristeller may be construed, circa 1950, as looking back on the momentous changes of the eighteenth century, that is to say, before Romanticism and modernism had taken hold and transformed the cultural landscape. Only much later did he seek to take account of the Romantic revolution itself, in an essay on “creativity” the historicizing message of which proved quite unwelcome to an establishment used to having things another way. Kristeller’s original ideas have more recently come under fire, his nuanced account misconstrued as a result.35 His brisk review of concepts, theories and practices stops well short of Kant—as he admits—and ignores the subsequent Romantic revolution. True, he glances at various nineteenth-century shifts in the sorting of the arts: the resurgence of decorative arts, for instance, or the “healthy” reaction to the “excesses” of aestheticism (where Dewey gets a positive mention). Yet Kristeller’s ultimate point seems to resist proper statement. On the one hand it is that the meaning and reference of ‘art’ date from fairly recent times, within the last three hundred years. We should take care, then, in projecting their use anachronistically into a distant past or an alien culture. On the other, Kristeller’s own perspective—tacitly assumed and never formulated as such—seems modern rather than eighteenth-­ century in conception. It presupposes the nineteenth-century “institution” of art (Bürger), a socio-cultural formation origination in the Romantic era.36 It also inherits a fraught relation with what Jean-Marie Schaeffer, in Art and the Modern Age (2000), disparages as the ‘sacralization’ of Art (“with a capital A”) via the Romantics’ speculative theory.37 True, Romanticism sought to retain a sacral function for art, following centuries of what amounts to institutionalized iconoclasm in European art.38 Hegel was both heir to and critic of that rearguard action. He supposed art to be originally “Kunstreligion,” although we “bend the knee no longer.” Intrinsic to art there remains a peculiar and mysterious power which Hegel acknowledges (as does Francis Sparshott in citing the ‘Mystic

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Line’ as an offshoot of the primary ‘Poetic Line’), but which abhors any conventionally religious function or meaning.39 The secular institution of art (museum, opera house, etc.) might still be hospitable to such post-­ iconoclastic powers, even as these are awkwardly translated into—or exchanged for—cultural capital. Without wading into controversies over Kristeller or the Romantics, in particular the accusations of theoretical imperialism levelled by Porter, Kottman and others, I will simply state that Hegel is not guilty.40 His approach to art—as to many phenomena and regions of experience—is precisely to register what had come to light in practice and theory: namely, the cultural emergence of Romanticism, of Art (in the singular) along with its theory (art as forming expression). Michael Ferber writes of “the Romantic system of the arts”—considered as successor to as well as reaction against the previous system of fine art—while wondering whether it was (to recall Schlegel’s aphorism) as much anti-system as pro. Not least, there occurred what Ferber dubs the “selving” of art: on the one hand, aesthetic theory replaced a model of the mirror (imitation) with that of the lamp (creation, expression), while on the other there was an intensification of poetic means, plus an invocation (or supplication) of religious feeling in and as the artwork.41 The lamp becomes the governing, or at least licensing, metaphor of Romanticism (though its wick often needs trimming). * * * 6. Romanticism and Anachronism: Overlooked by many—by Kristeller, then by critics and supporters alike—is the massive cultural fact of this revolution, a veritable sea-change in practice and in theory alike. It constitutes a paradigm shift to what Francis Sparshott—in what remains the best (though neglected) treatment of the topic—calls “the Idea of Art.”42 The word ‘art’ may be used in all sorts of ways, he allows, even if most prove spurious or (in Collingwood’s phrase) “art falsely so called.” That is not because they overlap with “bad art” (however gauged) but because the art falls short of authentic expressivity—the work proves inadequate to the import it is supposed to utter or reveal (Sparshott,

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290–91). Art “proper” (Collingwood) displays a spiritual or human capacity; not an idiosyncratic or personal truth, but something with the potential to unite the community, indeed, to form or regenerate community through its imaginative power.43 The “proper” meaning of ‘art’ contrasts with what Collingwood calls its “systematic ambiguity,” its misuse, namely: 1. obsolete meanings (habits clinging to our minds like drowning men), e.g., craft, ars, technē; 2. analogical meanings, e.g., magic, Freudianism (anachronistic projection into the past or other cultures); 3. courtesy meanings, e.g., ART! (mere symptom of the esteem in which it is held). I’d argue that those ancillary meanings cannot be dismissed in advance or denounced as improper. Theoretically and practically they bear upon current institutions and modes of reception. Craft (pragmatic rules for production or reception, in set contexts and for specific uses) is native even to Romantic creativity, as the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement allowed; while Hegel’s Phenomenology discerns expressivity even in classical poiesis. As for the prestige that Art (in the singular) now possesses, we might be suspicious of its ideological underpinnings yet cannot gainsay the cultural fact that it has become a dominant norm in modern society. We’re all Romantics now, and not just in artistic matters. The revolution cannot be reversed, even if applying the adjective ‘proper’ is hard to justify in historical terms (indeed, its use today seems quite improper). Hegel’s own approach should be measured against ‘Romantic’ theorists such as Schiller, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Schlegel. It is not the least of the ironies in play that Hegel views Greek art and its classical Ideal—traditional art as craft or skill (technē)—in the belated perspective of Romanticism. Yet Hegel also contextualizes the Romantics, historicizes expressivity, and so far as he retains a moment of externalization (‘Äusserung’) alongside transparent expression (‘Ausdruck’), he projects a

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sense of irony into the bargain. Otherwise put (in Jacques Rancière’s words): “Hegel transforms Romantic poetics into a theory of classicism,” while the Romantics’ programmatic future—which actually had no future—becomes an interpretation of the past.44 What Schelling and the Schlegels promoted as the principle of “infinite poeticity” Hegel takes instead as a mark of historical closure. The epic form was the poem of an “originally poetic state of the world,” and the Romantics (following Goethe) viewed the novel as its modern equivalent. But having lost the vaunted unity of epic, the world now displays only a comic aspect. For Schlegel, the novel had replaced ancient epic as paradigm for a poetic life in modernity (the Bildungsroman). But Hegel skewers its pretensions— the modern ‘hero’ being as much a philistine as anyone else—and he does the same with what he sees as the vapidities of Jean Paul, faulted for his self-reflexive word-play floating in the void.45 The speculative outcome of this dual assault is Hegel’s claim that Art (in philosophical perspective) promises to integrate individual and community, threading the needle so as to avoid Schiller’s stark alternative of naïve and sentimental, assimilation and alienation. The new institution finds its place (as the museum, etc.) and its theory (remembrance of things past). Another angle is offered by Rancière in his Aisthesis (2013), inasmuch as it captures the moment Hegel calls ‘the Ideal’ immanent in Dutch genre painting of quotidian reality.46 One of Rancière’s “Auerbachian” scenes, this derives from Hegel’s remarks (in his 1828–29 lecture series) about a pair of Murillo paintings recently viewed in Munich. For us these works appear overdetermined in several respects: as depictions of everyday life, in a burgeoning ‘free’ market for genre images (Dutch especially), as historical-cum-aesthetic display in the newly founded museum, and with the waning of hierarchies of schools and types (history painting, e.g.). Hegel picks up on the wonderful correspondence—or rather, the ineffable gap—between a free Art (in the singular) and a free people (the civic-minded Dutch). Murillo too bears a fraught relation to imperial power (Spain/Netherlands), but we catch his beggar boys in a precarious moment of freedom, in a painting we can now see to be partly about the very conditions of painting. Of course, Rancière adds, this moment could not last. His scenography serves to underline the contingency of our own situation with respect to Hegel’s Aesthetics:

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Humanity has known sculptors, dancers or musicians for thousands of years. It has … known Art as such—in the singular and with a capital A— for [only] two centuries.”47

Rancière adds the important caveat: “It has known it as a certain partitioning of space.” The institution of Art occupies its assigned place through the nineteenth century, and was further consolidated in twentieth-­century modernism. With that complex setup, I return to Hegel’s thoughts on anachronism, something that bears also on Hegelian historiography. ‘Anachronism’ has recently become a lively topic; besides Rancière, I mention Georges Didi-Huberman, Alexander Nagel, and Christopher Wood.48 Diagnosing anachronism assumes an underlying chronology, everything in its proper time and place. Hegel’s attitude is in fact complex. While decrying anachronism in performance, his philosophical practice will often break the rules, notably with the Aesthetics, which proposes a beginning and an end to art yet with many odd things along the way (including art before the beginning and after the end!). Hegel has been dubbed “the father of art history,” and he is often linked with a linear or even teleological ‘grand narrative.’ His name has been associated also with a supposedly dominant mode of composition in art history: its typological orthodoxy, termed by Christopher Wood “the Latin Christian model of figuration as transfiguration… art as a kind of allegorical revelation.” In reaction Wood proposes an alternative approach: a materialist model which lays emphasis on the ‘thingness’ of artworks and shuns their embedding within the linear format of an idealist or ‘spiritual’ narrative.49 In their major study, Anachronic Renaissance, Wood and coauthor Alexander Nagel argue that the “anachronic artifact” fits uneasily within a linear historicism: it breaks with conventions even as it reenacts them in new, surprising ways. Their alternative model envisages “mutual substitution” between various works and contexts; the historian’s job is less to tell a story in unified perspective than to allow the artifact to show what it can (or could once) do.50 “The principle of substitution generates the effect of an artifact that doubles or crimps time over upon itself,” they write.51 Wood acknowledges Hegel’s endorsement of the ‘individuality’ of each artwork, something scholarship should respect even as it opens up the new prospects offered by

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studying the work’s functions “within public and private life, what one might call the anthropology of art”—quite distinct from the old (pre-­ Romantic) theories gathering dust on the library shelves.52 I note, first, that such an ‘anthropology’ is quite distinct from linear historicism (let alone ‘teleology’), even though it is not necessarily materialist; and second, that Hegel’s “speculative” approach is less historical than ‘plastic’ (Iversen and Melville). It is viewed in the perspective of a flexible individuality, one that as we’ll see professes a certain anachronism. True, Hegel inveighs against anachronism in performance of art from the past: “in French dramatic works, Chinese, Americans, or Greek and Roman heroes must speak and behave exactly like French courtiers”— powdered wigs, colored ribbons and all (13, 346/266–7). Hegel here means the production rather than reception of such works, as becomes clear with the “end” of romantic art: The modern artist, it is true, may associate himself with the classical age and with still more ancient times; to be a follower of Homer is fine,… but the universal validity, depth, and special idiom [Eigentümlichkeit] of some material is one thing, its mode of treatment [Behandlungsweise] another. No Homer, Sophocles, etc., no Dante, Ariosto, or Shakespeare can appear in our day…. Only the present is fresh, the rest is paler and paler.53

Wood quotes this passage with approval, while criticizing what he sees as Hegel’s failure to see that modern life too could be presented as other than hopelessly “mired in the ‘prose of the world’.”54 His criticism is fair enough, yet it misses Hegel’s subtle attempt to save art for our consideration in and as the institution of art: in museum, concert-hall, or literature. Of greater moment is Wood’s diagnosis of two different historicisms at work in the Aesthetics: first, a faith that history will ultimately “add up and make sense” (Wood labels it ‘teleology’); second, the will to understand all works and cultures “individually,” in their own terms. The second historicism would take the first as rendering art necessarily past, even “a betrayal of the dead,” while in the eyes of the first historicism, the second “neglects the demands of the present and the promise of the future,” namely, the capacity of art to interpret modern life, bring it to life (ibid., 221–2). More broadly:

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The crack in Hegel’s golden bowl is impossible to ignore. The same faultline, between emancipatory aspirations and empiricist compunctions, runs through the discipline of art history today.55

Art history as narrative of human freedom, or art history as true to individual artwork, culture or period. I’ll return to the question of whether or how far Hegel remained true to both kinds of norm—wholesale narrative of reason, individual works— at least in his own approach to art. But I want to turn from anachronism in production (and reception) of artworks to a second sort of anachronism, found in Hegel’s conceptual treatment of art (or rather, of Art). I maintain that a ‘thinking regard’ exhibits clear anachronizing tendencies: it recounts not a linear narrative of art so much as a series of reflexive returns or reinterpretations, spiral rather than just circular in form. Thus, he conceives the classical Ideal in a Romantic (or rather, post-Romantic) perspective, as already observed: the classical artwork may be seen as expressing an inner subjectivity even though that mode of semiosis would emerge only later, with Roman ‘person,’ or with the long, gradual formation of modern citizen followed by moral subject. Conversely, Hegel sees symbolism as recurrent in eras and places other than the symbolic artform proper: in Hegel’s account, it characterizes the transition from classical to romantic artform/worldview, as well as some late-romantic art such as Goethean lyric. The sublime is still more labile: “the sublime slips in and out of history in a bewildering fashion” (James. Elkins ).56 To which I’d add only that Hegel observes the Romantic (“Longinan”) sublime at a reflective distance. He was never an enthusiast, even as he diagnoses certain effects of Romantic ‘subreption’ in the Psalmist’s troping rhetoric. To repeat, Hegel does not ‘Romanticize’ the past, as Novalis suggested the world be Romanticized. The classical Ideal is dead, and cannot be revived in its original cultic form. Yet neither need it be seen as dead and buried: the museum world can give it a peculiar afterlife—less as cult object than as part of modern culture. * * *

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7. Art historicized: The paradoxical obverse of Art as system—indeed, the paradigm of system—is its wholesale historicizing. Art has (just as the different arts have) a history, and is in History (singular not plural).57 To cite the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics: Some Romantics tended to romanticize or monumentalize past ages, consecrating them as self-creating organic wholes: Herder, for example, but equally the youthful Hegel in his Grecomanic phase. A subtler transformation occurs when the historian frames his own belatedness as opening up a truth that is no longer ours. Thus, Johann Joachim Winckelmann advocated the superior value of imitating the Greeks where they had imitated nature. This self-reflective constitution of the past in turn opens up three conceivable paths. One may (with Schiller or Friedrich Schlegel) trace out a narrative of declension, when irony becomes the end point, ambivalently inside and outside the historical stages it surveys and comprehends. Or one can propose that the historicist perspective is itself aesthetic, not just because it offers, as it were, imaginative picture galleries of the past, but also in operating under the aegis of artistic unification—the speculative stance of Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling's “identity philosophy” around 1800, which saw the artwork as having fused together unconscious nature and cultural reflection.58

Hegel was sympathetic to this alternative, but the Phenomenology assumes a third stance, which Hegel would maintain throughout his mature Berlin period. It attempts to explicate history—including the history of art—philosophically, and to situate philosophy (and art) in history, yet without reducing one moment to the other.59 It acknowledges on the one hand the effects of historical irony, on the other the countervailing demands of speculative system—namely, to have discerned reason at work in various cultural phenomena. Recalling again that in the final Jena system Hegel cast the artistic beauty found in classical Greece as more “the veil covering the truth than its presentation,” in one sense this remained for Hegel the essential truth (and the proper illusion) of art. In hindsight—or what you might call a ‘museological’ or ‘curatorial’ perspective—we today may view the glory of the classical Ideal, yet glimpse also its besetting superficiality.

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The Aesthetics does not offer any straightforward history of art, a linear representation or “grand narrative” of its venues and adventures. It relates how various symbolizing practices gradually became classical Kunstreligion (as it was later named), which over millennia became fine art, which in turn emerged as (what was later called ‘Romantic’) Art. Ernst Gombrich dubbed Hegel “the father of art history,” hence the authority to challenge. Yet his aspersion is unfair inasmuch as the various “critical historians of art” (in Michael Podro’s phrase) who both followed and criticized Hegel may all be seen as trying in their own ways to mediate between material particulars and historical universals (periods, styles, schools). Such mediation between singular artwork and emergent universal (meaning) I take to be Hegel’s essential aim as well. Although his language in the lecture transcripts can appear teleological, the Aesthetics in fact contains various accounts of the (contingent) emergence of configurations of ­ form/ 60 content. Squire’s indictment isn’t true even of Hegel’s Philosophy of World History, which conceives of a third kind of historiography: a “thinking consideration” of the past, offering accounts based on the methodological supposition—not simply a metaphysics—of “reason” operative in history.61 It certainly doesn’t apply to Hegel’s approaches to religion or to art, even if the schema of artforms/worldviews implies a sense of beginning, middle, and end (though—as Jean-Luc Godard perhaps said—not necessarily in that order). We may in fact discern “multiple beginnings and multiple endings” in Hegel’s conception of art or artworks—middles too—as enquiry continually returns to material already examined.62 Or rather, that conception will review what has already been considered, via spiralling perspectives which repeatedly manage to see through while also preserving the matter at hand. This spiral movement belongs to what Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville have termed Hegelian “plasticity” (see above).63 ‘Circles within circles’ well describes the Aesthetics, even after we factor in the frame of oral delivery and tone on the one hand, the givens of sensuous and historical singulars on the other. I see Hegel’s “hybrid” enquiry, balancing empirical survey against conceptual theorizing, as analogous to his approach in other areas (philosophy of science, religion and philosophy).64 Here again ‘individuality’ proves exemplary: the universal emerges from the particular or, conversely, is immanent in the singular.

