The Beautiful Soul: From Hegel to Beckett

The Beautiful Soul: From Hegel to Beckett

Drew Milne

Diacritics, Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp. 63-82 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/dia.2004.0016

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diacritics / spring 2002 63

THE BEAUTIFUL SOULFROM HEGEL TO BECKETT

DREW MILNE

The “beautiful soul,” lacking an actual existence, entangled in thecontradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self toexternalize itself and change itself into an actual existence, and dwelling inthe immediacy of this firmly held antithesis—an immediacy which alone isthe middle term reconciling the antithesis, which has been intensified to itspure abstraction, and is pure being or empty nothingness—this “beautifulsoul,” then, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciledimmediacy, is disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearningand pines away in consumption.

—G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

The figure of the beautiful soul marks out a limit of representation. Its persistence is thatof a literary fiction which cannot be actualized, but whose imaginative lure is no lesspowerful for being so resistant to embodiment. The beautiful soul emerges in a shiftfrom philosophical reflections on moral beauty into the romantic novel, but for RobertE. Norton, the history of the beautiful soul is brought to a close by Hegel [139].Nevertheless, the way this figure stands between philosophy and literature, and betweenmoral agency and the literary imagination, casts shadows over contemporary thought.Unreconciled immediacy, disordered by consciousness of its contradiction and proximityto pure abstraction, becomes the sign of modern art, perhaps most explicitly in the writingsof Samuel Beckett. In The Broken Middle, Gillian Rose projects the beautiful soul outof Hegel and Goethe into a speculative account of modern thought’s ethical equivocations.For Allen Speight, Hegel’s recourse to the awkward literary and novelistic status of thebeautiful soul reveals how “inescapable questions discernible in the products of modernliterary artists are ones that concern the account we give of our freedom as modernagents” [135]. This essay seeks to unravel some of the contemporary relevance of thebeautiful soul, exploring the instability of this figure as a mediation between philosophyand literature, in particular as a tension in the interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenologyof Spirit.

The difficulties posed by the beautiful soul for interpreting Hegel can be gleanedfrom Terry Pinkard’s impressively lucid survey German Philosophy, 1760–1860. Pinkardnotes how Hegel’s discussion of the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit “makesoblique reference to Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte, Fries, Novalis, perhaps Rousseau,and maybe even Hölderlin” [240n19] before ascribing centrality in Hegel’s discussionto Jacobi’s novel Waldemar. Oblique reference folds into a structure whose indeterminacyconcerns both the freedom claimed by literary representations of the beautiful soul, andthe inability of this freedom to amount to more than a confession of conceptual paralysisor impotence. The beautiful soul proves resistant to interpretation, a literary-philosophicalcompound that destabilizes conventions of referentiality. The beautiful soul threatens todissolve philosophy from the perspective of an inward delicacy of moral feeling, claiming

diacritics 32.1: 63–82

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the authenticity of a subjectivity that will do no wrong and knows no other as an objecton which to act. Philosophical interpretations are often too brusque with the reflexiveirony through which the beautiful soul is represented, or insufficiently literal-minded tocapture its content as form. In turn, the self-critical claims of literary representationoften dissolve into an ironic indifference to determinate consequences.

The beautiful soul, however, can hardly be said to have existed outside itsrepresentation in writing. It recurs in manifold guises more as an aspiration to be, orappear, morally sensitive but incapable of action. Donald Phillip Verene sketches itsbackground in the Romantic movement but suggests that: “The beautiful soul is notdifficult to understand, as Hegel sketches it in the several pages he devotes to it. We arefamiliar in ordinary experience with types of persons that approximate to the stance ofthe beautiful soul, that is, if we keep polite company and associate from time to timewith delicate people” [100–01]. Anyone who has spent time with aesthetes or poets whoclaim a delicacy of moral insight without feeling the need of justification or labor toactualize their insights knows the ills this shape of spirit is prey to. For Verene, theimplications of Hegel’s beautiful soul go beyond the portrait of a personality type, tellingus “something of the being of meditative thought in contemporary technologicalsociety,”and affording “a concept of the humanist as beautiful soul” [101]. His subsequentremarks imply a Heideggerian turn. Nevertheless, the suggestion that the beautiful soulis already familiar in everyday and philosophical experience points to this figure’sintelligibility as a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon whose recurrence Hegelprefigures and conceptualizes.

The beautiful soul emerges as a figure designed to fill the chasm opened out by theloss of belief in the theological grounding of morality. Capitalism’s intensification ofsecular conflicts with religious dogmatism opens this chasm to one of global proportions.In this sense, the beautiful soul can be understood as a symptom of secular modernity,the subject of privatized ethics that seek to separate moral thought from the aporiaconfigured and reconfigured in political and legal institutions. Shorn of credibleframeworks or institutions of duty, the beautiful soul lives through the aspiration tohave an inner beauty of moral feeling without recognizing heteronomous authorities.Attempts to conceptualize such aspirations motivate postmodern ethics and utopian formsof cosmopolitanism implicit in hopes for multicultural tolerance. A distant relative ofthe beautiful soul can be discerned in the paralysis experienced by someone newlysensitized to the moral claims of the Other, where otherness is conceived of as infiniterespect for the radical incompatibility of competing cultural, moral or legal conceptionsof the person.1 Nevertheless, a historical wasting away of the explicitly named figure ofthe beautiful soul parallels beauty’s decline as an explicit critical concept.2 Beauty canbe naturalized as though all that were at issue were physical needs, or the recognition oforganic or mathematically balanced forms. Suspicion attaches to claims for inner oressential beauty, or for a beauty animating appearances, as if beauty were necessarilybarred from revealing anything so noumenal as the idea of beauty. Yet at what cost dowe accept the diremption of inner worth from the appearance of beauty?

The desire to have an inwardly determined quality of secular saintliness runs throughthe dissident delicacy often demanded of the modern writer. This demand is perhaps

1. See the neo-Hegelian critiques of postmodern ethical alterity and legalism without law inGillian Rose’s The Broken Middle and Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law.

2. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics finds space for entries on“ekphrasis” and “organicism” but no room for beauty. M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of LiteraryTerms jumps from “Beat Writers” to “Biography.” There is a touch of prophetic pathos in thesubtitle and decline evidenced by E. F. Carritt’s anthology Philosophies of Beauty: From Socratesto Robert Bridges.

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clearest in the way poets are called on to embody the conscience of secular society,serving up beautiful particularities of moral perception free of the weight of worldlycomplicity. Family resemblances to the unstable literary-philosophical compoundrepresented by the beautiful soul can be recognized in the antiheroes of modernist literaryrepresentation. The ironic dynamics of confessional narration in critical self-portraitssuch as Proust’s narrator, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, or Kafka’s Joseph K can be tracedback to Goethe’s seminal representation in “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” (book 6 ofWilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). Metamorphoses can also be read through other writers:Jean Genet as the beautiful soul of criminality and dissidence [Sartre]; Frank O’Hara’spoetic persona as a beautiful soul affirming the unreconciled immediacy of everydayexperience. The indeterminacy of moral consequence afflicting the beautiful soulproduces oscillations in which good and evil become interchangeable transvaluations.Harris points out that “Hitler saw himself, and was seen by some of his admirers, as a‘Beautiful Soul’” [Harris 2: 483].

