Subjective Mind & Nature (original) (raw)
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Hegel's Philosophy of Nature of 1805-06; Its Relation to the Phenomenology of Spirit
Cosmos and History: A Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 2013
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) was the introduction and first part of the Jena System III; it was to introduce the other parts of his project. Most commentators on Hegel’s Phenomenology, however, do not consider how the Phenomenology relates to the other parts, and some discount Hegel’s understanding and commitment to the natural philosophy of his day. This paper attempts to make the connection between the Phenomenology and the Natural Philosophy of 1805-6 explicit; to show where and how the connections are made; to identify how Hegel uses the natural sciences of his day in creating his system. By showing these relations we should recognize that his concept of Spirit is born within his natural philosophy. It is part of his cosmology.
The Self and Its Body in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
"This treatise makes an outstandingly important contribution to the interpretation of the Phenomenology." --H.S. Harris, The Owl of Minerva A major criticism of Hegel's philosophy is that it fails to comprehend the experience of the body. In this book, John Russon shows that there is in fact a philosophy of embodiment implicit in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Russon argues that Hegel has not only taken account of the body, but has done so in a way that integrates both modern work on embodiment and the approach to the body found in ancient Greek philosophy. Although Russon approaches Hegel's Phenomenology from a contemporary standpoint, he places both this standpoint and Hegel's work within a classical tradition. Using the Aristotelian terms of 'nature' and 'habit,' Russon refers to the classical distinction between biological nature and a cultural 'second nature.' It is this second nature that constitutes, in Russon's reading of Hegel, the true embodiment of human intersubjectivity. The development of spirit, as mapped out by Hegel, is interpreted here as a process by which the self establishes for itself an embodiment in a set of social and political institutions in which it can recognize and satisfy its rational needs. Russon concludes by arguing that self-expression and self-interpretation are the ultimate needs of the human spirit, and that it is the degree to which these needs are satisfied that is the ultimate measure of the adequacy of the institutions that embody human life. This link with classicism - in itself a serious contribution to the history of philosophy -provides an excellent point of access into the Hegelian system. Russon's work, which will prove interesting reading for any Hegel scholar, provides a solid and reliable introduction to the study of Hegel.
The Revised Introduction to HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT - complete, in 9 Lectures and 36 Videos
2024
This is an important and detailed REVISION of my previous publication of "An Introduction to Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, complete in 9 Lectures and 36 Videos." The PHENOMENOLOGY is Hegel's Introduction to his System of Absolute Science. My Introduction to this famous work is based on a series of lectures I gave during the Spring semester of 2019 at St. John’s University and which also contains LINKS to the 36 videos that accompany my lectures. This module will contain 9 LECTURES with 4 parts to each lecture. LECTURE ONE will be an Introduction and Overview, including Hegel’s famous “Introduction” to the Phenomenology; LECTURE TWO will treat “A: CONSCIOUSNESS”; LECTURE THREE “B: SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS”; LECTURE FOUR “C: AA: REASON: A: Observing Reason”; LECTURE FIVE “C: AA: REASON: B: Active Reason and C: Practical Reason”; LECTURE SIX “C: BB: SPIRIT: A: True Spirit and B: Self-Alienated Spirit”; LECTURE SEVEN “C: BB: SPIRIT: C: Spirit Certain of Itself”; LECTURE EIGHT “C: CC: RELIGION: A: Natural Religion, B: Religion in the Form of Art, and C: The Revealed Religion”; and lastly LECTURE NINE “C: DD: ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE.
Ethics in Progress, 2022
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit develops not only the idea of absolute knowledge but also the notion of an inner criterion [Maßstab] of the spirit. The inner criterion or norm of knowledge is what, in the end of the speculative process, appears as the form of absolute knowledge. Experience and inner criterion are responsible for the development of the consciousness that has to become itself. Becoming and absolute, temporality and timelessness are the substance that becomes and is subject. The actuality of this method of analysis of spirit will be shown and discussed in this essay.
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Empathy
The purpose of this essay is to explore in depth the section of Hegel's (1804) Phenomenology of Spirit which deals with the problem of Self-Consciousness. I am particularly interested in this section of the Phenomenology because it bears on the question of empathy, or how we can know the subjective, experiential state of another person.