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‘Individuality’ might well be considered the guiding figure (Gestaltung) in Hegel’s conception of art: it characterizes the shaping of demeanor, speech or action, and of the artwork presenting these for our consideration. Yet this benign picture ignores the internal fracture within ancient Sittlichkeit as well as in the thematizing and commemoration of social reality by art (not to mention the strenuous memory work performed by a modern institution of Art). We noted how the classical Ideal combines (a) tranquil harmony of mind and body in quasi-divine spatial form, prototypically as the human figure—in turn epitomized in ancient sculpture—with (b) temporally extended action, whether epic or dramatic. Action may in turn appear either unified (in univocal deed and character) or else displayed via collision of norms, a collision that is no more than superficially mended and harmonized in tragic performance or genre. The tragic hero, inhabiting a “heroic age” or “world-condition,” would seem paradigmatic of beautiful, plastic, living individuality. But we may equally discern here a dualistic logic of reflection or ‘Schein,’ of seeming being, of “so-called” (vs actual) individuality: a movement detained, as it were, under false arrest. Individuality invokes both moments, and the dialectical passage between them (‘übergreifen,’ syllogism), something at once undergone and actively being pursued. What Hegel appears to celebrate in the Aesthetics—the animated, self-beholden human figure, fusion of sensuous shape and intelligible meaning—may turn out “in deed” (in der Tat) to be confusion. This is the moment of “the veil hiding the truth rather than its presentation,” as Hegel had put it at Jena. Matters are made still more complex by the dual perspective of art-as-­ craft (poiesis, techné: production) versus Art-in-the-singular (creativity, expressivity, productivity). Capitalized Art emerged only after art (as Kunstreligion, or at least with a religious function) verged on dissolution, as something exchanged in the marketplace, displayed in galleries or decorating  the home. For its part individuality first emerged—as concept and social fact—in essentially Romantic guise; characterizing the classical Ideal as ‘individuality’ is a view from abroad, in modern perspective. Conversely, casting art as expression instigates a dialectic between creative subject and resultant work: the true ship is the shipbuilder, and vice versa. As noted at the outset, without rules there is no objective check on originality or authenticity of expression; the dilemma is deeply linked with Hegel’s appeal to “a plastic discourse” in the Preface to the second edition

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of the Science of Logic..65 There will always be a “threat of fraudulence,” in Stanley Cavell words concerning Kierkegaard (see the Epilogue, below). Post-Romantic art, aiming for thein-and-for itself, finds itself shadowed by the for us, for other, a condition it can never escape.

Notes 1. 13, 203/152. 2. 14, 238/607–8. 3. Compare the brief treatment of ‘individuality’ under syllogistic logic: Chap. 3 (on the syllogism of love and family) and Chap. 6 (on the syllogism of “central individuality” modelling the solar system). 4. Robert Pippin draws attention to the significance of this passage: Pippin 2014, 49 and passim. Plato’s (?) distich, as reported by Diogenes Laertius, runs “Star-gazing [astares] Aster, would I were the skies/To gaze upon thee with a thousand eyes.” 5. Hegel 2015b/GW 28.1, 286 (Hotho 70): “Plato declares in a distich to his star that he would like to be the heavens, to see with a thousand eyes.” In 1823 Hegel expressly mentioned Aster, as witness the transcript by Carl Kromayr (Kr. 113), GW 28.1, 286, footnote: “his beloved Asper” (sic)—the error only confirming Hegel’s actual utterance. (I note in passing the homoerotic subtext of Plato’s supposed words.) As for the name ‘Argus’: given its total absence from extant transcriptions, Rebecca Comay’s comments on the monstrous “ambivalence” of the figure— Comay 2014, 140ff.—seem beside the point (a wild Argus chase?). ‘Phryne’ too, mentioned at 13, 374/720—on whom Comay comments, 28–9—is nowhere to be found. I shall try nevertheless to address Comay’s other charges, along with the voiced authority behind them. 6. Hegel 2018b, 701-2: Griesheim 188, Kehler 197. 7. Hotho 70–73 (2nd section: “das Kunstschöne oder das Ideal überhaupt”), then 73–93 (3rd section: the “actuality” of art-beauty, as “world-­ condition” [Weltzustand], “situation,” or “action,” [Handlung]). 8. Hilmer 1997, 79 f., on “the problem of organic unity and the model of natural beauty.” Beauty inheres in “Lebendigkeit” as such, but the human form is of an altogether distinct order, one in which the soul is externally “manifest,” at one with its corporeal manifestation. (Compare her later remarks on ‘manifestation’ in Chap. 5, plus my reference to Peters in the previous chapter.)

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9. “When, after a reading, you are asked/ to describe your aesthetics,/ you reply, An aesthetics of embodiment.” The final lines of Frank Bidart’s “As You Crave Soul”: Bidart 2014, 69–70. 10. Jaeschke 2016, 9.7: ‘Philosophie der Kunst,’ esp. 9.7.3: “Selbstbewußtsein des Geistes und Schönheit” (self-consciousness of spirit and beauty), 387–94. 11. Hegel 1990b, §459, 258. 12. Jaeschke 2016, 388: citing GW 28:1, 219. 13. Hilmer 1997, 79, citing Donougho 1980, 136, on the “weakness” of Hegel’s explanation. She refers to my doctoral dissertation, where I had linked Hegel’s logic of ‘Schein’ to the claim that beauty is defined as “das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee” (13: 151/111)—“the pure appearance of the Idea to sense” (Knox). When told by Professor Otto Pöggeler that this had no basis in any student transcripts, I abandoned the argument. 14. “Uebereinstimmung des Innern und Äusseren” (GW 28:1 = Hegel 2015b, 319). The “dynamic” of an approach via philosophy of spirit points rather to Raphael’s Pietà, Jaeschke counters, with its “pain of finitude” (Jaeschke, 289). 15. Donougho 2007, 180. Cf. Gaiger 2011, 187. It is common nevertheless to find Hegel described (and disparaged) as classicist, as in Rajan 2011, 126–7, even though she allows that Hegel finds the classical disappointing, mechanical, its themes cut-and-dried. Hegel should be read ironically, however, between the lines, not as someone in thrall to what she dubs the “perfect fusion” of the Ideal. 16. §4 of the Preface to the 2nd edition of The Gay Science (1886), Nietzsche 2001, 8–9. 17. Frye 1957, 33–5, and the First Essay passim. Frye admits the schematic nature of his effort, even sorting it under ‘anatomy,’ a species of Menippean satire (Anatomy, 309  f.) aimed at diagnosing intellectual folly or pedantry, Robert Burton, Jonathan Swift, even Lewis Carroll, among its models. Anatomy adopts an attitude. So does Hegel, in my view, though he is careful not to upset his listeners with his taxonomies and implicit value judgments. 18. For 1820/21, see the transcript by Ascheberg, in GW 28:1, which also contains Hotho’s transcript for 1823. For 1826, Griesheim is made the basis for GW 28:2, plus four variant sources. For 1828/29, see Hegel 2017, ‘Mitschrift Adolf Heimann’—the sole transcript of the final lecture series available to Hotho for his edition—and Hegel 2020: GW 28.3, Nachschrift zum Kolleg des Wintersemesters 1828/29, with variants due to Libelt, Rolin, and ‘Anonymous.’

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19. See note 14, above. Although long acknowledged as dubious, it gets cited even by those who might have known better (e.g., Bertram 2019, 72, and he mistakes it for Hegel/Hotho’s demarcation of ‘art,’ not ‘beauty’). 20. See my entry on “Winckelmann,” Donougho 2014b. 21. Hegel 2007a, §552, 250: “the thinking spirit of world history, when it sheds these limitations of the particular national spirits as well as its own worldliness [Weltlichkeit], grasps its concrete universality and ascends to awareness of absolute spirit, … necessity, nature and history are only servants of its revelation, vessels of its honour” (Hegel 1969, 10: 353). Michael Inwood observes that ‘absolute’ means ‘perfect’ as well as ‘liberating’ (Latin ‘absolvo’)—absolved from space and time: Inwood 2007, 606. 22. Kromayr 77 has “…Ideal, dem eigentlichen Kunstschönen.” Hotho’s transcript continues: “Herein lies the transition to what is then to be called the Ideal …. The higher [element], genuine manifestation, enters with the Ideal” (my translation): GW 28.1, 273. 23. Hilmer 1997, 82–3, citing Hotho’s transcript: “die Subjektivität, das Moment der Individualität, der Lebendigkeit” (Hotho 64). The paradigm of ‘Lebendigkeit’ continues through the 1826 lectures, she notes (86), but now with an added emphasis on subjectivity. She quotes Griesheim: “das Leben dadurch zum Lebendigen, d.h. das Leben ist wesentlich Subjekt” (Griesheim 60 = GW 28.2, 572). Cf. Griesheim 62 = GW 28.2, 574: “das Lebendige ist wesentlich Subjekt.” 24. Pace Rush 2018, esp. 163–6. Although organic life may show self-­ integration and self-development over time, neither trait is either inherently or incidentally beautiful, in Hegel’s view. Rush’s main point stands: for Hegel, Dutch still life (stilleven) virtuosically presents “nature explicitly denatured and, therefore, dead” (Rush, 186). 25. Luhmann 2013b, 74. 26. Comay 2014, 125–6. 27. Veyne 1988. See Donougho 1992, 59–60. Veyne answers his own question with a “yes and no,” comparing the situation to children’s “belief ” in Santa Claus. The Greeks didn’t even demarcate fiction from truth, he maintains. Yet there’s one distinction Veyne himself can be relied on to draw. Without stooping to mention proper names, he will always scorn “the labour of the negative” (Veyne, xii, 119)—that is to say, Hegelian ‘reason in history,’ devoid of imagination.

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28. Anderson 2018, e.g., 49, 59, 89; for “natural psycho-physical individuals,” see 10, 21, 105. Borrowing from the French anthropologist Philippe Descola (2013), he writes of “the great divide” imposed by modern Western thought. Sharing basic commitments with Bruno Latour, Descola cites the history of the very idea of ‘nature,’ beginning with Greek ‘physis’ and culminating in the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. While Hegel would hardly pledge allegiance to pre-Western myth or a supernatural mysticism, neither does he posit wholesale disenchantment of nature at the hands either of modern science or of the society it mirrors. 29. I draw here on my entry, “Hegel on the Historicity of Art,” Donougho 2014a. Considered sociologically, art (in the singular) falls within the general shift during the late eighteenth century from assigned values and hierarchical structures to what Niklas Luhmann called the “functional” operations of self-beholden systems. History is itself one such system, alongside society, state, literature, and—paradigmatically—art. 30. Blumenberg 1957. See Früchtl 2009, 201ff., for what he calls (pace Foucault) “a will to creation,” plus Franklin 2023 (the “Big Bang of creativity,” 6). “The word was first added to the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1933 Supplement,” Franklin  notes (ibid., 77), although the Whitehead usage it cites was anomalous.. 31. See Pahl 2012, 29–33, on ‘Text versus Expression,’ when Spirit succeeds Reason as sponsor of presentation. “The expression model of self-­ realization is of no use for Hegel because it treats spirit as a sack,” something to be emptied (41). 32. Smith 1998, 40: “He had no conception of art’s autonomous development.” Smith adds: “This move was taken up by his pupil Karl Schnaase (1798–1875)…. [who] agreed with Hegel that art developed in consort with religion” (Smith, 41). Smith further notes that it was Gottfried Semper (1803–79) who turned to craft as style, notably in architecture, something Hegel found difficult to square with his Idealist approach. For his part Smith adopts “a modified Hegelian view” of history, viz., as a dialectic between art in what he calls a general sense (imitating other crafts), and art understood in a special sense (imitating nature, it was the seed of ‘high’ art): Smith, 8–10. Smith is particularly intent on tracing the rise of art as autonomous style (from Winckelmann to twentiethcentury avant gardes), culminating in what he labels “the Formalesque”—a style of style which then becomes institutionalized as the globally domi-

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nant mode of art production and reception. Smith’s underappreciated book explores how the Formalesque proved capable of absorbing exotic, primitive, or occult sources, while becoming in turn the imperial signature of art practised everywhere—Asia, Africa, or Australasia as well as Europe and the Americas (Chap. 7). He says nothing about expressivist metaphysics or aesthetics however. 33. The original article (1951–2), “The modern system of the arts: a study in the history of aesthetics,” was included in Kristeller 1964. A similar case is made in Shiner 2001. 34. Heimann: “die breiten Wasserströmevon Theorie” (Heimann 4; Hegel 2020 = GW 28.3, 915), dated 27–28 October. Hegel totally revamped his Introduction in the 1828/29 lectures. For the rejection of rational theory, celebration of genius through “free production,” and recognition of “romantische Kunst,” ibid. For ‘the characteristic,’ see Heimann 7 = GW 28.3, 920, and Donougho 2020b. 35. James I. Porter’s polemic, “Is Art Modern?” (Porter 2009b), started the quarrel, continued in The Origins of Aesthetic Thought (Porter 2011). Larry Shiner replied (Shiner 2009); cf. his The Origin of Art (2001). See also Kottman 2017b. 36. Bürger (in Bürger 1984, 32–4, 48–51) contends that what he calls the “institution” of art emerges from the cultural self-awareness inspired by the Aestheticist Movement. It is an example of Hegel’s idea that historical events need repetition for general acceptance. 37. Shaeffer 2000, e.g., 6, 8. The sacralizing of Art aligns with a ‘compensatory’ function, which together stifle the aesthetic experience of art and sap our aesthetic sensibilities (Shaeffer, 12–13). Oddly enough Schaeffer begins his account with Alfred Baeumler, whose “general thesis, which links the birth of aesthetics to the philosophical problematics of individuality, is very seductive” (18). Schaeffer remains unseduced, invested as he is in aesthetics more than in social theory. Needless to add, I am seduced by the general thesis. In my view it captures many dimensions of aesthetics, art, and artworks. 38. See James Simpson, Under the Hammer (Simpson 2010)—the iconoclast’s as much as auctioneer’s. “The museum is not in every way a wholly distinct alternative to the iconoclast’s hammer. Not only does the museum’s existence imply the iconoclast’s hammer, but the museum is [also] incapable of successfully exorcising that hammer” (Simpson, 157–8).

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39. Sparshott 1982, 371ff. Sparshott adds another: the ‘Purist Line’ (414ff.), most readily thought of as a repudiation of all consumerist exchange, even at the cost of embodied examples. Its place within the museum or other cultural institutions is harder to imagine. 40. Porter 2009a, b, 2011; Shiner 2009. More recently, Paul Kottman’s anthology, The Instance of Art (Kottman 2017b), renewed the fight— against Kristeller, but more broadly against what he reads as the distortions wrought by the “potted intellectual histories” of Romantic theory. 41. Michael Ferber, “The Romantic System of the Arts,” chapter 32 in Ferber 2005, 543–70. See 561  f. for “selving,” a word he borrows from G.M.  Hopkins. Compare his concise yet comprehensive guide, Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Ferber 2010), esp. Chap. 6, on “the arts.”  For a superb account of Romanticism, alive to historical nuance and irony, see Hugh Honour (1979). “To some degree all subsequent Western art derives from it”; “creativity, originality, individuality, authenticity and integrity,” etc., continue to dominate aesthetic thought (Honour, 319). 42. The Theory of the Arts, Sparshott 1982. Despite its title, the book examines more than “I. ARTS” (the “Classical Line”) but also “II. ART” (the “Poetic Line”)—a theory of productivity, comprising (a) the main “Expressive” line, then (b) “Mystic” and (c) “Purist” lines. Sparshott registers the irony by which the fine arts had lost their unifying impetus— broadly derived from the idea of ‘imitation’—even as the institution itself survived the decline of its legitimating theory, only to be invaded and occupied by a wholly distinct theory, that of ‘imaginative expression.’ He appeals particularly to Croce and Collingwood in articulating an emergent theory of the Expressive Line. (Sparshott was a teacher of mine in Toronto, and my own views on Romanticism owe much to his book, although a long-standing admiration for Collingwood’s ideas had already prepared me for its arguments.) 43. Collingwood 1938. What art is not (“pseudo-art”) comprises mainly craft—most typically, technique, representation, or emotive arousal and effect (psychology). There are all told six kinds of error: (i) magic or amusement; (ii) propaganda or puzzle; (iii) instruction or exhortation. They are erroneous only if we take them to be ‘art proper’: Art, expression. Indeed, “magic is a thing which every community must have; and in a civilization rotten with amusement, the more magic we produce the better” (Collingwood, 278).

