On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Mind’: the self-knowing, actual Idea — part eight.
‘Psyche; or, the legend of Love’
by Mary Tighe (1772–1810)
CANTO I.
Much wearied with her long and dreary way,
And now with toil and sorrow well nigh spent,
Of sad regret and wasting grief the prey,
Fair Psyche through untrodden forests went,
To lone shades uttering oft a vain lament.
And oft in hopeless silence sighing deep,
As she her fatal error did repent,
While dear remembrance bade her ever weep,
And her pale cheek in ceaseless showers of sorrow steep.
‘Mid the thick covert of that woodland shade,
A flowery bank there lay undressed by art,
But of the mossy turf spontaneous made;
Here the young branches shot their arms athwart,
And wove the bower so thick in every part,
That the fierce beams of Phoebus glancing strong
Could never through the leaves their fury dart;
But the sweet creeping shrubs that round it throng,
Their loving fragrance mix, and trail their flowers along.
And close beside a little fountain play’d,
Which through the trembling leaves all joyous shone,
And with the cheerful birds sweet music made,
Kissing the surface of each polish’d stone
As it flowed past: sure as her favourite throne
Tranquillity might well esteem the bower,
The fresh and cool retreat have called her own,
A pleasant shelter in the sultry hour,
A refuge from the blast, and angry tempest’s power.
Wooed by the soothing silence of the scene
Here Psyche stood, and looking round, lest aught
Which threaten’d danger near her might have been,
Awhile to rest her in that quiet spot
She laid her down, and piteously bethought
Herself on the sad changes of her fate,
Which in so short a space so much had wrought,
And now had raised her to such high estate,
And now had plunged her low in sorrow desolate.
Oh! how refreshing seemed the breathing wind
To her faint limbs! and while her snowy hands
From her fair brow her golden hair unbind,
And of her zone unloose the silken bands,
More passing bright unveiled her beauty stands;
For faultless was her form as beauty’s queen,
And every winning grace that Love demands,
With mild attempered dignity was seen
Play o’er each lovely limb, and deck her angel mien.
Though solitary now, dismay’d, forlorn,
Without attendant through the forest rude,
The peerless maid of royal lineage born
By many a royal youth had oft been wooed;
Low at her feet full many a prince had sued,
And homage paid unto her beauty rare;
But all their blandishments her heart withstood;
And well might mortal suitor sure despair,
Since mortal charms were none which might with hers compare.
Yet nought of insolence or haughty pride
Found ever in her gentle breast a place;
Though men her wondrous beauty deified,
And rashly deeming such celestial grace
Could never spring from any earthly race,
Lo! all forsaking Cytherea’s shrine,
Her sacred altars now no more embrace,
But to fair Psyche pay those rites divine,
Which, Goddess! are thy due, and should be only thine.
But envy of her beauty’s growing fame
Poisoned her sisters’ hearts with secret gall,
And oft with seeming piety they blame
The worship which they justly impious call;
And oft, lest evil should their sire befall,
Besought him to forbid the erring crowd
Which hourly throng’d around the regal hall,
With incense, gifts, and invocations loud,
To her whose guiltless breast, ne’er felt elation proud.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). ‘Philosophy of Mind’. ‘Subjective Mind’.
(B) Natural Alterations
§396
In the soul determined as an individual, the differences take the form of alterations in it, in the single subject persisting in the alterations, and of moments in its development. As they are at once physical and mental differences, a concrete definition or description of them would require us to anticipate an acquaintance with the cultivated mind.
[Remark] ( 1 ) The first type of alteration is the natural course of the ages of life. It begins with the child, the mind wrapped up in itself. The next step is the developed opposition, the tension between a universality which is still subjective (ideals, imaginings, moral demands, hopes, etc.) and immediate individuality, i.e. both the existing world, which fails to meet the ideals, and the position in it of the individual himself, who, in his current state, still lacks independence and intrinsic maturity (the youth) . Next there is the genuine relationship: recognition of the objective necessity and rationality of the world as we find it, a world no longer incomplete, but able, in the work which it accomplishes in and for itself, to afford the individual a share and a confirmation for his activity. This makes the individual somebody, with actual presence and objective value (the man) . Last of all comes the completion of the unity with this objectivity: a unity which, while in its reality it passes into the inertia of deadening habit, in its ideality gains freedom from the limited interests and entanglements of the external present (old age).
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The ‘differences’ here are the ages of life, §396, sexual differences, §397, and sleeping and waking, §398) and the differences are primarily natural and hence the concern of anthropology and yet to describe fully for instance waking, it is necessary to know what it is like for a cultured adult to be awake, not simply an infant. Hegel distinguishes four ages of life (not seven like the Bard, see below). First, childhood: mind is ‘wrapped up in itself’, then youth, a gulf or ‘opposition’ opens up between the world and the individual, the world does not measure up to the youth’s ideals and the youth is not yet equipped for his part in the world. Third, manhood, the opposition is reconciled by the individual’s recognizing the necessity and rationality of the world and finding a respectable position in it for which he is well equipped and this is a sophisticated contentment with the world, in contrast to the immediate contentment of childhood. ‘World’ here refers not to raw nature but to the world already formed by human beings. And fourth, old age, the reconciliation between world and individual goes beyond the ‘genuine relationship’ of middle age to a ‘unity’ that brings with it the inertia of ‘habit’ a concept first considered in §§409–10 and freedom from the concerns of the present and this sophisticated grand contentment with the world is something Hegel himself did not live to experience. On the pattern: immediate unity 0 opposition — restored unity, see §387.