Writing that finds literary forms through which to represent the contradictory livedexperience of unreconciled immediacy often has a negative or radically transgressivebeauty, by turns dissident and utopian, but with an affirmative freedom won at the costof suspending the ethics of engagement in other forms of action. The struggle with thebeautiful soul’s inability to actualize itself tends toward constituting authorship itself asits beautiful form of existence. Relations to forms of existence other than writing becomeironic. To the extent that writers are made to serve, however negatively, as secular saints,the beauty of a writerly oeuvre comes to rest in its ability to seem self-legislating, ratherthan enslaved to external moral laws and rhetorical formulae. The beauty of the poet’soeuvre is only confirmed in the obituary. Society grimly insists on suspending judgmentuntil posthumous recollection reveals either the sordid autobiographical contradictions,or the beautifully lived vocation. From Keats to Frank O’Hara, the beautiful soul iscalled on to waste away and die young. Even madness and suicide are somehow toowilled or too violently active not to be read back in as the pathological disturbance ofwriting perceived as beautiful, as is painfully apparent in the damage done to the workof Hölderlin, Artaud, Célan, or Plath.3 The limited beauty allowed to modernist writingis predicated on the insistence that the beautiful soul is damaged.

The modern dream of an inner-directed and self-legislating authorship suspendsthe impossibility of acting out the part of the beautiful soul in reality. Suspended infiction, this impossibility can become the self-critical motive of literary production. Themoral purity of the beautiful soul may be impossible to sustain as a mode of agency, butthis very impossibility can be recognized as a condition of confessional writing, orrather of writing that offers the fiction of confession. The illusion of confession generatesthe required literary suspension, rather than any actualization of a dialogue intended toresult in recognition or absolution. Claims for the beauty and creativity of autonomousliterary production are evidently illusory and unsustainable, almost transparentlyideological. Critical recognition of deluded desires to be beautiful and creative cannevertheless be developed through representations of the self-reflexive inner voice ofliterary production. The impossibility of actualizing the beautiful soul animates literature’sotherwise disabling autonomy from communicative action. Adorno’s Minima moralia,subtitled “Reflections from Damaged Life,” exemplifies the aporia resulting fromattempts to move from self-critical literary representation to morally determinateconsequences. Often seen as a strategy of critical hibernation, Adorno’s writing is readby Habermas somewhat pejoratively as a rhetoric of “performative contradiction”{Habermas esp 106–30]. There is nevertheless a morality of style in Adorno’s writingsthat makes a virtue of bearing witness to negativity and contradiction, resisting the

3. Cf. Artaud’s “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society.”


temptation either to produce moral legislations or to affirm negativity’s beauty.4 Shadowedby Auschwitz, the impotence of the beautiful soul becomes a choice that is no choice:“Spellbound, the living have a choice between involuntary ataraxy—an esthetic life dueto weakness—and the bestiality of the involved. Both are wrong ways of living.”5

Adorno’s authorship seeks to represent the unrepresentable aporia from which thebeautiful soul impotently retreats.

Recognition of the limits of self-legislating authorship delimits the intersubjectivityof authorship as a mode of moral action. Such recognition has to work through theparalysis of representation figured by the beautiful soul to conceptualize what remainsunspeakable. The need to consider literary representation as a mode of moral thoughtpoints to philosophy’s complicity with its own rhetoric of moral rehearsal, confession,and hypothesis. Pinkard’s comments read as an allegory of modernist literary ethics:“The freedom sought by ‘beautiful souls’ is thus to be found not in a striving forindependence (the problem with all attempts at being a ‘master’ who is the author of thelaw but never subject to a law authored by anybody else), but in a recognition of ourcrucial mutual dependencies on each other” [242]. While arguments in this figure’shistory might seem philologically local, they continue to resonate. This resonance isnevertheless elusive. The lines of argument are necessarily indeterminate and difficultto embody, in part because the beautiful soul has metamorphosed so pervasively into astaple of modern literary representation.

The decisive critical characterization of the beautiful soul, or die schöne Seele, isprovided by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit. His account comes in the concludingpart of the Spirit section entitled “Conscience. The ‘beautiful soul,’ evil and itsforgiveness.” Hegel situates the beautiful soul as a form of Spirit that is certain of itselfwithin the antinomy of the moral view of the world. The beautiful in question is notaesthetic beauty, but the claims of moral self-consciousness to have an inner grace orpurity. The genealogy of such claims has many branches. Nevertheless, the harmoniouscombination of inner freedom with the external appearance of the beautiful characterproves easier to imagine in literary forms than to discern in reality. Put briefly, Hegelarticulates the beautiful soul as a critique of the idea of inner moral beauty. By analogywith Gadamer’s claim that the ontological function of the beautiful is to bridge thechasm between the ideal and the real [Gadamer 15], the ideological function of thebeautiful soul is to bridge the chasm between conscience and doing. The hope is that theexternal and internal promptings of moral conscience could be combined with grace,and that this grace might unite moral ideals with subjective reality. Contrary to Hegel’sreputation as a purveyor of aesthetic idealism, his critique of the beautiful soul prefigureskey moves in supposedly materialist objections to beauty, suggesting a more searchingaccount of the truth of beauty’s ideological mystification.

Unpacking Hegel’s speculative account of the beautiful soul is nevertheless fraughtwith difficulties. The figure makes only a momentary appearance in the Aesthetics.Discussing character in the section on the idea of artistic beauty, Hegel mentions Goethe’sWerther, and offers a critical sketch of the beautiful soul for which he cites F. H. Jacobi’sWaldemar, before dismissing the whole species of character.6 Such explicit referencesprovide some evidence that Goethe and Jacobi are implicitly referred to in thePhenomenology of Spirit, but not without straining the latter text’s referential

4. Cf. Rose, “The Search for Style” 11–26; Rose, The Broken Middle 288.5. Adorno, Negative Dialektik 356/Negative Dialectics 364.6. Vorlesungen über die Äesthetik 1: 342–43/Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 241–42. Hegel

rounds off his account pithily: “Zu solcher Absoderlichkeit des Gemüts kann man kein Gemüthaben” [343]. Compare Knox’s translation: “We cannot have any heart for this oddity of heart”[242].

