On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Mind’: the self-knowing, actual Idea — part nine.
‘Psyche; or, the legend of Love’
by Mary Tighe (1772–1810)
CANTO I. (continued)
For she was timid as the wintry flower,
That, whiter than the snow it blooms among,
Droops its fair head submissive to the power
Of every angry blast which sweeps along
Sparing the lovely trembler, while the strong
Majestic tenants of the leafless wood
It levels low. But, ah! the pitying song
Must tell how, than the tempest’s self more rude,
Fierce wrath and cruel hate their suppliant prey pursued.
Indignant quitting her deserted fanes,
Now Cytherea sought her favourite isle,
And there from every eye her secret pains
‘Mid her thick myrtle bowers conceal’d awhile;
Practis’d no more the glance, or witching smile,
But nursed the pang she never felt before,
Of mortified disdain; then to beguile
The hours which mortal flattery soothed no more,
She various plans revolved her influence to restore.
She called her son with unaccustomed voice;
Not with those thrilling accents of delight
Which bade so oft enchanted Love rejoice,
Soft as the breezes of a summer’s night:
Now choked with rage its change could Love affright;
As all to sudden discontent a prey,
Shunning the cheerful day’s enlivening light,
She felt the angry power’s malignant sway,
And bade her favourite boy her vengeful will obey.
Bathed in those tears which vanquish human hearts,
“Oh, son beloved!” (the suppliant goddess cried,)
“If e’er thy too indulgent mother’s arts
“Subdued for thee the potent deities
“Who rule my native deep, or haunt the skies;
“Or if to me the grateful praise be due,
“That to thy sceptre bow the great and wise,
“Now let thy fierce revenge my foe pursue,
“And let my rival scorned her vain presumption rue.
“For what to me avails my former boast
“That, fairer than the wife of Jove confest,
“I gained the prize thus basely to be lost?
“With me the world’s devotion to contest
“Behold a mortal dares; though on my breast
“Still vainly brilliant shines the magic zone.
“Yet, yet I reign: by you my wrongs redrest,
“The world with humbled Psyche soon shall own
“That Venus, beauty’s queen, shall be adored alone.
“Deep let her drink of that dark, bitter spring,
“Which flows so near thy bright and crystal tide;
“Deep let her heart thy sharpest arrow sting,
“Its tempered barb in that black poison dyed.
“Let her, for whom contending princes sighed,
“Feel all the fury of thy fiercest flame
“For some base wretch to foul disgrace allied,
“Forgetful of her birth and her fair fame,
“Her honours all defiled, and sacrificed to shame.”
Then, with sweet pressure of her rosy lip,
A kiss she gave bathed in ambrosial dew;
The thrilling joy he would for ever sip,
And his moist eyes in ecstasy imbrue.
But she whose soul still angry cares pursue,
Snatched from the soft caress her glowing charms;
Her vengeful will she then enforced anew,
As she in haste dismissed him from her arms,
The cruel draught to seek of anguish and alarms.
‘Mid the blue waves by circling seas embraced
A chosen spot of fairest land was seen;
For there with favouring hand had Nature placed
All that could lovely make the varied scene:
Eternal Spring there spread her mantle green;
There high surrounding hills deep-wooded rose
O’er placid lakes; while marble rocks between
The fragrant shrubs their pointed heads disclose,
And balmy breathes each gale which o’er the island blows.
Pleasure had called the fertile lawns her own,
And thickly strewed them with her choicest flowers;
Amid the quiet glade her golden throne
Bright shone with lustre through o’erarching bowers:
There her fair train, the ever downy Hours,
Sport on light wing with the young Joys entwin’d:
While Hope delighted from her full lap showers
Blossoms, whose fragrance can the ravished mind
Inebriate with dreams of rapture unconfined.
And in the grassy centre of the isle,
Where the thick verdure spreads a damper shade,
Amid their native rocks concealed awhile,
Then o’er the plains in devious streams displayed,
Two gushing fountains rise; and thence conveyed,
Their waters through the woods and vallies play,
Visit each green recess and secret glade,
With still unmingled, still meandering way,
Nor widely wandering far, can each from other stray.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), ‘Philosophy of Mind’. ‘Subjective Mind’.