‘Zusatz. When the soul, which at first is completely universal, particularizes itself in the way we have indicated and finally determines itself to singularity, to individuality, it enters into opposition to its inner universality, to its substance. This contradiction between the immediate individuality and the substantial universality implicitly present in it, establishes the life-process of the individual soul, a process by which the immediate individuality of the soul is brought into conformity with the universal, the universal is actualized in the soul and thus the initial, simple unity of the soul with itself is raised to a unity mediated by the opposition, and the initially abstract universality of the soul is developed to concrete universality. This process of development is education. Even merely animal life in its way exhibits this process implicitly. But, as we saw earlier, it does not have the power genuinely to actualize the genus within itself; its immediate, abstract individuality, an individuality that simply is, always remains in contradiction with its genus, both excluding it from itself and including it within itself. By this inability to exhibit the genus perfectly, the mere living creature perishes’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The ‘natural soul’ is to begin with ‘completely universal’, it particularized and then individualized itself in the stages described in §§391, but the soul as an individual keeps an ‘inner universality’, its substance and between individuality and universality there is opposition and contradiction. The life-process of the individual soul is driven by this contradiction and eventually overcomes it and as individuality and universality are brought together the original simple unity of the soul of the child with itself becomes in adulthood a unity mediated in youth by opposition and universality becomes concrete rather than abstract and the elderly become even more universal than the adult because they lose interest in individual details of the present and focus almost exclusively upon the universal, see §396.
We can detect a couple of issues here however. To begin with the universality to which the individual has to be reconciled is not the universality of the natural soul but the universality of the objective, primarily cultural, world, and the former is abstract and the latter concrete. Concrete (konkret) derivesfrom the Latin concretus, grown together, the perfect participle of concrescere, to grow together. The universality to which the adult attains is the universality grown together out of youthful opposition and not the abstract universality that presupposes no prior opposition. And further, the soul that is completely universal is not the child, but the natural soul that is prior (logically albeit not temporally prior) to individuality. The child is individual but not in opposition to the universal, opposition arises in youth and if the life-process stems from the contradiction between individuality and universality and in childhood there is no such contradiction it is not so evident what propels the advance from childhood to youth. See §396,
The life-process of an animal is in addition propelled by a contradiction between the individual and universality, that is to say, the genus or species. Hegel employs Gattung, the standard word for genus, rather than Art, species, in virtue of its connection with Begattung, copulation. The individual cannot actualize the genus or represent it perfectly and so the individual dies, terminated so to speak by the power of the genus endeavouring to actualize itself. This realization of the genus is abstract, the genus destroys the individual, which is also abstract in virtue of its incompatibility with the genus, individual and genus cannot grow together. see §381.
John Thomas, (1826–1913), ‘Scenes of Childhood’.
Humans bring to reality the genus in two ways in that it is genuinely realized when we think about it, think universal thoughts, see §381, but we also realize it at the anthropological level, not as adequately as in thought, but better than a lower animal does. And unlike its realization in thought this is a gradual realization in time for thought is to be conceived of as non-temporal for a few reasons. The thought one thinks if not the thinking of i, is non-temporal, it does not take time to think a thought, albeit to think a concrete thought properly one must in addition think the thoughts that grow together to form it. And in philosophical thinking one does not think about specific times and dates.
‘This sequence of distinct states is the series of the ages of life. It begins with the immediate, still undifferentiated unity of the genus and the individuality, with the abstract emergence of the immediate individuality, with the birth of the individual, and ends with the impression of the genus into the individuality, or of the individuality into the genus, with the victory of the genus over the individuality, with the abstract negation of the individuality, -with death. What the genus is in life as such, rationality is in the realm of mind; for the genus already has inner universality, the determination pertaining to the rational. This unity of the genus and the rational explains why the mental phenomena appearing in the course of the ages of life correspond to the physical alterations that also develop in the course of the individual’s life’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Impression is a translation of Einbildung which has come to mean imagination but is literally forming, moulding [Bildung] into [ein], particularly but not exclusively into the soul. The animal dies since it cannot otherwise realize its genus, the human dies because it does realize its genus and in each case the individual dies when it has done as much as it can to realize its genus.
The genus and the rational both have inner universality, which is to say, they are self-developing universals that constitute the entities to which they belong and determine the course of their development. A dog’s caninity unlike its brown colour significantly determines the pace and stages of its growth. See §383 and 387, and the ‘Encylopaedia Logic’ §§163–4. Reason or the rational likewise develops autonomously and significantly determines pace and order of the development of an individual mind and because an animal has no significant mental development and because the genus applies to animals as well as men and women the genus is concerned primarily with the physical alterations of an individual and the rational concern by contrast mental phenomena. And yet the stages of our physical and mental growth tend to correspond since genus and rationality are both inner universals and the correspondence between a person’s physical age and mental development is closer than that between the physical and mental characteristics of a race because an individual’s soul affects its body, that is, soul (or the rational) and body (or genus) do not develop independently of each other yet the physique and mentality of a race are fixed independently of each other and are less likely to coincide in any given individual. As for child prodigies are a not a particularly significant exception to the general correspondence of bodily and mental age.