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indeterminacy. The limited role played by the explicit figure of the beautiful soul inHegel’s Aesthetics is mitigated, however, by parallels with Hegel’s remarks on modern,romantic literature and his distrust of irony. Hegel’s characterization of the beautiful asthe sensuous embodiment of the idea is also bound up with his conception of how theConcept (Begriff) “ensouls”7 the existence that embodies it, such that the soul is theanimating life of something, a middle term between body and spirit.8 Between theAesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit, the beautiful soul also figures briefly inThe Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel refers back to his account in the Phenomenologyof Spirit, claiming that there he shows how “what has been called a ‘beautiful soul’—that still nobler type of subjectivism which empties the objective of all content and sofades away until it loses all actuality—is a variation of subjectivism like other forms ofthe same phenomenon . . .” [§140A, PR 103/GPR 139]. More pithily still, one of theadditions discusses how a will that can resolve on nothing is no actual will and comments:“However ‘beautiful’ such a disposition may be, it is nevertheless dead” [§13H, PR230]. In these different contexts, Hegel accords significance to the principle of ethicalindividuality as beauty, but disputes the claims of the beautiful soul to be able to actualizesuch a principle. As Speight comments, it is striking that in the Philosophy of Right therichest set of literary references concern tragedy, “whereas the more distinctively modernexperiences of the world of Bildung and the recognition structure of identity in comedyand the novel” are worked through “in a somewhat more diffuse way” [134]. As Hegelhimself indicates, the role accorded “Conscience” in the Philosophy of Right differsfrom its role in the Phenomenology of Spirit [§140A, PR 103/GPR 139]. These difficultiesoverlap with the different treatments of the relationships between art, religion, andphilosophy in the Encyclopedia, in the lectures on religion and aesthetics, and in thePhenomenology of Spirit.9

Hegel keeps the idea of beauty separate from the claims of the beautiful soul,restricting the former to religion and the spiritual work of art. It is nevertheless theanimating soul of art that embodies the idea of beauty. The distinct thematics of thebeautiful and of the soul ramify with alarming speed into questions for Hegel’s work asa whole, offering little purchase on the beautiful soul as a compound of such thematics.Given Hegel’s later reflections, the Phenomenology of Spirit is surprisinglyunforthcoming about beauty. Hegel’s often-misconstrued conception of the death of artcan be glimpsed in the earlier, more summary judgment in the preface to thePhenomenology of Spirit: “Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for askingof her what it cannot do” [§32 PhS 19/PhG 27]. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, however,beauty scarcely warrants a sustained digression, figuring tangentially in his account ofthe religious work of art through the contrast between corporeal or sensuous beauty andthe spiritual essence of the self-conscious soul, which in turns gives way to the purethoughts of the Beautiful and the Good displayed as “comic spectacle” [§746 PhS 452/PhG 543–44]. The critical allegory of the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spiritdissipates in his subsequent work, partly under pressure from the canonical topicality ofthe beautiful and the soul. Between the beautiful soul’s appearance in the Phenomenologyof Spirit and Hegel’s later ideas of beauty and the beautiful,10 there is an important gulf,whose animating significance across Hegel’s oeuvre has not been widely recognized.

7. Ensouls, along with expressions such as soul-giving and soul-laden, forms Knox’sneologistic attempt to translate the German beseelen and its cognate forms as they run throughHegel’s Aesthetics.

8. For discussion of the “soul” see part 3 of the Encyclopedia [25–153]. On Hegel’sconception of the soul as animating principle in relation to Aristotle’s De Anima, see Ferrarin.

9. See, for example, Bungay’s brief account of the problem [31].10. Bungay’s focus on the Aesthetics in Beauty and Truth precludes discussion of the beautiful

soul as a significant component in Hegel’s reflections on beauty.


Hegel’s later, more systematic accounts of beauty nevertheless germinate out of hisearlier conception of the beautiful soul.

Important indications of the considerations underlying Hegel’s earliest conceptionof the beautiful soul are hinted at in the “Berne Fragments”: “among the many whohave developed the idea of morality solely out of their own hearts, who have beheld herbeauty as though in a mirror and become enchanted by her, whose souls have renderedhighest tribute to virtue and moral greatness—a Spinoza, a Shaftesbury, a Rousseau, aKant—we find that the more these men came to revere morality and the moral characterof Christ’s teaching, the more did everything else appear irrelevant and superfluous”[82]. This is an unlikely group and an implausible generalization about Christ’s teaching.Hegel is struggling to understand the practical force of moral doctrines. A society ofbeautiful souls, in which freedom of conscience knows no moral laws save those thatcome from the heart and are found beautiful, threatens to become moral anarchy. Whatremains difficult, however, is the parallel Hegel discerns between the development ofmoral philosophy and the moral character of Christ’s teaching. This difficulty recurs inHegel’s most succinct, summary characterization of the beautiful soul in the “AbsoluteKnowing” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit: “The ‘beautiful soul’ is its ownknowledge of itself in its pure, transparent unity—the self-consciousness that knowsthis pure knowledge of pure inwardness as Spirit. It is not only the intuition of theDivine but the Divine’s intuition of itself” [§795 PhS 483/PhG 580]. This abstractcharacterization exposes the limits of what can be represented. It is tempting to flesh outwhat Hegel means through texts that offer representations more tangibly embodied andthat allow argument more purchase than the claims of divine intuition. However, thenecessity of such temptation is Hegel’s point and a motive force in his account of thebeautiful soul. Where Hegel disputes the beautiful soul’s claims to a quality of creativeand moral parthenogenesis, the structure of referentiality is not merely illustrative. Rather,Hegel attempts to conceptualize the truth of the way literary texts represent experience’salienation from itself, and to present this truth in a phenomenological exposition.

According to Norton, once its limitations “were openly and unmistakably pointedout by the critics of the idea, the beautiful soul retired from its long and extraordinarycareer and gradually retreated into its present obscurity” [7]. Hegel’s analysis, however,is not simply tied to the literary and philosophical contexts to which it alludes: “althoughthe beautiful soul did not survive, it did not entirely vanish either; it remained an importantthough superseded, moment in Hegel’s version of the development of Bildung, of Spirit,which ultimately culminates in the self-awareness of God” [281]. The truth of Hegel’saccount rests on the objective necessity of this subjective form of self-consciousness. Itmay require a renewal of speculative thought to recognize as much, but the phenomenondoes not merely survive in Hegel’s account, or indeed vanish, but remains an importantmoment in the formation of modern culture. The beautiful soul’s obscurity neverthelessintroduces historical content into any reckoning with Hegel’s claims for this figure’snecessary importance. Hegel is not describing a literary figure, but a shape of Spirit’shistorical and logical unfolding reflected in different literary and rhetorical forms. Abalance needs to be struck, accordingly, between reconstructing the historicalintelligibility of Hegel’s terms and assessing the truth of his argument. The lack ofspecificity in Hegel’s mode of allusion motivates a desire to read in knowing references,but an indeterminacy of reference is also inherent in Hegel’s critique of the conceptualindeterminacy of literary representation. Hegel deliberately avoids footnoting hischaracterization of the beautiful soul because he is more concerned with the logic in thisshape of Spirit. The beautiful soul acts as a placeholder for the claims of literature’sautonomous agency, the spirit of literary authorship as an end in its own right, as opposedto the claims of moral action and scientific cognition. There is nevertheless a polemical

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edge to Hegel’s account. This delimitation of the aesthetic ideology of the beautiful soulprefigures Hegel’s more general critique of the fate of beauty and the death of art. Thecontent of Hegel’s reflections on the literariness of the beautiful soul is not, then, aninjunction to develop a more nuanced intellectual history of all the manifold forms thisfigure once took and to which Hegel might be alluding. Rather, the challenge is torecognize the conceptual content of the literary manifold. The way Hegel disputes thebeauty of the beautiful soul’s representations suggests a more general critique withconsequences for any attempt to wrest the beautiful from its current position in ideologicalpurgatory.

