On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Mind’: the self-knowing, actual Idea — part thirteen.
‘Psyche; or, the legend of Love’
by Mary Tighe (1772–1810)
CANTO I. (continued)
When lo! a voice divinely sweet she hears,
From unseen lips proceeds the heavenly sound;
‘Psyche approach, dismiss thy timid fears,’
At length his bride thy longing spouse has found,’
And bids for thee immortal joys abound;
‘For thee the palace rose at his command,
‘For thee his love a bridal banquet crowned;
‘He bids attendant nymphs around thee stand
‘Prompt every wish to serve, a fond obedient band.
‘Increasing wonder filled her ravished soul,
For now the pompous portals opened wide,
There, pausing oft, with timid foot she stole
Through halls high domed, enriched with sculptured pride,
While gay saloons appeared on either side
In splendid vista opening to her sight;
And all with precious gems so beautified,
And furnished with such exquisite delight,
That scarce the beams of heaven emit such lustre bright.
The amethyst was there of violet hue,
And there the topaz shed its golden ray,
The chrysoberyl, and the sapphire blue
As the clear azure of a sunny day,
Or the mild eyes where amorous glances play;
The snow white jasper, and the opal’s flame,
The blushing ruby, and the agate grey,
And there the gem which bears his luckless name
Whose death by Phoebus mourned ensured him deathless fame.
There the green emerald, there cornelians glow,
And rich carbuncles pour eternal light,
With all that India and Peru can shew,
Or Labrador can give so flaming bright
To the charmed mariner’s half dazzled sight:
The coral paved baths with diamonds blaze:
And all that can the female heart delight
Of fair attire, the last recess displays,
And all that Luxury can ask, her eye surveys.
Now through the hall melodious music stole,
And self-prepared the splendid banquet stands,
Self-poured the nectar sparkles in the bowl,
The lute and viol touched by unseen hands
Aid the soft voices of the choral bands;
O’er the full board a brighter lustre beams
Than Persia’s monarch at his feast commands:
For sweet refreshment all inviting seems
To taste celestial food, and pure ambrosial streams.
But when meek Eve hung out her dewy star,
And gently veiled with gradual hand the sky,
Lo! the bright folding doors retiring far,
Display to Psyche’s captivated eye
All that voluptuous ease could e’er supply
To sooth the spirits in serene repose:
Beneath the velvet’s purple canopy
Divinely formed a downy couch arose,
While alabaster lamps a milky light disclose.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1870–1831), ‘Philosophy of Mind’. ‘Subjective Mind’.
§404
As individual, the soul is altogether exclusive and it posits difference within itself. What is differentiated from it is not yet an external object, as in consciousness, but only the determinations of its sentient totality. In this judgement, the soul is the subject in general; its object is its substance, which is at the same time its predicate. This substance is not the content of its natural life, but becomes the content of the individual sensation-packed soul; but since the soul is in that content at the same time particular, the content is its panicular world, in so far as that world is, in an implicit way, included in the ideality of the subject.
[Remark] For itself, this stage of mind is the stage of its darkness: its determinations do not develop to conscious and intelligent content; in this respect it is altogether formal. It acquires a peculiar interest in so far as it becomes a form and thus a state (§380) , to which the soul that has already advanced to consciousness and intellect, may again sink down. The more genuine form of the mind, existing in a more subordinate and abstract form, involves a discrepancy, which is disease. In this sphere we must consider, first, the abstract formations of the soul for themselves, and then consider them as diseased states of mind, since the latter can only be understood in terms of the former.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The difference between the soul and what is other than itself is a distinction drawn by the soul itself within itself, consult §398, and therefore it is exclusive in that is it expels or extrudes material from itself to become its object and this exclusivity is linked with the soul’s individuality as it it sustains its individuality by expelling what makes it one with the world rather than individual. The differentiation is a judgement, Urteil, which Hegel interprets as an original [ur-] division [teil], consult §389. To begin with the distinction was between the subject (the soul) and its object, albeit not yet an external object, and now that the distinction is a judgment it is in addition a distinction between the subject (the soul) and its predicate (the soul’s substance, consult §394, 397, 398. In its natural life (Naturleben(s) ), which is associated with sleep (consult §398), the soul is not individuell because there is no object opposed to it, it becomes individual when it becomes sensation-packed, consult §402. The soul’s substance is now the content of this individual sentient soul and not simply that of its natural life and this content is excluded from the soul as its object and its predicate. The soul, or perhaps the substance, sie, is not only individual, it is also particular. Consult §§378 and 402. Therefore the content is the particular world that the subject implicitly carries with it, consult §403, and this particular world is the same as the individual world talked about in §402.
