On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Mind’: the self-knowing, actual Idea — part twelve.
‘Psyche; or, the legend of Love’
by Mary Tighe (1772–1810)
CANTO I. (continued)
With terror, anguish, and astonishment
The oracle her wretched father hears;
Now from his brow the regal honours rent,
And now in frantic sorrow wild appears,
Nor threatened plagues, nor punishment he fears,
Refusing long the sentence to obey,
Till Psyche, trembling with submissive tears,
Bids them the sacrifice no more delay,
Prepare the funeral couch, and leave the destined prey.
Pleased by the ambiguous doom the Fates promulge,
The angry Goddess and enamoured Boy
Alike content their various hopes indulge;
He, still exploring with an anxious eye
The future prospect of uncertain joy,
Plans how the tender object of his care
He may protect from threatened misery;
Ah sanguine Love! so oft deceived, forbear
With flattering tints to paint illusive hope so fair.
But now what lamentations rend the skies!
In amaracine wreaths the virgin choir
With Io Hymen mingle funeral cries:
Lost in the sorrows of the Lydian lyre
The breathing flutes’ melodious notes expire;
In sad procession pass the mournful throng
Extinguishing with tears the torches’ fire,
While the mute victim weeping crowds among,
By unknown fears oppressed, moves silently along.
But on such scenes of terror and dismay
The mournful Muse delights not long to dwell;
She quits well pleased the melancholy lay,
Nor vainly seeks the parents’ woes to tell,
But what to wondering Psyche then befell
When thus abandoned, let her rather say,
Who shuddering looks to see some monster fell
Approach the desert rock to seize his prey,
With cruel fangs devour, or tear her thence away.
When lo! a gentle breeze began to rise,
Breathed by obedient Zephyrs round the maid,
Fanning her bosom with its softest sighs
Awhile among her fluttering robes it strayed,
And boldly sportive latent charms displayed:
And then, as Cupid willed, with tenderest care
From the tall rock, where weeping she was laid,
With gliding motion through the yielding air
To Pleasure’s blooming isle their lovely charge they bear.
On the green bosom of the turf reclined,
They lightly now the astonished virgin lay,
To placid rest they sooth her troubled mind;
Around her still with watchful care they stay,
Around her still in quiet whispers play;
Till lulling slumbers bid her eyelids close,
Veiling with silky fringe each brilliant ray,
While soft tranquility divinely flows,
O’er all her soul serene, in visions of repose.
Refreshed she rose, and all enchanted gazed
On the rare beauties of the pleasant scene.
Conspicuous far a lofty palace blazed
Upon a sloping bank of softest green;
A fairer edifice was never seen;
The high ranged columns own no mortal hand,
But seem a temple meet for Beauty’s queen.
Like polish’d snow the marble pillars stand
In grace attempered majesty sublimely grand.
Gently ascending from a silvery flood,
Above the palace rose the shaded hill,
The lofty eminence was crowned with wood,
And the rich lawns, adorned by nature’s skill,
The passing breezes with their odours fill;
Here ever blooming groves of orange glow,
And here all flowers which from their leaves distil
Ambrosial dew in sweet succession blow,
And trees of matchless size a fragrant shade bestow.
The sun looks glorious mid a sky serene,
And bids bright lustre sparkle o’er the tide;
The clear blue ocean at a distance seen
Bounds the gay landscape on the western side,
While closing round it with majestic pride,
The lofty rocks mid citron groves arise;
‘Sure some divinity must here reside,’
As tranc’d in some bright vision, Psyche cries,
And scarce believes the bliss, or trusts her charmed eyes.
— —
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). ‘Philosophy of Mind’. Subjective Mind.
§402
‘Because they are immediate and just found, sensations are individual and transient determinations, alterations in the substantiality of the soul, posited in the soul’s being-for-self, which is identical to its substantiality. But this being-for-self is not merely a formal moment of sensation; the soul is implicitly a reflected totality of sensation -sensation within itself of the total substantiality which it is in itself,- feeling soul’.
‘[Remark] In ordinary linguistic usage, sensation and feeling are not sharply distinguished. Still we do not speak of the sensation of right, self-sensation, etc. but of the feeling of right, self-feeling. Sensation is connected with sensitivity; it seems plausible therefore that sensation emphasizes more the aspect of passivity, of finding, i.e. the immediacy of the determinacy in feeling, whereas feeling looks more to the selfishness involved in it’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’.