§397
(2) The moment of real opposition of the individual to itself, so that it seeks and finds itself in another individual. This is the sexual relationship, a natural distinction between, on the one hand, subjectivity remaining harmonious with itself in the sentiment of ethical life, love, etc. and not advancing to the other extreme, of universal purposes, political, scientific, or artistic; and on the other hand, the activity tensing itself for the opposition of universal, objective interests to the existing condition both of itself and of the external world, and actualizing universal principles in the existing conditions to form a unity that is now produced for the first time. The sexual relationship acquires its spiritual and ethical significance and determination in the family.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The distinction between subjectivity and activity corresponds to the distinction between the two sexes whereby women are more closely associated with subjectivity and abstain from public life while men are associated with activity and public life, see §398, albeit the distinction in addition corresponds to two aspects of any human being, whether it be man or woman. A man needs a private, emotional life as well as public engagement while a woman also needs to make her mark upon the public world, if merely by proxy, and hence men and women cannot dispense with each other, each needs the other to satisfy both aspects of their nature. The family is regarded at §518. whereby §§518 and 519 correspond to an approximate extent to subjectivity while §520 on property corresponds to activity.
§398
(3) When individuality distinguishes, by immediate judgement, its being for itself from its mere being, this is the awakening of the soul, which initially confronts its self-absorbed natural life as one natural determinacy and state confronts another state, sleep. — lt is not merely for us or externally that waking is distinguished from sleep; waking is itself the judgement of the individual soul, whose being-for-self is for the soul itself the relation of this determination of it, its being-for-self, to its mere being, its distinguishing of itself from its still undifferentiated universality. The waking state includes generally all self-conscious and rational activity of the mind’s distinguishing, a distinguishing that is for itself. -Sleep is an invigoration of this activity, not as a merely negative rest from it, but as a return from the world of determinacies, from dispersion and solidification in individual details, into the universal essence of subjectivity, which is the substance of those determinacies and the absolute power over them.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Judgement (Urteil) is employed here in two senses, firstly, the individual judges in the ordinary sense of judge that it is awake and distinguishes this waking state from the state of sleep from which the soul has just emerged and this judgement is immediate, which is to say not based upon an inference, and secondly, judgement has the Hegelian sense of an original partition or division. For Hegel’s account of judgement see §388, 389, 467. The soul divides into the soul as it merely is, its mere being, and the soul as it is for itself, see §383, and in the undivided state the soul simply is, and is then asleep. When it divides it confronts its self-absorbed natural life, which is both its undivided sleeping state and a stratum of its divided state that persists when it is awake and although sleep is associated with the natural life of the soul, waking as well as sleeping is a natural state, and, at this stage of the exposition Hegel is concerned to exclude higher, spiritual aspects of waking life.
Let is illustrate the for us he mentions with an example, sometimes water is warm, sometimes it is cold, I think we can agree about that, bu this distinction is only for us since firstly the water is unaware of its states, and secondly which state it is in depends not upon the intrinsic nature of water but upon external conditions, and thirdly the distinction between warmth and cold is drawn by, and for the purposes of, the observer or user of the water. And similarly whether I am handsome or ugly even if I am aware of my condition and even if it depends upon my own nature is a matter to be decided by others and it is they who draw the distinction between beauty and ugliness. The distinction between sleep and waking is not just for us, the soul is aware that it is awake, aware that it has been asleep, and, maybe, that it will later go to sleep again. The distinction between the two states is drawn by the soul’s own bifurcation into its mere being and being for itself, that the states alternate also depends upon the soul’s own bifurcation that needless to say does not imply that the passage from one state to the other is voluntary, this bifurcation of the soul into being-for-itself and its being or undifferentiated universality, and its relating or relation (Beziehung) of the latter to the former are essential to the soul’s being-for-itself.