Form and formell do carry a certain degree of ambiguity, that this stage of mind is altogether formal suggests it is just a form with no content of which it is conscious, or it has no specific content of its own, it has some content, but there are no limits on the content that it can assume, or it does not occur in isolation as a state of a soul but merely as a factor in more complex mental conditions. To be formal is not the same as becoming a form, when the feeling soul becomes a form (als Form ist), it occurs as a distinct mental condition, not merely a factor in a more complex condition. It is a state (Zustand) of its own, not an aspect of some other state which does not mean that the feeling soul occurs unadulterated in, for instance, the infant or embryo (consult §405), or in adults who have relapsed into a totally infantile condition. He means that a person who has advanced to a ‘more genuine form [Form] of mind’, in particular that of intellectual consciousness, may retain the content appropriate to the higher form, but present this content in the ‘more subordinate and abstract’ form of mind, i.e. the feeling soul. Then there is a ‘discrepancy’ between the content and the form which amounts to a disease. ‘Consciousness and intellect’ are, unlike feeling soul, a healthy form of mind, not simply ‘formal’. Although they are superimposed on feeling soul and do not dispense with it altogether, they usually keep it in its proper, subordinate place.
(a) The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy
§405
(1) Initially the feeling individuality is indeed a monadic individual, but, being immediate, it is not yet Itself, not a subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence its selfish individuality is a subject different from it, a subject that may even be another individual. In relation to this subject it takes the form of a substance, which is only a dependent predicate; the subject’s selfishness sets it in vibration and determines it without the least resistance. This subject may be called its genius.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
On monads and monadicity, consult §389. A monad, from the Greek monas, a unit, is (according to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) a mind, a unitary mind, and every mind perceives, and yet only some minds apperceive, that is, are self-consciously aware of things. Mere perception is below the threshold of awareness though Hegel eschews the term apperception other than when speaking of Leibniz, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), etc., preferring Selbstbewusstsein, self-consciousness. The feeling individuality is not reflected into itself and is therefore immediate as opposed to being mediated by such reflection. As to why it of necessity has a selfish (selbstische, with the suggestion of egocentricity: consult §402) individuality is not fully accounted for and yet in virtue of it having one this has to be situated in a different subject albeit another individual, principally its mother. Predicate normally contrasts with substance as well as with subject yet the embryo is a substance, a passive object of influence, not an active subject. It is a predicate, and again not a subject, because it depends wholly upon its mother, the real subject. A Genius is a protective spirit, the word deriving from the Latin gignere, to generate, procreate, and so in Roman mythology a genius presides over one’s procreation and birth and then accompanies one throughout one’s whole life as a tutelary deity. It is to be distinguished from the genius or special mental endowment (Genie) talked about in §395. That the genius is the totality of reality, etc. as activity, not simply possibility, suggests that the feeling soul is the seat of reality, etc. as potentiality, which is then activated by the genius. The thought here is not merely of mother and embryo but also of the feeling soul and genius as components of a single adult. Consult §405.
‘In immediate existence this is the relationship of the child in its mother’s womb, a relationship neither merely bodily nor merely mental, but psychical — a relationship of the soul. Here are two individuals, yet still in undivided soul-unity: the one is still no self, not yet impenetrable, incapable of resistance; the other is its subject, the single self of both . -The mother is the genius of the child; for by genius we commonly mean the selfish totality of the mind, in so far as it exists for itself, and constitutes the subjective substantiality of another, which is only externally posited as an individual; the latter has only a formal being-for-self. The substance of the genius is the whole totality of reality, of life, and of character, not as a mere possibility, or capacity, or in-itself, but as activity and activation, as concrete subjectivity. If we look only at the spatial and material aspects of the child’s existence as an embryo in its particular integuments, etc. and of its connection with the mother by means of umbilical cord, placenta, etc., all that is presented to the senses and reflection is its external anatomical and physiological existence; for the essential matter, the psychical relationship, these sensory and material externalities and mediations have no truth. What ought to be noted about this connection is not merely the remarkable way in which determinations are communicated to and stamped upon the child by violent emotions, injuries, etc., of the mother, but the whole psychical judgement of the substance, by which the female nature can (like the monocotyledons in the vegetable kingdom) within itself break in two and in which the child does not merely get by communication, but originally receives in itself, susceptibility to illnesses as well as other predispositions of form, temperament, character, talent, idiosyncrasies, etc. Sporadic examples and traces of this magic relationship appear elsewhere in the area of sober conscious life, say between friends, especially female friends with delicate nerves (a relationship which may develop into magnetic phenomena), between husband and wife and between members of the same family.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
On judgement as original (ur-) division, consult §§388, 389. Monocotyledons are a family of flowering plant with a single cotyledon, seed leaf in their embryo. On magnetic phenomena, consult §379.