‘Now the process of development of the natural human individual splits up into a series of processes whose difference rests on the different relationship of the individual to the genus and establishes the difference between the child, the man, and the elderly. These differences are presentations of the differences of the concept. Childhood is, therefore, the time of natural harmony, of the peace of the individual with himself and with the world,-the oppositionless beginning, just as old age is the oppositionless end. The oppositions which may emerge in childhood remain without deeper interest. The child lives in innocence, without lasting pain, in the love it has for its parents and in the feeling of being loved by them. This immediate and therefore unspiritual, purely natural unity of the individual with its genus and with the world generally, must be sublated; the individual must advance to-the point where he opposes himself to the universal as the finished and subsisting substance that is in and for itself, to the point where he apprehends himself in his independence. But this independence, this opposition, at first appears in just as one-sided a shape as does the unity of the subjective and the objective in the child. The youth dissects the Idea actualized in the world, in the following manner: to himself he ascribes the true and the good, the determination of the substantial which belongs to the nature of the Idea; to the world, by contrast, he ascribes the determination of the contingent, accidental. We cannot come to a standstill at this untrue opposition; the youth must rise above it to the insight that, on the contrary, the world is to be viewed as the substantial, and the individual by contrast only as an accident,-that therefore man can find his essential activity and satisfaction only in the world that pursues its steady course independently in face of him, and that for this reason he must acquire the skill necessary for the substance. -Reaching this standpoint, the youth has become a man. Complete within himself, the man views the ethical world-order too as an order that does not first need to be produced by him, but as essentially complete. Thus he is active for, not against, the substance, he has an interest for the substance, not against it, he has thus risen above the one-sided subjectivity of youth to the standpoint of objective mindfulness. — Old age, by contrast, is the return to a lack of interest in things the old man has lived his way into things and just because of this unity with things, in which the opposition is lost, he abandons active interest in things’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Hegel runs trough the four ages of man again already outlined. The genus, on the different relationship to which the different ages depend, has changed its role and is now primarily man and woman’s rationality and general culture, not his or her physical structure, see §396. The ages present the differences of the concept only roughly because there are four ages, yet usually only three differences of the concept, immediate unity (universality) — opposition (particularity) — individuality (unity restored). The first is presented by childhood. Opposition appears in youth between the individual and the universal or world, the youth assigns opposed values to the opposites, he regards himself as true, good, substantial, and the world as contingent, accidental. That is to say, he believes the world needs to be perfected in conformity with his ideals which is a mistake, the world is not a blank canvas waiting for the youth to fill it in as he or she pleases nor an imperfect sketch in need of completion, it is already complete, an ethical world-order imbued with the Idea that the youth mistakenly transfers to him or herself. And so in endeavouring to reform the world the youth is banging his or her head against a brick wall nonetheless the opposition and the perverse valuation are essential for the emergence of the independent adult. One has to aim beyond one’s target in order to hit it and the opposition persists into manhood which is hence also a phase of particularity. And yet the valuation is reversed, the world is now substantial, the individual an accident, now the process of reconciliation can get off the ground, because it is much easier to bring oneself into conformity with the world than to bring the world into conformity with oneself. As previously the transitions from youth to manhood and from manhood to old age are better motivated than the passage from childhood to youth though there is a more detailed account of childhood to come, in particular on the child’s desire to grow up.
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All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
- Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’, Act “, Scene 7.