This passage delivers a transition from Empfindung (feeling, sensation) to Gefühl (feeling), words which in ordinary usage are not so far off in meaning, and yet here they ae distinguished in that Empfindung is individal (einzelne) and transient, not a feeling of the soul as a whole, while Gefühl is directed on the soul as a whole, on the self. Sensations are fleeting accidents in the substance of the soul, substances and accidents are discussed in the Encyclopaedia Logic, §§150–1. Sensations are gesetzt in ihrem mit derselben identischen Fürsichsein which from a grammatical point of view can be understood in a triple manner. First, they are posited (gesetzt) in its (the soul’s) being-for-self (Fürsichsein), which is identical with the soul’s substantiality. Second, they are posited in its, substantiality’s, being-for-self, which is identical with the soul. Third, they are set in their (the sensations) being-for-self, which is identical with it (the soul or not so likely probably its substantiality). William Wallace 1844–1897, Hegel translator not the Scottish knight who fought for Scottish independence), plumps for the first option. The second option is less likely if we ask why being-for-self should be ascribed not to the soul but to its substantiality, but other than that it differs not so much from the first option. The third option differs more significantly from first and after all Hegel implies that Fürsichsein belongs to sensation (Empfinden). This being-for-self’ is not merely a formal (formelles, that is, superficial) feature of sensation, because in itself (an sich, implicitly) the soul is reflected totality of sensation (or just possibly of being-for-self: reflektierte Totalität desselben). Which is to say, the soul is not merely a congeries of independently felt sensations, but a coherent totality of sensations with a single centre of awareness. Reflected means not that the totality is reflected upon but that the diverse sensations are, like light-rays, reflected back’to the centre: see ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’ §112 on essence and reflection. So within itself (in sich) the soul feels, or is sensation of, the whole substance which it is implicitly or in itself (an sich). It is therefore feeling (fühlende) soul, not simply sensing soul. It feels itself as a whole, not merely fleeting sensations. On Fürsichsein, combining the ideas of independence, self-awareness and actuality, see §387 and 398. On an sich, combining the ideas of independence, latency, and potentiality, see. §378, and 398.
Gefühl, ‘feeling’ and fühlen, ‘to feel’ are not clearly distinct from Empfindung, empfinden yet German speaks of Gefühl des Rechts, sense of right or justice, and Selbstgefühl, feeling of self, self-esteem, not Empfindung des Rechts or Selbstempfindung. Empfindung is related to Empfindsamkeit, sensitivity, sentimentality, and so Empfindung suggests passivity, finding, Finden, from which it derives: see §401. It emphasises the immediacy of what we feel, the fact that we just find it there and do not infer or derive it from anything else while by contrast Gefühl emphasises selfishness’. In ordinary German, selbstisch, like selfish, implies a deficiency of concern for others, motivation by self-interest, by one’s own pleasure and profit and this connotation is, in Hegel’s usage, suppressed, if not completely excluded. Selbstischkeit refers to orientation towards oneself that contrasts not with orientation towards others, but with lacking a conception of oneself, and also of others. According to R. B. Farrell (‘Dictionary of German Synonyms’, very useful), the distinction is to be given a different account. Fühlen refers merely to the strength or weakness of the feeling, empfinden to one’s capacity to react to or to be aware of stimuli, hence to one’s sensitiveness and powers of subtle discrimination, particularly first with regard to pain and second aesthetic experience. At times to be sensitive to is a more suitable English equivalent than to feel but this is not entirely at odds with Hegel’s account. The strength or weakness of a feeling depends upon the self rather than upon the stimuli to which it is sensitive.
In ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’ quality (§§86–98) involves three stages: being (§§86–8), determinate being or Dasein (§§89–95), and being-for-self (§§96–8), which is closely connected to ideality (§§95–6) and the soul determined wholly qualitatively corresponds to the stage of Dasein, whereby no distinction is drawn between an entity and its current quality. See §387, 390. Now the soul has distinguished itself from its quality or determinacy, it posits it as ideal (ideell), not flatly identical with the soul itself but only an aspect of it and becomes for itself, that is to say the sentient [empfindenden] individual [individuellen] soul. The soul is opposed to its substantiality, that is the level at which it is just qualitatively determined, and to itself as qualitatively determined. In its sensations, that is, its qualities, it gains not just single sensations but the feeling (Gefühl) of itself, consciousness of its totality, even though a subjective consciousness: see §402. The soul is no longer merely sentient because Empfindung is linked to the individual (das Einzelne), that is, we sense this and that, not the whole. The soul is now divided or ruptured, involved in a contradiction between, on the one hand, unfreedom, its lingering substantiality and naturalness, and, on the other, freedom, its burgeoning objective consciousness. This conflict is itself a sort of disease and indeed much insanity is in fact a reversion to this primitive psychical level and so insanity should be regarded in this context and will, in due course, cast some light upon this transitional state. See §408.
