On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Mind’: the self-knowing, actual Idea — part ten.
‘Psyche; or, the legend of Love’
by Mary Tighe (1772–1810)
CANTO I. (continued)
But of strange contrast are their virtues found,
And oft the lady of that isle has tried
In rocky dens and caverns under ground,
The black deformed stream in vain to hide;
Bursting all bounds her labours it defied;
Yet many a flowery sod its course conceals
Through plains where deep its silent waters glide,
Till secret ruin all corroding steals,
And every treacherous arch the hideous gulph reveals.
Forbidding every kindly prosperous growth,
Where’er it ran, a channel bleak it wore;
The gaping banks receded, as though loth
To touch the poison which disgraced their shore:
There deadly anguish pours unmixed his store
Of all the ills which sting the human breast,
The hopeless tears which past delights deplore,
Heart-gnawing jealousy which knows no rest,
And self-upbraiding shame, by stern remorse opprest.
Oh, how unlike the pure transparent stream,
Which near it bubbles o’er its golden sands!
The impeding stones with pleasant music seem
Its progress to detain from other lands;
And all its banks, inwreathed with flowery bands,
Ambrosial fragrance shed in grateful dew:
There young Desire enchanted ever stands,
Breathing delight and fragrance ever new,
And bathed in constant joys of fond affection true.
But not to mortals is it e’er allowed
To drink unmingled of that current bright;
Scarce can they taste the pleasurable flood,
Defiled by angry Fortune’s envious spite;
Who from the cup of amorous delight
Dashes the sparkling draught of brilliant joy,
Till, with dull sorrow’s stream despoiled quite,
No more it cheers the soul nor charms the eye,
But ‘mid the poisoned bowl distrust and anguish lie.
Here Cupid tempers his unerring darts,
And in the fount of bliss delights to play;
Here mingles balmy sighs and pleasing smarts,
And here the honied draught will oft allay
With that black poison’s all-polluting sway,
For wretched man. Hither, as Venus willed,
For Psyche’s punishment he bent his way:
From either stream his amber vase he filled,
For her were meant the drops which grief alone distilled.
His quiver, sparkling bright with gems and gold,
From his fair plumed shoulder graceful hung,
And from its top in brilliant chords enrolled
Each little vase resplendently was slung:
Still as he flew, around him sportive clung
His frolic train of winged Zephyrs light,
Wafting the fragrance which his tresses flung:
While odours dropped from every ringlet bright,
And from his blue eyes beamed ineffable delight.
Wrapt in a cloud unseen by mortal eye,
He sought the chamber of the royal maid;
There, lulled by careless soft security,
Of the impending mischief nought afraid,
Upon her purple couch was Psyche laid,
Her radiant eyes a downy slumber sealed;
In light transparent veil alone arrayed,
Her bosom’s opening charms were half revealed,
And scarce the lucid folds her polished limbs concealed.
A placid smile plays o’er each roseate lip,
Sweet severed lips! while thus your pearls disclose,
That slumbering thus unconscious she may sip
The cruel presage of her future woes?
Lightly, as fall the dews upon the rose,
Upon the coral gates of that sweet cell
The fatal drops he pours; nor yet he knows,
Nor, though a God, can he presaging tell
How he himself shall mourn the ills of that sad spell!
Nor yet content, he from his quiver drew,
Sharpened with skill divine, a shining dart:
No need had he for bow, since thus too true
His hand might wound her all-exposed heart;
Yet her fair side he touched with gentlest art,
And half relenting on her beauties gazed;
Just then awaking with a sudden start
Her opening eye in humid lustre blazed,
Unseen he still remained, enchanted and amazed.
The dart which in his hand now trembling stood,
As o’er the couch he bent with ravished eye,
Drew with its daring point celestial blood
From his smooth neck’s unblemished ivory:
Heedless of this, but with a pitying sigh
The evil done now anxious to repair,
He shed in haste the balmy drops of joy
O’er all the silky ringlets of her hair;
Then stretched his plumes divine, and breathed celestial air.
Unhappy Psyche! soon the latent wound
The fading roses of her cheek confess,
Her eyes bright beams, in swimming sorrows drowned,
Sparkle no more with life and happiness
Her parents fond exulting heart to bless;
She shuns adoring crowds, and seeks to hide
The pining sorrows which her soul oppress,
Till to her mother’s tears no more denied,
The secret grief she owns, for which she lingering sighed.