‘The being of feeling is thus intrinsically a completely determinate soul. The totality of the individual in this compressed form is distinct from the existing unfolding of its consciousness, its view of the world, developed interests, inclinations, etc. In contrast to this mediated asunderness this intensive form of individuality has been called the genius, which has the final determination in the show of mediations, intentions, reasons, in which the developed consciousness indulges. This concentrated individuality also makes an appearance in the form of what is called the heart or breast. A man is said to be heartless when he thinks and acts with sober consciousness in accordance with his determinate purposes, whether they be great substantial aims or petty and unjust interests; a good-hearted man means rather one who gives free rein to the individuality of his feeling, even if it is restricted in scope, and throws himself with his whole individuality into its particularities and is completely fulfilled by them. But of such a good nature it may be said that it is not so much the genius itself as the policy of indulgere genio’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The feeling soul has, as an embryo, its controlling genius in its mother and yet it is destined (bestimmt) to develop so that it provides its own rational, etc. controlling genius in one and the same individuality and yet at this stage the life of feeling (Gefühlsleben), no longer the feeling soul, because it has its own internal controller has become so determinate, containing its whole ‘character’, that the roles are reversed. The being of feeling (Gefühlssein) is the genius, which has the final determination, the last word, in the show of mediations, etc. The overall course of our life is determined by our Gefühlsleben. Reason provides a justification for what we do and works out the details yet the justifications are rarely conclusive and feeling has the deciding say on the matter. This is connected with heart or breast. Breast translates Gemüt, which denotes the seat of certain types of feelings, particularly those which embrace the world and its objects with warmth and affection. English is missing an equivalent term and has recourse to approximations such as soul, heart, disposition. It is normally translated as heart but this cannot be done here for Hegel explicitly mentions the heart. Everyone has a Gemüt, (apart from my ex), but not everyone indulges it to the same extent, therefore people are heartless, deficient in Gemüt, when they pursue their ends with cold, rationality (unlike my ex who pursued her ends with cold irrationality). They are good-hearted (Gemütlich), if they put their heart and soul into what they do, this good nature (Gemütlichkeit) is not itself the genius, but indulgence of it because even the heartless have a genius (yes my ex had a genius, namely, me). The Latin phrase indulgere genio occurs in the comic dramatist Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 BC), in the sense of to indulge one’s spirit of enjoyment, to enjoy oneself, let one’s hair down.
‘Where the philosophers, as they scorn to delight, so must they be content little to move -saving wrangling whether virtue be the chief or the only good, whether the contemplative or the active life do excel — which Plato and Boethius well knew, and therefore made Mistress Philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of Poesy. For even those hard-hearted evil men who think virtue a school-name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, and therefore despise the austere admonitions of the philosopher, and feel not the inward reason they stand upon, yet will be content to be delighted, which is all the good-fellow poet seems to promise; and so steal to see the form of goodness — which seen, they cannot but love ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of cherries’.
- Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’, 1580.