‘Zusatz. With what we have said in the preceding Paragraph, we have completed the first part of Anthropology. In that part, we had at first to do with the wholly qualitatively determined soul, or with soul in its immediate determinacy. By the immanent advance of the development of our object we have finally arrived at the soul which posits its determinacy ideally and in this returns to itself and becomes for itself, i.e. the sentient individual soul. This gives us the transition to the second part of Anthropology, a part as difficult as it is interesting and in which the soul opposes its substantiality, confronts itself, and in its determinate sensations at the same time attains to the feeling of itself or to the not yet objective, but only subjective consciousness of its totality, and thus, since sensation is tied to the individual, ceases to be merely sentient. In this part, because the soul here appears at the standpoint of its rupture with itself, we have to consider it in its diseased state. In this sphere, there prevails a contradiction between the freedom and unfreedom of the soul; for, on the one hand, soul is still fettered to its substantiality, conditioned by its naturalness, while, on the other hand, it is already beginning to separate itself from its substance, from its naturalness, and thus rises to the intermediate stage between its immediate natural life and objective, free consciousness. How far the soul now enters this intermediate stage we propose to elucidate briefly here’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’.
Now we come to consider the extreme states between which the feeling soul is intermediate: sensation and consciousness, sensation having only to do with the individual, etc., draws no distinction between the objective and the subjective and so the sentient soul takes what is sensed to be its own concrete actuality, not anything distinct from itself. Consciousness by contrast confronts an ordered objective world extending far beyond the fragments that we fleetingly sense. Hence consciousness attains a great deal of independence of the ‘material of sensation being aware for instance of remote times and places. It does so by elevating it to the form of universality excluding the contingent and retaining the essential, transmuting what is sensed into something represented. What is represented here floats between an individual entity, such as Fluffy, and a general idea of for instance a sheep. I sense a shimmering white patch and guess that it is a sheep albeit I do not see the whole sheep, only enough to identify it as a sheep. I omit the contingent, the particular shape and shade I see owing to my angle of vision, etc. I do not omit its whiteness, though sheep are not essentially, only usually, white. I fill in the parts of the sheep that I do not perceive, in their main outlines, but not all their detail, from my knowledge of the essential nature of a sheep and here I may err in believing it to have four legs when it has in fact only three and perhaps there is no sheep present there, it is a white cloth or a trick of the light. I may take what I sense for a mermaid, one of those representations to which ‘no actuality corresponds and such a transmutation of sensation into representation is subjective and so open to error but the world I project by this subjective process is objective, a world outside me about the contents of which I can be mistaken but the interconnection of things will normally enable me to correct my mistakes.
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Stockhausen rejected this piece immediately after completion because he found it was oriented on an obvious musical theme. Two decades later, in 1970 he composed ‘Mantra’, which brought this thematicism back, and from then on, most of his works followed the ‘formula’ technique of composition. The name ‘Formel’ is from 1971, when he noticed that this piece (originally called ‘Studie’) contained the elements of his new style.
He speaks of formulas rather than melodies.
=
The feeling soul differs from sensation in that it feels or glimpses itself as a whole and not just individual states or accidents of itself and it differs from representational consciousness in that what it feels is not an objective world which requires thought-mediated universality but a conglomerate of subjectivity and objectivity with the soul at its centre and this is the raw material that representational consciousness will turn into an objective world.