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‘Childhood we can differentiate again into three stages, or if we wish to include in the sphere of our treatment the unborn child which is identical with its mother, into four stages. The unborn child has as yet no proper individuality, no individuality to enter into relationship with particular objects in a particular manner or to draw in an external thing at a determinate point of its organism. The life of the unborn child resembles the life of a plant. Just as a plant has no interrupted intussusception but a continuous stream of nutriment, so too the child feeds at first by a continual sucking and as yet possesses no interrupted respiration. When the child is brought into the world out of this vegetative state in which it resides in the womb, it passes into the animal mode of life. Birth is, therefore, a tremendous leap. By it the child emerges from the state of a completely oppositionless life into the state of separation,-into the relationship to light and air and into a continually developing relationship to individualized objects in general and especially to individualized nourishment. The first way in which the child establishes its independence is breathing, the inhalation and exhalation of air at an individual point of its body, a process that interrupts the elemental flow. Immediately after the birth of the child, its body already shows itself as almost fully organized; only single details alter in it. Thus, for example, the so-called foramen ovale closes up only later. The main alteration in the child’s body consists in growth. In connection with this alteration it is hardly necessary to recall that in animal life generally, in contrast to vegetable life, growth is not a coming-out-of-itself, not an extrusion beyond itself, not a production of new structures, but is only a development of the organism and produces merely quantitative, formal difference, which relates both to the degree of strength and to the extension.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Hegel writes elsewhere:
‘The plant’s lack of sensibility may also be attributed to the coincidence between its subjective unity and its quality and particularization; unlike that of the animal, its being-within-self is not yet a nervous system which is independent of external being. Only that which has the faculty of sense can endure itself as other, assimilate this opposition by the resilience of its individuality, and venture into conflict with other individualities. The plant is the immediate organic individuality, in which the genus preponderates, and reflection is not individual. The individual plant does not return into itself as such, it is an other, and it therefore lacks sentience. The sensitivity of certain plants is merely a mechanical elasticity. It is not an example of sentience, and resembles the dormant state of plants, in which the relationship to light is the active principle’.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
The plant is the immediate organic individuality in which the genus has the preponderance and the reflection is not individual, the individual does not return into itself as such but is an Other and so has no self-feeling. Whereas the animal is silent or expresses its pain only by groaning, the child expresses the feeling of its needs by screaming. By this ideal activity the child shows that it is straightaway imbued with the certainty that it has a right to demand from the external world the satisfaction of its needs, -that the independence of the external world in face of man is void. Now as regards the mental development of the child in this first stage of its life, it can be said that man never learns more than in this period. Here the child makes itself gradually familiar with all specifications of the sensory. The external world now becomes an actuality for it. It progresses from sensation to intuition. Initially the child has only a sensation of light by which things are manifest to it. This mere sensation misleads the child into reaching out for something distant as if it were near. But through the sense of feeling the child orientates itself in regard to distances. Thus it gains an eye for distance, in general it casts the external out of itself. In this period, too, the child learns that external things offer resistance’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The idea is not that the external world is mind-dependent in the sense of traditional idealism, but rather that it is ready for colonization by mind and vulnerable to our practical and cognitive interventions. And yet elsewhere he attributes this attitude to lower animals because they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being but despairing of their reality and completely assured of their nothingness they fall to without ceremony and eat them up.
‘With this appeal to universal experience we may be permitted to anticipate how the case stands in the practical sphere. In this respect we can tell those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-objects that they should go hack to the most elementary school of wisdom, viz. the ancient EIeusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, and that they have still to learn the secret meaning of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. For he who is initiated into these Mysteries not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to despair of it; in part he brings about the nothingness of such things himself in his dealings with them, and in part he sees them reduce themselves to nothingness. Even the animals are not shut out from this wisdom but,,on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it; for they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up. And all Nature, like the animals, celebrates these open Mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Sensation and intuition will be considered later, in particular on the transition from sensation to intuition. Intuition is similar to perception, also dealt with later, and the transition from sensation to intuition is similar to the transition from sensory consciousness to perception in §418–19 and yet the two pairs of terms and their respective transitions belong to different phases of Hegel’s thought and are not explicitly brought together. To say that the child casts the external out of itself does not mean that it creates the external but rather that it becomes aware of the external world by referring its inner sensations to things outside it, see §389. Its awareness of an external world distinct from itself and its sensations is essential for its awareness of itself as an I.
But compare William James and his rejection of what he designates the eccentric projection of sensations.
‘The sensation, we say, comes from the ground. The ground’s place seems to be its place; although at the same time, and for very similar practical reasons, we think of another optical and tactile object, ‘the hand’ namely, and consider that its place also must be the place of our sensation. In other words, we take an object or sensible content A, and confounding it with another object otherwise known, B, or with two objects otherwise known, B and C, we identify its place with their places. But in all this there is no ‘projecting’ (such as the extradition-philosophers talk of) of A out of an original place; no primitive location which it first occupied, away from these other sensations, has to be contradicted; no natural ‘centre,’ from which it is expelled, exists. That would imply that A aboriginally came to us in definite local relations with other sensations, for to be out of B and C is to be in local relation with them as much as to be in them is so. But it was no more out of B and C than it was in them when it first came to us. It simply had nothing to do with them. To say that we feel a sensation’s seat to be ‘in the brain’ or ‘against the eye’ or ‘under the skin’ is to say as much about it and to deal with it in as non-primitive a way as to say that it is a mile off. These are all secondary perceptions, ways of defining the sensation’s seat per aliud. They involve numberless associations, identifications, and imaginations, and admit a great deal of vacillation and uncertainty in the result. I conclude, then, that there is no truth in the ‘eccentric projection’ theory. It is due to the confused assumption that the bodily processes which cause a sensation must also be its seat. But sensations have no seat in this sense. They become seats for each other, as fast as experience associates them together; but that violates no primitive seat possessed by any one of them. And though our sensations cannot then so analyze and talk of themselves, yet at their very first appearance quite as much as at any later date are they cognizant of all those qualities which we end by extracting and conceiving under the names of objectivity, exteriority, and extent. It is surely subjectivity and interiority which are the notions latest acquired by the human mind’.
- ‘Principles of Psychology’
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‘To My Little Son’
by Julia Johnson Davis (1909–1961)
In your face I sometimes see
Shadowings of the man to be,
And, eager,
Dream of what my son shall be,
Dream of what my son will be, In twenty years and one.