Waking involves dispersion (Zerstreuung) in various determinacies and individual details and sleep is withdrawal back into the undifferentiated substance underlying the details of waking life, the details are bubbles upon the surface of their substance which therefore has power over them. On substance, Hegel writes elsewhere:
§ 150
‘Inwardly the necessary is absolute relationship; i. e., it is the developed process (see the preceding paragraphs), in which relationship sublates itself equally into absolute identity. In its immediate form it is the relationship of substantiality and accidentality . The absolute identity of this relationship with itself is substance as such. As necessity substance is the negativity of this form of inwardness, and therefore it posits itself as actuality. But it is equally the negativity of this external [side], for through this negativity the actual, as immediate, is only something-accidental, which in virtue of this [very status of] mere possibility passes into another actuality; and this passing-over is substantial identity as activity-of-form (§§ 148, 149).
§ 151
Substance, therefore, is the totality of the accidents; it reveals itself in them as their absolute negativity, i. e., as the absolute might and at the same time as the richness of all content. The content, however, is nothing but this manifestation itself, since the determinacy that is inwardly reflected into content is itself only a moment of the form, which passes over into the might of the substance. Substantiality is the absolute activity-of-form and the might of necessity, and every content is just a moment that belongs to this process alone-the absolute overturning of form and content into one another.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
‘The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those teasers, as they may be called, which are often addressed to philosophy. Even Napoleon, on a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question to the class on ideology. The determinacy given in the Paragraph is abstract; it primarily treats waking as a natural state, in which the mind is of course involved implicitly, but is not yet posited in its embodied reality. If we were to speak more concretely of this distinction (which in its fundamental determination remains the same) , the being-for-self of the individual soul would already have to be determined as the I of consciousness and taken as intelligent mind. The difficulty raised by the distinction of the two states only really arises, in so far as we also take into account dreaming in sleep and then determine the representations of sober waking consciousness only as representations, which is what dreams are too. In this superficial determination of representations the two states of course agree, because we have thereby overlooked the difference between them; and in the case of any proposed differentiation of waking consciousness, we can always return to the trivial observation that after all this too involves only representations.-But the being-for-self of the waking soul, concretely conceived, is consciousness and intellect, and the world of intellectual consciousness is something quite different from a pictorial composition of mere representations and images. The latter, as such, are in the main only externally connected, in an unintelligent way, by the so-called laws of the so-called association of Ideas; though here and there of course categories may also be at work’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Ideologie here has its original sense of the doctrine of ideas that Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (1754–1836) gave to the French ideologie when he coined it, from the Greek idea and logos, word, study, etc., in 1796. The ideas in question were ‘ideas’ in the sense of John Locke, (1632–1704), and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, (1714–1780), what Hegel would call representations, and the objective of the science was to investigate empirically the origins and relations of ideas. Upon this foundation practical rules were to be established for education, ethics, and politics. Dreams consist of representations and waking life involves representations, representations are, in dreams at least, connected by laws of association of ideas’, see §455. For as long as we consider waking life, as well as dreams, as consisting only of representations there is no essential difference between waking and dreaming, any test suggested for distinguishing waking reality from a dream such as coherence or pinching oneself can be met with the trivial observation that the apparent success of the test is itself just a representation that might occur in a dream and so Hegel argues that waking differs from dreaming in two respects. Firstly, the waking mind is not merely a canvas upon which various representations appear, or an observer of such representations, but consciousness and intellect, a concrete I or ego. On consciousness and the I or ego, see §413, on intellect, see §422/3, 467. Secondly, owing to the intellect, intuition forms a concrete totality of systematically cohering and mutually supporting entities rather than a collection of ideas linked by association and our consciousness of this coherence however hazy it may be is implicit in our self-feeling. On self-feeling, see §407–8.