‘Zusatz. What we described in the Zusatz to §402 as the soul involved in the dreaming away and intimation of its individual world, has been called in the heading of the above Paragraph ‘the feeling soul in its immediacy’. We propose to portray this developmental form of the human soul more determinately than we did in the above Remark. Already in the Remark to §404 it was said that the stage of dreaming and intimation also constitutes a form to which, as a state of disease, even the mind that has already developed into consciousness and intellect can again relapse. Both modes of mind-healthy, intellectual consciousness on the one hand, dreaming and intimation o n the other- can now, in the first developmental stage of the feeling soul here under discussion, exist as more or less mutually interpenetrating, since the peculiarity of this stage consists precisely in the fact that here the dull, subjective or glimpsing consciousness is not yet posited in direct opposition to the free, objective or intellectual consciousness, as it is at the second stage of feeling soul, at the standpoint of derangement, but has rather only the relationship to it of something different, of something therefore that can be mixed with intellectual consciousness. Mind at this stage therefore does not yet exist as the contradiction within its own self, the two sides which, in derangement, fall into contradiction with each other still stand here in an unconstrained relation to each other. This standpoint can be called the magical relationship of the feeling soul, for with this expression one denotes a mediation-free relationship of the inner to an outer or to an other in general. A magical force is one whose effect is not determined by the interconnection, the conditions and mediations of objective relationships; and ‘the feeling soul in its immediacy’ is such a force working without mediation’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The soul’s dreaming away and intimation (Ahnen) of its concrete natural life, the first of three stages of feeling soul. Ahnen, to presage, suspect, etc., suggests dim awareness rather than explicit consciousness, it need not suggest foretelling or foreboding but Hegel also has this in mind. Consult §390.
‘For an understanding of this stage in the soul’s development it will not be superfluous to explain in more detail the concept of magic. Absolute magic would be the magic of mind as such. This, too, exerts a magical infection on objects, acts magically on another mind. But in this relationship immediacy is only one moment; mediation effected by thinking and intuition, as well as by speech and gesture, forms the other moment in it’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Absolute magic would be magic that is wholly immediate or direct, with no mediation or intervention whatsoever (don’t take magic literally, Hegel wasn’t a mystic). This would be the magic of the mind as such, of the mind without the involvement of anything else, the magical influence of one mind on another is not for the most part absolute, it involves mediation as well as immediacy: thought, language, and so on. The influence of adults on children is predominantly but not entirely immediate. In Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, the Earl of Kent refuses to accept the banishment Lear has imposed on him and continues to accompany him in disguise.
KING LEAR
How now! what art thou?
KENT
A man, sir.
KING LEAR
What dost thou profess? what wouldst thou with us?
KENT
I do profess to be no less than I seem; to serve him truly that will put me in trust: to love him that is honest; to converse with him that is wise, and says little; to fear judgment; to fight when I cannot choose; and to eat no fish.
KING LEAR
What art thou?
KENT
A very honest-hearted fellow, and as poor as the king.
KING LEAR
If thou be as poor for a subject as he is for a king, thou art poor enough. What wouldst thou?
KENT
Service.
KING LEAR
Who wouldst thou serve?
KENT
You.
KING LEAR
Dost thou know me, fellow?
KENT
No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.
KING LEAR
What’s that?
KENT
Authority.
KING LEAR
What services canst thou do?
KENT
I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message bluntly: that which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in; and the best of me is diligence.
KING LEAR
How old art thou?
KENT
Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old to dote on her for any thing: I have years on my back forty eight.
KING LEAR
Follow me; thou shalt serve me: if I like thee no worse after dinner, I will not part from thee yet. Dinner, ho, dinner! Where’s my knave? my fool? Go you, and call my fool hither.
- ‘King Lear’, Act I, Scene 4.
‘… Nathan the prophet, who, when the holy David had so far forsaken God as to confirm adultery with murder, when he was to do the tenderest office of a friend, in laying his own shame before his eyes, — sent by God to call again so chosen a servant, how doth he it but by telling of a man whose beloved lamb was ungratefully taken from his bosom? The application most divinely true, but the discourse itself feigned; which made David (I speak of the second and instrumental cause) as in a glass to see his own filthiness, as that heavenly Psalm of Mercy well testifies’.
— Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’, 1580.
Psalm 51 (excerpt)
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within.
Allegri: Miserere Mei (1661 Codex Version) — Sistine Chapel Choir
‘The child is, of course, infected in a predominantly immediate way by the mind of the adults it sees around it; at the same time, however, this relationship is mediated by consciousness and by the incipient independence of the child. Among adults, a superior mind exerts a magical force over the weaker mind; thus, for example, Lear over Kent, who felt himself irresistibly drawn to the unhappy monarch because the king seemed to him to have something in his countenance which he, as he puts it, ‘would fain call master’. A similar answer, too, was given by a queen of France who, when accused of having practised sorcery on her husband, replied that she had used no other magical force against him than that which nature bestows on the stronger mind over the weaker. In the cases cited, the magic consists in an immediate influence of one mind on another mind, and generally in magic or sorcery, even when it related to merely natural objects like the sun and moon, the idea has always been in play that sorcery occurs essentially by the immediate operation of the force of the mind, and in fact by the power of the diabolical mind, not the divine mind, so in the very same measure that someone possesses the power of sorcery, he is subservient to the devil’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The queen of France referred to is Catherine de’ Medici, (1519–1589), the wife of Henri II.