We, reflecting (reflektierende) consciousness distinguished in §401 external and internal sensations yet the feeling and sentient souls cannot draw that distinction because they are unaware of anything outside themselves. Unbeknown to itself the soul has ideality, is ideal, in the sense that it is internal and subjective not external and objective or real. In another sense of ideality (see §§379, 381, 386), it is the ideality or negativity of its sensations and every sensation appears to be for itself, independent, and indifferent to the others, but the soul negates this independence, interconnects them, and submerges them in itself. The soul and sensations are analogous to the objective world and objects within it, the world is a concrete (ein Konkretes, from the Latin concrescere, grow together) divided into distinct yet interrelated objects (sheep, shrubbery, etc.). Each of these objects is for itself , that is to say, in its own right, a concrete, a complex (ein Konvolut, a bundle, something rolled together) of determinations (whiteness, fluffiness, trotters, etc.). In similar fashion the soul is a totality of distinct determinacies, that is sensations. We are not to suppose that each sensation is, like a worldly object, itself a complex of determinations, the soul–world analogy does not stretch so far. Because such determinacies all unite in the soul, the soul does not split up into parts each corresponding to a sensation but remains a unified whole. It is infinite, that is self-contained, not restricted or bounded by anything else. It is being-for-self, independent and unified, not just a bundle of sensations.
‘The simple unity of the soul, its serene ideality, does not yet grasp itself in its distinction from an external reality. But though the soul has not yet any consciousness of this its ideal nature, it is none the less the ideality or negativity of all the various kinds of sensations, each of which in the soul seems to be for itself and indifferent to the others. Just as objectivity displays itself to our intuition not as something separated out into different aspects, but as a concrete divided into distinct objects, each of which is in turn for itself a concrete, a complex of the most diverse determinations, so the soul itself is a totality of infinitely many distinct determinacies which in the soul unite into one, so that in them the soul remains, in itself, infinite being-for-itself. In this totality or ideality, in the timeless, undifferentiated interior of the soul, the sensations which crowd each other out do not, however, vanish absolutely without trace, but remain in the soul as sublated, obtain in it their subsistence, as an initially merely possible content, which only advances from its possibility to actuality by becoming for the soul or by the soul’s becoming for itself in it. Thus the soul retains the content of sensation, even if not for itself, yet within itself. This preservation, relating only to a content internal for itself, to an affection of myself, to mere sensation, is still remote from recollection proper, since this sets out from the intuition of an externally posited object which is to be made internal, and here such an object, as already noted, does not yet exist for the soul’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The interior of the soul is timeless, unchanging, while the sensations crowd each other out and past sensations now supplanted by others remain in the soul, sublated (aufgehobene: see. §381) and merely possible or potential, a sensation becomes actual if it becomes for the soul or the soul is for itself in the sensation, that is, if the soul becomes aware of itself in the sensation. Past sensations are hence preserved and this preservation differs from recollection as preservation concerns only sensations conceived as states or accidents of the soulwhile recollection internalizes an external, intuited that is to say perceived) object. This caveat concerns recollection [Erinnerung] proper or in the strict sense, which Hegel takes to be the ‘making internal’, Er-innerung, of the recollected object: see §401. This is etymologically incorrect however for the idea is rather that of making oneself internal to, getting inside, the recollected object. On Erinnerung, see §§452–4. The soul, at this stage unbeknown to itself, is in the world or universe, in it at a definite standpoint, and thus related to it in a definite way. These relations are distinct from the residual content of past sensation, and need not figure in our present sensation or ‘representation’, yet they constitute the content of the soul and are not just an environment external to it. The world or its content has an infinite periphery, that is it is boundless or possibly of indeterminate extent yet with the individual soul at its centre. The soul that encapsulates this world is a soul of a world, an individually determined world-soul, the world-soul, Weltseele, also features in §§389 and 392 yet in those passages the soul is not, as here, an individual soul correlated to a unique perspective on the world.
‘Besides this material we are, as actual individuality, in ourselves also a world of concrete content with an infinite periphery, -we have within us a countless host of relations and connections which are always within us even if they do not enter into our sensation and representation, and which, no matter how much these relations can alter, even without our knowledge, none the less belong to the concrete content of the human soul; so that the soul, in virtue of the infinite wealth of its content, may be described as the soul of a world, as an individually determined world-soul. Because the human soul is an individual soul, a soul determined on all sides and therefore limited, it also stands in relationship to a universe determined in accordance with the soul’s individual standpoint. This counterpart of the soul is not something external to it. On the contrary, the totality of relationships in which the individual human soul stands, constitutes its actual vitality and subjectivity and accordingly has grown together with it just as firmly as, to use an image, the leaves grow with the tree; the leaves, though distinct from the tree, yet belong to it so essentially that the tree dies if they are repeatedly torn off. Of course, more self-dependent human natures that have attained to a life rich in deeds and experience, are far better able to endure the loss of a part of what constitutes their world than people who have grown up in simple circumstances and are incapable of continual striving; in people of this second type the feeling of being alive is sometimes so firmly bound up with their native habitat that in foreign parts they are stricken by home-sickness and resemble a plant which can thrive only in a definite soil’.