Hegel amends Immanuel Kant’s, (1724–1804), treatment of the categories and expands their number but he concurs with Kant that objectivity is conferred on our experience or on our representations by their ordering by categories, general thoughts, such as causality, that give representations a coherence beyond anything that can be supplied by association of ideas. That we are not explicitly conscious of the categorial structuring of our experience does not entail that it is not actually present in the mind and likewise the feeling mind need not be explicitly aware of the proofs of God’s existence even though they express its ascent to God. As Hegel writes elsewhere:
‘Since man is a thinking being, neither sound common sense nor philosophy will ever give up raising itself out of the empirical worldview to God. This elevation has the thinking consideration of the world as its only foundation, not the merely sensory one that we have in common with the animals. It is for thinking, and for thinking alone, that the essence, the substance, the universal might, and purposive determination of the world are [present] . The so-called proofs that God is there have to be seen simply as the descriptions and analyses of the inward journey’ of the spirit. It is a thinking journey and it thinks what is sensory. The elevation of thinking above the sensible, its going out above the finite to the infinite, the leap that is made into the supersensible when the sequences of the sensible are broken off, all this is thinking itself; this transition is only thinking. To say that this passage ought not to take place means that there is to be no thinking. And in fact, animals do not make this transition; they stay with sense experience and intuition; for that reason they do not have any religion either. 56 Both generally and in particular, two remarks have to be made about this critique of the elevation of thinking. First of all, where this elevation is given the form of syllogisms (the so-called proofs that God is there), the starting point is always the view of the world determined somehow or other as an aggregate of contingencies, or of purposes and purposive relations. It may seem that in thinking, where it constructs syllogisms, this starting point may seem to remain and to be left there as a fixed foundation one that is just as empirical as the material is to begin with. In this way, the relation of the starting point to the point of arrival is represented as affirmative only, as a concluding from one [reality] that is, and remains, to an other that equally is as well. But this is the great mistake: wanting cognition of the nature of thinking only in this form that is proper to the understanding. On the contrary, thinking the empirical world essentially means altering its empirical form, and transforming it into something-universal; so thinking exercises a negative activity with regard to that foundation as well: when the perceived material is determined by universality, it does not remain in its first, empirical shape. With the removal and negation of the shell, the inner import of what is perceived is brought out (cf. §§ 13, 23) . The metaphysical proofs that God is there are deficient explanations and descriptions of the elevation of the spirit from the world to God, because they do not express, or rather they do not bring out, the moment of negation that is contained in this elevation-for the very fact that the world is contingent implies that it is only something incidental, phenomenal, and in and for itself null and void. This elevation of the spirit means that although being certainly does pertain to the world, it is only semblance, not genuine being, not absolute truth; for, on the contrary, the truth is beyond that appearance, in God alone, and only God is genuine being. And while this elevation is a passage and mediation, it is also the sublating of the passage and the mediation, since that through which God could seem to be mediated, i. e., the world, is, on the contrary, shown up as what is null and void. It is only the nullity of the being of the world that is the bond of the elevation; so that what does mediate vanishes, and in this mediation, the mediation itself is sublated.-’
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
The proofs do not merely explicate the concept of God or establish his existence, they explicitly chart the route by which we ascend to God from finite things and concerns. The expression ‘ascent . . . to God’ (Erhebung … zu Gott) primarily means our ascent to awareness of God although it also suggests that we become God. God according to Hegel is not sharply distinct from our awareness of God, and so while Kant sharply distinguished between the finite objects of our experience whose objectivity is secured by the categories involved in them and an infinite God whose objectivity cannot be captured by categorial cognition Hegel puts forth religion as a continuation of our conceptual apprehension of the world. It is certainly the case that our experience and our language involves features of which we are not explicitly conscious, and furthermore it is the lack of certain of these features, most notably of category-generated coherence, that explains the subjectivity of dreams, for a fictitious story is subjective rather than objective and yet it need not lack category-generated coherence, and so a dream may be as coherent as such a story and yet still lack objectivity.