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44. Rancière 2011, chapter 4: “From the Poetry of the Future to the Poetry of the Past,” 81. For the comic perspective, 84. For his view of the birth of ‘literature’ as an illusory middle-path between novel and verbal play, 81–88. 45. Unkindly faulted, when in fact they had become friends in Heidelberg. Moreover, Jean Paul disdained what he called “poetic nihilists” who reduce the world to subjectivist “play in the void” (Vorschule §2: Jean Paul 1973, 15 f.; see esp. Croker 2018, 56). 46. Rancière 2013, Chap. 2, “The Little Gods of the Street: Munich-Berlin, 1828,” 21–37. “Aesthetic regime” refers to the political disposition (or distribution: partage) of art, in succession to the “representational regime” of the fine arts. Chapter 1 (“Divided Beauty”) deals with Winckelmann’s novel treatment of the sculptured torso, and the simultaneous emergence of Art and History (both singular); a process Rancière says Hegel would later explicate via his tripartite sequence of art-forms (19–20). 47. Jacques Rancière,  “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Rancière 2009, 31. 48. OED, ‘anachronism’ sense 1: “An error in computing time, or fixing dates; …. Said etymologically (like prochronism) of a date which is too early, but also used of too late a date, which has been distinguished as parachronism.” Prochronism corresponds to Collingwood’s ‘obsolete,’ parachronism to his ‘analogical’ meaning. For incisive treatment, see Rancière 2015. He registers the distinction (back to a past vs forward to a future) but adds that it never caught on. Anachronism “has remained alone to indicate the [alleged!] mistake against chronology in general” (Rancière, 23). 49. Wood 2004a: “The entire modern conception of art, whether textual or pictorial, derives, I would argue, from the Latin Christian model of figuration as transfiguration whose truth value is found in its dislocation from the real—art as a kind of allegorical revelation, in other words.” Cf. Wood 2004b. A similar angle is adopted in Wood 2008, which aligns Hegel (and other Germans) with interpreters concerned “to legitimate secular modernity,” at the same time “discrediting the traditional cult image” (79). 50. Nagel and Wood 2010, e.g., 14–16, 29–32, and—for the figural alternative—33. The authors cite with admiration (370) Georges Didi-­ Huberman—on “the unstable temporality of the image”—and Jacques Rancière—on “anachronies” (not ‘anachronism’).

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51. Nagel and Wood 2010, 45. They add that the “substitution of work for work produces a picture of history…without presupposing the workings of any actual memory. The commutativity of past and present is a memory effect generated by the substitutional machine.” Compare Wood 2008, 109: “Within the substitution model, all times were always present.” 52. Wood 2019, 221. For Hegel, see 215–23 and 229–30. On Hegel’s attitude to historical scholarship (praising Goethe for his scholarly criticism), see Hegel 2017, 8–9, Heimann ms. 4; Hegel 2020 (GW 28,3), 916. Cf. Donougho 2020b. 53. 14, 238/607–8. Hegel reproaches the French “for presenting Greek and Roman heroes, Chinese and Peruvians” disguised as modern-day courtiers. This comes just after his remark about citational eclecticism in contemporary art, one making ‘Humanus’ its new saint—see Donougho 1982a. Goethe presides over such late-romantic transitional products; his West-East Divan proves exemplary for what Hegel calls ‘objective humor.’ 54. Wood 2019, 229–30. 55. Wood, 222 (how much Jamesian irony is intended?). He admits Hegel’s open-minded sympathy for individual forms in the past or in other cultures. But he also acknowledges a general shift in the discipline of art history from “the drama of form” to more technical issues of representation or perception (see Wood, 380ff.). The shift was partly political (Gombrich), partly due to the perceived bankruptcy of formalism. In Wood’s own disillusioned view, art manages to escape the historian’s net (407). 56. “Against the Sublime,” Elkins 2012, 80; quoted in Donougho 2018, 224–5. Elkins considers talk of the sublime apt for certain periods (e.g., the so-called “Romantic” sublime) but not others. Its contemporary application is especially confused. 57. The work of Reinhart Koselleck is germane here, e.g., Futures Past: Koselleck 1985. Keith Tribe, its translator, remarked that the title should have read “former futures,” to bring out the emergent character of intellectual frameworks or horizons. 58. Donougho 2014a, 286. 59. Gethmann-Siefert 1984, 188. 60. Michael Squire, “‘Unser Knie beugen wir doch nicht mehr?’,” in Kottman & Squire 2018, 147–8, claiming for Hegel a specifically Lutheran frame of reference—a deus absconditus—as the implicit telos of

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art and philosophy of art. Squire refers to “Hegel’s linear, big-picture account,” “his progressivist teleology,” “the linear thrust of Hegel’s account” (138), a “peculiarly … Christian conceptual framework” (139), and a “theological conditioning” (138, 148). A likely story! 61. Hegel 1969, 12: 19–29/Hegel 2011a, 8–15. True, Hegel cannot resist calling history a theodicy (26/12), likely a mere façon de parler. The final section of Hegel’s analysis of the “varieties of historical writing” (original, reflective, philosophical) is absent from Hoffmeister’s edition of Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Hegel 1975a). Duncan Forbes’s ­introduction makes the point that ‘philosophical history’ is not really history at all: see xx–xxiii. For a balanced reconstruction of Hegel’s (sometimes blinkered or short-sighted) views, see Pinkard 2017, the ‘Introduction’ especially. 62. Donougho 2007, 180: “a kind of stereoscopic vision.” 63. Iversen and Melville 2010, Chap. 8: “Plasticity: the Hegelian Writing of Art.” “Here it is a matter of wheels within wheels…” (ibid., 155)—the symbolic within the classical or romantic (and late-romantic), the classical within the romantic (forms of displacement such as chivalry, honour, fidelity, character, the novel). 64. Gaiger 2011, 182, borrows the phrase “hybrid type of enquiry” from Otto Pächt, an art historian persistently critical of Gombrich’s vaunted empiricism (“There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists”). Pächt is equally allergic to “a strictly teleological, Hegelian approach,” as he dubs it (Pächt 1999, 119). Christopher Wood’s introduction draws attention (Pächt, 11) to Pächt’s guiding concept—namely, the ‘design principle’ (Gestaltungprinzip)—which joins “seeing and thinking” (Pächt, 70). Gestaltung was also Hegel’s key, of course. 65. Werke 5, 30–32/Hegel 2010b 19–21.

Bibliography Hegel, G.W.F. 1969, Werke, eds. Moldenhauer & Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969) Hegel, G.W.F. 1975a, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) Hegel, G.W.F. 1990b, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, trans. Steven Taubeneck (New York: Continuum, 1990)

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Hegel, G.W.F. 2007a, Philosophy of Mind, trans. M. Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Hegel, G.W.F., 2010b, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Hegel, G.W.F., 2011a, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, volume 1, trans. Robert Brown and Peter Hodson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Hegel, G.W.F. 2011b, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. Ruben Alvarado (based on Sibree) (Alten, Netherlands: Wordbridge Publications, 2011) Hegel, G.W.F. 2015b, Gesammelte Werke 28.1, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst I (Nachschriften zum Kolleg des Jahres 1820/21, 1826), hg. Niklas Hebing (Hamburg: Meiner, 2015) Hegel, G.W.F. 2017, Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik: Mitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829), eds. Alain Patrick Olivier and Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Paderborn: Fink, 2017) Hegel, G.W.F. 2018b, Gesammelte Werke 28.2, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst II (Nachschrift zum Kolleg des Jahres 1826), hg. Niklas Hebing & Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Meiner, 2018) Hegel, G.W.F. 2020, Gesammelte Werke 28.3, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst III (Nachschrift zum Kolleg des Wintersemesters 1828/29), hg. Walter Jaeschke & Niklas Hebing (Hamburg: Meiner, 2020) Anderson, Greg 2018, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Bertram, Georg W. 2019, Hegels ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’. Ein systematischer Kommentar (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2019) Bidart, Frank 2014, Metaphysical Dog: Poems (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014) Blumenberg, Hans 1957, “‘Nachahmung der Natur.’ Zum Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen,” Studium Generale 10 (1957), 266-83; reprinted in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Reclam, 1981), 55-103. Bürger, Peter 1984, The Concept of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) Collingwood, R.G. 1938, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938) Comay, Rebecca 2014, “Defaced Statues: Idealism and Iconoclasm in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” October 149 (2014), 123-42 Descola, Philippe 2013, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013; original 2005)

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Donougho, Martin 1980, “An Interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Art,” dissertation, University of Toronto, 1980 (director Kenneth Schmitz) Donougho, Martin 1982a, “Remarks on ‘Humanus heißt der Heilige,’” HegelStudien 17 (1982), 214-25 Donougho, Martin 1992 “Hegel and Creuzer: or, Did Hegel Believe in Myth?,” in New Perspectives in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Kolb (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 59-80 Donougho, Martin 2007, “Art and History: Hegel on the End, the Beginning, and the Future of Art,” in Stephen Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Arts (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 179-215 Donougho, Martin 2014a, “Hegel on the History of Art,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics , ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford UP, 2014), vol. 3, 285-88 Donougho, Martin 2014b, “Winckelmann,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford UP, 2014), vol. 6, 281-85 Donougho, Martin 2018, “Hegel’s Bathetic Sublime,” in Idealistic Studies 46: 3 (2018), 217-36 Donougho, Martin 2020a, “Seeing faces in Wilhelm Meister: Goethe and Physiognomics,” in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Philosophy, eds. Sarah Eldridge & Allen Speight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 134-63. Donougho, Martin 2020b, “Hegel’s ‘characteristic’ (die Charakteristik) in 1828/29,” in Studi di estetica (2020) Elkins, James 2012, Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, eds. Ronald Hoffmann & Ian Boyd Whyte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 75-90 Ferber, Michael 2005, Michael Ferber (ed.), A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) Ferber, Michael 2010, Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Franklin, Samuel Weil 2023, The Cult of Creativity. A Surprisingly Recent History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023) Früchtl, Joseph 2009, The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity, trans. Sarah L. Kirkby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) Frye, C. Northrop 1957, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) Gaiger, Jason 2011, “Hegel’s Contested Legacy: Rethinking the Relation Between Art History and Philosophy,” Art Bulletin 93:2 (2011), 178-94

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Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie 1984, Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Ästhetik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984) Hilmer, Brigitte 1997, Scheinen des Begriffs. Hegels Logik der Kunst (Hamburg: Meiner, 1997) Honour, Hugh 1979, Romanticism (New York: Harper and Row, 1979) Inwood, Michael 2007, Commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Iversen, Margaret and Stephen Melville 2010, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) Jaeschke, Walter 2016, Hegel Handbuch: Leben  – Werk  – Schule, 3rd edition (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016) Koselleck, Reinhart 1985, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (1979; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) Kottman, Paul 2017a, Love as Human Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017) Kottman, Paul and Michael Squire 2018, The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History, eds. Kottman and Squire (Paderborn: Fink, 2018) Kottman, Paul 2017b, The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy After Early Modernity, ed. Paul A. Kottman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017) Luhmann, Niklas 2013b, A Systems Theory of Religion, trans. David Brenner with Adrian Herman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) Nagel, Alexander and Christopher S. Wood 2010, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010) Nietzsche, F. 2001, The Gay Science (1886), ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Pächt, Otto 1999, The Practice of Art History: Reflections of Method, trans. David Britt (London: Harvey Miller, 1999) Pahl, Katrin 2012, Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012) Pinkard, Terry 2017, Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) Pippin, Robert 2014, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Porter, James I. 2009a, “Is art modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern system of the arts’ reconsidered,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49/1 (2009), 1-24 Porter, James 2009b, “Reply to Shiner,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49/1 (2009) 171-8

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Porter, James 2011, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Rajan, Tilottama 2011, “Difficult Freedom: Hegel’s Symbolic Art and Schelling’s Historiography in Ages of the World (1815)” Inventions of the Imagination: Romanticism and Beyond, ed. Richard Gray et  al. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 121-40 Rancière, Jacques 2009, “Contemporary art and the politics of aesthetics,” in Hinderliter et al (eds.), Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 31-50 Rancière, Jacques 2011, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (1998; New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) Rancière, Jacques 2013, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (London: Verso, 2013) Rancière, Jacques 2015, “The concept of anachronism and the historian’s truth (English translation),” InPrint, vol. 3:1, article 1 (2015), 20-45: https:// arrow.dit.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=inp. Rush, Fred 2018, “Still Life and the End of Painting,” in Kottman & Squire 2018, 159-87 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 2000, Art and the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (1992; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Shiner, Larry 2001, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) Shiner, Larry 2009 “Continuity and discontinuity in the concept of art,” BJA 49/2 (2009), 159-69 Simpson, James 2010, Under the Hammer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Smith, Bernard 1998, Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) Sparshott, Francis 1982, Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) Veyne, Paul 1988, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; original 1983) William Croker “Jean-Paul’s Lunacy, or Humor as Trans-critique,” All Too Human: Laughter, Humor, and Comedy in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Lydia Moland (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 51-71 Wood, Christopher 2004a, Review of Hans Belting, Bildanthropologie, Art Bulletin 86 (2004), 370-73

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Wood, Christopher 2004b, “Riegl’s mache,” RES 46 (2004), 155-72 Wood, Christopher 2008, Forgery Replica Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Wood, Christopher 2019, A History of Art History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)

10 Epilogue

My subtitle reads “beyond category”—hors catégorie, in cycling-speak. ‘Individuality’ doesn’t appear on the roster of familiar Hegelian operators, those the Preface to the Second Edition of the Science of Logic calls “knots” on the web (Netze) of thought, to bring out thought’s interconnectedness. “To purify these categories and in them to elevate spirit to truth and freedom, this is therefore the loftier business of logic,” Hegel adds (Werke, 5: 27/Hegel 2010, 17). Exactly how ‘individuality’ might help (or complicate) that task remains an open and difficult question. Hegel makes the point that, as ways of binding thought to being, of linking import (Gehalt) and form, categories are provisional and historical rather than fixed or abstract. They presuppose activity, a certain ‘pragmatics’ of thinking (where by ‘pragmatics’ I mean the speech act of addressing others, in certain circumstances, with definite aims in view and kinds of assumptions or “uptake” built in).1 To quote Michael Marder: “For Hegel, both the thing and the category are … intersections of subjective and objective being, of self-consciousness and actuality, each endowed with coherence across multiplicity.”2 Neither purely Aristotelian nor just Kantian in character, neither ontological nor epistemological, Hegel’s approach combines both, in a bid to escape their sway. “A category, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Donougho, Hegel’s ‘Individuality’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4_10

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according to the etymology of the word and Aristotle’s definition of it, is what is said of every existent,” Hegel observes near the start of the Logic of Essence.3 But he adds that the  “determinations of reflection” found in Book 2 are all self-referential, implicitly propositional in form rather than externally determined by their opposition or apposition to other determinations, as in Book 1. He prefers to distinguish (i) ‘categories’ from (ii) ‘determinations of reflection’ and from (iii) ‘the concept’ and its ‘moments,’ though all three count as ‘thought determinations’ (Denkbestimmungen).4 Informally we may continue speaking of distinct categories like ‘identity,’ ‘semblance,’ ‘ground,’ ‘appearance,’ or actuality,’ plus (from Book 3) ‘concept,’ ‘judgment,’ ‘mechanism,’ ‘life,’ and so on. When Hegel moves beyond the relatively fixed binaries of reflexional logic (essence versus appearance or semblance, or variations on this), he employs a logic of the syllogism whereby universal, particular and singular moments interact, ‘overgrasping’ one another in a fluid play of speculative thought. I suggest that ‘individuality’ takes matters still further, towards a tacit dimension beyond fixed determination of meaning or use, beyond even the rules of syllogistic inference (however elastically interpreted). More concretely, ‘individuality’ floats or swings between singular and universal moments (the first accommodating ‘particular’ or ‘eigentümlich’ features besides), in ways that defy final determination and upshot. Chapter 1 cited Hegel’s comment on power vested in the concept: The universal [concept] is therefore free power; it is itself and reaches out to its other [greift über sein Anderes über]; yet without doing violence [als ein Gewaltsames], instead being at rest and at home [bei sich selbst] in its other.5 Despite Hegel’s assurance—even his comparison of conceptual mediation with “free love” and “boundless blessedness”—some (notably Michael Theunissen) have understood its logic as potentially coercive, a masterful, even violent gesture exerted over its other (nature, life, force, even us). On its face ‘individuality’ resists such demonization. It bids fair to escape conceptual typing altogether, objective or subjective. On the one hand, it amounts to a ‘logic’ of equivocation: the plant is and is not individual; the seemingly independent planetary body is and is not subject to solar dominion. On the other, it exposes itself to possible

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misconstrual, even distortion: an instance of ‘so-called’ ‘individuality,’ when a certain fixity enters on the side either of subject or of object; the first as mere supposition (Meinen), the second as hypostasis. Akin to ‘Schein,’ illusive play is how our (non-)category functions. Ambivalence is evident, for example, in the section on the ‘Animal Realm of Spirit’ from the Phenomenology, where individuality is seen expressing itself relative to other individualities—indeed, each is true to itself both in its own work and in its communal efforts—while at the same time being engaged in strenuous make-believe, its own self-contradictory “song of myself.”6 It is the subject in which individuality exists as itself or exists just as much as this individual as well as all individuals, and it is the universal which is a being [ein Sein] only as this activity, which is the action of each and all; an actuality in that this consciousness knows it as its own individual actuality and as the actuality of all (Phenomenology, ¶417/310-11).