‘Now the most mediation-free magic is more exactly that which the individual mind exerts over its own bodiliness, when it makes this a subservient, unresisting executant of its will. But also over animals man exerts an extremely mediation free magical force, for these cannot endure the gaze of man. Besides the magical modes of mind’s activity just cited, which actually occur, people have by contrast falsely ascribed to humankind a primitive magical state in which the mind of man, without developed consciousness, gained knowledge quite immediately of the laws of external nature and of its own genuine essence, and also of the nature of God, in a much more perfect manner than now. This whole idea is quite as contrary to the Bible as to reason; for in the myth of the Fall, the Bible expressly declares that knowledge of the truth was granted to man only through the disruption of that original paradisiac unity of man with nature. The fabled mass of primitive men’s knowledge of astronomy and other matters dwindles to nothing on closer examination. It can, of course, be said of the mysteries that they contain the remnants of an earlier knowledge; traces of reason instinctively at work are found in the earliest and rudest times. But such instinctive productions of human reason, lacking the form of thought, must not be taken as proofs of a primitive scientific knowledge; on the contrary, they are necessarily something thoroughly unscientific, belonging merely to sensation and intuition, since science cannot be the alpha, only the omega’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
‘So much for the essence of the magical in general. But as regards the precise way in which it appears in the sphere of Anthropology, we here have to distinguish two different forms of the magical relationship of the soul. The first of these forms can be designated as the formal subjectivity of life. This subjectivity is formal, because far from laying a claim to what belongs to objective consciousness, this subjectivity itself constitutes a moment of objective life. For this reason it is no more something that ought not to be, something diseased, than, for example, cutting one’s teeth; on the contrary, it is only to be expected in a healthy human being. Bur the formal nature, the undifferentiated simplicity, of this subjectivity, at the same time implies that there. can be no question here even of a relationship of two self-subsistent personalities to each other, let alone the direct opposition of subjective consciousness to objective consciousness, which is only prevalent in derangement and is completely excluded here; such a relationship will only present itself to us with the second form of the magical state of the soul’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
And so to the mind’s magical influence upon objects, what is normally called magic, the mind’s to a greater or lesser extent immediate influence on natural objects, about this Hegel is somewhat doubtful. The mind’s capacity to move its own body matches the general definition of magic, the unmediated influence of a mind on something else, as well as does what is commonly called magic, or more explicitly, because it involves no words, chants, or spells. So does man’s influence on animals, since it works by a mere gaze and yet even these kinds of magic are not said to be entirely devoid of mediation. Beware of conceding anything to be entirely and exclusively immediate. Consult ‘Encyclopaedia logic’, §§66–74.
Humans had scientific knowledge is attributed by Hegel to Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) who said: Nature like a clear mirror of God’s creation had originally lain revealed and transparent to the unclouded eye of man:
‘“Nature,” so the fiction runs, “like a clear mirror of God’s creation, had originally lain revealed and transparent to the unclouded eye of man.” Divine Truth is imagined to have been equally manifest. It is even hinted, though left in some degree of obscurity, that in this primary condition men were in possession of an indefinitely extended and already expanded body of religious truths immediately revealed by God. This theory affirms that all religions had their historical commencement in this primitive knowledge, and that they polluted and obscured the original Truth by the monstrous creations of error and depravity; though in all the mythologies invented by Error, traces of that origin and of those primitive true dogmas are supposed to be present and cognizable. An important interest, therefore, accrues to the investigation of the history of ancient peoples, that, viz., of the endeavor to trace their annals up to the point where such fragments of the primary revelation are to be met with in greater purity than lower down’. -
Hegel. ‘Philosophy of History’.