‘Through waking, the natural soul of the human individual enters into a relationship to its substance which must be regarded as the truth, as the unity, of the two relations established between the individuality of man and his substantial universality or genus, one of them in the development that produces the course of the ages of life, and the other in the sexual relationship. For whereas in the course of life the soul appears as the single persisting subject, the differences emerging in it being only alterations, hence only transient, not lasting differences, and whereas in the sexual relationship by contrast the individual reaches a fixed difference, real opposition to itself, and the relation of the individual to the genus active in it develops into a relation to an individual of the opposite sex,-whereas therefore in the first case simple unity predominates, and in the second fixed opposition, in the waking soul we see a relation of the soul to itself that is not merely simple, but mediated by opposition; but in this being-for-self of the soul the difference is seen to be neither so transient as in the course of the ages of life nor so fixed as in the sexual relationship, but the self-producing enduring alternation of the states of sleep and waking in one and the same individual’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The alternation of sleep and waking is the third and most satisfactory of the ways in which a human individual, at the level of natural mind, is related to the genus or substantial universality from which it emerges and to become a proper mind the individual has to establish its mastery over the genus, to domesticate the natural mind and thereby liberate itself from it. The first relation between individual and genus was the ages of life in which the soul is a single subject persisting through transient differences and in the second relation of individual and genus, the sexual relationship, there is a fixed difference and an opposition. Male and female are opposites, not merely different, and ages of life by contrast cannot be opposites since there are more than two ages of life and a single thing cannot have more than one opposite. Therefore infancy cannot be the opposite of adolescence because adulthood has an equally strong claim to this status, and the two claims cancel each other. Furthermore, male and female are permanent and not transient conditions, people do not routinely change their sex in the way that they change their age. The permanence of the opposition comes at a price however, one and the same individual cannot be both male and female, there has to be two individuals, one of each sex, hence the terms of the individual’s relation to its genus are distinct individuals of opposite sexes. In sleeping and waking there is opposition because there are two and only two alternating states but the opposition is not so fixed that it cannot occur in a single individual and so the alternation of sleep and waking is a genuine relation of the individual to its substance, it is the‘unity of the first two relations combining the opposition of sexuality with the simplicity of the subject of the ages of life.
‘The necessity of the dialectical progression from the sexual relationship to the waking of the soul lies, however, more exactly in the fact that since each of the individuals standing in a sexual relation to each other finds, in virtue of their implicit unity, itself again in the other, the soul emerges from its being-in-itself to being-for-itself, that is, precisely from its sleep to waking. What in the sexual relationship is divided between two individuals, namely, a subjectivity remaining in immediate unity with its substance and a subjectivity entering into opposition to this substance, is, in the waking soul, unified, and so has lost the fixity of its opposition and acquired that fluidity of the difference by which it becomes mere states. Sleep is the state of the soul’s immersion in its undifferentiated unity, waking by contrast is the state of the soul’s having entered into opposition to this simple unity. Here the natural life of mind still has its subsistence; for although the first immediacy of the soul is already sublated and is now reduced to a mere state, yet the soul’s being-for-self resulting from the negation of that immediacy likewise still appears in the shape of a mere state. The being-for-self, the soul’s subjectivity, is not yet combined with its implicit substantiality; the two determinations still appear as mutually exclusive, alternating states. Of course, genuinely mental activity-will and intelligence- is comprised in the waking state. Here however we have not yet to consider waking in this concrete meaning but only as a state, consequently, as something essentially distinct from will and intelligence. But that the mind which, in its truth, is to be grasped as pure activity has in itself the states of sleep and waking stems from the fact that mind is also soul and, as soul, descends to the form of a natural, an immediate, a passive entity. In this shape, mind only suffers its becoming-for-itself. We can say, therefore, that awaking is brought about by the fact that the lightning of subjectivity pierces through the form of mind’s immediacy’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Hegel conflates two different accounts of the dialectical progress from sexuality to the alternation of sleep and waking. First, before their sexual union, each individual, the male and the female, has only being in itself but each individual when it finds itself in the other ascends to being for itself. That is, each of them, the male and the female, undergoes a transition analogous to waking from sleep. Second, the female remains in immediate unity with its substance while the male enters into opposition to it, that is, the female is in a condition analogous to sleep while the male’s condition is analogous to waking. The first account is defective because the change from being-in-itself to being-for-itself occurs within a single individual albeit it is stimulated by the encounter with another individual. The second account is better and yet may lack a certain plausibility, for instance even the most compliant wife is usually aware of her husband’s worldly activity whereas a sleeper is not aware of the waking state, and yet seemingly disparate phenomena may nonetheless be connected in a chain of necessity on other grounds.