Or again, with ancient Sittlichkeit (Phenomenology Chapter VI), we observe opposing roles and norms played out on the public stage, each agonist donning both singular and universal masks, or better, each affirming that the mask simply is its essence. Individuality marks the moment of authentic being whose obverse is empty feigning. Virtuous, heroic individuality may experience fateful necessity, power as violence (Gewalt), rather than a serene absorption into the polis. Yet the account offered by the Logic (under ‘real mechanical process’ in the chapter on Mechanism) has fate—das Schicksal—come from misconstrual or hypostasis: a people without deeds … is without the individuality that moves the unmoved … yet in this individuality the subject is also divested [Entäußerten] of its essence, becomes an object … (Hegel, Science of Logic: 6, 421-2/639).

‘For us,’ in retrospect, calling necessity Fate is a misprision, however admirable as aesthetic spectacle; we may  rather view it as subjectivity indisguise. In similar vein, Hegel’s treatment of the classical Ideal deals

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with nature—that is to say, ‘Nature’—in equivocal manner. Nature is negated in the advance to spirit, yet to distinguish it as ‘nature’ puts nature in its place, in both senses, that is, by excluding while defining (indeed, honoring) nature. Double distinction or reflection is characteristic of the Ideal, and of the beautiful individuality at its heart. The same ensues with the emergence of consciousness in the ‘Anthropology,’ via ‘habit,’ the ‘minding’ (and reminding) of the body: there’s always a contingent remainder with which to come to terms; I end up defining myself as defined by my corporeal situation. Or again, we see life operate both as real process (living being) and as category. Life reflects on itself, and concretely lives its self-reflection, as an ‘amphibium’ —body/mind, nature/spirit. * * * In several respects Hegel marks a watershed in the development of ‘individuality’ as quasi-category. It constitutes an important though under-­ appreciated resource in Hegel’s arsenal, I have argued. Yet its reticence might explain why it attracted few if any takers among Hegel’s successors. So far as it registers at all it becomes something to deny, repel, or evade. Let me conclude by sketching how Hegel’s ‘individuality’ was felt and resisted by Feuerbach, Stirner, and Kierkegaard. Each responded to Hegelian thematics as well as the form and pragmatics of Hegel’s project, even as they all tried to escape or ignore his legacy. All three identify the category—‘individuality’ included—as covertly exerting a power they wish forcefully to challenge, in the process bearing witness to the power of Hegel’s own pragmatics. They bring to the fore the question of address. Just who does Hegel’s ‘individuality’ speak to? Who is the speaker, and with what rhetorical force or communicative openness? (i) Feuerbach: Ludwig Feuerbach offers a perspective on Hegelian philosophy by turns sharp and muddled, polemical and mystifying, ironic and utopian. ‘Individuality’ is central to his project, yet it remains nebulous in sense and implication.7 Early on a disciple of Hegel, in his dissertation (Erlangen 1828) Feuerbach manages to throw Hegelian ideas back in his teacher’s face. A letter to Hegel from that year roundly declares that

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the I, the self altogether [überhaupt], …—which has dominated the world and conceived itself as the sole spirit existing, and as absolute has validated itself by suppressing the true absolute and objective spirit—must be kicked off its sovereign throne.8

It reveals Feuerbach’s clear awareness that concepts may function ambiguously in between thought and reality. They have the power to wield power—sometimes absolute—in the world: the ‘self ’ or ‘person’ has become sovereign in fact and theory, and must be resisted. It hints too at Feuerbach’s zeal for “sensuousness,” his conviction (to quote Karl Löwith) that ideas “should descend from the ‘heaven of their colorless purity’ and ‘self-unity’ to observable particularity.”9 Taking an extreme Idealist stance, Feuerbach’s dissertation (“On Reason”) contends that individual humans find their essence or truth in the species, in thought: “so far as I think, I am no longer individual.”10 As with early Schleiermacher and Hegel, individuals (individua) transcend their own individuality, or rather, their existence as singularized (vereinzelte; ut singularibus); otherwise there would be as many essences as individuals.11 Moreover, in conceiving myself as essentially related to other individuals, I frame reason as something communal (communis) and universal; strictly speaking, the singular person (singularis), separate from others, cannot be thought!12 “Humanity,” Feuerbach continues, “is accordingly bound to and united with the other (altero) in such a way that the singular (einzelne; singularis) person is just a fiction [res ficta].” While silent about exactly how the ‘I’ in principle relates to or recognizes the other, Feuerbach emphasizes I-Thou communication from the start, a habit that later becomes more pronounced; it tends (as with Schleiermacher) towards the model of divine love. Adducing Hegel’s logic of self-limitation, Feuerbach concludes that whatever lacks the potential to exceed limitation (as individual) will neither feel nor cognize its own limits. To be individual is tacitly to transcend one’s own individuality rather than remain stuck in one’s own self-relating egoism. Yet Feuerbach equivocates, speaking in his own voice yet also on behalf of an ideal ‘species-being.’ His later “anthropological” position, to quote Breckman,

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contained an unresolved tension between, on the one hand, the definition of humanity as a unified species-subject, and, on the other hand, the human individual as a being whose essence is radically undefined once it is emancipated from its theological illusions.13

Left unanswered, even unposed, is the question of who (or what) this “human individual” is, with respect to Feuerbach himself, as individual author. His ‘individual’ remains anonymous or impersonal, all the more so when promoted to ‘species-being,’ a transfiguration which leaves the sensuous individual (you or me) in the dust. Indeed (as Breckman remarks) Stirner’s frontal assault on an abstract ‘Gattungswesen’ persuaded Feuerbach to shift from the ideal of general humanity towards “a greater emphasis on the sensuous, needful, individual human being.”14 (ii) Stirner: It is ironic that the “real” name of Max Stirner—proponent of “die Einzige,” the unique one—was Johann Kaspar Schmidt. It only goes to show that names fail to capture our own inherent uniqueness (a Smith by any other name …). Stirner was the declared enemy of all hypostasis, carrying to an extreme the critique wielded by Kant, then Fichte, followed in turn by Hegel and Feuerbach, each undercutting his predecessor.15 He takes Feuerbach’s emphasis on ‘I-Thou’ communication one stage further, into ad hominem address. Isaiah Berlin summarizes his ideas: Stirner believed that all programmes, ideals, theories as well as political, social and economic orders are so many artificially built prisons for the mind and the spirit, means of curbing the will, of concealing from the individual the existence of his own infinite powers, and that all systems must therefore be destroyed, not because they are evil, but because they are systems, submission to which is a narrow form of idolatry … (Berlin 1996, 106).

The Ego and its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum: 1844) mentions ‘individuality’ solely to critique Feuerbach’s resort to it. Stirner’s preferred term is ‘der einzelne’ (rendered as ‘individual’ in the Byington/Leopold translation), along with ‘der Eigene’ or ‘Eigentum,’ occasionally ‘Einzigkeit’ (uniqueness).16 The ‘singular being’ is committed to avoiding dogma or

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idées fixes, however defined, as Stirner makes clear in a “Postscript” on Bruno Bauer’s “critical critique.”17Stirner accuses Bauer of being dogmatically against dogma, whereas he is neither thought nor thinking: “Against me—the unnameable—the realm of thoughts, thinking and mind is shattered” (Stirner 1995, 132). ‘Singular being’ resists being categorized or reduced to a concept of any sort. It amounts to sheer defiance, akin to Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” (Stirner’s ‘I’ dubs itself “Unmensch”). While this ‘I’ evinces definite commitments—to individualistic voluntarism, to egoism (both psychological and ethical), and to hedonism18— they all derive from the primary speech-act of insurgency (Empörung) against any “levelling” comparison. Löwith is justified in comparing Stirner with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (perhaps Feuerbach) on that score.19 Yet there remains an odd sense that Stirner, just to exercise autonomy, depends on the very hypostasis under attack. It resembles the skeptic’s ‘position’ (per Hegel’s dialectical critique) which finally is nothing but the activity of negating position, just getting even. Suspension of judgment remains an act, in determinate circumstances with definite implications. Marx and Engels charge Stirner with embracing the ideology of an isolated bourgeois self, sanctifying its own egoism (along with the abstract concept ‘property’ or ‘ownership’). Cast in this light he is seen as constantly pursued by the “specters” (Spuken) of past ideas and current opponents, no more than a “posited” (gesetzt—it also means sedentary) self.20 Armchair philosophizing, indeed! Even so a case can be made for Stirner’s projecting a bridge to future action, once “singular beings” have freed themselves of prevailing “spooks” (the final portion of his book, if we make it that far, looks ahead). In a post-modern climate Stirner might well be hailed as shaking off the pall of exhausted concepts, whether subject-object dichotomy, Bruno Bauer’s residual humanism, or the “Young Hegelian” quest for political subjectivity. The “concept” designated by ‘der einzige’ would thus be “extra-­ conceptual,” responding indirectly to the “crisis of levelling”—so declares Widukind De Ridder.21 If philosophy is (per Deleuze) the production of concepts, then Stirner posits the final concept: none at all! De Ridder cites the so-called “Rezensenten Stirners,” written (oddly) in the third person:

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What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a concept; what he means is no word, no thought, no concept. What he says is not what is meant and what he means is unsayable [unsagbar].”22

On its face that falls into pragmatic self-contradiction. Yet it also gestures at a pragmatics of self-positing in which the individual comprises “self-revelation,” momentary knowledge of itself, complete with “a sense of time” and of its own protean existence in time. If it resembles Kierkegaard’s “corrective” to the present at the hands of the individual (Einzelnen), Stirner’s performative self nevertheless remains one-­ dimensional and weightless: it lacks a sense both of addressing other individuals and of exhibiting openness towards otherness as such.23 True, he writes about “my” egoism, thereby tacitly appealing to potential readers. But we find no engagement with what authorship implies, of the kind that Kierkegaard attempts through his “indirect” writing, or that Nietzsche gestures at in speaking of (and to) his “friends.” * * * (iii) Kierkegaard: Kierkegaard begins from a Hegelian standpoint on irony and ‘individuality,’ a “determinate negation” of the master which yet remains indebted to him. He explicates ‘individuality’ as an equivocal moment which might precipitate a properly religious position, and an identification with ‘the singular being’ (den Enkelte). He accuses Hegelian (or rather Danish Hegelians’) aestheticism of plagiarizing classical Greek ‘individualitet.’ Kierkegaard borrows the category for his own purposes, namely, to capture our appearance on the social or aesthetic stage, using Hegel’s dialectic of form/content, inner/outer (rather, Hegel’s focus on its enunciation or utterance).24 Kierkegaard’s own chosen non-category, by contrast, is ‘hiin Enkelte’—that singular being—the discovery of which he took as registering his own authorship, in words he said might befit his gravestone. “With the category the single individual [den Enkelte], I marked the beginning of the writing bearing my signature …” (Kierkegaard 1998, 119). But that is shadowed by the specter of his own non-authorship, as though there were a “governance” (divine or diabolical) dictating his words (compare Cavell’s anxiety about being able to pronounce ‘I’).

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The pseudonymous Either-Or (1843) repudiates an aesthetics of harmonious ‘individuality,’ inverting Schlegel’s aestheticism, in a parody of Lucinde’s mixed genres and self-reflexive address. And it challenges Hegel’s logical “equation” of inner and outer, whereas “inwardness” ought to weigh with me infinitely more than “outer.”25 Part of the challenge concerns the limits laid upon the aesthetic sphere of existence: how, and how far, may individuality truly exist in sensuous guise? Either/Or comprises a series of literary presentations of self-representation, fashioned to expose the constituent limits to representation, with respect to (i) the inner, then (ii) the outer and finally (iii) their “balance” (ligevægten) in a developing “personality.” Its indirectness makes the book about individual readers, appealing to our own conscience, our self-relation. In “The Unhappiest One” we find the (aphoristic) suggestion that “we live aphoristically … as aphorisms in life” (220). Aphorisms are fragmentary wholes shaped by their horizons—individualities, in short.26 Formally speaking they pervade Part I, which may be said to explore an aesthetics of individual appearance—of individuality—, from fragmentary refrains (‘Diapsalmata’), through Mozartean opera, tragic drama, silhouettes (coeval with Physiognomics), ‘The Unhappiest One’ (Scribe’s comic melodrama), to the aesthete Johannes’ ‘Diary of Seduction.’ Whereas in “Greek culture the sensuous was controlled in beautiful individuality [skjønne Individualitet]”—a nod to the Aesthetics—or better, “was liberated to life and joy in beautiful individuality,” in modernity the sensuous-­ erotic becomes focused rather on the singular (den Enkelte: 62), temporally embodied as pure music. Mozart’s hero manifests as unreflective, hovering unstably between idea and singular individual (et enkelt Individ: 92, 96), an individual continually under formation, never finished: the “absolutely musical,” a character only heard in music but never seen on stage (96-7). When it comes to tragedy, topic of the following section, Kierkegaard (A, rather, addressing the ‘Fellowship of the Dead’) offers a parody of Hegel’s account in the Aesthetics (137-64). Leonardo Lisi points out that the text traverses the categories of action (143), guilt (144), and finally mood (145-7)—all centered on individuality. By contrast, modernity lacks the “substantial categories of family, state, or kindred, and must instead turn the single individual [det enkelte Individ] over to himself …

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he becomes his own creator” (149). Tragedy dies. In its stead the speaker promises a “fragmentary” presentation of modern tragedy, but in “posthumous” mode, as something “left behind”: a ruin, an unfinished work. There follows an account of Antigone in modern guise, entirely his own creation, as A admits. On this revised account Antigone’s life “is turned inwards, not outwards. The stage is within, not outside; it is a spiritual stage” (157). We now proceed in reverse, from mood, through guilt, to action. Antigone’s pain is rendered personal rather than a family secret. Her hidden pain is that she loves her father Oedipus while never knowing for certain whether he came to acknowledge his own guilt. The “amphiboly” renders her situation tragic—so A argues (161). (To which I’d add that this process recapitulates Hegel’s own presentation of artistic decline from individuality to bare individual in prosaic society.) Kierkegaard consigns ‘individuality’ to the aesthetic sphere, which he takes to fall decisively short of both ethical and religious existence. Yet he has much to say about ‘individuality,’ condemning its refusal to take existence seriously or applauding its presentation of—by seeing through—the aesthetic masquerade. Either-Or hardly exhausts the author’s indirect works, most of which remain part-aesthetic in mode (dialectic of inner/ outer, distinctive narrative stance). Nor does it account for comedy, the genre that transcends tragedy and opens the way to religion. My interest however lies in the possible ‘theatricality’ (Michael Fried), wearing the guise of “governance,” which Kierkegaard senses shadowing him relentlessly, undermining any claim to authenticity. Stanley Cavell finds an interesting angle on the question of whether art can ever get beyond the surface of existence (beyond mimetic form or creative genius). He argues that only in the nineteenth century—after the birth of Romantic ‘Art’ (as concept and social fact)—could there arise “the threat of fraudulence,” obverse of its potential for “authenticity.”27 Cavell takes the dialectic as characteristic of modern art. More than the ontology of artworks is at stake: it is equally the “role” played by the audience, work made expressly for the public being fraudulent from the start. Indeed, we should speak instead of what we take to be aesthetic modernism, given that in this situation everything is at stake. What something really is and how we may approach it exist in delicate balance: an amphiboly, indeed.

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The same might be said about post-Romantic art when viewed in the Hegelian perspective of ‘individuality.’ In theory or as institutional fact it performs a balancing act, always at risk of becoming ‘so-called’ individuality, or else an ‘overgrasping’ which is more like domination.