The myth of the fall is also discussed elsewhere
‘Let us now consider the myth of the Fall more closely. As we remarked earlier, what is expressed here is the general relationship of cognition to the spiritual life. In its immediate shape spiritual life appears first as innocence and simple trust; but it is of the essence of spirit to sublate this immediate state, since spiritual life distinguishes itself from natural life, and more precisely from the life of animals, by the fact that it does not abide in its being-in-itself, but is for itself. In like manner, however, this stage of schism must itself be sublated in turn, and spirit must return through its own agency to union with itself. This resulting union is a spiritual one, and the guiding principle of that return lies in thinking itself. It is thinking that both inflicts the wound and heals it again. Now, it says in our myth that Adam and Eve, the first human beings, or humankind as such, found themselves in a garden, in which there were both a tree of life and a tree of cognition of good and evil. We are told that God had forbidden this human pair to eat of the fruits of the latter tree; at this point there is no more talk of the tree of life. So what this means is that humanity should not come to cognition, but remain in a state of innocence. We also find this representation of the original state of humanity as one of innocence and of union, among other peoples that have reached a deeper consciousness. What is correct in it is the implication that the schism in which we find everything human involved can certainly not be the last word; but, on the other hand, it is not correct to regard the immediate, natural unity as the right state either. Spirit is not something merely immediate; on the contrary, it essentially contains the moment of mediation within itself. Childlike innocence does certainly have something attractive and touching about it, but only insofar as it reminds us of what must be brought forth by the spirit. The harmonious union that we see in children as something natural is to be the result of the labour and culture of the spirit.-Christ says, “Except ye become as little children,” etc. [Matt. 18:3]; but that does not say that we must remain children. 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. But the myth does not conclude with the expulsion from paradise. It says further, ‘God said: Behold Adam is become as one of us, to know good and evil’ [Gen. 3:22] . Cognition is now called something divine and not, as earlier, what ought not to be. So in this story there lies also the refutation of the idle chatter about how philosophy belongs only to the finitude of spirit; philosophy is cognition, and the original calling of man, to be an image of God, can be realised only through cognition.-The story now goes on to say that God drove man out of the garden of Eden, so that he should not eat of the tree of life; this means that man is certainly finite and mortal on the side of his nature, but that he is infinite in cognition’.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
God forbids Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2: 9, 17). He eats the fruit and is then expelled from Eden. Knowledge is not our primeval condition but the result of our fall which is a circuitous ascent. Hegel was not aware of Babylonian astronomy which was at its zenith when Greek astronomy was merely getting off the ground. The Babylonians carried careful observations but did not, as the Greeks did, produce theories. The best known Babylonian astronomer is Kiddinu, in Strabo’s (64 or 63 BC — c. 24 AD) ‘Geographica’ or Kidenas in Gaius Plinius Secundus’, (AD 23/24–79), ‘Naturalis Historia’. He was born c.340 BC and worked out the precession of the equinoxes: consult. §392. The mysteries were associated with Greek cults devoted to the gods of the underworld, primarily those established at Eleusis from about the seventh century BC and later incorporated in Athenian state religion. They are discussed in a similar way in the ‘Philosophy of History’.
‘So much for the essence of the magical in general. But as regards the precise way in which it appears in the sphere of Anthropology, we here have to distinguish two different forms of the magical relationship of the soul. The first of these forms can be designated as the formal subjectivity of life. This subjectivity is formal, because far from laying a claim to what belongs to objective consciousness, this subjectivity itself constitutes a moment of objective life. For this reason it is no more something that ought not to be, something diseased, than, for example, cutting one’s teeth; on the contrary, it is only to be expected in a healthy human being. Bur the formal nature, the undifferentiated simplicity, of this subjectivity, at the same time implies that there. can be no question here even of a relationship of two self-subsistent personalities to each other, let alone the direct opposition of subjective consciousness to objective consciousness, which is only prevalent in derangement and is completely excluded here; such a relationship will only present itself to us with the second form of the magical state of the soul’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
This deals only with ‘the formal [formelle] subjectivity of life’. The second, oppositional, and therefore pathological, form of magic is the subject of §406.