The alternation of sleep and waking is the most satisfactory of the three relations between the individual and its genus and yet is beset with inadequacy, waking is merely a state of the soul, alternating with another state, sleep, hence the waking mind has no more control over the sleeping state than Dr Jekyll has over Mr Hyde, (not Hegel’s example) the waking mind cannot decide when it will emerge from sleep and is to that extent not even in control of itself. The free mind can voluntarily wake up, I can set an alarm, drag myself out of half-sleep, or maybe successfully will myself to wake after a certain interval and yet these abilities presuppose will and intelligence that are not available to the soul at the level of anthropology. up awaking the soul merely finds itself and, in opposition to itself, the world. Waking in essence involves sensation (Empfindung) but not the will and intelligence needed to integrate the world into one’s own thought and activities, and furthermore even when one is fully endowed with mental equipment it generally takes some time after waking to orient oneself in the world. Hence the mind in waking as well as sleep is still encumbered with a natural aspect and is not yet as it is in its truth, namely pure activity.
‘But not only in physical nature but also in the human organism a distinction is to be found which corresponds to the distinction between the sleeping and the waking of the soul. In the animal organism it is essential to distinguish the side of its remaining-within-itself from the side of its other-directedness. Bichat has called the former side organic life, the latter animal life. As organic life he counts the reproductive system: digestion, blood-circulation, perspiration, breathing. This life continues in sleep; it ends only with death. Animal life by contrast, which according to Bichat comprises the system of sensibility and of irritability, nervous and muscular activity, — this theoretical and practical outward-directedness ceases in sleep, which is why even the ancients portrayed sleep and death as brothers. The only way in which the animal organism in sleep is still related to the external world is breathing, this wholly abstract relationship to the undifferentiated element of air. With particularized externality by contrast the healthy human organism in sleep no longer stands in any relation. If, therefore, a man in sleep becomes active outwardly, then he is ill. This occurs with sleep-walkers. They move about with the utmost confidence; some have written letters and sealed them. Yet in sleep-walking the sense of sight is paralysed, the eye in a cataleptic state’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind
Unterscheidung der Seele von sich selbst und von der Welt the distinguishing of the soul from itself and from the world, alternatively the soul’s distinguishing of itself and of the world, that is between itself and the world. The latter is more apt for what has been spoken of is only of a distinction between the soul and the world and not between the soul and itself, nonetheless waking depends upon the soul’s distinguishing-itself-from-itself, das Sich-von-sich-selbst-Unterscheiden in contrast to its undifferentiatedness in sleep and this enables it to distinguish itself from the world and aided by daylight between different things in the world.
‘In what Bichat calls animal life, then, an alternation of rest and activity prevails, hence, as in waking, an opposition, while the organic life that does not participate in that alternation corresponds to the undifefrentiatedness of the soul present in sleep. But besides this difference in the organism’s activity, we must also note a difference in the structure of the organs of the internal and the outward-directed life, a difference corresponding to the difference between sleeping and waking’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Marie Franc¸ois Xavier Bichat, (1771–1802), was a French physician whose discoveries arose from the post-mortems he conducted, he presents the distinction between organic and animal life in Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, 1800. The irritability of nerves and muscles was discovered earlier by a Swiss physiologist, Albrecht von Haller (1708–77). A slight stimulus to a muscle produces a sharp contraction, nerves are even more irritable, responding to a lesser stimulus, a stimulus to a nerve produces a sharp contraction in the muscle to which it is connected, suggesting that muscular movement depends on nervous, rather than directly muscular, stimulation and Bichat discusses the difference referred to above in the second article of his Recherches.
In sleep the soul does not distinguish itself from itself or from the external world and this definition (Bestimmung) is not derived from or answerable to experience, it is intrinsically necessary and yet it is confirmed by the fact that sleep is induced by an object that is either monotonously simple or incoherent. The waking mind and the world that keeps it awake are symmetrically related, each is an internally differentiated totality, in opposition to and unity with the other. One may object that we may be bored yet remain awake unless we suppose that wakeful boredom only occurs at the level of representational thinking and that our intellect is always aroused when we are awake. As for the objection that we may find a dream interesting, one’s representational thinking, the same may well be true of a waking erotic experience that is not in the least boring and has no tendency to send one to sleep.