Notes 1. See my essay, “Performing Hegel” (Donougho 2011). 2. Political Categories: Marder 2019, 15. He cites the Phenomenology (¶344/Werke 3: 260) on the category as immediate unity of the I with being; unity of being (Seins) and its own (Seinen), Hegel adds. Marder advocates going beyond Aristotle and Kant so as to put the categories to work. He takes note (Marder, 19) of an etymological proximity to the agora of public discussion, and to the ‘bringing down’ (kata) of legal accusation. It’s a political matter, when all is said and done: the thing (Sache, res) adjudged to matter to us all. 3. Werke, 6: 36/Hegel 2010, 355. Hegel decries the reduction of categories to abstract or quantitative determinacy, and equally the Kantian deduction of the categories as “pure concepts.” He seldom mentions ‘categories’ in the ‘Subjective’ Logic (Books 2 and 3); when he does, it is to challenge their singular status, mutually external. Thus, with respect to ‘Contradiction,’ Hegel writes: “The categories must rather be considered on their own, that is to say, it is their own reflection that must be considered …. Each is the reflective shining of itself in the other, and itself the positing of itself as the other” (6, 70/378). Categories engage in beating their own bounds, so to say—breaking the bounds too. Purification would undermine their very existence! 4. Science of Logic, Hegel 1969: 6, 500/Hegel 2010, 698: “Thought determinations in general, the categories, the determinations of reflection, as well as the formal concept and its moments…”—these are said to have acquired with Kant merely finite status. Kant didn’t take the categories “in and for themselves” (6, 268-9/524, 525). Compare “thought determinations in and for themselves” (560/743) in the last chapter, “the absolute Idea.” The ensuing pages explore the deep paradox by which the concept negates itself, its second negative then becoming self-reference—hence the “turning point” of method.

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5. Hegel 6: 277/Hegel 2010, 532. He continues: “Just as it has been called free power, it could also be called free love and boundless blessedness, for it relates to what is distinguished [dem Unterschiedenen] solely as to itself; in that [the distinguished] it has returned to itself.” 6. Walt Whitman, Song of myself, 51. From Leaves of Grass (1891-92), in Whitman 1982, 246: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” 7. Sonenscher 2022, 87-90, places Feuerbachian ‘individuality’ within the Romantic and theological tradition of early Schelling and Hegel. He finds (ibid., 89) a continuity with Luhmann’s idea of self-differentiation. 8. Werke (1901) IV, 357-63, at 359. Letter and dissertation are analyzed in Warren Breckman (94-8), who takes his subtitle from the passage. 9. Löwith 1965, 72. Löwith’s study originally appeared in 1941. Compare his habilitation (under Heidegger’s direction), Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen (Löwith 1928). Löwith sees Feuerbach as the first to break with an older philosophical tradition rooted in subject-object relations, although Hegel too may be cast in that light: the “truth” of Hegelian dialectic is dialogue, a drive to communicate (Löwith 1928, 12). 10. Feuerbach 1981, 18. 11. Ibid., 90-91. 12. Ibid., 163, note 54 to §17. 13. Breckman 1999, 98. 14. Breckman 1999, 303. 15. See Frederick Beiser, in Moggach 2011, 281-99, at 282. 16. Citations are to Leopold’s edition (Stirner 1995). 17. Ibid., 129-35, 305-14. “If … I grasp the idea as my idea, then it is already realized, because I am its reality; its reality consists in the fact that I, the bodily [me?], have it” (314). 18. Beiser, in Moggach 2011, 284-8. 19. See Löwith 1928, 177  ff. Cf. Löwith 1965, 111, 297: on differences from Kierkegaard, 249; similarities with Nietzsche, 187. 20. Marx 1965. Two-thirds of this work—almost four hundred pages!—is devoted to demolishing “Saint Max.” Jacques Derrida (in Derrida 1994) pictures Marx and Engels as obsessively hunting down Stirner the ghost-­ hunter, haunted by hunting; see chapter 5, 134-40. 21. De Ridder 2011, 150-3.

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22. Ibid., 157. See http://www.lsr-­projekt.de/msrec.html (accessed 26 September 2016) for the 1845 text, 149. Later we read: “der Einzige ist ein gedankenloser Wort, es hat keinen Gedankeninhalt …. Undankbar und unsagbar” (152). 23. Löwith 1965, 318-21. Löwith obscures the difference between Stirner’s “singular being” and Kierkegaard’s hiin [or den] enkelte (‘that/the singular’), rendering the latter as “Einzeln” (translated as ‘individual”). 24. George Pattison (1997) reveals Kierkegaard’s debt to Heiberg’s Hegelian dialectic of form/content, and its bearing on genre. See Pattison, 80-90, on Don Giovanni, Antigone, and Scribe. 25. Kierkegaard 1987, Parts I & II. So does Hegel himself, one must add! 26. The shapes expounded there all take their cue from Hegel’s ‘Unhappy Consciousness,’ obtaining their essential content elsewhere while also being shaped by—or responding to—that context. ‘Individuality’ recurs more than a dozen times (e.g., 223-5), epitomizing this stage, though not in a positive light. 27. Cavell, “Kierkegaard’s On Authorship and Revelation,” in Cavell 1969, 175-6, and 163. Compare “Music Discomposed” (ibid., 188-9, 198-200).

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Donougho, Martin 2011, “Performing Hegel,” in Baur & Wood (eds.), Person, Being, & History: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Schmitz (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 156-80 Feuerbach, Ludwig 1981, Gesammelte Werke I, ed. Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademie, 1981) Kierkegaard, Søren 1987 Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Howard & Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) Kierkegaard, Søren 1998, The Point of View For My Work as an Author, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 22, trans. Howard & Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) Löwith, Karl 1928 Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen. Ein Beitrag zur anthropologischen Grundlegung der ethischen Probleme (München: Drei Masken Verlag, 1928). Löwith, Karl 1965, From Hegel to Nietzsche: the revolution in nineteenth-century thought, trans. David E. Green (London: Constable, 1965). Marder, Michael 2019, Political Categories: Thinking Beyond Concepts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019) Marx, Karl 1965 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846, published 1932); several translators (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965) Moggach, Douglas 2011, Moggach (ed.), Politics, Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011) Pattison, George 1997, “Art in an age of reflection,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, eds. Alastair Hannay & Gordon Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76-100 Ridder, Widukind De 2011 “Max Stirner: the end of philosophy and political subjectivity,” in Saul Newman (ed.) Max Stirner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 143-67 Sonenscher, Michael 2022, Capitalism. The Story Behind the Word (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022) Stirner, Max 1995, The Ego and its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 1844), trans. Steven Byington, revised David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Whitman, Walt 1982, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1982)

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Index1

A

Abazari, Arash, 31n7 Abstraction, 10, 32n8, 41n72, 62, 101n20, 131, 136n11, 144n64, 182n36, 193, 203, 212n11, 238, 239, 284 Acknowledgment, see Recognition/ acknowledgement Action (Handlung), see, Aesthetics; Deed (Tat); Reaction Adorno, T.W., 178n14 Adventure (Abenteuerlichkeit), 286 Aeschylus, 91 Aesthetics, 2, 5, 13, 20–22, 25, 26, 42n82, 55, 61, 64, 69, 71, 148, 158, 169, 173, 179n19, 181n31, 185n65, 227, 245–247, 259n76, 267–295, 296n10,

297n15, 297n16, 298n23, 299n36, 302n55, 303n65, 305n81, 309–331, 333n22, 333n23 Agamben, Gorgio, 2 Aggregate states, 216n38 Allegory, 97, 281 Ambiguity, 12, 20, 37n42, 98, 100n11, 136n9, 163, 168, 195, 197, 254n38, 315, 323 Amphibium, 348 Amphiboly, 354 Anachronism, 5, 6, 33n12, 42n80, 177n4, 303n64, 325–327, 337n48, 337n50 Anderson, Amanda, 299n29 Anderson, Greg, 179n17, 318, 334n28

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Donougho, Hegel’s ‘Individuality’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21369-4

393

394 Index

Animal Realm of Spirit, 33n16, 34n18, 107, 123, 126, 138n26, 140n41, 154, 177n8, 347 Anthropology, 37n47, 51, 55, 223–249, 249n2, 255n42, 256n52, 258n64, 276, 277, 284, 314, 326, 348 Anti-essentialism, 227 Antigone/Antigone, 5, 26, 28, 149–151, 154–158, 170, 178n13, 180n24, 180n26, 181n31, 181n34, 181n35, 182n39, 182n40, 185n62, 227, 245, 354, 357n24 Aphorism, see Fragment Apollo, 91, 304n76 Apollo Belvedere, 304n76 Apollonian, 170, 173, 316 A posteriori, 192 A priori, 192, 211n6 Apriorism, 192 Archetypal plant (Urpflanze), 216n41 Architecture, 179n19, 334n32 Argus, 1, 4–6, 22, 27, 74n21, 101n26, 254n38, 272, 309–311, 315, 316, 323, 325, 331n5, 337n49, 354 Ariosto, 286, 309, 326 Aristophanes, 185n68, 294 Aristotle, 100n18, 138n29, 195, 201, 212n14, 247, 253n31, 319, 346, 355n2 Art-beauty (Kunstschöne), 311, 316, 331n7 Artisan (Werkmeister), 115, 167, 217n50 Art-religion (Kunstreligion), 147 Ascheberg, 274, 300n44, 301n50, 302n57, 302n59, 332n18

Assimilation, see Configuration; Reproduction Association (Verbindung), 87 Aster, 101n26, 311, 315, 331n4, 331n5 Atom, 52, 217n45 Attraction, 205 Auerbach, Erich, 293, 304n78 Austin, J.L., 268, 296n4, 315 B

Bad infinity, 94, 134 Baeumler, Alfred, 36n29, 335n37 Balibar, Etienne, 52 Baumgarten, Alexander, 36n29 Bearing, 28, 61, 89, 107, 162, 223, 233, 259n71, 312, 348, 352, 357n24 Beautiful soul, 63, 72, 73n2, 107, 109, 141n49, 163, 164, 170, 174–176, 184n55, 185n63, 187n78, 187n79, 323 Beauty, 22, 41n76, 70, 90, 96, 97, 99, 170, 248, 249, 280, 282, 285, 287, 300n38, 300n44, 310–317, 320, 328, 331n8, 332n10, 332n13, 333n19 Behler, Ernst, 66 Being-at-home (Beisichsein), 238, 239 Being-within-itself (Insichsein), 176 Beiser, Fredrick, 71, 77n69, 79n84 Benjamin, Walter, 301n50 Berlin, 67, 72, 96, 213n19, 218n57, 267, 269, 270, 280, 298n19, 309, 312 Berlin, Isaiah, 350 Bern, 88

 Index 

Bernstein, J.M., 165, 184n57 Bertram, Georg, 180n22, 183n52, 333n19 Bhagavad Gita, 66 Bichat, Xavier, 230, 232, 252n27, 254n34 Bildung, 42n83, 338n57 Bildungsroman, 324 Billings, Joshua, 156, 158, 181n34, 182n42, 186n69 Blake, William, 1, 31n2 Blood, 170, 230 Blumenbach, J.F., 223, 249–250n2, 255n46, 287, 302n61 Blumenberg, Hans, 319 Body, see Mind; Spirit (mind) Bondsman, see Lordship, Herrschaft Botany, 195, 225 Bourgeois, see Burgher Bowie, Andrew, 39n56 Bowman, Brady, 94, 95, 134 Boyle, Nicholas, 58, 60, 74n26 Bradley, F.H., 12, 147, 148, 177n6 Brandom, Robert, 2, 137n19, 184n56, 212n14 Breckman, Warren, 182n43, 349, 350, 356n8 Brian, see Life of Brinckman, Klaus, 214n27 Briscoe, Lily, see Virginia Woolf Brittleness, see Physics Brontë, Anne, 33n16 Brontë, Charlotte, 33n16 Bruce-Robinson, Lawrence, 39n57 Bruford, W.H., 76n54 Bryson, Norman, 300n41 Buchdahl, Gerd, 193, 211n10 Burbidge, John, 23, 40n63, 210, 218n55 Bürger, Peter, 320, 321, 335n36

395

Burgher, 187n79, 259n76, 286, 305n81, 351 Burke, Kenneth, 275, 298n19 Burrow, J.W., 35n24, 35n25, 65 Butler, Judith, 2 Bykova, Marina, 41n73 C

Camper, Petrus, 255n46, 259n71, 287, 302n61 Carriage, see Aesthetics; Bearing Carroll, Lewis (Dodgson, Charles), 142n56, 143n58, 224, 250n4, 332n17 Category, 1–6, 17, 27, 28, 31n5, 32n8, 39n57, 70, 71, 87, 89, 111, 133, 148, 151, 152, 184n56, 191, 193, 195, 196, 204, 213n18, 267, 272–274, 277, 278, 321, 345–348, 352, 353, 355n2, 355n3, 355n4 Cavell, Stanley, 13–16, 32n8, 331, 352, 354 Cell, 9, 19, 33n17, 210, 228 Central individuality, see Physics Chagfoot, Nadine, 150 Character (ethos), 242 Characteristic, 2, 21, 23, 65–67, 69, 71, 78n80, 87, 97, 106, 164, 165, 173, 193, 194, 205, 207, 212n14, 235, 239, 243, 247, 248, 257n57, 267, 272, 277, 284, 291, 292, 295, 296n10, 297n11, 301n50, 304n76, 315, 316, 320, 348, 354 Chemistry, 210, 228, 250n5 Chiamys (hunting cloak), 268, 296n4 Chiasmus, 178n14, 274

396 Index

Chivalry, 31n5, 259n74, 286, 301n50, 339n63 Chorus, 172, 173, 185n65, 294 Citizen, 31n5, 76n53, 119, 167, 177n5, 179n21, 199, 214n28, 261n88, 288, 294, 303n65, 327 Civil society, 31n5, 33n16, 92, 127, 142n52, 245, 259n73, 277, 286 Clairvoyance, 237, 238 Cohesion, 38n54, 205, 206 Coleridge, S.T., 21 Collingwood, R.G., 6, 7, 33n12, 319, 322, 323, 336n42, 336n43, 337n48 Collision, see Aesthetics Comay, Rebecca, 317, 331n5 Comédie sérieuse, Rameau’s Nephew, 159, 295, 296n9 Comedy, 92, 98, 101n20, 118, 155, 168, 170, 174, 181n31, 182n38, 270, 278, 294, 295, 305n81, 354 Comets, 198, 199, 214n30, 214n31, 283 Community (Gemeinde), 5, 8, 11, 16, 22, 27, 67, 68, 77n70, 98, 99, 108, 111, 141n49, 143n62, 148–153, 156–158, 164, 165, 167, 168, 172, 179n19, 181n30, 323, 324, 336n43 Confession, 164, 165, 170, 175, 184n55, 184n56 Configuration, 113, 230, 234, 241, 248, 253n28, 316, 324, 330

Configuration (Gestaltung), see Shaping Connection (Beziehung), 90 Conscience, 79n89, 107, 147, 161–164, 177n5, 183n50, 183n51, 183n52, 247, 259n74, 353 Consciousness (cf. self-consciousness), 3–5, 54, 61, 94, 98, 105–107, 109–115, 119–128, 130–133, 137n17, 137n18, 137n19, 138n26, 140n41, 141n46, 141n49, 148, 151, 154, 159–169, 175, 176, 177n4, 177n7, 178n9, 180n25, 181n32, 182n40, 184n53, 184n61, 185n68, 186n76, 196, 197, 201, 213n25, 225, 231, 233, 238, 239, 241, 243–245, 247, 256n50, 256n53, 300n36, 314, 317, 318, 332n10, 345, 347, 348 Construction (Schelling), 61, 94, 98, 192 Contingency, 92, 94, 98, 107, 120, 130, 131, 157, 162, 173, 183n44, 194, 212n16, 245, 247, 257n58, 260n80, 285, 291, 295, 301n52, 324 Continuum, 32n10, 56, 58, 60, 108, 110, 115, 120, 122–124, 129, 133, 138n24, 175, 176, 179n21, 196, 201, 241, 259n74, 271, 289, 298n25, 316 Contradiction, 40n65, 54, 63, 97, 114, 121, 130, 148, 161, 231, 238, 239, 245, 255n45, 282

 Index 

Corporation, 246 Corporeity, 234, 241, 242, 287 Countenance, see Face; Physiognomics Courage, see Virtue (Tugend) Craft, 319, 320, 323, 334n32, 336n43 Cranioscopy, 117, 118, 139n34, 139n35, 287 Crawford, Matthew, 33n15, 62, 75n42 Creativity, see Romanticism (cf. romantic) Creon, see Sophocles Creuzer, Friedrich, see Symbolics Croce, Benedetto, 336n42 Croker, William, 337n45 Crystal/crystallization, 207, 208, 217n51, 218n52 Cult, 26, 27, 151, 153, 154, 165, 169, 170, 248, 327, 337n49 Culture, self-formation (Bildung), 28 D