-’Philosophy of Mind’
Two notions are brought together. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646–1716), doctrine that a mind or monad mirrors the universe from a certain point of view: see §392. And a post-Enlightenment doctrine associated with Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and the Romantics, that people are not purely rational cosmopolitans but in essence attached to a particular place and time, their homeland or Heimat, detachment from which can induce homesickness (Heimweh). People differ in their ability to endure transplantation or even homelessness, but even the strongest natures need for their self-feeling (Selbstgefühl) a portion of the world (or an individual world) that they can call their own. Without it the soul would lack actuality, a determinately distinct individuality Einzelheit, here einzel(heit) and individuell are used interchangeably: see §§394. A Heimat, a country, town, or village, differs from a Leibnizian perspective on the world in that it is normally occupied by more than one person. So how might it individualize a soul? A Heimat radiates outwards from a chair in which one usually sits, a family in which one has a unique position, a cottage in which they live, and rational ego-hood on its own is not enough for individuality. As rational I’s or egos people do not differ from each other: ‘The rational is the high road where everyone travels, where no one is conspicuous’ (‘Philosophy of Right’, §15Z.), and attachment to one’s Heimat lies at a deeper level than rationality or objective consciousness.
‘Of course, more self-dependent human natures that have attained to a life rich in deeds and experience, are far better able to endure the loss of a part of what constitutes their world than people who have grown up in simple circumstances and are incapable of continual striving; in people of this second type the feeling of being alive is sometimes so firmly bound up with their native habitat that in foreign parts they are stricken by home-sickness and resemble a plant which can thrive only in a definite soil. All the same, the concrete self-feeling of even the strongest natures requires a certain range of external relationships, an adequate piece, so to speak, of universe; for without such an individual world the human soul, as we have said, would have no actuality at all, would not attain to a determinately distinct individuality.? But the human soul does not merely have natural differences, it differentiates itself within itself, separates its substantial totality, its individual world, from itself, sets this over against itself as the subjective. Its aim here is that what the mind is in itself should become for the soul or for the mind,- that the cosmos contained, in itself, within the mind should enter into mind’s conciousness. But as we have likewise already noted, at the standpoint of soul, of the not yet free mind, there is no place for objective consciousness, for awareness of the world as a world actually projected out of myself. The feeling soul communes merely with its internal determinations. The opposition between itself and that which is for it, remains still enclosed within it. Only when the soul has negatively posited the manifold, immediate content of its individual world, made it into a simple entity, into an abstract universal, hence only when a pure universal is for the universality of the soul and the soul has in this way developed into the I that is for itself, its own object, into this self-related perfect universal (a development which the soul as such still lacks) , only then, after reaching this goal, does the soul emerge from its subjective feeling to genuinely objective consciousness; for it is only the I that is for itself, liberated, at least in an abstract way initially, from immediate material, that also allows the material the freedom of subsistence outside the I’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Natural differences are here the differences between one individual and another depending upon the difference of their individual world. In the feeling soul there is as yet no other difference as its world is within itself but gradually it divides itself, separates its world from itself, and counterposes it to its subjective self and it does this in order that it or the mind can be for itself what it already is in itself. In this process the mind as well as the world undergo a parallel change. The manifold content of its individual world becomes a simple entity, an abstract universal and correspondingly the soul too becomes universal, the I that is for itself, etc.. The I is liberate from its worldly material and can therefore allow this material to subsist independently of itself. And so, as to the soul’s objective this is not just to be for itself, consciously, what it is in itself, but to be adequate to its concept, namely, self-related, simple subjectivity. Only such subjectivity can be conscious of objectivity but if we ask why the soul, in becoming a conscious and self-conscious I, comes into conformity with its concept the idea is that the concept is rather like the programme of development embodied in, for instance, an acorn whereby the acorn is ‘in itself or by its concept an oak-tree and yet because it is not yet actually (für sich in one of its senses: see §383) an oak-tree it does not yet correspond to its concept. A soul is like an acorn for there any reason to suppose that its destiny is to become an I aside from the empirical fact that human souls, unlike animal souls, tend to become I’s.