‘Only occasionally does something occur in a dream that has a significant connection with actuality. This is especially so with dreams before midnight; in these the representations can still to some extent be held in an orderly connection with the actuality with which we have occupied ourselves in the daytime. At midnight, as thieves very well know, we sleep soundest; the soul has then withdrawn into itself away from all tension with the external world. After midnight, dreams become even more arbitrary then before. Occasionally, however, we feel in dreams a presentiment of something which in the distraction of waking consciousness we do not notice. Thus sluggish blood can evoke in a man the definite feeling of an illness of which, in waking, he has not yet had an inkling. Similarly in a dream the smell of something smouldering can in sleep provoke dreams of conflagrations which do not break out until several days later and whose signs we have not noticed in waking’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
What distinguishes waking is not the clarity of intuition in its immediacy regardless of its mediations, its interconnections with other intuitions, but the overall coherence of the intuited object as a rational totality, see §398 and on ‘intuition §449–50. Hegel does not suggest that we think all the time, even in dreamless sleep for had he meant so he would have referenced René Descartes, (1596–1650), or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, (1646–1716). Rather any human mental activity be it in sleep or in waking involves thought, for instance in seeing a tree thought or categories enable me to see it as a unitary object as a tree and to assign the perception to myself, to be aware that I can see the tree. The doctrine stems from Kant but it is also present in Plato’s ‘Theaetetus’, 184–6, where Socrates argues that perception of a unitary object by a unitary self involves such concepts as being, identity, and difference.
Socrates Consider, then, Theaetetus, this further point about what has been said. Now you answered that perception is knowledge, did you not?
Theaetetus Yes.
Socrates If, then, anyone should ask you, ‘By what does a man see white and black colours and by what does he hear high and low tones?’ you would, I fancy, say, ‘By his eyes and ears’.
Theaetetus Yes, I should.
Socrates The easy use of words and phrases and the avoidance of strict precision is in general a sign of good breeding; indeed, the opposite is hardly worthy of a gentleman, but sometimes it is necessary, as now it is necessary to object to your answer, in so far as it is incorrect. Just consider; which answer is more correct, that our eyes are that by which we see or that through which we see, and our ears that by which or that through which we hear?
Theaetetus I think, Socrates, we perceive through, rather than by them, in each case.
Socrates Yes, for it would be strange indeed, my boy, if there are many senses ensconced within us, as if we were so many wooden horses of Troy, and they do not all unite in one power, whether we should call it soul or something else, by which we perceive through these as instruments the objects of perception.
Theaetetus I think what you suggest is more likely than the other way.
Socrates Now the reason why I am so precise about the matter is this: I want to know whether there is some one and the same power within ourselves by which we perceive black and white through the eyes, and again other qualities through the other organs, and whether you will be able, if asked, to refer all such activities to the body. But perhaps it is better that you make the statement in answer to a question than that I should take all the trouble for you. So tell me: do you not think that all the organs through which you perceive hot and hard and light and sweet are parts of the body? Or are they parts of something else?
Theaetetus Of nothing else.
…..
Socrates …. But through what organ is the faculty exerted which makes known to you that which is common to all things, as well as to these of which we are speaking — that which you call being and not-being, and the other attributes of things, about which we were asking just now? What organs will you assign for all these, through which that part of us which perceives gains perception of each and all of them?
Theaetetus You mean being and not-being, and likeness and unlikeness, and identity and difference, and also unity and plurality as applied to them. And you are evidently asking also through what bodily organs we perceive by our soul the odd and the even and everything else that is in the same category.
Socrates Bravo, Theaetetus! you follow me exactly; that is just what I mean by my question.
- ‘Theaetetus’
There are two stages to Plato’s argument, first that there is knowledge which is not a matter of perception, that is to say, that percepts cannot be the only objects of knowledge, and second that the additional objects of knowledge referred to in the first stage are in fact the only objects of true or real knowledge.
In dreams Hegel contends our mental activity, for instance dreaming about a tree, also involves thought albeit to a lesser degree.