Dahlstrom, Daniel, 39n62 Dante (Alighieri), 70, 293, 304n78, 309, 326 Darwin, Charles, 212n15, 252n26 Daub, Adrian, 67, 72, 77n64, 79n88, 88, 99n6 Davies, Robertson, 298n27 Davis, Whitney, see Symbolic artform Death, 8, 88, 91, 109, 110, 120, 124, 139n38, 148, 175, 186n74, 186n77, 223, 225, 231–233, 235, 240, 254n36, 255n45, 259n74

397

De Boer, Karin, 92, 150 DeCaroli, Steven, 255n46 Deed (Tat), 22, 25, 116, 276, 315 Deities, 76n56, 148, 149, 169–171, 173, 179n19, 248, 268, 271, 276, 284, 290 De Laurentiis, Allegra, 302n61 Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 38n50, 351 Deligiorgi, Katerina, 40n66 De Man, Paul, 2, 178n14, 280, 299n34 Density, 38n54, 205, 206, 212n16 Deportment, 240 Derangement, 238, 239 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 178n14, 218n52, 299n34, 356n20 Descartes, René, 16, 135n6, 147, 174, 186n70 Descola, Philippe, 179n17, 334n28 DeSouza, Nigel, 74n13 Dewey, John, 321 Dialectic, 4, 22, 27, 37n47, 42n80, 78n72, 79n90, 93, 94, 98, 100n8, 107, 109, 134, 136n13, 138n27, 141n46, 142n50, 151, 157, 158, 163, 164, 173–175, 178n14, 184n55, 197, 204, 208, 217n45, 239, 243, 255n45, 256n52, 267–269, 275, 278, 309, 315, 317, 318, 330, 334n32, 352, 354, 356n9, 357n24 Dickey, Laurence, 101n18 Diderot, Denis, see Comédie sérieuse, Rameau’s Nephew Digestion, 32n10, 230, 234

398 Index

Di Giovanni, George, 39n62, 79n91, 79n92, 94, 100n17, 212n12, 251n20 Dillon, Brian, 276 Diogenes Laërtius, 331n4 Dionysian (cf. Apollonian), 170, 316 Disease, 223, 225, 232, 233, 254n41, 255n42 Disruption (Zerissenheit), 239 Distich, 281, 310, 311, 331n4, 331n5 Distinction, 1, 4, 11, 20, 21, 24, 25, 32n10, 39n61, 42n82, 67, 69, 77n68, 88, 91, 98, 101n19, 106, 109, 112, 128, 140n41, 143n59, 152, 167, 176, 180n25, 182n43, 184n55, 192, 195, 201, 202, 204, 205, 212n14, 234, 236, 237, 252n24, 254n40, 272, 275, 289, 290, 297n16, 299n35, 304n74, 315, 317–319, 333n27, 337n48, 348 Distributed person, see Gell, Alfred Divination (manteia), 179n18 Domination (Herrschaft), 31n7 Douglas, Mary, 298n26 Drama, 27, 137n17, 158, 172, 173, 185n65, 244, 259n74, 271, 274, 276, 294, 295, 296n9, 299n27, 304n79, 338n55, 353 Drive (Trieb), 208 Dualism, 23, 124, 162, 179n17, 194, 201, 234, 318 Ductility, 205 Durkheim, Émile, 12

E

Earth, 38n52, 95, 112, 180n23, 199, 203–205, 208, 209, 214n30, 214n31, 216n42, 217n49, 224, 226, 227, 312 Egypt, 279 Elasticity, 38n54, 205, 206, 212n16 Electricity, 38n54, 95, 206, 209, 210, 212n16, 218n53, 218n57, 318 Eldridge, Richard, 184n57 Elias, Norbert, 12, 35n27 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), 33n16, 33n17 Eliot, T.S., 10, 34n18 Elkins, James, 327, 338n56 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 12, 14, 16, 105, 128, 142n55, 316 Empson, William, 296n5 Encyclopædia, 19, 73n11, 87, 191, 195, 196, 223, 229, 237, 268, 284, 301n52 Energy, see Potential (energeia cf. work, ergon) Entanglement (Verwicklung), 92, 150 Enthusiasm, 68, 90, 227, 237, 319 Epic, 151, 170–172, 197, 273, 274, 277, 291–293, 324, 330 Epigram, 186n75, 281, 311 Equivocation, 3, 21, 25, 140n40, 157, 228, 259n71, 346 Estrangement (Entfremdung), 159 Eteocles, 156 Ethical life (Sittlichkeit), 93, 244, 316 Eumenides, 91, 92, 165 Evil, 58, 110, 115, 120, 122–124, 129, 133, 140n42, 142n52,

 Index 

163–165, 175, 176, 179n21, 184n53, 196, 201, 241, 259n74, 271, 289, 298n25, 350 Evolution, 98, 195, 226 Exposure (Äusserung), 313, 320 Expression (Ausdruck), 115, 281, 313, 320, 323 Expressivism, 55, 138n26, 319 F

Fable, 281, 299n32 Face, 11, 16, 58, 91, 94, 97, 116, 159, 175, 247, 269, 282, 293, 302n57, 317, 346, 348, 352 Facial expression, 116, 242, 288, 310 Fackenheim, Emil, 39n57 Falstaff, 286 Family, 26, 31n5, 67, 101n24, 120, 150–153, 156, 159, 179n16, 179n21, 181n30, 244–246, 259n73, 259n74, 259n76, 286, 294, 353, 354 Faraday, Michael, 204, 209 Fate (Schicksal), 165, 284 Faust, see Gretchen Ferber, Michael, 322 Ferrerin, Alfredo, 137n18 Ferrini, Cinzia, 250n5, 254n35 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 11, 230, 348–351, 356n9 Fichte, J.G., 13, 18, 51–72, 90, 140n44, 143n59, 149, 176, 187n79, 272, 273, 350 Fidelity, 193, 271, 285, 301n50, 301n52, 339n63

399

Figure, 13, 51, 58, 68, 91, 98, 143n59, 158, 165, 166, 173–175, 182n43, 248, 249, 268, 280, 283, 288, 290–292, 297n16, 298n19, 310, 330, 331n5 Fish, Stanley, 270, 296n6 Flay, Joseph, 2 Force (Kraft), 157 Forgetfulness, 173, 174 Forgiveness, see Confession Form, see Morphé (shape) Forman, Paul, 42n83 Formative drive, see Physics Forster, E.M., 278 Förster, Eckart, 136n8, 225 Forster, Michael, 57 Fragment, 60, 70, 75n34, 78n81, 88, 196 Franco, Paul, 24 Frank, Manfred, 32n7, 52 Frankenstein, 9, 33n16 Frankfurt, 88, 136n15 Freedom, 42n80, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 87, 117, 118, 160, 161, 167, 177n5, 243, 244, 246, 257n57, 260n78, 275, 290, 304n75, 324, 327, 345 French Revolution, see Terror Fried, Michael, 354 Früchtl, Josef, 334n31 Frye, Northrop, 332n17 Function, 17–20, 26, 27, 38n53, 71, 117, 143n58, 226, 230, 232, 237, 245, 251n14, 281, 294, 321, 322, 326, 330, 335n37, 347, 349

400 Index G

Gabriel, Markus, 257n56 Gaiger, Jason, 332n15, 339n64 Gall, F.J., see Cranioscopy Galton, Francis, 18 Garber, Margaret, 298n25 Garff, Joakim, 36n31 Gell, Alfred, 37n48, 37n49, 106 Gender, 11, 77n64, 152, 154, 178n15, 180n25, 180n27, 182n41, 227, 231, 259n76 Gene, 19 Genetics, 226 Gentleman (honnête homme), 141n49 Genus, see Species (Art) Geology, 111, 204, 224, 250n5 Geraets, T.F., 22, 23 Gesture, 13, 20, 94, 118, 134, 156, 242, 243, 272, 311, 320, 346, 352 Godfrey Smith, Peter, 38n53 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 27, 35n24, 35n26, 42n79, 51–72, 116, 120, 136n8, 163, 180n24, 183n51, 185n63, 193, 209, 211n9, 216n41, 218n54, 225, 227, 278, 281, 293, 299n30, 302n57, 324 Gombrich, Ernst, 290, 304n75, 329, 338n55, 339n64 Good, see Continuum; Evil Government, 26, 93, 101n27, 150, 153–157, 160, 199, 260n79, 318 Grace, 280, 295 Gravity, 198, 199, 202, 214n27 Greenblatt, Stephen, 15

Gretchen, 120, 121, 124, 139n38, 140n39 Griesheim, K.G.J., see Aesthetics Gumbrecht, Sepp, 183n44 H

Habermas, Jürgen, 13, 14, 18, 36n33, 37n44, 65 Habit, 21, 24, 27, 32n10, 37n47, 42n80, 58, 68, 69, 87, 106, 114, 126, 196, 217n45, 232, 233, 239–241, 243, 244, 252n23, 252n27, 257n58, 258n64, 277, 287, 314, 323, 348, 349 Haemon, see Antigone Hafiz, 293 Hägglund, Martin, 254n41, 255n41 Haller, Anton, 211n9 Hamacher, Werner, 15, 34n21 Hamlet, 118, 139n34, 140n42, 173, 177n3, 285, 294 Hannay, Alastair, 36n31 Hardimon, Michael, 40n66 Harris, Henry Stilton, 17, 20, 22, 23, 95, 101n19, 102n30, 111, 113, 118, 126, 128, 130, 136n9, 137n23, 139n34, 139n35, 140n39, 140n42, 141n49, 141–142n50, 143n63, 158, 168, 179n20, 181n30, 185n64, 228, 231, 268, 283, 310 Hartman, Geoffrey, 282 Hazlitt, William, 304n76 Health (cf. illness), 38n52, 231–234, 239

 Index 

Hearing, see Physics Heidegger, Martin, 356n9 Heidelberg, 299n33, 312, 337n45 Heimann, Adolf, 288, 300n36, 301n52, 302n55, 304n76, 335n34 Heine, Heinrich, 250n6 Henrich, Dieter, 280, 300n38 Herder, J.G., 4, 5, 51–72, 316, 328 Herdt, Jennifer, 286 Hermeneutics, 278, 282, 312, 313, 316 Hierarchy, 53, 245 Hilmer, Brigitte, 22, 258n69, 301n52, 311, 312, 316, 331n8 Hippel, Theodor G., see Aesthetics Hirt, Aloys, see Characteristic; Ideal Historism (Historismus), 28 Hobbes, Thomas, 183n50 Hölderlin, Friedrich, see Beautiful soul Homer, 185n64, 291, 292, 326 Honig, Bonnie, 151, 178n11, 178n13 Honneth, Axel, 99n4 Honor, 109, 131, 154, 169, 244, 260n80, 268, 271, 285, 286 Hopkins, G.M., 336n41 Horlacher, Rebekka, 42n83 Hotho, H.G, see Aesthetics Houlgate, Stephen, 192 Huish, Louise, 39n56 Huizinga, Johann, 301n50 Hull, David, 251n13, 254n38 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 11, 12, 14, 35n25, 36n33, 51, 59, 60, 63–66, 76n52, 89, 142n55, 164, 179n19

401

Humbug (Betrug), 163 Huxley, Julian, 16, 19 Hypnosis, 239 Hypocrisy, 134, 135, 143n63, 174, 259n74 Hypostasis, 272, 347, 350, 351 I

Idea, 1, 3, 5, 7–14, 17–19, 22–24, 32n11, 34n17, 36n33, 38n53, 56, 62, 63, 65–67, 70–72, 73n9, 75n34, 76n57, 90, 95, 100n17, 102n32, 113, 117, 126, 127, 135n4, 138n26, 138n30, 139n35, 141n49, 159, 182n38, 185n64, 192, 194, 195, 212n16, 213n21, 216n41, 217n47, 218n57, 229, 231–233, 238, 243, 247, 249, 252n27, 253n29, 254n34, 254n39, 255n46, 256n50, 273, 294, 302n55, 310, 312, 313, 315, 317, 318, 321, 334n28, 335n36, 336n42, 349–351, 353, 355n4, 356n7, 356n17 Ideal, 6, 26–28, 32n10, 35n24, 42n79, 42n80, 59, 63, 70, 71, 79n88, 152, 177n4, 194, 200, 205, 206, 242, 248, 250n2, 261n87, 268, 269, 271–274, 278–280, 282, 283, 285–287, 289, 290, 295, 296n3, 296n10, 297n11, 297n13, 303–304n74, 304n76, 310–315, 317, 320, 321, 323, 324, 327, 328, 330, 331n7, 332n15, 333n22, 334n32, 337n46, 347–350

402 Index

Idealism, 54, 71, 131 Idiosyncrasy, 21, 38n56, 70, 235 Il’iin, Ivan, 39n57 Illness (acute/chronic), 231–234, 239 Image, 12, 17, 55, 91, 94, 96, 109, 111, 165, 167, 169, 175, 180n26, 224, 244, 258n63, 279, 281, 303n65, 313, 324, 337n49, 337n50 Imagination, 31n2, 143n62, 166, 244, 294, 319, 333n27 Imitation, 21, 62, 67, 112, 123, 141n46, 199, 242, 248, 261n87, 322, 333n21, 336n42, 349 Immediacy, 153, 161, 173, 193, 219n60, 240, 248, 276 Immunology, 226 Implicit (an sich, à même), 2, 9, 21, 22, 55, 56, 164, 177n4, 205, 213n22, 224, 231, 233, 249, 280, 281, 311, 312, 316, 321, 332n17, 338n60 Import (Gehalt cf. meaning, Inhalt), 18, 25, 106, 198, 244, 247, 269, 276, 279, 283, 285, 322, 345 Indexicals, 186n75 Indifference, 108, 132, 161, 199, 213n22, 285 Individuality, 1–31, 51–72, 78n73, 78n81, 87–99, 105–135, 147–176, 191, 223–238, 244–247, 251n13, 251n14, 251n18, 252n22, 253n28, 253n29, 253n30, 254n40, 255n41, 255n45, 256n47,

256n48, 256n51, 257n54, 257n57, 258n64, 259n71, 259n74, 260n80, 260n82, 261n88, 267–295 Individuation, 14, 31n3, 36n32, 37n44, 69, 98, 127, 173, 207, 227, 254n38 Inference, see Syllogism Insanity, 238 Inspiration (Einfall), 281 Intelligence, 93, 98, 194, 240, 244, 258n63, 302n61 Intersubjectivity, 14, 41n73, 51, 52, 63, 134, 137n18, 144n66, 281 Intuition (Anschauung), 60, 68, 91, 248 Inversion (Verkehrung), 106, 120, 136n13, 151, 253n28 Inwood, Michael, 22, 39n57, 39n60, 257n54, 261n88, 333n21 Irony, 12, 16, 37n39, 63, 64, 70, 72, 89, 98, 100n8, 149, 150, 158, 167, 170, 251n11, 272, 323, 324, 328, 336n42, 338n55, 352 Irritability, 230, 232 Iverson, Margaret, 288, 329 Izenberg, Gerald, 64, 77n66 J

Jacobi, F.H., 52, 66, 68, 73n2, 78n75, 79n91, 87, 90, 97, 100n15, 163, 183n47, 185n63 Jaeschke, Walter, 312, 313, 332n14 Jahren, Hope, 38n52, 252n26 James, Henry, 10, 12, 35n28

 Index 

James, William, 10, 12, 15, 35n28 Jena, 24, 72, 89, 98, 153, 179n21, 180n23, 192, 251n12, 328, 330 Judgment, 3, 6, 17, 32n8, 57, 70, 71, 87, 97, 102n30, 108, 117, 132, 134, 139n33, 143n62, 152, 160, 183n50, 184n55, 213n21, 235, 236, 238, 253n29, 256n50, 280, 310, 320, 332n17, 346, 351 Justice, 15, 34n17, 37n42, 57, 74n26, 117, 291, 293, 302n54

403

Knowles, Dudley, 246, 260n81 Koebner, Richard, 40n70 Koerner, Joseph, 175, 186n75, 296n7 Koerner, Lisbet, 251n11 Kojève, Alexandre, 2, 101n24 Kolb, David, 212n15 Korngiebel, Johannes, 79n90, 79n92 Koselleck, Reinhart, see Bildung Krahn, Martin, 254n38 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 320–322, 335n33, 336n40 L