Pinkard cites Novalis’s aphoristic formulation that “life must not be a novel that isgiven to us, but one that is made by us” [no. 99; qtd. in Pinkard 148]. There is a peculiarmorality of self-production here which can be traced into modern, post-Nietzscheanconceptions of how one’s life might be seen as or become a work of art. Pinkard seesHegel’s attack on the spirit of such ideas as a personal attack on Novalis: “Hegel, whoknew him in Jena, scornfully characterized him in his Phenomenology as thequintessentially ‘beautiful soul,’ whose ‘light dies away within it, and it vanishes like ashapeless vapor that dissolves into thin air’” [148]. Baillie’s translation of thePhenomenology even footnotes Hegel’s characterization of the beautiful soul, that it“pines away in consumption,” by pointing out: “This was the actual fate of Novalis, the‘St. John of Romanticism’” [676n1]. Verene asks: “Why is Hegel so nasty?” [100].11

Slippage between inferring something as explicit as character assassination and Hegel’soblique structure of referentiality is surprisingly common. Quentin Lauer talks of Hegel’s“rather cruel reference to Novalis” [225]. Jean Hyppolite, who provides what remainsone of the more nuanced commentaries, suggests that Hegel “perhaps intended to portray”Novalis in “the last features of his figure of the beautiful soul” [515]. The emphasis on“last” features is nice here, because this is only one moment in the way Hegel, asHyppolite puts it, “reproduces the entire evolution of the beautiful soul” [515]. ForRobert R. Williams, Hegel “locates the beautiful soul within Fichtean irony” [196].H. S. Harris mentions Shaftesbury, Wieland, Jacobi’s Waldemar, Goethe’s WilhelmMeisters Lehrjahre, Novalis, and Schlegel’s Lucinde, commenting rather optimisticallythat “Hegel would expect his readers to know all of these sources,” before suggestingmore categorically that: “Hegel’s text makes it perfectly clear that the Hyperion ofHölderlin (1797, 1799) contains the most perfect (and the most positive) projection ofthis Gestalt of consciousness” [479–80]. What seems clear, however, is that Hegel’saccount is sufficiently general and particular that it can generate confident but verydifferent allusions in the eyes of its beholders.

Robert C. Solomon comments accordingly that this section of the Phenomenologyof Spirit “has often appeared as a mystery to commentators, an arbitrary addition to thefairly solid discussion of Kant and conscience preceding it” [622]. It would indeed besurprising if Hegel intended to introduce obscure mysteries at such an important juncture.Solomon’s solution broadens the scope of the figure’s intelligibility: “it is not just theRomantic ‘beautiful soul’ that Hegel portrays at this stage of the dialectic. The referencesto ‘self-destruction’ may fit certain Romantic heroes, but they are surely tailor-made tothe Passion of Jesus” [623]. The despairing Hegel scholar can be forgiven a degree ofhistorical vertigo, but just as all the preceding commentaries provide helpful perspectivesgrounded in scholarly evidence, so it becomes necessary to consider the speculativeidentity between Jesus and the “beautiful soul.” Solomon points to Hegel’s earlytheological writings: “In a grotesque fashion, Hegel’s ‘Life of Jesus’ attempted to consider

11. Miller’s translation is less intrusive here, but the crudeness of attempts to spell out Hegel’sreferentiality resurfaces in Miller’s own interpolations, as in footnotes suggesting allusions toSophocles, Diderot, and Shakespeare, esp. 446.


Jesus only as a normally born and normally buried human being, who distinguishedhimself as the first Kantian in his ‘Sermon on the Mount.’” The historical Jesus is thusa beautiful soul “who teaches ethics by example” [622]. Harris too describes how inHegel’s early theological writings Jesus is understood to have “recognized the divinityof ‘life’ in its integrity and the consequent possibility of reconciliation. But he couldonly express this recognition—and his own reconciliation with the infinity of life—bydenying every aspect of the organization of human life in his actual community, andsacrificing his own finite life willingly as the price of that denial. Thus, he became theperfect model of an absolutely internalized reconciliation with the divine life—theBeautiful Soul.”12 Solomon, moreover, highlights the way the beautiful soul sectionconcludes, on the verge of the transition into Religion, with the words: “it is Godmanifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge”[§671 PhS 409/PhG 494]. Reading this section as a sustained allusion to Jesus helps tospecify the importance of the beautiful in the transition from Spirit to Religion. Thesubsequent summary characterization of the beautiful soul resonates rather differentlyif read as a speculative account of the Passion: “It is not only the intuition of the Divinebut the Divine’s intuition of itself” [§795 PhS 483/PhG 580]. Hyppolite is right to saythat “The portrait of the beautiful soul—that of Christ in his early works—did not havethe pejorative nuance that it has in the Phenomenology.” But he overstates the casewhen he claims that “In the Phenomenology, the portrait of the beautiful soul has anentirely different signification” [515–16]. The awkwardness of aesthetic representationsof Jesus runs through many remarks on the portrayal of Christ in the Aesthetics.Understood as a speculative identity between the truth of the historical Jesus and thetruth of the Pietistic and literary beautiful soul, the condition of the modern beautifulsoul is analogous to the self-consciousness of Jesus, following from an inwardness ofcommandments that are laws unto themselves. Interpretation of the beautiful soul isthus caught in an indeterminate space of referentiality, reading a figure that oscillatesbetween a needlessly cruel characterization of Novalis and a more fundamentalcharacterization of Jesus as the beautiful soul through which Spirit intuits its own divinity.The transformation of the Pietistic beautiful soul into a secular and novelistic characteralso reveals the indeterminacy of moral and conceptual content implicit in the limits ofJesus as a historically concrete self-consciousness.

Some of the drama of Hegel’s account can be discerned if the following passage isread as a description both of Jesus’s self-consciousness and of the dangerously deludedway in which the beautiful soul worships its own autonomous moral intuitions:

Conscience, then, in the majesty of its elevation above specific law and everycontent of duty, puts whatever content it pleases into its knowing and willing.It is the moral genius which knows the inner voice; and since, in knowing this,it has an equally immediate knowledge of existence, it is the divine creativepower which in its Notion possesses the spontaneity of life. Equally, it is in itsown self divine worship, for its action is the contemplation of its own divinity.[§655 PhS 397/PhG 481]

Part of the violence of reading this as a phenomenological description of Jesus’s self-consciousness is the extent to which our knowledge of Jesus is not accessible to ourown self-consciousness but dependent on the Gospels. Hegel’s own unsatisfactory attemptto write a life of Jesus reveals problems implicit in generating determinate morality outof literary representation, and his dissatisfaction with this attempt informs Hegel’s

12. Hegel’s Ladder 1: 4–5. Cf. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate.”

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understanding of the limits of art and its necessary overcoming in religion and philosophy.The awkward historical ordering of this overcoming in Hegel’s thought reflects twodistinct and related logical moments: the dissolution of early Christianity into an organizedreligion and the more contemporary dissolution of the beautiful soul into communitiesof pietistic solipsism and literary irony. The critique of the literary beautiful soul alsoimplies a critique of Jesus qua representation which necessitates the transition to theinstitutional expression of religion and thence to philosophical self-consciousness. Saveperhaps for brief moments, such as the dramatic representations of Jesus’s doubts on thecross, the Gospels, not unreasonably, say little about Jesus’s experience of self-consciousness and how he came to recognize his own divinity. Hegel is similarly reticent.Our dependence on literary representations of Jesus offers scant material for aninvestigation into what it felt like for Jesus to come to self-knowledge of his divinity.There is more than a hint of hubris and comic misrecognition in speculating on one’sown identity with such self-knowledge, and yet this is the implicit condition of thebeautiful soul’s self-worship.