Let us pursue that thought. A mere feeling soul is lumbered with its individual world, its world is extraneous to its concept. For one thing, while all human souls should partake in the same concept each soul’s individual world is different hence in shedding its individual world a soul becomes simply what it is without any contingent extraneous material. It thereby becomes universal, not different from other souls and it also becomes for itself in another sense, self-aware or self-conscious. A soul that is wholly embedded in its individual world cannot be conscious of itself as distinct from this world. The world is projected out of myself (aus mir herausgesetzten) a simple and an abstract universal since soul-world symmetry needs this for world and self march in step, there is a systematic correlation between the nature of the subject and the nature of its world. This notion derives partly from Immanuel Kant ( 1724–1804) and parts company with René Descartes (1596–1650). The soul becomes simple and universal hence must the world that is for the soul and somehow mirrors the soul. The world is simple in at least two ways, it is one and the same world for every soul or I, and it is unified by concepts and categories into a single orderly structure: or interconnection of things: see §402. The world is universal, it is the same for all, not perspectivally differentiated, it is abstract, maybe since its content is no longer concrete, as it is in the soul, but expanded or unfolded, or maybe since it is, like the I, for itself or self-aware.
The three stages of elevation from the feeling soul to consciousness are: the feeling soul in its immediacy’ (§§405–6), self-feeling [Selbstgefühl] (§§407–8), and habit (§§409–10). The stages follow the pattern, immediate unity–division–restored unity: see §387. Immediate unity is associated with universality, division withparticularity’ (Besonderheit), here qualified as individual (einzelnen), maybe since it occurs within an individual soul, and restored unity with individuality (Naturindividualität): see §38. At the third stage the soul habituates its body and so acquires control of it, it casts or projects from itself the content that does not belong to its body to form the objective world. For the anticipation of higher phases of mind in the description of lower ones see §§380, 398.
‘At the first stage we see the soul involved in the dreaming away and intimation of its concrete natura/ life. In order to comprehend the wonder of this soul-form, which in recent times has received universal attention, we must bear in mind that here the soul still lies in immediate, undifferentiated unity with its objectivity. The second stage is the standpoint of derangement, i.e. of the soul divided against itself, on the one hand already in control of itself, on the other hand not yet in control of itself, but held fast in an individual particularity in which it has its actuality. At the third stage finally, the soul becomes master of its natural individuality, of its bodiliness, reduces this to a subservient means, and projects out of itself as an objective world that content of its substantial totality which does not belong to its bodiliness. Reaching this goal, the soul emerges in the abstract freedom of the I and thus becomes consciousness. But about all these stages we have to remark, as we already had to remark in the case of the earlier stages of the soul’s development, that here too activities of mind which can only later be considered in their free shape, must be mentioned in advance, since they are already at work in the feeling soul’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
THE FEELING SOUL
§403
‘The feeling individual is the simple ideality, subjectivity, of sensation. What it has to do is to posit its substantiality, its merely implicit fulfilment, as subjectivity, to take possession of itself, and to become for itself as the power over itself. As feeling, the soul is no longer a merely natural, but an inward, individuality; its being-for-self, which in the merely substantial totality is only formal, is to be liberated and made independent’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Ideality or subjectivity contrasts with substantiality: see §398. That which belongs to substantiality alone is merely in itself or implicit and not something that the soul is aware of. Because the feeling individual (fühlende Individuum) is ideality it has to realize its potentiality, to raise its substantiality to subjectivity and therefore take control of itself. Formal (formelle) is used loosely and here it amounts to implicit or in itself (an sich). In §402 by contrast formal appears to contrast with an sich and to mean something like superficial, see §402.
On ideality, see §379. Idealität contrasts with Realität, and ideell with reell. (Ideell is distinct from ideal, ideal in the sense of perfect, but Idealität serves as the noun for both adjectives. By contrast, reell and real are used interchangeably, something is ideell or Idealität if it negates the real, which is to say retains it virtually (virtualiter, here equivalent to an sich), but suppresses it, so that it does not exist. In other places though not here Hegel uses aufheben, sublate, for this preserving suppression: see §381. Hegel uses exist(ence) (existieren, Existenz) in the sense of to come forth, to have/having come forth, relying on the literal meaning of its Latin ancestor, ex(s)istere, to step forth, etc., see ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’ §123. The sensations, representations, etc. stored up (aufbewahrt, see §402) in the featureless cavern or mine of the I are the real that is suppressed and preserved. At this stage the soul is not yet an I nor a consciousness but a unity that underlies the consciousness that later emerges from it.