When you are to manhood grown,
And all your manhood ways are known,
Then shall I, blissful, try to trace
The child you once were in your face.
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‘The transition from childhood to boyhood is to b e located in the development of the child’s activity towards the external world; the child, in gaining a feeling of the actuality of the external world, begins to become an actual human being itself and to feel itself as such; but in doing so it passes on to the practical tendency to put itself to the test in this actuality. The child is equipped for this practical response by growing teeth, by learning to stand, to walk, and to speak. The first thing to be learnt here is to stand upright. This is peculiar to man and can only be effected by his will; a man stands only in so far as he wills to stand; as soon as we no longer will to stand, we collapse; standing is, therefore, the habit of the will to stand. Man acquires an even freer relationship to the external world by walking; by this he sublates the asunderness of space and gives himself his own place. But speech enables man to apprehend things as universal, to attain to the consciousness of his own universality, to the enunciation of the I. This apprehension of its I-hood is a supremely important point in the mental development of the child; at this point it begins to reflect itself into itself out of its immersion in the external world. Initially this incipient independence expresses itself in the child’s learning to play with sensory things. But the most rational thing that children can do with their toys is to break them’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Hegel returns to the upright posture distinctive of human beings in §§410–11 where he discusses habit. It is of principle importance since it comes to us less naturally than crawling or walking on all fours so that it requires a special effort of will that only humans can muster. Specifically human walking presupposes the upright stance, it sublates the asunderness of space in that I can walk from one place to another, therefore overcoming their separateness, and also decide where I want to place myself. Lower animals also walk but they do not acquire a language, language enables one both to view things as instances of a universal type and to regard oneself as ‘I’. ‘I’ itself is universal in that it expresses the bare individual, what is common to all human beings, in contrast to its particular states and activities, hence if one regards oneself as ‘I’, one can detach oneself from one’s particular states and activities and also from the external things that produce the states and provoke the activities. On the I or ego, see §413.
There are two arguments opposed to the view that learning should be sweetened by play. First, that which makes the child educable is its desire to become like the adults in its surroundings and if the adults present themselves as playful, that is childlike, this desire is not exploited to the full. Second, children so educated will as adults treat everything disdainfully. Opposed to the view that children should be encouraged to raise quibbles about what they are taught there are also two objections, that this diminishes the ideal towards which the child is striving, and that it makes them impudent. To become a proper adult one needs instruction in ‘the substance’(die Sache), the culture of the age and this is a serious and not a playful matter and only upon imbibing it are one’s thoughts and objections worth considering. See §395.
there are two reasons given for discipline. If children are allowed to follow their own inclinations they go wrong and do not learn what is right and uninhibited indulgence in one’s own inclinations is intrinsically bad and one has to learn to overcome them. The reasonable assumption is that one’s own inclinations tend to be selfish. Innocence consists in ignorance of good and evil, an ignorant infant or any animal is innocent whatever it does. Upon acquiring knowledge of good and evil then self-will (Eigenwille) is the source of evil.
This is illustrated elsewhere with the biblical story of the Fall.
‘In our Mosaic myth, moreover, we find that the occasion for stepping out of the unity [of innocence] was provided for humanity by external instigation (by the serpent) . But in fact, the entry into the antithesis, the awakening of consciousness, lies within human beings themselves, and this is the story that repeats itself in every human being. The serpent expounds divinity as consisting in the knowledge of good and evil, and it is this cognition that was in fact imparted to man when he broke with the unity of his immediate being and ate of the forbidden fruit. The first reflection of awakening consciousness was that the human beings became aware that they were naked. This is a very naive and profound trait. For shame does testify to the severance of human beings from their natural and sensible being. Hence animals, which do not get as far as this severance, are without shame. So the spiritual and ethical origin of clothing is to be sought for in the human feeling of shame; the merely physical need, on the contrary, is something only secondary. At this point there follows the so-called Curse that God laid upon human beings. What this highlights is connected with the antithesis of man and nature. Man must labour in the sweat of his brow, and woman must bring forth in sorrow. What is said about labour is, more precisely, that it is both the result of the schism and also its overcoming. Animals find what they need for the satisfaction of their wants immediately before them; human beings, by contrast, relate to the means for the satisfaction of their wants as something that they themselves bring forth and shape. Thus, even in what is here external, man is related to himself’.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’’
On the benefits of discipline:
‘With regard to one of the two aspects of education, discipline, the boy should not be allowed to follow his own inclination; he must obey in order to learn to command. Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom; for through obedience the will that does not yet know the true, the objective, that does not make this its goal and therefore far from being genuinely independent and free is still immature, accepts within itself the rational will coming to it from outside and gradually makes this its own will. On the other hand, if one allows children to do as they please, if one commits the additional folly of handing over to them reasons for their whims, then one falls into the worst mode of education, children develop a deplorable absorption in particular likes and dislikes, in peculiar cleverness, in self-centred interest,-the root of all evil. By nature, the child is neither evil nor good, since it starts without any knowledge either of good or of evil. To regard this unknowing innocence as an ideal and to yearn to return to it would be silly; it is without value and of short duration. Self-will and evil soon emerge in the child. This self-will must be broken by discipline, this seed of evil must be annihilated by it’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
See also Hegel’s account of mastery and bondage in §435, and at greater length elsewhere:
‘Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains at the formal stage, and does not extend to the known real world of existence. Without the formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become explicitly for itself If consciousness fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-centred attitude; for its form or negativity is not negativity per se, and therefore its formative activity cannot give it a consciousness of itself as essential being. If it has not experienced absolute fear but only some lesser dread, the negative being has remained for it something external, its substance has not been infected by it through and through. Since the entire contents of its natural consciousness have not been jeopardized, determinate being still in principle attaches to it; having a ‘mind of one’s own’ is self-win, a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude. Just as little as the pure form can become essential being for it, just as little is that form, regarded as extended to the particular, a universal formative activity, an absolute Notion; rather it is a skill which is master over some things, but not over the universal power and the whole of objective being’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
On language and the alphabet, see also §459.