‘Dream Worker’, 1983, Hawkwind:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). ‘Philosophy of Mind’. ‘Subjective Mind’.
( y) Sensation
§399
‘Sleep and waking are initially, in fact, not mere alterations, bur alternating states (a progression to infinity) . This is their formal, negative relationship; but in it the affirmative relationship is also present. Being is contained as an ideal moment in the being-for-self of the waking soul; the determinacies of the content of its sleeping nature, where they are implicitly as in their substance, are thus found by the waking soul within its own self and, indeed, for itself. This particular material, since it is determinacy, is distinct from the self-identity of being-for-self, and at the same time simply contained in its simplicity: sensation’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
On the distinction between‘being-for-self, Fürsichsein, and mere being, Sein, see §398.
The sleeping soul is mere being and is a substance with certain accidents or determinacies that are particular rather than universal and these determinacies are also in the waking soul, but there they are for itself, not simply implicitly or in itself, an sich, but the waking soul merely discovers them in itself, it does not create them itself or decide what they are to be. In the waking soul, albeit not in the sleeping soul, the determinacies are an ideal moment, they do not constitute its nature but are distinct from the self-identity of its being-for-self. The purpleness of a violet for instance is not at least immediately deal but real, it partly constitutes the nature of the violet. When, in looking at the violet I have a sensation of purpleness, this is ideal and in no way constitutive of my nature, even if I must have some sensations I need not have this one.
On ideality, as Hegel explains elsewhere:
‘In being-for-itself the determination of ideality has entered. Being- there, taken at first only according to its being or its affirmation, has reality (§ 91); and hence finitude, too, is under the determination of reality at first. But the truth of the finite is rather its ideality. In the same way the infinite of the understanding, which is put beside the finite, is itself also only one of two finites, something-untrue, something-ideal. This ideality of the finite is the most important proposition of philosophy, and for that reason every genuine philosophy is Idealism. Everything depends on not mistaking for the Infinite that which is at once reduced in its determination to what is particular and finite.-That is why we have here drawn attention to this distinction at some length; the basic concept of philosophy, the genuine Infinite, depends on it. This distinction is established by the reflections contained in theparagraph. They may seem to be unimportant, because they are quite simple, but they are irrefutable’.
- Encyclopaedia Logic’
Sensation translates Empfindung a word that drifts between feeling’ and ‘sensation deriving from the verb empfinden, to sense, feel. Hegel takes advantage of its connection with finden, to find, a sensation is merely found by the soul, not produced by it. §402 explains the difference between Empfindung and Gefühl, feeling.
Sleep and waking alternate in what is or would be, were it not for death an infinite progression and this is one case of bad or false’ infinity, the other being the sharp separation of the infinite or God from the finite or the world. The solution to such unsatisfactory infinity is good or true infinity wherein the infinite is not cut off from the finite and which does not go on for ever.
As Hegel explains elsewhere:
‘Something becomes an other, but the other is itself a something, so it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum’.
‘This infinity is spurious or negative infinity, since it is nothing but the negation of the finite, but the finite arises again in the same way, so that it is no more sublated than not. In other words, this infinity expresses only the requirement that the finite ought to be sublated. This progress ad infinitum does not go beyond the expression of the contradiction, which the finite contains, [i. e., ] that it is just as much something as its other, and [this progress] is the perpetual continuation of the alternation between these determinations, each bringing in the other one’.
‘What is indeed given is that something becomes another, and the other becomes another quite generally. In its relationship to an other, something is already an other itself vis-a-vis the latter; and therefore, since what it passes into is entirely the same as what passes into it-neither having any further determination than this identical one of being an other-in its passing into another, something only comes together with itself; and this relation to itself in the passing and in the other is genuine Infinity. Or, if we look at it negatively: what is changed is the other, it becomes the other of the other. In this way being is reestablished, but as negation of the negation. It is now being-for-itself’.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
There however the solution to bad infinity is albeit temporarily being-for-self while here the solution is facilitated by the fact that sleep and waking as initially described both one-sided. Sleep is undifferentiated and waking is abstract and empty being-forself. The waking soul is self-aware but has no definite nature to be aware of as it distinguishes itself from the external world but has no means of acquiring definite information about the world and it is these deficiencies that motivate the endless alternation, albeit it can no more relieve them than one can relieve financial problems by endlessly borrowing more money to pay off old debts as I know all to well. To get its filling or fulfilment the waking soul appropriates the determinations or determinacies that occur unconsciously in the sleeping soul, they are now immersed in the soul’s universality and occur in an ideal form, as semblance, Schein.