‘Am I awake or dreaming? In dreams our attitude is only representational; there our representations are not governed by the categories of the intellect. But mere representation wrests things completely out of their concrete interconnection, individualizes them. Hence in dreams everything drifts apart, criss-crosses in wild disorder, objects lose all necessary, objective, intellectual, rational interconnection and only enter into an entirely superficial, contingent and subjective combination. Thus it happens that we bring something we hear in sleep into an entirely different context from what it has in actuality. One hears, for example, a door slam, believes a shot has been fired, and now pictures a story of robbers. Or while asleep, one senses a pressure on one’s chest and explains it to oneself by the incubus. The occurrence of such false representations in sleep is possible because in this state the mind is not the totality for itself, with which, in waking, it compares all its sensations, intuitions, and representations, in order to ascertain, from the agreement or non-agreement of the individual sensations, intuitions, and representations with its totality, a totality that is for itself, the objectivity or nonobjectivity of that content. It is true that when awake a man can give himself up to the nonsense of quite empty, subjective representations; but if he has not taken leave of his senses, he knows at the same time that these representations are only representations because they stand in contradiction with his present totality’
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The waking soul does two things. First it frees itself from the external world and develops into an independent totality, second it frees objects from its own subjectivity and regards them as totalities belonging to an all-embracing totality as an interconnection of necessity. The two attainments are connected for as long as the soul is absorbed in nature it is confined to individual items with no coherent order, we must step back from the world, detaching ourselves from it in order to survey it as an ordered whole. This independence from the world is connected with being an I, being able to think and speak of oneself as I. The two attainments are assigned to intellect (Verstand) rather than reason (Vernunft), since intellect is primarily responsible for orderly arrangement, reason being more prone to cruising. The objectivity of a representation depends upon its agreement or coherence with the totality both of the world and of the mind. The word Totalität derived from the Latin adjective totus, whole, suggesting a systematically ordered whole.
‘Only occasionally does something occur in a dream that has a significant connection with actuality. This is especially so with dreams before midnight; in these the representations can still to some extent be held in an orderly connection with the actuality with which we have occupied ourselves in the daytime. At midnight, as thieves very well know, we sleep soundest; the soul has then withdrawn into itself away from all tension with the external world. After midnight, dreams become even more arbitrary then before. Occasionally, however, we feel in dreams a presentiment of something which in the distraction of waking consciousness we do not notice. Thus sluggish blood can evoke in a man the definite feeling of an illness of which, in waking, he has not yet had an inkling. Similarly in a dream the smell of something smouldering can in sleep provoke dreams of conflagrations which do not break out until several days later and whose signs we have not noticed in waking’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
See §380 and 401 on the greater susceptibility of animals to sensory stimuli.
‘Finally we must add that waking, as a natural state, as a natural tension between the individual soul and the external world, has a limit, a measure, that therefore the activity of the waking mind gets tired and so induces sleep which, on its side, likewise has a limit and must progress to its opposite. This double transition is the way in which, in this sphere, the unity of the soul’s substantiality, which is in itself, with its individuality, which is for itself, makes its appearance’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
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For the One … my dream girl 🌹🎶🎶🎶🎶
I guess you know that I really go for that
come on smile and those laughing eyes of blue,
Little dream girl,
My dream girl,
The way you move only goes to prove your a
perfect doll and I sure could fall for you,
Your my dream girl,
My dream girl,
When you walk down the street ah you flip me off my feet,
Never thought a girl could look so sweet,
But your twice as nice as sugar and spice,
From top to toe you just seem to glow like a
livin′ dream made of silk and satin and pearls,
Little dream girl,
My dream girl,
Aaah aah aah oooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh,
Aaah aah aah oooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh,
I guess you know that I really go for that
come on smile and those laughing eyes of blue,
Little dream girl,
My dream girl,
The way you move only goes to prove your a
perfect doll and I sure could fall for you,
Your my dream girl,
My dream girl,
Aaah aah aah oooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh,
Aaah aah aah oooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh,
Dream girl
My dream girl
Coming up next:
Sensation.
It may stop but it never ends.