‘With regard to the other side of education, instruction, it is to be noted that this rationally begins with the most abstract thing that the child’s mind can grasp. This is the alphabet. This presupposes an abstraction to which entire races, for example, even the Chinese, have not attained. Language in general is this airy element, this sensory-unsensory, by increasing knowledge of which the child’s mind rises more and more above the sensory, the individual, to the universal, to thinking. This growing capacity for thinking is the greatest benefit of primary education. But the child only gets as far as representational thinking; the world is only for his representation; he learns the qualities of things, becomes acquainted with the circumstances of the worlds of nature and mind, develops an interest in things, but does not yet cognize the world in its inner connectedness. This knowledge comes only with manhood’
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The child rises above the sensory in a variety of ways. In contrast to an ideographic script such as Chinese an alphabet consists of intrinsically meaningless signs standing for sounds that are themselves signs. In contrast to a syllabic script such as Japanese it analyses spoken sounds as far as possible. Spoken language itself is both sensory and unsensory in that while the sounds of which it consists are sensory they are intrinsically meaningless and bear no non-conventional relationship to what they express or denote. Language consists of universals: phonemes and letters are universals, types that may be instantiated by indefinitely many tokens and language also expresses universal concepts or thoughts and not simply individual entities and states of affairs. Nonetheless a youngster gets only as far as representational thinking, that is, such universal but nevertheless representational thoughts as ‘animal’ and ‘The horse is an animal’ but not such pure thoughts as ‘being’ or such claims about the ‘world in its inner connectedness’ as ‘Spirit came into being as the truth of nature’ (see §388).
And yet they appreciate the super-sensory world in this representational form and should be introduced to religion, and to right namely law and formal morality, early on, and this is best done at school where the child is not valued simply as the individual it is but is assessed according to general rules and criteria, i is subjected to universal regulations which forbid things such as walking on the lawn which though harmless if done by one individual are harmful if done by many and this prepares it for the transition from the family (see §518) which usually forbids only activities that are in themselves harmful) to the rules and regulations of civil society (see §523). Two distinct conceptions of the non-sensory are in operation. First there is abstract thought about the sensory world and abstract rules for our conduct in it and second there is the super-sensory world of Christianity, a world located beyond the sensory world. The two conceptions are closely connected, and religion as well as right is best taught in school where we are governed by abstract regulations. At the level of representation, the super-sensory world of Christianity appears to rise above the sensory in a quite different way from abstract thinking and abstract practices, at the level of philosophical thought on the other hand the two conceptions converge. To be a Christian is to think about this world and about oneself in a particular way and also to act in a certain way. On Christianity, see §564 and on Christianity’s greater exaltation above the sensory and absorption in its own inwardness in contrast to Greek religion, see §557.