‘The sleep that follows waking is the natural mode of the soul’s return from difference to distinctionless unity with itself. In so far as mind remains entangled in the bonds of naturalness, this return exhibits nothing but the empty repetition of the beginning-a boring cycle. But in itself, or according to the concept, this return at the same time involves an advance. For the transition of sleep into waking and of waking into sleep, has for us a result which is no less positive than negative: both the undifferentiated substantial being of the soul present in sleep and the still quite abstract, still quite empty being-for-self of the soul achieved in awaking prove to be, in their separateness, one-sided, untrue determinations and let their concrete unity emerge as their truth. In the repeated alternation of sleep and waking, these determinations are always only striving towards their concrete unity without ever reaching it; in this alternation each of the determinations always only falls from its own one-sidedness into the one-sidedness of the opposite determination. But this unity always only striven for in that alternation comes to actuality in the sentient soul’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Schein, a term whose difference from Erscheinung, appearance, is explained in the Lesser Logic:
‘Essence must appear. Its inward shining is the sublating of itself into immediacy, which as inward reflection is subsistence (matter) as well as form, reflection-into-another, subsistence sublating itself. Shining is the determination, in virtue of which essence is not being, but essence, and the developed shining is [shining-forth or] appearance. Essence therefore is not behind or beyond appearance, but since the essence is what exists, existence is appearance’.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
By contrast sleep does not incorporate any features of waking. Dreams are not to be regarded as an essential feature of sleep but as a problem in the way of distinguishing it from waking.
The waking soul has now become in a way infinite, it incorporates its other in itself, it forms a kind of circle, it goes out from itself to its other, is at home or together with itself, bei sich, in its other, and then returns to itself and posits itself in contrast to the sleep-derived determinations. It now has true individuality, individualität, a combination of universality and particularity (see §379 and 394). It does not cease to sleep but it now sleeps because it is tired, not in order to repair some intrinsic deficiency in itself and the dialectical progress from waking to sensibility is not a temporal process in history or in the life of the individual. It is, first, a progression in Hegel’s thought for if we suppose the soul to be subject to two alternating states, blank substantiality and sheer being-for-self, then we must suppose that it is driven to such endless alternation by the deficiency in each of the states, more particularly in the waking state and these deficiencies cannot be successfully resolved by the endless alternation fuelled by them so to resolve the difficulty we need to allow to the waking soul something of the substantiality of sleep, a result which coincides with what we otherwise know as sensibility. And further, nature itself is driven by this dialectic which thereby explains why we have sensations as well as sleep and waking, if we alternately wake and sleep then we must have sensations, nature is driven by its internal logic to supply sensations once it has introduced sleep and waking, if one is awake one must be awake to something or (as one may put it were the term consciousness set apart for a higher stage of mind) conscious of something.
The immediate determinacy in the soul, for instance a sensation of purple, is particular and definite, one of an indefinite range of possible sensations, the soul itself is universal and capable of accommodating any sensation in the range and irretrievably attached to no particular one of them, it maintains its universality even in the face of a particular sensation. Water too is intrinsically universal, colourless, that is to say, yet capable of assuming any particular colour but when it is given a particular colour, for instance purple, it does not maintain its universal nature and therefore does not have a sensation of purple.
‘In the above discussion of the essence of sensation it is already implied that if, in §398, awaking could be called a judgement of the individual soul-because this state produces a division of the soul into a soul which is for itself and a soul which merely is, and at the same time an immediate relation of the soul’s subjectivity to an Other-we can assert the presence in sensation of a syllogism, and from that derive the assurance of wakefulness achieved by means of sensation. On awaking, we find ourselves initially in an entirely indeterminate distinguishedness from the external world generally. Only when we start to sense does this distinction become a determinate distinction. In order, therefore, to attain to full wakefulness and certainty of it, we open our eyes, take hold of ourselves, in a word, examine whether some determinate Other, something determinately distinct from ourselves, is for us. In this examination we no longer relate ourselves directly to the Other, but mediately. Thus, for example, contact is the mediation between myself and the Other, since though it is different from these two sides of the opposition, yet at the same time it unites them both. So here, as in sensation generally, the soul by the mediation of something standing between itself and the Other, joins together with itself in the sensed content, reflects itself out of the Other into itself, separates itself from the Other and thereby confirms to itself its being-for-self. This joining of the soul together with itself is the advance that the soul, after dividing itself in awaking, makes by its transition to sensation’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
A Schluss, an inference or syllogism is literally a closure or conclusion putting two and two together’ (see §389), in the syllogism
All men are mortal
All Greeks are men
All Greeks are mortal
we join the term ‘Greeks’ together with the term ‘mortal’, by way of the middle term ‘men’.