‘The first form of this [magica] state [of the soul] to be discussed next contains, on its part, three different states: 1. natural dreaming; 2. the life of the child in the womb; and 3. the relationship of our conscious life to our secret inner life, to our determinate mental nature, or to what has been called the genius of man. 1. Dreaming. In dealing with the awaking of the individual soul in §398 and more precisely in establishing the determinate distinction between sleep and waking, we already had to speak of natural dreaming in anticipation, because this is a moment of sleep, and on a superficial inspection can be regarded as proof of the identical nature of sleep and waking; against this superficiality we had to insist on the essential distinction between these two states even with regard to dreaming. But the proper place to consider the last-named soul-activity is with the beginning made in §405 of the development of the soul involved in the dreaming away and intimation of its concrete natural life. Now since we refer here to what has already been said in the Remark and Zusatz to §398 about the thoroughly subjective nature of dreams, bereft of intellectual objectivity, the only thing we have to add is that in the state of dreaming the human soul is filled not merely with individualized impressions but it attains, more than is usually the case in the distractions of the waking soul, to a profound, powerful feeling of its whole individual nature, of the entire compass of its past, present, and future; and that the fact that the individual totality of the soul is sensed in this way is precisely the reason why dreaming must be mentioned in our consideration of the soul that feels itself’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Impressions (Affektionen) are more or less equivalent to ‘sensations’ (Empfindungen): consult §402. As individualized (vereinzelten) they are contrasted with the feeling (Gefühle) of the soul’s whole individual nature albeit there is no consistent distinction between fühlen and empfinden in virtue of the fact that the soul’s individual totality is said to be‘sensed (Empfundenwerden).
‘The relationship of the individual to its genius. The third way in which the human soul arrives at the feeling of its totality is the relationship of the individual to its genius. By genius, we are to understand the particularity of the individual, which in all situations and relationships decides its conduct and fate. That is to say, I am a twofold entity within myself: on the one hand, what I am aware of myself as being in my external life and in my universal representations, and on the other hand, what I am in my interior, determined in a particular way. This particularity of my interior constitutes my destiny, for it is the oracle on whose pronouncement all resolutions of the individual depend; it forms the objectivity which asserts itself from out of the interior of the individual’s character. That the circumstances and relationships in which the individual is situated turn his fate in just this direction, and no other-this lies not merely in the circumstances and relationships, in their peculiarity, nor even merely in the universal nature of the individual, but also in his particularity. This determinate individual reacts differently to the same circumstances from a hundred other individuals; certain circumstances can have a magical effect on one individual, while another individual will not be forced by them off his usual path. Circumstances, therefore, blend with the interior of individuals in a contingent, particular manner; so that individuals become what becomes of them partly by circumstances and by what is universally valid, and partly by their own particular inner determination. Of course, the particularity of the individual provides grounds, thus universally valid determinations, for its acts and omissions; but it always does this only in a particular way, since its attitude here essentially involves feeling’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The undivided soul–unity (Seeleneinheit) of two individuals, one of them an actual self, the other having a formal, that is potential, being-for-self, is a mystery to the ‘intellect’, but not to genuine philosophy. Fate’ translates Schicksal, destiny, Verhängnis, which today means doom or unhappy fate, but is here used in a neutral sense more or less equivalent to that of Schicksal. General principles and objective circumstances never fully determine what a given individual does or how he fares. Reason or ‘grounds’ are given for one’s actions, but one’s genius determines what one sees as good reasons: consult §405.
‘… the soul, in dreams, attains to the representation of its individual world. But on the other hand, the relationship of the individual to his genius is distinguished from the two relationships of the feeling soul considered earlier, by the fact that it is their unity, that it unites into one the moment of the simple unity of the soul with itself contained in natural dreaming, and the moment of the duality of soul-life present in the relationship of the foetus to the mother, since the genius, on the one hand, is a selfish other confronting the individual, like the mother’s soul in relation to the foetus, and, on the other hand, forms a unity with the individual just as inseparable, as the unity of the soul with the world of its dreams’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
My world gets richer and richer because of my gorgeous muse who works her glorious magic.
Her kind of magic with its incredible potency ….
One dream, one soul, one prize, one goal One golden glance of what should be (It’s a kind of magic) One shaft of light that shows the way No mortal man can win this day
The bell that rings inside your mind It’s a challenging the doors of time (It’s a kind of magic)
The waiting seems eternity The day will dawn of sanity It’s a kind of magic (It’s a kind of magic) There can be only one
This rage that lasts a thousand years Will soon be gone This flame that burns inside of me I’m hearing secret harmonies
The bell that rings inside your mind Is challenging the doors of time (It’s a kind of magic) (It’s a kind of magic)
This rage that lasts a thousand years Will soon be, will soon be Will soon be gone
This is a kind of magic There can only be one This rage that lasts a thousand years Will soon be gone (gone)
Magic, it’s a kind of magic It’s a kind of magic Magic, magic, magic, magic Magic, ha ha ha ha it’s magic
Ha ha Yeah, yeah
It’s a kind of magic
Coming up next:
Animal magnetism.
It may stop but it never ends.
