In the previous two chapters, we have shown how two important elements of Hegel's concept of agency – what we have termed “retrospectivity” and “theatricality” – derive their particular force from a consideration, respectively, of tragedy and comedy. The Phenomenology's task is to show how both of these two moments of agency require recognitive, interpretive structures capable of integrating first- and third-person perspectives of agency. In each case, the PhG is deeply guided by a reading of specific tragic and comic works, as in the appropriation of Antigone and Rameau's Nephew in the first two main sections of the “Spirit” chapter.

The explorations of both retrospectivity and theatricality have left further questions for our account of agency: Do unintended consequences just leave an agent – as the “tragic” experience of action suggests – with the need to accept a case-by-case determination of what must be regarded as “sticking” to the action for which he is responsible? Is the spectator/spectacle split between the agent who acts in the (external) world and the (internal) judge of that action always present, as the “comic” experience of action suggests? The historical situations of tragedy and comedy that Hegel has probed in the “Spirit” chapter – that of the tragic hero's relation to fate and the comic hero's awareness of the maskedness of all action – left little in the way of resolutions for viable modern agency: neither the tragic agent's amor fati nor the fractured sense of a divided self which afflicts the comic agent seems to hold possibilities for a genuinely free and rational agent who can in some sense “return” to himself from out of these tragic and comic moments of his agency.