Two terms joined or mediated form a syllogism even when the terms do not occur in propositions, just as sleep and waking are bifurcated as a judgement albeit no propositional judgement is involved (see §389). Here there appears to be two syllogisms in play, first, the soul is united with the external world by way of its sensations, the soul’s other is no longer merely sensations but external things distinct from ourselves, by getting in touch with them we assure ourselves that we are awake. And second, the soul is united with itself by way of the other, the other may be a sensation or external things, in either case the process is the same as that mentioned earlier, where the other from which the soul reflects itself is sensation.
— —
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§400
‘Sensation is the form in which the mind weaves its sombre web in its unconscious and unintellectual individuality, where every determinacy is still immediate, posited in an undeveloped way both in its content and as an objective counterpart to the subject, belonging as it does to the subject’s own most particular, natural peculiarity. The content of sensation is, by this very fact, restricted and transient, since it belongs to natural, immediate being, thus to what is qualitative and finite’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
In sensation the mind is unconscious not in the sense that it is unaware of its sensation but that sensation does not involve consciousness of an object distinct from oneself hence it belongs to the mind’s ownness or peculiarity, Eigenheit, its private possessions rather than public property. In sensation mind is also without understanding or unintellectual since sensation involves no intellectual discrimination or argument: it is just what I sense or feel, and that is that. What I sense or feel thus tends to be thin and indeterminate as well as ungrounded, it is qualitative, I sense for instance purpleness, not the whole violet to which it belongs, it is finite or piecemeal, I sense the redness alone, not together with other qualities with which it is connected. As is explained elsewhere:
‘Being-there is being with a determinacy, that is [given] as immediate determinacy or as a determinacy that [simply] is: quality. As reflected into itself in this its determinacy, being-there is that which is there,b something. The categories that develop in respect of being-there only need to be indicated in a summary way’.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
Empfindung now assumes the look of feeling as well as sensation but where sensation appeared not so fitting it may be translated as sentiment to keep the distinction between Empfindung and Gefühl, feeling. (See §380, 381, 390, 399). Empfindung is a form which can have various types of content. I can sense purpleness, or again whiteness, purpleness and whiteness are the content, sensing is the form. The form of Empfindung is the immediate or direct, unconscious, that is to say non-objectifying, intellectually undeveloped apprehension of a quality. Some types of content are intrinsically appropriate to the form of Empfindung. Colours for instance are simple, directly apprehended qualities that naturally fit into this form, we do not usually ask for reasons why something is thought to be of a certain colour we just see that it is for instance purple but other contents such as moral principles and religious doctrines, contents that are not normally considered as simple and directly apprehended, may also assume the form of Empfindung.
‘Everything is in sensation, and, if you like, everything that emerges in the conscious mind and in reason has its source and origin in sensation; for source and origin just mean the first, most immediate manner in which something appears. It is not enough, they say, to have principles, religion, etc. only in the head: they must also be in the heart, in sentiment. In fact, what we thus have in the head is in consciousness in general and the content is an object of consciousness. So that although the content is posited in me, in the abstract I, it can equally be kept at a distance from me, from my concrete subjectivity. In sentiment, by contrast, such a content is determinacy of my entire being-for-self, dull as it is in such a form; it is thus posited as something of my very own. What is my own is something unseparated from the actual concrete I, and this immediate unity of the soul with its substance and with the determinate content of the substance is just this unseparatedness, in so far as it is not determined as far as the I of consciousness, still less to the freedom of the mind’s rationality. It is, by the way, a commonly held view that will, conscience, and character possess an entirely different intensity and steadfastness of being-my-own, than sentiment in general and the aggregate of sentiment, heart. Of course it is correct to say that above all the heart must be good. But sentiment and heart is not the form by which anything is justified as religious, ethical, true, just, etc., and an appeal to heart and sentiment either means nothing or means something bad. We should hardly need to be reminded of this. There can be nothing more commonplace than the experience that at least there are also bad, evil, godless, mean, etc. sentiments and hearts. In fact, that the heart is the source only of this type of content is expressed in the words: ‘For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, false witness, blasphemies, etc.’ In times when scientific theology and philosophy make heart and sentiment the criterion of what is good, ethical, and religious, it becomes necessary to recall this commonplace experience; just as it is nowadays necessary to remind ourselves that thinking is what is our very own, is what distinguishes man from animals, and that man has sensibility in common with them’.
— ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Look at the sky with me
The clouds tell us a story
There is a lovely gypsy queen
It lives in rainbow land
One day a caliph came down from the rainbow
And saw the little gypsy
Sitting there among the coloured clouds
And she seemed to be very unhappy
So he ask herWhy do you look so sad
You live in rainbow land
And everyone is lucky here
And the gypsy replied
I like to know all about things
Happen in the world
But nobody will tell me
No one seems to know
Don’t worry, little caliph said
I think I can help you
Take that little magic ball
When you look inside
You can see the whole world
And all things that happen in it
___________________________________________________
I feel that God is merciful and I see that stealing is wrong and I intuit that knowledge is good, there is no denying that mental states or acts corresponding to such claims occur yet their natural home is the form of thought rather than Empfindung. Three reasons are condidered for denying this. First, the empiricist dictum:
Everything is in Empfindung, everything is based on or rooted in sensation-feeling.
This is so but we need not thereby concede that everything can appropriately remain in the form of Empfindung.
Second, principles, religion, and so on must be in the heart as well as the head to guarantee that they are my very own, mein Eigenstes. What I am merely conscious or aware of intellectually for instance the existence of God can be kept at a distance from myself leaving me unmoved, I may cease to believe it without loss to myself. By contrast what I sense or feel becomes an inseparable accompaniment of my whole self. Hegel’s rejoinder is that ‘will, conscience, etc.’ have a superior sort of ‘being-my-own’, Meineigen-Seins and what this is is explained: ‘thinking is what is our very own, das Eigenste, is what distinguishes man from animals, and that man has sensibility in common with them’. Our distinctive characteristic, so the appropriate form for what is our very own is thus the form of thought. It may be objected that thought may be our very own, human in contrast to bestial, and may make will and conscience our very own, but it is not my very own, in contrast to the common property of humanity. Nonetheless Hegel has little regard for what is my very own, the private possession of an individual.
Thirdly, religion, and so on, can be justified by appeal to the heart. but as Hegel points out feelings and the heart may be bad or wrong as ‘Matthew’ implies:;
‘But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man’.
- Matthew 15: 18–20
You would have thought the son of God would know about germs.
Anyway, Hegel works with four contrasting pairs of terms, the first of each pair characterizes spiritual or mental content, the second the form of Empfindung and the content appropriate to it:
(i) mediated — immediate
(ii) universal — individual(ized) (Vereinzelt(es))
(iii) necessary — contingent
(iv) objective — subjective.
(i) Empfindung, primarily sensation but also feeling or sentiment is immediate or direct. I just have a sensation of purple without regard to argument or to other qualities in my environment and so what is sensed, the purpleness, is not connected with, mediated by, other qualities or other instances of the same quality. So:
(ii) what I sense is individual not universal. When individuality contrasts with universality Hegel tends to use einzeln and its relatives and when individuality involves universality he tends to use individual and its relatives (see 377). I sense this purple and that purple, not purpleness as such or colour as such.
(iii) What is merely individual is contingent and contingency involves two ideas, the possibility of being otherwise and dependence on something else:
‘Being just the inwardness of actuality, possibility is, precisely for that reason, merely external actuality or contingency as well. The contingent is generally what has the ground of its being not within itself but elsewhere. This is the shape in which actuality first presents itself to consciousness, and which is frequently confused with actuality itself. But the contingent is only the actual in the one-sided form of reflection-in to-another or the actual considered as what is merely possible. We consider the contingent, therefore, as what either can be or can also not be, as what can be thus or otherwise too, i. e., as that whose being or not being, being thus or otherwise, is grounded not within itself but in another. It is, on the one hand, the general task of cognition to overcome the contingent, whilst, on the other hand, in the domain of the practical, the point is not to remain at the stage of the contingency of willing or of [simple] freedom of choice’.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
What is sensed in isolation, for example a purple patch, may well have easily been otherwise, for instance, white. There is no argument or causal context to establish the necessity of its purpleness. Does not its being contingent upon something else secure the necessity of the purpleness? If Hegel meant to introduce this second component of contingency here he perhaps means that whatever necessity there is to the purpleness of the patch cannot be discerned by isolated sensation but only by ascending by thought rather than sensation to a larger whole in which individual items appear as necessary elements in a system. Or he may mean that what the sensation is contingent upon is not sufficient to determine the necessity of what is sensed, someone’s feeling that sex before marriage is wrong, for instance, may be both contingent upon something else, upbringing, personal experiences, and so on, and capable of being otherwise, a feeling for instance that sex before marriage is not wrong, if the upbringing, personal experiences, and so on had been otherwise. My own view is that sex before marriage is wrong if it delays the service, (I slip in these jokes now and then just to check if anyone is actually reading what I post).