As Hegel goes on to show, however, although this knowledge of the inner voice inits immediacy is absolutely certain of its self-consciousness, it is unable to actualizeitself as anything more objective than the pure “self” of this consciousness: “This absolutecertainty into which substance has resolved itself is the absolute untruth which collapsesinternally; it is the absolute self-consciousness in which consciousness is submerged”[§657 PhS 399/PhG 482–83]. The unexplicated substance of this submerged (versinken)consciousness is an extreme oscillation between abstractions in which the inner voiceloses its difference from itself. Hegel helps to explicate this through a comparison withthe Unhappy Consciousness, a comparison that also points to the beautiful soul’s loss ofconsciousness as experienced in language:

It is the fluctuating attitude to itself of the Unhappy Consciousness; but herethis fluctuation takes place explicitly for consciousness within itself, and isconscious of being the Notion of Reason, whereas the Unhappy Consciousnessis only implicitly that Notion. The absolute certain of itself thus finds itself,qua consciousness, changed immediately into a sound that dies away, into anobjectification of its being-for-self; but this created world is its speech [Rede],which likewise it has immediately heard and only the echo of which returns toit. This return, therefore, does not mean that the self is in essence and actualitypresent in speech; for essence is not for it an it-self or merely implicit being,but its very self. [§658 PhS 399/PhG 483]

The shift into language is decisive, foregrounding the conditions of representation throughwhich such an experience of self-consciousness is embodied. This picks up Hegel’searlier reflections on language (Sprache) as the existence of Spirit in which “languageis self-consciousness existing for others” [§652 PhS 395/PhG 478]. To the extent thatlanguage is the middle term, mediating between the independent and the acknowledgedself-consciousness, the self-consciousness of conscience cannot recognize itself savethrough the language that embodies it. Recognition of its embodiment as a consciousnessin language would force it out of its self-communing autonomy. Jesus, howeverrepresented, is an unlikely if not unspeakable model for such a representation of thisexperience in language. The unhappy and yet beautiful dissolution of the inner voice’sunreconciled immediacy is perhaps more familiar as the unfolding voice of Beckett’sThe Unnamable.

Before turning to Beckett, however, we need to see how, for Hegel, the beautifulsoul’s self-certainty founders on the attempt to actualize itself in language and literary

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representation. The passages just cited lead directly into Hegel’s first explicit naming ofthe beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit:

It lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing,and to endure being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its innerbeing by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of itsheart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willedimpotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimateabstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thoughtinto being and put its trust in the absolute difference. The hollow object whichit has produced for itself now fills it, therefore, with a sense of emptiness. Itsactivity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes anobject devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back onitself, finds itself only a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, anun-happy, so-called “beautiful soul.” its light dies away within it, and it vanisheslike a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air. [§658 PhS 399–400/PhG483–84]

He unravels the contradictory limits of this figure as a necessary but insubstantial shapeof Spirit and in terms which suggest that the beautiful soul is not so much beautiful as anoddity of heart, a self-denying perversity. The beautiful soul cannot be or act beautifully.Rather, the beautiful soul’s lack of objectivity can only be embodied as something moreakin to a fiction, a fiction that might be perceived as beautiful. Hegel seeks to raise thisfiction to a critically reflexive recognition of itself. Hegel does not invent this fiction,but takes it up as a historical phenomenon whose contradictory dynamics characterizethe workings of Spirit. Thus the objectivity of the beautiful soul falls somewhere betweenthat of a phenomenon produced within the history of Spirit’s labors to come to knowitself, and a logically necessary shape through which Spirit must pass. This, however, isthe logic of literary representation’s rhetorical excess and conceptual indeterminacy,rather than a mathematical or formal logic.

Hegel introduces the name of the beautiful soul somewhat derisively as that whichis merely “so called” (sogennante). The beautiful soul is so called by others, and thislends Hegel’s own characterization an awkwardly allusive referentiality, borrowing someof its critical energy from sources Hegel does not specify, while also taking on a life ofits own in Hegel’s text. Harris comments that Hegel “uses the name ironically, for hisuse of the qualification ‘so called’ clearly implies that this soul is not really ‘beautiful’at all; and I think the adjective ‘unhappy’ fleshes out the irony” [2: 487]. Confessionalor literary representation of this unhappy soul is only “beautiful” in a negative or ironicsense. Hegel’s recourse to figurative language through which to characterize this soulhas its own beauty as a rhetorical performance. The almost excessive literariness of hischaracterization helps to explain the need for philosophical interpretation to supply astructure of referentiality with which to contain this excess. Attempts to refer this excessback to Jacobi, Goethe or Novalis fail to recognize the necessity of this recourse tofigurative language. Hegel reveals how the phenomenon of a figure at the extremes ofabstraction generates a rhetorical supplementarity, a poetry of negativity which goesbeyond colorful illustration into something that inverts the claims of literary autonomy.This in turn suggests how the beautiful soul’s lack of substantiality can neverthelessbecome actual as a theme for rhetorical invention.

The extent to which such rhetorical self-consciousness is constitutive of thePhenomenology of Spirit has become increasingly evident in Hegel scholarship. ForSpeight, “Among the most striking facts about the PhG’s use of literature, in fact, is itssudden eruption in the middle of the work: despite many allusions to philosophical and


religious works, the shapes of consciousness in the first half of the book (from ‘SenseCertainty’ to the middle of the ‘Reason’ section) are presented in a way that relies onvirtually no resources from explicitly literary texts” [18–19]. John H. Smith makes themore radical claim that Hegel’s approach to representation is thematic throughout thePhenomenology of Spirit, suggesting that Hegel thinks reality and ontology throughrhetoric [Smith]. For Verene, similarly, rhetoric is central to Hegel’s dialectical expositionof recollection or Erinnerung: “dialectic is really a logical way of describing what areessentially rhetorical processes or rhetorical powers of the mind” [23]. In Verene’saccount, the working through of rhetorical processes allows philosophy to recollect the“gallery of images” (Galerie von Bildern) [§808 PhS 492/PhG 590] described in thefinal pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The stakes of interpretation raised by the beautiful soul are thus dizzying, oscillatingbetween literary specificity and metaphysical questions of the highest order. It becomesnecessary to work through the articulation of the beautiful soul in the Phenomenologyof Spirit with a sense of its referentiality, and with a sense of the logic of the phenomenonas Hegel describes its representations. The unstable and unreconciled shape of Spiritrepresented by the beautiful soul is, then, more like an ideological representation whoseinternal contradictions can be embodied only as a fiction, even in philosophical critiquesof this fictionality. Spirit figures itself through the fiction of a pure moral intuition thatis certain of itself but lacks the ability to actualize its unreconciled immediacy or tobecome self-conscious of its logic as a phenomenon. Hegel works through itsrepresentation as appearance to its recognizable conceptuality, a movement fromrepresentation to recognition which in turn is recollected in absolute knowing. Theargument sketched here suggests the extent to which the Phenomenology of Spirit callsfor speculative reading, reading alive to the relation between the logical and historicalidentities of the phenomena described, while remaining sensitive to the limitationsimposed by the narrative and rhetorical forms of representation and philosophicalexposition. More is required than an oscillation between conceptual paraphrases andphilological reconstructions of sundry contextual “backgrounds.”