‘[Remark] Nowhere else is it of such essential importance for our understanding to keep hold of the determination of ideality as it is in the case of the soul and still more of the mind. Ideality is the negation of the real, but the real is also stored up, virtually retained, although it does not exist. It is this determination that we have before us in respect of representations, memory. Every individual is an infinite treasury of sensation-determinations, representations, information, thoughts, etc.; yet I am for all that an entirely simple entity, -a cavern without determinations, in which all this is stored up, without existing. It is only when I recall one representation, that I bring it out of that interior to existence, before consciousness. Sometimes, in sickness, representations or information, supposed to have been forgotten years ago, because for all that time they have not been brought into consciousness, once more come to light. They were not in our possession, nor perhaps by such reproduction as occurs in sickness do they for the future come into our possession; and yet they were in us and remain in us from now on. Thus a person can never know how much information he really has in him, even if he has forgotten it. It belongs not to his actuality, not to his subjectivity as such, but only to his implicit being’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’.
We are presented here with a quandary. The soul has to raise its substantiality to subjectivity, does this mean that it has to suppress and preserve its sensations, etc. or that it has to become explicitly aware of sensations, etc. that are so far suppressed and preserved? The former appears the more likely given that ideality is the negation of the real, not awareness of it, and the soul is supposed to take possession of itself, not of its sensations, etc. It is its suppression of sensations, rather than its recalling them to awareness, that unifies the soul.
Hegel discards what is in essence a Cartesian view whereby the soul is an intrinsically non-bodily thing conjoined with a material body quite different in nature from itself. Consciousness and the intellect regard the body as material, extended, and divisible, and as outside the soul. Consciousness sees the body in this way since it views the body from the outside just as it views other objects from the outside. Intellect concurs, because it draws a sharp distinction between body and soul, just as it draws sharp distinctions between other entities and concepts. And yet the feeling soul views the body differently. It contains a bodiliness that involves no plurality of separate parts and this unitary bodiliness is compatible with the material body just as the unitary ego is compatible with the multiplicity of its representations.
As the feeling soul suppresses and preserves its sensations, etc., so it suppresses and preserves the various parts of the material body. To have sensations the soul requires the material body, through which it is immediately determined and yet the material body does not count for the soul as anything real or as a barrier confining its activity. In similar manner the material body does not count as real for the concept, the soul is the existent concept, that is to say the concept bodying forth or actualized. The soul is somewhat like a unitary code or plan determining the growth and structure of its bodily realization and it is therefore the ‘existence of the speculative (die Existenz des Spekulativen). Unlike the intellect with its clearly defined distinctions speculation discerns the unity of things in their opposition: see §378, and ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’ §82. By analogy the soul does this in reality not merely in thought, it joins together with what is apparently opposed to itself, namely the material body and because this body is not a barrier for the soul, the soul is in the body as an omnipresent unity. Every part of the body is animated by the soul but the soul itself does not consist of parts, each occupying a part of the body. The amputation of a left arm does not entail the amputation of a part of the soul; the severed arm simply loses its vitality.
For representation (Vorstellung) the body (Leib) is a single representation (Vorstellung) and has attained to one determinate concept. We do not see or conceive the body, even when we view it from the outside, as a conglomerate but as a single entity and in similar manner bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) is reduced in the feeling soul (which does not have representations or concepts) to ideality, that is to say to a unity in which the natural multiplicity of bodiliness is overcome. It is because the feeling soul idealizes bodiliness in this manner that we are able to represent the material body as a unity. In itself the soul is the whole of nature, the individual soul is a monad which, as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) says, mirrors the world from a certain point of view. (‘On monads, see §388, 402). The soul receives sensations from what it will later come to regard as the external world by way of its body, the body receives sensations, however faint and suppressed, from the whole of nature, however remote but it receives them always in a certain position and from a certain point of view, so the world it contains is its own particular world.