‘One must therefore describe as an error the claim that a boy as yet understands nothing whatever of religion and right, that therefore he must not be bothered with these matters, that on no account must ideas be forced on him, but on the contrary he must be provided with experiences of his own and one must be content to let him be stimulated by what is sensorily present. Even the ancients did not allow children to dwell for long on the sensory. But the modern mind involves a wholly different elevation above the sensory, a much deeper absorption in its own inwardness, than the ancient mind. Therefore, the super-sensory world should now be presented to the boy’s imagination at an early age. This happens in a much higher degree through the school than in the family. In the family the child is accepted in its immediate individuality, is loved whether its behaviour is good or bad. In school, on the other hand, the immediacy of the child no longer counts; here it is esteemed only according to its worth, according to its achievements; here it is no longer merely loved but criticized and guided in accordance with universal determinations, moulded by the objects of instruction according to fixed rules, in general, subjected to a universal order which forbids much that is innocent in itself, because it cannot be permitted that everyone does it. The school thus forms the transition from the family into civil society. But to civil society the boy has at first only an indeterminate relationship; his interest is still divided between learning and playing’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
‘The boy matures into a youth, when with the onset of puberty the life of the genus begins to stir in him and to seek satisfaction. The youth turns, in general, to the substantial universal; his ideal no longer appears to him, as it does to the boy, in the person of a man, but is conceived by him as a universal, independent of such individuality. But in the youth this ideal still has a more or less subjective shape, whether it lives in him as an ideal of love and friendship or as an ideal of a universal state of the world. In this subjectivity of the substantial content of such an ideal lies not only its opposition to the current world, but also the urge to sublate this opposition by actualizing the ideal. The content of the ideal instills into the youth the feeling of energy; he therefore fancies himself called and qualified to transform the world, or at least to readjust the world that seems to him to be out of joint. That the substantial universal contained in his ideal has, in keeping with its essence, already attained to development and actualization in the world, is not discerned by the zealous mind of the youth. To him the actualization of that universal seems a lapse from it. Therefore he feels that both his ideal and his own personality are not recognized by the world Thus the peace in which the child lives with the world is broken by the youth. Because of this direction towards the ideal, youth has the semblance of a nobler sense and greater selflessness than is seen in the man, who attends to his particular, temporal interests. As against this, it must be pointed out that the man is no longer wrapped up in his particular impulses and subjective views and occupied only with his personal development; on the contrary, he has plunged into the reason of actuality and proves himself active for the world. The youth necessarily arrives at this goal. His immediate aim is to cultivate himself in order to equip himself for the actualization of his ideals. In attempting this actualization he becomes a man’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The life of the genus here combines the ideas of universality and of sexual desire, see §396. That the youth’s ideal is detached from any individual person enables the youth to view the ideal as unrealized. If an ideal is embodied in a particular person, the ideal is at least actualized in that person. Why must the youth regard the ideal as unrealized when it is already realized? We may detect four responses. First, one of the youth’s aims, sexual love, is at this stage likely to be unrealized and this dissatisfaction is transferred to the youth’s assessment of the world as a whole. Second, the youth wants his or her own personality to be recognized by the world and this aim is not yet realized and never will be in the egocentric form that youth requires. Third, the youth is out of tune with world, not yet equipped to play a part in it and he or she blames the world for this not him or herself. And fourth, the youth needs an unrealized ideal to motivate his or her ascent to man or womanhood, he or she becomes a man or woman in endeavouring to equip him or herself to realize the ideal. But why could he not become a man or woman by simply continuing to model him or herself on his father or mother? One may suppose it is because the youth’s ascent requires more energy than is now discernible in his or her father or mother who is by now a complacent middle-aged bourgeois.
On civil society in contrast to the family, the state, and, presumably, the university, see §396 and 523.
‘At first, the transition from his ideal life into civil society can appear to the youth as a painful transition into the life of the philistine. The youth, who hitherto has been occupied only with universal objects and has worked only for himself, now that he is growing into manhood and entering into practical life, must be active for others and attend to individual details. Now, however much this lies in the nature of things-since if one is to act, one must get down to the individual case — , the occupation with details can at first be very distressing to a human being, and the impossibility of an immediate actualization of his ideals can make him hypochondriac. This hypochondria, however inconspicuous it may be in many cases, is not easy for anyone to escape. The later the age at which it attacks a man, the more serious are its symptoms. In weak natures it can persist throughout the entire lifetime. In this diseased mood the man will not give up his subjectivity, is unable to overcome his aversion to actuality, and by this very fact resides in a state of relative incapacity which easily becomes an actual incapacity. If, therefore, the man does not want to perish, then he must recognize the world as an independent, essentially complete world, accept the conditions set for him by it and wrest from its obduracy what he wills to have for himself. As a rule, the man believes that he must agree to this compliance only from necessity. But, in truth, this unity with the world must be recognized not as a relationship of necessity, but as the rational relationship. The rational, the divine, possesses the absolute power to actualize itself and has, right from the beginning, fulfilled itself; it is not so impotent that it would have to wait for the beginning of its actualization. The world is this actualization of divine reason; it is only on its surface that the play of contingencies prevails. The world can lay claim, therefore, with at least as much right as the individual becoming a man, indeed with even greater right, to be regarded as complete and independent; and therefore the man acts entirely rationally in abandoning his plan for a complete transformation of the world and in striving to actualize his personal aims, passions, and interests only in his connection to the world. Even so, this leaves him scope for an honourable, far-reaching and creative activity. For although the world must be recognized as essentially complete, yet it is not a dead, absolutely inert world but, like the life-process, a world that perpetually produces itself anew, a world that, in simply preserving itself, at the same time progresses. It is in this preserving production and continuance of the world that the man’s work consists. Therefore, on the one hand we can say that the man only produces what is already there. Yet on the other hand, his activity must also bring about an advance. But the world’s progress occurs only on the large scale and is only noticeable in a great sum total of what has been produced. If the man after a labour of fifty years looks back on his past, he will already recognize the progress. This knowledge, as well as insight into the rationality of the world, liberates him from sorrow over the destruction of his ideals. What is true in these ideals is preserved in the practical activity; what the man must work out of his system is only what is untrue, the empty abstractions’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The hypochondria induced by the descent from generalities to details and by the inability to realize one’s ideals seems to be depression or malaise rather than a tendency to imagine that one is ill. Three claims are presented concerning the world. It is independent (Selbstständige) and complete (fertige). It cannot easily be altered in accordance with the subjectivity, the hopes and wishes, of the individual. To try to change it as one might for instance rebuild or refurnish one’s house is both impracticable because the world is independent and superfluous since it is already complete. And so it is necessary to adapt to the world and its ways but it is also desirable to do so, the world embodies a rationality far exceeding the bright ideas of any single individual and this rationality is divine rather than human and this is connected with the first point. That such rationality is divine implies that it is embodied in an independent and complete world. God does not need any particular Tom Dick or Harry or Sue Jane or Mary to realize his plan, though he does of course need human beings in general so individuals need to act and their activity serves three purposes, first, it gets the individual what he or she wants, as long as his or her aims are realistic and his or her behaviour adapted to the ways of the world. And along with the activity of many other individuals it preserves the world. (Further, in addition it helps to change or develop the world, the world develops like a living organism, individuals and their conduct develop along with it and such change is discernible only over large areas and long (fifty-year) periods.