Although the argument sketched here falls short of providing a more detailedspeculative reading of the “beautiful soul” section as a whole, it has nevertheless outlinedthe task. Beyond the passages already discussed, Hegel pursues his characterization byshowing how the dissolution of the beautiful soul generates an antithetical consciousnessof evil and hypocrisy. As a consciousness whose moral self-determination comes solelyfrom itself: “It does well to preserve itself in its purity, for it does not act; it is thehypocrisy which wants its judging to be taken for an actual deed, and instead of provingits rectitude by actions, does so by uttering fine sentiments. Its nature, then, is altogetherthe same as that which is reproached with making duty a mere matter of words” [§664PhS 403/PhG 487]. Making it conscious of its hypocrisy through language in turngenerates a dialectic of confession. Self-consciousness confesses its hypocrisy, butnevertheless hopes that words without deeds might be recognized as a beautiful form ofsuperiority. Torn between confession of its own wickedness and persistence in theunrepentant certainty of its own beauty of soul, the beautiful soul can only preserve itspurity by refusing to recognize this contradiction between its inner being and the outerexistence of this inner being as it is expressed in language. The reception of Hegel’s texthas tended to skate over the way Hegel goes on to unfold the argument. In part this isbecause Hegel draws out what is already implicit in his more dramatic representation ofthe beautiful soul’s necessary dissolution. Moreover, the movement through confessionto the moral actions of forgiveness, reconciliation, and reciprocal recognition works asa reprise of earlier parts of the Phenomenology of Spirit. What is perhaps missed, however,is Hegel’s difficulty in presenting the logic of his exposition in as vivid a form as his

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dramatization of the beautiful soul’s crisis of self-consciousness and representation.The movement of the beautiful soul section as a whole can be brought to life if it is readas a description of the Passion of Jesus, but this threatens to plunge the exposition intoa kind of metareligious poetics. The potential for distraction generated by vivid imagesis evident in the ink spilt on such metaphors as the owl of Minerva or the Phenomenologyof Spirit’s concluding image of “die Schädelstätte des absoluten Geistes,” translated byMiller as “the Calvary of Absolute Spirit” [§808 PhS 493/PhG591].13 The beauty ofsuch moments in Hegel’s text tends to undermine the argument by providing occasionsfor thought to become clouded by poetic associations. Among the reasons why Hegel’scritique of the beautiful soul leaves its objects of representation implicit is the threatposed to the phenomenological immanence and self-legislating autonomy of his owntext. Hegel nevertheless overplays the difference between literature and philosophy.

The most vivid and most often quoted passages enact the beautiful soul’s literarydissolution in rhetorical excess, telling of how the beautiful soul “is disordered to thepoint of madness, wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption” or how “itslight dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thinair.” Such excess points to capacities of reflexively self-critical literary representationwhich Hegel seeks to harness negatively. The affinities between Hegel’s own text andthose that represent the beautiful soul are disavowed. But novelistic characterizations ofthe beautiful soul can also be read as self-critical representations, suggesting variousdifferent pathologies, such as those of moral duplicity, narcissism, unacknowledgedcruelty, and the vanity of artistic production as such. Among the most interesting featuresof Hegel’s disavowal of his affinities with such representations is that the beautifulsoul’s dissolution is shown not to be ugly so much as hard-hearted, hypocritical, andevil. The structural difference is that between moral beauty and misrecognition, betweengoodness and hypocrisy or evil. This precludes the possibility that the ugliness of thebeautiful soul might become a major literary theme as a socially deluded, unknowinglymalevolent, or unconsciously damaged spirit. The subsumption of the beautiful withinan opposition between good and evil is superseded in Hegel’s subsequent Aesthetics.This points to the need to rethink Hegel’s subsequent reasons for bracketing thedissolution of the beautiful soul as an exemplary moment in modern literature, particularlygiven its prominence in the Romantic novel. In both the Phenomenology of Spirit andthe Aesthetics, however, there is a complex matrix of oppositions between the good andthe beautiful, and between religion and literature, which tends to exclude the possibilityof modern, secular literature as a self-critical articulation of the limits of representation.Claims that the negativity of modernist literary writing can constitute an autonomousmoral conscience fall prey to the dynamics Hegel articulates as those of the beautifulsoul. There are nevertheless more profound affinities between Hegel’s rhetoric ofphilosophical exposition and modernist writing’s articulation of the beautiful soul’sdelusions.

Gillian Rose’s account of Hegel’s work as an agon of authorship is helpful here inproviding a middle term between philosophy and literature. For Rose, “ThePhenomenology of Spirit is the quintessence of agon of authorship in Hegel’s system”[173]. Rose’s speculative reading suspends the final authority of Hegel’s system withina more open-ended account of Hegel’s philosophical rhetoric. As an authorship, Hegel’swriting struggles with the law of its own form. Hegel’s resistance to the temptation ofauthorship to arrogate authority for itself shapes the conflict between natural andphilosophical consciousness constitutive of the Phenomenology of Spirit [175].

13. More literally, die Schädelstätte is the place of the skull. Baillie translates this as“Golgotha” 808.


Understood in relation to my account, Hegel’s appropriation of existing representationsof the beautiful soul does not create its account out of itself, but struggles with theextent to which its authorship is already implicated. Philosophy can no more claim to beits own autonomous and self-legislating author than the beautiful soul can claim to bethe author of its own moral laws. Whereas the beautiful soul cannot embody moralbeauty as an actual existence, Hegel struggles to comprehend the contradictions of moralself-consciousness in argument and writing. The consequences of Rose’s struggle toappropriate Hegel’s authorship within her own are perhaps clearest in her account ofRahel Levin/Varnhagen’s reading and appropriation of Goethe’s representation of thebeautiful soul in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Faced with the fate of becoming a damagedexample of the beautiful soul, Rose sees Varnhagen’s life and writings as an example ofhow Goethe’s novel liberates Varnhagen to work through the impasse diagnosed byHegel. Although Rose’s reading of Hegel’s diagnosis as a reworking of Goethe’s novelunduly limits the indeterminacy of referentiality in Hegel’s text, her account neverthelessreveals how the symbiosis between Varnhagen and Goethe’s novel suggests affinitiesbetween Goethe’s authorship and Hegel’s. Both Goethe and Hegel emerge as writersengaged in authorships that struggle to embody critical representations of the beautifulsoul. Goethe’s novel, if anything, is more successful in articulating the truth of thebeautiful soul’s crisis of experience as a practical guide to moral action.

