The Narcissism of the Beautiful Soul: Does it really Desire its own Reflection?

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2010-01-01

Author

Parkan, Barış

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In this paper I will present an apology for the beautiful soul against Hegel's accusation of narcis-sism. Hegel makes this charge at the end of Chapter 6 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the section entitled »Conscience: The >beautiful soul<, evil and its forgiveness«. In trying to identify the object of Hegel's critique in this section, Hegel scholars (such as Pinkard, Rose and Baillie) have come up with a number of suggestions, speculating on whether Hegel had in mind here a particular literary or historical figure. Jacobi's Waldemar and the protagonist of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister 's Lehrjahre appear to be two favourite candidates. Another favourite among Hegel scholars seems to be the possibility that it is a »personal attack« on Novalis. Schaftesbury, Fichte, Schlegel, Rousseau, and Hölderlin are other possibilities that have been entertained.1 Perhaps the best working suggestion is Robert Solomon's claim that »the beautiful soul« is Jesus.2 While this controversy is an interesting one and worth engaging in in its own right, I believe that for my purposes, it will be best not to limit the object of Hegel's critique to a single figure. The beautiful soul seems to be a family resemblance concept; and it is best to treat it as such, searching for common traits among all these possible figures. As Robert Ε. Norton explains in his book The Beautiful Soul - a careful study of the meaning and history of this notion - the idea of »the beautiful soul« is in fact primarily an Enlightenment project, even though its roots can be traced back at least to Plato's Symposium,3 In The Beautiful Soul Norton explains how, in an eagerness characteristic of the Enlightenment to set ends for humanity to strive for, and drawing inspiration from the Greek conception of kalokagathia, a hodgepodge of Enlight-enment thinkers and writers, ranging from the Cambridge Platonists to the German neo-humanists, have fashioned models of human perfection ( Vollkommenheit) to be cultivated through Bildung, (another Enlightenment trademark).4 The primary craving for inner harmony and unity underlying the project seems not that different from Hegel's longing for the unification of the in-and for-itself, except that the Enlightenment thinkers, again in their characteristic individualistic strain, formulate this goal around a single human being. I believe that it is this selfish lust for obtaining such perfect contentment and inner peace on an individual level that really irritates Hegel in relation to the beauti-ful soul.

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/106992

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Department of Philosophy, Article