At this stage the soul does not yet distinguish its own body from the rest of nature and so Hegel talks of the Leib, body, only once in this passage when the body is an object of representation, a faculty that the feeling soul does not yet possess. Elsewhere he favours Leiblichkeit, bodiliness, and das Leibliche, the bodily, since the unity of the body, implied by Leib, is under consideration, not presupposed. ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’ §34Z brings the matter home in a manner more accessible. ‘In philosophy at present we hear little of the soul: the favourite term now is mind [Geist]. The two are distinct, soul being as it were the middle term between body and mind, or the bond between the two. The mind, as soul, is immersed in bodiliness, and the soul is the animating principle of the body’. Hegel’s sights are set upon a view that operates with only two terms, body and mind, or body and soul, whereby the soul is more or less equated with the mind and conceived as an incorporeal intellectual principle. Rather, we need three terms: body, the soul that animates the body, making it a single living body, and the more intellectual mind. The soul/mind distinction then approaches without exactly coinciding with Aristotle’s distinction between psuche (soul) and nous (intellect), see §378. Upon being idealized and unified by the soul the body is not basically opposed to the mind but is fit to accommodate it.
‘The individuality is and remains this simple inwardness, amidst all the determinacy and mediation of consciousness that is later installed in it. Here we must keep in mind that the soul to which this simplicity belongs is at first the feeling soul, in which bodiliness is contained, and we must resist the idea suggested by consciousness and the intellect, that this bodiliness is a materiality outside the soul and with its parts external to each other. Just as the number and variety of representations does not establish an asunderness and real plurality in the I, so the real apartness of bodiliness has no truth for the feeling soul. As sentient, the soul is determined immediately, and so in a natural and bodily way, but this asunderness and sensory multiplicity of the bodily does not count for the soul, any more than it does for the concept, as anything real, or therefore as a barrier. The soul is the existent concept, the existence of the speculative. Thus in the bodily the soul is simple, omnipresent unity. For representation the body is one representation, and the infinite variety of its material structure and organization has won through to the simplicity of a determinate concept; similarly in the feeling soul, bodiliness, and all the asunderness that belongs to its sphere, is reduced to ideality, to the truth of the natural multiplicity. The soul is in itself the totality of nature, as an individual soul it is a monad; it is itself the posited totality of its particular world, so that this world is included in it, its fulfilment; in relating to this world it relates only to itself’.
- ‘Philosophy of 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 particular world, in so far as that world is, in an implicit way, included in the ideality of the subject’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The difference between the soul and what is other than itself is a distinction drawn by the soul itself within itself: see §398, and so it is exclusive as it expels or extrudes material from itself to become its object and this exclusivity is connected with the soul’s individuality, it sustains its individuality by expelling what makes it one with the world rather than individual (individuell). The differentiation is a judgement, Urteil, which Hegel interprets as an original [ur-] division [teil]’: see §389. To begin with the distinction was between the subject (the soul) and its object, though 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’: see §§394, 397; 398). In its natural life (Naturleben(s) ), which is associated with sleep (see §398), the soul is not individuell becaus there is no object opposed to it. It becomes individual when it becomes sensation-packed, see §402, and the soul’s substance is now the content of this individual sentient soul, not just that of its natural life and this content is excluded from the soul as its object and its predicate. The soul or not so plausibly the substance, sie, is not only individual it is also particular, see 378, 402, and so the content is the particular world that the subject implicitly carries with it: see. §403, and this particular world is the same as the individual world discussed in §402.
Form and formell are not employed particularly transparently indeed there is some ambiguity. That this stage of mind is altogether formal might mean first, it is just a form with no content of which it is conscious, second, it has no specific content of its own, it has some content but there are no restrictions on the content that it can take, or third it does not occur in isolation as a state of a soul but merely as an element 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 just an element in a more complex condition. It is a state (Zustand) of its own not an aspect of some other state but this does not mean that the feeling soul occurs pure and unadulterated in for instance the infant or embryo (see §405), or in adults who have relapsed into a totally infantile condition (we know all to well that happens, spend some time on YouTube). Rather, a person who has advanced to a more genuine form [Form] of mind, in particular that of intellectual consciousness, might retain the content appropriate to the higher form but present this content in the more subordinate and abstract form of mind, that is to say the feeling soul and 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 merely formal, albeit they are superimposed upon feeling soul and do not dispense with it altogether, they normally retain it in its appropriate which is to say subordinate place.
‘[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’
For my muse. I love you. ❤️
Heigh ho! I am here
The things I’ll give to you
A stroke as gentle as a feather
I’ll catch a rainbow from the sky
And tie the ends together
Coming up next:
The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy.
It may stop but it never ends ….