Rose’s agon of authorship, unlike Hegel’s, includes the possibility of literary fictionsand rhetorical strategies as “facetious” forms, capable of sustaining ironic suspensionsof the ethical in new ethics of writing.14 Rose’s own agon of authorship is exemplary inits attempts to learn from Hegel’s authorship how to address contemporary thought. Sheshows how the temptations of the beautiful soul afflict contemporary ethics and politics,and how to recognize such temptations in authorships as various as those of Kierkegaard,Rosa Luxemburg, and Walter Benjamin [Rose, “Walter Benjamin”]. Rose’s difficulttexts show how Hegel’s account of the death of literature and the supersession of literarybeauty by the Science of Knowing remains premature and historically unfinished.

If Rose’s agon of authorship remains largely unassimilated, Samuel Beckett providesstriking evidence of a more widely known authorship that struggles to overcome theunreconciled immediacy of the beautiful soul. The most explicitly self-criticalrepresentation of the dynamics sketched by Hegel emerges in the unfolding “voice” ofThe Unnamable. The development of this unfolding out of Molloy and Malone Diesgenerates an awkward structure of internal and self-cancelling referentiality constitutiveof the “trilogy,” the fulcrum of Beckett’s oeuvre. Although almost any passage fromThe Unnamable could serve to introduce the dynamics of Beckett’s literary form, partof the beauty of The Unnamable is its resistance to brief quotation. The text’s unfoldingsustains a synthetic relation to earlier parts of the trilogy which exemplifies thearchitectonic dissolution of the conditions of Beckett’s writing as a whole, while alsoproceeding at a level of linguistic particularity which negates the determinacy of particularparagraphs, sentences, and words. The confession of literary impotence refuses to arrogateany authority for its self-cancelling authorship while systematically dismantling thegrounds of its literary aspirations and delusions:

Unfortunately it’s a question of words, of voices, one must not forget that, onemust try and not forget that completely, of a statement to be made, by them, byme, some slight obscurity here, it might sometimes almost be wondered if alltheir ballocks about life and death is not as foreign to their nature as it is to

14. Cf. Denise Riley’s defense of irony as a political strategy in The Words of Selves:Identification, Solidarity, Irony.

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mine. The fact is they no longer know where they’ve got to in their affair, wherethey’ve got me to, I never knew, I’m where I always was, wherever that is, andtheir affair. I don’t know what is meant by that, some process no doubt, thatI’ve got stuck in, or haven’t yet come to, I’ve got nowhere, in their affair, that’swhat galls them, they want me there somewhere, anywhere, if only they’d stopcommitting reason, on them, on me, on the purpose to be achieved, and simplygo on, with no illusion about having begun one day or ever being able toconclude, but it’s too difficult, too difficult, for one bereft of purpose, not tolook forward to his end, and bereft of all reason to exist, back to a time he didnot. Difficult too not to forget, in your thirst for something to do, in order to bedone with it, and have that much less to do, that there is nothing to be done,nothing special to be done, nothing doable to be done. [The Unnamable 354]

This unfolding narrator refuses to waste away to nothing, but continually struggles witha condition in which it cannot do or become anything resembling a reconciled existence.A prosody of the phrase or grammatical unit allows this voice to become a series ofutterances which are relatively stable as phrases or units, before reflection dissolves thisstability. However, the self-consciousness that ensouls this process of narration is neverallowed to become a being. Becoming dissolves in a negativity of denial and undoing, aprocess that demonstrates an acute awareness of its complicity with literary illusions,from the fictions of time and space to questions as to what motivates this oscillationbetween consciousness and self-consciousness, between speech and writing. The text’sability to continue convicts itself of a kind of absolute certainty which is immediatelydenied. Doing something takes second place to saying that nothing is being done, thatnothing can be done. This saying is the doing that cannot quite reconcile itself with itscontradictory awareness that it is a speaking that is becoming a thing of writing. Theunfolding voice’s refusal to do as it is told fends off the dawning recognition that thisrefusal is a rebellion that cannot become determinate. There is a beautiful freedom inthe refusal to recognize any heteronomous authority that might attempt to legislate forthis wasting away, but it is a freedom from habit that damages the voice’s ability to bereconciled with itself. This desire for freedom is intensified to levels of abstractionwhich are nevertheless continually made concrete. The process is dynamic, but thedynamism animating this process moves between the vanity of minor differences andabsolute indifference, refusing to become dialectical or to recognize its negativity as aprocess of determinate negations. The oscillation between resistance to any heteronomousauthority and absolute certainty as to the superiority of its inventive lack of moral certaintybecomes a comic spectacle, a spectacle the voice knowingly records as a journey intoabsolute ignorance.

The Unnamable’s ability to undermine critical exposition of its parts generates ananxiety of beginning for any literary critical account. This anxiety of beginnings, to saynothing of means and ends, also becomes a constitutive problem for Beckett’s subsequentwritings. A more easily isolated group of texts, published in translation as Texts forNothing, illustrates Beckett’s difficulty in finding a way out of the impasse articulatedby The Unnamable. Texts for Nothing opens with an unpromising sense of stalemate:“Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on. Someone said,You can’t stay here. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on” [1: 71]. What has becomethe characteristically self-correcting voice of Beckett’s prose seems caught in its ownheadlights, attempting to wriggle forward through a blizzard of injunctions. Any newbeginning of this textual labor and agon of authorship is both sudden in its immediacyand yet pre-scripted. The written texture of language and of Beckett’s preceding worksprefigures the attempt to make a start that cannot be sudden. Abrupt beginnings find


themselves paralysed by an inability to stop ending. Each articulation recoils from theattempt to hear some preceding truth or to find an inner voice. The fiction of truthfulimmediacy records its mediations as it denies its identity with them. Later in Texts forNothing, the I-voice analyzes its status as a self-recording stenographer, caught in thetrial of its own making: “I’m the clerk, I’m the scribe, at the hearings of what cause Iknow not. Why want it to be mine, I don’t want it. There it goes again, that’s the firstquestion this evening. To be judge and party, witness and advocate, and he, attentive,indifferent, who sits and notes” [5: 85]. The pose of detached indifference, as if amongitself and only taking notes, cannot quite deny the desire for due process and some truthto the rights of the legal person. The will articulated is nevertheless paralyzed by acounterforce denying its claims of agency as so much vain musing: “One, meaning me,it’s not the same thing, in the dark where I will in vain to see there can’t be any willing”[5: 85]. This will that resolves on nothing is no actual will, but a vain willing that cannotreconcile the gulf between its finitude and the infinite freedom after which it hankers.This in turn is recognized and then denied as a conflict of desires and pretense: “I seewhat it is, I seek to be like the one I seek, in my head, that my head seeks, that I bid myhead seek, with its probes, within itself. No, don’t pretend to seek, don’t pretend tothink, just be vigilant, the eyes staring behind the lids, the ears straining for a voice notfrom without, were it only to sound an instant, to tell another lie” [5: 85]. This quasi-phenomenological articulation of self-consciousness seeks to bracket its will to illusion,its desire for deceit, and yet its confessional form reveals both a pathological restlessnessand a comedy of recognitions denied: “Ah yes, I hear I have a kind of conscience, andon top of that a kind of sensibility, I trust the orator is not forgetting anything, andwithout ceasing to listen or drive the old quill I’m afflicted by them, I heard, it’s noted”[5: 86]. The desire for justice extends an awareness of the risk of error in the rhetoricand in the falseness of all the forms of action available. For all the attempts to read Textsfor Nothing back through some underlying philosophical matrix, the focus is on fictionalconditions of possibility and on the negativity of writing as it resists the self-consciousnessof language.