The causal history of the feeling and such necessity as it confers on the feeling is not relevant to the status of what is felt. Since what is felt, the wrongness of sex before marriage, is merely felt, it could as well be otherwise, and would have been felt to be otherwise if different circumstances had obtained.
(iv) For similar reasons Empfindung is subjective in a sense which excludes its objectivity. The sensation is confined to an individual subject, not common to all, and so what is sensed or felt has no objective status conferred upon it. One type of subjectivity, free, etc., subjectivity, following its own law, is compatible with objectivity. This is the autonomous subjectivity of the mathematician or the philosopher, their thoughts are the thoughts of the individual thinker, but they are also objective thoughts, common to all, or at least to all who consider the matter in an appropriate way. Natural subjectivity by contrast is confined to and determined by particular times, places, and circumstances. I cannot expect others to share my precise sensations, cravings for alcohol, or moral feelings, whatever content assumes the form of Empfindung takes on these characters of immediacy, individuality, contingency, and subjectivity. What is properly the concern of rational thought, for instance the morality of sex before marriage, is withdrawn from it in so far as it is merely felt.
The soul that does no more than feel or sense does not distinguish itself or its feeling from what is sensed or felt, to do this requires consciousness of an object as distinct from myself, and this in turn requires thought, the ‘abstract thought of its I’ (see §402). This is connected with the subjectivity of feeling even when the subject can distinguish itself from its object: mental states or acts belonging to a stratum of the mind which lacks the resources for drawing the subject–object distinction are themselves subjective. The distinction between subject and object is considered in §413. Anthropology, and in particular §401, considers not this distinction but the distinction to be found in the content of Empfindung, which is to say between sensations that originate in the body and those that originate in the soul.
‘The subjectivity of sentiment must not be sought in an indeterminate way in the fact that by sentiment man posits something within himself-for in thinking, too, he posits something within himself-but more determinately in the fact that he posits something in his natural, immediate, individual subjectivity, not in his free, spiritual, universal subjectivity. This natural subjectivity is not yet a self-determining subjectivity following its own law and acting in a necessary manner, but a subjectivity determined from outside, tied to this space and to this time, dependent on contingent circumstances. Therefore, by transposition into this subjectivity every content becomes a contingent content and acquires determinations belonging only to this individual subject. It is thus quite inadmissible to appeal to one’s mere sentiments. Whoever does this withdraws from the realm, common to all, of grounds, of thinking, and of objectivity, into his individual subjectivity, into which, since it is essentially passive, the most unintelligent and bad content can work its way, as well as the intelligent and the good. It is evident from all this that sentiment is the worst form for the mental and that it can spoil the best content. -At the same time, it is already implied in the above that the opposition between a senser and a sensed, a subjective and an objective, still remains foreign to mere sensation. The subjectivity of the sentient soul is such an immediate subjectivity, so undeveloped, so little self-determining and self-differentiating, that the soul, in so far as it only senses, does not yet apprehend itself as a subjective confronting an objective. This distinction belongs only to consciousness, only emerges when the soul has attained to the abstract thought of its I, of its infinite being-for-self. Of this distinction therefore we have first to speak in the Phenomenology. Here in Anthropology we have only to consider the distinction given by the content of sensation. This we shall do in the following Paragraph’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Dedicated to my lovely One, when I’m feeling blue I have something beautiful to dream about and that is you. ❤️
Dream
When you’re feelin’ blue
Dream
That’s the thing to do
Just watch the smoke rings rise in the air
You’ll find your share of memories there
So dream
When the day is through
Dream
And they might come true
Things never are as bad as they seem
So dream, dream, dream …..
Coming up next:
Bodiliness.
It may stop but it never ends ….