The Problem of Nature's Spectral Haunting of Hegelian Subjectivity
Concentrating on G.W.F. Hegel’s controversial Naturphilosophie (1830) and his Anthropology as developed in his Wissenschaft des Geistes (1830), this essay attempts to develop an intense sense of the problems that revolve around Hegelian subjectivity and its grounding in the anteriority of natural materiality. Its central claim is that Hegel’s thought offers us the conceptual tools with which to think with precision the myriad of ways in which finite subjectivity is perpetually haunted, to a degree that is underappreciated in the secondary literature, by the traumatic fragmentation that characterizes Hegelian nature. In order to develop the force of this thesis the essay first develops an interpretation of Hegelian nature that insists on the extimate fragmentation of the natural register. Subsequently, the essay focuses on what this interpretation must mean in terms of the emergence of finite subjectivity from the domain of natural materiality and therefore it concentrates on Hegel’s anthropological writings. Tracking Hegel’s conceptual analysis of the body and his bizarre yet fascinating discussion of ‘madness’, the essay attempts to develop a sense of how the natural register ambivalently and spectrally haunts Hegelian subjectivity: it is both its basal ground and the source that outlines the possibility of its annihilation. Concluding, the essay attempts to situate what such a reading of Hegel’s system might mean in terms of the broader socio-historical context of the late Enlightenment.
Hegel on Nature and Spirit: Some Systematic Remarks
2012
- Status quaestionis and research trends: a brief survey; 2) Issues at stakes in the transition from Nature to Spirit: a brief historical survey and some introductory remarks; 3) Contribution to the discussion: A. The Idea as being and its phenomenological justification; B. Negativity and positivity of Nature C. The path of return of nature to spirit: the philosophy of nature\u2019s emancipation from externality; 4) The Transition to Spirit; 5) Final systematic remarks on the relation between Nature and Spiri
Hegel's Psychology (The Oxford Handbook of Hegel), draft
Despite its central importance in Hegel’s mature system, the section Subjective Spirit in his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences has attracted relatively little attention in the reception history of Hegel’s work. The most influential early readers of Hegel were mostly interested in other parts of Hegel’s system; and relatively soon after Hegel’s death more empirically oriented approaches to the topics of Subjective Spirit won the day, displacing the overly ‘speculative’, armchair philosophical approach that Hegel was seen as representing. Hegel’s direct disciples and moderate ‘centre Hegelians’ Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz and Karl Ludwig Michelet did write extensive commentaries on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, but their influence paled in comparison to the more politically astute and independently creative Hegelian ‘left’ who mostly focused on the Philosophy of Right or the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as to the Hegelian ‘right’ who were mostly interested in Hegel’s views on religion and history. The long neglect of Subjective Spirit shows even today in the curious way in which the recent revival of Hegel as an epistemologist and a philosopher of mind, or of “mindedness”, has mostly ignored this text —even if systematically speaking Subjective Spirit is the part of Hegel’s system where issues of knowledge and of the mind are explicitly at stake. There is also a widely spread view according to which Hegel was engaged in his Jena-writings in a project of ‘detranscendentalizing’ the Kantian subject of knowledge and action problematically divided between the empirical and transcendental, or in other words of consistently conceptualizing it as a living individual human person embedded in the natural and social world, in language and in intersubjective interaction. According to this view, after Jena Hegel for whatever reason gave up this project and in his later work regressed into a dubious metaphysics of a ‘spirit’ which obfuscates the concrete lived reality of the human individual. Whatever the truth about Hegel’s metaphysics, this article aims to show that in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Hegel develops a thoroughly ‘detranscendentalized’ account of the human person as the “concrete” flesh and blood subject of knowledge and action, an account which deserves much more attention than it has so far received. In short, whereas the section ‘Anthropology—Soul’ of Subjective Spirit (see previous chapter) deals with the bodily aspects of the concrete subject, the section ‘Phenomenology of Spirit—Consciousness’ deals with the various dimensions of intentionality, or in other word of the subject’s theoretical and practical relation to objectivity, and finally the section ‘Psychology—Spirit’ deals with the intrasubjective or mental processes and activities at work in the various object-relations. Eventually all of the three chapters contribute to a holistic picture of the human person as the “concrete subject” of knowing and acting, yet reconstructing this picture requires a proper understanding of the structure of the text which at first sight, on a simple linear reading, appears rather fragmentary and thus confusing. This article focuses on the Psychology-section, and the thematically closely connected Phenomenology-section. I will first (1.) reconstructs the ‘parallel architectonics’ of the Phenomenology and Psychology, the understanding of which is essential for comprehending the substantial views Hegel puts forth in them. I will then (2.) draw on this reconstruction and introduce central elements of Hegel’s account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action as it unfolds in the text.
Life and Mind in Hegel's Logic and Subjective Spirit, Hegel Bulletin (2018)
This paper aims to understand Hegel's claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel's naturalism. I suggest that Hegel's approach to naturalism should be understood as 'formal', and argue that Hegel's Logic, particularly the section on the 'Idea', provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an interpretation of Hegel's method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel's method by providing a reading of Hegel's Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections 'Anthropology' and 'Phenomenology' in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel's Idea.