Such change is progress and in retrospect the individual derives satisfaction from his or her contribution to it and to the rationality embodied in it, such progress fulfils what is true in our youthful ideals, the rest is dross to be discarded. Different individuals have different callings, but common to them all is right, ethics, and religion, they perform their civic and familial duties and the duties attached to their particular calling, and, as well as performing specifically religious duties they preserve and promote the work of God as it manifests itself in the world. To be a fully fledged adult an individual must complete his or her education and earn his or her own living. For an individual to live in idleness and dependence is comparable to a people’s being ruled by paternalistic temporal and spiritual authorities rather than attending to its own interests by free trade and the Protestant religion. After all, what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational, (see the ‘Philosophy of Right’) a claim that does not entail that every fifty-year period exhibits in retrospect progress or improvement in the human condition. This rationality allows for and even requires periods of apparent decline and collapse. When St. Augustine died in 430 AD, the invading Vandals were besieging Hippo. As for who sees progress since 380AD no doubt the Vandals did. St. Augustine in considering his own grand contribution to Christianity and to thought in general and reflecting on the vicissitudes ordained by divine providence and the possibility that the Vandals will eventually adopt the culture they are attempting to destroy may discern progress but the ordinary citizen of Hippo might reasonably see nothing but the destruction of fifty years’ work.
‘When the man now passes into practical life, he may well be vexed and morose about the state of the world and lose hope of any improvement; but in spite of this he finds his place in objective conditions and becomes habituated to them and to his occupation. The objects with which he has to occupy himself are, it is true, individual, changeable, in their peculiarity more or less new. But at the same time, these individual details contain a universal, a rule, something lawful. The longer the man is now active in his occupation, the more this universal emerges out of all the particularities. In this way he gets to be completely at home in his field, to immerse himself thoroughly in his destiny. The essential element in all the objects of his occupation is then entirely familiar to him and only the individual, the inessential can occasionally present him with something new. By the very fact, however, that his activity has become so completely appropriate to his business, that his activity no longer meets with any resistance in its objects, precisely by this completed cultivation of his activity, the vitality of the activity expires; for the interest of the subject in the object disappears together with the opposition between the subject and the object. Thus by the habit of mental life, as well as by the dulling of the activity of his physical organism, the man becomes an old man’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
That in the course of one’s career one discerns the universal in one’s tasks and thus becomes perfectly familiar with them is more plausible of some jobs than of others, playing chess, teaching philosophy, and possibly political activity are not easily mastered or exhausted in a single lifetime, especially if the progress mentioned in §396 implies that the tasks themselves change. The elimination of the opposition between subject and object is something to be striven for but when it becomes complete and no further object arises to offer resistance to the subject, the subject lapses into inactivity. Life requires opposition and conflict. Death is an abstract negation because unlike a concrete’ negation it terminates what it negates and does not develop it into something new.
‘The old man lives without any definite interest, for he has abandoned the hope of actualizing the ideals he cherished earlier and the future seems to promise him nothing new at all; on the contrary, he believes that he already knows the universal, the essential in anything he may still encounter. The mind of the old man is thus turned only towards this universal and to the past to which he owes the knowledge of this universal. But in thus living in recollection of the past and of the substantial, he loses his memory for details of the present and for what is arbitrary, names for example, in the same measure that, conversely, he firmly retains in his mind the wise teachings of experience and feels obliged to preach to those younger than himself. But this wisdom, this lifeless, complete coincidence of subjective activity with its world, leads back to oppositionless childhood, in the same way that the growth of the activity of his physical organism into a static habit leads on to the abstract negation of the living individuality, to death. The course of the ages of man’s life thus rounds itself off into a concept determined totality of alterations which are produced by the interaction of the genus with the individuality’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
For my lovely One… we grow young together 👩❤️👨
Songs were meant to sing while we’re young
Every day is spring while we’re young
None can refuse, time flies so fast
Too dear to lose, and too sweet to last
Though it may be just for today
Share our love we must, while we may
How blue the sky, all sweet surprise
Shines before our eyes while we’re young
How blue the sky, all sweet surprise
Shines before our eyes whilе we’re young
Coming up next:
Subjectivity and activity.
It may stop but it never ends …