K

Kain, Philip, 182n41 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 11, 13, 18, 32n8, 36n29, 67, 90, 100n14, 106, 127, 135n4, 144n64, 183n47, 201, 212n14, 223, 272, 280, 302n55, 321, 350, 355n2, 355n4 Kaufmann, Walter, 136n8 Keats, John, 12, 35n28, 269, 282, 296n5 Kelvin, Lord, 206 Khurana, Thomas, 239, 240, 253n29, 257n56 Kierkegaard, Søren, 11, 13, 14, 16, 33n15, 36n31, 36n34, 111, 302n54, 331, 348, 351–354, 356n19, 357n23, 357n24 Kinetics, see Physics Knecht, 4, 93, 106, 110, 137n17, 138n24, 148, 271, 272, 280 Knight, see Chivalry; Honor

Lacan, Jacques, 2 Laden, Anthony, 143n63 Language, 14, 16, 27, 34n22, 36n33, 51, 55–57, 65, 66, 69, 116, 118, 119, 139n33, 152, 159, 160, 164, 169–172, 177n4, 181n34, 185n62, 185n63, 280, 317, 329 Lask, Emil, 63 Last Supper (Liebesmaal), 89 Latour, Bruno, 179n17, 334n28 Lavater, J.C., 57, 58, 115, 116, 139n31, 242, 243 Leibniz, G.W., 8, 13, 51–72, 73n3, 102n29, 135n6, 139n35, 176, 213n22, 236 Leitinen, Arto, 141n46 Leonardo, 291, 353 Lewis, C.S., 183n50, 257n56, 332n17 Lichtenberg, 57, 116, 117 Lidgard, Scott, 38n53

404 Index

Life, 8–10, 16, 19, 23, 27–29, 32n8, 35n26, 37n43, 38n53, 40n64, 51, 53, 55–59, 62, 63, 68, 87–89, 91, 93, 95–98, 101n19, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 122, 126, 136n13, 136n14, 138n30, 139n38, 142n51, 150, 156, 167, 171, 172, 178n10, 182n43, 191, 193, 199, 200, 210, 211, 211n1, 212n14, 215n33, 219n60, 223–225, 227, 229–234, 240, 242, 244, 250n5, 250n10, 251n19, 253n28, 253n29, 254n34, 273, 284, 286, 291, 293, 294, 301n51, 312, 316, 324, 326, 333n24, 346, 348, 353, 354 Life of, 16, 17, 37n39 Light, 3, 17, 26, 37n47, 63, 91, 129, 140n39, 179n19, 195, 199, 201, 202, 209, 215n37, 216n43, 218n53, 249, 272, 276, 282, 286, 304n80, 322, 351, 356n9, 357n26 Limit (Grenze), 13, 52, 54, 65, 94, 112, 116, 117, 131, 134, 141n46, 148, 201, 202, 227, 237, 252n20, 277, 280, 295, 349, 353 Linnaeus, Carl, 112 Lisi, Leonardo, 353 Liveliness (Lebendigkeit), 290, 310, 313 Logic, 3, 5, 17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 31n5, 31n6, 32n10, 39n56, 39n57, 42n78, 71, 89, 94, 101n25, 113, 135n4, 144n65,

165, 173, 195, 196, 199–201, 204, 209, 210, 213n19, 213n22, 229, 234, 252n27, 253n28, 253n29, 253n30, 309, 318, 332n13, 345–347, 349, 355n3 Logic of reflection, 23, 194, 199, 201, 330 Lord (Herr), see Bondsman; Knecht Lordship, Herrschaft, 4, 106, 110, 134, 137n17, 138n24, 148, 271, 272, 280 Love, 8, 31n7, 33n16, 34n17, 58, 59, 61, 67, 71, 79n88, 88–90, 97, 99n5, 99n6, 101n24, 120, 136n15, 139n38, 140n39, 177n6, 183n50, 186n74, 231, 237, 245, 255n43, 256n52, 259n74, 260n78, 271, 275, 285, 293, 301n50, 301n52, 331n3, 346, 349, 354, 356n5 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 70 Löwith, Karl, 349, 351, 356n9 Lugowski, Clemens, 278 Lukes, Steven, 40n70, 41n70 Luther, Martin, 65 Lypp, Berhard, 101n21 Lyric, 42n79, 170, 271, 274, 291, 293, 327 M

Macbeth, 173, 294 MacGregor, David, 182n41, 245, 260n77 McCumber, John, 2, 241 Madness, 122, 238, 241, 243, 257n54

 Index 

Magnetism, 38n54, 95, 207, 208, 210, 212n16, 217n51, 218n52, 238, 318 Magrí, Elisa, 257n56 Malabou, Catherine, 4, 27, 42n80, 87, 115, 241, 252n27, 257n56, 258n64, 303n64 Mancuso, Stefano, 228 Manifest Religion, 106, 175, 248 Marder, Michael, 227, 345, 355n2 Markell, Patchen, 137n17, 178n15, 180n28 Marriage, 8, 33n16, 61, 79n88, 88, 227, 244–246, 259n73, 259n75 Mars, 193, 211n4 Mask (persona), 10, 11, 116, 147, 150, 172, 174, 182n43, 186n71, 242, 288, 309, 347 Maturana, Humberto, 251n18 Matuštík, Martin, 36n34 Maxwell, James Clark, 206 Maybee, Julie, 39n57 McCumber, John, 2, 241 Mead, G.H., 12 Mechanical memory (Gedächtnis), 239, 257n57, 281 Mechanical process, 196, 213n22, 347 Mechanics-(‘free mechanism’), 26, 95 Mediation (cf. immediacy), 3, 17, 22, 34n21, 97, 106, 120, 124, 134, 173, 200, 213n18, 229, 234, 237, 238, 245, 246, 289, 310, 329, 346 Meinecke, Friedrich, 40n69

405

Melville, Stephen, 288, 289, 326, 329, 339n63 Mendelson, Edward, 8–11, 33n16, 33n17 Menke, Christoph, 42n80, 158, 182n40, 185n65, 240, 241, 244, 257n57, 257n59 Mesmerism, 238 Metamorphosis, 61, 92, 226, 227, 281 Metaphor, 55, 56, 97, 150, 174, 175, 182n43, 227, 258n63, 281, 283, 298n19, 322 Michelangelo, 291 Michelet, Karl, 105, 211n1 Middle-term (syllogism), 72, 102n30, 113, 116–118, 124, 140n41, 149, 155, 166, 170, 198, 204, 259n75, 318 Mien (Miene), see Facial expression Mill, J.S., 12, 35n25, 64 Miller, A.V., 108, 111, 122, 142n53, 181n30, 185n68, 186n69, 193, 217n44, 257n54 Mind, 20, 23, 27, 28, 38n54, 53, 56, 58, 69, 88, 98, 115–117, 154, 194, 196, 198–207, 209, 210, 211n4, 212n13, 212n16, 213n26, 214n30, 214n31, 217n46, 217n47, 218n53, 219n60, 223, 229, 232, 233, 241, 249, 253n29, 255n45, 256n50, 273, 276, 279, 282–284, 287, 303n65, 311, 313, 314, 316, 317, 330, 346, 348 Mise-en-abime, 234 Mitchell, Robert, 254n39

406 Index

Moggach, Douglas, 356n15, 356n18 Moi, Toril, 278 Moland, Lydia, 270 Molecules, 205, 217n45 Monad, 7, 13, 26, 52–54, 56, 58, 74n11, 130, 213n22, 236 Monarch, 246, 260n80, 260n81 Mood (Stimmung), 181n34, 236, 292, 353, 354 Moons, 198, 199, 202, 214n30, 214–215n31, 283 Moritz, Karl P., 320 Morphé (shape), 9, 13, 22, 27, 35n24, 38n53, 53, 54, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70, 90, 92, 95–97, 106, 108, 114, 117, 130, 134, 135, 136n9, 151, 153, 155, 157–159, 166–169, 171–173, 176, 180n24, 181n33, 191, 193, 194, 198, 200–203, 205–207, 210, 212n14, 213n22, 215n33, 215n34, 216n40, 217n44, 226, 229, 232, 235, 239, 240, 242, 247–249, 253n28, 254n36, 267, 271–273, 278, 283, 284, 286, 288–290, 293, 295, 296n3, 297n11, 297n17, 299n32, 310–312, 315, 316, 319, 320, 323, 324, 327, 329, 330, 331n8, 338n55, 339n63, 345, 346, 350, 352, 354 Morphology, 57, 60, 225 Moyar, Dean, 140n44, 142n51, 163, 183n48 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 324 Musil, Walter, 94 Mysticism, 279, 334n28 Myth/mythology, 10, 33n17, 42n79, 71, 174, 317, 334n28

N

Nachtomy, Ohad, 53 Nagel, Alexander, 325 Nägeli, Carl, 252n25 Nance, Michael, 40n67 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 236, 256n50 Napoleon-Bonaparte, 95, 251n12 Nasser, Dalia, 79n86 Nature, 6, 7, 16, 19–21, 23, 26, 28, 32n10, 35n24, 40n62, 42n80, 53, 55, 56, 58–60, 69–71, 73n7, 78n81, 89, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 101n19, 106, 108, 109, 111–115, 118, 124, 126, 128, 129, 135, 138n28, 141n46, 150, 152, 153, 155, 161, 166–169, 179n17, 182n37, 191–198, 208, 210, 211, 224, 225, 228–236, 240–242, 244, 248, 249, 250n9, 252n27, 253n28, 253n29, 254n35, 254n36, 256n49, 258n64, 259n72, 268, 273, 282, 283, 287, 290, 293, 296n10, 297n16, 299n34, 303n65, 310–313, 316–319, 321, 328, 332n17, 333n21, 333n24, 334n28, 334n32, 346, 348 Naturphilosophie, 192, 194, 318 Necessity, 98, 112, 121–123, 130, 136n7, 138n25, 139n38, 157, 171, 172, 192, 195, 200, 208, 219n60, 223, 284, 294, 333n21, 347 Negativity, 128, 157, 165, 166, 175, 241, 247 Nelson, Eric, 260n80 “Newtonian Schema” (Smolin), 216n38

 Index 

Ng, Karen, 253n29 Ngai, Sianne, 3, 17, 32n8, 37n42 Nicolas of Cusa, 319 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 16, 18, 37n47, 314, 332n16, 351, 352 Novakovic, Andreja, 87, 239, 242 Novalis (G.P.F.v. Hardenberg), 51, 70, 184n55, 187n78, 327 Novel (cf. romance), 216n38 Nussbaum, Martha, 185n65 Nutrients, 225, 226, 230 Nuzzo, Angelica, 63, 143n62 O

Oedipus, 173, 354 Ontology, 354 Opposition, 27, 87, 89, 91, 101n20, 109, 115, 123, 129, 139n36, 157, 169, 173, 180n27, 186n69, 197, 199, 202–204, 207, 275, 346 Organics (teleology), 2, 26, 196, 200, 223–249, 250n5 Organism, 19, 20, 38n52, 109, 110, 112, 113, 136n13, 137n23, 181n30, 200, 203, 210, 215n36, 223, 312 Othello, 294 Overgrasping (Überreichen), 3, 4, 19, 21, 28, 100n8, 157, 165, 199, 239, 318, 346, 355 Overskou, Thomas, 299n27, 299n28 P

Pächt, Otto, 339n64 Pahl, Katrin, 115, 138n26, 139n33

407

Painting, 210, 270, 274, 278, 288, 291, 296n7, 324 Parable, 281 Parachronism, 33n12, 337n48 Paradox, 8, 9, 13, 34n21, 36n29, 42n80, 62, 67, 68, 70, 128, 142n55, 150, 166, 177n4, 194, 215n32, 215n35, 230, 233, 258n64, 260n78, 269, 275, 277, 278, 280, 298n21, 304n78, 311, 316, 317, 321, 355n4 Parent, 88, 110, 154, 183n51, 237 Parody, 160, 286, 303n71, 353 Particularity, 18, 22, 39n56, 72, 169, 170, 181n32, 184n56, 186n77, 199, 214n29, 237, 239, 246, 251n18, 256n48, 271, 272, 282, 284, 285, 291, 294, 349 Pastoral, 269, 295, 296n5 Pathos, 156, 168, 172, 276, 277, 285, 287, 293, 314 Peculiarity (Eigentülichkeit), 21, 38n56, 89, 94, 196, 272, 277, 284 People (Volk), 7, 12, 31n4, 33n15, 35n28, 41n75, 55, 59, 63, 90, 91, 93, 99, 119, 148, 153, 167, 169, 172, 173, 177n4, 178n13, 186n69, 197, 235, 245, 247, 277, 280, 324, 347 Performativity, 17, 174, 268 Pericles, 288 Peters, Julia, 42n80, 87, 241, 249, 258n66, 258n67, 284, 289, 302n62, 302n64, 331n8 “Petites perceptions” (Leibniz), 53, 236

408 Index

Phidias, 288 Phrenology, 34n17, 77n69, 94, 107, 115, 117, 139n34, 139n35, 298n25 Physics, 198, 201, 205, 206, 213n26, 331n3 brittleness, 205 cohesion, 38n54, 205, 206, 217n46 density, 38n54, 205, 206, 212n16 ductility, 205 elasticity, 38n54, 205, 206, 212n16 hearing, 53, 288 heat, 38n54, 205, 206, 216n39, 217n47 pitch, 38n54, 122 sight, 207 smell, 38n54, 207, 209, 212n16, 218n53 sound, 38n54, 205, 206, 217n46 taste, 38n54, 62, 207, 209, 212n16, 218n53 tenacity, 205 texture, 207, 315 timbre, 116, 206 tone, 79n86, 206 Physiognomics, 25, 57, 58, 115–117, 227, 247, 258n64, 259n71, 271, 277, 287, 310, 353 Physiology, 226, 287 Pinkard, Terry, 32n9, 55, 105, 126, 135n1, 136n7, 136n14, 137n20, 141n48, 141n49, 142n53, 143n59, 148, 177n5, 180n29, 186n69, 194, 212n14, 259n76, 285, 301n51

Piper, Annemarie, 34n21, 37n44 Pippin, Robert, 75n42, 134, 141n46, 243, 258n70, 288, 311, 313, 331n4 Planets, 111, 192, 198, 199, 202, 211n4, 212n16, 214n30, 214n31, 267, 283 Plant, 19, 52, 53, 61, 98, 107, 112, 137n21, 194, 201, 203, 206, 211, 216n41, 225–228, 245, 251n16, 251n17, 251n19, 252n22, 252n24, 252n26, 255n41, 310, 346 Plasticity, 4, 27, 42n80, 95, 267, 288, 303n64, 303n71, 329 Plato, 24, 96, 247, 288, 297n11, 310, 311, 331n4, 331n5 Plot, 105, 173, 273, 277 Podro, Michael, 329 Poetry (didactic/descriptive), 71, 175, 281, 296n6 Pöggeler, Otto, 213n18, 332n13 Polyneices, see Antigone Porter, James, 322, 336n40 Portraiture, 285, 291 Posch, Thomas, 179n19, 193, 201, 206, 211n4, 212n11, 216n38 Potential (energeia cf. work, ergon), 2, 3, 5, 11, 20, 22, 26, 27, 34n18, 35n27, 54, 57, 65, 66, 68, 70–72, 87, 92, 95, 99n4, 100n11, 105, 108, 111, 115, 116, 119, 125, 128–131, 133, 134, 136n8, 138n29, 141n46, 142n55, 158, 163, 168–170, 172, 181n30, 181n34, 186n69, 209, 217n50, 218n52, 227, 231, 234, 242,

 Index 

248, 254n40, 267–270, 272, 274, 275, 281, 287, 291–293, 295, 296n10, 297n11, 298n19, 299n30, 311, 312, 315, 319, 322, 324–328, 330, 338n51, 347, 354, 355n2 Potts, Alexander, 296n7 Pragmatics (cf. pragmatism), 2, 3, 6, 13, 16, 21, 22, 25, 28, 157, 174, 175, 267, 268, 283, 290, 296n4, 310, 345, 348 Predicate, 52, 131, 132, 162, 183n49, 196, 288 Procreation, 231, 253n28 Prose of the world, 270, 281, 326 Providence, 57, 174 Psychology, 107, 113, 114, 118, 127, 215n32, 235, 237, 239, 244, 258n63, 277, 298n25, 336n43 Purpose, 123, 125, 128, 130, 140n44, 142n51, 158, 160–162, 174, 292, 352 Putnam, Robert, 41n74 Pyramid, 269, 279, 286 Q

Quante, Michael, 40n66, 87, 116, 138n27, 138n30 R

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 218n52 Rajan, Tilottama, 233, 234 Rancière, Jacques, 28, 42n82, 324, 325, 337n44, 337n46, 337n48, 337n50 Rand, Sebastian, 211n6, 212n14