This literary terrain, a going on that goes on not going on, is familiar in Beckett’stexts almost to the point of being repetitive, a figurative cliché overburdened by thefalse appearance of immediacy while struggling through the habitual negation of habit.As Beckett puts it in Proust, “Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit” [19].The oscillation in Texts for Nothing between you-voices and I-voices combines theseparate voices of the notorious conclusion of Waiting for Godot: “VLADIMIR: Well?Shall we go? ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go. [They do not move.]” [88]. In the prose works,however, the question of literary agency foregrounds the unreconciled immediacy ofthe writing voice, or what has become known in Beckett criticism as “the narrator/narrated.”15 Beckett continually highlights this assumed condition of prose as a mode ofnegativity, narrating the restless inability of inner promptings to reconcile speaking withwriting. Whereas the plays dramatize various states of inaction, the mature prose workscollapse the present tense of speaking into a writing that seems unable to reconcile thedifference between literary production and worldly agency.

The urge to be free of literary baggage lends Beckett’s prose articulations ofnegativity a texture both of conscientiously suffered disbelief and of comically reflexiveautocriticism. His critique of the urge to invent, to say or create something new inlanguage, struggles on as an immanently unfolding critique of pure fiction. Part of thebeauty of the writing stems from its ability to keep going amid the ruins of the desire forbeautiful writing. His texts seem intimate with a knowing reluctance to beautify either

15. The phrase is Beckett’s, quoted from a letter in Kenner [94].

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experience or writing, a reluctance that seems both intimately personal and objectivelyimpersonal. Readers are spared the embarrassment of differentiating fiction fromautobiography by recognizing the author’s profound distaste for personal disclosureand for the illusions of fictional invention. The pleasures of Beckett’s texts owe much tothe confessed impotence of their literary agency. The authority of Beckett’s authorshipeschews moral or political designs on the reader, inverting any call for worldly agencyinto a confessional denial of extratextual purpose. This is writing that tarries with thenegativity of literary production. Its labors are undoubtedly those of a spirit all tooconscious of its sins, unable to give up the desire for a purity of free play in language buttorn by recognition of its necessarily impure actuality. Insofar as Beckett’s writingssustain utopian yearnings within a thoroughly dystopian sense of the morality of self-consciousness, Beckett emerges as one of the beautiful souls of modern literature. Textsfor Nothing even articulates itself as a soul among souls: “And perhaps beside me, andall around, other souls are being licked into shape, souls swooned away, or sick withover-use, or because no use could be found for them, but still fit for use, or fit only to becast away, pale imitations of mine” [10: 105]. There is an intimation of solidarity withother souls in the voice of Texts for Nothing, a solidarity that could be extended to thegallery of moribund souls who waste away in the purgatorial indecision and Calvary ofBeckett’s works. The more characteristic note, however, is the vanity of self-differentiation which sees other souls as pale imitations, lesser beings compared withthe arrogated narcissism of this self-consciousness’s negativity. Indeed, the very rhetoricis denied: “No, no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death, you’ve got to go on withoutany of that junk, that’s all dead with words, with excess of words . . .” [10: 105]. Thetruly beautiful soul confesses the idiocy of such rhetorical costumes.

For all that the ideas of beauty and the soul are so much historical junk, there is asurprisingly tense competition in modern literature to figure as the beautiful soul ofmodern writing. Detachment from worldly action in preference for the life of writing isthematic in Proust. Even if writing is itself a form of communicative action, posing thesuperiority of the life examined through writing as opposed to the unexamined life ofthe activist, writing displaces and defers other kinds of action. Radical criticism takessuch displacement and deferral as an ersatz form of political criticism, often suggestingthat literature is itself the ideological containment of political contradictions. Insofar asBeckett seems emblematic of the apolitical writer, the writer whose writing would standabove or below the tides of political struggles, his writing’s indifference to politicalquestions regarding what is to be done, either as experiences of agency or of newsworthynarration, stands as an inversion of engagement or commitment. Indeed, the worldlypressures of moral commitment provide Beckett’s work with material for comicdetachment and an engaging resistance to complicity with ethical life. If Beckett’s careeras a writer provides an exemplary articulation of the beautiful soul, it is not, however, inthe sense that Beckett himself was incapable of committing himself to action. This isillustrated by his involvement in various political struggles, not least his role in theFrench resistance and in struggles with the political and economic forces that seek tocontrol or mediate the conditions of writing. Insofar as the form and content of Beckett’swriting nevertheless seems profoundly apolitical, his writing offers little purchase forpolitically motivated critics, who are forced to fall back on quasi-Adornian claims forliterary autonomy. But if this autonomy is precisely freedom from moral or politicaldeterminacy, then the attempt to politicize Beckett’s forms has to traverse waste landsof philosophical abstraction, and in ways that generate little determinate moral or politicalcontent. Hegel’s account of the beautiful soul’s wasting away remains relevant as areflection on the morally indeterminate consequences of affirming literature’s ironicsuspension of the ethical in an ethics of beautiful writing. The beauty of Beckett’s


authorship risks being taken as a justification for remaining within the dilemmas of thebeautiful soul, rather than struggling through the agon of authorship to overcome suchdilemmas.

Much effort has gone into showing how Beckett’s prose deconstructs the speakingvoice, subjectivity, and the phenomenology of consciousness, but at the cost ofemphasizing the formalism of the techniques and epistemological reflections involved[cf. Katz]. There is undoubtedly a care for formal problems in Beckett’s writing, even ifthe value of such care is continually doubted. But the writing itself would be monotonousas a logical pattern were it not for the questions of experience thought through formalreflexivity. The residues of what might be bracketed as merely personal experiences arepart of the texture of even the most abstract of Beckett’s works. And there is a persistentchallenge to what might be described as merely philosophical perspectives, a challengethat animates the writing’s soul as a resistance to the epistemological and rhetoricalquestions so fondly perceived by critics. What emerges is not so much an expression ofphilosophical interests, but rather a pathology of the philosophical turn as one moreconsoling bandage over the wounds of experience. Against Hegel’s claim that “Thewounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind” [§669 PhS 407/PhG 492], Beckett’swriting articulates the dissolution of such consolations as it is experienced by the beautifulsoul. The epistemological and rhetorical reflexivity of Beckett’s writing remains avowedlysuperficial, while this conflict of form and experience marks out a shape of Spirit thathas not yet healed, articulating unreconciled antagonisms between being, thought, andlanguage. The world remains largely indifferent or skeptical with regard to Hegel’saccount of the journey to absolute knowledge, but it does so by remaining restless withinthe literary and philosophical shape of Spirit represented by the beautiful soul.

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The Beautiful Soul: From Hegel to Beckett