409

Raphael, 291, 332n14 Raunig, Gerald, 37n47, 37n49 Rawlinson, Mary, 101n25 Reaction, 9, 22, 25, 156, 197, 207, 243, 275, 292, 314, 317, 320–322, 325 Realism, 53, 96, 123, 140n42, 271, 277, 278, 293, 304n78 Reason, 4, 21, 22, 33n16, 52, 62, 64, 65, 68, 73n2, 89, 94, 110, 111, 118, 119, 122, 125, 126, 128, 131, 133, 135, 136n10, 137n20, 138n26, 140n41, 140n44, 142n51, 142n52, 143n63, 148, 162, 177n4, 182n41, 193, 238, 240, 241, 243, 258n64, 258n70, 260n80, 271, 274, 285, 290, 304n78, 327–329, 333n27, 334n31, 349 Recognition/acknowledgement, 4, 14, 61, 62, 69, 75n43, 88, 92–94, 98, 99, 106, 110, 130, 132, 134, 136n15, 137n17, 137n18, 147, 148, 163, 164, 176, 180n22, 182n39, 245, 260n78, 298n27, 313, 318, 335n34 Recollection, 88, 187n79 Reconciliation (Versöhnung), 93, 98, 147, 148, 173, 177n3, 182n42, 185n65, 185n66, 286, 293, 301n50 Redfield, James, 182n37 Reed, T.J., 59, 75n31 Reid, Jeffrey, 63, 64, 77n66, 77n68, 184n55, 187n78, 199, 214n29, 214n30, 297n12

410 Index

Relation (Verhältnis), 6, 9, 10, 14, 16, 23, 25, 26, 31–32n7, 38n52, 38n53, 52, 54, 61, 62, 67, 75n43, 77n68, 89–91, 93, 97, 100n17, 101n27, 105, 115–118, 128, 129, 132, 136n12, 139n36, 139n38, 152, 154, 180n26, 183n49, 193, 194, 197, 199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 210, 213n22, 214n31, 218n53, 225, 226, 229–231, 233, 236, 243, 246, 247, 251n14, 254n36, 259n73, 259n76, 260n78, 260n80, 276, 280, 283, 284, 287, 300n36, 312, 317, 321, 324, 356n9 Religion, 18, 65, 67, 71, 77n65, 97, 99, 107, 114, 137n17, 165–168, 175, 215n32, 247–249, 261n83, 261n87, 280, 284, 294, 312, 329, 334n32, 354 Renaut, Alain, 52 Renunciation, 187n78 Replaceability, 178n13, 180n26 Reproduction, 19, 93, 110, 225, 230, 231, 234, 260n78, 293n10, 324 Rhapsode, 170–172, 185n64, 274, 292 Richards, Robert, 77n65 Ridder, Widukind de, 351 Riehl, W.H., 95, 102n32, 260n81 Riemer, A.W., 60 Riskin, Jessica, 73n7 Ritter, Joachim, 41n78 Roberts, Jennifer, 218n52

Robertson, Ritchie, 35n24, 59 Rödl, Sebastian, 212n14, 230 Romanticism (cf. romantic), 5, 6, 8, 11–13, 17, 21, 22, 25, 33n12, 37n42, 38–39n56, 40n69, 42n79, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 66, 67, 69–71, 73n2, 76n57, 78n77, 88, 97, 107, 129, 142n54, 142n55, 149, 169, 179n19, 181n34, 194, 234, 245, 248, 268–271, 273, 279–281, 285, 286, 302n57, 309, 314, 319–324, 326–330, 336n40, 336n42, 338n53, 338n56, 339n63, 354, 356n7 Rose, Gillian, 38n50 Rosenzweig, Franz, 95 Ross, Nathan, 213n18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 101n18, 141n49, 183n46 Rukeyser, Muriel, 174, 186n71 Rumford, Count (Benjamin Thompson), 217n47 Rumi (Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi), 248 Ruscha, Ed, 17, 37n42 Rush, Fred, 333n24 S

Satire, 284, 332n17 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 321, 335n37 Schelling, Friedrich, 60, 68, 72, 79n91, 79n92, 89, 90, 93, 95, 98, 100n14, 138n24, 176, 194, 225, 300n38, 323, 324, 356n7 Schelver, F.J., 225, 251n12

 Index 

Schiller, Friedrich, 51, 61, 140n40, 272, 281, 290, 300n38, 323, 324, 328 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 4, 21, 38–39n56, 51–72, 89, 90, 111, 142n55, 184n55, 235, 275, 349 Schmitz, Kenneth, 183n45 Schnaase, Karl, 334n32 Schneider, Helmut, 178n15 Science (Wissenschaft), 6, 9, 19, 34n17, 35n26, 41n71, 57, 64, 72, 77n65, 96, 98, 99, 107, 108, 111, 113, 116, 117, 136n7, 139n31, 139n35, 179n17, 191–193, 195, 211n1, 225, 226, 228, 243, 250n5, 273, 318, 329, 334n28 Sculpture, 21, 27, 42n80, 169, 259n71, 271, 274, 275, 284, 286–289, 291, 301n49, 303n64, 313, 330 Seigel, Jerrold, 75–76n43, 102n32, 260n81 Self-consciousness, 61, 107, 109, 110, 115, 119, 120, 123, 127, 131, 137n17, 137n18, 148, 154, 159–161, 164, 165, 167–169, 176, 177n4, 177n7, 180n25, 181n32, 182n40, 184n61, 186n76, 197, 213n25, 245, 247, 332n10, 345 Self-possession (Besonnenheit), 56, 115, 238, 239 Semblance (Schein), 20, 106, 112, 122, 129, 135n4, 148, 157, 173, 185n66, 196–198,

411

214n28, 227, 272, 273, 309, 330, 332n13, 346, 347 Semper, Gottfried, 334n32 Sensation, sentience (Empfindung), 23, 56, 96, 226, 236, 240, 256n49 Sensibility, 56, 218n53, 230, 232, 272, 311, 335n37 Sentimental, 269, 324 Sex, see Gender Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 18 Shakespeare, William, 14, 70, 177n6, 285, 286, 293, 294, 309, 326 Shame, 67, 77n64, 88, 236 Shannon, Daniel, 217n49 Shaping, 230, 248, 267, 273, 274 Shapiro, Gary, 141n49 Shiner, Larry, 335n33, 335n35, 336n40 Shklar, Judith, 143n59 Siep, Ludwig, 87, 117, 139n32, 141n49 Simile, 56, 281, 293, 311 Simmel, Georg, 40n69 Simpson, David, 275, 297n19, 298n21 Simpson, James, 335n38 Singleton (Einzelne), 23, 39n56, 79n92, 93, 101n25, 106, 108, 111, 114, 120, 127, 137n18, 140n41, 149, 153, 155, 157, 159, 160, 167, 171, 172, 178n16, 179n21, 185n68, 214n28, 225, 231, 235, 246, 250n9, 259n74, 349

412 Index

Singularity (Einzelheit), 3, 4, 18, 22–26, 31n7, 37n44, 40n62, 40n66, 40n67, 41n77, 68, 79n89, 90–92, 98, 99n4, 100n17, 101n19, 106, 111–114, 119–122, 124, 125, 136n11, 140n41, 148, 150–159, 161, 162, 164–166, 169–176, 177n4, 178n9, 179n16, 179n21, 181n30, 181n36, 182n39, 184n56, 184n61, 185n64, 185–186n69, 186n76, 193, 194, 196–198, 204, 213n19, 214n27, 214n29, 224, 229, 231–233, 235, 240, 244–246, 248, 250n9, 252n27, 253n28, 254n36, 255n45, 256n47, 256n53, 259n73, 260n79, 261n88, 268, 272, 279, 280, 286, 291, 318 Skillings, Derek, 38n53, 251n16 Smith, Adam, 33n16, 119, 127, 133, 141n49, 143n62, 144n64 Smith, Bernard, 320 Smith, Justin E.H., 73n9 Smithson, Robert, 218n52 Smolin, Lee, 216n38 Sociability, 67 Socrates, 92, 174, 288 Solar system, 20, 192, 198, 199, 202, 267, 283, 331n3 Solger, K. W. F., 63 Somnambulance, 237 Sophocles, 150, 156–158, 178n15, 181n35 Soul/body, 7, 20, 27, 28, 37n47, 52, 53, 56, 58, 63, 69, 72, 73n2,

73–74n11, 88, 107, 115–117, 154, 163, 164, 169, 170, 174, 175, 179n19, 184n55, 185n63, 187n78, 194, 196, 198, 201–207, 209, 210, 211n4, 212n16, 214n30, 219n60, 229, 232–237, 239–244, 248, 249, 250n6, 253n28, 253n29, 255n42, 255n45, 256n48, 256n50, 258n63, 258n64, 258n66, 258n67, 271, 273, 276, 279, 283–285, 287, 299n34, 303n65, 309–311, 313, 314, 316, 317, 330, 331n8, 346, 348 Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 230 Sparshott, Francis, 321, 322, 336n39, 336n42 Species (Art), 40n62, 111–113, 137n23, 215n33, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233, 235, 250n7, 250n9, 253n30, 254n38, 256n47 Species-being (Gattungwesen), 349, 350 Spectacle (Schauspiel), 181n31, 347 Speight, Allen, 78n75, 177n8, 185n63, 261n84, 297n11 Spencer, Herbert, 1, 19, 31n3, 34n17, 38n53, 226, 251n14 Spinoza, Benedict, 54, 58, 66, 102n29, 128, 129, 135n6, 139n35, 176, 317 Spirit (mind), 20, 23, 27, 28, 38n54, 53, 56, 58, 69, 88, 98, 115–118, 154, 194, 196, 198–207, 209, 210, 211n4,

 Index 

212n13, 212n16, 213n26, 214n30, 214n31, 217n46, 217n47, 218n53, 219n60, 223, 229, 232, 233, 235, 241, 249, 253n29, 255n45, 256n50, 273, 276, 279, 282–284, 287, 303n65, 311, 313, 314, 316, 317, 330, 346, 348 Squire, Michael, 304n75, 329, 338–339n60 Stafford, Barbara, 57 State, 6, 12, 23, 31n4, 31n5, 38n54, 53, 56, 58, 65, 66, 76n53, 92, 93, 95, 119, 157, 160, 170, 181n34, 203, 206, 210, 216n38, 216n41, 216n42, 218n57, 232, 234, 238, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 255n41, 259n74, 260n80, 261n83, 261n88, 284, 287, 294, 302n57, 303n65, 315, 322, 324, 334n29, 353 Statement (l’énoncé), 166, 246, 268, 275, 321 Stella, Frank, 210 Stern, David, 257n56 Stewart, Jon, 299n33, 300n46 Stirner, Max, 348, 350–352 Strathern, Marilyn, 18, 37n48 Strauss, Jonathan, 178n16 Subject, 5, 9, 10, 14, 16–18, 22, 24, 28, 40n65, 62, 64, 70, 76n43, 98, 102n30, 121, 131–133, 135, 141n46, 152, 159, 161, 166, 168, 169, 183n49, 187n79, 194, 196, 197, 199, 201, 212n13, 212n14,

413

213n26, 238, 239, 241, 244, 247, 248, 255n45, 256n53, 269, 270, 281, 283, 288, 291, 296n6, 303n68, 317, 327, 330, 346, 347, 350, 356n9 Sublate (Aufheben), 109, 218n52 Sublime, 32n10, 66, 279, 280, 282, 290, 315, 327 Substance, 13, 34n21, 52, 53, 55, 79n90, 98, 108, 131, 133, 141n50, 156, 163, 168, 176, 177n7, 181n33, 182n43, 186n73, 187n79, 209, 216n42, 234, 244, 247, 269, 277, 292, 294 “Sun King,” 159 Sunlight, 204, 226 Supersensible, 109 Suther, Jensen, 253n29 Swabian, 209 Swart, Koenraad, 40n70 Syllogism, 4, 28, 58, 155, 252n24, 253n29, 302n61, 346 Symbolic artform, 299n35 Symbolics, 22, 56, 268, 269, 271, 279–282, 291n33, 293n34, 296n2, 299n31, 327, 339n63 Symbolism, 271, 279–281, 295, 327 T

Taxonomy, 137n23, 227 Taylor, Charles, 2, 5, 37n49, 138n26, 141n46 Terror, 160, 176, 239 Thermodynamics, 206, 216n39 Theunissen, Michael, 31n7, 346

414 Index

‘The thing that matters’ (die Sache selbst), 33n16, 126, 127, 131, 132, 134, 141n46, 163 Thinking, 3, 10–12, 17, 20, 23, 39n57, 54, 58, 60, 66, 70, 71, 77n69, 87, 89, 90, 95, 110, 140n42, 141n50, 176, 195, 212n11, 228, 229, 240, 247, 249, 270, 273, 284, 288, 291, 310, 333n21, 345, 351 Thirwall, Connop, 182n38 Thought, 1, 8, 10, 13, 20, 23, 24, 33n12, 34n19, 42n80, 52–56, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69, 75n42, 89, 93, 138n30, 143n63, 163, 175, 176, 184n55, 191–193, 196, 204, 208, 212n13, 212n16, 213n21, 217n49, 217n50, 218n52, 227, 242, 243, 247, 278, 303n68, 311, 325, 334n28, 336n39, 345, 346, 349, 351, 352, 355n4 Thucydides, 288 Time, 2, 3, 6, 9, 16, 19, 21, 25, 26, 35n27, 56, 59, 63, 64, 77n68, 106, 111, 114, 119, 125, 128, 139n36, 152, 153, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173, 176, 180n27, 185n64, 192, 195, 203, 206, 208, 211n6, 212n13, 215n33, 215n35, 216n38, 216n40, 218n53, 223, 226, 233, 236, 248, 253n30, 270, 273, 275, 276, 278, 281, 282, 293, 294, 301n50, 303n68, 315, 318, 321, 325, 326, 333n21, 333n24, 337n48, 337n49, 338n51, 347, 352, 357n26

Titans, 317 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 24 Todorov, Tzvetan, 101n24 Tragedy (Trauerspiel), 26, 28, 91, 92, 94, 98, 121, 147, 148, 155, 158, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177n3, 197, 259n76, 293–295, 353, 354 Tree, 19, 38n52, 88, 175, 212n14, 227, 228 Trembling (Erzittern), 206, 229 Trilling, Lionel, 10 Trope, 281, 303n64 Turner, J.M.W., 296n7 U

Unger, Roberto, 216n38 Universality (Allgemeiheit), 13, 22, 36n29, 40n64, 52, 66, 97, 99, 106, 113, 114, 122, 123, 129, 133, 134, 150, 151, 157–159, 164, 169, 176, 178n9, 180n25, 182n36, 186n77, 193, 196, 197, 214n29, 226, 229, 232, 235, 238, 244, 246, 250n2, 253n30, 255n45, 259n73, 274, 282, 291, 318, 333n21 Utopia, 269 Utterance (énonciation), 4, 17, 150, 162, 163, 166, 169, 172, 268, 313, 320, 331n5 V

Valet, 164 Validity (Gelten), 53, 148, 164, 314, 326

 Index 

415

Varela, Francisco, 251n18 Veil (Schleier), 26, 41n76, 58, 97, 268, 312, 314, 328, 330 Veyne, Paul, 317, 333n27 Violence (Gewalt), 196, 199, 203, 206, 214n31, 247, 347 Virginia Woolf, 10 Virtue (Tugend), 28, 40n65, 71, 91, 98, 100n18, 122–125, 138n29, 140n42, 141n49, 154, 166, 174, 242, 276, 278, 285, 286, 295 Virtuosity, 68, 90, 242 Viscera, 230 Voice, 5, 9, 28, 55, 98, 108, 116, 150, 152, 156, 177n3, 185n65, 243, 349 Vulcan, 193

Wilde, Oscar, 100n8, 275 Williams, Robert, 256n49 Willson, A. Leslie, 78n74 Wilson, Catherine, 55, 74n19 Winckelmann, Johann J., see Ideal Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 204, 216n41 Wokler, Robert, 183n46 Wolterstorff, Nicholas Wood, Christopher, 296n5, 325, 326, 337n49, 338n51, 338n55 Woolf, Virginia, 9, 10, 33n16, 34n19, 34n20 Worldview (Weltanschauung), 135, 269, 281, 304n75, 327, 329

W

Y

Walker, Mack, 95 Wandschneider, Dieter, 194 Warfare, 96, 150, 158, 247, 260n80 Way of the world (Weltlauf), 122, 123, 125 Weber, Max, 12, 24, 40n70 Wellbery, David, 27, 42n79, 59 Welsh, Patrick, xi, 142n52, 213n26 Westphal, Kenneth, 41n73 Whitman, Walt, 11 Wieweg, Klaus, 260n82

Yeomans, Christopher, 18, 32n7, 37n43, 87, 127, 128, 140n44 Young, Edward, 1

X

Xenophon, 288

Z

Zarathustra, 16 Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 184n60, 241, 246, 257n56, 258n63 Zoology (botany), 195, 228